A Flower in the Desert (8 page)

“If it does,” I said, “Melissa Alonzo may be in danger. Her sister wasn't just killed. She was tortured. Probably for some time.”

Her face was closed, shuttered. She didn't want to believe me, didn't want to listen. Perhaps she felt that if Melissa actually were in danger, then she herself might be partially responsible. Melissa, therefore, could not be in danger.

I said, “I'm trying to help Melissa, Mrs. Carpenter. If you know anything at all about where she might be, where she might've gone, you'd only be doing her a favor by telling me.”

She shook her head. “I told you. I haven't got any idea.”

I asked her, “What do you know about Elizabeth Drewer?” Dazzle them with a sudden change in the questions. Interrogation 101.

We were back to performances once again. To demonstrate concentration, she paused longer than she should have. “A lawyer, isn't she? One of the firebrand feminists.”

“She's supposed to be connected to the Underground Railroad.”

She demonstrated puzzlement.

“They help women in Melissa's position,” I said. “Women who're trying to keep their children away from abusing fathers.”

She nodded. “I read about them, I think.
People
magazine.”

Maybe I should renew my subscription. “Did Melissa ever mention them to you?”

She uncrossed her legs, drew up her right knee. Another lie approaching? “No,” she said.

“Never mentioned Elizabeth Drewer?”

“No.”

“And you have no idea where she might've gone.”

“Like I said.”

“All right,” I said. “Thank you, Mrs. Carpenter.”

“Edie,” she said. She smiled. “Are you off duty now?”

“Nope.” I stood. “Back to the salt mines.” I reached into my shirt pocket, plucked out my card and my Erasermate. On the back of the card I wrote down the name of my hotel. I handed her the card. “I'll be there tonight. If you think of anything that might help me locate Melissa, could you give me a call?”

Smiling, she tapped the card with a long red fingernail. “Are you sure I can't offer you a drink? Something else?”

I ignored the intentional broadness of that
something else.
I smiled back. My guileless smile, deliberately obtuse. “Thanks, I appreciate it, but I've got an appointment. Maybe some other time. And if Melissa does contact you, anytime in the future, could you give her my Santa Fe number?”

“You know,” she said, smiling, “you could do pretty well in this town.”

“How's that?”

“You don't have any appointment. You haven't looked at your watch since you sat down. You're a damn good liar, Croft.”

I grinned down at her. “You're not bad yourself, Edie.”

She stared at me for a moment, and then she laughed. It was still a good laugh. She looked me up and down again. Then she showed me that she was the second person I'd seen today who was able to raise a single eyebrow. “Well,” she said, “that remains to be seen.”

Seven

I
DID
HAVE AN APPOINTMENT, BUT
it wasn't until six thirty. I thought I might have time to pick up some California fast food—an abalone tortilla, maybe, or an escargot-and-pineapple pizza. But the traffic was terrible, bumper-to-bumper cars breathing frustrated hydrocarbon sighs at each other, and I spent over an hour getting to the beach. At the entrance to Malibu Colony, the guard found my name on his clipboard, told me that Mr. Arthur was waiting at the Alonzo house, and explained how to get there.

As I drove down the street, I could smell, through the open window of the Chevy, the astringent tang of brine and kelp, and even here, out at the farthest reaches of Civilization As We Know It, the quintessential Southern California scent of automobile exhaust.

For the most part, the houses along the shore side of the road were alike—narrow, two-story buildings of weathered gray shingle, some of them looking like they'd been imported from Cape Cod or Fire Island, all of them so close together you could spit from your window into your neighbor's margarita. All sat with their backsides facing the street and their fronts facing west, so their owners could enjoy an expensive view of sea blurred by smog. Beyond the houses, where the sun should have been, the sky was a dull apocalyptic red, as though out there on the gray Pacific, beneath a pall of dense yellow smoke, a city were afire.

The Alonzo house was newer than most of the others, a long, modernistic structure that looked like irregularly shaped boxes of cedar and glass, jumbled together by a very large hyperkinetic child. A spotless black Mercedes 250-SL, its top down, was parked in the shade of the carport. I pulled the Geo in beside it, got out, walked over to the unprepossessing wooden door, and pushed the doorbell.

After several long moments, the door was opened by a man wearing black leather loafers, lightweight gray wool slacks, an open vest of the same material, a dark blue silk shirt with the sleeves rolled back, and a silk tie of gold and red with its Windsor knot loosened and tugged down, all of which made him look like a straightforward, no-nonsense kind of guy. Maybe he was. He was in his early thirties, tall, and in very good shape. His shirt—and presumably the vest and the missing suit coat—had been cut to display the nicely defined curve of his pectorals. His wavy hair was brown and so was his Tom Selleck mustache. He was tanned.

“Croft?” he said.

I admitted I was.

“Chuck Arthur.” Unsmiling, he held out his tanned hand. I shook it. He didn't move from the doorway and he didn't invite me in. He said, “I'm not sure why I agreed to this.”

“Maybe because you're concerned about Melissa Alonzo and her daughter,” I said.

“I
am
concerned. Damned concerned. I hate to think of the two of them out there, on the run. But I'm still not sure that talking to you is a good idea.”

“I'm not the enemy, Mr. Arthur. I told you over the phone, my primary interest is in delivering Mr. Montoya's message to Mrs. Alonzo.”

He looked at me for a moment, expressionless. “Well,” he said finally. “Come on in.”

We went down the passageway, passing several closed doors—storage space, perhaps, or slaves' quarters.

The air smelled of wood polish and cleanser, like an obscure museum, often cleaned, seldom visited. Our footsteps, echoing faintly back from ahead, clipped the silence into hollow fragments.

The passageway opened up into a sunken living room with white sectional furniture surrounding a large rectangular stone fireplace, also white. Abstract paintings, their colors muted in the dim light, hung on the white walls. Above the fireplace, an enormous inverted funnel of stainless steel chimney climbed to the faraway beamed ceiling. We walked down some polished tile steps, crossed the brick floor of the living room, walked up some more tile steps to the terrazzo floor of the dining room, past a round white-enameled wooden table circled by white-enameled wooden chairs, and through an opened sliding glass door to a glass-enclosed porch. Beyond them, another sliding door, partially opened, led out onto a redwood deck that held, along the side abutting the house, a pair of ficuses in large terra-cotta pots. The floor in here was oak, bleached and waxed, but the furniture once again was white, a metal table and three metal chairs padded with white corduroy cushions. Draped from the arched back of one of the chairs was a gray suit coat.

Chuck Arthur stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, looking out the wall of glass at the smudged red and yellow bands in the darkening sky. If you didn't know what caused them, they might have been pretty—a soft, distant, impressionistic blur of color. The tide was out, and a few people, mostly couples in shorts or rolled-up trousers, walked along the smooth brown sand. Out on the water, some motorboats loafed across the gray. In the sky, some seagulls soared.

“You picked a fine time to visit Los Angeles,” he said without looking at me. “This is the worst smog I've ever seen. It never used to get all the way out here, to the beaches. You could stand here, anywhere along the coast, and you could see practically all the way to Hawaii.” He frowned. “It gets worse every year.” He was killing time, I thought, postponing a possible confrontation.

He turned, stepped over to the entryway, pushed a button. Above us, a neon light flickered for an instant, then glowed, filling the room with that artificial brightness that seems, while there's still some light in the sky, thin and paltry and sad. “Have a seat,” he told me.

I sat down on the far side of the table and he sat opposite me, in the chair that held his suit coat. “All right,” he said. “You're looking for Melissa Alonzo.”

“That's right.”

“And, according to you, you're not working for her ex-husband.”

“Right.”

“This story about Alonzo's uncle. I hope you don't mind if I tell you that I still find it a little difficult to believe.”

“I don't mind,” I said. “Sometimes I have problems with it myself. But like I said over the phone, you can call Martin Durham in Santa Fe. He'll verify everything.”

“I did call him, and he did.” He smiled a small, wry smile. “But I'm a lawyer myself, remember. I don't necessarily have to believe everything another lawyer tells me.”

I smiled. “Even when he used to be a governor?'

He smiled back. “Especially then.” His face became expressionless again. “You said you intended to act only as a go-between, without telling Mr. Montoya where Melissa is. If you do find her, what will prevent him from hiring someone else to follow your trail?”

“For one thing, I'll keep looking for her.”

He thought a moment, then nodded. “After you find her, you mean.”

I nodded. “I won't contact him until I've moved on a reasonable distance from wherever she is.”

A faint smile. “Is that ethical?”

I shrugged. “I told Mr. Montoya that I'd do whatever I could to guarantee Melissa and Winona's safety.”

“You'll be charging him for work that you won't actually be doing.”

“I can live with that. So can he.”

Another faint smile. “Are you always so relaxed about overcharging your clients?”

“Not always,” I said. I smiled; I was careful to smile. “But then I'm not a lawyer.”

He laughed. There was some surprise and some reluctance in the laughter. “Is that your standard technique for lowering a witness's defenses? Insulting his profession?”

“When I think it'll work.”

He looked at me, smiling thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “All right. What can I do for you?”

“You represented Melissa in her divorce, as well as the custody thing.”

“Yes.”

“I imagine you got to know her fairly well.”

He shrugged lightly. “Inevitable, given the nature of the case.”

“What did you think of her?”

He seemed surprised. “Why?”

“I don't know the woman. And knowing something about her, about the kind of person she was, might be helpful.”

Another small, wry smile. “The psychological approach?”

“Yeah. They said in the correspondence course that it was a good way to go when there was nobody around to beat up.”

He smiled. Again he looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, and again he made up his mind. “Melissa Alonzo,” he said, “is one of the bravest women I've ever known.”

He said it with a casual matter-of-factness that was more impressive, and more believable, than an intense conviction. That told me a few things. It told me that possibly he cared for Melissa beyond the boundaries of the lawyer—client relationship. And it told me that, because he might, I'd have to be careful with the questions I asked him. It told me, too, that I'd have to be careful with the answers he gave. He might not consciously lie to me, but if he were involved with Melissa, or if he'd wanted to be, his attachment to her might color his perceptions. I glanced at his left hand. No wedding ring.

It could be. Even lawyers, I had heard, can make fools of themselves for love.

And so, I had heard, can private detectives.

“Brave how?” I asked him.

“She has this … she has a really remarkable inner strength. She's—you've seen pictures of her? You know what she looks like?”

I nodded.

His eyes were brighter now and his face was animated. “Well,” he said, “here's this slight, slim woman—she's in her thirties but she looks like a teenage girl—and you think, Jesus, a strong breeze would blow her over. She's very open, very unguarded, very … innocent. Almost an Alice in Wonderland figure. And she gives you the feeling that she could be hurt extremely easily. And she
could
be. She
is
. She's certainly sensitive, and she's certainly had more than her share of pain and disappointment. But beneath all the other qualities there's an amazing strength of character. All through the trial, with reporters badgering her, her family ignoring her, her husband lying through his teeth up on the stand, she never broke. She had some rough moments. She had some extremely rough moments. A couple of times there I thought she was gone. I thought she'd crumble. But she always picked herself up and got on with the business at hand. She's an extraordinary woman.”

I nodded. I no longer wondered whether the man had been attached to Melissa. Any lawyer learns early on to hide his feelings. And a divorce lawyer can see people at their worst, at their most wounded, their most malicious. A lot of divorce lawyers become hardened. He hadn't. Or, if he had, something about Melissa Alonzo had caused him to open his shell to her. And now to me.

“And she was a wonderful mother,” he said. “Caring. Supportive. Protective of Winona without trying to smother her.”

“After the trial,” I said, “or during it, did Melissa ever talk about running off with Winona?”