A Flower in the Desert (14 page)

“Mr. Bigelow,” I began.

“Your phone message said you wanted to know about my daughter,” he said. “I have no daughter. I lost the only daughter I had last week. A vicious, brutal, unnecessary death. I know nothing about Melissa Alonzo. I have no information about the woman, and no desire to obtain any. That should satisfy you. If it doesn't, you'll have to ask elsewhere.”

Closer up, in better light, I saw that he was a beefy man in his sixties. His wavy white hair was combed back from a precise widow's peak. His face was dark, but a bright florid red rather than the usual California tan. It was the kind of ruddy complexion that came from standing at the tiller while the wind and the spray beat at you and the sun drummed down. Or from three-martini lunches. The pouches beneath his hazel eyes and the tracery of veins across the bridge of his nose suggested the latter. Still, he had clearly been a handsome man at one time, and even now he was a man of presence.

“Mr. Bigelow,” I said. “I can understand your grief at the death of your daughter. I honestly regret having to intrude at a time like this. But I believe it's possible that the death of your daughter Cathryn and the disappearance of Melissa may be connected in some way.”

He unlaced his fingers and put his hands along the edge of the desk. His face had gotten redder. “That is absolute, utter horseshit. Cathryn was killed by a maniac. A psychotic. How dare you imply that she had anything to do with Melissa?”

“She was apparently in contact with Melissa.”

“
Melissa
was in contact with Cathryn. One goddamn postcard. Cathryn would never have contacted Melissa. Never. She knew what Melissa is, knew what kind of life she leads.”

“What kind of life is that?”

“Depraved. Abandoned.” He started to say something, then looked at his gold mariner's Rolex. “Your time is up,” he announced.

“Mr. Bigelow, maybe you've got good reason to feel the way you do about your daughter. But aren't you concerned about your granddaughter?”

He stabbed his thumb at a button on his desk. He turned to me, his florid face set. “I told you. I know nothing, and I care nothing, about Melissa Alonzo. And I know and care nothing about any member of her family.”

“We're talking about a six-year-old girl, Mr. Bigelow. A six-year-old girl isn't responsible for the kind of life her mother leads. You can't just let her—”

He slammed his hand down against the top of his desk. “Don't you goddamn tell
me
what I
can
and
can't
do! I don't have to take that, not from some goddamn slimy private eye in goddamn
cowboy
boots! You get the fuck—” He turned toward the door and then gestured toward me, abruptly, with his thumb. “
Get him out of here
,” he growled.

I turned.

I hadn't heard them come in. Both of them wore sleekly styled khaki rent-a-cop uniforms. Italian, probably. One of them was big and slope-shouldered, his belly sagging like a beanbag over his belt. The other was small and wiry and he moved very nicely on the balls of his feet. He was the one carrying the police baton, slapping it lightly into the palm of his left hand. He was smiling and his eyes were eager.

“Well now, Ace,” he said, smiling as he floated lightly across the carpet, “guess it's time for you to say your goodbyes and come along like a nice little boy.”

I stood up and reached into my blazer. The short rent-a-cop stopped moving forward and stopped smiling. He blinked nervously—neither he nor his friend was wearing a gun. I took out a business card, set it on Calvin Bigelow's desk. “If you change your mind,” I told Bigelow.

Without looking at me or the card, Bigelow said to the guards, “Throw him out.”

The short rent-a-cop made a mistake then. Maybe he resented my causing, and seeing, his brief flicker of fear. Maybe, like Bigelow, he didn't like my cowboy boots. Whatever the reason, he grabbed at my left arm with his left hand and raised the baton in his right.

It had been a bad day for me, first Elizabeth Drewer and now Bigelow and his Keystone Kops, and I was not in the best of moods. I went with the force of his pull, throwing him off balance, then slammed the heel of my hand up into his jaw. His teeth clicked and his eyes went loose. He lowered the baton.

I turned to the big guard, who had just realized that things weren't going according to plan. His arms were reaching for me as though he wanted to sweep me into an embrace. I hit him as hard as I could, just below the sternum. You don't aim for the surface, the skin and flesh—you aim for the spine. He gasped, doubling over, and his sweeping arms flew down and grabbed at his belly.

I turned to the smaller guard. He was about to make a comeback, shaking his head and trying to focus as he raised the baton again. I clipped him on the jaw with a pretty good left and he took two steps backward and sat down. The baton bounced once, then thumped against the carpet.

I looked at Bigelow. He had the telephone receiver to his ear and he was quickly tapping buttons on the base unit. His florid face seemed a shade or two darker.

“Have a nice day,” I told him, and left.

Inside the elevator, sliding smoothly down to street level, I checked my left hand to make certain that all the knuckles were still attached to their proper fingers. They seemed to be.

There was a woman in the car with me, a gray business suit, blue rinsed hair, Joan Crawford eyebrows, Broderick Crawford jowls. She eyed me for a moment, and then edged slightly away, toward the door. Maybe I was smiling oddly.

Sometimes there's nothing quite as satisfying as taking out your aggressions in an absolutely physical way. Particularly when you're still upright and mobile afterward. I believe it was Rocky Marciano who first made this observation.

Rita, of course, has often maintained that this is a childish attitude. But, as I've often pointed out, no one ever called Rocky Marciano childish.

Back in the Chevy, the tie torn off and draped across the passenger seat, I considered my options. If Bigelow had called the police to complain about my littering his office with rent-a-cops, I probably didn't have many. I had believed Sergeant Bradley when he told me that if he heard any reports about my hassling his citizens, he would request that I vacate the City of Angels.

Not much point in worrying about it. Either Bigelow had called the cops or he hadn't. Either the cops would pick me up or they wouldn't. I might as well proceed as though everything were still hunky-dory.

I had an appointment at five with Charles Hatfield, the head of the L.A. branch of Sanctuary. It was twelve thirty now. I had time to get myself some food—maybe try one of those tofu burgers I'd read about. Afterward, I could drive to Beverly Hills and attempt to learn more about Melissa Alonzo.

By the time I reached Beverly Hills I was dyspeptic and grumpy and tired. Dyspeptic because the burrito I'd eaten was now eating me back. Grumpy and tired because the adrenaline that had gushed through me in Bigelow's office had by now flushed itself from my system. And my left hand hurt.

The house was hidden behind a tall fieldstone wall, but it was one of the few houses on the sweeping, shaded street that didn't have an electrified gate at the front. I followed the winding driveway up past a rolling lawn just slightly smaller than Arlington National Cemetery, and I parked the car behind a long black diesel Mercedes that could have done duty there as a hearse. The house was stone, like the wall, and it was huge, the towering gray walls draped with green ivy so glossy it must have been waxed once a week.

I've never understood why two people need more than a few rooms to live in. A living room, a couple of bedrooms, a den for the bowling trophies, maybe a spare room to tuck the pope away when he dropped by for the weekend. This house—which looked like it had been shipped here stone by stone from some medieval estate in France—must have held fifteen or twenty rooms. Perhaps the owner needed all that space to contain his ego. Or his house guests. And their egos.

As I padded toward the front door, I thought I saw someone move away from one of the casement windows to my right, a sudden darting movement that might have been merely the reflection of a passing bird. Perhaps it had been.

At the door, I rang the bell and after a few moments it was opened by a Hispanic woman in her fifties, plump, gray-haired, looking homey in a housedress and a floral apron. She smiled at me. “Yes?”

“My name is Joshua Croft,” I told her. “I'm an investigator licensed by the state of new Mexico. If Mrs. Bigelow is free, I'd like to talk to her about her daughter.”

Sadness replaced the smile. “A very terrible tragedy. Mrs. Bigelow is still very upset.”

“I understand. And I apologize for disturbing her. I won't take much of her time.”

She looked at me for a moment, thoughtful, and then came to a decision. “Well, okay,” she said. Maybe she liked my cowboy boots. “You wait here, please, while I ask.”

I waited some, and after another few moments the woman returned. She nodded to me. “Please follow,” she said, and I did, through a dark foyer, around a corner, across a broad formal living room festooned with the kind of spindly antique furniture favored by former French kings and wealthy middle-aged hairdressers, down some carpeted steps, around another corner, and into a large room flooded with light.

The air was somehow denser in here, and it held a heavy floral scent, like the air in a greenhouse, or a funeral home. White lace curtains were draped at the sides of the casement windows. The walls were white, the moldings Wedgwood blue, and the floors were oak, partially covered by a cream-colored Persian carpet. It would have been a spacious place, except that it was crammed with the same sort of dark, brittle furniture that filled the living room, and every inch of surface area—bookshelves, credenzas, tables—was occupied by small porcelain animal figurines: rabbits, puppies, kittens, fawns, baby giraffes and hippos and chimpanzees, all of them equipped with wide adorable stares and wide adorable smiles. Individually, any one of them might have seemed pleasant, or at least harmless. En masse, they seemed like an invasion force.

A petite woman in a black silk jumpsuit sat at the far corner of a yellow loveseat. Her hair, styled in a gamine cut, snug against her delicate skull, was as black and shiny as her outfit. Because she was so tiny and fine-boned, at a distance she might have been mistaken for a small girl. Up close, however, I noticed the age freckles on the backs of her frail hands, and the tight glazed skin, smooth as bone, along her cheeks. Her makeup was artfully applied, rouge, lipstick, eyeliner, mascara, but in the bright daylight it had turned her oval face into the mask of a younger woman. In her own way, she was fighting time and age as desperately as Edie Carpenter. But she had been fighting them for much longer.

She said, “How do you do, Mr.… Um?”

“Croft. Joshua Croft, Mrs. Bigelow. Fine, thanks. I'm sorry to disturb you like this.”