A Flower in the Desert (2 page)

He sounded entirely sincere to me. But sincerity was what, as an actor, he was paid to deliver. “How old is Winona?” I asked him.

He winced. “She turned six in July. She was five when Melissa started all this.”

I nodded again. “I did read something about it. I didn't follow it very carefully.” I didn't follow it at all. I seldom read about celebrities, and I never read about child abuse.

“Five years old, Mr. Croft. Can you imagine what an accusation like that could do to a five-year-old girl?”

“No,” I said. I didn't really want to.

“It was a mess,” he said. “Melissa sued to deny me visitation, I countersued for defamation of character. It went on for months. Lawyers, doctors, social workers, judges. A circus. A nightmare. And poor Winona was in the middle of it. Finally, though, the appellate judge ruled that there was no evidence of abuse. Naturally—there had never been any abuse. Anyway, afterward, Melissa went off to South America for a few days, to lick her wounds. When she came back, she picked up Winona and the two of them disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Vanished. No one's seen either one of them since then.”

“This was when?”

“Middle of August. August the seventeenth. As soon as we knew what Melissa was up to, my lawyer and I hired a private investigator to track her down. He had no luck.”

“Why come to me? And why now?”

“Melissa had a sister in L.A. Cathryn Bigelow. Last week, Cathryn was killed. Murdered. I was in New York when I learned about it, and I had to fly out there. While they were investigating her apartment, the police found a postcard from Melissa, a postcard that was postmarked in Albuquerque. All the Santa Fe mail is postmarked in Albuquerque—you know that, right?”

I nodded. “So is all the Albuquerque mail.”

“Sure, but we have a house here in Santa Fe. Had a house. It's mine now, part of the settlement, a little place out in La Tierra. But Melissa has contacts here in town. Friends, people she trusts. She doesn't know all that many people in Albuquerque. She was here, in Santa Fe. I'm sure of it. And it's possible that she's still here.”

“Has she come to Santa Fe since the divorce?”

“Yes. A couple of times. She stayed at The Cloisters.” An expensive guest ranch north of town. “But I've already checked there, and no one's seen her.”

“Let's go back a bit. You said her sister was murdered?”

“Strangled.” He shook his head. “A horrible thing. A genuine tragedy. I always liked Cathryn. A really sweet girl, one of the world's true innocents.”

“Who killed her?”

“Some kind of burglar. A maniac, according to the police. They haven't found him yet.”

“They have a suspect?”

He shook his head. “I don't think so.”

“You've seen this postcard they found?”

“Yes. A picture of Taos Pueblo.”

“What was the date of the postmark?”

“The twenty-third of September.”

“Was there a message on the card?”

“Just one line. ‘
The flower in the desert lives.
' And then her signature. Melissa's.”

“‘
The flower in the desert lives'?
Does that have any special significance?”

“Not that I know of.” He shrugged. “Probably some private thing between Cathryn and Melissa.”

I nodded. “So what is it you'd like me to do, Mr. Alonzo?”

He frowned. “Well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it? I want you to find Melissa and Winona, and I want you to bring my daughter back to me.”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't do that.”

Two

Y
OU
'
RE A SNOB, JOSHUA
.”

“The guy was a major asshole, Rita.”

“I rest my case,” she said.

The two of us were in sitting on the sofa in Rita's living room. From there, as we sipped our tea, we could look out through the French doors and across the patio to the west, where the sun was turning into a plump ripe peach as it glided down the sky toward the distant slopes of the Jemez Mountains.

I said, “From the time he came into the office until the time he left, he was busy auditioning. He was playing a part. He was playing three or four parts.”

“Maybe he sensed what a tough critic he was dealing with. Maybe he wanted to dazzle you with his virtuosity.”

Above a long, flowing, navy blue skirt she wore a pale blue satin blouse that contrasted nicely with her smooth dark skin and the thick tumble of her hair, as black as a raven's wing. Gone now was the wheelchair in which she'd spent the days of the past three years. In its place, at the end of the sofa, stood a stainless steel walker. Using the walker must have been difficult for Rita, and painful: she never used it while I was around. Whenever I arrived at the house she was already sitting on the sofa, and when I left she was still sitting there.

“First of all,” I said, “he made it sound like his ex-wife had cleaned him out when they got the divorce. California is a community property state, just like New Mexico. Either he kept half of what they had, or he gave it away in the settlement. If he gave it away, she must've had something on him.”

“He did tell you that he had a house here in Santa Fe.”

“And he made that sound like a little old shack by the railroad tracks. It's in La Tierra, Rita. There aren't any railroad tracks in La Tierra. They're against the zoning laws.”

She smiled at me over her teacup. Her smile wasn't something that happened only to her lips. It happened to her large black eyes, too, and it put a glow behind the smooth skin of her face; and it put a kind of taut emptiness in my chest. “Joshua, there's no zoning law against his trying to get your sympathy.”

“No law against my withholding it, either.”

She smiled again, sipped at her tea. “Would you have been so hostile if Alonzo hadn't played a private detective on that television program?”

“I wasn't hostile. I was a prince. Polite. Respectful. Completely professional.”

“Why is it, then, that he wanted to punch you in the nose?”

I shrugged. “Macho posturing, I suppose.”

“His or yours?”

I took a sip of my tea. Lapsang souchong. “Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”

“Desperately,” she said.

Roy Alonzo had frowned when I told him I couldn't help him. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean that I won't involve the agency in a sexual abuse case. They're messy, and they only get messier, and there's never any final way to determine the truth. The medical evidence, if there is any, is ambiguous—the first doctor says yes, the second doctor says no. The testimony of the child is suspect. And so, obviously, is the testimony of the parents. Both parents.”

“What's all that got to do with anything? I just want you to find my daughter.”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry, Mr. Alonzo. I won't take the case.”

“You won't take the case,” he repeated, his voice flat.

“No. If you'd like, I can give you the name of a good private investigator here in town, someone who'd be happy to take it.”

“Someone who doesn't have your scruples, you mean.”

“Scruples don't enter into it.”

He leaned slightly forward in his chair. “Listen to me,” he said. “A little over a year ago, I was on top of the world. I had a top-twenty series on a major network—the only Hispanic in the history of television who's ever carried a prime-time hour by himself. That may not mean a damn thing to you, but it was something I took a lot of pride in. And I had a big-budget feature in the chute. It was a go. I had a lock on it, points in the gross, the video, the cable, everything. We're talking, conservative projections, something like two or three million dollars. Today, I don't have diddly. Even though I proved in court that I never laid a finger on Winona, not that way, even though everyone knew that the whole thing was a crazy lie of Melissa's, my career was shot. Suddenly I was a leper. The series was canceled, the money people flushed the feature. I've spent nearly every dime I had on lawyers, fighting this. My entire life is in fucking turn-around. All I have left is my daughter, and now she's gone.”

“I understand that, Mr. Alonzo.”

“You have children?”

“No.”

“Then you don't understand a fucking thing.” He frowned again, shook his head, sat back in the chair. “All right. Look. Forget I said that.” He took a deep breath. When he spoke, his voice was level and his face was open. “I want my daughter back. I don't want to hurt my ex-wife, I don't want revenge. All I want is to get my daughter back.”

“Like I said, I'll be happy to give you the name of a competent private investigator here in town.”

He nodded, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Explain to me why you won't take a child custody case.”

“I already did.”

“Try it one more time.”

“Because I like to be on the side of the angels, and there's no way, in a situation like this, for me to determine where that is.”

“Listen to me, Mr. Croft,” he said calmly, earnestly. “I give you my word that I never abused my daughter. I swear to God that I never once touched her.”

Once again, he sounded entirely convincing. But, once again, that was exactly the way he was supposed to sound. As George Burns said, sincerity is the most important thing—if you can fake that, you've got it made.

“I'm sorry,” I told him.

He was leaning forward in his chair. He nodded. “So,” he said, “what you're doing, basically, is calling me a liar.”

“What I'm doing, basically,” I said, “is telling you I won't take the case.”

His face had closed up the way it did on television whenever Rick Valdez discovered that during the next few minutes of airtime, he would be wading through a puddle of thugs. He stood, moved away from the chair, planted his feet. “All right,” he said. He held out his hands, palms up, and flicked his fingers at me. “Come on.”

I sat back and smiled up at him. Partly, I was genuinely amused; but partly, too, I suppose, I was trying to needle him. It's not only the make-believe P.I.s who're capable of asshole-ism. “Mr. Alonzo, seems to me you've already had enough lawyers and court appearances. You sure you want to waste your time with an assault and battery charge?”

He showed me still another of his smiles, this one curled at the corner with scorn. “That the way you handle things, Croft? You hide behind your lawyers?”

“Whenever I can.”

He put his hands on his hips, cocked his head slightly back, the better to look down at me. “I heard you were a
man.
”

I nodded. “Got a certificate to prove it.”

“You look like a goddamn pussy to me.”

“Then both of us could be in serious trouble.”

His smile vanished and his eyes narrowed. He leaned forward and put his hands, fingers splayed, along the edge of the desktop. “I'm not through with you, Croft.” His voice, low and menacing, was the voice that had sent spasms of fear rippling through the pimps and dealers and grifters who inhabited “Valdez!” “I know people in this town. I know a lot of people. Big people. Important people. I can make your life very unpleasant.”

“You already have,” I told him. Some folks, without even trying, bring out the best in me.

He reached across the desk for the front of my shirt. I slapped his hand away and he nearly went sprawling across the blotter. No big deal; leaning forward like that, he was off balance.

As he pushed himself back, righted himself, I said, “Let's not forget those lawyers.”

He adjusted the lapels of his jacket, straightened his shoulders. He took a deep breath. “I'll see you again, Croft.”

I nodded. “I look forward to it.”

He turned, stomped across the room, tore open the door, strode through it, and slammed it shut behind him, just like Kirk Douglas in
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Or maybe it was like Gregory Peck in
Duel in the Sun.
Hard to keep track sometimes. Anyway, it was a swell exit.