Mrs. Bigelow canted her head to the side, thoughtful. At last she said, “We had a housekeeper named Juanita once. But she’s dead now, I believe. Yes, I’m sure she is. We sent flowers.”
“No other Juanita?’
“Not that I can recall.”
I said, “Did she ever tell you how she met Deirdre Polk?”
She waved a hand vaguely. “Some opening or other.”
“In Santa Fe?”
“I believe so.”
I said, “What about the people involved in the group she worked with. Sanctuary.”
“That,” she said, looking displeased. She shifted slightly in her seat.
I asked her, “Did she ever mention the names of anyone in the group?”
“It was something we didn’t really discuss. She knew that Cal and I didn’t approve of her involvement with those people.” It seemed that there were a lot of things that Melissa and her mother never discussed.
“Why is that?” I asked.
She sat upright, gathering herself together. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure that many of them are very well intentioned. Like Melissa is. And I suppose they see themselves as romantic figures, flouting authority, aiding the downtrodden. But it seems to me that they’re no better than common criminals, some of them. They’re helping illegal aliens, you know. They’re breaking the law of the land. I know that Melissa would never be involved with that part of it. But we felt that it was dangerous, her being a member of a group like that. The law is the law, after all. If we didn’t have laws, we’d be no better than animals.” This she said as though it were something else she had learned many years ago, and had often repeated since then. Repetition had emptied it of any conviction it might once have had, genuine or hoped for.
“How much of her time did Melissa spend in Santa Fe? While she was married to Roy?”
She thought for a moment. She blinked. “Well, she and Roy used to go out there for the summers, when Roy wasn’t making that television series. And then later, toward the end of the marriage, she spent more of her time out there, she and Winona. A week here and there.”
“Did she go there after the divorce?”
“Yes. Occasionally.”
“Does Sanctuary have an office in Santa Fe?”
“I really couldn’t say. As I said, we didn’t discuss those people.”
“Did Melissa speak to you after she returned from El Salvador? Before she disappeared?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t even know she had disappeared until Roy called me and asked if I’d heard from her.”
She looked down again.
I said, “Is there anyone else you can think of, Mrs. Bigelow? Any other friend she might’ve gotten in contact with?”
She shook her head slowly. Then she looked up and stared out the window once more. I saw that quietly, politely, discreetly, she was crying. Tears dark with mascara rolled down her taut cheeks. Without looking at me, she said, “Lately, you know, we haven’t talked that much.”
It occurred to me then that if she had been the figure I’d glimpsed at the window, she might have been looking out across that broad sweep of lawn for Melissa. Standing there, drink in hand, waiting for her daughter to return. Since last week, the only daughter she had left.
It was not a happy thought.
I told her, “I’ll find Melissa, Mrs. Bigelow.” There was nothing else to say.
“Please,” she said softly, still staring out the window. Then she closed her eyes and she sat there, holding her drink in her lap with both hands, as the tears made small slick trails down the mask that was her face.
Fourteen
MELISSA ALONZO,” CHARLES HATFIELD TOLD ME, “is a Committed woman. Absolutely dedicated. Her assistance has been invaluiable to this organization.”
I hadn’t expected to like Charles Hatfield. After leaving Mrs. Bigelow and her grief, I hadn’t expected to like anyone. But the L.A. director of Sanctuary surprised me. He didn’t look like a common criminal, but then I hadn’t thought he would—an organization like Sanctuary wouldn’t last long if its directors resembled street thugs.
He was English and he was short and a bit overweight and his thick white hair was combed back in waves over a pair of ears that were slightly larger, and slightly redder, than ears were supposed to be. A waxed white mustache curled heroically from beneath his rounded nose. His ruddy face was friendly and sincere—a combination that often makes me uneasy, but one that in Hatfield’s case I found myself buying. He wore a white oxford shirt, a club tie opened at the neck, tweed trousers, and a tweed jacket that sported leather patches on the elbow and a leather patch at the right shoulder, the kind that’s designed to keep the cloth beneath from getting ruffled by the butt of your Purdy shotgun when you blast away at some wily pheasant. Or some wily peasant. I doubted that Hatfield had ever blasted away at anything.
His cordovan wingtips were perched atop his wide mahogany desk, and he was smoking a bulldog pipe that refused to stay alight. Every five minutes or so, he torched it with a jet of flame from his Dunhill lighter and puffed up a cloud of blue smoke.
I asked him, “Have you heard from her since she disappeared?”
“No. Nothing.” He sucked at his pipe, then grinned engagingly around its stem. “Wish I had. We could use her right now. Work’s piling up right and left.”
“What exactly did Melissa do for you, Mr. Hatfield?”
“Little bit of everything,” he said. “Typing, filing, general secretarial. May not sound like much, but in a place like this”—he waved his pipe to take in the office, and, by implication, the rest of Sanctuary—”absolutely essential.”
The office in question was about the same size as Elizabeth Drewer’s, but it was done up as an alcove in a gentlemen’s private club: red carpet, black leather chairs studded with brass, framed lithographs of Irish setters on the dark hardwood walls, a glassed-in mahogany bookcase holding shelves of handsome leather-bound books that had probably never been read.
“And Melissa,” he said, “was sharp as a tack. Never made a mistake. Never misfiled anything. I wanted something, some record, all I had to do was ask her, and she’d have it to me in a shot.”
“She didn’t work here full time.”
He waved his pipe negatively. “No, no, no. Once or twice a week. Wish it’d been more. It’s a completely volunteer staff here, and Lord knows they’ve all got their heart in the right place, splendid bunch, work like slaves. But some of them, well, amateurs pretty much says it. Not Melissa, though. A real professional. Had her job down cold.”
“What about her trips to Central America?”
He sucked at his pipe, smiled. “What about them?”
“What were the trips for?”
The pipe had gone out again. He lifted his lighter from the desk, flicked it open, spun the wheel. He held it to the pipe and a long finger of flame tapped at the bowl. “Fact finding,” he said around the pipe stem, through a billow of smoke. “Getting the scoop on those bullies down in El Salvador and Guatemala. First-person accounts.” He flapped his hand, waved away the smoke.
I looked down at my notebook. “According to the press reports, there were three other people on the trip with her. Bob Slavin, Terrence Courtney, and Beatrice Wocynski. I understand that Melissa was supposed to leave with them from San Salvador on August twenty-first. What was their reaction when she left on the seventeenth?”
“They didn’t know she’d left the country until the twentieth, day before they left themselves. Melissa didn’t show up at the Hilton, in San Salvador, like she was supposed to. They called her hotel in Santa Isabel, discovered she’d checked out on the seventeenth. Left a message for them. Flying home, personal business.”
“And what was their reaction?”
“Surprise.” He grinned around the pipe. “Mystification.”
“And what was your reaction?”
He frowned slightly. “Well, surprise, too, naturally. But I know Melissa a
bit better than they do. She’s … mercurial.” He liked the sound of the word. Nodding, he repeated it: “Mercurial. She’s done things like that before, you know. Gone off on her own, without a word to anyone. Not that she isn’t a responsible person, fundamentally. She is. Like I say, when she worked here at the office, she had her job down cold.”
“What was your reaction when you learned that she’d disappeared from L.A. with her daughter?”
“Now that worried me, got to confess. Leaving Salvador was one thing, but leaving town like that …” He shook his head sadly. “And with Winona. Something else again. Not like her.” He puffed at the pipe.
“Do you know why she left?”
He shrugged. “Under a lot of pressure, wasn’t she? Lot of stress. The court case, that cretinous judge awarding visitation to that swine of a husband.”
“You think that Roy was guilty of child abuse?”
“Course he was. Melissa would never’ve accused him otherwise. Would never’ve put Winona through all that sordid business. The court, the press. Horrible. She loves that little girl. Crazy about her.”
I nodded. “Do you know Roy Alonzo?”
He snorted into his mustache. “Thought I did. Saw him fairly often. Drinks, dinner. He was our spokesperson, you know. Typical actor. All smiles and charm outside, pit viper inside.”
“He’s not the spokesperson now?”
He looked affronted. “Course not. Last thing we need is a bloody bent swine for a figurehead. I took it up with the board myself, straightaway. Got to get rid of this pig, I said. A total liability. Got to dump him.”
“But what if Roy was innocent? What if Melissa misunderstood something Winona said?”
“Rubbish. I told you, Melissa wouldn’t have gone ahead with this thing if she hadn’t been sure. And there were the doctor’s reports. Roy was no innocent.” He shrugged. “Besides, didn’t matter in the end. Image. That’s what’s important in this town. Image. Caesar’s wife. We couldn’t have him representing us. Simple as that.”
I nodded. “One thing I’m a little unclear about.”
His eyebrows—both of them—arched expectantly.
“What was Melissa doing in Santa Isabel?” I asked him.
“Bit of R and R,” he said. “It’s on the coast, Santa Isabel. Quiet little place, palm trees, sand, grass huts. The four of them had pretty much finished with their business down there. Interviews, whatnot. Terry and Bob flew off to Costa Rica, Melissa rented a car and drove to Santa Isabel. Beatrice stayed in San Salvador.”
“Did anything happen in Santa Isabel while Melissa was there? Anything that might’ve put her in jeopardy?”
Below the elaborate mustache, his mouth widened in a grin. “Sand in the margaritas. That’s probably the worst thing that could happen in Santa Isabel. Tiny little place. Very pretty. Very quiet, like I say. Quaint. Miles and miles from the fighting.”
So much for Rita’s theory that Melissa was running from some unknown event that had occurred down there.
I said, “Could you give me addresses for the three people who went with her?”
“Bob and Terry are in Guatemala right now.” He grinned. “Suckers for punishment, the two of ’em. Beatrice is around, though. Give you hers, if you like.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Want it now? That it? We finished?”
“First,” I said, “could you tell me what it is that Sanctuary does, exactly?”
He shrugged. “Bit of everything. PR for the cause. Legal aid for the people in the camps, posting bonds, finding sponsers—”
“The camps?” I interrupted him.
“The INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, calls ’em service processing centers. But concentration camps is more like it. We’ve got a couple here in California. The men’s camp at El Centro, the SPAN women’s facility in Pasadena. Between three and four hundred men at El Centro, all treated like animals. Overcrowding, slop for food. Half of them are OTMs—”
“OTMs?”
“Sorry. Border Patrol lingo.” His pipe had gone out again. “Other than Mexican. Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans.” He thumbed his lighter, sucked at the flame. “No problem with the Mexicans. Border Patrol just VR’s them—VR, that’s voluntary return.” He puffed, waved away the smoke. “Gets them to sign an I-274, waive their right to an immigration appearance, and then ships ’em back across the border. A farce. Most of’ em slip over the fence again an hour later. They know they’re going to, and so does the Border Patrol.”
“What about the rest? The other than Mexican?”
“Bit more trouble there. They do not want to go back. Who could blame them? Salvador, give you an example, has a wretched track record when it comes to handling returned emigrants. Some of these poor people are arrested. Disappear, never heard from again. Some are simply shot on arrival. Simpler that way. Sets a nice example for the others, as well.”
“The INS knows that?”
“Course they do. Thing is, the INS likes to call these people illegal aliens. They’re not. The Geneva Convention of 1948 forbids signatories—and the U.S. is a signatory—from returning refugees to a war zone. And if any country qualifies as a war zone, it’s El Salvador. But of course this government, the United States government, has gone on record as saying that the government there is a fine, upstanding, peaceful democracy.”
He puffed at his pipe. “Which it isn’t, of course. Basic fascist oligarchy. Fourteen families own everything, including the police and the army. Official government policy for dealing with the unruly countryside is pacification. Means the same thing there it used to mean in Vietnam.”
He puffed some more. “Fact is, under international law, all these refugees have a legal right to come here, and a legal right to stay here, until hostilities cease. The INS, by denying them that right, is the party that’s acting illegally.”
“Does Sanctuary provide shelter for the kind of refugees you’re talking about?”
He smiled. “Safe houses, you mean?”
I nodded.
“Official policy is to operate entirely within the law. And we do. As I say, legal aid, sponsorship, educating the public. But that’s not to say that individuals within the organization mightn’t stretch the law a bit. We discourage it, naturally, but—” He shrugged. “Some people see it as a matter of saving lives. Simple as that.”
“Was Melissa Alonzo,” I asked him, “ever involved in the movement of illegals?”
His eyebrows lowered and his lips frowned around the pipe stem. “Been talking to the FBI, have we?”
“Yeah. They talked to you?”
He nodded. “Fellow named Stamworth. Very smooth, very polite. Bit too smooth, I thought. He wanted to know the same thing.”
“When was he here?”
“End of September.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“Absolutely not. Too visible. A celebrity’s wife. Our spokesperson’s wife.” He shook his head, frowning against the pipe stem. “Wouldn’t do, you know.”
“Would she know people within the organization who might’ve been involved in sheltering illegals?”
He puffed thoughtfully. “Perhaps. But she wasn’t involved herself. I’d swear to it.”
I nodded. “Does Sanctuary have an office in Santa Fe?”
He nodded. “Want the address?”
“Yeah. Thanks. Did Melissa do any work for the Santa Fe office?”
“Don’t think so. If she did, it was on an unofficial basis. What I gathered, she used Santa Fe as a kind of … sanctuary.” He grinned. “No pun intended. But that was where she went to relax. Recharge. You follow? I shouldn’t think she involved herself in anything with our people out there.”
“Did Melissa ever mention a woman named Deirdre Polk to you?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Can’t say she did.”
“What about a woman named Juanita?”
Again he thought, again he shook
his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells. Sorry.”
“Did you ever meet Melissa’s sister, Cathryn?”
“She stopped by the office a few times, when Melissa was here. Nice girl, she seemed to be. Retiring type. Shy. Shame about her death. Makes you wonder what this town’s coming to.” He frowned suddenly. “You don’t think her death’s got anything to do with Melissa?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
He stared off at an unpleasant distance. “Good Lord,” he said. “How awful.”
“The phrase ‘The flower in the desert lives.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head again. “Can’t say that it does.”
“Did Cathryn ever contact you, to tell you that she’d heard from Melissa?”
“No. Why should she?”
“You have no idea where Melissa might be?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not a one. Sorry.”
After leaving Hatfield’s office, I drove back to the hotel. I called Beatrice Wocynski, one of the three people who had accompanied Melissa Alonzo to El Salvador. She was polite and concerned, but she was unable to give me anything I didn’t already have. Melissa’s disappearance from Los Angeles had been as much of a surprise to her as Melissa’s disappearance from El Salvador. Like Hatfield—but less intimately, I suspected—she had known Roy Alonzo. And like Hatfield, she had no trouble seeing him as a child molester. She liked Melissa, thought she was a “wonderful person,” but, again like Hatfield, she had no idea where Melissa might be now.
I had dinner in the restaurant downstairs—some fish and some brightly colored vegetables artfully arranged around an expanse of white porcelain plate, like bits of sculpture on a skating rink—then I went back to my room and packed.
Part Two
Fifteen
RITA SIPPED AT HER COFFEE. “IF Stamworth isn’t FBI,” she said, “then who or what do you think he is?”
“No idea,” I said. Sitting at the opposite end of the sofa, I was drinking hot cocoa. A bright rectangle of morning sun lay across the Persian carpet. Rita wore a white silk blouse and a pleated black skirt. Her hair, thick and black, was pulled loosely behind her neck, folded like wings along her Indian cheekbones. The stainless steel walker stood upright beside her.
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