North of Montana

by April Smith

  “Almost a year. Why?”

  She shifts the boy to her other shoulder and faces me directly. Now I see the reason for the strange bearing: the left eye turns out slightly, enough to give an off-centered look of which she seems to be extremely self-conscious.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  “Bad news?”

  “Violeta Alvarado was killed.”

  Suddenly the child seems too heavy for her. She turns and calls, “Carmen! Por favor!” in the worst Spanish accent you can imagine.

  A tiny brown grandmother appears, right out of the Andes. She grins with gold teeth and reaches for the boy, who clings to his mother’s neck. They have to pry his hands apart. He starts to wail. The grandmother, still smiling, whispers soothing words I can’t under stand and bears him away, still crying fiercely, arms outstretched toward his mom.

  Claire Eberhardt closes her eyes to her son’s distress and turns back to me, clearly shaken.

  “How did it happen?”

  “A drive-by shooting. About two weeks ago.”

  “She was shot to death?”

  I nod.

  She props an elbow against the doorjamb and pulls off the elastic band, running a hand through her bangs, then clamping down tightly as if she’s going to pull out her hair. As it falls into place I see that actually she has a shoulder-length precision haircut and is wearing a diamond wedding band.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Despite the diamonds and the do, this is not a lady of culture.

  “Excuse me, but—Jesus Christ. She had kids.”

  “I know.”

  She stays that way, gripping her hair, staring down at her bare feet.

  “I’m a nurse. I mean, I haven’t worked since we moved out from Boston, but I’ve seen …,” her voice trails off, “in the ER … what it’s like when someone is shot.”

  She is a nurse. I am in law enforcement. She lives in this house now, she has servants now, but maybe we are not so far apart. We both serve the public. We are both in the business of order and repair. She gazes up and for a moment I am able to hold her look in mine. One thing we share is professional knowledge; we have both seen what a young woman’s body looks like after it has been decimated by bullets.

  “You’re her friend? It must be pretty bad for you, too.”

  Embarrassed because it’s not as bad as it probably should be, “I’m trying to help out because of the kids. Somebody told me you owed Violeta money.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “When she left. About four hundred dollars.”

  “My husband took care of paying her.”

  “Would you like me to talk to your husband, then?”

  “I would really like you … to just go away.”

  She gives me a half-assed smile as if I’m supposed to graciously understand her confusion and shock. But I don’t understand, because there’s something else going on here, something much deeper.

  “You seem upset, Claire.”

  The tip of her nose is red and moist, eyes bright with tears. She shakes her head and looks up at the sky as if to contain them. “Did you ever make a really bad mistake?”

  “I never make mistakes,” I say. “I’m a perfect person.”

  She appreciates that and it opens her up. “I used to drink a lot in high school,” she goes on, “I could do Southern Comfort all night long and wake up in the morning fresh as a daisy.”

  There’s something fresh about her still. Maybe it comes from the creamy pale skin and light freckles, but she seems unguarded and direct, as if after one beer she’d tell you her whole life story and you’d be interested because there wouldn’t be any crap.

  “We used to party, it didn’t matter with who, we used to skip school and go to Revere Beach—no matter what you did, you could get away with it. But then there’s the one guy you really fall for, and he’s always a mistake. Does that kind of thing ever happen to you?”

  She makes me think of John Roth and I blush.

  “Once or twice.”

  “Did you get away with it?”

  I reply with a wry look. “That remains to be seen.”

  Suddenly her fingers form a fist and she gives the mahogany door frame a good pop. I wonder if her husband, the hapless sap who paid for the multimillion-dollar house, was the mistake she’ll never get away with.

  “I wouldn’t hit that too hard,” I advise. “They don’t build houses like they used to.”

  She smiles. “Hey, we’re in California. Isn’t it all supposed to fall apart?”

  I return the smile. “What else about Violeta?”

  “She was a very sweet girl.”

  “Do you think she was involved with drugs?”

  Claire Eberhardt seems shocked. “No, not at all. Never. She was straight as straight could be. A real Catholic.” She tries to laugh. “Not like me.”

  “Then why did you fire her?”

  In an instant the openness dries up. As direct as she can be, I see also that Claire Eberhardt can take on a stony working-class defiance. I’ve crossed some line of propriety and there’s no going back; she’s simply through talking to me.

  “We just had to let her go. Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  She has left the door open. I glimpse a two-story entryway with a crystal chandelier way up there in the stratosphere. And she’s arguing with me over four hundred bucks?

  She returns clutching a peach-colored business card and a tissue. She’s apparently got herself all worked up again.

  “My husband would know about the money.”

  I observe her critically, trying to square Mrs. Gutierrez’s description of the lady being “very mean” with what I see. There is something churning inside Claire Eberhardt, but it does not appear to be malice. It appears to be guilt.

  On the verge of breaking down completely, she murmurs, “I’m so sorry,” and gently closes the door. In gray script the card says, RANDALL EBERHARDT, M.D., DANA ORTHOPEDIC CLINIC, with an address on Fifteenth Street, south of Wilshire across from the hospital, ten minutes away. So she’s a nurse and the sap turns out to be a doctor. Now I know how Claire Eberhardt got into the neighborhood.

  • • •

  The Dana Orthopedic Clinic is in its own remodeled Victorian house in the medical center of Santa Monica. The waiting room, just like the business card, is peach and gray. The receptionist has told me that without an appointment to see Dr. Eberhardt I will have to wait. Luckily the upholstered benches—peach and gray—are orthopedically correct and it is actually relaxing to sit there and read Glamour magazine.

  Then I get antsy. Then I get pushy. Because there is nobody else in the waiting room.

  “Is the doctor in surgery?”

  “No.”

  “Is the doctor on the premises?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “He’s with a patient. It will just be a little longer.”

  We have three more rounds of this and another forty-five minutes pass. My plan is to bully the doctor into writing out a check for four hundred dollars then and there and be done with this whole business. If he balks I will threaten a lawsuit on behalf of Violeta’s children. Doctors don’t like lawsuits. That should end the discussion. Again I refrain from pulling out my badge and terrifying the receptionist. That would be against regulations.

  An hour later the doctor is still with a patient and I feel a sudden panic about getting back before Duane Carter notices how long I have been gone. Resigned to confronting Dr. Eberhardt at another time I thank the receptionist for her tremendous help and skulk out the door around back to the alley where I have parked my government car illegally and where, I am further incensed to discover, it is being blocked by a black limousine.

  I had backed the blue Ford between a telephone pole and a dumpster next to a brick wall; now this limousine has pulled up alongside, making it impossible to maneuver out. The doors of the limousine are lo
cked and there is no driver in sight.

  By holding my breath and walking on tiptoe I can squeeze in between the two vehicles and open my door about eight inches—enough to angle a shoulder inside and turn on my siren and loudspeaker.

  “A black limousine, license plate JM, you are blocking the alley, you will be cited and towed …”

  The second repeat and a couple of good whups from the siren brings a bulky red-faced driver in uniform running down the alley carrying a cone topped with a large spiral of ice cream.

  “Hey, lady, what’s your problem?”

  “Just move the car.”

  He eyes me derisively. “Gotta get to the sale at J.C. Penney’s?”

  I badge him. “No. I’m with the FBI. Now move the car.”

  Suddenly he grins. “And I’m a state trooper. Used to be, before I sold out and went Hollywood. See that? Brothers and sisters under the skin. Tom Pauley. Glad to meet you.”

  He offers a stubby hand. We shake.

  “Can I get you frozen yogurt?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Here. Have this one. It’s virginal. Never been licked.”

  “You enjoy it, Tom. I’m going to catch hell at the office.” I squeeze into my car and turn the engine.

  “I understand. Guess I was kind of a jerk, but you should have seen your face. I really should have let you run the license plate. That’s what I do with the cops. Then it’s: Tom, what can I do for you? Tom, can you get me an autograph for my wife?”

  “You’re a celebrity, huh?” I jam the gearshift into drive, hoping he will get the hint.

  “Anybody who works for Jayne Mason automatically is.”

  I have to admit, he got me as he knew from experience he would; that the mention of the name is enough to stop even the most cocky cop in his tracks.

  “Where is Jayne Mason—at the yogurt store?”

  “Seeing the doc. That’s why I had to park near the back. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  He nods toward the gray door of the Dana Clinic.

  “I thought she was at the Betty Ford Center.”

  “They sprung her.”

  “Cured?”

  “Seems to be, but she’s always had a back problem. You’re not going to leak this.”

  “Yeah, Tom. I really care about Jayne Mason’s back problems.” Then, curiously, “Is her doctor named Eberhardt?”

  Giving me a smile: “You know I can’t release that information.”

  I look toward the door as the sweet odor of rotting garbage rolls toward me on the ocean breeze. “So that’s why he kept me waiting two hours.”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry. Hanging around like that can fry your brains. I’m used to it. That’s why I went and got myself some lunch.”

  The gray door swings open and Jayne Mason strides out. She doesn’t get far before a white-coated arm grabs her by the shoulder. She tries to twist away but the arm holds tight, forcibly turning her around so she’s facing a tall, solidly built man with blondish hair and aviator glasses, wearing a white lab coat.

  “Is that the good doctor?”

  Tom nods.

  Dr. Eberhardt—a nice-looking man with the soft underchin of middle age—keeps the hand on her shoulder so she won’t run away. She is wearing a red sweat suit, sneakers, and a red turban that completely covers her hair. He is taller, younger, stronger; but she is strong too—a dancer and still lithe. He is maintaining an authoritative posture, talking calmly although she seems distraught.

  “The whistle blows,” Tom says, tossing the uneaten yogurt into the dumpster.

  He positions the limo in the middle of the alley, then, leaving it running, gets out, opens the door, and waits. She doesn’t even have to look in his direction for him to know the correct moment to make his move as she finally pulls away from the doctor with an expression of willfulness so he can be right there to gracefully take her hand and guide her over the torn asphalt. As they approach I can see that her sweatshirt is decorated with a pair of kittens batting a yarn ball. It is a real yarn ball and the kittens are furry with big glittery eyelashes. They pass right in front of me. The actress’s skin is dove white against the crimson knit, reflecting a brilliant smear of color in the immaculate black shine of the limousine door; she is her own annunciation, creating in this smelly alley a moment of startling vivacity that could not have been outdone by a hundred performing troubadours dressed in gold.

  The limousine pulls away. Dr. Eberhardt is gone, the gray steel door sprung shut. I wonder if the doctor’s wife knows how intimate her husband is with his famous patient; how he kept his hand on her shoulder the whole time and how, although she was angry, she did not move away as long as she felt his touch.

  I pull out of the alley, picturing Claire Eberhardt leaning against the other side of the mahogany door of their home, innocent of this, crying a river of penitent tears over a poor Salvadoran housekeeper.

  PART TWO

  DESERT CLARITY

  SEVEN

  IN THE DESERT everything is clear.

  It doesn’t hit until you are two hours out of Los Angeles, past the tangled hell of downtown and the protracted ugliness of San Bernardino, beyond the world’s biggest freeway interchange where the 605 meets the 10 in swooping parabolic ribbons of concrete. It starts somewhere out there when the shoulders of the road turn to white sand and there are no more sky-blue town-house colonies popping up in the distant wasteland; when the air, thinned of pollutants, becomes light and transparent and you can see amazing details like rockfalls on the slopes of snow-topped mountains miles away.

  Slowing down off the freeway, suddenly quiet enough to hear your very tires chewing over feathers of sand blown across the off-ramp, as the setting sun shoots every tiny needle of every single cactus with scarlet backlight, it hits. Desert clarity. The absence of motion, pressure, traffic, and people. A mysterious monochromatic landscape speckled with life. Your body settles down. The air feels spiritual—that is, filled with spirits that a tacky little town can’t restrain. Rolling down the gamy main street of Desert Hot Springs you want to shout just to hear how your own voice would sound as a loose uninhibited coyote wail instead of the tight pissed-off squeak with which you usually address your fellow man.

  Poppy’s condominium is no great shakes for what it cost, set up on a ridge looking west over an empty shopping center with a Thrifty Drug and a Vons market, a KFC and video rental store, all new construction—clean black asphalt without a tire mark and spindly palms in redwood boxes. Carrying groceries to my car (if I don’t buy my own supplies, I wind up drinking Seagram’s at night and gagging on All-Bran in the morning), I enjoy the mild breeze and calculate that by the time the town grows big enough to actually support this overblown supermarket Poppy will be dead and I can sell his condo for a nice piece of change.

  I know I am fooling myself with that kind of thinking. We buried my mother when I was fourteen, my grandmother was gone before I was one year old. One more trip to Eternal Valley Memorial Park would finally cut me loose from the already thin thread of kinship like rusty shears operating in the hands of one of those gnarly sisters of fate. It wouldn’t be a clean easy cut, not at all, but a slow severing with lots of fray and lots of pain. I can see my fingers stretching up last minute to catch the end of the line so I won’t fall into space, because without my Poppy I don’t know who I would be.

  In fact, when I really look at our family, it becomes as clear as the lucidity of cactus spikes revealed by the blood-red sun that three generations of females have lived our lives not as free individuals but in relation to this one man.

  Grandma Elizabeth was a policeman’s wife in a small seaside town in the 1950s—what choice did she have? When she died, my mother, aside from working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, took over the solemn duty of caring for Poppy, preparing Koenigsberger Klops, his favorite veal and pork meatballs (when he worked the night shift, she woke up at five in the morning to warm them up for him in the oven). These past ten ye
ars it has been my turn (drawing the line at Koenigsberger Klops). We talk on the phone several times a week, I drive out to see him at least once a month. First thing in the morning Poppy is in my thoughts, sometimes with a fearsome rush of anxiety that he has died during the night, although I know he is independent and strong as a horse. When I have a question, his voice tells me what to do. When I screw up, his voice punishes me. I may be a hotshot federal agent who carries a gun and a pair of handcuffs (they’re light, you can throw them in the bottom of your purse trash) but my self-worth is still measured by my grandfather’s rules. From childhood he was my standard and my mother’s standard and I have always believed as innocently and completely in the rightness of Poppy as I do the American flag.

  I am here for an overnight visit to wish him a belated seventieth birthday, but questions about my supposed cousin Violeta Alvarado and my father and the lost Latino side of the family are definitely percolating in the back of my mind, so that when I approach the tan steel door loaded with groceries, a birthday cake, and a duffel bag and hear barking from within, I am not pleased.

  Sure enough it’s Moby Dick, one of Poppy’s whacked-out desert pals, and his friendly pack of killer Akita dogs, which he raises in a shack out there in the wilderness, illegally crossing purebreds with German shepherds to create these hulking muscular monsters with mottled gray fur and curling tails and schizophrenic personalities, just like his. Bikers and police officers with families buy them for five hundred dollars apiece.

  “Freeze! It’s the FBI!” laughs Moby Dick, opening the door. I give him a wincing smile. His enormous bouncing belly is almost covered by a black T-shirt that says Fuck Dieting.

  The television is on, beer cans on the coffee table.

  “It’s about the dogs.”

  “No problem.” He drags them out to the balcony by their collars and slides the heavy glass doors shut, shouting, “Commissioner! Your little girl’s here!”

  I put the stuff in the kitchen. Poppy keeps a neat place. The dish drainer is empty. One box of Keebler’s crackers on the counter. Inside the refrigerator everything is low salt, low cholesterol—except for Bloody Mary mix and two New York steaks. At least Moby Dick isn’t staying for dinner.