“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
WHEN 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 greet
ing 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.”
Once I’d loaded the cassette into Chuck Arthur’s minirecorder and turned it on, the first thing that Arthur and I heard was Melissa’s outgoing message. I glanced across the table at Arthur. He was staring down at the machine, his lower lip caught between his teeth, his head slightly cocked. Suddenly, as the message ended, he reached out, lifted the machine from the table, and hit the Stop button.
I looked at him. “Why?”
“This is a patent invasion of privacy.” He held the recorder tightly in his hand—his tanned knuckles were white. Beneath his mustache, his mouth was set.
“You’re her attorney,” I said.
“Yes, but you’re not.”
“Come on, Arthur. We both want the same thing. We both want Melissa and Winona safe and sound. The cops can’t find her, the FBI can’t find her. Your private detective couldn’t find her. Did he think to check the tape?”
He frowned.
“No,” I said, “he didn’t. So already we’re ahead of the game, the two of us.” Bonding.
“The police must’ve checked it.”
“Maybe they did. And maybe they didn’t—I don’t think they put a real high priority on finding Melissa. You were here when Stamworth searched the house?”
He nodded. “He listened to the machine. I watched him. But he didn’t take out the tape.”
Penalty against Stamworth. Five yards. Stupidity.
“When was this?” I asked him.
“Two weeks ago. He said he was investigating a connection between Melissa and illegal aliens.”
“Melissa’s sister was killed last week. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
He frowned, probably wondering where I was going with this. “Once. At court. Afterward. Just for a moment. I got the impression that she felt she wasn’t supposed to be there. She was nervous. Worried that someone might see her talking to Melissa.”
“Who?”
He shrugged. “The press. And then it would get back to their parents. Melissa was the black sheep in her family. Her father’s a stubborn old goat. He was furious about the court case, and he’d disinherited Melissa. Cathryn wasn’t supposed to contact her.”
“Did Cathryn ever contact you, let you know that she’d heard from Melissa?”
“No.” He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. “You’re suggesting that Cathryn’s death is connected to Melissa somehow.”
“No one else seems to think so. And maybe they’re right. But what if they’re wrong? Wouldn’t that suggest to you that Melissa and Winona might be in danger themselves?”
He said nothing. He looked down at the recorder in his hand.
“Look,” I said. “I’m good at what I do. I don’t have the resources that the cops and the feds have, but I don’t have their bureaucracies either. And I’m a stubborn bastard. I’m going to find Melissa and I’m going to make sure that she and her daughter are okay, whether you help me or not. But if you do help me, I just might be able to find her a little faster.”
It was a good speech, and I believed most of it.
So did Arthur, apparently. He took another deep breath, frowned again, and then, without a word, he leaned forward, set the machine on the metal table, and pushed the Play button.
The two of us listened to what I’d heard before—the two blank spots on the tape in which someone, or two someones, had hung up after Melissa’s outgoing message. They were followed by a faint metallic click, and then three more hang-ups separated by beeps. The faint click came again, then a man’s voice, one I thought I recognized:
“… check in with you later. Bye.”
I reached out, hit the Stop button. “That’s you?” I asked Arthur. “That’s your message?”
“Yes.”
“Any way of telling when you left it?”
He shook his head. “I generally left the same message whenever I got her machine. Is it important?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. When was the last time you left a message?”
“On the twenty-third,” he said. “The day she was supposed to come to my office.”
I hit the Play button. The machine beeped and then a woman’s voice said, “Mel? Hi, this is Deirdre. Give me a call when you get a chance.”
I turned off the machine. I asked Arthur, “You know a Deirdre?”
He shook his head.
I hit the Start button. Another beep, then a different woman’s voice, in Spanish, urgent, and trembling with something like fear. “This is Juanita. I have just heard, Melissa. Call me right away.”
I stopped the machine, looked at Arthur. “What about Juanita?”
Frowning, he shook his head. “That was Spanish?”
“Yeah.” I translated it for him.
He was still frowning. “Did she sound frightened to you?”
“Maybe. Hard to tell. Did anyone take Melissa’s messages while she was in El Salvador?”
“I don’t know. She had a woman come in, but I don’t know what kind of arrangement they had.”
“Do you know the woman’s name?”
“Not offhand. It’s a Spanish name. Not Juanita. I can find it. My secretary makes out her checks.”
“You’re paying Melissa’s bills?”
“It’s only temporary,” he said, a bit defensive. “I’m billing her account.”
“At her request?”
“Someone had to take care of it. She can settle when she comes back.”
I nodded. The electricity was still on, so presumably he was paying that, too. And probably some kind of maintenance fee to keep Melissa in good standing with the Colony. He had to know that he had no legal obligation to pay anything, and that Melissa had no legal obligation to pay anything back, when she returned. If she returned.
“The woman’s still cleaning the house?” I asked him.
“Once a week.”
“Could you get in touch with her? Find out if she’s checking the messages now, and if she checked them while Melissa was in El Salvador?”
He nodded. “I’ll call her tonight.”
“Thanks.” I hit the Start button. We heard a beep, and then a deep, rumbling actor’s baritone, angry. “Where the hell are you, Melissa?”
I turned off the tape player. “That’s Roy Alonzo.”
Arthur nodded.
“The beeps,” I said, “mean a separation between a set of messages. That little click means that we’re moving from one set of messages to another. An earlier set.”
“So this set may be from the twenty-third. Alonzo and I were still trying to reach her here.”
“Yeah.” I hit the button. Another beep, and then:
“Melissa, are you back yet? This is your mother, dear. Call me, would you?”
A beep, a pause, another beep, then the metallic click. Then:
“Call me, dear.” Melissa’s mother again.
A beep. Then: “Hi, Mel. This is Deirdre. I just got your message. I’m back home, and I’ll be here all night, so give me a call if you can.”
A beep. Then: “Melissa, this is Chuck Arthur. Would you call me sometime tomorrow morning? I’d like to talk to you before we go to court. Bye.”
I shut off the machine. “Can you remember when you left that?”
“Well, obviously,” he said, “it had to be during one of the trials. The divorce or the child abuse case.”
“Usually, when you left a message, did you call yourself Chuck or Chuck Arthur?”
“Chuck Arthur.” He frowned. “I may’ve given you the wrong impression. What we had, Melissa and I, was only a professional relationship.”
However much he might have wanted it otherwise. I nodded. I hit the Play button. A beep sounded. Then Roy Alonzo’s voice came racketing out of the tiny speaker, higher in register now, and shredded with anguish:
“How can you do this, Mel? How can you do it to me, how can you do it to Winona? How can you tell all these lies you’re telling!”
Nine
AND WHAT DID ARTHUR SAY TO that?” Rita asked me over the phone.
“He wasn’t very concerned,” I told her. “He pointed out that Alonzo was an actor. And also that there was no way of determining exactly when the message was left. Roy might’ve left it back in the beginning of all this, when he still thought he could persuade Melissa she was wrong.”
“And what do you say?”
“About Roy abusing Winona? I can’t say anything yet, Rita. So far, everyone I’ve talked to is in Melissa’s camp, more or less.”
A Flower in the Desert Page 7