A Flower in the Desert (3 page)

Smiling sadly, Rita shook her head. “Joshua,” she said, “do you think you'll ever grow up?”

I smiled. “I doubt it, Rita. I'm having too much fun being an adolescent.”

“An occasionally obnoxious adolescent.”

“Jeepers,” I said. “
He
started it.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes I think there's something worrisome about this need to be a wiseass.”

I nodded. “Maybe so. Things probably would've gone better if I'd just duked it out with the guy. Knocked out a couple of million dollars worth of dental caps. Had
his
lawyers screaming assault and battery.”

“I'd like to think that there was some other option. Something besides beating him up.”

“I should've shot him, you think?”

“Perhaps you could've been a shade more diplomatic.”

“Diplomacy would've been wasted on this guy, Rita.”

She sipped her tea. “Possibly not only on him.”

I smiled. “Ah, Rita. You play pelota with my heart.”

We talked for a while longer, but since what we were talking about was the business, and since there hadn't been much of that lately, it wasn't for a very long while. Before I left, I asked her, as I always did, how it was going.

She knew what I meant and, as she always did when I asked, she smiled. “Fine,” she said.

“So when do we get to go down to the Plaza?” Rita hadn't been off her property since she'd returned from the hospital, where the doctors had plucked a .38-caliber bullet from her spine. For three years now she'd been telling me that she wouldn't go into town until she could walk there.

“Soon,” she said. As she always did.

With my usual maturity and sophistication, I resented this. Partly, because getting answers to questions was what I did for a living, and I wasn't getting them from her. And partly, I suspect, because by refusing to answer me she failed to allay the anxieties I felt about her recovery. Crippled, she had depended on me. When her legs were working once again, would she use them to walk out of my life?

These were secret, selfish, chicken-shit anxieties, and I wasn't especially pleased to find them floating around my soul. But self-knowledge rarely leads to self-esteem.

“You let me know,” I told her.

“I will, Joshua.”

It was around seven thirty when I left. I drove over to Furr's Cafeteria in De Vargas Mall, pigged out on chicken-fried steak and home-fried potatoes and tossed salad, then picked up a six-pack of cold Pacifico at Albertson's and drove home.

At a little after nine o'clock, while I was reading yesterday's
New York Times
and sipping the good Mexican beer, someone knocked at the front door.

I set the newspaper on the end table, stood, crossed the room, flicked on the exterior light. There was a time, years ago, when I used to open the door without looking through the peephole. But opening the door onto one or two unpleasant surprises had changed that. Now, a glance through the hole showed two men standing out there, both of them distorted by the fish-eye lens, their bodies elongated, their faces bulbous. One of them I recognized, the other I didn't. The one I didn't recognize was a small, slight, white-haired man in his sixties. The one I recognized was Roy Alonzo.

For a moment, I wondered whether I should trot back to the bedroom and snare the Smith & Wesson from the shoebox at the back of the closet. Alonzo and I had not parted as compadres. Maybe he and his friend had turned up here to cause me grief.

But Alonzo hadn't impressed me as much of a threat this afternoon, and the little white-haired man didn't impress me as much of a threat right now. Probably, with a bellyful of beer and chicken-fried steak, I wasn't much of a threat to these two, either; but I figured that if worse came to worst I could always sit on them.

I opened the door.

As soon as I saw the older man clearly, I did recognize him—and I realized that he was very much of a threat indeed. His name was Norman Montoya. I had met him once, a year or two ago. According to the state police, and the federals, he was responsible for most of the illegal things that went on in northern New Mexico, from petty vandalism on up to drugs and murder.

When I'd last seen him, he'd been sitting back against the curve of his hot tub, streamers of steam rising off his naked shoulders. Now he was wearing a natty cashmere topcoat, opened, and, beneath it, a gray three-piece suit with pinstripes so subtle they might have been imaginary. His shoes were black brogues, polished to a mirror shine. I liked the brogues. On formal occasions, most of the males in New Mexico wore cowboy boots. Norman Montoya, whose family had been here since the conquistadors, wore brogues.

He nodded to me. “Good evening, Mr. Croft. A pleasure to see you once again.” He turned to Roy Alonzo. “Tell him, please.”

Alonzo frowned. He put his hands up, a gesture that seemed at once supplicatory and defensive. “All right. Look. I was out of line this afternoon. I apologize.”

“Very good,” said Norman Montoya, as though to a reasonably competent but not particularly bright child. “Now, please, wait in the car.”

Alonzo took the dismissal well, certainly better than I would've taken it. He only blinked, nodded, shoved his hands into the pockets of his gray twill trousers, then turned and stalked down the steps.

Norman Montoya said to me, “May I come in?”

Three

A
S NORMAN MONTOYA ENTERED MY LIVING
room, I offered to take his topcoat.

“Thank you, Mr. Croft,” he said, “but I shall keep it.” He smiled. “Old bones are never warm.”

I nodded. “Have a seat.”

He sat down in the armchair. I sat down opposite him, on the sofa.

“He is my nephew,” said Norman Montoya. His voice was as smoky as I remembered it, and as well modulated. “My oldest sister's son.”

“Roy Alonzo is your nephew?”

He smiled once again. “Even television actors must have relatives, Mr. Croft.”

Maybe, but usually they don't have an uncle who's the Hispanic Godfather of New Mexico.

“And you appreciate,” said Norman Montoya, “that with family, sometimes it is necessary for one to impose oneself.”

“And how,” I asked him, “are you planning to do that?”

“I have already done so. It was I who suggested to Roy that he contact you.”

“Why me?”

“Because when we met, you and I, some time ago, I found you to be a serious person.”

“Serious.”

“Yes.” He smiled. “Despite a perhaps unfortunate fondness for childish humor.”

I nodded. “Mrs. Mondragón would probably agree with you about that.”

Another smile. “Mrs. Mondragón is a woman of no small discernment.”

I nodded. “That she is. But tell me, Mr. Montoya. What is it, exactly, that I can do for you?”

He shrugged lightly. “I should think it obvious. I should like you to reconsider your refusal to help locate my nephew's daughter.”

“Did your nephew tell you why I refused?”

“Yes. And your reasons are excellent.” A small quick wince of distaste flickered across his face. Except for a slightly aquiline nose, his features were even, fine-boned, aristocratic. He would have made a good Roman emperor. Or at least a good-looking one. “A situation like this, it is extremely unpleasant. For everyone. But always, Mr. Croft, the one who suffers most, no matter what the truth might be, is the child. In this case, the child is my sister's granddaughter. And it is the child whom I wish to protect.”

“I can appreciate that, Mr. Montoya, but—”

He held up his right hand. Like the rest of him, it was small but well shaped. “Please, Mr. Croft. Hear me out. What I propose to you is this. I propose that you accept me, rather than my nephew, as your client. I propose that you investigate the disappearance of his wife and child, and also that you attempt to determine the truth of the other matter. If you in fact discover that my nephew has actually”—once again he winced slightly—“interfered with his daughter, then I should be grateful if you told me. You have my word that such an interference will never occur again.”

“The California courts said he didn't.”

He nodded. “And I hope they were correct.” He smiled his small slight smile. “But permit me not to rely too heavily upon a decision made in the courts. Particularly in California.” I've never met a New Mexican who had a great deal of respect for the state of California.

I said, “You believe that he's capable of abusing his daughter?”

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. At last he said, “I told you once that I was a Buddhist, did I not, Mr. Croft?”

“You did, yeah.” In his enormous hilltop mansion up north, while the two of us sat in his huge hot tub before a wall of double-glazed glass that looked down a steep river valley draped with mist. He owned the valley.

“As a Buddhist,” he said, “I believe that no one of us is evil. We are each of us, finally, an aspect of the same thing—call it what you will—God, Self, Buddha-nature. And yet there are evil actions in the world. Evil patterns. And through our ignorance, or our anger, or our greed, these are patterns into which some of us, into which perhaps any one of us, may fall.”

I nodded. “Is that a yes?”

He smiled. “Yes, Mr. Croft. I believe that he might be capable. But is he in fact guilty? I should be inclined to think that he was not.”

“All right,” I said. “Let me see if I understand this. You want me to locate Roy Alonzo's wife and daughter, or try to. You also want me to find out, if I can, whether Alonzo actually abused the girl. If he did, then you want me to tell you, so you can prevent him from doing it again. How exactly do you plan to do that?”

Another smile. “I detect, in your voice, a note of wariness. Do you believe that I would do so by an exercise of violence?”

“Mr. Montoya,” I said, “I know you well enough to know that you're a man of strong convictions. I don't know you well enough to know exactly what those convictions are.” I thought,
There you go, Rita, how's that for diplomatic?

Norman Montoya produced a light easy laugh, something a bit more complicated than a chuckle but a bit less exuberant than a guffaw. “Fortunately,” he said, “I am a man who has had virtually no convictions whatever in the state of New Mexico.”

This was apparently an example of Hispanic Godfather humor. It was my first. I wasn't altogether overwhelmed by it, but the thought did occur to me that smiling might not be a bad idea.

Norman Montoya smiled back, and nodded. “Ah, you indulge an old man, Mr. Croft. I thank you for your kindness.” He smiled again, his eyes twinkling now. I've read about eyes twinkling often enough, but I've never actually seen them do it before. “But, yes,” he said, “to answer your question. Assuming past abuse, how would I prevent it in future? First, by providing for both the mother and the daughter. They would want for nothing. And second, by suggesting to my nephew that he never see either one of them again unless he undergoes some sort of psychotherapy.”

“‘Suggesting'?” I said.

“Strongly suggesting,” he said. “There will be no need for violence. My suggestion, I like to believe, carries a certain amount of weight with Roy.”

I nodded. “When you say ‘providing for' the mother and the daughter, what do you mean, exactly?”

“Providing for them financially.”

“On whose terms?”

He smiled. “I set no terms, Mr. Croft. I am concerned only with the welfare of my great-niece.”

“So your support would be open-ended, independent of wherever or however Mrs. Alonzo chooses to live?”

“Precisely.”

“
If
I discover that Roy Alonzo abused the girl. Even if he did, it's probably impossible to prove it. The courts couldn't.”

He nodded. “I understand this. I would accept your recommendation, whatever it might be.”

“That puts an awful lot of responsibility on my shoulders.”

He nodded again. “And upon mine.”

“Yours are probably used to it.”

“All of us must accept some responsibilities, Mr. Croft.”

“I generally like to pick the responsibilities I'm going to accept.”

“As you will here. You are perfectly free to reject this offer and the responsibilities it entails.”

I smiled. “And no hard feelings.”

Once again he returned the smile. “And no hard feelings. You would be of little help to me if you were operating under duress. If you prefer not to involve yourself, I will, regretfully, find someone else.”

I nodded. “Suppose I involve myself and it looks to me that your nephew didn't abuse the girl?”

“Of course, as I told you, I believe that this would be the case. If it is, and if you can locate Mrs. Alonzo and the child, I should like you to act as go-between and attempt to construct an arrangement that both Roy and his former wife would find workable.”

“Something else the courts couldn't do.”

“But often, in the courtroom, people find themselves taking a stance from which they cannot, publicly, withdraw. I know that Roy will be more flexible now than he was then. Perhaps the same will be true of his former wife.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“We shall never know, shall we, Mr. Croft, unless we locate the woman. And, as we sit here so casually discussing it, perhaps she and her daughter are in jeopardy.”

“Do you have any reason to believe that they're in jeopardy?”

He shrugged lightly. “A single woman and a young child? In hiding? Trying desperately to avoid the legal authorities? What would be more likely than their being in jeopardy?”

I nodded. “I'll reconsider taking the case. On two conditions. The first is that Mrs. Mondragón agrees. The second is that when I locate Mrs. Alonzo,
if
I locate Mrs. Alonzo, I don't disclose her whereabouts. Not to you, not to anyone. I'll contact her, I'll explain your offer. I'll act, as you put it, as a go-between. If she decides she wants to buy into the game, fine. But if she decides to pass, then it's over. I leave it alone. And you leave it alone.”