“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
MELISSA 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 gut
s.”
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.”
“When was the body found?”
“Around twelve. She didn’t show up for work, didn’t answer the phone. A friend came by from the library to check on her. That’s where Bigelow worked, the library. Friend saw the body through the kitchen window, called us.”
“She was strangled.”
Bradley nodded.
“And she was tortured.” I’d gotten that from Ed Norman.
Bradley nodded.
“How, exactly?”
“Exactly?” Bradley mimicked. “You get a kick out of that shit?”
“Was it sexual torture, the kind that might be done by a psychopath? Or was it the kind of torture designed to make her talk?”
Bradley smiled sourly. “And reveal the present whereabouts of her sister, Melissa Alonzo?”
“For example.”
“Alonzo disappeared two months ago. Why would the guy, whoever he was, wait all this long?”
“Was it sexual torture, Sergeant?”
He shook his head. “No.” Then he grinned at me, evilly. “You want details?”
“No. But maybe, if you’re willing, I’d better get some.”
“He beat her. Then he tied her up. To a kitchen chair. Hands, feet, body. Gagged her with a kitchen towel. Then he started on her fingernails with a pair of pliers.” He said all this flatly, watching me for a reaction.
I said, “Did she talk?”
He shrugged. “She still had some fingernails left.”
“He strangled her with what?”
“A belt, probably.”
“It wasn’t on the scene?”
He shook his head.
So, after using it to choke away her life, the killer had calmly slipped it back around his waist. Nice.
“There was a postcard found,” I said. “From her sister, postmarked in Albuquerque on September the twenty-fourth.”
He nodded.
“You have it?” I asked him.
“It’s in the evidence locker.”
“‘The flower in the desert lives.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“And that was all that was written on the card?”
He nodded. “That and her signature. Melissa.”
“Any other kind of evidence? Prints? Fibers?”
Bradford grinned. “Jeez, you’re a regular Sherlock Holmes.”
“Was there any?”
“That’s privileged information.”
“All right. Is Melissa Alonzo a suspect?”
“Everyone’s a suspect until they prove they aren’t.” This is what most cops believe to be an unwritten amendment to the United States Constitution.
“So you’re actively looking for her?”
“Not me.”
“Who then?”
“Talk to the FBI. Guy named Stamworth.”
“I still don’t understand why the FBI is involved.”
He shrugged. “Talk to Stamworth.”
“You don’t really think that Melissa Alonzo tied up her sister and ripped off her fingernails?”
He shrugged. “Could of happened.”
“You believe that it did?”
He shook his head.
“So what do you think happened?”
“A crazy.”
“Why the fingernails? Why would a crazy want her to talk?”
Another shrug. “Who can figure crazies. We had a guy here last month, took a hammer to his landlady because she was sending death beams at him. From her microwave.”
“What about Bigelow’s associates? Boyfriends? Family?”
“No associates, no boyfriends. Worked as a librarian out in Brentwood. Never went out. Never did anything. Little Miss Muffet.”
“How old was she?”
“Thirty-four.”
“And the family?”
He smiled. “You figure Mom and Dad aced her because she didn’t call ’em on the weekends? And look. Like I said before, how’s this gonna help you find Alonzo?”
“I don’t know. Do you know anything about a woman named Edie Carpenter?”
He grinned. “Know the story about her husband. You heard it?”
I had, from Ed Norman, but Sergeant Bradley was enjoying himself. Time for a bit of bonding here. I shook my head.
“Scriptwriter,” he said, lowering his arms and putting them along the arms of his chair. “Successful. Big bucks. Edie’s an actress, a second stringer, gets chewed up by the giant bug fifteen minutes in. Anyway, Carpenter marries her. Two days later he decides to kill himself.” He shrugged, grinned. “Maybe Edie’s too much for him. What he does, he’s got one of those fax machines can send the same fax automatically to a bunch of people, one after the other. So he writes his bye-bye note, So long, sayonara, I’m splitting, and he sticks it in the machine, tells the machine to send it to everyone he knows. This is maybe thirty people. Close friends, right? Then he goes into the library and eats his Colt Commander.” He grinned, shook his head.
I smiled. Once again, I could feel the muscles of my face holding the smile in place. “Where was Edie?”
He grinned again. “Getting lessons from her tennis pro. Horizontally.�
�
“A marriage made in heaven.”
“Yeah.”
“What about the people he sent the faxes to? Any of them try to reach him?”
Another grin. “At three in the afternoon? In L.A.? They were all doing lunch.”
I made myself smile again. “No connection between Edie and Cathryn Bigelow?”
He shook his head. “You gonna be talking to Edie?”
“She was a friend of Melissa Alonzo’s.”
Grinning, he ran his right hand over his shiny dented scalp. “Ask her something for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Ask her if she kept the fax machine.”
Driving up the winding turns of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, past the elms and the eucalyptus, I went over what Ed Norman had told me about Melissa Alonzo. It was better than going over what he’d told me about Rita. And what Rita hadn’t told me about herself.
Melissa came, Ed had said, from Old Money. Old Money in Los Angeles is about two hundred years younger than Old Money in the East, but then things happen faster here. Her grandfather, John Bigelow, had originally put the pile together, mostly in real estate, and her father, Calvin, had added to the heap. With holdings in L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, Calvin was still involved in real estate, but he’d broadened his base to include a construction company and a bank or two.
His daughter Melissa graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1972; afterward, she put in two year at UCLA. In 1975, at the age of twenty, she married a William Lester, some twenty-five years her senior and a business partner of her father’s. While not as short-lived as Edie Carpenter’s, this had been another marriage that wasn’t made in heaven—Bigelow and Lester divorced a year later. Amicably, said Ed Norman.
Living in a Malibu condo paid for by her father, drifting from one nondescript secretarial job to another, taking an occasional course in political science or sociology, Melissa was, according to Ed, the kind of “rich young liberal who doesn’t really come alive until she finds herself a cause.” The cause Melissa found was called Sanctuary, a nondenominational group that aided refugees from Central and South America. From 1979 until she disappeared, she worked for them as a volunteer, and it was at a benefit dinner for the group that she met her future husband, Roy Alonzo.
A Flower in the Desert Page 4