North of Montana

ONE

IT WAS PURE SEX.

Opening day at Dodger Stadium and all I had to do was stop at California First Bank on Pico to pick up some surveillance film, then off to the cool breezes of Chavez Ravine, a pitching battle between Martinez and Drabek, a Dodger Dog, and definitely one of those malted ice milks in the giant cup that make you feel all bloated and content like a fat stupid balloon.

I am having the obligatory chat with the manager of the bank that was robbed the day before. We have already been there of course and done our initial investigation, but the manager is still in shock and needs to talk. He is about fifty, a marathon runner with pale hair, stoop-shouldered, wearing a blue madras jacket with nice deep purples in it and gray slacks. He keeps a laminated plaque of The Objectives of Kiwanis International on the wall above his desk.

In fact he runs a spotless organization. It is a brand-new branch with shiny oak floors and large watercolors of fields of flowers in brass frames. The girl tellers wear pretty dresses and costume pearls, the boys have slick haircuts and wide-shouldered suits, although I can’t figure out how they can afford to look that way on their dog-meat salaries. Along with brochures for savings plans and loans there is even a pot of coffee and a plate of mini chocolate chip cookies on a table near the back door where the robber exited with $734 in cash.

The manager is touching my arm with bony, trembling fingertips. It is the sixth robbery of his banking career and after each one he gets an incapacitating migraine headache. It’s seeing that gun, he tells me, starting to flush pink, so I give what support I can muster (while arguing with myself whether Juan Samuel or Brett Butler should be the lead-off batter), reminding him that we are living in the bank robbery capital of the United States, that at the Los Angeles field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation we work maybe ten robberies a day, so especially if your branch happens to be situated near two freeway off-ramps the odds are good that it will happen to you — but the odds are also that nobody will get hurt, that’s why the bad guys take up this line of work, it is so astonishingly low risk.

I am wasting time and not making a dent in his anxiety; his spick-and-span little Swiss clock of a world has been skewed so dreadfully out of shape by the violent invasion of the barrel of a gun that it can no longer be trusted to tick along reliably. The FBI comes along after the fact, and now here is this five-foot, four-inch female agent, who on opening day is not even wearing the authoritative gray suit that falls to the knee but a T-shirt and jeans, and, I am sorry to say, a pair of pink high-top Keds. She is a long way from being a solid brother of the Kiwanis Club, and her petite frame and impatient attitude present not the slightest assurance that the whole damn thing won’t happen to him all over again.

I have to get up on a ladder to remove the surveillance film. Half the time there isn’t any film because the bozos have forgotten to reload the camera, but today is my lucky day. Also I am usually being harassed by my partner, Mike Donnato, who loves to make me go up on the ladder so he can allegedly look at my rear end, but it is just a joke because he is married and we have been together three years and once when I changed my hair from black to red it took him a week to notice. Today Donnato is on vacation and I am alone.

I have noticed that nothing good happens to you when you are alone.

I get the film, put a new roll in the camera, leave the manager at his desk unhappily pouring herbal tea from a thermos into a mug that says Captain, and go out and sit in my car, which I have parked in the shade. I am listening to the AM radio for a report on the traffic going to Dodger Stadium when I see a man get out of a car, put on sunglasses, and tug a baseball cap way down over his eyes, acting real hinky. He buttons a short-sleeved shirt over the one he’s already wearing. And there is a bulge under the shirt.

I am trying to rationalize that he is probably an undercover cop assigned to the bank after the robbery when he looks dead at me. I stay neutral, not smiling. We hold eye contact until finally he looks down, shakes his head once, and gets back in his car.

All I know at this point is that the man is about six feet tall and white. I don’t know if he got back into the car because he took me for some kind of a cop or if he just forgot his passbook — if that’s a Walkman under his shirt or a Browning pistol. I decide to get his license number.

So I roll the Ford behind his car just as he’s backing out and we almost crash. I get the number, put on my turn signal, and move slowly out of the parking lot like I’m going to go left and be gone, watching all the while in the rearview mirror without moving my head, just the eyes.

As soon as he sees me turn, he zips back into the parking space, cuts the engine, gets out of the car, and heads for the bank on the run.

This is when I get seriously annoyed with Donnato for being in Catalina with his wife while I am confronting a robbery suspect alone. In seven years as a street agent I have had to draw my weapon maybe a dozen times, always with a partner or heavy-duty backup. We are not local cops. We cannot arrest someone on suspicion. We have to present evidence to the Assistant U. S. Attorney before we then make the bust unless it is a felony in progress. Our operations are carefully controlled. I have never been in a free-floating situation like this in my life. As if words of wisdom from Mom and Dad, two principles from training school flash repeatedly in my mind: Keep a clear head … and go by the rules.

If I call in a “211 in progress request assistance,” LAPD will pick it up and send in six screaming cruisers while the radio room at the Bureau contacts the bank to verify that a robbery is happening. If I am right and it is a robbery, springing all that firepower on the man inside could precipitate a bloody disaster. If I’m wrong and he’s just another slob in a baseball cap, the rest of my squad will be royally pissed for having been called back from a relaxing afternoon at Dodger Stadium.

I wheel back into the lot, park the G-ride behind a dumpster, and try for that clear head: my job at this moment is to make sure nothing goes wrong inside the bank. I am going to let him rob it and let him come out. That way everyone will be happy, except the bank manager, who is probably dead of a heart attack by now despite his undoubtedly low cholesterol. The bank will be insured, the customers safe, and when I do call it in, I’ll know I have probable cause.

I am listening to the police scanner in my car, waiting to hear the LAPD dispatcher say, “211 silent, California First, 11712 Pico,” which would mean one of those well-groomed, well-trained young tellers had tripped the silent alarm, but all I am hearing is the sharp squawk of routine police business over the roar of two nearby freeways and meanwhile my anxiety level is going sky-high. What do I do when the dirtbag comes out? He’s probably on dope and can run faster than I can — then a new flush of dread as it dawns on me that my bulletproof vest and shotgun are in the trunk.

Incidentally, real time elapsed since the guy went into the bank is probably less than ninety seconds, but by now I am frankly scared, convinced that something went horribly wrong inside, that the nice new oak flooring is splattered with civilian blood — and just as I am finally reaching for the radio here he comes, running with a fistful of cash, looking around, throwing away his baseball hat and tearing off the second shirt.

I still haven’t actually seen a gun, nor have I been alerted to any crime, but a reasonable and prudent person does not race out of a bank discarding clothing, which seems to me at that moment of hyperreality to be a legal principle of exceptional solidity and more than enough justification to roll my car in front of his, block his exit as soon as he has closed his door, draw down on him, and ascertain if he would like to meet God.

I am carrying a.357 Magnum which I point against the driver’s window inches from the guy’s ear.

“Freeze — or I’ll blow your head off like a ripe watermelon.”

He stops trying to jam the keys into the ignition and stares up at me with runny eyes.

“I’m really nervous right now, so don’t make me use this because I probably won’t kill you, I’ll just maim you for life.”

The old clichés really work when you want someone to get a very clear, very quick picture of the consequences of his actions.

He seems hypnotized by the barrel of the gun, which must look like a cannon from his point of view, with a blurry, indistinct but clearly assertive person at arm’s length behind it.

“I want both hands on the windshield, real, real, slow.”

He puts the palms out and they cleave against the glass with a moist suction. Graying hair flies around his head in sweaty wisps. A soft belly presses up against the wheel. Somewhere it registers that the subject seems down. Irritated. Sad.

“Don’t move or I’ll blow your face right off.” He doesn’t move. “Now open the door and back out.”

As soon as the door is opened I jam the gun into the base of the skull and remove the bulge from his belt. It is a starter pistol.

“On the ground. Hands behind your back.”

Now he’s proned out on the concrete and I get the handcuffs on him.

“Back into the car. On the front seat. Face down.”

He’s in. He’s down. And the adrenaline rush sweeps through. Suddenly I’m becoming sensory perceptive, feeling things I wasn’t feeling before, like the intense heat of the noon sun, the fact that I can’t catch my breath, sweat coursing under my arms and between my breasts.

And I still haven’t called the damn thing in.

Someone’s loping through the parking lot, past people who have frozen in place like odd statues all facing the same way.

“I can’t believe you’re still here.” It’s the bank manager, also breathing hard. “We’ve just been robbed again … and”—then, incredulously—“you got him!”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

I pick up the radio. At this moment I want to be very cool: “This is signal 345. A good 211 just occurred at California First Bank, 11712 Pico. I am 10–15 with one male subject. Would appreciate assistance to handle additional inside investigation.”

There is silence on the other end. “Say again?”

Well, that’s about as cool as I get. “I got the sucker coming out of the bank!”

Another pause. Then: “You gotta be shitting me.”

I hear the information echoed on the police scanner as the emboldened bank manager, my deputy and new best friend, rescued from despair after seven robberies and bursting now with hope for civilization, scurries around the parking lot telling people to “stand away” from the crime scene and suddenly here comes the chopper and all faces turn toward the sky.

An LAPD officer hovering above us bellows through a bullhorn, “Are you okay?”

I give him the international okay sign — a tap to the top of the head — and he banks away as the crazy Latvian cop who has this beat skids through the parking lot with sirens screaming, along with about a dozen other boys from the Wilshire Division who want to see how their brakes and tires really work. It was beautiful.

• • •

The next morning is party time. My squad has a tradition of coffee and donuts at eight a.m. and they are ready for me when I drag myself in after staying at the office until almost midnight the night before pushing the paperwork through.

I get a round of applause and one of those three-foot-long green foam-rubber hands with the fingers forming “number one” and another thoughtful souvenir from the ballpark: a cardboard tray with a Dodger Dog still wrapped in the authentic aluminum foil bag, a double sack of peanuts, and my favorite malted ice milk melted to a fine lukewarm puree.

“We thought about you all nine innings,” says Kyle Vernon. “Of course, damned if we were gonna leave!”

The others laugh. They didn’t have to leave because I had it all tied down.

“Our supervisor’s out jerking them off in Washington, why should we miss Sciosca’s dramatic run in the bottom of the ninth?” says Frank Chang with a sly smile.

“His what? Oh shit!”

Meanwhile Mike Donnato has been lying back in a chair, with tasseled loafers crossed up on his desk, and stroking his blond beard, which is on the way to gray. It is natural to be gathered around him; ten years older than me, he is the senior squad member and spiritual leader.

“So, Donnato,” I smirk, “how was Catalina Island? Nice and peaceful? Go scuba diving?”

He wrinkles his nose. “You got lucky.”

“You’re jealous!”

“You wait your whole career for a break like that. There is no justice.”

“But you and Pumpkin got to see some really neat fish.”

“If you don’t buzz off I’ll make you drive,” Donnato threatens lazily.

“Hey, I’m out of here.”

“You think this bust is your ticket to the C-1 squad?”

“I’m writing my request for transfer today.”

“Get in line, baby. Duane Carter’s really pushing for that transfer to headquarters,” says Kyle.

Duane Carter is the squad supervisor and not much liked.

“Carter’s pissed too many people off,” says Barbara Sullivan, our robbery coordinator, aka The Human Computer. “They’ll never assign him to headquarters, they’ll leave him here to rot.”

“You wish.”

“No, I don’t wish,” says Barbara, whipping the pearl she always wears back and forth on its gold chain. “If he’s going to rot, let him rot in hell.”

“Either way, Duane won’t make it easy,” says Kyle. “He likes torturing you slits.”

Barbara makes a face.

“His word, not mine,” Kyle shrugs.

“As an Afro-American, I would think you’d be especially aware of offensive stereotyping.”

“Forgive me.” Kyle matches her arch tone. “I have misplaced my gender sensitivity manual and I am at a loss as to how to reply.”

“Try this: ‘Yo! Honky bitch!’ ” says Frank, and we all laugh because we have just been through a multicultural awareness workshop that was one big snore.

“Carter won’t have a choice.” Donnato swings his feet to the floor and breaks off a piece of sugar donut in a matter-of-fact way. “It was the perfect bust.”

I am thrilled. “Thanks.”

His eyes are full of warmth. “You just earned your spurs.”

Rosalind, an administrative assistant who’s worked in this field office twenty years, comes up to our group.

“Ana? Can I talk to you?”

“Join the party.”

“Did you hear about Ana’s perfect bust?” Donnato calls. “If you haven’t, she’ll tell you.”

“Ana,” she repeats impatiently, “I have to talk to you.”

“You better mind.” Kyle smiles toward Rosalind, who is old enough to be his mother, but today she doesn’t want to play. Planted there in the middle of the room, I notice she has a peculiar look.

“What’s the matter?”

She leads me away. Her voice is low.

“A message came for you. It’s bad news, Ana.”

Something went wrong on a case. Which one? My brain is not functioning yet this morning. I’m still back in the parking lot playing Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

We step into a doorway for a shred of privacy. We face each other. She is even smaller than I am. She has to look up.

“Violeta Alvarado was killed.”

I must have stared like an idiot.

She gives me a yellow Post-it telephone message slip that says “While you were out …” with a Spanish name and phone number. I look at it but it makes no sense.

“Violeta Alvarado?”

Rosalind nods. Her eyes are moist and round with sadness, anybody’s sadness. Her eyebrows pinch together with sympathy that comes from having lost who knows how much in her lifetime.

She gives a little shrug. She understands my confusion. It is natural when you hear something like this. She takes my hand in both of hers.

“They said she’s your cousin.”

She watches me, patient, present, waiting for me to comprehend.

TWO

MY DESK is among twenty others lined up in pairs in a big open room called the bullpen. The light is fluorescent yellow and you can only see the outside world if the door to Duane Carter’s office is open and you can angle a view through his window of Westwood looking south.

But from where I sit all I get is a vista of a long metal coatrack against an anonymous beige wall. The single item hanging on the rack is an old tan sport jacket. Written across the back in black marker are the words Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise. The front of the jacket has been decorated by generations of agents with medals, advice, maps, and obscenities in everything from green ink to real blood (gleaned from a nasty run-in Special Agent Frank Chang once had with a stapler).

Since I look at it all day, I have come to think of the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise as a partner — a veteran who has been through it all, who knows our secrets and knows the answers but is bound to silence by the poignant dumb invisibility of a ghost. Who suffers more in his isolation? Him or us?

I phone the number on the yellow Post-it and get a loud Latino television station in the background and the voice of an older woman: “Bueno?”

“Mrs. Gutiérrez? This is Special Agent Ana Grey with the FBI.”

She immediately begins talking with great urgency in Spanish.

“I’m sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”

“No?” Surprised. “No problem. I can speak in English. I am very sorry about your cousin.”

If my instincts were right about the dirtbag at the bank I am probably right again that this is some sort of a scam.

“Just a minute, ma’am. I don’t have a cousin named Violeta Alvarado.”

“Yes, she talked about you. You are the big cousin who works for the United States government.”

I blush at the thought of being anybody’s “big cousin who works for the government.”

“I’m sorry, but I have never met Ms. Alvarado.”

“I know you are the one. And right now, your family needs your help.”

She is so fierce, so absurd, that it makes me laugh. “It’s not my family! Look, I was born in Santa Monica, California—”

“And your father’s people come from El Salvador.”

Suddenly I am very uneasy. Nobody has mentioned my father in years. He was allegedly from Central America but I never even knew which country, since he abandoned us when I was a tiny child and was always a taboo subject in our home. My mother and I lived with her father, a police officer, and I was raised Protestant and white; you couldn’t get more white, all the way back to the curl in the horns on the headgear of our Viking ancestors. I happen to have thick wavy black hair but that’s as Mediterranean as I get. Hispanics are simply another race to me.

Colder now, “Why are you calling, Mrs. Gutiérrez? What do you want?”

“It’s not for me, it’s for Violeta’s children. They have nobody in this country to take care of them.”

Part of me is working hard to believe this is all a fake. Already I have come up with a scenario for how the scam must work: they find some indigent who dies. Call a relative (real or imagined) who has never met the person. Hit them up for “money to take care of the children.” Sooner or later somebody will send a check out of guilt. I start to take notes. Maybe this will warrant opening a case.

“Really?” Writing now, “And what are the children’s names?”

“Cristóbal and Teresa.”

“What is your relationship to the children?”

“I live in the building. I become very close with Violeta because we are both from El Salvador. I baby-sit for her children while she works. Only now there is no one because she is dead.”

“How was she killed?”

“She was shot down in the street, on Santa Monica Boulevard only two blocks from here. She was shot up so bad that her hands were gone. When they laid her in her coffin they had to put white gloves on the end of the arms.”

“What did the police say?”

“They don’t know anything.”

There is a breath or a sob and the woman’s tone becomes desperate: “Who will take care of the children?”

The professional response comes easiest: “I will put you in touch with a city agency—”

She interrupts: “The last lady Violeta worked for still owes her money. If you can get the money, I will take care of the children until they find a home not with strangers … but with family.”

The way she says “family”—with intimacy and conviction, the way religious people speak effortlessly of God — is embarrassing. My only living family is my grandfather and my lifestyle is aggressively without God: the furnished one-bedroom in Marina Del Ray. My 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible. Sixty, a hundred hours a week at the Bureau, a diet shake for lunch, and a mile in the pool every day. A career timetable so tight you could plot it on graph paper — a straight line to Assistant Special Agent in Charge or even the first female Special Agent in Charge of a cherry field office like Denver, which, because I am a woman, will require at least five more years of crossing each square perfectly, never one millimeter off; no messiness, no mistakes, no fat.

Reaching for my Rolodex, “I’m going to refer you to a social worker.”

“No,” insists this stranger with absolute authority, “it is not right. These children are of your blood.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Violeta and your father came from the same village.”

“Which village?”

“La Palma.”

“Never heard of it.”

“She told me it is a small place, maybe one hundred miles from San Salvador, with a black sand beach.”

Of the few fragments remaining of my father there is a relic as real yet mysterious as a shard of wave-polished glass: “When your father was a boy, he played on a black sand beach.”

It shakes me.

“Mrs. Gutiérrez — I’m sorry, but I have to take another call. Good luck to you.”

I hang up and stare at the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise. The sleeves are empty. The heart, weightless.

After a moment I realize the intercom is in fact buzzing. Barbara Sullivan has something for me on the bank robbery.

THREE

ONE ENTIRE WALL of Barbara Sullivan’s office is covered with still photographs taken by surveillance cameras of bank robberies in progress. To the untrained eye, except for gross differences in gender and race and type of weapon, they all look pretty much the same and walking in there can actually make you feel nauseated, overwhelmed by the tang of film developer, confronted by a floor-to-ceiling sea of gray images, most so grainy and out of focus you need a magnifying glass to get any detail.

But to the Human Computer the surveillance photos are daily bread, to be carefully chewed, swallowed, digested, and turned into masses of information stored in the brain for instantaneous retrieval. The Human Computer forgets nothing, including the minutiae of one’s personal life. Before she got married to another agent, Barbara and I used to pal around police bars together and she can still repeat the time and place that I met every one of my liaisons. She even remembers their ranks and names.

The job of the bank robbery coordinator is to find connections between the more than two thousand bank robberies committed each year in Los Angeles County. Most individual robbers will repeat ten or fifteen times for less than a thousand dollars a take, easily losing themselves in a tangle of freeways or a robber-friendly matrix of underinformed and understaffed law enforcement. Now that gangs have become involved, resources are stretched even thinner. Our conviction rate is not great. Often it is the Human Computer, meditating alone before this sorry montage, who provides a clue that leads to an arrest.

When I walk into her office, Barbara is reading People magazine with Jayne Mason on the cover and eating birthday cake from a big slab someone left in the lunchroom, deep chocolate with raspberry in the middle. She pushes a slice on a Mickey Mouse paper plate toward me along with a folded napkin and red plastic fork. I have brought my mug, knowing she always has fresh brew flavored with cinnamon perking along in her personal coffeemaker.

“I am absolutely devastated about Jayne Mason,” she says, not taking her eyes from the magazine. “My whole world just went up in smoke.”

I look at the upside-down photos, familiar as a family album. Even now in her fifties or sixties or who knows what, Jayne Mason remains one of our truly enduring movie stars.

“She’s a drug addict.” Barbara slaps her hand down and looks up with real hurt as if she’s been personally betrayed.

I sip the coffee. ‘Why is that a surprise? She’s an actress. Of course she’s on drugs.”

“Oh, come on! Jayne Mason? Every American girl’s prefeminist dream? You have to admit she’s exquisite.”

She flips the magazine around so I can see the famous black and white portrait of Jayne Mason taken when she was barely twenty, the amazing cheekbones then described as: “Pure as the curves of a Stradivarius … heartbreaking as the Mozart played thereon.”

Barbara is going on impatiently, “Don’t you remember those wonderful old sentimental musicals?”

“I hate musicals.”

“She was angelic. She always played the good-hearted farm girl whose pa just passed away or the poor street urchin who gets the swell idea of putting on a musical production, then finds out she has tuberculosis. But don’t worry — the handsome young doctor saves her life and she becomes a big Broadway star.”

I say nothing. Barbara glowers at me with frustration. “Your idea of a tearjerker is Terminator. ”

“That’s right. The robot dies and it’s sad.”

“She turned down the title role in Gigi—big mistake — because she was having a tumultuous affair with Louis Jourdan at the time.” The Human Computer cannot be shut down: “Her first dramatic role was Bad Men, a famous western with John Wayne.”

“Even I remember that. They were making love on the tallest butte in Arizona and supposedly they really screwed.”

“Look at this!” Barbara picks up the magazine and throttles it. “She’s an addict! Like every other sleazeball on the street.”

I swipe it from her and examine a photo of Jayne Mason taken just last week. She is getting into a limousine wearing dark glasses and a tailored white linen suit, clutching a bouquet of yellow roses, looking like she’s running for a plane to Rome rather than dodging reporters on the way to the Betty Ford Center.

Barbara sighs. “I used to wear a full slip underneath my Catholic school uniform because Jayne Mason looked so sexy and romantic in them. The first time I saw her on the Academy Awards I was three years old and watched every year since, hoping she’d be on. She was the queen of queens in the prom gown of all prom gowns. God, I wanted to be beautiful.”

But I am fussing over something else: “You can’t remember anything when you’re three.”

“I can.”

“I remember nothing before the age of five. The whole time we lived with my grandfather in Santa Monica is a blank.”

Barbara gives a wry look over her coffee cup. “Have you spoken to your therapist about this?”

“Why? That’s normal.”

But Barbara’s attention has returned wistfully to the magazine.

“I was so sorry when Jayne didn’t marry President Kennedy. They would have made the sexorama couple of the century. Nobody wears full slips anymore.” Then, without a pause, “When does Duane get back?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“We’re going to have something very special waiting for him.”

Barbara smiles. Small-boned, with curly reddish hair down to her shoulders, a pert nose, and wide-set blue eyes, she has an advanced degree in biology and looks about as much like an FBI agent as I do, especially with a Mickey Mouse napkin tucked into the neck of her yellow wool suit.

She places one of the surveillance photographs in front of me.

“Here’s your guy.”

There’s my guy in the baseball hat and two shirts standing in front of a teller’s window in California First Bank. He isn’t pointing a gun or doing anything even slightly dramatic. The photo is stamped UNSUB. Unknown Subject.

“And here’s your guy again.”

In a second photograph he is wearing different shirts, a different baseball hat, with the same puffy face and sagging eyes.

“Same M.O.,” Barbara continues, pointing with her fork. “The gun, the baseball hat, same instructions: ‘Give me your hundreds and no dye packs.’ ”

The second photo is stamped UNSUB, Bank of the West, Culver City Branch, 1984. I am astonished.

“How do you do that?”

Vitamin A.”

“How do you remember? Is there some kind of trick?”

“Sure there’s a trick.”

She stands abruptly, dumps our plates in the trash, and turns to me, arms folded.

“When I was a new agent, Duane Carter used to routinely get me up against a filing cabinet and suggest how we might spend the rest of the afternoon. I would laugh him off, being cute and ‘not wanting to hurt his feelings’—then one day he pulled me down on his lap on top of his hard-on and slipped his hand under my skirt.”

“Barbara!”

“Yeah, well, I should have shot the sucker between the eyes but instead … I didn’t handle it very well. I cried. Told him I had a boyfriend. Some damn lie or other. This was before sexual harassment cases.”

She whips the pearl back and forth.

“He would take me to lunch when we were supposed to be discussing a case and talk about how we should get the penthouse suite at the Beverlywood Hotel, how Mormon males are great in bed, they have some super sexual secret, that’s why they have so many wives and children … when the truth is, he hates women.”

I look again at the little Catholic schoolgirl from Chicago in the yellow suit and pearl necklace, still so ladylike in her obsessive rage. “I am so sorry you had to put up with that shit.”

“After I got married I deliberately transferred back to Duane Carter’s squad. For years he thought he had this dirty little secret on me. But times have changed and I’ve got it on him.”

“How? It’s too late for legal action.”

“I’m watching him and he knows it. Why do you think I’ve hung in as robbery coordinator so long? It’s the perfect position to keep sticking it to him. Like right now — you’re going to bust this guy for two robberies and get your transfer to C-1 and it will drive Duane Carter absolutely nuts because you’re a woman and you did it, and he ain’t getting transferred nowhere.”

I put my arm around her shoulder. She is my friend. “Don’t spend your life on Duane Carter.”

“It makes me happy.” Her thin rosy lips compress into a tight smile.

“Someday,” I tell her, “you’re coming with me over the wall.”

“Go with God.”

• • •

Three hours later I am in a stuffy interrogation room at the Metropolitan Detention Center with my guy, whose name is Dennis Hill. I had interviewed him when I gave him his rights and had him sign the FD395 form, but he had refused to talk. He’s wearing orange overalls with MDC on the back and looks just as sullen as he did yesterday, when I busted him — a jowly unshaven face and unkempt gray hair matting and merging with curls growing up the back of the neck.

“You’re a pretty good bank robber, Dennis.”

His eyes watch me. I see intelligence there.

“This is not your first job. You’ve just never been caught before. Am I right?”

He doesn’t answer.

“That makes you pretty good. Not great. But good.”

I show him the two surveillance photos, one from his most recent work, the other stretching back into history.

“We pulled down these photos. That’s you. Both times.”

He looks at the photos and back at me with heavy eyes.

“It’s okay, Dennis. You don’t have to say anything. We’ve got you on two.”

I slip the photos back into the envelope.

“You’ve got me on dick.”

His first words. How charming.

“Is that so?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

He puts both hands on the table and pushes his chair back. I tense involuntarily, even though there is a six-foot-four cop standing at the door.

Dennis runs a hand through his greasy hair.

“You know where I used to live?”

“Paris.”

“Palos Verdes. In a house that was worth at the time … maybe half a million dollars.”

“You must be a better robber than I thought.”

He shakes his head. “I was an executive sales director at Hughes Aero-Space. Made two hundred thousand dollars a year.”

He is quiet, as if waiting for me to put the pieces together. I remember my first impression when I confronted him in his car in the parking lot. He didn’t resist. He seemed edgy … down … on the down side of a high.

“Who got you into the powder?” I ask gently.

“Nobody but myself. High roller. Big deal with women. Nice car. Liked the ponies. Big shit, you know?”

I nod. “You got in over your head. Started selling your assets to pay for the habit. And when you lost it all you got desperate and robbed a bank. It was easy. So you did it again.”

A tremble goes through him. “I’ve got a son. He came to see me this morning. He still loves me.”

He bites a corner off the nail on his thumb.

“You’re a smart, educated guy, Dennis. Why didn’t you go for help?”

“Because I happen to love cocaine.”

We sit in silence for a while. He loves cocaine. I have never heard it said more clearly or more completely without apology. He loves cocaine more than he loves his own son.

I believe I can smell the sweat on him and the sweat on the cop and the rancid layers of sweat on the grimy tile walls of a thousand other murderers, pederasts, rapists, junkies, movie stars, and thieves who will tell you with the same unself-conscious certainty that they did it, whatever it was, because they were in love. And being in love absolves them and makes them innocent.

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 takeout 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.

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 proof?”

“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.

“Is this Violeta Alvarado’s apartment?”

“Yes, but I am living here now.” Mrs. Gutiérrez beckons me to a sofa in harshly textured pea-green plaid, the kind you would find in a twelve-dollar-an-hour motel room in Tijuana.

“Were you living with Violeta?”

“No, I had a small apartment upstairs. One room only. I called the landlord right away and asked if I could have this one.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez fights a cigarette. She is buxom, with the most improbable hairstyle — dyed bright black, chopped short around the ears and teased high off the crown, then falling below her shoulders in a mantilla-like effect. She wears a yellow sleeveless dress that does not apologize for a stoutish body, the short skirt showing off bare round legs and feet with painted toenails in rubber thongs.

“So after Violeta was killed, you got her apartment.” I watch for her reaction.

She nods. “I had to call right away. Lots of people wanted it.” She is proud of herself for making a smart move. She is a survivor.

“Are these Violeta’s children?”

“Teresa and Cristóbal are in the other room. I have a day care business. In San Salvador I was in charge of the kitchen of a very big hotel. I had a nice white house, a husband and two boys — all killed by the military.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t get that kind of a good job here. So these are the children I watch for the parents who are working.”

They seem clean and healthy and occupied with one another and the few frayed dolls and beat-up blocks they have to play with. I become aware of a biting, sour smell just as Mrs. Gutiérrez rises, murmuring something in Spanish, and lifts an infant from a rickety wooden crib I hadn’t noticed that was stuck in a corner.

I stay where I am while she changes the baby on a card table, taking in the Japanese prints on the wall alongside paintings of volcanos, beginning to suspect that what I am seeing is simply what there is: no addicts, no hookers, no child abuse, no scam.

Mrs. Gutiérrez props the baby up on her shoulder and gives it a few comforting pats. “I am very glad you came,” she says.

“I came to tell you to stop saying Violeta Alvarado was my cousin.”

The woman puts the baby back in the crib, opens a drawer in a wood-grained cardboard dresser, and removes a small black Bible stuffed with folded papers. She removes the rubber bands that hold it all together, carefully rolling them over her wrist so they won’t be lost, takes out a white business card, and gives it to me.

“This is why I know it is true.”

The card bears a gold seal and in discreet black type: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, Ana Grey, Special Agent, along with our Wilshire office address and phone number.

“There are a hundred ways she could have gotten my card.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez points with a bronze-red nail. “Look on the other side.”

Turning it over I see the words “Immigration and Naturalization Service, 300 North Los Angeles St., 213-894-2119,” written in my own hand.

“You gave this to Violeta when she first came to this country.”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“It was seven years ago.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez folds her hands over her stomach and rocks back with a satisfied nod.

It could have been that when I was a rookie agent on desk duty a young Latina came tremulously to the FBI in the big skyscraper. Possibly she couldn’t speak English (animated now in imagination, a peasant girl, humble, a mass of black hair) and I slipped information on the U.S. Immigration Service to her through the slot, condescendingly, impatiently telling her to try somewhere else, too pumped up about the real challenges at the Bureau that lay ahead of me to listen or care what another confused immigrant was babbling about in Spanish, as she backed away in frustration from the double wall of bulletproof glass that protects us from the public.

The card that I hold in my hand seems to be evidence that we did once meet. I wonder if it could have happened that way, if my arrogance somehow caused a young woman to take a path that eventually led to crossfire and contorted dying.

Slipping the card into my jacket pocket, “How are we supposed to be related?”

“She told me once you are cousins through your father.”

“I don’t know a lot about my father’s side of the family.”

“I will show you.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez wets her lips and shuffles through the papers, holding them at arm’s length and squinting.

“This is Violeta’s mother, Constanza. Probably she is your aunt.”

In the snapshot a middle-aged woman is standing alone in a cleared area that seems surrounded by luxuriant overgrowth. She has shapeless black hair and there is darkness under the eyes, but she is smiling warmly. She wears a black and white dress with pale orange blossoms and no shoes and is holding a baby.

“This is the house where Violeta grew up.”

It looks more like the unfinished frame of a house to me, made of bamboo sticks, cloth, and leaves with no roof or walls. There are pictures of Violeta’s brothers — more alleged cousins — husking corn, and a dim shot of a parrot in a palm tree, the colors faded to a uniform, dull aqua.

I shake my head. None of it makes sense.

“The police think Violeta was involved with drugs.”

“That is wrong.” Mrs. Gutiérrez looks straight at me with clear brown eyes.

“They think that’s why she was killed.”

“The police are crazy. I know Violeta. She was afraid of the drugs. She didn’t want her children to grow up with the drugs and the gangs, that is why she was saving money to go back to El Salvador. She was a good person,” Mrs. Gutiérrez insists, eyes swelled now with tears. “She loved her children. In our country there was a war, but she came all the way to the United States to be shot down in the street.”

She holds the cigarette under running water in the sink until it turns a sickly gray, then tosses it angrily into a metal garbage can.

‘Where did she work?”

“She was a housekeeper for a lady in Santa Monica. That lady owed her a lot of money.”

“What is a lot of money?”

“Maybe …” Mrs. Gutiérrez puts a fist on her hip and looks toward the cottage cheese ceiling. “Four hundred dollars. Violeta was very unhappy. The lady was mean and she fired her.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Mrs. Gutiérrez says sharply. “You can ask the lady. I have the address because I used to take care of the kids when Violeta worked there. Look. This is Cristóbal and Teresa.”

Two children dash across the room. The little girl is maybe five, her brother three. She leads him by the hand to the refrigerator, which she tugs open after several tries, reaching for something.

“I’ll get it, corazón,” Mrs. Gutiérrez calls. “What do you want?”

“Kool-Aid.”

Suddenly the apartment is flooded with unbearably loud Latin music coming from the open carport. I move the dirty beige fiberglass curtains aside to peer at two young fellows laughing, talking loudly, carrying a ghetto blaster, and unwinding a garden hose in the direction of a 1975 Dodge Dart with most of the paint honed off. They are going to wash that piece of crap using a half hour’s worth of city water in the midst of a serious drought. My neck is tensing up.

“Cristóbal? Teresa? This is Señorita Grey. A cousin of your mommy and you.”

Facing me are two golden-skinned children with almond-shaped eyes holding plastic mugs in their hands. It is preposterous that they have anything to do with me. The girl, unsmiling, slides her eyes away. She is wearing pink shorts and a scrawny tie-dyed T-shirt that looks as if it might have actually survived the sixties. The boy’s green army fatigue shorts are way too big for him, folded many times at the waist and pinned with a big safety pin, no shirt at all.

“Do you know where my mommy is?” he asks.

“Your mommy is in heaven,” Mrs. Gutiérrez says, ruffling his thick black hair. “I told you that.”

But the boy repeats his question imploringly, directly to me: “Do you know where my mommy is?”

Mrs. Gutiérrez clucks her tongue with sympathy and scoops him up in her arms. “Come here, Cris. Want to dance with me?”

She tilts her hips this way and that to the music which is shaking the floor, bouncing the boy against her body and laughing a big laugh, grinning a big grin to his tiny bewildered simper.

“Teresa! Let’s dance! Let’s do some merengue.”

The girl is standing before me, not moving, not looking exactly anywhere. Drawn to her, I kneel down until we are eye level and then without quite knowing it, brush her cheek with my hand. She drops onto all fours and crawls under the baby’s crib, curling up tightly with her arms folded, face pressed against the wall.

I feel a strange, distant portentous hum — then suddenly it is upon me with tremendous force: mixed with the pounding music, waves of heat ripple through my body along with a raw, unidentified fear. Panicked, I fight the urge to follow Teresa under the crib, to be small again in a small dark place, to seek the almost immaterial tininess of a dot of a spider who can wholly disappear into the safety of a crack in the tile, because if you are that small your pain must be small too, small enough to become inconsequential and, finally, gone.

The music has been turned up, incredibly, another notch. Mrs. Gutiérrez gathers the papers and puts them back into the Bible. Speaking with a quiet intensity that penetrates the music she says, “Take this. It was Violetas,” and presses the book into my hand.

“Even if I could get the money … it won’t go to you.…” I am shouting, but Mrs. Gutiérrez has surrendered to a faraway look and slipped into a smooth sideways step, the boy on her hip too stunned by the movement and the volume to cry. “The money will go to the children. And they’ll probably be put into foster care—”

I finger the worn dry leather of Violeta Alvarado’s Bible, giving up, drowned out, having lost the girl to her inexpressible grief and Mrs. Gutiérrez to the dreams of the merengue.

FIVE

WE HAVE REASON to believe the “JAP Bandit” has struck again. This slurring appellation was bestowed by squad supervisor Duane Carter on a woman in her thirties who dresses well with lots of gold jewelry, has long manicured nails, and happens to like working the Valley. Her M.O. is to blend in with the clientele and take the tellers by surprise. We think she has about a dozen robberies to her credit, Washington Savings and Loan in Sherman Oaks being the latest.

Donnato and I respond to the 211 and get there about the same time as the local police. We are just beginning to interview the witnesses when my beeper goes off. When I call the office, Rosalind says that Duane Carter wants to see me immediately.

My message to him is basically to take a flying leap since we’re in the middle of an investigation. I don’t exactly speed back when we are finished three hours later, either. I am chatty. Donnato is subdued.

“After a few years on C-1 I’m going to put in for transfer to headquarters. I always wanted to live in Washington, D.C.”

“Washington is shit city during the summer.”

We are stuck on the 405 freeway going south, a solid motionless curve of cars in both directions between dry brown hills.

‘Worse than this?”

Donnato doesn’t answer. I let it go. He lives in Simi Valley in a house he had to borrow from his in-laws to finance. On a good day it is an hour’s commute to Westwood; tonight he will fight the traffic going north all over again, opposite to the way we are heading now, and when he gets home at eight or nine o’clock he will spend an hour doing homework with his oldest son, who has a learning disability and is a source of constant anxiety.

Donnato married a girl from Encino fifteen years ago and stayed married to her. They were having a rough time and separated for about six months when we first became partners, but Donnato and I were new to each other and he didn’t talk about it. Also Donnato is one of the most moral people I know (“I live by a code,” he once said, not joking) and I think, as unhappy as he was, he refused to be disloyal to his wife. When they got back together there was general relief that the Rock of Gibraltar was still standing and, as if to make a statement about their marriage, shortly thereafter Rochelle and Mike won their event in our annual Bakersfield to Vegas Run. Every time you go by his desk you have to look at that photo he has propped up of the two of them drenched in sweat, kissing over the damn trophy.

“Don’t fuck with Duane Carter,” he says finally, out of the depths of a moody silence.

“What’d I do?”

“I heard you on the phone being Miss Hey-I’m-On-A-Case. Don’t tease. Carter’s like a cornered rat.”

“Why, because he’s dying for a promotion?”

“He wanted Galloway’s job — he wanted to be in charge of the entire field office. Look at it from his point of view — a Catholic from New York, no less, holding him down by the throat.”

“Galloway seems to have gotten the picture pretty quick.”

“Galloway’s on pretty thin ice himself. He’s been out here eight months, keeping low, just trying to avoid mistakes. Carter makes him nervous.”

“I have nothing to worry about from Duane Carter,” I say confidently. “The California First bust speaks for itself.”

Donnato only grunts. I turn on the radio but he isn’t interested in “Sports Connection” and turns it off, watching quietly out the window while I buck and inch along the endless choked artery, cars cars cars cars as far as you can see.

• • •

Duane Carter is in his office doing paperwork when I finally get there, feeling that whatever it is might go down a little easier if I say something halfway conciliatory:

“Sorry it took so long, the traffic was unbelievable.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Duane is from Austin, Texas, with one of them cute accents to match. On another man that drawn-out lazy boy intonation might be charming — echoes of cowboys with hearts of gold — but on Duane it is menacing and icy, a gunman with no regard for human life. When Duane levels that slow-moving good-ole-boy stuff at you it’s like he’s taking his time pointing a.45 at your forehead. I would call him a sociopath but he doesn’t like people.

And nobody much likes him, probably because he has no facial hair. He looks like a stunted adolescent: a fifteen-year-old with cottony pale skin, a large soft body hunched over at the shoulders. He’s got a round face, straight black shiny hair — one forelock always hanging down — and his eyes are also black, impenetrable. He went to good schools, has a law degree from Georgetown, but there’s still something dangerous and unpredictable about him, a backwoods brutality at odds with all the book learning.

A male agent told me Duane once confessed to having been a virgin when he got married. He says he is no longer practicing but came up through the ranks when the “Mormon mafia” ran the Los Angeles field office. They got shaken loose when a class-action discrimination suit filed on behalf of some Hispanic agents broke up the power structure and now the place looks like a poster for Brotherhood Week. That was before my time. Some of the guys enjoy hanging out with him because of his Japanese sword collection, but for a woman, walking into his office is like entering a deep freeze. I imagine the carcasses of former female agents swaying on elaborately wrought scimitar-style hooks.

“Where were you yesterday?”

I have to think. In Violeta Alvarado’s apartment.

“North Hollywood.”

“What you got working over there?”

“Personal business.”

“On government time?”

I should just take the hit and let it pass, but I am miffed that my boss has been back two days and intentionally not said anything about the most amazing arrest of the year.

“If you look at my time card you’ll see I was on duty all last Tuesday night writing up my affidavit on the California First Bank bust. I’ll probably log a hundred hours on it.”

Duane just sits there bouncing a tennis ball on his desk and watching me with glittering eyes.

“I looked at your time card. I looked at your affidavit too, why in hell do you think I called you back from the Valley this afternoon?”

The fear grips me. “Why?”

“You fucked up, lady.”

“How?”

“You sit there and you think about it. I’m gonna take a leak and when I get back I know you’ll come up with the answer because you’re a bright little thing.”

He leaves me paralyzed in the chair, stung by a primitive humiliation, like he is going to take a leak on me.

By the time he returns my palms are damp and I am breathing harder. “I did everything right and by the books.” Then, blurting it out like a child: “It was a perfect bust.”

Duane settles himself behind the desk and starts bouncing the tennis ball again.

“It would have been perfect,” he answers levelly, “if you’d told anyone else what was going on.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t call in a 211 in progress.”

I laugh. The relief is so profound I feel like taking a leak myself.

“Is that it?”

“You didn’t know what was going down inside the bank.”

“I had no way to know.”

“Exactly right, which is why you should have called in. You placed yourself and the public in unreasonable jeopardy.”

I can’t help scoffing. “It turned out fine.”

“It just as well could have turned to shit.”

“Well, it didn’t. I live right.”

My arms are folded and my legs stuck out in front of me. Defiant now. Catch me if you can.

“I’m glad you’re taking this lightly, Ana.”

“I don’t take anything lightly that has to do with my job, but I think, with respect, Duane, you’re overstating the situation.”

“I don’t. You showed poor judgment. That’s my assessment.”

His use of the words “judgment” and “assessment” just about causes my heart to stop. “Judgment” is one of the categories of our semiannual performance appraisals. If he gives me poor marks in judgment, it will derail my progress in the Bureau for years.

I know what I have to do and it is as onerous and revolting as if he were actually instead of symbolically forcing me to suck his dick.

“Message received. Next time I’ll call it in.”

“No, Ana, I’m afraid ‘sorry’ doesn’t cut it.”

“I didn’t say I was sorry. I said, Next time I will call it in.”

Duane gives me a real serious look. Serious and sober, Big Daddy concerned for my best interests.

“I see you’ve applied for transfer to the C-1 squad.”

“Correct.”

“Ana, you know I believe in full disclosure …”

I can’t wait to tell Barbara that one.

“… so I want to let you know up front that I’m going to attach an addendum to your request.”

“What kind of an addendum?”

“I’m going to say that in my opinion as your immediate supervisor you have demonstrated poor judgment and are not ready for transfer. We need to keep you close to home a little bit longer.”

By now my entire body is stiff with icy cold. I can hardly bend my knees. I wonder if moving slowly like this, taking my time to stand up, makes me seem unaffected and casual.

“You can’t make that call.”

“I know. It’s up to Special Agent in Charge Galloway.”

“And his decision remains to be seen.”

Duane nods almost warmly. “It remains to be seen.”

I walk past the message center, collect two messages from Mrs. Gutiérrez, and continue to my desk, although the lights in the bullpen seem awfully dim and in fact there is darkness on both sides of my vision so the world narrows to what I can see directly in front of me which turns out to be my telephone, which I try repeatedly to rip out from the floor connection with both hands and although it’s screwed in there tight I do manage to pop the cable from its staples all along the floorboard so that it has enough play to finally enable me to pick up the telephone and hurtle it against the wall.

Arms are around me and the smell of a man’s starched shirt and suddenly I am on the stairwell with my face up against the cinder block, hands pinned behind my back.

My nose is bending. I am hyperventilating.

My hands are released. I stand still. My shoulders ache from being twisted and wrenched.

“Are you sober now?”

I nod, still facing the wall. When there is no further action from behind I turn and slump down on the metal stairs. Donnato sits next to me.

“I hope I’m the only one who witnessed that little display.”

I brush my nose with my sleeve. It is scratched and bleeding. Doesn’t feel broken.

“Sorry. I had to get you out of there. Didn’t know if you were armed.”

“Armed,” I echo hoarsely, as if an assault rifle could have stopped that sweeping awful wave of darkness.

“I knew when he beeped you at the bank that Carter was get ting cute. He’s spent most of his career walking over bodies. Yours isn’t any different. Don’t take it so goddamn personally.”

I lean over and put my head in my hands. I want desperately to disappear. To be that small being in a dark place, inconsequential and alone.

“Talk to me,” he says, so gently that a tear actually leaks from my eye.

I shake my head silently. I don’t understand these overpowering, nameless sensations. I can’t seem to get control of my voice.

Someone passes us. I turn my face away. Donnato calls out very brightly, “How’re ya doin’?” and the person continues to clatter down the stairs.

“Seven-year burnout,” he says when they are gone.

“Is that what it is?”

“Unless you’re psycho and been hiding it from me all these years.”

A crooked smile: “Been trying.”

“This is a new Ana Grey. What’s going on?”

I can’t describe it. “Pressure.”

“I can dig that. Let me buy you a drink.”

I am deeply ashamed of having behaved like an asshole and certainly don’t want to sit around and dwell on it. If I weren’t fixated on the searing humiliation of having lost control, I might have heard the tenderness in Donnato’s voice.

“Thanks but it’s better if I work out in the pool.”

“You’re too good.”

“Hey, I’m perfect.”

“You try to be. That’s why you’re throwing phones against the wall.”

We are moving back toward the doorway of the stairwell. My body feels like it has been run over by a truck.

“It’s not just Carter.” Struggling to put a label on it: “There’s some weird stuff that came up that might involve my family.”

“I hope your grandfather is okay.”

“Him? Healthy as a horse and knocking the hell out of golf balls in Palm Desert.” It makes me feel brighter to think of Poppy in his yellow Bermuda shorts out there at seven in the morning with the other old farts — a foursome of retired policemen if you can picture that, cursing and telling racist jokes all the way down the fairway — embraced by the baking heat of the rising desert sun and the infantile pleasure of their unbroken routine.

“Poppy’s got it wrapped,” I tell Donnato. “No, it’s these other people.”

“Relatives.” Donnato shakes his head. “Take ’em to Disneyland.”

The wonderful simplicity of that idea makes me laugh.

“Okay now?”

I nod.

“Can you take care of it?”

“Sure.”

Donnato squeezes my arm. “Good triceps.” That wry, affectionate look. “Go swimming. See you tomorrow.”

When I duck inside to grab my bag I notice the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise embracing the phone in a tangled heap on the floor, the empty hanger still rocking above it.

SIX

A FEW DAYS later I slip into my car with the intention of returning a humidifier. I hadn’t been too precise about changing the water so it stopped working last winter and rotted in the bedroom all spring. When I finally dumped the tank out sometime around Halloween it was evident that new life forms had sprouted inside. The store where I bought it guarantees a “lifetime warranty” so you can keep bringing in the old fishy-smelling one and exchanging it for a brand-new one, no questions asked, for the rest of your life. I know, because I already pulled this stunt last year, when the original humidifier dried up and died.

Somehow despite the excellent intention of running over to Century City and back during my lunch break, I am still sitting here in the G-ride without having turned on the engine. I have found the Bible that belonged to Violeta Alvarado thrown on the passenger seat along with a ton of papers and law books and am looking through it, suddenly disoriented in the middle of the parking lot of the Federal Building.

Slowly removing the crossed rubber bands with the same care as Mrs. Gutiérrez, I run my finger down the dense type printed in Spanish on delicate tissuey pages and look through the faded snapshots again, stopping at the one of Violeta’s mother holding a baby. Behind them the landscape is gray green, scrubby and heartless.

I have never been to the tropics. I cannot know what life is for that woman and that baby. My past begins and ends with my grandfather — his California boyhood, his own mother’s trek across this country from Kansas, his devotion to the moral duties of police work in the expansive fifties, have formed my sense of myself as a full-blooded optimistic American and, growing up, there was never any reason to question any of it.

Now I am forced to question it all as I hold a piece of paper torn from a small notebook upon which is written the name of a white woman who allegedly fired a cousin of mine who was Hispanic. The name is Claire Eberhardt. The address is on Twentieth Street, eight blocks from Poppy’s old house, north of Montana, where I spent the first five years of my life, in the city of Santa Monica — a former beach town of funky bungalows and windswept Pacific views that has now become an overbuilt upscale enclave on the westernmost edge of the Los Angeles sprawl.

Even pulling out of the parking lot I hesitate, then make a decisive turn away from Century City and the sweet new humidifier, west down Wilshire and on to San Vicente Boulevard. These days I come to Santa Monica on Bureau business or to catch a movie at the Third Street Promenade, but north of Montana is definitely not my turf. This is the land of the newly rich where noontime joggers pass beneath scarlet-tipped coral trees on a wide grassy meridian. The Ford looks stupid next to Mercedeses and BMWs and hot Toyota Land Cruisers that have never seen a speck of mud. I take the fork onto Montana Avenue and curve past a golf course. Already the air is flooded with the scent of flowers and cool watered grass, pine and eucalyptus.

The top end of Montana Avenue could be a small nondescript residential street anywhere, but as you pass a school and start down an incline all of a sudden you are hit by a row of shops with blue awnings.

I have noticed that whenever you have awnings you have quaint.

On Montana Avenue there are lots of awnings: maroon awnings with white scallops, artsy-fartsy modernistic awnings that hang by steel cords.… The stores that don’t have awnings make up for it with two-story glass windows and dramatic lettering, letting you know that it takes a special kind of money to shop here: a lot.

Males and females amble along carrying shopping bags or pushing baby strollers, enjoying themselves. I guess they have nothing else to do all day. Sidewalk tables are filled with folks taking a leisurely lunch under green umbrellas, watching the steady stream of traffic flow down Montana Avenue to the ocean, which you can actually see at the rise on Fifteenth Street, a flat band of blue straight ahead.

I’m kind of mesmerized, it’s a different pace from the rest of the city and my old neighborhood after all, even if I could never afford to live here today. Passing the vintage Aero Theatre now wrapped in a slick retailing complex, I wonder if as a girl I ever saw a movie there, then on impulse turn up Twelfth Street looking for our old address.

There it is, just past Marguerita, beside some big pink modern construction with round windows: an old California cottage, which must have been built in the 1920s, with a pitched roof and a real estate company’s For Sale sign out front. I park with the engine idling. The house is tiny; a modest-sized beech tree in a dry scrap of a front yard easily hides half of it. The wood siding is painted a sickly tan and the front door and trim a kind of red chocolate brown. There are two narrow glass panels on either side of the door. The only distinguishing flourish is a bit of arched wood over the entryway supported by two posts, like an open bonnet with trailing ties.

Something hits my windshield, a spiny round seedpod from a gum tree growing near the curb. I wait for some revelatory memory to hit me over the head but there is nothing, just an abandoned old house. The property next door is also for sale. It is made of white clapboard and small enough to be home for a family of field mice. The chain-link fence that separates these two relics has been long smashed at the post, as if the neighbors had a problem backing a car out of the mouse-sized driveway.

It is curious all right. The age of the place alone makes it easy to picture Poppy as a handsome young man with blond hair and strong jaw striding out the front door in his blue policeman’s uniform, my mother on the strange little side porch coming off the kitchen shelling peas in some kind of a hairdo from World War II.… But that’s imagination, not memory.

My earliest real memory is of an event that took place fifty miles south. It was the first day of kindergarten at Peter H. Burnett Elementary School in Long Beach, 1965, when my mother said goodbye on the sidewalk and turned away, seemingly without emotion. Before that moment when she pushed me out into the world at the age of five there is only darkness and silence, but afterward I remember everything: the weak feeling in my legs as I crossed the schoolyard alone toward the sandy-colored building. The exotic art deco architecture that made it look like a castle carved from brown sugar. Inside I remember the spice of tempera paint and the fresh smell of new books and my first friend, Laura Levy, who wore two neat braids. We had sour-tasting milk in the afternoon.

Poppy, my mother, and I lived on Pine Street in an upper-middle-class neighborhood called Wrigley. Most of the homes had been built in the thirties, Craftsman or bungalow style, but ours was redbrick and brand-new. The trolley tracks ran two blocks away and it was a big deal to take the Pacific Electric Red Car into downtown Los Angeles to go to Cinerama or the May Company, a fancy department store they didn’t have in Long Beach.

The Public Safety Building that housed the Long Beach Police Department, where Poppy eventually earned the rank of lieutenant, was then less than ten years old, and seemed very forward with its sea-blue glass and columns encrusted in mosaic tile. In Southern California in the sixties everything was on the upswing.

I could continue from there, a million tiny remembrances of a normal childhood in a sunny coastal town where farmers would come to retire from the brutal winters of the Midwest; a conservative, easygoing community before developers got ahold of downtown and surgically removed every last twitching tissue of life. My claim to fame at Long Beach Polytechnic High School was being elected captain of the girls’ swim team. My best subjects were science and math. The motto over the school entrance still reads, “Enter to Learn — Go Forth to Serve,” and I guess I still take it seriously.

All of that is clear; what I can’t figure out is this wizened little preconscious cottage in Santa Monica. I strain to place myself inside its tantalizing history. What kind of little girl was I? Where were my secret places? Did I climb the beech tree? Who lived in the house next door? Memory does not respond. I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel, feeling numb.

The next thing I know I am driving up a street with tall pines and deep shade. Clearly when we lived here we lived on the modest end of the neighborhood; as the street numbers get bigger, so do the homes. By Twentieth Street the landscaping is lush, the flowers sumptuous, screaming orange-red bougainvillea flopping over white stucco walls. On every block gardening or construction work is being done by Hispanic men. Lunch trucks selling Mexican food cruise the area along with private Westec security patrols. I am concentrating on these details to avoid a growing feeling of sadness. I know it is coming from having seen that house, which I now wish I had avoided. I note a uniformed maid walking a dog and try to conjure up some cynicism but the sadness is there. Maybe I am confusing myself with Violeta’s children, it must be Teresa I am picturing huddled in the skirts of a starched dress in the scrawny marigolds beside my grandfather’s house, not me. Teresa alone and crying, not me.

• • •

The Eberhardts live in a two-story contemporary Mediterranean, bald and newly built. It has a red tile roof and two huge curved casement windows looking into the first-floor living room that echo the archway over an outsized door. A quarry tile walkway bends through a scruffy brown lawn; a few plants edge up against the off-white walls — except for a grouping of vigorous young birch trees, the place looks dry and neglected as if after paying a million and a half dollars the owners didn’t have the stamina to deal with landscaping. I guess to most people a million-and-a-half-dollar box with a few doodads is plenty.

Of course on this scale of house there is no doorbell — instead, a security system, with a square white button to push and a speaker to talk into.

“Yes?”

“Hello, my name is Ana Grey. I’m looking for Claire Eberhardt.” Since this is not government business I do not identify myself as a federal agent.

“This is she.”

“I’m a … friend … of Violeta Alvarado,” still speaking into the microphone. “Could I talk to you?”

Pause. “Violeta … doesn’t work here.”

I stifle the urge to say, Of course not, she’s dead. I am getting tired of talking to the wall.

“I know that. This will just take a minute, ma’am.”

“All right. Hang on.”

Silence. She’s coming. Which gives me the opportunity to study the front door — four feet wide and twice as tall as normal with a crescent-shaped window over the top, dark wood, mahogany maybe with some sort of finish intentionally scratched up. Just as I am wondering why anybody would need such a huge door, it opens.

She is holding a boy about two years old who is resting his head against her bare neck.

“Peter just woke up from a nap,” she explains, pivoting so I can see Peter’s flushed cheek and glossy eyes. They both have shiny black hair, so dark it almost has shades of eggplant purple, the boy’s in long loose curls, hers sticking out in all directions from a pink elastic band pushed up off the forehead as if she just wanted to get her bangs out of the way.

“I’m Claire.” She is wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and baggy turquoise cotton tights meant to hide a few extra pounds. Her breasts are loose. Even with the crazy hair and padded hips she is attractive in a reckless sexual way; but her looks are a neglected afterthought, as if it is enough that she’s made it from wherever she came from, she lives north of Montana. Although she seems as if she’s been napping along with her son, she is wearing strawberry-red lipstick. My first impression of Claire Eberhardt is that she is as unfinished as her house.

You’d expect her to take up the doorway with ownership and conviction, but instead she is backed up inside, curved around the child, unsure. She seems to be looking at me but away at the same time.

“Sorry to barge in on you, but it’s about Violeta Alvarado.”

“What about her?”

“Did Ms. Alvarado work here?”

“Yes. Until about three months ago. We had to let her go.”

“Why was that?”

She cocks her head in a peculiar manner as if staring down at a corner of the doormat. “It just didn’t work out.”

“How long was Ms. Alvarado employed here before you let her go?”

“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 locked 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.