A Flower in the Desert by Walter Satterthwait Read Free Book Online Page B

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?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œScriptwriter,” 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.”
    â€œA marriage made in heaven.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhat 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?”
    â€œShe was a friend of Melissa Alonzo’s.”
    Grinning, he ran his right hand over his shiny dented scalp. “Ask her something for me.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œAsk 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.
    â€œSanctuary was Alonzo’s pet charity,” Ed had explained. “You have to understand, Joshua, that the heavy-duty