A Flower in the Desert

by Walter Satterthwait

  His ruggedly handsome face was square, with a firm, determined jaw neatly bisected by a manly cleft. His eyes were brown and steady. His hair was dark brown and curly. He had a splendid tan. I was beginning to believe that everyone who worked in L.A. had been hired from Central Casting, and that none of them had ever heard of skin cancer.

  He smiled politely and said, “Mr. Croft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jim Stamworth. FBI. May I come in?”

  I looked at my watch, to see what his reaction might be.

  He smiled politely again. “Just a few questions. They won’t take long.”

  I nodded. “Come in.”

  He came in and I gestured toward the two overstuffed chairs by the window. He walked across the room and sat down in one, gave a gentle tug to the knees of his slacks, and crossed his legs, left ankle over right knee. Shiny silk socks that matched his suit, sleek black leather slip-on shoes. Italian, probably.

  I sat down in the other chair, stretched out my legs and crossed them ankle over ankle. I’d kicked off the boots when I arrived in the room and I was wearing white cotton socks. Taiwanese, probably.

  I said, “What can I do for you?”

  He smiled politely again. “We understand that you’re attempting to determine the whereabouts of Mrs. Melissa Alonzo.”

  “We?” I said.

  “The Bureau.”

  “Do you have any identification, Mr. Stamworth?”

  Another polite smile. “Of course.” He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, slipped out a black eelskin billfold, opened it, handed it to me. His hands were nicely manicured.

  The photo on the ID looked like him, although not quite so ruggedly handsome. Nothing in the world could look quite so ruggedly handsome. I handed the billfold back and he returned it to his pocket. I asked him, “What’s the FBI’s interest in Mrs. Alonzo?”

  Still another polite smile. “It’s two pronged, actually. One team is attempting to locate her because by removing her daughter from Los Angeles without permission, Mrs. Alonzo put herself in violation of a court order. By crossing state lines, she put herself within the jurisdiction of the Bureau. My own concern, however, is somewhat different.”

  “How so?”

  “We have reason to believe,” he said, “that Mrs. Alonzo might be able to assist us with an ongoing investigation into the movement of illegal aliens into the United States.”

  “Assist you how?”

  “We have evidence which suggests that Mrs. Alonzo, through her involvement in a certain political group, may possess valuable information about such activities.” He still hadn’t run out of polite smiles. Nor polite evasions. “Now, Mr. Croft, may I ask the questions for a while?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Which certain political group?”

  He shook his head slightly, still smiling. “My turn, I believe.”

  I shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  “Who was it that employed you to locate Mrs. Alonzo?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m not at liberty to discuss that.” I don’t know why I didn’t tell him; I’d told everybody else, and if he really wanted to know, he could find out without too much trouble. I was probably just being a jerk.

  He managed another polite smile, but I had a feeling he was nearing the end of his supply. “Mr. Croft,” he said, “under both state and federal law, a private investigator has no claim to the privilege of confidentiality.”

  “Unless he’s working under retainer for an attorney.”

  “And are you?”

  “Martin Durham in Santa Fe.” Before Norman Montoya had left my house last night, he’d called the lawyer and told him that I was now, technically, working for Durham. Told him. Martin Durham, a former state senator, a former governor, and one of the most expensive and powerful lawyers in New Mexico, had immediately agreed. I said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to talk to Mr. Durham.”

  Stamworth surprised me by finding, somewhere in his reserves, yet another polite smile. He slid a small eelskin notebook from his shirt pocket, and then a Montblanc ballpoint pen. He flipped open the notebook and wrote something in it. Durham’s name, possibly. Possibly a reminder to get his shoes buffed.

  He looked at me and his handsome face went ruggedly serious. “Mr. Croft,” he said. “Shall we be frank?”

  “Let’s.”

  “I have no interest in Mrs. Alonzo’s flight from California, per se. My only concern is our illegal-alien investigation. As a matter of fact, if Mrs. Alonzo should be disposed to cooperate with us in this matter, I think I can safely say that the Bureau would be inclined to … ignore, shall we say, the matter of her flight from California. And even, perhaps, assist her in a relocation of some sort.”

  “You’d work a deal with her.”

  He smiled broadly, apparently gratified by my quick understanding. His teeth were very white. “Exactly,” he said. “But in order to arrange this, of course, we need to contact Mrs. Alonzo.”

  “And so far you haven’t.”

  “Precisely. Now, we’ve checked you out, Mr. Croft, you and Mrs. Mondragón. From the records we have available, the two of you appear to run an exemplary private agency. You, personally, seem to be an intelligent and determined investigator. I’m hoping that you’ll be disposed to cooperate with us.”

  “Work a deal with you.”

  He smiled, gratified once more. I was coming along nicely. “It’s always a good thing,” he said, “to have a friend or two at the federal level.”

  That was the carrot. I wondered how long it would take him to bring out the stick.

  “And naturally,” he said, smiling, “it would be a shame not to have a friend or two at the federal level.”

  Not long. It was a stick wrapped in velvet, but it was a stick.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “CPA or law?” The FBI recruited only CPAs and attorneys.

  He smiled. “Law.”

  I wasn’t surprised. CPAs don’t usually have so large a reservoir of polite smiles.

  I said, “Who are these illegal aliens you’re interested in?”

  Another smile. “To quote you, Mr. Croft, I’m not at liberty to reveal that.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I was tired. I stood up. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Mr. Stamworth. Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

  “Sit down, Croft,” he said. The reservoir was empty. His voice was hard.

  I smiled. “Do you have a warrant? Search? Arrest? Anything?”

  “I can get one.”

  “On what basis? What just cause?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “You do that. In the meantime, you’re leaving and I’m going to bed. Good night.”

  Still sitting in the chair, he looked down at the floor, examined the carpeting for a while, then looked back up at me. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot,” he said. “I’d appreciate a few more minutes of your time. Believe me, this is as much for your benefit as for mine.”

  I doubted that, but I sat down anyway.

  He studied me for a bit, and then he said, “I assume you have some conception of Bureau agents as storm troopers, swooping out of the night to grab terrified families of poor starving migrant workers.”

  “I don’t have any conception of Bureau agents at all.” Except for a suspicion that this particular agent was about to start laying down a scam.

  “That might’ve been true,” he said, “back in the old days. But we’ve changed. We’ve cleaned up our act. We—most of us, anyway—believe in due process. We believe that the ends don’t justify the means.”

  I smiled. “Didn’t I hear you mention something about a warrant?”

  His polite smile resurfaced. “I regret that. Sometimes unfortunate things are said in the heat of the moment.”

  He studied me some more, his handsome features thoughtful. Finally he said, “I’m going to take a chance with you, Mr.
Croft.”

  “Golly,” I said.

  If he heard the sarcasm, he ignored it. “I’ll need your word that what I’m about to tell you will never be repeated to anyone.”

  “I can’t give it. Mrs. Mondragón will have to know everything I know.”

  “Excepting Mrs. Mondragón.”

  “Fine.”

  He nodded. “You’ve heard of Sendero Luminoso?”

  “Shining Path,” I said. “Terrorists. Or guerrillas. Or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view. Peru?”

  “Peru. And no matter what they call themselves, they’re terrorists pure and simple. We have reason to believe—and I’m talking solid evidence, not hearsay—that a cadre of Shining Path terrorists has infiltrated itself into the United States, disguised themselves as illegal aliens from Salvador and Guatemala and utilizing the various underground groups that assist such people.”

  “And why is a Shining Path cadre sneaking into the United States?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Croft, truly sorry, but that comes under the heading of national security. Suffice it to say that, on the evidence we possess, the threat they represent is immediate and quite real.”

  “So you think Melissa Alonzo is involved with a group of terrorists.”

  “Not wittingly, we believe. We have no reason to think that Mrs. Alonzo sympathizes with these people. We suspect she knows nothing about their intentions and their true identities. But we do believe that she may possess information as to their location.”

  “And what is it you want me to do?”

  “We’d be very grateful if you gave some serious consideration to apprising Mrs. Alonzo of the situation, assuming you do manage to contact her. If you can persuade her to get in touch with us, you’ll be doing both Mrs. Alonzo and yourself a great favor.”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it some serious consideration.”

  He smiled politely once more. He reached into his coat pocket, slipped out his eelskin billfold again, took from it a business card, handed me the card. “I can be reached at that number anytime, night or day. If you do locate Mrs. Alonzo, please ask her to call me.”

  I nodded noncommittally.

  He stood up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Croft.”

  He held out his hand and I shook it. I asked him, “What about Cathryn Bigelow?”

  He frowned. “What about her?”

  “Does her death have anything to do with Melissa’s disappearance?”

  Another frown. “Why should it? From what I understand, the police believe that a psychotic is responsible.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “I haven’t given it any thought. The two things have nothing to do with each other.”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said. “I hope we’ll be hearing from you. Or from Mrs. Alonzo.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He showed me his polite smile one more time, in case I’d forgotten what it looked like. “So we shall,” he said.

  After he left, I lay for a while on the bed staring at his card. It was an expensive card, heavy off-white paper, embossed black print. James B. Stamworth, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. The phone number was a local call, prefixed by 213, L.A.’s main area code.

  Like Stamworth himself, the card seemed a bit too expensive. The man wasn’t picking up tailored silk suits and Montblanc pens on an FBI agent’s salary. Maybe he was an independently wealthy young swell who’d decided, as a lark, to become a crimebuster. The FBI, for all I knew, was riddled with independently wealthy young swells in silk suits.

  But I doubted it. And the shoulder rig bothered me. According to a Santa Fe friend, a gun buff who followed such things, the FBI these days was partial to hip holsters, and usually they filled them with the Smith & Wesson .38 or, on more merry occasions, with the Smith 9-millimeter automatic. The bulge under Stamworth’s carefully tailored suit suggested something larger. A Glock, maybe. Or a Scud missile.

  And I really couldn’t see the FBI dividing its forces, setting up a two-pronged operation, to look for one woman. A woman who, after all, was hardly Ma Barker.

  And Stamworth’s story about the Shining Path cadre sounded like something that had been slapped together, on an off day, by the Brothers Grimm. The last I heard, the Shining Path people were too busy toppling the Peruvian economy to worry about exporting terrorism, or anything else, into North America.

  But if Stamworth wasn’t FBI, then who was he? And how had he managed to track me down so quickly?

  Sergeant Bradford, the L.A. homicide cop, knew where I was staying. But Bradford, even if he actually bought Stamworth’s FBI story, hadn’t seemed particularly disposed to cooperate with the Bureau.

  Edie Carpenter knew, but why would she notify Stamworth? Why would Chuck Arthur?

  Stamworth had claimed that he—they—had checked out me and Rita. That might have been smoke. But if it wasn’t, it argued some sort of organization behind him.

  Or did it? Maybe he was a computer whiz, like Rita.

  In any event, it seemed to me that Stamworth was probably not what he claimed he was.

  But even if he wasn’t FBI, he could very well be from some other obscure branch of the federal government, which meant that he could have already arranged a tap on the hotel phone.

  Eleven

  ELIZABETH DREWER LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE WHAT she, and possibly what People magazine, claimed she was. In her early forties, with close-cropped and curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a navy blue skirt and a matching coat, a pale blue blouse and a red and blue Hermés scarf, she was the perfect picture, almost the stereotype, of a tough, businesslike woman attorney. She didn’t have a tan, but maybe, even in L.A., tough, businesslike women attorneys weren’t supposed to.

  Her face was lean, her nose narrow and pointed, her mouth thin. It was a face that, when animated, would be attractive; but when guarded, as it was now, seemed pinched and disapproving. She was tall and angular, filled with a wary nervous energy, and she held and she moved her body as though it were a vaguely irritating but necessary apparatus into which she’d slipped that morning, like a suit of armor. Perhaps when she got back home, she clambered out of the thing, and her bright restless spirit, suddenly loosed from the burden of flesh, flittered and swooped from room to room.

  Her eyes were brown and they had been unfriendly since I sat down opposite her on Wednesday morning, across a desk littered with computer printouts and legal texts and a sprawl of file folders. The rest of the office was impeccably neat, but this wasn’t much of an accomplishment, because the rest of the office was all bookshelves, every one of them packed with law books. One small window looked out onto a small courtyard that held a single dispirited palm tree shading a patch of Culver City gravel. It was the office of someone who hasn’t experienced a great deal of financial success, possibly because she didn’t care much about it.

  “Look,” she said when I finished explaining my reason for invading her life, “let’s cut the shit.” Sitting back in her swivel chair, holding a yellow Bic pen between the first two fingers of her right hand, she tapped it against the edge of her desktop, rapidly, steadily, like a speed-freak drummer in a rock band. “First of all, even if I had been contacted by Melissa Alonzo, which I don’t for a moment admit, the nature of the attorney-client relationship precludes my discussing it. You’re familiar with the word precludes?”

  I smiled pleasantly. “Maybe if you spelled it.”

  “Secondly,” she said, “I don’t like private detectives. I’ve had too many nasty experiences with them.”

  I smiled pleasantly again. It was only slightly more difficult this time. “Mrs. Drewer—”

  “Ms.,” she said, without losing her steady beat against the desktop.

  “Ms. Drewer.” Of course. “I only accepted this case because it seemed to me that Mrs. Alonzo”—she frowned, I smiled apologetically and silently cursed the person who had invented that ugly
word—“Ms. Alonzo might be in danger. Her sister was killed last week. It’s possible that there may be a connection between the sister’s death and Ms. Alonzo’s disappearance.”

  “What evidence do you have to support that contention?”

  “None. But it’s not a contention. If I’m contending anything, I’m contending that it’s a possibility.”

  “It’s an unlikelihood. Melissa Alonzo disappeared almost two months ago.” Still tapping against the desktop, she said, “You’re working for Roy Alonzo.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” I said.

  Her thin lips moved slightly in something that was more a sneer than a smile. It suggested that she knew more about this particular situation than I did, and probably more about most other situations, as well. “Really?” she said. “For who, then?”

  For whom, I nearly corrected her. I didn’t. We might have sat there all day, taking turns correcting each other’s speech. “For his uncle.” I explained the arrangement I’d made with Norman Montoya.

  “You expect me to believe that?” she said. The small superior sneer hadn’t left her lips.

  I was beginning to suspect that Elizabeth Drewer and I would never exchange girlish confidences. “What I expect and what I hope are two different things,” I said. “I was hoping that you’d give me the benefit of the doubt.”

  “The benefit of the doubt,” she repeated, and bitterness made the words curl up at the edges. “That’s what the judge gave Roy Alonzo. Do you know what Roy Alonzo did to his five-year-old daughter?”

  “I know what he was acquitted of doing.”

  “If you’d read the transcripts, you’d know that the evidence was absolutely conclusive.” She swiveled the ballpoint, held it as though it were a pen and not a drumstick, and then knifed its point against her desk blotter, once, sharply. “Winona testified that her father forced her to commit fellatio.” She knifed the penpoint against the blotter again. “Winona’s hymen was ruptured.” Another stab. “There was evidence of rectal scarring.”

  Involuntarily, I winced. “Why did the court decide that the abuse hadn’t occurred?”