North of Montana

by April Smith

  I stand up. “Let’s get a stenographer in here and get your statement.”

  “Statement on what?”

  “The other robbery.”

  Of course he hasn’t actually admitted to the Culver City job. I’m angling. I’m hoping.

  “I didn’t do another robbery.”

  I wait it out a moment, thinking, I’m getting somewhere with this guy. We have a rapport. I’ll come back—

  Then he says, “I did six.”

  • • •

  Donnato treats me to lunch the next day at Bora-Bora, a collegiate hangout where the waitresses wear skimpy little shorts and Hawaiian shirts and everything is served in plastic baskets and it is so noisy we can hardly hear each other.

  “This is the one that’s going to do it for you,” he says. “Get you above the crowd.”

  “I’ll miss you, Donnato.”

  He shrugs and takes a bite of a chicken burrito. “You’ve got to move on. I told you: seven years. That’s the time most agents light their blue flame.”

  “You think the Kidnapping and Extortion Squad is the right move?”

  I have asked him this before but for some reason I want to prolong the moment.

  ‘I told you: less pressure. More involved cases. You can take some in-service courses, and the supervisor is a nice guy.”

  I reach over and smooth some tortilla flakes from his beard.

  “What are you going to do without me?”

  “Drive some other split-tail crazy with lust.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Ana, I can read you like a book.”

  “You are so full of it,” I tell him. “You are the most married man I know.”

  “Luckily for you.”

  I am dying for a beer but when the waitress comes I order another iced tea.

  “Look at you,” I tell my partner. “Can’t take your eyes off her Lycra bicycle shorts.”

  “Is that what they’re made of? I thought it was the foreskin of a whale.”

  Giggling, “So don’t pretend I’m anything special to you. Just because I’m leaving you forever.”

  Suddenly Donnato seems to tire of our little flirtation. He gets that way. He says being a street agent is a young person’s game, although he’s got the tight, honed body of a thirty-year-old. But he has three kids and his heart lies with them. Somewhere along the line being an involved father gained an edge over being an agent, although he still performs both roles with a dedication and intensity most people barely muster for one. You can see the exhaustion come over him like a shade.

  “Ana, you’re a terrific agent. I’m really proud of you.”

  “Hey …” I am choking with awkwardness, but it has to be said: “You taught me everything I know. I guess this is the time to thank you for it.”

  We both look away, embarrassed, catch CNN going on the television set above the bar, and stare at it until the bill arrives; he pays it, and we leave. Back at the office I get the forms from Rosalind and spend the rest of the afternoon composing an eloquent statement on why I should be transferred to C-1, Kidnapping and Extortion.

  Just as I am about to leave for a 6:30 p.m. swim workout I get a call from LAPD Detective Sergeant Roth.

  “Ana? It’s John.”

  He waits. So do I.

  Cautiously, “Where are you these days, John?”

  “Wilshire Division, crash unit.”

  Another silence. I listen to his tense breathing, not knowing what to say.

  “You must be a busy boy.”

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “Only good thoughts, I hope.”

  I’ve been standing with the strap of the swimming bag over my shoulder, poised to go, as far from the desk as possible, the curly cord of the telephone receiver stretched taut. They teach you in the academy that anxiety is the same physical response as the body’s flight-or-fight reflex: hearing John Roth’s voice again is producing the exact chemical reaction I would have, to use their example, if a man wearing a ski mask had stepped out of my shower stall.

  “I’ve been working a homicide that took place about two weeks ago on Santa Monica Boulevard. A female Hispanic named Violeta Alvarado. No next of kin except for two minors, but a neighbor says the victim was related to an FBI agent named Ana Grey.” He adds, singsong: “It had to be you.”

  Tense: “Must be.”

  “So then this is a condolence call. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I didn’t even know the deceased.”

  I give in to the pull of the telephone. The cord slackens as I sit back down and allow the bag to slump to the floor.

  “This is too weird, John. That you would get this case.”

  “I know it.”

  When John Roth and I first started having sex we used to marvel at how powerful and instantaneous our connection was, as if we were riding a secret current that swept past ordinary pleasures to a lagoon of desire known only to us. We thought we were so inventive and unique and amazing that we used to joke about making an instructional video or posing coupled for an artist; we used to watch ourselves in a mirror and tease each other with pet names, “John” and “Yoko.”

  So now, a year or so after the crash and burn, maybe we’re both thinking—me with cold dread—that our connection is somehow still in force; that the universe has brought us together again in a strange and unexpected way.

  “We probably have a lot of dead people in common,” John says.

  I laugh nervously. He seems encouraged.

  “I was calling outside of channels because I thought you’d want to check this thing out.”

  “It has nothing to do with me.”

  “The lady was insistent—”

  Suddenly the flight part of the flight-or-fight reflex clicks in and my foot is tapping up and down as if it had a mind of its own.

  “Look, John. It’s weird, it’s funky, it’s whatever, but it’s over. I never even heard of Violeta Alvarado and I really don’t give a rat’s ass, so please don’t call me again. I’ve got to go. I’ve got a meeting.”

  I hang up and grip the familiar nylon handles of the bag, heavy with rubber fins and hand paddles, a folding hair dryer, and a mesh sack containing slippery old bottles of shampoo and moisturizer with the writing rubbed off. Crossing the bullpen, I try to concentrate on how good it will feel to hit the water and stretch it out for that first fifty yards. As the workout builds, the fear will dissipate; by the end of the hour I’ll forget about John Roth.

  FOUR

  FRIDAY NIGHT and I have big plans: grocery shopping and a hot bath. Barbara lent me the hardcover edition of Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy and I am looking forward to reading it in bed with a cup of raspberry tea. There is a lot to be said for the monastic life.

  Ocean View Estates is one of the oldest apartment complexes in Marina Del Ray. It was world famous for a brief moment during the quaint psychedelic era of 1970, when I was ten years old. At one of their notorious swinging singles parties, somebody sprinkled LSD over the potato chips and three people boiled to death while tripping out in the Jacuzzi.

  Afterward they changed the name from South Sea Villas to Ocean View Estates, but the singles and transients and corporately owned condominiums remain. Friday nights they still have a “social barbecue” where everyone’s supposed to come out of their huts and gather around some greasy old grills, but dragging my briefcase and four plastic bags of groceries past the pool area, all I see this Friday night is an extended Middle Eastern family right off the boat, women in black veils unpacking bright yellow boxes of take-out chicken, tortillas, rice and beans from El Pollo Loco. My brand-new multicultural training tells me they haven’t got a clue.

  My place is located in a cul-de-sac of two-story brown stucco apartment buildings still absurdly called Tahiti Gardens. It is a long way from the parking garage but it’s home. I have lived in these three furnished rooms for seven years. The good part is I have never had to buy a couch.r />
  The mailbox is filled with catalogues and one large brown manila envelope with no return address. I might have gotten to the envelope earlier if I weren’t fumbling with the groceries and desperate to pee. Instead it lies on the counter.

  The air is stagnant and laced with the smell of carpet shampoo and Formica scrubbed with scouring powder; I guess latex wallpaper over wallboard over cinder block doesn’t breathe. Shoving the heavy glass doors open, I step onto a balcony to a nice view of the largest manmade marina in the world, six thousand boats moored at neatly laid out docks, a shifting forest of white masts. I enjoy looking at the boats even though I’ve never been on one, letting my eyes wander the riggings and blue sail bags and pleasantly swelled white hulls glazed with golden light. Someday I will learn to sail.

  Forty-five minutes later the groceries are put away and I am sorting through the catalogues to decide who to spend dinner with, Eddie Bauer or J. Peterman. The timer goes off and I pull chicken cordon bleu prepared by Boy’s Market—my little indulgence—out of the microwave and settle on a stool at the counter, cozying up to a warm cloud of steam scented with toasted bread crumbs and Gorgonzola cheese.

  I open an Amstel Light.

  And the envelope.

  Inside is a series of photographs of an autopsy taken by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.

  I stare at the glossy images in a state of numb disbelief. They are eight-by-tens, in color, and more pornographic than anything I have ever seen or could imagine. The victim is identified by a plate reproduced in the bottom right corner of each as V. ALVARADO. There is no cover letter, there doesn’t have to be: the angry marks of the sender are all over the photographs like fingerprints.

  First there are aerial shots of an intersection with an arrow drawn in grease pencil to show the probable route taken by the car.

  Next, overall streets: bars, warehouses, street corners, alleys.

  Orientation view of the crime scene: The body as it lay face down on the sidewalk. White triangular markers set next to a purse thrown five feet away and more markers where the bullets hit a bus-stop bench and a wall.

  Closer on the body: She had tiny bare feet. God knows what happened to her shoes. The tight jeans with zippers at the ankles have white embroidered flowers over the pockets. The shirt is still tucked in neatly but the entire back is blackened with blood and a tangle of dark hair that blends into the sharp shadow cast by the flash.

  Her face, on its side looking at the camera, is heart shaped, jaws apart, tongue swollen and protruding in the classic configuration of a choking victim. The eyes are half closed and that is what draws you to the picture, those dark glinting slices of obsidian beneath lids set halfway between anguish and nothingness.

  The pictures of the actual autopsy, showing the progression of the body from when it was brought in fully clothed through every step of the procedure, are grisly as hell.

  But the worst—as I sit frozen on my kitchen stool—is not the surgical blood and gore but the initial shot of the naked body lying on its back on the gurney after it has been undressed and still looks like a person. It is shameful to look so frankly at someone no longer able to defend herself, spread in death with blood smeared all over, rudely exposed with no secrets left. The magnitude of the violence that it takes to shatter a human body to this degree is deeply sobering. I think, my God, somebody take care of this woman, pull the sheet back over her, do whatever it takes to restore her dignity.

  The rest of the photos document the probing of the wounds to remove the 45s. The Y incision down the abdomen to the pubic bone. The removal of the rib cage, which I have been told they do with a pair of pruning shears. The examination of internal organs. Until all that is left of the victim, the violence, and the scientific examination of that violence is a scraped-out carcass. A bit of nonliving refuse and on to the next. The packet is minus any medical dictation except a form stamped M.E. REPORT PENDING.

  I slip the photos back into the envelope, shaken by the impact and outraged that John Roth would send them to me. But why should I be surprised? He’s always favored shock tactics—the midnight phone call, the drunken appearance from behind a pillar in the garage. Six months ago I heard he received a thirty-day suspension for firing a handgun into the pitchers mound of a public park while doing some righteous partying with a bunch of other officers. I jump off the stool and stalk into the bedroom. The smell of congealed Gorgonzola cheese is making me sick.

  Punching his number without even thinking about it, “Stop pulling this shit.”

  “Cool out, Ana. You’re way over the top.”

  He sounds stoned. I got him in his apartment in Redondo Beach, where I can easily picture him sitting on the seat of a rowing machine—because the only other furniture is a NordicTrack—wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants and smoking a joint. Young to be a detective sergeant, he has built himself one of the world-class torsos, but still wears that sort of Tom Selleck moustache that went out in the seventies, maybe to distract from rivulets of acne scars that run across his cheeks.

  “Ana … what are you so afraid of?”

  He used to whisper that in bed, challenging me to take it farther until we passed some very distant boundaries. When I told him I’d had enough, his bombardment of flowers, phone messages, faxes, cute little trolls with open arms took on the same aggression as his sex, infuriating me to the point where I once threw a punch and cracked him on the lower jaw. The more I pulled away the harder he came on, relentless and increasingly irrational, until I took to carrying a weapon at all times.

  “What is the point, John?”

  “Thought you’d be interested in a last look at your cousin.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck me?” He laughs. “Miss Señorita Alvarado was a fucking dope dealer.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez described Miss Señorita Alvarado as a long suffering mother of two.

  ‘What makes you say she was dealing dope?”

  “It was a hit.”

  I am interested. “Were there witnesses?”

  “A street kid named Rat called it in to 911 but—no surprise—later told the investigating officer he didn’t see a thing. Doesn’t matter. It was a drive-by. The weapon was a forty-five-caliber Mac-10, fully automatic, good for nothing but killing people. Fifteen shots were fired. The victim was hit by seven.”

  “Could have been random.”

  “Take a look at picture number five.”

  I walk back into the kitchen with the phone to my ear and pick up number five, the one where the body was washed to show the wounds. Half-inch bullets do not make neat pinholes. They break bones. They rip out the windpipe and cause hemorrhaging in the thorax.

  “That’s a lot of destruction.”

  “You know what it feels like to get an injection. Imagine something the size of a pencil being shoved through your body.”

  “How do you die?”

  “Blood fills the chest cavity until you can’t breathe.”

  “How long do you think it takes to drown in your own blood, John?”

  “Couple of minutes,” he answers matter-of-factly. “You lay there thinking about it. Look at the hands.”

  No hands, just two bloody stumps.

  “They blew off her hands,” he instructs. “As punishment for taking what didn’t belong to her. Dealers like that kind of thing. It’s a symbol even a lowlife can understand.”

  It is easier to talk to him as a colleague, two professionals on safe ground. I remember that was part of it, too.

  “Was there evidence of drugs?”

  “No, but what are the two reasons a female would be out on Santa Monica Boulevard at five in the morning? Dealing crack or turning tricks.”

  “A typically sexist assumption.”

  “That’s me.”

  “No shit.”

  “This Gutiérrez woman keeps bugging us, swears the victim was related to Ana Grey in the big FBI and that she has proof.”

  “What kind of pro
of?”

  “Yo no se but the thought ambled across my cocked-up brain that if Alvarado was dealing and the bad guys were pissed enough to blow her away, and if they know you’re a fed … Who the fuck knows, there could be some kind of fallout.”

  “I appreciate the concern.”

  Now I can clearly hear him taking a toke. On the exhale, “Relax, Ana. You’ll be happy to know I’m boffing the lady lieutenant over on homicide.”

  What was I afraid of?

  John Roth hadn’t stopped calling until I threatened a court order. A few weeks later I found a blood-soaked tampon hanging from the doorway in my living room—a symbol even a lowlife could understand that John was seeing another woman. I never confronted him, never had proof, but changed the locks and stopped dating men.

  “I’m happy for you both.”

  You couldn’t walk or even step on the balconies of the apartment building where Violeta Alvarado lived in Pico Rivera; they are purely decorative, as if a dozen grates of phony wrought iron and some Spanish-looking lamps could transform an orange stucco box into a hacienda. The building is typical West Coast tenement housing, a cockeyed design of stucco trapezoids overhanging an open carport, so that everybody’s windows open into everybody else’s and a central courtyard is created that magnifies and echoes every sound. Someone has wedged a bicycle between his window and the black metal filigree. Needless to say it is on the second floor—otherwise, the bicycle would have been picked clean through the bars like a skeleton.

  Nobody is around this Monday morning. I am buzzed into the lobby through some warped metal doors and pass underneath a hanging sculpture that looks like the innards of a pipe organ, skipping the elevator because who knows what is lurking inside, trudging up two flights of metal stairs.

  The apartment smells like roach spray and fish cooked in oil. The light-chocolate-colored carpet is thin and cheap and bunches up under your feet; if you don’t trip on the rug, you will over the children—five or six of them running between two small rooms.