A Flower in the Desert (39 page)

Authors: Walter Satterthwait

He had shut his mouth. Now he opened it: “She was â¦ Melissa was hysterical when she wrote this â¦ It's all a â¦ figment of her imagination.”

“That's not true. And that's not what people are going to think. That's not what they'll say.”

“My lawyer â¦” His voice tapered away. He stared off, perhaps into the future. Perhaps he was hearing what people were going to say.

“Mr. Bigelow,” I said, “do you know who Norman Montoya is? He's Roy Alonzo's uncle, Winona's great-uncle. He's concerned about Winona. He's the one, after Cathryn died, who persuaded Roy Alonzo to hire me. Roy went along with the idea to humor himâRoy already knew where Melissa was. Now you're a pretty powerful man out in California. But Norman Montoya has a different kind of power, and he's perfectly willing to use it. If you don't do what I'm telling you to do, he's prepared to take action on his own. He doesn't like you. He's got this idea that if you hadn't violated Melissa, none of this would've happened. I don't know that he's right. Maybe not. Maybe Melissa would've still gone off to El Salvador. But I think that if you'd never touched her, she'd never have married someone like Roy Alonzo. So you give that some thought on your way back to Los Angeles.”

He looked at me. “I â¦”

“Goodbye, Mr. Bigelow.” I wanted him out of the office. I didn't want to feel sorry for the man, and I was beginning to.

He stood up. The papers slipped, unnoticed, to the floor. He turned and walked away, his broad shoulders stooped.

“Do you think Stamworth will do a deal?” Rita asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably. It's in the interest of ânational security.'”

She was sitting back against the arm of a small couch, staring out the window, her arms crossed. It was night and the room was dark. Moonlight spilled through the window and splashed against her black hair, her black gown.

“And Bigelow?” she said.

“Him for certain. He doesn't want anyone to know who he is. What he is.”

“Poor Melissa,” she said, still staring out the window. She breathed in deeply and the pale white light slid along the black silk of the gown. “I keep thinking about those postcards she wrote. â
The flower in the desert lives.
'”

“She tended to dramatize herself a bit.”

“Yes. But with a childhood like hers, she must've felt all her life like a flower in the desert.”

And the flower in the desert dies, I thought. “At least Winona's safe. The Coopers will take good care of her.”

She turned to me and smiled. “You looked good with her last night. In the car, coming back.”

“You looked pretty good yourself last night, Rita.”

And so she had, standing in the doorway, supporting herself on an aluminum cane. One shot had taken care of Roy Alonzo, who lay on the ground amid the goat droppings, clutching his arm and hissing through his expensive teeth. When Rita turned the gun on Sam and Bilbo and told them to raise their hands, both of them were inclined to listen to her.

Later, when everything was over and we had finally returned to her house, she told me that she had actually arrived before Alonzo. She had parked her Volkswagen in the stand of pines beside my borrowed Jeep, and she had just started for the buildings of the commune when she heard Alonzo's car. She had waited in the trees until he reached the barn, then set out after him. Hobbling with the cane across seventy-five yards of snow and ice.

“You could've called Hector,” I had told her.

“I did,” she said. “And he told me he'd try to get the state police there, but I wasn't certain that they'd arrive in time. They needed a warrant.”

I had smiled. “It's a good thing someone arrived in time.”

Now, in the moonlight, she said to me, smiling, “Maybe you should think about having children of your own.”

“It's a lot of work, I hear.”

She smiled. “It requires practice.”

“Well,” I said, “why don't you come back to bed, and we'll practice some more.”

She smiled and opened her robe and let it fall and then stood up and walked to me through the moonlight.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the staff at the Santa Fe Public Library for their help. Thanks to J. W. Satterthwait and to my agent, Dominick Abel. Thanks to Anita Battat for her help with the computer and for her sage advice. Many thanks, and another birthday card, to Reagan Arthur at St. Martin's, for her endless patience while answering questions and tolerating bad jokes. For information on electronic surveillance, thanks to Michael Peros and his Privacy Electronics in Pinellas Park, Florida. Thanks to Carol Mothrer for the loan of her paintings. Thanks to Ada Dryce for her company and the use of her washing machine. Thanks to Josiah Thompson, whose excellent book
Gumshoe
provided many valuable insights. Thanks to Miriam Davidson, whose book
Convictions of the Heart
, also excellent, did the same. And thanks once again, and a Hatlo Hat-tip, to Jonathan Richards and Claudia Jessup, who've been good friends through the occasional patch of thick and the protracted periods of thin.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This edition published in 2012 by
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