A Flower in the Desert (6 page)

“When was the body found?”

“Around twelve. She didn't show up for work, didn't answer the phone. A friend came by from the library to check on her. That's where Bigelow worked, the library. Friend saw the body through the kitchen window, called us.”

“She was strangled.”

Bradley nodded.

“And she was tortured.” I'd gotten that from Ed Norman.

Bradley nodded.

“How, exactly?”

“
Exactly?
” Bradley mimicked. “You get a kick out of that shit?”

“Was it sexual torture, the kind that might be done by a psychopath? Or was it the kind of torture designed to make her talk?”

Bradley smiled sourly. “And reveal the present whereabouts of her sister, Melissa Alonzo?”

“For example.”

“Alonzo disappeared two months ago. Why would the guy, whoever he was, wait all this long?”

“Was it sexual torture, Sergeant?”

He shook his head. “No.” Then he grinned at me, evilly. “You want details?”

“No. But maybe, if you're willing, I'd better get some.”

“He beat her. Then he tied her up. To a kitchen chair. Hands, feet, body. Gagged her with a kitchen towel. Then he started on her fingernails with a pair of pliers.” He said all this flatly, watching me for a reaction.

I said, “Did she talk?”

He shrugged. “She still had some fingernails left.”

“He strangled her with what?”

“A belt, probably.”

“It wasn't on the scene?”

He shook his head.

So, after using it to choke away her life, the killer had calmly slipped it back around his waist. Nice.

“There was a postcard found,” I said. “From her sister, postmarked in Albuquerque on September the twenty-fourth.”

He nodded.

“You have it?” I asked him.

“It's in the evidence locker.”

“‘
The flower in the desert lives.
' Does that mean anything to you?”

He shook his head.

“And that was all that was written on the card?”

He nodded. “That and her signature. Melissa.”

“Any other kind of evidence? Prints? Fibers?”

Bradford grinned. “Jeez, you're a regular Sherlock Holmes.”

“Was there any?”

“That's privileged information.”

“All right. Is Melissa Alonzo a suspect?”

“Everyone's a suspect until they prove they aren't.” This is what most cops believe to be an unwritten amendment to the United States Constitution.

“So you're actively looking for her?”

“Not me.”

“Who then?”

“Talk to the FBI. Guy named Stamworth.”

“I still don't understand why the FBI is involved.”

He shrugged. “Talk to Stamworth.”

“You don't really think that Melissa Alonzo tied up her sister and ripped off her fingernails?”

He shrugged. “Could of happened.”

“You believe that it did?”

He shook his head.

“So what do you think happened?”

“A crazy.”

“Why the fingernails? Why would a crazy want her to talk?”

Another shrug. “Who can figure crazies. We had a guy here last month, took a hammer to his landlady because she was sending death beams at him. From her microwave.”

“What about Bigelow's associates? Boyfriends? Family?”

“No associates, no boyfriends. Worked as a librarian out in Brentwood. Never went out. Never did anything. Little Miss Muffet.”

“How old was she?”

“Thirty-four.”

“And the family?”

He smiled. “You figure Mom and Dad aced her because she didn't call 'em on the weekends? And look. Like I said before, how's this gonna help you find Alonzo?”

“I don't know. Do you know anything about a woman named Edie Carpenter?”

He grinned. “Know the story about her husband. You heard it?”

I had, from Ed Norman, but Sergeant Bradley was enjoying himself. Time for a bit of bonding here. I shook my head.

“Scriptwriter,” he said, lowering his arms and putting them along the arms of his chair. “Successful. Big bucks. Edie's an actress, a second stringer, gets chewed up by the giant bug fifteen minutes in. Anyway, Carpenter marries her. Two days later he decides to kill himself.” He shrugged, grinned. “Maybe Edie's too much for him. What he does, he's got one of those fax machines can send the same fax automatically to a bunch of people, one after the other. So he writes his bye-bye note, So long, sayonara, I'm splitting, and he sticks it in the machine, tells the machine to send it to everyone he knows. This is maybe thirty people. Close friends, right? Then he goes into the library and eats his Colt Commander.” He grinned, shook his head.

I smiled. Once again, I could feel the muscles of my face holding the smile in place. “Where was Edie?”

He grinned again. “Getting lessons from her tennis pro. Horizontally.”

“A marriage made in heaven.”

“Yeah.”

“What about the people he sent the faxes to? Any of them try to reach him?”

Another grin. “At three in the afternoon? In L.A.? They were all doing lunch.”

I made myself smile again. “No connection between Edie and Cathryn Bigelow?”

He shook his head. “You gonna be talking to Edie?”

“She was a friend of Melissa Alonzo's.”

Grinning, he ran his right hand over his shiny dented scalp. “Ask her something for me.”

“What's that?”

“Ask her if she kept the fax machine.”

Driving up the winding turns of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, past the elms and the eucalyptus, I went over what Ed Norman had told me about Melissa Alonzo. It was better than going over what he'd told me about Rita. And what Rita hadn't told me about herself.

Melissa came, Ed had said, from Old Money. Old Money in Los Angeles is about two hundred years younger than Old Money in the East, but then things happen faster here. Her grandfather, John Bigelow, had originally put the pile together, mostly in real estate, and her father, Calvin, had added to the heap. With holdings in L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, Calvin was still involved in real estate, but he'd broadened his base to include a construction company and a bank or two.

His daughter Melissa graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1972; afterward, she put in two year at UCLA. In 1975, at the age of twenty, she married a William Lester, some twenty-five years her senior and a business partner of her father's. While not as short-lived as Edie Carpenter's, this had been another marriage that wasn't made in heaven—Bigelow and Lester divorced a year later. Amicably, said Ed Norman.

Living in a Malibu condo paid for by her father, drifting from one nondescript secretarial job to another, taking an occasional course in political science or sociology, Melissa was, according to Ed, the kind of “rich young liberal who doesn't really come alive until she finds herself a cause.” The cause Melissa found was called Sanctuary, a nondenominational group that aided refugees from Central and South America. From 1979 until she disappeared, she worked for them as a volunteer, and it was at a benefit dinner for the group that she met her future husband, Roy Alonzo.

“Sanctuary was Alonzo's pet charity,” Ed had explained. “You have to understand, Joshua, that the heavy-duty actors and actresses here in town, the big stars, they're not the shallow, superficial beings you may think they are. Oh, they may blow thousands of dollars on real estate and Ferraris and nose candy, but deep down, you see, they're deeply committed human beings. Every one of them—above a certain tax bracket, anyway—has a charity of his own. Usually he's the spokesperson, and usually it's a disease of one kind or another.”

He inhaled on his cigarette. “Well, by the time Alonzo was making enough cash to afford a charity of his own, all the really good diseases were taken. About the only thing left was postnasal drip. Alonzo decided to go with Sanctuary instead. It firmed up his standing in the Hispanic community, and it put him in solid with the Hollywood young guard.”

I had asked him, “Sanctuary is a bit leftish?”

Smiling, Ed exhaled cigarette smoke through his nose. “In a very civilized, socially conscious way. Somewhere slightly to the right of Greenpeace, maybe.”

“Being involved didn't hurt Alonzo's career?”

He smiled again. “So long as the receipts keep coming in, it's perfectly okay for you to dabble in lefty politics. Or in witchcraft, for that matter. The bottom line in this town, Joshua, is the bottom line.”

I smiled back at him. “I hope I never get quite that cynical.”

“Then maybe,” he had told me, smiling, “you'd better head back to Santa Fe as soon as you can.”

Over the next few years, Ed said, Melissa had gone, usually with other members of the group, on fact-finding missions south of the border: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. She had continued her work with them after her divorce. It was, in fact, just before her most recently scheduled trip, back to El Salvador, that the appellate court had decided in favor of her ex-husband and his visitation rights. Melissa had gone anyway, two days later, the second of August, leaving her daughter, Winona, with her sister in Brentwood. She returned to Los Angeles on August 17, picked up Wynona, and disappeared the next day.

I had asked Ed, “Bank accounts, credit cards?”

“She closed out her accounts on the eighteenth, checking and savings, for a total of about five grand. Converted some stocks into cash, another four grand. She left all her plastic behind. No action on any of her cards since she left. Left her driver's license, too, and her passport.”

“Her car?”

“She left it at the airport. Took a cab home, took another cab to her sister's house.”

“She's being careful,” I said.

Ed nodded.

“She was able to raise only nine thousand in cash?”

“Her lawyers, the trials, ate up most of what she had.”

“She couldn't borrow a ruble or two from Mom and Dad?”

“Dad stopped paying her an allowance after she married Alonzo. He disowned her after she went to the police with the story about Alonzo's sexual abuse.”

“Why?”

Ed shrugged. “Bad publicity?”

“Alonzo told me that the P.I. he hired had been able to put her with a woman named Elizabeth Drewer, a lawyer.”

Ed nodded, inhaled on his Marlboro, exhaled. “You know anything about Drewer?”

“According to Alonzo, she's a connection to something called the Underground Railroad. People across the country who help women and children who're running from the kind of thing Melissa Alonzo was running from.”

Another nod from Ed. “Drewer doesn't deny it. Doesn't admit it, either. But she's an industrial-strength feminist, and she's very vocal about the way the courts have handled child abuse.”

“You think Alonzo could've disappeared down their pipeline?”

“It's possible. They'd be able to provide her with papers, a new name, safe houses.”

“Seems a rough way for a poor little rich girl to travel.”

Another shrug. “Maybe she thought the alternative was rougher.”

The house I wanted was on a side road at the top of the mountain. Hidden from the street by a small forest of maples and elms, lying at the apex of a semicircular asphalt driveway, it was a long, low, Spanish-style structure that, if it hadn't looked as though the peons had finished erecting it just yesterday, might have been built back in the seventeenth century. I parked the rented Chevy and followed the flagstones to the front door, which was about eight feet tall and four feet wide, built of solid oak and braced with strips of antiqued black wrought iron. There was no doorbell. In the center of the door, at chest level, was a wrought iron clapper. I raised it and banged it down once. I half expected the door to be opened by Zorro.

It was opened by a maid. A real maid, in a real maid's cute little frilly black outfit that displayed quite a lot of very good leg. She was young and attractive, her features even, her hair in tight black curls, and she was, like maids were supposed to be, extremely pert. But probably, with the kind of salary she made, she could afford to be pert. She cocked her head, smiled, and she said, “Yes? May I help you?” She spoke without a French accent. This was, for me, a major disappointment.