Seven

I DID HAVE AN APPOINTMENT, BUT it wasn’t until six thirty. I thought I might have time to pick up some California fast food—an abalone tortilla, maybe, or an escargot-and-pineapple pizza. But the traffic was terrible, bumper-to-bumper cars breathing frustrated hydrocarbon sighs at each other, and I spent over an hour getting to the beach. At the entrance to Malibu Colony, the guard found my name on his clipboard, told me that Mr. Arthur was waiting at the Alonzo house, and explained how to get there.

As I drove down the street, I could smell, through the open window of the Chevy, the astringent tang of brine and kelp, and even here, out at the farthest reaches of Civilization As We Know It, the quintessential Southern California scent of automobile exhaust.

For the most part, the houses along the shore side of the road were alike—narrow, two-story buildings of weathered gray shingle, some of them looking like they’d been imported from Cape Cod or Fire Island, all of them so close together you could spit from your window into your neighbor’s margarita. All sat with their backsides facing the street and their fronts facing west, so their owners could enjoy an expensive view of sea blurred by smog. Beyond the houses, where the sun should have been, the sky was a dull apocalyptic red, as though out there on the gray Pacific, beneath a pall of dense yellow smoke, a city were afire.

The Alonzo house was newer than most of the others, a long, modernistic structure that looked like irregularly shaped boxes of cedar and glass, jumbled together by a very large hyperkinetic child. A spotless black Mercedes 250-SL, its top down, was parked in the shade of the carport. I pulled the Geo in beside it, got out, walked over to the unprepossessing wooden door, and pushed the doorbell.

After several long moments, the door was opened by a man wearing black leather loafers, lightweight gray wool slacks, an open vest of the same material, a dark blue silk shirt with the sleeves rolled back, and a silk tie of gold and red with its Windsor knot loosened and tugged down, all of which made him look like a straightforward, no-nonsense kind of guy. Maybe he was. He was in his early thirties, tall, and in very good shape. His shirt—and presumably the vest and the missing suit coat—had been cut to display the nicely defined curve of his pectorals. His wavy hair was brown and so was his Tom Selleck mustache. He was tanned.

“Croft?” he said.

I admitted I was.

“Chuck Arthur.” Unsmiling, he held out his tanned hand. I shook it. He didn’t move from the doorway and he didn’t invite me in. He said, “I’m not sure why I agreed to this.”

“Maybe because you’re concerned about Melissa Alonzo and her daughter,” I said.

“I am concerned. Damned concerned. I hate to think of the two of them out there, on the run. But I’m still not sure that talking to you is a good idea.”

“I’m not the enemy, Mr. Arthur. I told you over the phone, my primary interest is in delivering Mr. Montoya’s message to Mrs. Alonzo.”

He looked at me for a moment, expressionless. “Well,” he said finally. “Come on in.”

We went down the passageway, passing several closed doors—storage space, perhaps, or slaves’ quarters.

The air smelled of wood polish and cleanser, like an obscure museum, often cleaned, seldom visited. Our footsteps, echoing faintly back from ahead, clipped the silence into hollow fragments.

The passageway opened up into a sunken living room with white sectional furniture surrounding a large rectangular stone fireplace, also white. Abstract paintings, their colors muted in the dim light, hung on the white walls. Above the fireplace, an enormous inverted funnel of stainless steel chimney climbed to the faraway beamed ceiling. We walked down some polished tile steps, crossed the brick floor of the living room, walked up some more tile steps to the terrazzo floor of the dining room, past a round white-enameled wooden table circled by white-enameled wooden chairs, and through an opened sliding glass door to a glass-enclosed porch. Beyond them, another sliding door, partially opened, led out onto a redwood deck that held, along the side abutting the house, a pair of ficuses in large terra-cotta pots. The floor in here was oak, bleached and waxed, but the furniture once again was white, a metal table and three metal chairs padded with white corduroy cushions. Draped from the arched back of one of the chairs was a gray suit coat.

Chuck Arthur stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, looking out the wall of glass at the smudged red and yellow bands in the darkening sky. If you didn’t know what caused them, they might have been pretty—a soft, distant, impressionistic blur of color. The tide was out, and a few people, mostly couples in shorts or rolled-up trousers, walked along the smooth brown sand. Out on the water, some motorboats loafed across the gray. In the sky, some seagulls soared.

“You picked a fine time to visit Los Angeles,” he said without looking at me. “This is the worst smog I’ve ever seen. It never used to get all the way out here, to the beaches. You could stand here, anywhere along the coast, and you could see practically all the way to Hawaii.” He frowned. “It gets worse every year.” He was killing time, I thought, postponing a possible confrontation.

He turned, stepped over to the entryway, pushed a button. Above us, a neon light flickered for an instant, then glowed, filling the room with that artificial brightness that seems, while there’s still some light in the sky, thin and paltry and sad. “Have a seat,” he told me.

I sat down on the far side of the table and he sat opposite me, in the chair that held his suit coat. “All right,” he said. “You’re looking for Melissa Alonzo.”

“That’s right.”

“And, according to you, you’re not working for her ex-husband.”

“Right.”

“This story about Alonzo’s uncle. I hope you don’t mind if I tell you that I still find it a little difficult to believe.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Sometimes I have problems with it myself. But like I said over the phone, you can call Martin Durham in Santa Fe. He’ll verify everything.”

“I did call him, and he did.” He smiled a small, wry smile. “But I’m a lawyer myself, remember. I don’t necessarily have to believe everything another lawyer tells me.”

I smiled. “Even when he used to be a governor?’

He smiled back. “Especially then.” His face became expressionless again. “You said you intended to act only as a go-between, without telling Mr. Montoya where Melissa is. If you do find her, what will prevent him from hiring someone else to follow your trail?”

“For one thing, I’ll keep looking for her.”

He thought a moment, then nodded. “After you find her, you mean.”

I nodded. “I won’t contact him until I’ve moved on a reasonable distance from wherever she is.”

A faint smile. “Is that ethical?”

I shrugged. “I told Mr. Montoya that I’d do whatever I could to guarantee Melissa and Winona’s safety.”

“You’ll be charging him for work that you won’t actually be doing.”

“I can live with that. So can he.”

Another faint smile. “Are you always so relaxed about overcharging your clients?”

“Not always,” I said. I smiled; I was careful to smile. “But then I’m not a lawyer.”

He laughed. There was some surprise and some reluctance in the laughter. “Is that your standard technique for lowering a witness’s defenses? Insulting his profession?”

“When I think it’ll work.”

He looked at me, smiling thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “All right. What can I do for you?”

“You represented Melissa in her divorce, as well as the custody thing.”

“Yes.”

“I imagine you got to know her fairly well.”

He shrugged lightly. “Inevitable, given the nature of the case.”

“What did you think of her?”

He seemed surprised. “Why?”

“I don’t know the woman. And knowing something about her, about the kind of person she was, might be helpful.”

Another small, wry smile. “The psychological approach?”

“Yeah. They said in the correspondence course that it was a good way to go when there was nobody around to beat up.”

He smiled. Again he looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, and again he made up his mind. “Melissa Alonzo,” he said, “is one of the bravest women I’ve ever known.”

He said it with a casual matter-of-factness that was more impressive, and more believable, than an intense conviction. That told me a few things. It told me that possibly he cared for Melissa beyond the boundaries of the lawyer—client relationship. And it told me that, because he might, I’d have to be careful with the questions I asked him. It told me, too, that I’d have to be careful with the answers he gave. He might not consciously lie to me, but if he were involved with Melissa, or if he’d wanted to be, his attachment to her might color his perceptions. I glanced at his left hand. No wedding ring.

It could be. Even lawyers, I had heard, can make fools of themselves for love.

And so, I had heard, can private detectives.

“Brave how?” I asked him.

“She has this … she has a really remarkable inner strength. She’s—you’ve seen pictures of her? You know what she looks like?”

I nodded.

His eyes were brighter now and his face was animated. “Well,” he said, “here’s this slight, slim woman—she’s in her thirties but she looks like a teenage girl—and you think, Jesus, a strong breeze would blow her over. She’s very open, very unguarded, very … innocent. Almost an Alice in Wonderland figure. And she gives you the feeling that she could be hurt extremely easily. And she could be. She is. She’s certainly sensitive, and she’s certainly had more than her share of pain and disappointment. But beneath all the other qualities there’s an amazing strength of character. All through the trial, with reporters badgering her, her family ignoring her, her husband lying through his teeth up on the stand, she never broke. She had some rough moments. She had some extremely rough moments. A couple of times there I thought she was gone. I thought she’d crumble. But she always picked herself up and got on with the business at hand. She’s an extraordinary woman.”

I nodded. I no longer wondered whether the man had been attached to Melissa. Any lawyer learns early on to hide his feelings. And a divorce lawyer can see people at their worst, at their most wounded, their most malicious. A lot of divorce lawyers become hardened. He hadn’t. Or, if he had, something about Melissa Alonzo had caused him to open his shell to her. And now to me.

“And she was a wonderful mother,” he said. “Caring. Supportive. Protective of Winona without trying to smother her.”

“After the trial,” I said, “or during it, did Melissa ever talk about running off with Winona?”

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.