When I was behind the children’s dormitory, I left the trees. Snow crunching loudly beneath me, I approached the building. A light was on beyond a long narrow window at eye level. Cautiously, I peered in.
Children sat on cushions on the floor, listening, as Freddy, who sat in an antique wooden rocker, read to them from a thin cardboard-bound book opened on her lap. Metal bunk beds, three of them, ran along the far wall. All the children were girls, ranging in age from three or four to ten or eleven, and all of them wore cotton pajamas. One of them was Winona. She sat somewhat apart from the others, the stuffed panda resting on her crossed legs.
I could see why, two days earlier, I hadn’t realized that there was a girl beneath her boy’s clothes. Without being at all unfeminine, her face owed something to her father’s—her features were stronger than Melissa’s, her jaw proportionally wider, her chin firmer. She would be a striking woman one day.
I backed away from the window and spent a few moments deciding how to handle this. I could keep skulking around, see if I could locate Melissa. I could wait until Freddy left, then wait some more to see if somehow I could isolate Winona.
But maybe Freddy wouldn’t leave. Maybe she slept out here with the children.
And my feet were cold.
Might as well get this over with.
I circled the dorm. The building had two entrances, one at the far side that presumably led into the boys’ section, and the one beside which I stood now. I slipped my hand into my pocket, wrapped my gloved fingers around the reassuring shape of the Smith & Wesson. I figured that with the revolver I was an even match for a single mother and six preadolescent girls. Keeping the gun in my pocket, I reached out my left hand and turned the doorknob. I pushed open the door and stepped into the room.
For a moment there was an absolute silence.
Then a girl screamed.
It wasn’t a terrified scream—it was more the sort of wild theatrical scream young girls make when young boys invade the pajama party.
But it set some of the others to squealing and giggling.
“Quiet,” Freddy snapped. Calmly, she closed the book on her lap and then said to me, “What on earth are you doing here?”
I said, “You weren’t entirely truthful with me, Freddy. I’m disappointed.”
A girl tittered. Another girl slapped her lightly.
“You’re trespassing on private property,” Freddy said. She ran her hand back through her untamed gray hair. She was wearing the same kind of bulky clothing she had worn two days before: a long dress, a man’s shapeless brown sweater.
“Winona,” I said. “Where’s your mother?”
The young girl had clutched the panda to her chest, her hands pressed tight against its black and white fur. She looked from me to Freddy, then back to me.
Freddy said to the girl, “Mary, you don’t—”
Winona said to me, “She got sick.”
I don’t remember any more. It’s possible that Bilbo said something before he clubbed me, possible that he warned me, or threatened me, but I doubt it.
I was lying on my side and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my hands. My wrists hurt, but I couldn’t bring them around in front of me to see what the problem was. The air held the strong ammoniac smell of goats, and it was cold.
I opened my eyes. In the wavering yellow lantern light, I could see across the dirt floor of the barn, strewn with straw and spotted with goat droppings, to where Bilbo and Sam sat on some bales of hay.
My head felt as though someone had kicked it down a stairway. I took a breath and, abruptly, I was nauseated. I vomited, and then, coughing, hacking, I rolled away from the mess I’d made. I tried to sit up, and my wrists screeched at me. They were tied together. I felt around with my fingers. Tied not with rope but with wire.
Sam looked at me over his shoulder, his gray ponytail swaying along his red mackinaw. He stood up from the bale of hay and crossed the dirt flooring and looked down at me. He shook his head sadly. “Jesus, man, what’d you have to come back here for?”
Bilbo still sat on the hay, eyeing me silently.
“Could you help me sit up,” I said to Sam.
He squatted down, eased my shoulder up, gently eased me back against another bale of hay. Leaning on it seemed to tighten the wire at my wrists, but it was better than lying in the dirt.
Sam stood up, put his hands in his pockets.
“This isn’t good, Sam,” I told him. “People know where I am.”
“What the fuck you have to come back here for?” The barn door was wide open, letting in the cold black night, and Sam’s breath made a cloud of white vapor before his face.
“For Winona,” I said. “And Melissa. Where’s Melissa, Sam?”
He said nothing.
“Is she dead, Sam?”
He said nothing.
“We should off him,” Bilbo said.
“Shut up,” Sam told him. “We’ll wait.”
Bilbo shrugged. “You know what the man’s gonna say.”
I said, “Bilbo the one who hit me?”
Sam nodded.
“What did he use?”
“Gun.” He smiled, and the smile seemed almost embarrassed. “He doesn’t like you very much, I guess.”
“That’s a shame. I’ve gotten real fond of him.”
Bilbo seemed indifferent to this.
I asked Sam, “How long was I out?”
Sam took a brass railroad watch from his front coverall pocket. “Almost three hours.”
“Three hours? From a hit on the head?”
“Freddy gave you a shot.”
“A shot of what?”
He shrugged. “Some downer. She said it was safe.”
“She’s a real Mother Teresa, that Freddy.”
He shrugged again. “She knows about drugs.”
I nodded. “You know, Sam, you’re too smart a guy to be in this position. My partner knows I was coming out here. I was supposed to call her a couple of hours ago. By now she’s notified the police.”
Sam looked around. “Don’t see any police.”
But I could hear a car coming and so, now, could Sam: the thin whine of an engine came drifting through the barn door. He turned to Bilbo. “It’s probably him. Go check.”
Bilbo got up from his bale of hay, slipped his hands into his pockets, and sauntered to the doorway. Without a glance back, he disappeared out into the night.
“Sam,” I said. “It’s over. In a little while this place’ll be crawling with cops.”
He shook his head. “Anything like that about to go down, I’d get a call from the sheriff. Got a CB in the house.”
I heard a car door slam outside.
I said, “Did he kill her, Sam? Is that what this is all about?”
Sam said, “You never should’ve come back here, man.” He shook his head again. “That was a bad mistake.”
Bilbo walked through the barn door, followed by Roy Alonzo.
Alonzo wore a full-length black leather topcoat, a white scarf draped outside the upraised collar. Gestapo night at the opera. Hands in his pockets, he walked up to me and said, “You are one world-class putz, Croft.”
I said nothing.
Without looking away from me, Alonzo said to Sam, “He have a gun?”
“Bilbo’s got it.”
Not taking his glance off me, he held his hand out from his side and said, “Bilbo?” Bilbo came up behind him and put my revolver in his hand. It was a nice piece of stage business. I think I saw it once on an episode of “The Man from UNCLE.”
He grinned down at the pistol. “A Smith and Wesson. Good gun.”
I said, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told Sam. My partner knows I’m here. By now she’s called the police.”
He grinned at me, the same dauntless, devil-may-care grin that Rick Valdez had always grinned in the face of adversity. Flawless teeth, dimples in his cheeks. “This’ll all be over in a few minutes.”
He u
nbuttoned his coat, squatted down on his haunches so that we were at eye level. He grinned again, tapped the barrel of the pistol lightly against the ankle of his black leather boot. “You know, usually I’m the one in your position. Trussed up, surrounded by enemies. All hope gone, and only a minute or two left until the pizza commercial. I have to admit, in real life I prefer being on this side of the gun.”
“You won’t be able to enjoy it for long.”
Another grin. “Longer than you.” He tapped the pistol against his boot. “Why’d you come back here?”
“I found out that you and Sam were old buddies. Went to college together out in Oregon. Even acted together. A mime troupe.”
He smiled. “One of my first gigs.” He looked up at Sam. “Good times, eh, Sam?”
“Of all the places that Melissa could’ve come to,” I said, “this was probably the worst. Sam knew you. All he had to do was let you know that Melissa and Winona had shown up here.” I turned to Sam. “What was it, Sam? Money? You needed cash for your nifty new meditation hall?”
Sam said nothing. I turned back to Alonzo. He was still grinning, still enjoying the denouement of the piece. “And so you came out here,” I told him. “And you killed her.”
His smile vanished. “It was an accident. She got hysterical. I was just trying to calm her down.”
I let out my breath. I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding it.
The long-haired woman squinting into the New Mexico sun. The friend to Deirdre Polk and Juanita Carrera. Mother to Winona. Dead.
I said, “And I’ll be another accident.”
“No.” He grinned. “You’ll be a pleasure. Wiseass prick.”
“The cops’ll figure it out.”
“I’ll be gone. Winona and I. I’ve got money hidden, we’ll go to Europe. Brazil. Someplace where we can start living our lives again. I’ll take care of her.”
“Right. Take care of her. You’re destroying her.”
His face hardened. “You scumbag. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I love her, and she loves me. What Winona and I have is something special, something that a sleazeball like you could never understand.”
“You’re right about that.”
He stood up, held out the gun, grinned at me. “Say good night, Gracie.”
Sam said, “Roy, wait a minute, man. What about the cops?”
Without looking at him, Alonzo said, “He’s full of shit. There aren’t any cops. He never called anyone.”
From the doorway, Rita said, “Drop the gun.”
Alonzo didn’t, and she shot him.
Twenty-Nine
ON THE NEXT DAY, MONDAY, TWO visitors came to the office. The first of them arrived in the morning, at eleven thirty. I was on the phone with Hector when the man opened the door and walked in.
“I’ll call you back, Hector.” I hung up the phone.
Beneath a neatly pressed tan trench coat, Jim Stamworth was wearing another beautifully tailored suit, this one made of cashmere. He showed me his polite smile. “May I sit down?”
“It’s a free country.”
He smiled again and sat in one of the clients’ chairs, lightly tugging up the creases of his slacks. He folded his hands together on his lap. His fingers were still nicely manicured. “So you found Melissa Alonzo.”
“I found her body.”
They had buried her there, at the commune. The state police, sent there by Hector, had arrived shortly after Rita did, and it didn’t take them long to persuade Sam to tell them everything he knew.
Stamworth said, “You’ve been a busy man, Mr. Croft.”
“Yeah.”
“You were also instrumental in the capture of two Salvadoran assassins, I hear.”
“The capture of one. The death of the other.”
“The Los Angeles police have arrested Charles Hatfield. You apparently had something to do with that as well.”
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
The second Salvadoran had implicated Hatfield, whose motive, as Rita suggested, had been money. Questioned by the L.A. cops, Hatfield had folded almost immediately.
He said, “I understand that Mrs. Mondragón shot Roy Alonzo.”
I nodded. “Mrs. Mondragón is pretty good with a handgun, Rita. Alonzo won’t be using that arm for a while.”
“He’s claiming, I understand, that he killed his ex-wife by accident.”
“That won’t sell. He’ll spend a long time in the prison system. And he should be very popular there. The residents have a real fondness for child molesters.”
Stamworth shook his head. “It’s been a terrible thing, hasn’t it?” he said. “A tragedy.”
“But fairly convenient for you, I’d say.”
He raised an eyebrow. His left. “How so?”
“Now Melissa Alonzo won’t be able to tell anyone about what she saw in El Salvador.”
“And what was that?”
“She saw a squad of soldiers from the Atlactl Battalion rape a woman. She saw them drive the woman and a priest off to be executed. The government of the United States is still claiming that El Salvador’s a constitutional democracy. It was members of the Atlactl Battalion, American trained, who killed those five priests down there a few years ago. Another couple of killings by the same troop of Boy Scouts might be an embarrassment right now.”
He shrugged. “What makes you think that I have any interest in El Salvador?”
“Let me tell you what I think. I think some spook down in Salvador found out that the Salvadorans were sending a couple of goons up here to kill Melissa Alonzo. I think some other spook sent you out to find her before they did. I’m not sure why. But whatever the reasons were, I don’t think you had Melissa’s best interests at heart. You were working undercover. You lied to the L.A. cops. You lied to me. I think you wanted to find her and tuck her away somewhere. Neutralize her before she told her story.”
He smiled. “Even if what you say were true, I might simply have been trying to locate her in order to protect her. I might’ve been able to guarantee her safety, and the safety of the child.”
“Maybe. If she kept her mouth shut about what happened down there.”
He shrugged again. “As you say, it’s all academic now.”
“I didn’t say that.” I opened the drawer, took out the sheets of copy paper. I tossed them across the desk.
He leaned forward, picked them up, sat back, started to read. He glanced over at me once, expressionless, then continued his reading. I waited. He read them through, all eight of them. When he was finished, he tapped them against his thigh, to straighten them, then leaned forward and set them carefully on the desk. He sat back. “Where are the originals?” he asked.
“I have them.”
“How did you find them?”
“Melissa wrote them in a diary, a small red book about four inches by six. Maybe an inch thick. Before she went to the commune in Palo Verde, she hid it inside her daughter’s stuffed toy panda. Winona gave it to me last night, after we came to Santa Fe.”
“Who’s seen them?”
“I have.”
He smiled politely. “You’re out of your element here, Croft. You might possibly find yourself in serious trouble.”
“Possibly.”
He nodded. “What do you want?”
“Jaunita Carrera.”
“What about her?”
“I’m assuming that she’s your reason for coming here now. She’s a loose end. We can’t have that, now can we?”
“Spare me the sarcasm. What do you want?”
“I want her protected. She calls me once a month to tell me she’s all right, and I keep those buried. Something happens to her, anything happens to her, I give them to a reporter I know and then the whole world finds out what Melissa saw down in El Salvador, all of it nicely drafted in her own handwriting. Something happens to me, the reporter gets them anyway.”
He gave me another polite smile. “And what if
something happens to Carrera accidentally? Or happens to you?”
I gave him my own smile. I suppose it wasn’t particularly polite. “I’ll try real hard to be careful. I’ll recommend to Juanita that she do the same.”
He nodded. “There’s a possibility that something might be arranged.”
“Let me know.”
He nodded again, then stood. He brushed nonexistent wrinkles from his trousers. He smiled politely one more time and said, “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
“Perhaps.”
I didn’t go out for lunch. I wasn’t hungry. I put the copy of Melissa’s account back in the drawer and I sat back in the office chair, my feet on the windowsill, and I stared up at the white mountains and I thought about Melissa Alonzo and her daughter.
I was still sitting there at one thirty, when Melissa’s father, Calvin Bigelow, arrived at the office. I’d been expecting him, but not so soon.
He wore a black doublebreasted suit, a long black wool topcoat. He was either in mourning or he was going to negotiate a merger. The black made his hair seem whiter and his face seem more red than I remembered.
“I just spoke to the people who have my granddaughter,” he announced. “The Cooper people. They insisted I talk to you.”
“Have a seat,” I told him.
He sat down stiffly, his back upright, his arms along the arm of the chair. “This is outrageous,” he said. “Winona’s my flesh and blood. Those people have no right to keep her from me. After everything she’s been through, she needs the protection of her family. I don’t know what you think you’re up to, Croft, but I can tell you I’ve already notified my lawyer.”
I opened the drawer that held the copies taken from Melissa’s book. Below the sheaf of papers I’d showed Stamworth were four more sheets. I slipped them out, leaned forward, laid them on the desk in front of Bigelow. “Read that,” I said.
He looked at the papers, looked at me, reached out and took them from the desk.
He read a few paragraphs. He frowned. Suddenly he looked up at me. “This is libelous! This is vile! How dare you!” His mouth moved some more, but no sounds came out.
“Mr. Bigelow,” I said.
He stood, his face a brighter shade of red now, the papers trembling in his hand. “You cheap, penny-ante … you no-account, low-life swine …!” He was sputtering, spraying bits of spittle.
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