A Flower in the Desert (16 page)

She shook her head, gently twirled her ice again. “We haven't talked much. We weren't talking much, I mean, before she left. Just a phone call now and then.” She set the glass on the end table, reached out for a small beige box encircled by a platoon of adorable baby animals, and pressed a button in its center.

I asked her, “The message on the postcard. Do you know what it means?”

“I assumed …”—she waved her hand vaguely—“I assumed it was a sort of reassurance, a way to tell me she was all right.”

“Did Melissa ever mention anyone in Santa Fe she might've gone to, a close friend?”

She looked off to the window that faced the front lawn, her eyes focused on some place far beyond the grass, then she looked back at me. “There was a woman. An artist, a painter. Deirdre, I think … Deirdre Polk. But she didn't live in Santa Fe.” She frowned, trying to remember.

Deirdre. I took out my notebook and pen. I wrote the name down. “Where
does
she live, Mrs. Bigelow?”

Her face was pinched in concentration. Finally, she said, with a mock desperation that threatened to become real, “Isn't that awful? I can't remember. I—” Abruptly she put on a bright, vacant smile as the Hispanic woman returned. “Thank you, Annabella.” She set her empty glass on the tray, took the full one waiting for her, cocked her head, and turned the bright smile in my direction. “Are you sure I can't get you anything?”

“I'm sure. Thanks.”

The Hispanic woman padded away.

“
Hartley
,” Mrs. Bigelow said suddenly. “That was the name. The name of the town.”

North of Santa Fe, closer to Taos, it was a small town, locally famous for its artists' colony. I wrote the name down.

“Anyone else?” I asked her.

She shook her head, took a sip from the fresh drink. Her face was slack now, as though the effort of remembering had drained it of life. Her voice was toneless. “We never really talked, Melissa and I, about the people she knew in Santa Fe.”

“Did she ever mention a woman named Juanita?”

Mrs. Bigelow canted her head to the side, thoughtful. At last she said, “We had a housekeeper named Juanita once. But she's dead now, I believe. Yes, I'm sure she is. We sent flowers.”

“No other Juanita?'

“Not that I can recall.”

I said, “Did she ever tell you how she met Deirdre Polk?”

She waved a hand vaguely. “Some opening or other.”

“In Santa Fe?”

“I believe so.”

I said, “What about the people involved in the group she worked with. Sanctuary.”

“
That
,” she said, looking displeased. She shifted slightly in her seat.

I asked her, “Did she ever mention the names of anyone in the group?”

“It was something we didn't really discuss. She knew that Cal and I didn't approve of her involvement with those people.” It seemed that there were a lot of things that Melissa and her mother never discussed.

“Why is that?” I asked.

She sat upright, gathering herself together. “Please don't misunderstand me. I'm sure that many of them are very well intentioned. Like Melissa is. And I suppose they see themselves as romantic figures, flouting authority, aiding the downtrodden. But it seems to me that they're no better than common criminals, some of them. They're helping illegal aliens, you know. They're breaking the law of the land. I know that Melissa would never be involved with
that
part of it. But we felt that it was dangerous, her being a member of a group like that. The law is the law, after all. If we didn't have laws, we'd be no better than animals.” This she said as though it were something else she had learned many years ago, and had often repeated since then. Repetition had emptied it of any conviction it might once have had, genuine or hoped for.

“How much of her time did Melissa spend in Santa Fe? While she was married to Roy?”

She thought for a moment. She blinked. “Well, she and Roy used to go out there for the summers, when Roy wasn't making that television series. And then later, toward the end of the marriage, she spent more of her time out there, she and Winona. A week here and there.”

“Did she go there after the divorce?”

“Yes. Occasionally.”

“Does Sanctuary have an office in Santa Fe?”

“I really couldn't say. As I said, we didn't discuss those people.”

“Did Melissa speak to you after she returned from El Salvador? Before she disappeared?”

She shook her head. “I didn't even know she
had
disappeared until Roy called me and asked if I'd heard from her.”

She looked down again.

I said, “Is there anyone else you can think of, Mrs. Bigelow? Any other friend she might've gotten in contact with?”

She shook her head slowly. Then she looked up and stared out the window once more. I saw that quietly, politely, discreetly, she was crying. Tears dark with mascara rolled down her taut cheeks. Without looking at me, she said, “Lately, you know, we haven't talked that much.”

It occurred to me then that if she
had
been the figure I'd glimpsed at the window, she might have been looking out across that broad sweep of lawn for Melissa. Standing there, drink in hand, waiting for her daughter to return. Since last week, the only daughter she had left.

It was not a happy thought.

I told her, “I'll find Melissa, Mrs. Bigelow.” There was nothing else to say.

“Please,” she said softly, still staring out the window. Then she closed her eyes and she sat there, holding her drink in her lap with both hands, as the tears made small slick trails down the mask that was her face.

Fourteen

M
ELISSA ALONZO
,”
CHARLES HATFIELD TOLD ME,
“is a Committed woman. Absolutely dedicated. Her assistance has been invaluiable to this organization.”

I hadn't expected to like Charles Hatfield. After leaving Mrs. Bigelow and her grief, I hadn't expected to like anyone. But the L.A. director of Sanctuary surprised me. He didn't look like a common criminal, but then I hadn't thought he would—an organization like Sanctuary wouldn't last long if its directors resembled street thugs.

He was English and he was short and a bit overweight and his thick white hair was combed back in waves over a pair of ears that were slightly larger, and slightly redder, than ears were supposed to be. A waxed white mustache curled heroically from beneath his rounded nose. His ruddy face was friendly and sincere—a combination that often makes me uneasy, but one that in Hatfield's case I found myself buying. He wore a white oxford shirt, a club tie opened at the neck, tweed trousers, and a tweed jacket that sported leather patches on the elbow and a leather patch at the right shoulder, the kind that's designed to keep the cloth beneath from getting ruffled by the butt of your Purdy shotgun when you blast away at some wily pheasant. Or some wily peasant. I doubted that Hatfield had ever blasted away at anything.

His cordovan wingtips were perched atop his wide mahogany desk, and he was smoking a bulldog pipe that refused to stay alight. Every five minutes or so, he torched it with a jet of flame from his Dunhill lighter and puffed up a cloud of blue smoke.

I asked him, “Have you heard from her since she disappeared?”

“No. Nothing.” He sucked at his pipe, then grinned engagingly around its stem. “Wish I had. We could use her right now. Work's piling up right and left.”

“What exactly did Melissa do for you, Mr. Hatfield?”

“Little bit of everything,” he said. “Typing, filing, general secretarial. May not sound like much, but in a place like this”—he waved his pipe to take in the office, and, by implication, the rest of Sanctuary—”absolutely essential.”

The office in question was about the same size as Elizabeth Drewer's, but it was done up as an alcove in a gentlemen's private club: red carpet, black leather chairs studded with brass, framed lithographs of Irish setters on the dark hardwood walls, a glassed-in mahogany bookcase holding shelves of handsome leather-bound books that had probably never been read.

“And Melissa,” he said, “was sharp as a tack. Never made a mistake. Never misfiled anything. I wanted something, some record, all I had to do was ask her, and she'd have it to me in a shot.”

“She didn't work here full time.”

He waved his pipe negatively. “No, no, no. Once or twice a week. Wish it'd been more. It's a completely volunteer staff here, and Lord knows they've all got their heart in the right place, splendid bunch, work like slaves. But some of them, well,
amateurs
pretty much says it. Not Melissa, though. A real professional. Had her job down cold.”

“What about her trips to Central America?”

He sucked at his pipe, smiled. “What about them?”

“What were the trips for?”

The pipe had gone out again. He lifted his lighter from the desk, flicked it open, spun the wheel. He held it to the pipe and a long finger of flame tapped at the bowl. “Fact finding,” he said around the pipe stem, through a billow of smoke. “Getting the scoop on those bullies down in El Salvador and Guatemala. First-person accounts.” He flapped his hand, waved away the smoke.

I looked down at my notebook. “According to the press reports, there were three other people on the trip with her. Bob Slavin, Terrence Courtney, and Beatrice Wocynski. I understand that Melissa was supposed to leave with them from San Salvador on August twenty-first. What was their reaction when she left on the seventeenth?”

“They didn't know she'd left the country until the twentieth, day before they left themselves. Melissa didn't show up at the Hilton, in San Salvador, like she was supposed to. They called her hotel in Santa Isabel, discovered she'd checked out on the seventeenth. Left a message for them. Flying home, personal business.”

“And what was their reaction?”

“Surprise.” He grinned around the pipe. “Mystification.”

“And what was your reaction?”

He frowned slightly. “Well, surprise, too, naturally. But I know Melissa a bit better than they do. She's … mercurial.” He liked the sound of the word. Nodding, he repeated it: “Mercurial. She's done things like that before, you know. Gone off on her own, without a word to anyone. Not that she isn't a responsible person, fundamentally. She is. Like I say, when she worked here at the office, she had her job down cold.”

“What was your reaction when you learned that she'd disappeared from L.A. with her daughter?”

“Now that worried me, got to confess. Leaving Salvador was one thing, but leaving town like that …” He shook his head sadly. “And with Winona. Something else again. Not like her.” He puffed at the pipe.

“Do you know why she left?”

He shrugged. “Under a lot of pressure, wasn't she? Lot of stress. The court case, that cretinous judge awarding visitation to that swine of a husband.”

“You think that Roy was guilty of child abuse?”

“Course he was. Melissa would never've accused him otherwise. Would never've put Winona through all that sordid business. The court, the press. Horrible. She loves that little girl. Crazy about her.”

I nodded. “Do you know Roy Alonzo?”

He snorted into his mustache. “Thought I did. Saw him fairly often. Drinks, dinner. He was our spokesperson, you know. Typical actor. All smiles and charm outside, pit viper inside.”

“He's not the spokesperson now?”

He looked affronted. “Course not. Last thing we need is a bloody bent swine for a figurehead. I took it up with the board myself, straightaway. Got to get rid of this pig, I said. A total liability. Got to dump him.”

“But what if Roy was innocent? What if Melissa misunderstood something Winona said?”

“Rubbish. I told you, Melissa wouldn't have gone ahead with this thing if she hadn't been sure. And there were the doctor's reports. Roy was no innocent.” He shrugged. “Besides, didn't matter in the end. Image. That's what's important in this town. Image. Caesar's wife. We couldn't have him representing us. Simple as that.”

I nodded. “One thing I'm a little unclear about.”

His eyebrows—both of them—arched expectantly.

“What was Melissa doing in Santa Isabel?” I asked him.

“Bit of R and R,” he said. “It's on the coast, Santa Isabel. Quiet little place, palm trees, sand, grass huts. The four of them had pretty much finished with their business down there. Interviews, whatnot. Terry and Bob flew off to Costa Rica, Melissa rented a car and drove to Santa Isabel. Beatrice stayed in San Salvador.”

“Did anything happen in Santa Isabel while Melissa was there? Anything that might've put her in jeopardy?”

Below the elaborate mustache, his mouth widened in a grin. “Sand in the margaritas. That's probably the worst thing that could happen in Santa Isabel. Tiny little place. Very pretty. Very quiet, like I say. Quaint. Miles and miles from the fighting.”

So much for Rita's theory that Melissa was running from some unknown event that had occurred down there.

I said, “Could you give me addresses for the three people who went with her?”

“Bob and Terry are in Guatemala right now.” He grinned. “Suckers for punishment, the two of 'em. Beatrice is around, though. Give you hers, if you like.”

“I'd appreciate it.”

“Want it now? That it? We finished?”

“First,” I said, “could you tell me what it is that Sanctuary does, exactly?”

He shrugged. “Bit of everything. PR for the cause. Legal aid for the people in the camps, posting bonds, finding sponsers—”

“The camps?” I interrupted him.

“The INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, calls 'em service processing centers. But concentration camps is more like it. We've got a couple here in California. The men's camp at El Centro, the SPAN women's facility in Pasadena. Between three and four hundred men at El Centro, all treated like animals. Overcrowding, slop for food. Half of them are OTMs—”