North of Montana

by April Smith

  Our huge revolving “dead files” downstairs are records of every complaint we have received by a citizen over the phone or transom, and a thorough check by two of the brighter clerks yields nothing. The California Medical Licensing Board tells me no charges have been filed by any other patient regarding Dr. Eberhardt. They confirm that he graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Medical School and completed an internship and residency in orthopedic medicine at New England Deaconess Hospital. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Buckingham, Browne and Nichols, an upper-class prep school.

  I contact our Boston field office and request a deep background check, emphasizing this is an urgent, high-profile case that came to us through the Director. The road back to Boston feels promising. Whatever the cause of Eberhardt’s deviation it must have been in evidence before the move to California. Maybe there’s a pattern. I put in a request for travel to the East Coast just in case.

  All of that in place, I allow myself to return to the question of Dr. Eberhardt’s housekeeper and what I alone know about her. I have been keeping the envelope containing Violeta Alvarado’s meager archive in a desk drawer and sometimes find myself looking through it: a Bible, a few snapshots that tell of a journey to America, autopsy photos documenting a violent death. I have heard her described as a hard worker and loving mother and have seen her children, real enough. She might turn out to be a cousin of mine after all, but my job is to sweep all that sentimentality aside and look at the facts. The more closely I look the more convinced I become that LAPD Detective Sergeant John Roth’s theory has a strong possibility of being correct: that Violeta Alvarado was involved with drugs—perhaps on behalf of her former employer, Dr. Randall Eberhardt.

  My work often requires me to make this type of construction, a model of human behavior, like the origami polyhedron that hangs on a string off Special Agent Michelle Nishimura’s desk lamp. I have watched her make the most amazing things out of paper, complex folds executed in sequence, the pure logic of the design giving strength to the most fragile of materials.

  I have bounced my little spheroid, the possibility of Violeta Alvarado’s connection to the Jayne Mason case, off the mental wall a couple of hundred times and it still holds up, which gives me the nerve to call John Roth again.

  It takes a few days for him to phone back because he is working undercover. His attitude is maddeningly the same:

  “Why the fuck should I do you a favor?”

  “Do yourself a favor and close a homicide for once.”

  ‘Why break my record?”

  “Did you get the autopsy report yet?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s the status of the case?”

  “It’s in the ‘Who Cares?’ file, as in, Who cares about a dead Mexican?’ ”

  Something is blowing far away, not even visible on the horizon, detectable only in a subtle shift of atmosphere, from dry to humid, say, as aspen leaves flutter in the first omen of change.… And a strange quieting of the usual roar so that one note can be heard over and over, sultry and urgent.

  My voice drops to a level warning. “She was from El Salvador and she had kids.”

  “So do a million other dead Mexicans.”

  “You asshole.”

  He laughs with a wild stoned hysterical edge.

  “It’s your own brilliant deduction, John. She was out on Santa Monica Boulevard at five in the morning. She was killed in a drive-by that looks pretty deliberate. Her hands were blown away, which means a hit.”

  “Pretty good.”

  “She was working for a doctor who’s been accused by Jayne Mason of overprescribing medication. She could have been a street connection for him. I’m asking you to reopen the case.”

  “I’ve got a few other things going.”

  “This is major.”

  “So is my hard-on.”

  I bite my lip. I need this badly.

  “John. Cut me some slack here, okay?”

  I wonder if the vulnerability is as obvious to him as it is mortifying to me.

  • • •

  “A doctor who overprescribes narcotics is like a fireman who sets fires,” Barbara declares. “One sick puppy.”

  “Not necessarily. It could be very calculating.”

  “You mean blackmail and extortion?”

  We have met over the copy machine and are walking together down the hall.

  “Or he could be getting kickbacks from a pharmacy or an insurance company, but I checked out his bank accounts and credit cards and he’s solid.”

  “Then it’s not about money, it’s about power.” Barbara’s eyes are bright with conjecture. “Can you imagine what it would be like for some boring straight doctor to have Jayne Mason under his total control?”

  “Doctors are control freaks,” I agree, starting to make sense out of it.

  “How could you even perform an examination on a woman like that?”

  “I’ll let you know. I’m going out to Malibu this afternoon.”

  Barbara punches herself in the chest and doubles up in a paroxysm of envy.

  “Don’t worry,” I assure her as she continues to pant wordlessly, “I promise to get Jayne Mason’s lingerie closet on microfilm.”

  • • •

  I swing out of the tunnel at Ocean Avenue onto the Pacific Coast Highway and the sun hits me whap off the water, tall corridors of air suddenly open and unobstructed. Even the palm trees are tiny, way up there on top of the palisade, as I shoot along a narrow roadway with cars rushing at me sixty miles an hour in the opposite direction, no divider. I’m reeling from a sudden sense of space, distracted by surfer-dotted silver waves, RVs jammed crazily along the narrow shoulder, a continual jumble of low-slung houses with their backs up right against the road, thinking it must be death to turn into one of those precarious garages. The ocean chews at the shore on the left, and looking at the huge gouging claw marks that mud slides have taken from the hillside to the right, I remember boulders rolling onto the road during last year’s killer winter storms. The order of the world steadily uncoils as I head north, skimming the very edge of the continent like a top in dizzy balance between sanity and the unknown.

  Just past Pepperdine University I leave all the crap behind—the Spanish-style malls and the beach traffic. The road narrows and becomes pastoral, horse ranches reaching up into the Santa Monica Mountains, spectacular vistas of the Pacific to the west with an occasional glimpse of surf curling up to a cove half hidden below rocky cliffs.

  Arroyo Road comes up quickly, marked by a thin, weathered sign. After a hairy left turn across the highway I find myself on a dirt lane canopied by shaggy giant eucalyptus trees obviously planted a very long time ago. It is surprising how much land can be secreted away between the highway and the sea. A flimsy corral fence made of pipe runs along a meadow of high golden grass where two Appaloosa horses are grazing. I wonder about security. The road curves through the pasture into a clump of sequoias.

  There is a gatehouse but it is empty and the white armature is up, so I breeze through to Foxtail Ranch, acres of coastal woodlands with a private beach that Jayne Mason bought in the seventies for two million dollars, now worth easily ten times that much.

  Five or six vehicles are parked in a small gravel area, workmen’s light trucks, the JM limousine, and a creamy new Cadillac with gold detailing that must belong to Mason’s personal manager, Magda Stockman, who (I have been told) will be present with her client today.

  Thick foliage obscures most of the house. The entrance is nothing more than a door in an unglamorous white wall next to a garage.

  A young man with lustrous shoulder-length brown hair answers my ring. Some men with long hair look like greaseballs and some look like jungle sex gods—like this one, with his muscular shoulders, alert animal eyes, faded swimming trunks, magenta polo shirt, and bare feet.

  “My name is Jan. How was the traffic?”

  “Better than Westwood.”

  �
��It’s a hassle coming out but once you get here most people are glad they made the trip.”

  I follow Jan through a courtyard, keeping my eyes on his powerful ankles (forget the calves, I won’t even go into the calves), which are embraced by a pair of woven Guatemalan ankle bracelets. I like the way the tan goes all the way between his toes—long, prehensile toes you can easily picture curled around the edge of a surfboard or, okay, the rails of a brass bed.

  “You like it out at the beach, Jan?”

  “Oh, yeah. I used to be a windsurfing instructor.”

  “Don’t tell me Jayne Mason is into windsurfing.”

  “No, she’s not,” he answers seriously.

  “What do you do for Ms. Mason?” trying to keep a straight face.

  “I’m her assistant.”

  The Hollywood term for secretary. So Jayne Mason walked down to the beach one morning and picked up a hot young surfer to adorn the house and open her mail. His absolute lack of imagination makes me believe he is her secretary and nothing more. Everything he says is delivered with just enough energy to sound personal when it is actually by rote, like a bellhop in a good hotel. He isn’t interested in me. He doesn’t bother to meet my eyes. He is interested in his body and how he will look posed against the bar at McGinty’s tonight. I take note of these things because I have noticed that people generally hire assistants who are like themselves.

  We continue around a corner where I am immediately hit by the sense of an old pool—the dense smell of chlorine and wet concrete—and sure enough, to my left is an oval-shaped swimming pool about forty feet long with a turquoise tile bottom. Nearby are two redwood chaise longues with green and yellow floral cushions, and, on the ground beside them, a Frisbee. The water looks funky and not very inviting, even to a water rat like me. I imagine the only people who use this pool are Jayne Mason’s grandchildren. Barbara told me she has five, from three marriages.

  We enter a huge den with fake beams and a bright shamrock green carpet where I am suddenly jolted to find myself face-to-face with Jayne Mason, wearing an evening gown and a big smile and holding a bouquet.

  After a stunned moment I realize it is only a life-size cutout but the presence is unsettling.

  “Can I get you something? Coffee? Perrier?”

  “Coffee would be great.”

  “Decaf or regular?”

  “Highest octane.”

  “You got it,” Jan says without smiling, and leaves.

  There are large deep brown swivel chairs that look like barrels and several coffee tables inlaid with stained-glass designs of maidens and doves and suns and moons. A prominent wet bar is stocked with everything from Glenfiddich scotch to French crème de cassis and plastered with layers of memorabilia.

  Welcome to Café Jayne Mason. There are comic strips and caricatures and photographs of her taken with every conceivable celebrity including the last five presidents of the United States, as well as framed tabloid articles with amusing headlines speculating about her exploits. In the very center of the bar stands an enormous arrangement of fresh yellow roses in a crystal vase.

  The odd thing is, the dates on the newspapers stop in 1974.

  Now I understand the room. Why the brown louvered shutters are closed. Why the furniture, despite its grand scale and spotless upkeep, seems worn, and the air feels closed in and damp. This is a seventies house that has not been changed in twenty years. This room was designed for smoking dope and drinking alcohol and flirting and fucking and hiding from the California sun. It is a stage set for the kind of hedonistic pleasure that was taken in a certain style during a certain age and preserved intact so Jayne Mason can revisit that lusty image of herself whenever she steps through the doorway.

  I pace the room, trying to get a feel for how recently it has been used and for what. No ashtrays. No wastebaskets. The fieldstone fireplace has been swept clean. But right above it, so poorly hung that it angles out from the wall as if about to tumble, is an utterly astonish ing painting. A seascape of sailboats racing across translucent blue-green water stirred by wind, so alive that it actually radiates light, too alive for the boundaries of its heavy gilded frame, the outdated room, the movie star’s sterile home.

  Seeing such a thing in real life is a shock. I stare with longing into the passionately felt world of the canvas, unexpectedly moved to tears. The vitality of the painting makes everything else, including my own sad heart, seem dead.

  “It was painted by Edouard Manet.”

  I spin around. I hadn’t known there was anyone else in the room besides the cardboard cutout of Jayne Mason.

  “She saw this when she was filming on Majorca. I have always encouraged her to collect art, but it does not suit her. She is only interested in acting, which is lucky for me. I am Magda Stockman, her personal manager.”

  She is a large woman, a size fourteen, but dressed in a black suit with braided white piping of such fine wool and style that it makes her figure look trim. She moves with a rustle—it must be lined with silk. As we shake hands several heavy gold charm bracelets on her wrist jingle like Christmas bells and I am enveloped by a sweet, rich perfume. She wears black stockings and black high-heeled pumps with two back-to-back gold Cs on the toe that even a lowlife like me recognizes as the trademark for Chanel.

  “Are there paintings like this all over the house?”

  “Only a few small Picassos. It is just as well. Jayne is not the kind of person who enjoys to sit by the fire and look at pictures. She must always be in motion. ”

  Magda Stockman rolls her hands over each other like a small engine so the bracelets tinkle merrily. The accent is mellow and burnished, possibly Central European. I get the impression she has been in this country a long time but cultivates the accent as part of the persona. She has broad Slavic cheekbones and moist unlined skin that seems extremely white against the black hair pulled severely off the face into a bow. She is so artfully put together that the only way to imagine her age is to guess somewhere between fifty and seventy.

  “I am sorry to say that Jayne and I cannot see you today. We are having a meeting with some people out from St. Louis and it cannot be interrupted. Please to apologize to the FBI.”

  My back stiffens.

  “This matter came to us through the Director. We were told it was urgent.”

  “It is of the highest urgency. But not today.”

  She smiles indulgently with polished red lips.

  “Please take your time and relax. You are of course welcome to walk down to the beach. Ask Jan if you need anything.”

  Having given the United States government thirty seconds of her time, Magda Stockman hurries out, drawn by the ringing of a telephone somewhere in the house.

  Jan reappears with a silver tray on which is a china coffee set patterned with strawberries—pot, cup and saucer, cream and sugar, the whole thing: service for one, like you’d see on a bed tray in one of those mail-order catalogues with hundred-dollar sheets, including a silver teaspoon on a blue cloth napkin.

  He sets the tray down carefully, then runs a strong square hand through his tawny hair. “We’ll call your office to reschedule.”

  “Jayne likes yellow roses.” Figuring if everyone else is calling her Jayne I’ll give it a try.

  “Yes, she does.”

  And that’s it. He leaves me with the coffee and the souvenir Manet. I have never been told quite so graciously to take a flying leap.

  • • •

  I walk down to the beach, what the hell, the path across the sloping lawn looks enticing, bordered by fluttering pansies in combinations of yellow, red, blue, and purple that remind me of my mother’s cotton hankies flapping on the clothesline in the backyard. At the top of the cliff a sea wind powerful enough to blow the hair straight back is like an elixir drowning you with exotic promises—Hawaii is out there and China, after all—so by then there is no choice, so what if the wet air wilts the beige linen suit I wore to meet the movie star, I grip the metal chain that loop
s along the steep wooden stairway and make my way down a hundred vertical yards of headland rock.

  Here I am sitting on Jayne Mason’s private beach at three in the afternoon as the sun reflects off the sand like a mirror with just the right intensity of heat, watching the whitecaps on green water, tasting the salt in the air, no noise, nothing in the brain but wind, no other humans or their works within view, utterly alone, thinking I would cheerfully commit a capital crime in order to have something like this, when a man climbs unsteadily over the rocks adjoining the next cove. For a moment he is a black silhouette against the brilliant screen of light and I think he must be a fan of Jayne Mason or a tabloid photographer trying the marine approach to her property. I get off the weathered wooden chest I am perched upon, my hand hovering instinctively near the weapon under my jacket.

  As he lumbers closer I realize it is Tom Pauley, the limousine driver.

  And that he is completely naked.

  “Tom,” I call out to warn him, “it’s Ana Grey, FBI. We met in the alley, remember?”

  “Sure do.” He continues walking until he is standing right next to me. “Gorgeous day.” Unconcerned, he opens the chest. Inside is a tangle of old netting, some clothes, folded towels, and a red cooler. Inside the cooler is fresh ice and some brown bottles of Mexican beer and fruit sodas and half of a shrink-wrapped watermelon.

  “Jeez, Tom. We have to stop meeting like this.”

  He grins. His lips are sunburned and chapped. Shoulders padded with fat. A pale distended belly. The usual dangle. And a pair of bow legs the color of boiled Santa Barbara shrimp.

  “Have a beer.”