A Flower in the Desert (9 page)

He considered his answer. Finally, expressionless once again, he said, “I'm sorry. That would have been privileged communication. I can't answer that question.” He was trying, I thought, to walk a line that wound precariously between his legal ethics, his residual wariness of me, and his desire to help find Melissa. But he must have known that by refusing to answer the question, he was permitting me to assume that Melissa had in fact mentioned the idea of running off.

I said, “Can you tell me if she ever discussed the Underground Railroad with you? A network that helps hide women and their children?”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry. I can't answer that either.” Which again, if I was reading him correctly, probably meant that Melissa
had
discussed the Railroad.

“Were you surprised when Melissa vanished?”

“Yes,” he said—more at ease, apparently, now that he could answer without playing games. “Completely surprised. We had an appointment at my office on the twenty-third. The twenty-third of August. She was due back the twenty-first. When she didn't show up, I tried to reach her. When I couldn't, I … I made a few inquiries. That's when I learned that she'd gone.”

“You didn't know that she'd come back early from El Salvador?”

“No.” He frowned slightly. That still rankled. Or still hurt.

“Did you try to locate her?” I said.

“I know a local private detective. He's worked with me from time to time. I asked him to see what he could find.” He made it sound casual, an offhand request to an old friend. Both of us knew that locating someone who doesn't want to be located is not an offhand kind of job.

“And what did he find?”

“Nothing.”

“Have you heard from her since she left?”

He took a deep breath, the kind you take when you try to fill an emptiness in your chest that has nothing to do with oxygen, and already I knew what his answer would be, and I knew that I believed it. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

He looked out the window. The blur of red and yellow was gone now. Except for a faint luminescence in the west, the sky and the sea were a dull seamless sheet of lead.

I asked him, “Does the phrase ‘
The flower in the desert lives
' mean anything to you?”

“No,” he said to the window. He turned to me. “Should it?”

“Maybe not. It's just a phrase that's come up. Did Melissa ever talk with you about her involvement in Sanctuary?”

“Nothing specific. We talked about it in general terms. She was very serious about helping those people.” He shrugged, and his shoulders seemed to have gotten heavier. “As I said, she's an extraordinary woman.”

He looked off to the window again.

“In your mind,” I said, “there's no doubt that Roy Alonzo was guilty of sexually abusing Winona?”

He turned, and his face was flushed. For a moment I thought he was going to hurl aside the table and jump me. I braced myself. Then he sat back. “You haven't read the trial transcripts,” he said flatly.

“Not yet.”

“Read them. There's no doubt whatever that Roy was guilty.”

I nodded. “You understand that I had to ask.”

He stared at me, and finally his face softened and he nodded. He looked out again at the leaden sea.

I said, “Would you mind if I looked around the house now?”

He turned to me. He managed a weak, ironic smile. “Do you think the police haven't looked around? The FBI?”

“An agent named Stamworth?”

He nodded. “Some nonsense about Melissa being involved with illegal aliens. He went all over the house. So did the police.”

And so did you, probably, I thought. I said, “Maybe they weren't looking for the right things.”

He nodded lifelessly. His voice without tone, he said, “The psychological approach.”

“Yeah. That.”

“Go ahead. The bedrooms are upstairs. I'll wait here.”

There were three bedrooms on the second floor. The first might have been Roy Alonzo's bedroom at one time, if he and Melissa had slept separately. Now it was obviously a guest room, as characterless and as impersonal as a room at the Marriott. A white-enameled dresser, a white-enameled nightstand supporting a brass three-way lamp, a double bed with a chenille bedspread, a fairly good Navajo rug on the hardwood floor, an empty closet. Two framed paintings, both Southwest landscapes, hung on the wall. They were signed
Sedgewick
, a name that meant nothing to me. A door led into a bathroom smelling of the floral-scented soap, sculpted into hearts and eggs, that filled a small wicker basket on the windowsill.

I got the feeling that whoever had put the bedroom and the bathroom together—and I assumed it was Melissa—had done so without much enthusiasm. They were moderately comfortable, but they were perfunctory and prosaic, as though she hadn't really expected guests, or particularly wanted them.

I broke the bedroom into quadrants and searched each of them. Found nothing useful. Did the same in the bathroom, and found the same.

The master bedroom smelled very faintly of Jean Naté. It had a beamed ceiling and, like the porch downstairs, a glass wall that faced the sea. Pale yellow satin drapes, pulled shut now. A king-size bed lounging in a sleek brass frame and covered with a white satin bedspread. Two white Flokati rugs on the floor. A long oak dresser. Atop that, facing the bed, a twenty-one-inch color television, a VCR, a large jewelry box, a single photograph in a silver frame. Obviously taken by a professional photographer, this showed a young baby, presumably Winona, gurgling merrily at the camera. There were no photographs of anyone else. No Roy Alonzo, no grinning friends, no beaming grandparents.

On the wall above the bed was another Southwest landscape, also signed
Sedgewick
, this one a Cinemascope view of Monument Valley.
A
bit gaudy, I thought, but technically well done. John Wayne would've liked it. There were two other paintings in the room, to the left of the television. These were much smaller, both about six inches by twelve, and each was a view from a doorway into the interior of a room, one of them a parlor, the other a kitchen. The light in each had a Vermeerish quality, glinting off polished surfaces of tile and wood, and the paintings themselves, precisely detailed, had a quiet elegance and a slightly haunting quality, as though the rooms were inhabited by smiling ghosts, just out of sight. They were signed D.
Polk.

The paintings and the yellow drapes were the only touch of color in the room. Everything else was white or off-white, monotoned, making the place seem stark, almost sterile. As though Melissa had been reluctant to reveal herself by committing to blues or reds or browns, plaids or checks or stripes.

I searched the room, and then the dressing room and then the bathroom, which held a sunken hot tub large enough to bathe a Buick. At the bottom of one of the dresser drawers, I found a pair of handcuffs. A nice toy. I wondered what the earlier searchers had made of those. I wondered what I made of those.

There was none of the other grim paraphernalia of bondage: no riding crops, no choke collars, no clamps or clips or shiny leather straps. Maybe there had been, and the cops had removed it. But wouldn't they have taken the cuffs as well?

In the jewelry box, which held mostly costume stuff, rolled gold and paste, I discovered that a few of the slots in the velvet, slots which still bore the impression of jewelry, were empty now: some earrings and some rings were missing. Melissa might have taken them, possibly pawned them; or possibly they'd been lifted by someone else. The cops. Stamworth. Chuck Arthur, for all I knew.

All I knew was approximately nothing.

I found nothing to indicate that a man, any man, had ever once set foot in the room. I found no note from Melissa Alonzo that described her current location.

The final bedroom was a surprising contrast to the rest of the house, a giddy explosion of color. The walls were pink, banded toward the ceiling with lavender, covered all over with appliqués of laughing cartoon characters, teddy bears and rabbits and Smurfs and the entire Disney contingent. The curtains were red, patterned with large black dots, like the wings of a ladybug. Braided, multicolored throw rugs were scattered around the floor. And stuffed animals were everywhere: along the walls, along the bright yellow bedspread, sitting and lying and slouching in the blue plastic bookshelves.

I looked around and, once again, I found nothing. I sat down on the bed, picked up a brown rabbit. It seemed old, older than the toy of a six-year-old, its plush worn down to the thread in spots, its long ears limp. Perhaps it had once been Melissa's.

I glanced around the room. It was cheery, festive—happy. I wondered whether Melissa, whose decorating had been so restrained throughout the rest of the house, who seemed to have denied a fondness for color and patterns, as though perhaps she were hiding herself, had felt suddenly liberated when she designed this room for her daughter.

I looked down into the shiny brown glass eyes of the rabbit. He didn't know the answer. Or if he did, he wasn't telling.

Eight

W
HEN I
GOT BACK DOWNSTAIRS, ARTHUR
still sat staring out at the sea, which was invisible now in the blackness. His face, reflected in the glass wall, was empty.

He glanced up at me, silently watched me circle the bar, turn on the light, and enter the kitchen. It had all the cooking toys, and then some—a restaurant-quality gas oven and stove, a microwave-convection oven, a Cuisinart, a blender, rows of Sheffield knives, ceramic pots holding an assortment of metal spatulas and wooden spoons, a deep freeze filled on one side with uncooked roasts and steaks and chops and hams and fish, and half filled on the other with leftovers carefully wrapped in aluminum foil and carefully labeled: pot roast, coq au vin, pork in ginger sauce. The cabinets were packed with expensive crockery and an impressive array of herbs and spices. Someone had removed all the perishables from the refrigerator, but it still contained a forest of commercial sauces and condiments: green chili jam, blueberry preserves, mayonnaise, three imported mustards, curry paste, mango pickle, lime chutney.

From all of this I deduced that Melissa had been something of a cook. Or that Winona had been. Or that the two of them had hired someone who was.

At the end of the bar, an answering machine sat beside a cordless telephone and its base. The indicator said that there were no messages, which meant that someone, at some time, had retrieved whatever messages might have been on the tape. But most of these machines don't erase the most recent messages, even after they've been retrieved, until they record over them to receive a new one. I pushed the button. There was a silence, someone not speaking after hearing the outgoing message, then a beep. Another silence, then a series of three beeps, to let me know there were no more messages available.

I fiddled with the machine until I found the button that played the outgoing message. I pushed it. A woman's voice, flat, nonregional, announced the phone number and asked the caller to leave a message.

Melissa's voice, presumably. Melissa herself was off somewhere, but here in Malibu her disembodied voice was still mechanically greeting callers.

The voice told me nothing about its owner. I hadn't expected it to; people are usually a bit constrained when they're recording a message into their machine.

After the tape rewound, I opened the machine, fumbled the tiny cassette out of its berth, carried it around the bar and out to the porch.

Chuck Arthur said, “Jesus, that gave me a start. Hearing Melissa's voice on the machine like that.”

“When the police were here,” I said, “did they take anything from the house?”

He shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

“Did Stamworth?”

“No.”

“Has anyone, that you're aware of? Have you?”

“No, of course I haven't. No one has.”

I nodded. “You wouldn't happen to have a mini tape recorder, would you?”

He frowned. “In the car.”

I would've bet on it. Would've bet that he had a cellular phone, too. And a laptop computer. Maybe he and Rita had modemed together.

“Could you get it?” I asked him.

“Why?”

I held up the cassette. “After you retrieve your messages, the answering machine rewinds the tape to the beginning. Any new messages are recorded over the messages already on the tape. But if there're more old messages than new ones, some of the old ones, the ones that haven't been recorded over, will still be there. The machine won't play them, because it only plays the messages that've come in since you last retrieved. But they're still there.”

He looked at the cassette. “And you think that'll help, listening to the messages?”

“Let's find out.”