A Flower in the Desert (4 page)

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, but I noticed, once again, the twinkle in his eyes. “If you succeed in locating her, what is to prevent me from hiring someone else to locate the two of you?”

I smiled. “The Code of the West?”

Norman Montoya chuckled once more. His eyes still twinkling, a slim, slight, Hispanic Santa Claus, he smiled at me. “Will you take my word, Mr. Croft, if I give it?”

“Is your word any good?” When you say that to someone like Norman Montoya, even when he's in Santa Claus mode, you say it with a smile.

Still twinkling, still smiling, he said, “If I tell you
yes
, how will you know I'm not lying?”

“I suppose I won't. Maybe I should reconsider my reconsideration.”

“Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Croft”—he smiled—“that even if I gave my word, and even if you accepted it, you would not take precautions against my having lied to you?”

I smiled. We were doing a lot of smiling tonight, the two of us. A couple of old buckaroos sitting around beaming at each other. “No,” I said. “I don't mean to tell you that.”

“Very good.” He nodded approvingly. “And I do give you my word. My word, you will discover if you inquire, is good. And I do accept your conditions. If she refuses to negotiate with Roy, I will make no further attempt to contact her. So long as you make clear to her that whether she negotiates with Roy or not, I should like to offer my assistance to her and her daughter.”

I nodded.

“Would it be appropriate now to discuss your fee?”

“After I talk to Mrs. Mondragón.”

“And when will this be?”

“Is Alonzo still outside?”

“Yes. In his car. We arrived separately.”

“He'll accept the conditions that we've discussed?”

“Yes.”

I nodded. “Then I'll call her now.”

He stood. “Very well, Mr. Croft. I thank you, and I shall await your answer outside.”

“Joshua,” Rita told me over the phone, “you said you never wanted to take a case like this.”

“I think we might be helpful here. And I think that in terms of protecting the girl, everything is pretty much covered.”

“Can you trust Norman Montoya?”

“I honestly don't know,” I said. “But if I can find the girl and her mother, I think I can find them without leaving a trail that anyone else could follow.”

“Because your heart is pure?”

“Because my heart is tricky.”

“Well, just in case, I'll have Paul draw up a contract specifically for Mr. Montoya.” Paul Gallegos was our lawyer.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “Paul can't put together a contract that forbids Montoya from hiring another investigator.”

“No, but if it's important to Montoya that he's perceived as a man of his word, and his word is given on paper, then perhaps he'd be less likely to violate it.”

“Worth a try, I guess.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Four

T
HOUSANDS OF FEET BELOW US, THE
parched tan plains of western New Mexico slowly rolled away. Here and there a conical hill, looking like the sand-blasted nub of some ancient volcano, rose from the wasteland and cast a crouched, hunchbacked shadow in the slanting light of early morning. Down the hillsides gullies wound and twisted, fanning out across the empty flats into pale brown lacework deltas, dry as bone now, but reminders of the sudden spring showers, swiftly gone. Ahead of us, small as a sparrow, a phantom black airplane skimmed along the bleak khaki surface, exactly matching our speed.

Only fifteen minutes out of Albuquerque, sitting back in the thickly padded first-class seat, sipping my freshly squeezed orange juice, I was already beginning to regret accepting this case.

For one thing, I've never been very fond of Los Angeles. It's always seemed to me about as appealing, and about as substantial, as a cheap wedding cake.

For another, I couldn't stomach the idea of child abuse, sexual or otherwise. Back when I started working with Rita, it had been my idea, not hers, that we refuse any cases in which it might be involved. This was partly because of their ambiguity—as I'd told Alonzo, to me it seemed unlikely that anyone outside a family would ever be able to determine what truly went on within it.

But there was another reason. You can't live at the close of the twentieth century and not be aware that human beings are capable of a savagery that would make a hyena gag. No animal on earth is capable of the frenzy that we bring, blindly, merrily, to one another: the rapists, the racists, the serial killers, the ideologues, the genocidal lunatics. But nothing, no other kind of cruelty, bothers me as much as the cruelty visited, all too often, by parents upon their children. It's the ultimate violation, a betrayal of love by power, and I don't like to think about it. Out of basic gutlessness, I prefer to pretend that it doesn't exist. And I hoped, probably as much for my sake as for his, that Ray Alonzo was innocent.

Certainly, sitting with his uncle in my living room last night, he had once again seemed innocent. After I'd asked them both if I could get them anything, a drink, a coffee, and both had refused, Alonzo had said to me, “Listen, Croft, I mean it. I acted like an asshole this afternoon.”

I nodded agreeably because I entirely agreed with him. “Yeah, well,” I said, “there's a lot of it going around. I've had a touch of it myself from time to time.”

“And I want to tell you how much I appreciate your changing your mind about looking for Mel.”

I noticed two things. That his wife was Mel now, not Melissa. And that he hadn't interrupted his earnestness to react to, or maybe even register, my response. He was still playing a part, still reading lines. Well, it didn't necessarily mean that he was lying. Maybe he simply didn't know any other way to tell the truth.

I said, “You do understand, Mr. Alonzo, that it's Mr. Montoya who's hiring me?”

“Sure, sure. Absolutely.”

“He's the one I'll be reporting to. If you've got any questions about the progress I'm making, you'll have to ask him. Are we clear on that?”

“A hundred percent. I just wanted you to know how glad I am that you'll be helping us out.”

“Thanks.” I lifted my notebook and my Pilot Razor Point from the end table. “What I'll need first of all,” I told Alonzo, “is the basic list of friends and relations.”

“People here or people in L.A.?”

“Let's start with Los Angeles.”

And so on Tuesday afternoon, after a change of planes in Phoenix and another hour of flying time, there I was, starting with Los Angeles. The regret that I'd been feeling in the air didn't let up when I reached the ground. LAX, Los Angeles International Airport, is as big as a fair-sized city, and the bustle of its passengers had me immediately nostalgic for the austere silences of New Mexico. Los Angeles is the sort of place that produces instant nostalgia for somewhere else. For almost anywhere else.

At the Hertz counter I traded my signature and a peek at my credit card for a '91 Geo and a bored smile from the redheaded woman behind the counter, who could have been, who probably had been, a Miss Citrus or a Miss Diesel Fuel back in Clearwater or Omaha. They flock here from all over the country, these astonishingly beautiful young women, and sometimes for years they beat their wings against the screen door, hoping desperately that it will open and let them flutter into that bright white beckoning light. Not many of them make it.

The Hertz bus trundled me to the parking lot where my car awaited. Above a grim flat commercial wasteland of discount furniture stores and auto repair shops, the sky was dullish chrome yellow. At its edges it had darkened to a sooty brown, like an old newspaper about to burst into flame. The air was warm and tasted like it had passed through too many lungs and too many machines.

It's become a cliché that the city of Los Angeles is a prefigurement of the end of the world, but clichés are clichés for a reason. Once upon a future time, after all the trees had burned and all the animals had died, we humanoids would be standing in line beneath a smoky yellow sky, and we would learn that today we wouldn't be receiving our ration of coal tar derivatives, because the coal tar had run out.

Thinking such sanguine thoughts, I took the San Diego Freeway north in sixty-mile-an-hour bumper car traffic until I got off at Sunset. I drove past UCLA and through Beverly Hills, cool complacent estates hidden up there behind the trees, gardens slung with bougainvillea, jasmine, rose. Then I was in Hollywood, amid the drugstores and the burger stands and the sleaze shops, each building looking as though it had been designed by a different mad architect. I passed Moorish castles and Venetian palaces and Mediterranean villas, an eerie landscape spangled with limp palm trees and bright gaudy billboards. Only the billboards seemed real.

Ed Norman had moved his offices since I had last been in Los Angeles. His new operation was on Gower, and it occupied the entire top floor of a twelve-story building. I rode the elevator up to twelve and stepped out into the lobby. Was greeted by silver linen wallpaper, silver shag rugs. Behind a black lacquered desk, a beautiful blond receptionist with a spectacular tan—a former Miss Blue Grass, from her Kentucky accent—took my name. After silently noting that it belonged to nobody in The Industry, she spoke it into a telephone, then told me with a bored smile to take the hallway down to the door at the end. I thanked her. She gave me another bored smile and went back to working on her screenplay.

I walked down the hallway. Maybe, behind the doors I passed, investigators were busy interrogating witnesses and poring over clues, but if they were, they were doing it silently. The only sound was a very faint background drone, barely audible, like the hum sometimes made by neon lights.

At the end of the hallway there was a door with a brass plaque set about three quarters up.
EDWARD W. NORMAN,
it said.
PRESIDENT,
it said. I knocked on the door and it buzzed and I pushed it open. I stepped into a small anteroom, more silver linen walls, more silver shag carpeting, to the left a gray sofa and a black lacquered coffee table that held copies of
Newsweek
and
U.S. News & World Report.
To the right, behind another black lacquered desk, sat a brunette in a gray skirt and a white blouse. She was a tanned and extremely well-endowed young woman who, from my vantage point, seemed to consist entirely of profiles. The smile she presented was a definite improvement on the smiles I'd received so far today. It was bright and open and it contained no boredom at all. Much more exposure to that smile and I'd be forced to tell her, reluctantly, that my heart was promised to another. In a soft, pleasant voice, she informed me that Mr. Norman was expecting me and that I should go right in. I noticed, as I passed by her, that her eyes were green. I opened the office door.

Inside, white linen on the walls, white shag on the floor. The desk, lacquered in white, wasn't quite as big as a cabin cruiser. Neither was Ed Norman, who stood up behind it and then walked around it, smiling at me and holding out his hand. Beyond the desk, framed in the big picture window, stood the Capitol Records Building, one of L.A.'s monuments to American good taste.

Six feet four inches tall, Ed Norman was a black man with an uncanny resemblance to the young Harry Belafonte. The current Harry Belafonte also possesses an uncanny resemblance to the young Harry Belafonte, but Ed's resemblance was uncannier—maybe because Ed was about two feet wider at the shoulders. Today those shoulders were neatly encased in a conservative gray suit of tropical-weight wool whose tailoring was so sleek it could have been genetically engineered.

He squeezed my hand. “How's it going, Joshua?”

“Fine,” I said. “I can see that things are a little rough for you right now.” I looked around the office. “If I can help out, a shoulder to cry on, a ten-spot till next Thursday, you let me know.”