A Flower in the Desert (25 page)

Hernandez never stopped looking at me. He said, “How well did you know Deirdre Polk, Mr. Croft?”

“I met her for the first time today. You found my card at her house?”

Hernandez said, “What was the nature of your relationship with her?”

“There was no relationship. I was asking her some questions. About a case I was working on.”

“What case is that?” Hernandez asked me.

I told them. Everything. Told them about Roy Alonzo, Melissa, Cathryn Bigelow and her murder, all the people I'd spoken to out in Los Angeles, all the people I'd spoken to since I returned to Santa Fe. I told them about Juanita Carrera. If the Hispanic man had killed Deirdre Polk, then Juanita was in danger. Someone had to find her before he did. The police, as I'd told Chuck Arthur, had more resources than I would ever have.

The only person I left out was Norman Montoya.

When I finished, Hernandez said, “So you think there's some connection between this Carrera, Melissa Alonzo, and Deirdre Polk?”

“I know there is,” I said. “I just don't know what kind of connection. Listen. Deirdre Polk had a dog. A big German shepherd. Is the dog okay?” I knew, even as I asked, that it was a foolish question.

“The dog is dead,” Hernandez told me. “Shot.”

He would have had to kill the dog to get to Deirdre.

I took another deep breath. I wanted a cigarette.

“Okay,” said Hernandez. “Let's go through it one more time.”

“What was the time of death?” I asked him.

Hernandez frowned slightly. He was supposed to be asking the questions. But I'd been cooperating, and he bent. “Body was still warm, from what we have. We haven't been to the scene. We're out of the Santa Fe station. Hartley comes under the Española substation. Taos County sheriff's department called them at eleven. Española didn't have anyone free to come down here, so they called us. Friend of Polk's, a woman, found her at ten thirty. According to you, she was still alive at seven thirty.”

“I was here getting phone calls at ten thirty.”

Hernandez nodded. “From Gallegos and …” He glanced at Green. Without looking at his notebook, his eyes steady on me, Green said, “Cavanaugh.”

“Cavanaugh, yeah,” said Hernandez. “Take you a couple of hours to get here from there, this weather.” He shrugged. “So maybe you've got an alibi. Depends on what the M.E. tells us, after the autopsy.”

I had a sudden quick image of Deirdre Polk's long body sprawled naked atop a stainless steel table. I said, “It was pretty smart of me to leave my business card there after I killed her.”

Hernandez shrugged again. “People do funny things.”

“I could've left the card there last week. Last month.”

“Neighbor saw a dark Subaru wagon driving into Polk's driveway just before the storm hit. You own a dark Subaru wagon. You changing your mind? You saying you weren't there tonight?”

“I was there.”

Hernandez nodded. “Let's start from the top. Roy Alonzo came to your office.”

They left at a quarter to two. I walked into the kitchen, poured myself another drink. I walked back into the living room, stood staring down for a long time at the painting Deirdre Polk had given me. It was propped against the lamp on the end table. I took a sip of the bourbon and then, making a low growl in my throat that I heard only vaguely, as though from a distance, I hurled the glass at the wall. It trailed a comet's tail of whiskey through the air and then shattered loudly against the plaster.

How had he found Deirdre Polk? If he'd had access to Melissa's phone bills, he would've located her months ago. The FBI had.

How had he found her?

I stood there for a minute or two. Then I went back to the kitchen, ripped the roll of paper towels out of the plastic holder, carried it into the living room. I cleaned up the mess. I noticed that some of the whiskey had spattered Deirdre Polk's painting. A few droplets were very slowly rolling down its smooth surface, like tears down a face.

One of those chance junctions of the commonplace that momentarily seem filled with significance. We're creatures of meaning, acute to signs and portents. And we get them. The solitary raven circling the graveyard. The No Sale on the 7-Eleven cash register after some febrile moron blows away, in an instant of rabid excitement, a harmless clerk. Like a bad movie, life is happy to provide us with symbols that hint, briefly, at import. But they're empty, cheap and tawdry, meretricious, and all they finally signify is the random association of lifeless objects in what must be, with all its casual cruelties, a random universe.

Or so I felt then, without any conscious thought. And for an instant, once again, I was enraged. I very nearly reached out and smashed the painting against the wall.

Instead, I took a breath, and then, carefully, gently, I patted the painting dry. If we can't discover meaning, we can provide it.

When I finished cleaning, I made another drink, carried it back into the bedroom, set it on the nightstand. I undressed, climbed into bed.

I didn't sleep well that night.

Leroy's shop on Cerrillos Road didn't open until eight thirty, but I was up and dressed by seven. Steel-toed insulated waffle-stompers, tan cords, denim shirt, crew-neck sweater. I knew I should eat but I wasn't hungry. I forced down some toast and coffee. I cleaned the Smith & Wesson. I sat for a while watching smiling people on the television trade snappy patter. I cleaned the Smith again, and reloaded it. At eight I put on the sheepskin jacket, picked up the .38, put it in my right-hand jacket pocket, slipped on my gloves, and left.

I walked out into a world of glare. Sunshine, blue skies, brilliant white snow. The neighboring houses looked like ancient pueblos, lying abandoned beneath the drifts. Snow fell in soft clumps from the trees and blew like smoke from the rooftops, glittered through the air like tiny sequins. It was a beautiful morning. Deirdre Polk wouldn't be seeing it.

In the station wagon, I opened the glove compartment and got out my sunglasses, put them on. I drove in four-wheel down to Acequia Madre, took a left, followed the narrow road until it met Paseo de Peralta, took another left, shifted into two-wheel, drove down to Cerrillos. The snow was already gone from the major streets and they were black with moisture and gritty with the sand laid down by the early morning work crews.

Cerrillos Road, as usual, was busy, cars splashing at speed through today's slush and sand as though it didn't exist.

Leroy wasn't at the shop when I arrived. I waited in the car.

He showed up at eight thirty-five and I told him what I wanted him to do. I drove the Subaru around back and into his garage, turned off the ignition, got out.

Leroy was short and squat and he moved in a perpetual stoop. His hairy arms were too long and his heavy forehead was too low. He was a genius. Rita had once said that he was the sort of person who could make you rethink your position on evolution, whatever your position might be. But he wasn't genius enough, this morning, to know that I was in no mood for chatter. As he stalked slowly around the Subaru, holding a small black box that looked like an oscilloscope, he would not stop yammering.

“So I'm out with this chick, right, she's Anglo, a honey, awesome body, dynamite legs, very
bonita
, and we're gonna go to dinner, then maybe for drinks someplace nice, maybe Vanessie's or that new place on Palace, whaddya call it, Armand's, next to the gallery there, so I say to her, I say, So whaddya feel like eating, you know, and she tells me tofu. Tofu, she says. I say to her,
Tofu?
And she says to me, Tofu, yeah, it's like made from soybeans, and I say to her, Yeah, I know what it's made from, I ate it once, it tastes like spit only it's solid. It's very healthy, she tells me. It's
natural
, she says. I say to her, It's
natural?
Like it what, it grows on trees? You ever see a field with chunks of tofu growing all over? I'll tell you what's natural. You know what's natural? You know what they eat in the rain forests, I tell her, those little guys with the blow guns and the leather jock straps, climbing trees all the time, you know what they eat? You know what's natural for those guys? Sure, of course, they eat a lotta weeds and stuff when they don't have any choice, rocks and dirt too, probably, who knows, but what really turns 'em on, what really floats their boat, is nice fresh monkeys. That's what they really like. They shoot down a monkey with one of those darts they got and they're happy as clams. Okay,” he said, and pushed a button on the machine. “Nothing.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“Means we eliminate the second string. Now we see about the first.” He stalked, long arms swinging, over to a locked metal cabinet. “So anyway, I say to her, I say, maybe, you want natural, we should go someplace they got monkeys. …”

I let his voice fade out and I glanced around the garage. Tape decks and CB radios, some used, some still in their boxes, arranged in stacks along the plywood shelves. Speakers, too, and amplifiers and graphics equalizers, and piles of complicated equipment that probably I would never be able to identify.

“… solutely
gross
, she says.” He was circling the car again, holding this time a red metal box, larger than the first. “I can't believe you'd say that, she says. Are you some kind of—hold
on
, man, we are
hot
here.” Excited now, holding the box before him as though it were a treasure chest, he was approaching the rear of the wagon.

“Something?” I said.

“
Something
, man, Jesus Christ, you have got a goddamn
honey
in here.” He was at the tailgate. “You got the keys to the gate?”

I took them from my pocket, walked over, handed them to him. He unlocked the top gate, lifted it, swung the box inside. “Sonofabitch, man, you got the
mother
of honeys.” I moved closer as he turned and set the metal box on the floor. He reached into his pocket, fished out a small flashlight, lowered the bottom gate, leaned into the cargo space. He threw back a flap of the carpeting and tugged off the stiff sheet of plastic that concealed the spare tire well. “
There
you are, sweetie,” he said, his voice hushed. “Oh, Jesus, you are just one beautiful little honey, aren't you now?” He looked back to me over his shoulder. “C'mere. Take a look.”

I drove up north on St. Francis past the Old Taos Highway, turned left on Camino La Tierra. This used to be called Buckman Road, back before the developers put in La Tierra, a community of expensive adobe homes tucked between the juniper and piñon on ten-acre lots. It was paved, and some traffic had already passed over it this morning—the snow was gray and rutted. Roy Alonzo's house was somewhere back in here, among the rolling hills, but I wasn't going to Roy Alonzo's house.

Two or three miles in, the road went from pavement to dirt beneath the snow, and the station wagon began to fishtail. I slowed down and shifted into four-wheel. There were fewer tire tracks here, and after another mile or so there were none at all. I drove on for half a mile, found a space to turn around, angled the car to block the road, put the stick into neutral, left the engine running, and got out. Arms crossed, I leaned back against the right front fender. Once again, I waited.