Free A Flower in the Desert by Walter Satterthwait

even here, out at the farthest reaches of Civilization As We Know It, the quintessential Southern California scent of automobile exhaust.
    For the most part, the houses along the shore side of the road were alike—narrow, two-story buildings of weathered gray shingle, some of them looking like they’d been imported from Cape Cod or Fire Island, all of them so close together you could spit from your window into your neighbor’s margarita. All sat with their backsides facing the street and their fronts facing west, so their owners could enjoy an expensive view of sea blurred by smog. Beyond the houses, where the sun should have been, the sky was a dull apocalyptic red, as though out there on the gray Pacific, beneath a pall of dense yellow smoke, a city were afire.
    The Alonzo house was newer than most of the others, a long, modernistic structure that looked like irregularly shaped boxes of cedar and glass, jumbled together by a very large hyperkinetic child. A spotless black Mercedes 250-SL, its top down, was parked in the shade of the carport. I pulled the Geo in beside it, got out, walked over to the unprepossessing wooden door, and pushed the doorbell.
    After several long moments, the door was opened by a man wearing black leather loafers, lightweight gray wool slacks, an open vest of the same material, a dark blue silk shirt with the sleeves rolled back, and a silk tie of gold and red with its Windsor knot loosened and tugged down, all of which made him look like a straightforward, no-nonsense kind of guy. Maybe he was. He was in his early thirties, tall, and in very good shape. His shirt—and presumably the vest and the missing suit coat—had been cut to display the nicely defined curve of his pectorals. His wavy hair was brown and so was his Tom Selleck mustache. He was tanned.
    â€œCroft?” he said.
    I admitted I was.
    â€œChuck Arthur.” Unsmiling, he held out his tanned hand. I shook it. He didn’t move from the doorway and he didn’t invite me in. He said, “I’m not sure why I agreed to this.”
    â€œMaybe because you’re concerned about Melissa Alonzo and her daughter,” I said.
    â€œI am concerned. Damned concerned. I hate to think of the two of them out there, on the run. But I’m still not sure that talking to you is a good idea.”
    â€œI’m not the enemy, Mr. Arthur. I told you over the phone, my primary interest is in delivering Mr. Montoya’s message to Mrs. Alonzo.”
    He looked at me for a moment, expressionless. “Well,” he said finally. “Come on in.”
    We went down the passageway, passing several closed doors—storage space, perhaps, or slaves’ quarters.
    The air smelled of wood polish and cleanser, like an obscure museum, often cleaned, seldom visited. Our footsteps, echoing faintly back from ahead, clipped the silence into hollow fragments.
    The passageway opened up into a sunken living room with white sectional furniture surrounding a large rectangular stone fireplace, also white. Abstract paintings, their colors muted in the dim light, hung on the white walls. Above the fireplace, an enormous inverted funnel of stainless steel chimney climbed to the faraway beamed ceiling. We walked down some polished tile steps, crossed the brick floor of the living room, walked up some more tile steps to the terrazzo floor of the dining room, past a round white-enameled wooden table circled by white-enameled wooden chairs, and through an opened sliding glass door to a glass-enclosed porch. Beyond them, another sliding door, partially opened, led out onto a redwood deck that held, along the side abutting the house, a pair of ficuses in large terra-cotta pots. The floor in here was oak, bleached and waxed, but the furniture once again was white, a metal table and three metal chairs padded with white corduroy cushions. Draped from the arched back of one of the chairs was a gray suit coat.
    Chuck Arthur stood