A Flower in the Desert (11 page)

I never got a chance to give Rita's regards to Ed Norman. He never showed. I waited twenty minutes in the bar downstairs, trying not to listen to people at nearby tables as they talked expansively about packages and product and Julia and Warren. I sipped at my Jack Daniel's and wondered how many of these deals were real and how many were sheer fantasy. In a town built upon fantasy, it was probably impossible to say. I doubted whether any of these tanned stalwarts in Armani jackets actually knew for certain themselves.

Also, I spent some time pouting. Was Rita going to leave the agency? After all the time we'd spent together? After all that we'd meant to each other? Or after all, at any rate, that she'd meant to me?

I knew, a part of me knew, that Rita's leaving was unlikely. Probably unlikely. Not terribly likely. But the possibility did exist, and self-pity will burn whatever fuel is available. I was working myself into a pretty good brood when someone, a woman, said, “Mr. Croft?”

I looked up, and then I stood up. For a moment I didn't recognize her. Dark-haired, blue-eyed, stunning, she wore a short red dress as tight and shiny as the peel of an apple.

“Bonnie Nostromo,” she said, smiling. “We met today at Ed's office.”

“Of course. Good to see you. Have a seat.”

Holding a small red purse in her left hand, she lowered herself into the chair opposite me with an efficient, liquid grace—no small feat, considering the dress she wore.

As though reading my mind, she smiled her memorable smile when I sat, and she said, “This isn't what I'd usually wear to a place like this. I was working on something when Ed got in touch with me. He had to run up to La Jolla, an emergency, and he couldn't get through to you.”

I'd been on the phone most of the evening, trying to reach Melissa Alonzo's parents, and then talking to Rita.

I said, “So Ed sent you instead?” Your professional detective is trained to make these startling intuitive leaps.

She nodded. “I've got some of the information you asked for. Edie Carpenter, the Underground Railroad, Elizabeth Drewer.”

A cocktail waitress materialized to my right. “Can I get the lady something?”

I was a tad disappointed to see that Bonnie Nostromo smiled as genuinely at the waitress as she'd smiled to me. She ordered a club soda and lime. Not a designer water, I noted, and I was vaguely, irrationally pleased. I ordered another Jack Daniel's.

As the waitress left, Bonnie opened her purse, took out some folded sheets of paper, opened them. “Can you read shorthand?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “I sometimes have trouble with basic English.”

She smiled. I noted that she wore no ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. “I'll translate,” she said. “Which first? Carpenter?”

“Why not?” Her breasts, firm and round beneath the taut red fabric, had almost certainly never been touched by a surgeon. Except perhaps by an off-duty surgeon, and then, no doubt, with enthusiasm and a sense of enormous good fortune.

“Do you want it all?” she said. “History? Career?”

“Not unless it connects to Melissa Alonzo.”

“You want the dirt, you mean.”

“I collect it. I've got a big ball of it at home.”

She smiled. “I know the feeling. You never know what you're going to find under the rocks, do you?”

“Except that it's almost never gold.”

Another smile. I noticed that she had an attractive overbite, just like the women on “Valdez!” I wondered if she had a boyfriend. Did women still have boyfriends these days, or only Significant Others? Did they keep secrets from their Significant Others? “No gold here,” she said. “The story is that Carpenter's a swinger, kinky, into S and M, very big time.”

“We're talking what?”

“Leather. Whips. Private parties. Mistresses, masters, slaves. The usual sad nonsense.”

I remembered Edie Carpenter's smile when she told me she'd met Melissa at a party. I remembered the handcuffs I'd found in Melissa Alonzo's dresser.

I said, “The usual?”

“It's not that uncommon here. L.A. La-la Land. Everything and anything is possible. These people, Carpenter's playmates, they're all rich. Upper-upper-middle class, lower-middle age. They've got all the toys they've ever wanted, and they still feel hollow. Some of them try to fill up the hollowness by acting out their sexual hangups. They have get-togethers. Parties. They play whatever role turns them on.”

The waitress brought our drinks and I asked her to put them on my tab. She was agreeable.

As she left, I asked Bonnie, “Carpenter organizes these?”

“Sometimes, so the story goes. Sometimes she's only a participant.”

“And what role turns Carpenter on?”

She sipped at her soda. “Mistress. Dominatrix.”

I nodded. “She'd look good in leather.” She certainly looked good out of it. And so, it occurred to me, would Bonnie Nostromo. “Is there anything to tie Melissa Alonzo to these soirées?”

“Nothing definite. This is all gossip, Mr. Croft. Gossip is one of the major currencies in this town. But a lot of it is counterfeit.”

“Joshua. Please. You're making me feel upper-upper-middle aged.”

She smiled that smile again. “Joshua.”

Maybe I should invite her up to my room. We could discuss all this in private. I could explain some of the finer points of investigative work.

“What's the
nothing definite?
” I asked.

“Old stories. Secondhand, thirdhand. Stories that Roy and Melissa Alonzo would show up once in a while.”

“As participants?”

“From what I gather, one is more or less compelled to participate. If you're a participant, you're not likely to go telling stories about everyone else.”

“Everyone else could tell the same stories about you.”

She nodded. “But as I said, this is all second- and thirdhand information.”

“Do we know what sort of roles Roy and Melissa favored?”

“Roy, according to the stories, was the dominant, Melissa the submissive.”

“Those are the technical terms?”

“Those are the terms these people use. Sadist and masochist are passé.”

I nodded. “Okay. Tell me about the Underground Railroad.”

What she told me was that the people responsible for its organization were careful and smart. A woman and a child in need of help—occasionally a man and a child—first contacted them through an intermediary. Who, in Melissa Alonzo's case, might well have been Elizabeth Drewer. They, whoever they were, would request convincing proof that sexual abuse had been committed. If they determined to their satisfaction that it had, and that the woman had attempted every legal means to protect the child, and had failed, they would provide her with instructions. How to vanish, leaving behind no trail. Where to go. How to get there: often by bus, sometimes in a private car with a driver, a “conductor,” who was part of the network.

From what Bonnie had been able to learn, there were four loosely structured but interlocking networks, one in the Northwest, one in the Northeast, and two in the South.

As she talked, I regarded Bonnie Nostromo's face, her blue eyes, her mobile, intelligent features. I wondered if she'd ever considered vanishing from Los Angeles. Ever considered, for example, relocating to a small, quaint Southwestern town …

“Sometimes,” she said, “they can zigzag, the mother and child, up and down the country, moving from one safe house to another. Go to Boise, Idaho, and then Las Vegas, and then Rockford, Illinois, and then New Orleans, or wherever, before they finally settle down.”

“Why zigzag?”

“There are some states where the network hasn't organized any safe house.”

“These people, the Railroad, they provide papers? ID?”

“Usually. Birth certificates, some of them forged. Some obtained from public records.”

“They visit cemeteries, find names whose birth dates match.”

She nodded. “And with the birth certificates, they can get drivers' licenses, Social Security cards.”

It was the classic method for obtaining false papers. “So who are they? The organizers?”

She sipped at her soda. “No one seems to know,” she said. “There are supposed to be four or five of them. Elizabeth Drewer might be one.”

“Who runs the safe houses?”

She shrugged. “They call themselves ‘keymasters.' Some of them, apparently, are old sixties radicals. Some of them are children's rights advocates. Some are just sympathetic families—sometimes the wife, sometimes the father, has a history of having been sexually abused.”

“Where are we getting all this information?”

“Off the databases. Magazine articles.”

“
People?
”

She smiled. “Among others.”

I'd put the check in the mail tomorrow.

“Okay,” I said. “Elizabeth Drewer?”

“She's one of the most vocal supporters of the Railroad here in California. Or at least here in Los Angeles. And, as I said, she may be one of the organizers. Rumor says she is. But so far the FBI hasn't been able to prove it. She's extremely bright. Ed says you're talking to her tomorrow.”

I nodded.

She said, “I'd suggest you don't try to bullshit her. She's also extremely tough.”

“I'm the soul of guilelessness,” I said. And then I asked her, guilelessly, “Would you like another soda?” Maybe the bubbles would go to her head and I could sling her over my shoulder and cart her off to my lair.

She shook her head. “No thanks. Got to run. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine over an hour ago.”

Ah.

I said, “One more thing. In all this checking you've done, did you run across anyone named Deirdre? Or a woman named Juanita?”

She shook her head. “No. Are they important?”

“I don't know yet.”

“No. Sorry.” She folded the sheets of paper, which she hadn't once looked at while she spoke, slipped them back into her purse, and smiled. “It was a pleasure talking to you. I wonder if I could ask you a really big favor?”

“What's that?”

“Could you tell Rita, Mrs. Mondragón, how much I admire her work? We've talked, over the phone and over the modem, but I've never really had a chance to tell her that I think she's just amazing.”

Wonderful. I nodded. “I'll do that,” I said.

Ten

I
LAY ON THE BED STARING
at the photograph Roy Alonzo had given me back in Santa Fe.

It showed a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt and running shoes leaning back against a low adobe wall, brown hills studded with piñon and juniper rolling off into the background. The sky was blue, as it usually is in New Mexico. The woman squinted against the sun, and her arms were folded together beneath her breasts, and her legs were crossed, and she stood with her hip canted a bit stiffly, as though she felt awkward being photographed. Her pale, fine blond hair fell straight to her shoulders, making her look, as Chuck Arthur had said, like an Alice in Wonderland figure. Her smile, like her pose, was a bit stiff. She had been thirty-three when the picture was taken, but looked much younger. Perhaps because the stiffness, the awkwardness, made her appear tentative, vulnerable, even somewhat lost.

Melissa Alonzo.

And now in fact she was lost.

Where are you, Melissa? On a bus somewhere right now, you and Winona huddled together on a hard flat seat, hurtling through the darkness down a long empty highway? Do you miss your hot tub? Your Cuisinart? Your handcuffs? Your peace of mind?

Did Winona miss her rabbit?

And
who
are you? A poor little rich girl? A political activist? A wife fighting to save her daughter from a monster of a father? A woman driven by jealousy and spite? A bored Hollywood homemaker with a fondness for an occasional bout of S and M?

Taken together, all the snippets of information I'd collected—none of them supported by any hard facts, except a nice house and a pair of handcuffs—didn't jell into any single individual. They couldn't. Certainly they couldn't jell into the young woman who stood there poised so awkwardly against that adobe wall, beneath that bright New Mexican sun.

I was still staring at the photograph when someone knocked at the door to my hotel room.

I looked at my watch. Five after twelve. Five after one back in Santa Fe.

Bonnie Nostromo? Swept away by my charm, she'd decided to forgo her boyfriend?

I rolled off the bed, crossed the room. There was no peephole set into the door, but, so far as I knew, I hadn't antagonized anyone in Los Angeles.

I opened the door without asking who might be out there.

The man standing outside the door was tall and broad shouldered, and he wore a pale yellow shirt, a Countess Mara tie, and a dark gray three-piece suit that had probably made several thousand silkworms extremely proud, or extremely frazzled. The coat was so exquisitely tailored that, unless you were looking for it, you might never notice the very faint bulge under the left shoulder. I could afford a suit like that if Rita and I had gone through an exceptionally good month, and my landlord had let the rent slide.

His ruggedly handsome face was square, with a firm, determined jaw neatly bisected by a manly cleft. His eyes were brown and steady. His hair was dark brown and curly. He had a splendid tan. I was beginning to believe that everyone who worked in L.A. had been hired from Central Casting, and that none of them had ever heard of skin cancer.

He smiled politely and said, “Mr. Croft?”

“Yes.”

“Jim Stamworth. FBI. May I come in?”

I looked at my watch, to see what his reaction might be.

He smiled politely again. “Just a few questions. They won't take long.”

I nodded. “Come in.”

He came in and I gestured toward the two overstuffed chairs by the window. He walked across the room and sat down in one, gave a gentle tug to the knees of his slacks, and crossed his legs, left ankle over right knee. Shiny silk socks that matched his suit, sleek black leather slip-on shoes. Italian, probably.