A Flower in the Desert (5 page)

He smiled. “It's all front. Tinsel and glitter, like everything else in town. So how's Rita?”

“She's fine. Fine. She's out of the chair, you knew that?”

He grinned. “Yeah.” He shook his head. “Jesus, that's great. I can't tell you how pleased I was when I heard.”

I nodded. “Me too.”

“Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”

“Tea, sure. Thanks.”

He leaned back against the desk, tapped a button on his phone, and said, “Bonnie, could you bring us a pot of tea, please?” He tapped the button again, lifted a manila folder off the desktop, turned back to me. “Take a seat.” He nodded to the long white sofa.

We sat down on it and he stretched back, propped his Florsheims atop the coffee table, and reached into his shirt pocket and plucked out a pack of Marlboros. He turned to me. “You're still not smoking?”

“Seven years now.”

“You're not going to get all prissy on me if I light up?”

I shrugged. “Your office. Your lungs.”

He smiled and stuck a cigarette between his lips, tossed the pack to the coffee table. “At least you're not a Born-Again Breather. Quite a few of those here in town.” He slipped his hand into his suit coat pocket, slipped it out holding a gold Dunhill lighter, flicked the lighter, lit his cigarette, returned the lighter to his pocket. He took a long deep drag that probably left nicotine stains along the soles of his socks. I felt the ex-smoker's mixed feelings of contempt and envy.

“Okay,” he said, exhaling. He opened the folder against his lap. “This is what I've been able to put together since this morning, when you called. It's not a lot, but it should get you started.” From the folder he lifted a sheath of computer-form paper, the sheets still connected to one another, the sprocket strips still attached. He looked at me. “Tell me something. I didn't ask this morning because I don't function too well before that first cup of coffee. But why is it that Rita didn't do the search herself?” He sucked on his cigarette.

“The search?”

“The database search.” Exhaling a cumulus of smoke, he lifted the computer paper. “For all this.”

“I never asked her. I thought that you being out here, you'd be able to find the stuff more easily.”

He smiled a tolerant smile. I knew it was a tolerant smile because I got a lot of those from Rita. He leaned forward, flicked his cigarette ash into a round onyx ashtray. “Joshua, most of this has been retrieved from databases that're accessible from anywhere in the world. And Rita is one of the best on-line investigators in the business. I send business to her by modem all the time. I know three or four other P.I.'s who'd be lost without her. She does it all—prejudgment and postjudgment asset searches, corporation and limited partnership information, state and federal court records. I could use one of my own people, but Rita's faster and better. She goes whizzing through those gateways like she was wearing roller skates.” He inhaled on the cigarette.

“Gateways?” I said, beginning to feel like a fool.

“Information gateways. DIALOG. BSR. CompuServe. They provide access to five or six hundred different databases.” He frowned. “You don't talk to Rita about all this?”

“Rita handles the computers,” I said. “I'm the one who hustles the bad guys into the alley and pounds the shit out of them.”

He was looking at me. I had no real idea what was going on beneath the surface of his handsome black face, but I had a sense that it was something like puzzlement, and perhaps even something like pity.

By then my transformation into fool was feeling fairly complete. I had known for years that Rita played around with a computer.
Played around
being my perception of what she did. I'd even known that from time to time she helped out other agencies, searching for information in what I had assumed was a single database. But I'd had no notion at all that she did this so extensively and so frequently.

My first reaction was to wonder why she hadn't told me. My second reaction was a variation on this, a variation distorted by a sudden, full-blown attack of the weasely unease I'd been feeling lately: why was she keeping secrets from me?

I nodded to the sheaf of computer paper in Ed Norman's hand. “So what do we have?”

Ed had the grace to pretend that nothing had happened. “Okay,” he said briskly. He looked down. “Roy Alonzo. Born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1946. Did elementary and high school there. Grades okay, nothing spectacular. Interest in drama. Played football, first string. No apparent trouble, no arrests. Went to Reed College, out in Oregon, in ‘sixty-five. Head Start Program. Drama major. Graduated in ‘sixty-nine. Once again, grades okay but not spectacular. No trouble, no arrests. Toured for a while with some improvisational group—” He looked up. “More of this, or shall I cut to the good stuff?”

“What's the good stuff?” Was she planning to abandon the agency and go full time into this computer investigating?

“In 'seventy-eight,” said Ed, “there was a story going around that he was nearly busted for statutory rape. The girl was fifteen. Her parents got paid off and backed away. Or so the story goes.”

“How reliable is the story?” Why else would she hide from me what she was doing?

Forget it for now, I told myself.

Ed shrugged his heavy shoulders. “No arrest was made, no charges were ever brought. Alonzo was here in L.A. by then, and his career was coming along pretty well. He was also a certified stud, if you believe the fan magazines.”

“You bet I do.” How could she let Ed Norman—and at least three or four other P.I.'s—know things about her that I didn't?

He smiled. “From the source I talked to, I get the impression that there
was
a young girl, but that she didn't look anything like fifteen. One of those precocious little numbers with a twenty-three-year-old body and a forty-five-year-old soul. In fact, assuming it did happen, the whole deal could've been something she set up. Or her parents did. According to the story, they were perfectly happy to take the money and run.”

“It's a wise father who knows his child.” Forget about it. Deal with the case.

He nodded. “I believe I read that somewhere.” Ed had once taught English at a small New England college.

I smiled. The smile felt a bit wan. “What else do you have?”

Someone, just then, knocked at the door. Ed called out, “Come in,” and the door opened. A tea caddy entered the room, followed by the young woman from the anteroom. I stood up as she pushed the table toward the sofa. She was taller than I'd thought and she looked more voluptuous in a businesslike skirt and a demure white blouse than anyone has a right to look. I wondered if she kept secrets from people.

“Joshua,” said Ed, smiling up at us from the sofa, “this is my associate, Bonnie Nostromo. Bonnie, Joshua Croft.”

She smiled that remarkable smile again. Her eyes, in the natural light from the window, now seemed blue. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And pleased to meet you.”

She smiled the smile once more and then turned and walked back to the door and out through it, closing it behind her.
Walking
, though, is really too prosaic a term to describe accurately the pneumatics and mechanics of her movement.

Ed, grinning, had been watching me watch her.

“Attractive woman,” I said, feeling suddenly like a lickerish old man on a park bench.

He nodded. “A friend of mine—an unredeemed sexist, of course—described her as having the kind of body that made you proud to be a mammal.”

“Proud to be a biped, too. And listen, just exactly where do you go to redeem your sexists?”

He smiled. “She's got a rated IQ of 160. She's wasted as a secretary—she's only filling in this week as a favor to me. She's one of the best surveillance people I've got. In another year she'll have her P.I. license. A year or two after that, and she'll probably open an agency of her own.”

“Does she have an older sister? One with an IQ closer to mine? Something in the double digits?”

Ed raised his left eyebrow. I've always found this, probably because I've never been able to do it myself, an irritating habit. “Are you really in the market, Joshua?” He had known Rita and me for a long time now.

“No,” I admitted. “Not really.” I took a deep breath and nodded to the computer printout. “Okay. What else do we have on Roy?”

“No more dirt. You already know most of the rest. The divorce from Melissa Bigelow Alonzo in ‘eighty-seven. The court battle in ‘eighty-nine, her accusing him of sexual abuse, him denying it.”

“He was found not guilty.”

“The jury liked his doctor.”

“Better than hers, you mean.”

“Right.”

“You figure him for guilty?”

He shrugged. “No way to know.”

I nodded to the manila envelope. “You have transcripts in there?”

He shook his head. “Press coverage.
L.A. Times.
We can get the transcripts if you want them.”

“Let's wait on that. Why don't you tell me about Melissa Alonzo.”

Five

M
ELISSA ALONZO
,”
SAID SERGEANT BRADLEY, SITTING
back in his swivel chair, his fingers laced comfortably together beneath the round, comfortable swell of his belly. He shook his head. “I got nothing to do with her. Like I told your buddy Norman, you should check with missing persons. Or the FBI.”

“Why the FBI?” I asked him. “Why are they involved? There's no kidnapping here. She was the daughter's legal guardian.”

“Hey,” said Bradley, and showed me the palms of his meaty hands. “I look to you like a PR guy? Ask someone at the Bureau.” He put a nice ironic twist on the word
Bureau.

Like a lot of homicide cops, Bradley was a big man who had gotten bigger over the years. The extra weight comes from cheeseburgers and tacos and pizzas eaten on the run, and occasionally from the booze some of them use to wash away the memory of what it was they were running to, and running from.

Unlike most homicide cops, except for Meyer Meyer and Kojak, Bradley was completely bald. The shiny scalp of his big round head was dented here and there, as though bullets had bounced off it. Like the rest of him, it was untanned. So far, he was the first person I'd met in Los Angeles who didn't look like he spent his afternoons basting himself at the beach.

Ed Norman had told me that Bradley was a tough cop, but a fair one.

“That sounds,” I had told him, “like the whore with a heart of gold.”

Ed had smiled, and blown some cigarette smoke out across the room. “People in this town start playing out their lives the way they see them up on the silver screen.”

“Terrific,” I'd said. “He'll be crusty and colorful, and we'll start out hating each other's guts, but by the end of the second reel we'll establish a grudging respect for each other.”

“I doubt it,” he'd said. “You'll probably still hate each other's guts.”

So far, I'd seen no reason to doubt Norman's prediction. For ten minutes I'd been sitting across a desk from Bradley in his cubicle at LAPD, and I'd learned nothing.

I asked Bradley, “Is there anything you can tell me about her sister's murder?”

“They got copies of the
Times
in the library. And look. You tell me you're looking for Melissa Alonzo. How come you want to know about her sister?”

“One sister disappears, and then a few months later the other sister is murdered. It seems to me possible that there's a connection.”

He chuckled and his round belly, encased in a tight-fitting yellow polyester shirt, bounced up and down. “What're you? Mannix?”

I smiled amiably. I could feel the corners of my mouth working at it. “Sergeant, I'm not asking you to reveal anything about your investigation. All I'm trying to do is locate Mrs. Alonzo and her daughter. Maybe there isn't any connection. But if there is, and I locate her, then maybe she'll be able to provide information that could help you.”

Grinning, Bradley shook his head. “Jesus. You're worse than Norman. You used to teach college too?”

“Home Economics.”

He chuckled. He looked down at his desk, shrugged, looked back up at me. “What the hell. I can waste a half hour. But let's get the ground rules straight.”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Your New Mexico license isn't worth jackshit here. Far as we're concerned, you're just another citizen. We get a complaint you're harassing anyone, you're history.”

I nodded. “I can live with that.”

“You do any surveillance, you report it to us. First. Before you start. Otherwise, you get noticed, we're gonna pick you up. And the odds are, friend, you're gonna get noticed.”

I nodded.

“And you find anything, any single solitary thing, that points at somebody for the Bigelow killing, you bring it to me before you take another breath.”

I nodded. “If I learn anything, I'll let you know.”

“Because, my friend, if you don't, you are going to be extremely sorry.”

A bit of overkill in the threat department, I thought, but didn't bother pointing out. He was establishing territory, laying down spoor in the corners of his realm. I said, “I understand, Sergeant.”

“I hope so.” He sat back in his swivel chair, hooked his hands behind his neck. Hector Ramirez, a friend and a Santa Fe cop, frequently did the same thing. Maybe the two of them had read the same manual. “Okay,” he said. “What you wanna know?”

I got out my notebook, my pen. “Cathryn Bigelow. When was she killed?”

“Last week. October the second. Wednesday.”

“Time of day?”

“Coroner figures between eight and nine in the morning.”