North of Montana

by April Smith

  She laughs and I laugh with her, although trying to follow the increasing zigzag of her conversation has lost me.

  “I did a musical directed by Vincente Minnelli. It was a Technicolor extravaganza and in one scene I wore a fox cape. Well, Mr. Minnelli had it sent to New York and dyed to match my eyes. Why? Because it was romantic. ”

  “I think I saw that one.”

  “Louis B. Mayer always told me his philosophy was to make beautiful pictures about beautiful people,” she goes on with great sweep. “We all need romance, even you, Ana, dear. You are a serious young woman—I could see that right away—but there’s a part of you that needs to blossom.”

  She is leaning over the table, fixing me with misty green-blue eyes. The pupils are dark and wide and wondering in the caressing orange-red sunset light.

  “Give yourself the magic, Ana.”

  It is as if she has seen through to my soul, seen what was missing, and supplied it. I feel myself touched and melting. I nod. I want to say, Thank you.

  Tom Pauley is holding the car door open as we exit the restaurant.

  “Did you enjoy dinner?”

  “Lovely, Tom,” says Jayne with an edge.

  Inside the limousine, she explains, “Now when I talk about romance, I don’t necessarily mean between a sixty-year-old driver and a twenty-one-year-old wardrobe girl, not that I think there’s anything inherently wrong, God knows John Barrymore was old enough to have been my grandfather at the time, but I do feel protective about my people and I’m afraid these two are heading for disaster.”

  “So Tom and Maureen are an item,” confirming what I’d seen on the beach.

  “Yes, but all is not well in the castle,” Jayne sighs, “all is not well.”

  Pauley pulls the limousine into traffic.

  “Take this.” She hands me a rooster water pitcher she has evidently just filched from the restaurant under my very eyes. “To remember the evening.”

  I take it. It seems a harmless, endearing gesture. After the movie and the manicotti and the veal and the cheesecake and espresso, I feel cozy and content as a pet cat, stretching out and yawning unself-consciously, hoping Jayne Mason will start singing again.

  Like Randall Eberhardt, I have totally lost my bearings.

  • • •

  Barbara looks up I enter her office carrying a large heavy glass containing two dozen yellow roses.

  “For me? Are we getting engaged?”

  I put the vase down.

  “From Jayne Mason. On my desk this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m such an understanding person.”

  “You?”

  “She said so in her note: ‘Thank you for being understanding.’ We went to the movies and dinner and she told me her philosophy of life.”

  Barbara’s fair face flushes red. “You had dinner with Jayne Mason?”

  “Just the two of us. She likes me.” I sit down and cross my feet up on her desk.

  “A once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Barbara murmurs enviously.

  “It was pretty amazing,” I admit, still basking in the warmth of the limousine. “ ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.’ She said that in one of her movies. I told her, Hey, Jayne baby, you’re talking about me!”

  “What else did she say about her philosophy of life?”

  Barbara has stopped fingering the yellow petals. Her smile is tentative.

  “Oh, she told a lot of great old Hollywood stories. You would have loved it. like the time this guy had a fox cape dyed to match her eyes—”

  “Who did?”

  “Liza Minnelli’s father.”

  “Vincente Minnelli? The director?” she asks incredulously.

  “Yeah, she was doing a picture with him and he sent this fur to New York to be dyed … What’s wrong?”

  Barbara’s mouth is tight and her exhilaration has drained to pale concern.

  “That was Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette.”

  “Can’t be.”

  “It was one of the most excessive movies ever made. They spent a fortune on period antique furniture and incredible costumes and the wardrobe designer, Gilbert Adrian, even had a fox cape custom-dyed to match Norma Shearer’s eyes. The punchline is, to save money they wound up shooting the movie in black-and-white. It’s a famous story.”

  “But Jayne Mason said it happened to her.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Maybe she got mixed up.”

  “And that line about ‘Live fast, die young’? That was John Derek in Knock on Any Door with Humphrey Bogart.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I know it is futile to question the recall and accuracy of the Human Computer. I think of the rooster carafe and the intimate moment just for me. My feet drop off the desk and onto the floor.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “She just takes things.”

  I don’t know why this should be so upsetting and bewildering.

  “Maybe she was acting.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Maybe she’s crazy.”

  “She’s not.”

  Barbara is dismayed. Even the Human Computer can’t process this. ‘

  “I don’t understand. These are facts. She openly lied. What unbelievable arrogance.”

  But I have processed it all too quickly.

  “She’s lying about the whole damn thing.”

  “The doctor?”

  I nod. I think I’m going to cry.

  “Check him out,” Barbara advises softly. “You have to. For Galloway. One more time.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I TRACK DOWN Donnato in the public cafeteria on the first floor of the building. He is sitting behind a pillar where nobody can find him, finishing a piece of blueberry pie and reading the Wall Street Journal.

  “I’m between a rock and a hard place, Donnato.” I tell him my troubles and eat the piece of crust he has left on the plate. “I need something for Galloway. I can’t go back and say the trip to Boston was a bust and I’ve been chasing my tail ever since. I’ve got to find out for myself if the doctor is dirty.”

  An Indian woman in a yellow silk tunic edges to the table beside us and wearily sets down a tray. Another civil servant trying to make it to the next three-day weekend.

  “It’s time to check out the source. I think I should go undercover. Put on a wire, get in there as a patient, ask the doctor for painkillers and see if he’ll give them to me.”

  “Why didn’t you go to a wire before?”

  “I never had the evidence to get Galloway to approve an undercover assignment.”

  “You still don’t.”

  “Right. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

  “Without approval?”

  I nod, swallowing down the anxiety that is rising in my throat like acid vomitus.

  “I know this is a little out of bounds—”

  “Way out of bounds.”

  “Will you partner up with me? Monitor the wire?”

  “On a maverick operation? What if it goes bust?”

  “It can’t go bust, it’s too simple. You and I have each done this routine a thousand times.”

  Donnato rubs his beard upward against the grain in that impatient way of his when he wants to be done with an annoying thought.

  “It’s a risk.”

  “A controlled risk.”

  Donnato shakes his head. “Not my thing.”

  “I understand.” I feel hot and foolish and suddenly lost. “That’s okay. I’ll use a microcassette in my purse.”

  Donnato drains the last of his lemonade.

  “Pumpkin started law school, did I tell you?”

  “Good for her.”

  “I was hoping she’d wait until Jeremy’s settled in high school, but that’s two more years.”

  “Is he having a tough time?”

  “Working with a tutor, but with attention deficit disorder, which is th
e latest thing they say he’s got, it’s an ongoing process. Rochelle didn’t want to wait.”

  He stands and dumps his garbage. The public cafeteria smells of hot dogs sitting in greasy water. We walk past a table of government co-workers: a Japanese clerk using chopsticks to eat food she brought from home in a plastic box, two white males in shirtsleeves, and a Filipino girl with a fake Gucci bag. What on earth do they have to say to one another?

  When we get to the door, he opens it for me.

  “I’ll partner up,” he says.

  I look at him with gratitude but his eyes are focused across the plaza, where members of a film crew are setting up folding canvas chairs and dragging cables through the shrubbery, fitting a big ungainly camera onto a tripod and unpacking black cases filled with lighting equipment. A crowd of workers from the Federal Building is gawking at some television actress whose mane of blond hair looks familiar. I can see that if she were Jayne Mason it would cause a serious disturbance. We head straight through until a kid with a walkie-talkie stops us and makes us go around to the side doors. I don’t like being bossed around by civilians and I resent like hell being called “Madame.”

  You’re supposed to get used to film crews shooting on location in Los Angeles, it’s good for the local economy and some people think it’s a thrill, but to me it’s nothing but a pain in the ass, all these self-important types taking over our plaza like they own it because—let’s face it—movie people are special, they are above life.

  Meanwhile, down here in the public cafeteria, we are all the same.

  • • •

  The cubicle where you check out surveillance equipment is in the southeast corner of the garage behind an unmarked door.

  I hate going there because the clerk running it has a terrible purple birthmark across half his face and compensates by being unbearably helpful, nodding and making little bows over every transaction. He’s got a pocket-size TV tuned to the soaps and three postcards pinned to the wall that people sent him from vacations, and he stays down there all day in his dark orderly little warren, tape recorders and cameras neatly numbered and stowed on metal shelving. Filling out the forms in duplicate, you know that if there is an anteroom to hell this is it, and if there is a keeper who suffers for eternity this poor guy with the birthmark must be he, or maybe your discomfort is appropriate for the act you are about to commit, the threshold you are about to cross: spying on citizens, recording their most intimate acts.

  I finesse an appointment with Dr. Eberhardt by pleading with the receptionist that I have incapacitating back pain from a recent car accident in which I was rear-ended, thinking of the incident in Boston that still gives me a twinge after a hard set of butterfly. She asks who referred me and for one appalling moment I don’t have an answer. Then:

  “I overheard two women in the gym talking about Dr. Eberhardt. They said he’s the best.”

  “We think so,” the girl responds warmly.

  I tell her my name is Amanda Griffin and she gives me an appointment for 9:45 the next day.

  • • •

  From the pile of clothes on the floor in the back of my closet I dig out a pleated gray skirt and cranberry silk blouse, dating from my early days as an agent when I thought the way to get ahead was by dressing smart. After a few undercover assignments where you had to sit in a car on stakeout for ten hours at a stretch I abandoned my suits and heels and started wearing whatever I felt like to work, discovering it was a lot more fun to be one of the boys than an uptight corporate girl. In my jewelry box I find a string of plump fake pearls and in an overstuffed bathroom drawer an old tube of wine red lipstick. It’s kind of a kick, like getting dressed for a play, with the same nervousness. I look in the mirror and the word that comes reflecting back is “straight.” I am pleased with the transformation. It fits Amanda Griffin, who, I have decided, is a legal secretary.

  I am swinging a long lost imitation-lizard bag over my shoulder and my keys are in my hand when the phone rings. It is Poppy.

  “I can’t talk, I’m on a case, the Jayne Mason thing.”

  “I need five minutes of your time.”

  “Can I call you back later?”

  As usual my assertions are meaningless.

  “I want you to go to the bank on Wilshire, what’s it called—”

  “Security National?”

  I put my keys down on the counter but they are still contained in my clenched fist.

  “And get some papers out of my safe-deposit box.”

  I force myself to expel the breath I have been holding in frustration.

  “I want my birth certificate, my will, everything that’s in there, clean it out.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got a fight on our hands, Annie.”

  Boiling with impatience now, I can just imagine Poppy engaged in a lawsuit with some neighbor who doesn’t like the way he lets his Buick slop over into two parking spaces.

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “The doctor says I’ve come down with cancer, but I told him it’s bullshit.”

  Some kind of ice-cold chemical flushes through my bowels.

  “What do you mean, ‘cancer’?”

  “Oh I found some bumps in my neck when I was shaving.”

  My fist unclenches. The keys have left deep marks in the flesh of my palm.

  “It sounds serious.”

  “Uh-uh. Not to worry. This is not the one that takes me down.”

  I suddenly have to go to the bathroom. I have to be in Santa Monica in ten minutes.

  “I’ll drive out and see you as soon as I can.”

  “No need. I’m fine. Just put the papers in the mail. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Go rescue my gal Jayne from the bad guys.”

  • • •

  Donnato parks at a meter in front of the Dana Orthopedic Clinic.

  He opens a briefcase. Inside is a Nagra tape recorder hooked up to a radio receiver. I place the radio transmitter inside the shoulder bag.

  “What’s your cover?”

  “Amanda Griffin. She’s a legal secretary who lives in Mar Vista with her two cats.” My voice sounds oddly flat.

  “Keep it simple,” Donnato admonishes, twisting the plug into his ear. “And whatever you do—don’t entrap the bastard. Talk into your handbag.”

  I hum into the radio receiver and the needles on the Nagra jump. Without another word I get out of the car and cross the sidewalk and walk up the steps to Dr. Eberhardt’s office.

  I barely have a chance to settle against those curved peach and gray benches when a young woman in a white lab coat opens a door, calling softly, “Amanda Griffin?”

  She shows me to an examining room. A cotton gown is folded on the table.

  “Take everything off except your panties. Put the gown on with the opening in back. Dr. Eberhardt will be just a few minutes.”

  She leaves. I place the bag with the radio transmitter on a chair close to the examining table.

  I start taking off my clothes, then realize that I am not wearing panties beneath the carefully chosen daytime sheer neutral panty hose and that I must face the doctor, the criminal suspect of this investigation, totally naked.

  Clutching the gown around myself uneasily, I pad barefoot across the spotless linoleum and start looking through cabinets and drawers. I find several shelves filled with a drug called Naprosyn—“Successful management of arthritis,” it says on the cartons—gauze, towels, child-size smocks printed with dinosaurs. All the cabinets are open except for the lower one near the window, which is locked just as Jayne Mason described. My heartbeat increases with the possibility that inside are shoe boxes full of Mexican narcotics.

  A knock on the door. I quickly sit in a chair as the doctor comes in.

  “Amanda Griffin? I’m Dr. Eberhardt.” A smile, a dry handshake, eyes on Amanda Griffin’s empty chart. “You had a car accident and your back is giving you pain.”

  I have seen the subject only that one time across t
he alley. He is bigger than I remembered but somehow softer too, wearing not a starched white lab coat but loose short-sleeved green hospital scrubs revealing well-developed biceps. His sandy-colored hair is expensively styled and he wears steel-rimmed reading glasses low on the nose. Soft and helpless inside the gown, I shrink from the sense of privilege that emanates from Randall Eberhardt, in his physical assurance and in the firm sense of medical authority that is sealed for the world by the crest on his Harvard class ring.

  He casually hops up on the examining table and crosses his feet in big puffy blue paper boots. Peering affably over the glasses, he asks, “How fast were you going when you were hit?”

  “I was going nowhere. Some punk rear-ended me when I was stopped for a light. On Cushing Avenue. It happened in Boston.”

  “I’m from Boston,” he says. “I know all about Massachusetts drivers.”

  He writes on the chart. I watch the muscles in his smooth tan forearms.

  “You’re in great shape,” says Amanda Griffin, who is a bit of a dork. “Do they pump iron in Boston?”

  “Not like here. I have to work out for two reasons: to practice orthopedics and keep up with my kids.”

  “They keep you running, don’t they?”

  “My little girl is a climber. I swear she’s part monkey. You come home and she’s sitting on top of the piano. You should see her balancing on the edge of the play structure with the seven-year-olds, it gives me arrhythmia. And quickly her baby brother is following in her footsteps. Were you looking up in the rearview mirror when you were hit?”

  “No, I was looking down, trying to read a map.”

  “Probably saved your neck from getting whiplash.”

  “I don’t have kids, I’m not even married,” volunteers Amanda.

  “Kids give you perspective on what’s important.”

  “What’s important, doctor?”

  “The only thing that’s important to me is my wife and children.”