North of Montana

SEVEN

IN THE DESERT everything is clear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s about the dogs.”

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

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

“Annie!” He is there in the doorway wearing nothing but a white towel at the waist, vain as ever, showing off his extraordinary tanned barrel chest and weight-lifters ropy arms.

Even though he is seventy, hugging him bare-chested is an experience in maleness that brings back Sunday afternoons at the YMCA on Long Beach Boulevard, the reward for sustaining a perfect freestyle for fifty yards being holding my cheek to that strong upper quadrant — the compact pectorals, cool feel of chlorine-scented skin, dark furry hair surrounding a useless nipple, fascinating turkey folds under the chin, hard shoulders beneath my small naked feet as he magically lifted me out of the water to dive over his gleaming wet head. I didn’t have a father to teach me to swim; I had Poppy.

“Happy birthday. You’re looking great.”

“Not bad for seven decades on this earth. What’re you drinking?”

“Brought my own.” I slip a bottle out of a bag.

“White wine?” He shakes his head. “That’s the L.A. crowd.” Grabbing a handful of ice, “Hope you still eat red meat.”

“I eat it and I fuck it.” Beating him to the punch.

He cracks a can of 7UP. “Easy on the language.”

“Sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend Moby Dick.”

“Is that how Feebees talk?”—derisive cop term for FBI agents—“I thought they were educated bastards.”

I laugh. Here we go. “We try to be tough. Almost as tough as you.”

• • •

Poppy sits in a chair near the balcony wearing nothing but the towel, legs crossed demurely, drinking Seven and Sevens until long after it is dark and the relentless air conditioning has given me a chill. The dogs are still out there. From time to time they nose against the glass near his feet like canine spirits conjured up by the original Agua Caliente Indians.

I admit that the other reason I drove out to the desert was to tell all the details of my perfect bust at California First Bank to Poppy in person. How I was alone. How I staked the guy out and made the right moves and cuffed him with no assistance. How my brilliant interview technique led the suspect to confess to six other robberies. How it was so good it was pure sex.

I am always offering Poppy things like that. Accomplishments. Gifts. His reaction is usually noncommittal, with the implication that it really isn’t good enough, although he did attend my graduation from Quantico in his lieutenant’s full-dress uniform, and he did cry. Still I keep coming back, hoping that what I’ve done will be better, that it will please Poppy at last.

Moby Dick is a more appreciative audience and I find myself playing to him. He follows the action as if it were a Police Academy cartoon (which he watches religiously in the shack on Saturday mornings), stomping his huge Jordans and shouting “Right on!” Poppy’s only reaction is to tell about the time he, as a rookie patrol officer, cornered a murder suspect alone on the footpath near the Santa Monica Pier and chased him onto the beach. It was Saturday in July, crowded as hell, the suspect dove into the ocean and was never seen again.

“Wow, Commissioner, that’s a story,” Moby Dick tells my grandfather reverentially.

“What else happened when you were a rookie? When we lived north of Montana?”

“Well, we had the famous Hungry Thief,” Poppy grins, settling back with his drink. “Broke into a market, stole a thousand bucks, left two half-eaten knockwurst sandwiches.”

Moby Dick laughs, a whistling snort up the nose.

“I went past the old house on Twelfth Street,” I put in casually. “Trying to remember what it was like. Did you and Mom and I ever live there with my father?”

“I’ll tell you something that happened,” Poppy says suddenly, eyes bright, blatantly ignoring my question. “I had you down at the station one time when all of a sudden we hear this god-awful racket and we run outside to see what the hell it is, and goddamn, a military helicopter is making a landing right in the parking lot.”

Moby Dick asks, “What for?”

“For John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Poppy nods to our dumbfounded silence. “The President wasn’t actually on board, but at that time he used to make quite a lot of trips out to L.A. — they said to see his brother-in-law Peter Law-ford at the beach, but actually it was so he could keep on sticking Marilyn Monroe, so the Secret Service was checking out where to land the presidential helicopter and I guess they thought the Santa Monica police station would be pretty secure, the stupid bastards, boy did they fuck up in Dallas.”

Moby Dick says, “Amazing.”

Poppy chuckles. “They had these guys painting lines on the parking lot, they had it all marked off with chalk, then this goddamn huge thing lands and blows it all away.”

“Did I see the helicopter?”

“You?” Poppy looks at me, surprised to remember I am part of the story. “You were a little girl, you were scared of all the noise and the hullabaloo. Held on to my hand like there was no tomorrow.”

I remember none of this. It is the oddest sensation to hear a description about yourself when you can’t remember any of it, like having sex and feeling nothing.

“Is it true President Kennedy had an affair with Jayne Mason?”

“Great legs,” Poppy croons, again ignoring my question. “They used to call her Little Miss Sunshine, of course that’s when she was a kid. She grew into some looker. The guys had a picture of her up in the station. I saw Jayne Mason maybe ten years ago in Vegas. Beautiful voice, really something. The way she sings makes you cry.” He pats a finger against his eye as if I wouldn’t believe him. “Those are my songs.”

Moby Dick interrupts my grandfather’s reverie with an urgent bulletin: “I’m only laying this on you because I hope and pray the FBI could do something about it but I’m warning you right now that when the shit goes down, I’m gone. I’m invisible. Okay?”

It turns out he’s heard there are satanic sacrifices of children taking place at Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs.

By this time I have killed the bottle. We forget about the steaks, work our way through two Domino’s pizzas and the birthday cake. “Let’s go down to the Escapade,” suggests Moby Dick.

In my present state it sounds like a lot of fun: “You mean that place with the twin girl saxophone players?”

“Those dolls were in their sixties at least,” Poppy corrects me.

“All I remember is drinking Salty Dogs and dancing with a retired locksmith,” I say.

“He’s dead. Sorry, golf tomorrow, seven a.m.”

“It’s a rough life, Commissioner.”

Poppy slips on a polo shirt and khaki slacks and we all go down to walk the beasts. It is midnight and the air must still be seventy degrees. The moon is high, crumpled, yellow as an old dead tooth. Moby Dick loads the animals into his van, which is spray-painted black and gray, and mercifully drives away.

We take a circuitous route through the complex just to breathe the night air. I suddenly decide that it is too late to start rooting around the family tree. I still feel stung by Poppy’s refusal to acknowledge the question about my father and don’t want to bring it up again. Besides, I’m tired. He’s tired. I have to get up at five to drive back to L.A. and be on duty by eight. Another time. Maybe over the phone. But my voice is talking anyway:

“Do I have a cousin named Violeta Alvarado?”

“Not to my knowledge. Not with a name like that.”

“On dad’s side of the family.”

‘Who is dad?” Genuinely puzzled.

“My father. Miguel Sanchez. Or Sandoval. Nobody ever told me which.”

Jesus, what is this? Just saying the name out loud, seeing him tense, and a cold chill passes through my body. Through the warm cozy alcoholic shroud I am suddenly alert. I am scared.

“We don’t know a lot about that son of a bitch, do we?”

“We must know something. Was he from El Salvador?”

“Somewhere.”

‘What was he like?”

“He was a common laborer. What do you care?”

“I’m curious.”

“Forget about it.”

Almost thirty years old and still afraid to make Poppy angry.

“Some people have shown up claiming to be relatives.”

“What do they want?”

Making it simple: “Money.”

“You know what I would tell them, whoever they are — get lost.”

“You didn’t like him because he was Hispanic?”

“I have nothing against Hispanics. I was pissed off because he knocked up my daughter.” He says this easily. Authoritatively. As the one in charge of history. “Then the son of a bitch walks away. Abandons her — and you. Why would you care about a guy who left? I’m the one who raised you.”

“I know that, Poppy.” I take his hand. “Would you rather he stuck around?”

“No. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with him.”

“What did she think?”

Poppy makes a little snuffle. A warning. “Didn’t matter what she thought. She was eighteen years old.”

“Why didn’t she ever marry again?”

“She was busy raising you.”

“But she was pretty. Did she go on dates?”

“I didn’t encourage dating.”

“Why not?”

“She was too young.”

I laugh. “Young? She lived with you until she died at the age of thirty-eight.”

Unexpectedly he puts his arm around me. “You getting this from the L.A. crowd?”

“Getting what?”

“This multicultural bullshit.”

I grin with slow deep amusement. “Poppy … I think maybe I am the epitome of multiculturality.”

As has been said of the Ayatollah Khomeini: he doesn’t get irony.

“Like hell you are. You’re an American and if you’re not proud of it then one of us has fucked up beyond belief.”

He goes behind a palm tree to take a leak.

I call after him, “The house on Twelfth Street is for sale.”

“I’m surprised it’s still standing.”

“Who lived in the little white place next door?”

“Swedish family. Everyone in the neighborhood was German or Swede. What I remember about them is I was working nights and they had a dog that barked its head off all day long so I couldn’t get any sleep.”

Alone, I sit on a curb with my arms around my knees. I am getting a headache from the gummy pizzas and the saccharine cake and too much wine and I really don’t like it in the parking lot anymore. Although the sky is jammed with glittering stars, down here it is very, very dark and the lights spotting the parked cars are too weak. A constant dry wind rakes the palm fronds, rattling them with a sound like the snapping of cellophane. I am wearing cutoffs and a sleeveless denim top and I feel vulnerable. My gun is in my bag upstairs. Just around the corner from these last silent buildings is open desert. Black space.

My heart is beating fast. I keep hearing dogs. No, now I can identify them as coyotes, laughing like a bunch of lunatics out there in the darkness. The parking lot looks strange. Did that fat asshole put LSD in my drink? I am walking home with Juanita Flores. She is wearing a sleeveless lilac-colored cotton dress trimmed with red rickrack and she is older than I am, maybe eight years old. She has stolen a tablet of white paper from school for the novel she is writing about a pair of sisters who live in a haunted house and she is asking me to steal some stamps from my mother’s bureau drawer so she can send it in to be published. She seems to be lonely and never supervised and I don’t know where she lives. We met in the playground at Roosevelt Elementary School and she drew me into her vivid world of fantasy, often wandering up to Twelfth Street on her own to find me and continue our games.

In this memory I am seeing in the black and white of the park ing lot, a mongrel named Wilson gets out of the yard of the brick house next door and confronts us in the middle of the street, snarling and snapping. We are terrified to go on. Juanita begins to whimper. I know I must save her. I drag her back to my house.

“Wilson’s out! Juanita can’t go home!”

My policeman grandfather will take care of this. He comes out of the bathroom holding a rolled newspaper, big, blocking what little light there is in the narrow corridor to the kitchen.

“She can’t stay here.”

“But Wilson—”

“I don’t want a little spic girl in my house.”

I watch dumbly as he escorts my friend to the front door and out. Parting the white lace curtains that cover the narrow windows on either side of the door I see Juanita Flores alone, immobilized by humiliation and fear. The barking dog is ahead. A closed door is behind. Slowly a yellow stream trickles from beneath the lilac dress, puddling on our doorstep.

But I am safe. I am not thrown out. Even though I have heard the boy who was my father referred to as “the Mexican,” that was far away and doesn’t count and I am not a little spic girl like Juanita Flores. In the cool darkness I look up at my grandfather, grateful for his love. From that moment on, I want to be just like him.

EIGHT

IT IS KYLE VERNON’S IDEA for everyone to contribute to a potluck lunch once a month. A serious student of French cooking and connoisseur of fine wines, Kyle once conned three of us from the office into taking a class in pizza making in the private kitchen of some schmancy chef up in the Hollywood Hills. I sat on a bamboo stool and drank the free Chianti Classico and made wise-ass remarks. Kyle was in ecstasy. He just didn’t want the excitement to end. The Brentwood housewives went home with special pizza baking stones and dried oregano still on the vine; I went home with no illusions about rolling out the dough for the man in my life.

This month Kyle shows off with a couple of French apple pies for which the apples have been cut so thin he must have used a razor. The slices are arranged in perfect concentric circles on a layer of custard and covered with a coating of orange jelly that he identifies as apricot glaze.

“Geez, Kyle,” I say, “why didn’t you just go to a bakery? You could have saved a lot of work.”

“Ana, it’s people like you who wrecked the Pietà.”

“Pietà,” I muse just to get him going, “isn’t that some kind of a Middle East sandwich?”

Barbara baked lasagne and Rosalind brought a tuna casserole. Duane Carter’s contribution, needless to say, is Texas chili so bitter and hot it makes you sweat. Frank Chang’s mother made Chinese raviolis and I plunk down a family-size container of Chicken Mc-Nuggets.

Kyle looks pained. “I’m not even sure we should allow that semi-food product on this beautiful table.”

“Hey, I don’t have a wife to go shopping for me.”

“Who’s talking wives? I went to Ranch Market and personally inspected each and every piece of fruit that went into those tarts.”

“That’s because you’re a compulsive maniac who should be treated.”

“What about Barbara? What about Rosalind?” Kyle goes on. “Do they have wives? Or do they put their best effort forward for their squad?”

“He has a wife.” I point dramatically to Donnato, who looks up from prying the lid off a giant blue plastic bowl filled with lettuce and topped off with slices of carrots and radishes that are in turn carefully overlaid with rings of red onion and green pepper to create a virtual kaleidoscope of vegetables.

“Admit it, Donnato. Your wife made that salad.”

“The evidence is compelling. I’ve never known a man who could use Tupperware,” Barbara remarks in her dry way. “The airlock seal is beyond them.”

Donnato unscrews the lid from a fresh bottle of blue cheese dressing and dumps the entire thing in a pile into the bowl. “Guilty as charged. Chain me to the wall and beat me.”

“Very tempting,” I whisper, reaching past him for the Chinese raviolis, which I know from experience are the best thing out there.

At first he doesn’t seem to react. His eyes are on the black plastic tongs he is using to toss the salad; the tongs from the utility drawer in the harvest gold kitchen in the tract house in the Simi Valley, where the daisy pot holders match the daisy towels and the metal canisters lined up by size are lettered Sugar, Spice, Everything Nice.

Finally, after giving it a lot of thought, Donnato calls my bluff: “If you’re into that sort of thing I know a leather bar up on the Strip.”

“And I bet you’re a regular customer.”

Still deadpan: “We’ve been partners for three years but how much do you really know about me, Ana?”

I laugh. “I can see you in a lot of things, Donnato, but somehow leather is not one of them.”

“What’s so funny?” Barbara wants to know.

“Donnato in a black leather girdle.”

Donnato’s mouth has taken on a funny pull, a hint of a smile beneath the beard.

“I can see you,” he says. “Annie Oakley in black lace.”

Barbara elbows my ribs conspicuously and fires something back at him which I am not hearing. His eyes touch mine for half a moment—Annie Oakley in black lace? — then he turns away and I find myself unexpectedly flushed from the groin like a teenager.

Back in the bullpen a phone is ringing.

“I’ll get it.” Rosalind automatically puts her plate down.

“No — it’s mine.” I can see the light flashing on my desk across the room.

The moment I hear Mrs. Gutierrez’s voice the sexy little high evaporates as my stomach contracts into an anxious knot.

“Everybody is sick,” she is telling me. “All the children have the runny nose and Cristóbal is hot.”

“Does he need to see a doctor?”

“I don’t think so. I think he gonna get better in a day. I just give him soup.”

I am watching the group behind the glass partition of the lunchroom. Donnato is listening along with everyone else to Duane Carter holding forth. Even with his slumped shoulders Duane is tallest. He says something that makes everyone laugh.

“Did you get the money from Mrs. Claire? I was waiting to hear.”

“No. I didn’t. I talked to her, but … I didn’t get anywhere.”

“How can I take care of the children with no money?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Gutiérrez.”

While I am standing there, Henry Caravetti, a mailroom clerk with muscular dystrophy, rolls by in his electric wheelchair and puts a bundle of envelopes into my tray. I give him a thumbs-up. His pale lips stretch into a wobbly smile as he removes one frozen hand from the controls, jerks it up toward the ceiling to return my gesture, and travels on.

“These children are your family,” Mrs. Gutiérrez spits angrily, “but you feel nothing. Lady, I am sorry for you.”

She hangs up. I sit there motionless, feeling attacked from within and without. Suddenly it all turns to anger and I slam through desk drawers, purse, and the pockets of my jacket, finding the peach and gray card from the Dana Orthopedic Clinic squashed on the bottom of my blue canvas briefcase along with some warped throat lozenges. Once again I fight the impulse to identify myself as an FBI agent in order to cut through the standard receptionist bullshit but I do use the words “very urgent” and “legal matter,” which finally get me through to Dr. Eberhardt.

“I’m sorry — who are you again?”

I tell him that I am a cousin of their late housekeeper, Violeta. It sounds odd but I stick with it.

“Apparently you still owed her money when she left your employ.”

Cold: “She was paid.”

“She told a friend you still owed her approximately four hundred dollars.”

“That’s crazy. I wouldn’t rip off a housemaid.”

“Let’s short-circuit this.” I feel guilty and deeply conflicted and he is a doctor living in a million-and-a-half-dollar house with a crystal chandelier. “Her children have nobody to take care of them, okay? May I suggest out of common decency, as her last employer, you make a contribution to their welfare?”

“Hold it, Ms. Grey,” he says, making a big deal out of Ms. “I fired Violeta. Do you want to know why? Instead of watching my children, which she was paid very well to do, she was inside gabbing with another housekeeper. Because of her negligence my four-year-old daughter fell into a pool and almost drowned.”

Subdued: “I didn’t know about that.”

“No, you didn’t know, but here you are making insulting accusations.”

“Still,” pressing forward despite shaky ground, “her children need help.”

“How about help from a government agency? I pay fifty-one percent of my income to the government, which is supposed to take care of people like Violeta. People, by the way, who aren’t even American citizens.”

Another burst of laughter from the lunchroom.

There is a pause as if he’s thinking about it, then Dr. Eberhardt blows an exasperated breath into the phone. “If she claims I owed her money I’ll write out a check just to close the books.”

I thank him and tell him to send it directly to Mrs. Gutiérrez.

“Violeta behaved negligently, but what happened to her was senseless and outrageous, and I feel for the kids. Just don’t ever come to me again.”

I sink into the chair, nodding triumphantly toward the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise as if it should congratulate me for solving the problem of Teresa and Cristóbal. It doesn’t wave or hold its sleeves up in a clasp of victory, however, and a darkening shadow edges my relief. The doctor’s description of Violeta’s negligence does not square with his wife’s reaction to my questions. Claire Eberhardt shut down, saying only, “We had to let Violeta go, it didn’t work out.” If a maid let my kid almost drown in a pool I’d feel a right to be a bit more critical. My impression of her at the door wavers and finally becomes clear: Claire Eberhardt was behaving like the classic suspect with something of her own to hide.

As if to sort things out, I absently start going through my mail. That is when I find the official letter from Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Robert Galloway, who has reviewed my request for transfer to the Kidnapping and Extortion Squad. He has denied that request, citing an “unfavorable addendum” from my supervisor, Duane Carter.

I return to the lunchroom and stand there empty-handed while people tuck into neat slices of Kyle’s French apple tarts and Duane Carter tells a story about a fifteenth-century katana sword worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harder than steel we make today, it is still incredibly delicate. Touch it and your fingerprint will ruin the surface. Breathe on it and it will begin to rust in thirty minutes, Duane says.

The men wow and the females in the room start to clean up.

I say to Barbara: “Duane fucked me.”

“What now?”

“Request for transfer denied.”

“Damn.” She folds her arms and sinks into the word. “Damn.”

Our voices are low. My jaw is clenched with the effort of not giving in to a rage that is steadily building out of control.

Barbara leans over to pick up a dish off the table. “This is discrimination.”

Looking past her I see the smudgy glass window plastered with notices of Softball games and scuba diving trips, wavery white shapes of anonymous people passing in the hall. Sometimes I so desire the comforting of a mother.

“If it is discrimination it’s going to stop right now.”

Ignoring her look of caution I step toward Duane Carter and square off with him right there at the potluck lunch.

“Hey, Duane.”

“Ana?”

“The SAC denied my request for transfer.” The talk quiets. “Your unfavorable addendum had a big influence on his decision.”

Duane glances at the members of the squad who have caught the drift and suppresses a smile.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Are you really sorry, Duane?”

“Of course he’s sorry,” says Donnato from out of nowhere. “Now he’s got to put up with you for seven more years,” giving our supervisor a sideways cock of the head as if commiserating on how difficult and challenging it is to manage women on any level in this world today. I hate it when Donnato mediates for Duane, even though he does it because he thinks he’s protecting me.

“I guess I can put up with her,” Duane jokes.

“If you force me to continue to work on your squad, Duane, I promise you this: only one of us is going to be left standing.”

Donnato’s smile fades into a look of appalled disgust, as if I have just wandered out into the middle of a firefight like some rank rookie amateur while he and every other smart veteran is well under cover and intends to stay there. Nothing I can do for you now, he is telling me with a shudder, the only question remaining is whether he will hang around to watch me get blown away.

But instead of letting loose with everything he’s got, Duane surprises everyone by pulling up a chair and straddling it so he and I are actually eyeball to eyeball and I can observe the fine texture of his porcelain-white skin and the few short dark hairs that lie flat beneath his lower lip, wondering if he even shaves.

“Why don’t you like me?”

It is meant to be disarming and of course it is, this roll-up-the-sleeves honesty undertaken in public, Duane’s attempt to make me look like the bad guy, my aggressiveness turned ugly in the face of his genuine hurt. I know Barbara doesn’t buy it and neither does Donnato, but they leave the room anyway, along with most everyone else who suddenly has to get back to their desks.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“But that’s just it. I don’t dislike you, Ana. If I’m tough with you it’s because you can take it. And maybe also, frankly, because you need it. You do tend to carry a chip.”

“So you denied my transfer for my own good.”

Duane isn’t interested in sarcasm from me. He is concentrating on following the line of his sincerity, which is an effort.

“When the time comes, you’ll take off like a bat out of hell and nobody’ll stop you. But there’s no need to be in such a hurry. Christ, you’re not even thirty yet, are you?”

I have been leaning my butt against the edge of one of the brown lunchroom tables. I am wearing a short black skirt, black tights and heels and it makes me feel sexy and insouciant to be lounging there, arms crossed, fingering the soft sleeves of the white sweater I wore for the potluck lunch, the one with the lacy almost see-through bodice. Duane Carter is looking at me with a neutral kind of innocence like an adolescent boy who has quit setting fires for the day and is on his knees playing with a toy car collection like when he was six.

“The fact remains that I made a perfect bust out there at California First Bank and I deserve to be rewarded for it, not punished.”

“I’m trying to explain this is not about punishment—”

“Sure it is. You’re punishing me because I’m female.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and laughs out loud. “I hope you don’t really believe that.”

“Yes, I do, and I’m going to bring an EEOC lawsuit charging sex discrimination against you and the Bureau to prove it.”

Duane gets to his feet and tosses the chair aside. His hands are deep in his pockets, feeling for those stolen matches or whatever his source of destructive psychic power. The innocence is gone and black fire rages once again in his eyes. That didn’t take long.

• • •

Ever since that class action suit on behalf of Hispanic agents, the FBI has been under scrutiny; another lawsuit filed by some black agents also received wide attention. I know very well the powers that be within the Bureau will not tolerate accusations of discrimination against the Los Angeles field office.

It turns out, after a couple of conversations with the advocacy lawyers, that I have a very good case. So good that on the eve of the filing deadline, Special Agent in Charge Robert Galloway calls both Duane and me to his office for a special meeting.

I have never been inside Galloway’s corner office, with the wide-open view of downtown Los Angeles and the better carpeting and new butterscotch plaid furniture.

“I had to go back to the start of this thing to try and get somewhere,” Galloway begins in his Brooklyn accent, “and I can see where each of you has a particular point of view.”

Galloway worked the organized crime division of our New York office for eighteen years yet there isn’t a strand of gray on his head of thick wavy black Irish hair. He always wears a turtleneck — his trademark — never a shirt and tie, no matter what the occasion or weather, giving rise to rumors of tracheotomies and bullet wounds and cancer scars.… But he still smokes cigars so either he’s got a death wish or, like the rest of us, he holds out for being a maverick in his own way.

It is ten thirty and below us the blocky low cityscape of Los Angeles is lit by a dazzling milky white haze that will burn off to clear skies and seventy-five degrees by noon. By coincidence Duane and I are both wearing navy blue suits with white shirts, which makes us look like a pair of airline reservation clerks.

On the coffee table there are souvenirs of Galloway’s days in New York City, including a model of the Statue of Liberty and a four-inch oval brass seal of NYPD Detective Division.

Galloway picks it up and worries it in his hand. I ask what it’s for.

“It’s a belt buckle. They couldn’t afford to give me the whole belt.”

He refers to a file on his lap. He has come around the desk, management style, positioning himself near us to show we are all equal, comfortably sitting with legs crossed, an unlit cigar between his teeth.

“Going back to this bust at the bank … it looks like Ana did quite a noteworthy thing. She ascertained there was a felony in progress, single-handedly isolated and subdued the subject so that he could be arrested without incident by LAPD.… And then”—he shakes his head and laughs—“the schmuck turns out to be good for six other robberies!”

He laughs and laughs. He laughs until he coughs and turns red in the face.

Duane Carter is not even smiling. He is leveling that eerie killer look at Galloway. I remember Donnato telling me about their rivalry and feel a chill, wondering if Galloway feels it, too.

“Special Agent Grey failed to call for backup assistance, thereby endangering herself and the public,” says Duane.

Galloway wipes his eyes. “You’re right. Calling in a 211 in progress would have been the approved procedure.”

His arm is dropped over the side of the chair but he’s still holding the heavy belt buckle, fingering it with implacable cool. They are locked on to each other now.

“He’s right on a technicality.” I am swinging my leg impatiently. “He’s not right to deny me a transfer because—”

“I said at the beginning that you both have a point,” Galloway interrupts sharply. “Stop pouting, Ana, it’ll give you worry lines and you’re much too young and pretty.”

He raises his eyebrows, daring me to call him on it. Instead I take a cue from his own behavior and laugh. More of a snort, actually, but at least I’m not pouting.

“I’m going to allow Duane’s addendum to stand.”

Meaning it will be a part of my personal file forever. Other people down the line will read it, not know the facts, and assume I screwed up. The unfairness of it propels me to my feet.

“That is just plain wrong!”

“Nobody says you have to agree.”

“I don’t agree. I disagree in the strongest terms and I’m certain the EEOC will back me up.”

I stop breathlessly. The power has shifted with dizzying speed. Now they’re both watching me, secure in their chairs, while I’m stamping my foot in the middle of the room.

The worst of it is Duane Carter looking at me with pity.

“Well, if you’d calm down and cool out,” Galloway continues, “I’ll tell you the rest of my decision.”

I back down into the chair.

“I’m going to let the addendum stand … but I am also going to approve Ana’s request for transfer.”

“Excuse me,” says Duane, “but ain’t that just the teensiest bit disingenuous? How can you do both?”

“I’m approving Ana’s transfer on a contingency basis. If after a trial period it looks like she can handle it, then we’ll go ahead and move her up to Kidnapping and Extortion.”

“What a complete pile of steaming horseshit.”

In my opinion it is a masterly compromise.

“What’s the contingency?” I ask eagerly.

Galloway gets up and goes back to the desk, puts the half-chewed cigar in an ashtray with two other soggy butts.

“I’m going to put you on a drug case. See how you do.”

I’m leaning forward in my chair ready to jump up and sprint for it, whatever it is.

“This came to me through the Director’s office. It’s what they call ‘high profile.’ ”

I can’t tell if Galloway is smiling because he’s giving me a gift or because he finds the words “high profile” particularly amusing, worthy of an ironic twist. In the meantime, Duane’s face is turning so dark it is almost the color of his navy blue suit.

“Jayne Mason is alleging that her physician got her addicted to prescription drugs.”

There is a moment of stupefied silence. We were expecting Colombians, Mexicans, Crips, and Bloods.

“You’d have to be on Mars not to know Jayne Mason was in and out of the Betty Ford Center,” Galloway continues. “Well, now she claims she’s an addict because of this shyster M.D. named Eberhardt.”

Duane: ‘What’s the Bureau’s jurisdiction?”

“She claims the drugs he gave her came from Mexico.” Galloway tosses a file at me.

“Mighty thin,” observes Duane.

“Look at Title 18 of the Federal Code, Drug Abuse Prevention, or maybe 21, Wrongful Distribution.”

I am speechless.

I know perfectly well that I am obligated to tell the Special Agent in Charge immediately of my conflict of interest concerning this case. That my alleged cousin, who died under mysterious circumstances, worked for this very Dr. Eberhardt.

“Sounds like a case of medical fraud to me,” Duane persists, “which would put it under the jurisdiction of the White Collar Crime Squad, am I wrong?”

“Like I said before,” Galloway repeats sternly, “this came from the Director’s office.”

He has made the political significance clear to both of us.

“I will handle it with discretion.”

“Fuck discretion,” Galloway grunts. “Just get to the fucking bottom of this so I can appear halfway fucking intelligent.”

We file out. Duane is already through the doorway when Galloway touches my shoulder lightly. I turn. The cigar is back in his mouth.

“There’s no reason to file that lawsuit now, am I right?”

“I think you’ve been very fair.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Duane is waiting for me in the hall.

“Prestige case,” I say, tossing my hair.

“Dog case,” he replies with a great big happy smile and strolls away.

It doesn’t matter what Duane Carter thinks, this is my chance to advance a dozen squares on the achievement chart or even rocket off the chart — Jayne Mason, it has to be big — and the fact that I have prior knowledge of the players involved has pivoted in my mind from being a conflict of interest to an incredible advantage.

I am thinking about that day in the alley behind the orthopedic office when I saw Jayne Mason and the accused doctor together. She was dressed in red, breaking out of his grasp, striding toward the limousine. Now I remember something else. A fanciful detail. The doctor had been holding a rose. A yellow rose on a long stem. After the limo disappeared, he tossed the rose into the trash and the heavy door snapped shut behind him.

NINE

THE FIRST STEP is to assemble all the information on Randall Eberhardt, M.D., that currently exists on the hard disk and magnetic tape archives of the world.

I run his name through our in-house computer, which will turn up previous arrests anywhere on the globe and discover there are none. I check with the California Department of Motor Vehicles for citations of reckless driving, driving under the influence, or speeding, which are, again, negative. I subpoena the records and obtain a printout from the telephone company of toll calls made from both the medical office and the residence on Twentieth Street, looking for a pattern that would point to a drug connection, but all I learn is that the Eberhardts still make a lot of calls to friends and relations in Boston.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why break my record?”

“Did you get the autopsy report yet?”

“No.”

“So what’s the status of the case?”

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

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

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

“So do a million other dead Mexicans.”

“You asshole.”

He laughs with a wild stoned hysterical edge.

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

“Pretty good.”

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

“I’ve got a few other things going.”

“This is major.”

“So is my hard-on.”

I bite my lip. I need this badly.

“John. Cut me some slack here, okay?”

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

• • •

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

“Not necessarily. It could be very calculating.”

“You mean blackmail and extortion?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Better than Westwood.”

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

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

“You like it out at the beach, Jan?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m her assistant.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Coffee would be great.”

“Decaf or regular?”

“Highest octane.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was painted by Edouard Manet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My back stiffens.

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

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

She smiles indulgently with polished red lips.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, she does.”

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

• • •

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

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

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

And that he is completely naked.

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

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

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

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

“Have a beer.”

“I’ll take a black currant — boysenberry.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was invited.”

“By who?”

“Your boss.”

“Someone under investigation?”

“Could be.”

“Someone on staff?”

“Yes, Tom. We know all about that scam you’re running.”

He smiles and raises his eyebrows over the Dos Equis.

“Got me.”

“You can run but you cannot hide.”

We stand there looking out to the ocean and I’m the one who feels like an idiot because I’m dressed, don’t ask me why.

The tide is coming in faster now. The boulders Tom climbed over are almost totally obscured by foamy surf, which makes it harder for a second figure, a woman, to make her way around the jutting cliff, clear the rocks, cross the sand, and join us.

“Meet Maureen.”

Also naked.

Maureen is a very thin redhead, too thin, as if she’s got an eating disorder. She has bony arms and flaccid thighs, two small mounds with flat nipples for breasts, but great hair. Ropes of terrific red hair whipping around in the quickening breeze.

Maureen takes Tom’s hand and says nothing. I guess she’s shy. She reaches for a denim shirt inside the locker but instead of putting it on — as I hope she will — spreads it out and lies down.

Tom grabs a towel and sits cross-legged next to her, his middle-aged form like a big pile of pearly white Crisco beside her delicate nymphette body. One meaty hand tips the bottle of beer to his mouth while the other smooths Maureen’s young freckled forehead.

“You two look like you want some privacy.”

“No, no. We’re just on a break.”

“This is how they take coffee breaks in Malibu?”

‘Whenever possible,” Tom grins.

“You both work for Jayne Mason?”

“Maureen does her clothes.”

“I have a friend named Barbara who, due to a tragic childhood deprivation, is obsessed about Jayne Mason and where she gets her clothes.”

Maureen shrugs her bare shoulders. “She takes them.”

“What do you mean, takes them? From a store?”

“From the studio.” Maureen keeps her face to the sun, speaking without opening her eyes. “She’ll be like talking to a grip or someone, doing her Greta Garbo imitation, and I’m backing the car up to the dressing room and carrying out boxes of stuff.”

‘What kind of stuff?”

“The stuff she wore in the movie. I guess it’s kind of like hers anyway.”

“Does this behavior have anything to do with the drug problem?”

“That’s over. She gave up drugs,” Maureen tells me in a solemn voice. “Big time.”

Tom rolls over and props up his head on an elbow.

“They all steal from the studio, Ana. Standard operating procedure.”

“Someone will go, Where did you get that dress? And she’ll go, Oh, it’s from my personal designer, Luc de France, when it’s really from Twentieth Century-Fox. I love Jayne.” Maureen smiles into the infrared rays.

I realize this girl can’t be more than twenty years old with about as many brain cells.

“How long have you been working for Jayne?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a year?”

“Isn’t that fast to be given such a big responsibility? Don’t they have union rules?”

“Maureen’s an assistant,” Tom explains. “There’s someone else — or actually a few people — in charge of, you know—”

“Designing, buying, fitting,” Maureen chants like a child at her lessons, “conceptualizing.” She waits. Her eyebrows frown. “I don’t really want to do clothes.”

“No?” I drain the bottle.

“I have a great idea for a screenplay.”

“Little Maureen’s big dreams.” Tom strokes her hair affectionately.

“Maaagda thinks it’s a good idea.” She opens her eyes just wide enough to glare at Tom.

He smiles placatingly. I toss the bottle back into the cooler.

“Why don’t you stay and join us?” he offers.

“Join you in what?”

“Whatever.”

I look out at the ocean one more time. The waves are six feet high now, heavy and forbidding.

“In another life. Nice to meet you, Maureen.”

I walk back to the cliff, grab hold of the chain, and hoist myself up the stairs.

When I get to the top, just a touch out of breath, I am startled to meet Jan, who is standing on the head of the promontory, wearing the upper half of a wet suit, hair streaming back over the shoulders in a stiff wind. He is looking at the ocean through a pair of high-powered binoculars.

“Dolphins,” he explains as I pass, without taking his eyes from the glass.

Clearly he is watching the naked lovers.

TEN

JAN DOES CALL to “reschedule”—and cancel and reschedule — maybe a dozen times. I keep working on my other cases but drop everything each time Jan says his boss is ready to meet. Once I go all the way to a fancy Italian restaurant at the top of Beverly Glen only to be told by the maître d’ that Miss Mason will not be able to meet me but I should go ahead and order lunch as her guest. I choose a seafood salad for $21.00 and when it comes, to my horror, a tiny naked octopus the size of a dime crawls out of the mixed greens to the edge of the plate and collapses onto the tablecloth.

“To keep the calamari extremely fresh, the chef puts them into the salad alive,” the waiter explains, “and kills them with olive oil.”

The next day I find a rubber octopus hanging at the end of a noose over my desk. What astonishes me is that one of them — probably Kyle — actually stopped off at a joke store and bought a rubber octopus. The merry pranksters also made photocopies of a picture of Jayne Mason and taped them on my wall: “Meet me at the Polo Lounge!” “Meet me in the bathroom.” “Luvya, baby!” “To Ana — My Dearest Friend.”

It is now “absolutely set in stone,” according to Jan, that I am to meet Jayne Mason in the office of her Beverly Hills attorney a week from Monday. That settled, I am able to give full attention to deep intercourse with Les, a new mechanic at Marina All-Makes. I actually enjoy having work done on the Barracuda, it’s such a quixotic challenge to keep it running. Although he can’t explain why the headlight is shorting out he is telling me the smart thing would be to replace the entire wiring and light bulb assembly. It will cost around $300 and we’ll have to wait for parts.

I become aware that something is going on at the far side of the bullpen, a small commotion over a mildly extraordinary event, as if someone had won fifty bucks in the lottery, but I am concentrating on Les, trying to control my irritation, appealing as he was at seven a.m. this morning in a filthy flannel shirt, ponytail down the back, long blackened fingers wrapped around a white paper coffee cup, aromatic vapors and stale breath commingling in the cold air.

Maybe old Les was intimidated by the muscle car, or maybe he just had a hangover, but if he had applied a screwdriver instead of a screw job he would have seen that the headlight bulb is interchangeable with the one Chrysler uses in all its Dodge vans. You could pick the thing up for ten dollars in an auto parts store, but as I am trying to educate him the disturbance at the other end of the office has started to build and is coming toward me. Like a wave cheer in a baseball stadium people are standing up in tiers and within fifteen seconds everyone around me is on their feet.

My first thought is that we are under attack, that some nut has managed to get through the security door, but nobody’s reaching for their weapon and no SWAT teams have arrived. “To be continued,” I promise Les and step around my desk to crane a look, only to find the view opening up as a sea of white shirts parts for Jayne Mason, who is walking right toward me.

I don’t have time to wonder what she’s doing here. Frantically I rip the photocopies of her picture off the wall. Big flakes of plaster come loose and fly into my eye. I stuff everything into the trash, trying to compose myself into the serious-minded FBI agent Jayne Mason has come to see. Then I realize a rubber octopus is hanging over my desk.

I glance down the aisle. I can see Magda Stockman’s glossy black head above the crowd and the flash of gold earrings. She is subtly managing the flow of human energy around her client by positioning herself like a rock, keeping Mason in her lee while moving her along, protecting her from the onslaught while maintaining a benign expression and expertly scanning the room to anticipate what might be coming toward them next. Being almost six feet tall gives her the ability to see over the heads of many people.

I calculate I have ten seconds before they reach me so I grab a scissors and step onto a chair, but two desks away the entourage suddenly turns left, continues to the end of the bullpen, and disappears into Galloway’s office. I climb off empty-handed, staring after them.

Immediately Barbara Sullivan is on my back like a dervish, digging her fingers into my deltoids.

“I got her autograph!”

She sticks a legal pad under my nose. A carefully legible signature has been written across an entire sheet.

Jayne Mason can turn a scrap of paper into a marquee, she can transform the day with a walk across a room. The woman is magical, and even I, a disbeliever, feel on the outs, hurt and inadequate because I am not on the other side of that door. “What is the big deal about Jayne Mason?” I mutter sourly.

“Either you get it or you don’t,” Barbara sighs and hurries away. “I’m calling my sisters in Chicago — they’re not going to believe this.”

She takes two steps, then stops herself and turns back as if suddenly surprised to see me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Trying to get my headlight fixed.” I have already redialed Marina All-Makes.

Barbara’s eyes grow round and horrified. “Why aren’t you in Galloway’s office?”

“She came to see him, not me.” I offer a stiff smile.

“Are you crazy?” She snatches the phone away. “Get in there.”

“Barbara, I can’t just crash a meeting—”

“You’re going to sit here and wait for a royal invitation?” Goofiness gone, her eyes are bright with the same fanaticism that comes over her whenever someone mentions Duane Carter’s name. “It’s your case, don’t let them ace you out.”

“Obviously this thing has kicked up to a higher level.”

Barbara grips my upper arm in a very unpleasant way. “Get in there, you dumb shit.”

Her reaction seems excessive, but I say, “I’m going.”

She releases me. It hurts.

“Jesus Christ.”

I pick up a file and a half-drunk can of cola and sashay slowly toward Galloway’s closed door, lifting the uninjured arm to fluff at my hair, looking back once to find Barbara Sullivan glaring at me. The eldest of seven, she can be swift and severe. If I had a big sister like her, God knows where I’d be today, but it wouldn’t be here.

• • •

As I sidle into the room, Galloway booms heartily that he was just about to buzz me.

He should have told me to bring my own chair because the place is crowded.

Jayne Mason sits alone on the butterscotch plaid sofa. I can’t take my eyes off her face; naturally and perfectly formed, it radiates light just like her Manet. She is wearing a peach-colored chiffon dress with a scoop neck, long sleeves with lacy cuffs that flop over the hands, and a flounce at the knee and dyed-to-match high-heeled sandals. Maybe later she is going to a bridal shower.

Magda Stockman is to her right in the armchair and two male attorneys, who, I am told, are from a Beverly Hills law firm, perch on typing stools that have been rolled in. Galloway lugs an ungainly black leather desk chair around and motions for me to sit. It’s one of those masculine “executive” numbers where the back is higher than my head, the seat swivels uncontrollably on loose bearings, and I feel like some bizarre shrunken monarch about to be dethroned by centrifugal force.

All this time Jayne and Magda continue a private conversation.

“It is truly astoundingly funny, it never stops,” Magda is saying. “I cannot believe it will not be a huge success.”

“I hear it’s a four-hankie ending.”

“No, it’s wonderful.”

“I cry all the time,” says Jayne. “Why do I have to go to a movie to cry?”

“He’s lovely in this picture, he’s a darling person. And they are so real together.”

“We’re all flying back to New York on the same plane,” Jayne tells her. “Isn’t that cute?”

Everyone in the room has been listening politely without understanding a thing. Finally Jayne Mason acknowledges the rest of us by asking:

“Can I get some Evian water?”

“We’ve got sodas in the machine.” Galloway nods in my direction. I raise my can.

“The sugar would send me around the bend.”

“We’ve got regular water.”

“My nutritionist would have a conniption.”

Galloway is looking a bit rumpled and both attorneys have begun to search for a phone but Stockman hasn’t flinched.

“The water is coming, Jay.”

Again I am impressed by the dark throaty voice that seems to match the authority of her big solid body and today’s olive brown suit with brass buttons and gold braiding on the sleeves, an elegant takeoff on an officer’s uniform (Barbara would know which designer). Her legs are stocky — peasant legs — she keeps them knees up, pressed together, in brown stockings and matching pumps with the signature Cs. The olive quilted bag with the gold chain also says CC. She is sporting more Cs than a caracara.

While there is a nervous tenseness about Mason, Stockman is nothing but composed command. Her movements are resolute and unhurried. The black hair drawn back into the bow accentuates the cheekbones and knowing Mongolian eyes.

“Really, we can get water,” Galloway is going on, rattled.

“The hell with water, bring on the Scotch!” Mason cries cheerily and we laugh.

“Did you say hello to our woman FBI agent, Ana Grey?” Stockman prompts.

The movie star looks me in the eyes and extends her hand, instantly, subtly, putting me in my place. Make no mistake: we have been gathered here to serve her personal needs. I stumble out of Galloway’s chair. My hand is damp. Hers is trembling.

“We’ve heard such good things about you,” she murmurs with a smile.

It takes me by surprise. I can’t imagine what the good things were or who said them to whom.

“We’re very pleased to have a woman on the case,” adds Stockman.

“Ana’s here because she’s good, not because she’s female,” Galloway chimes in, placing a cigar in his mouth. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to light this.”

“Oh, men and their cocks,” Mason declares. “I told Clark Gable, why do you smoke a cigar when you’re hung like an ape?”

“Jay, don’t fib.”

“Women don’t need to smoke a big cigar or carry a gun to prove they can come.”

The two attorneys giggle quietly as if they’ve heard this kind of thing before. Galloway catches my eye with an amused look.

“Not that we don’t need to protect ourselves, that’s another story,” Miss Mason continues. “Tell me, Ana, do you carry a gun?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she whispers, “you can protect us from the lawyers!”

Everyone in the room is hooting and snorting as the door opens and Maureen, the formerly naked Maureen of the private beach, enters the office carrying a large bottle of Evian water.

“Sit by me, sweetie.”

Jayne Mason sweeps the folds of the dress aside so Maureen can be close. She is introduced as “the very talented girl who does my wardrobe, and a dear friend.”

‘We’ve met,” I respond, although from her vacant look I wonder if Maureen has a clue about when and where. She is definitely, as they say, “in her own space.” Today she looks like an incarnation from another era with those extraordinary ropes of orange-red hair falling from a tortoiseshell comb, a vintage rayon dress loaded with amber necklaces and running shoes with thick socks.

“I’m sorry, this is all they had at the 7-Eleven.” Maureen pulls a party pack of fifty plastic cups from a big canvas shoulder purse, plucks one out, and pours for Jayne.

Magda Stockman now addresses Galloway: “In my conversations with the Director, he assured me that we would receive your most serious attention.”

“You got it,” says Galloway. “Do you mind if we put this on tape?”

“I was hoping you would, so we may all have a record.”

Galloway places a Panasonic microcassette player on the coffee table and presses the On button.

Magda nudges softly, “Jayne?”

Jayne Mason stands up. Her eyes blink. Her hands find each other and clasp at the diaphragm as if she is about to begin a concert.

“This man, this Dr. Eberhardt, got me addicted to painkillers.”

She is moving now, turning to us occasionally, testing the swing of the skirt, adjusting her body to the space of the room.

“Of course I trusted him, I was his patient. At first the pills helped, but he kept giving me more until I couldn’t live without them. I became a drug addict, I can admit that now without shame.”

She lifts her chin, relaxing into the role.

‘What kind of pills were they?” Galloway asks.

“Dilaudid.” She glances at Stockman for reassurance, then goes on. “He said they were generic Dilaudid from Mexico, that they were cheaper that way, although he sure charged me a fortune.”

I follow up: “Where did you get these pills from Mexico?”

She looks back to Stockman, confused. The manager answers for her smoothly: “He gave them to her in the office.”

“He didn’t write prescriptions?”

“Prescriptions would have been easy to trace. This guy is smart,” says one of the suits.

“Not that smart,” says the other. “Dispensing a controlled substance from his professional office?”

The intercom buzzes. Phone call for Miss Mason. She disappears into an adjoining office. The lawyers take the opportunity to make calls of their own. Galloway clicks off the tape recorder. We make small talk. I go to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later we start again, Jayne Mason now poised dramatically by the window.

“Where did Dr. Eberhardt keep the Dilaudid?” I want to know specifically so when we search the office he doesn’t get the jump and flush the pills.

“In the examining room in a locked cabinet. He had a shoe box filled with bottles and boxes of all sorts of pills with Spanish writing on the labels. He’d give them to me, just like that.”

I think about this. Locked cabinet. Pills in a shoe box. Dr. Eberhardt sounds like a reckless fool. What I saw that moment in the alley behind his office was just the opposite: a man in his prime with everything ahead of him, very much in control. It was she who was out of control that day.

There are more interruptions — Miss Mason would like some yogurt to tide her over until luncheon but it has to be nonfat and it has to be honey nut crunch, until finally I’ve had it.

“Ms. Mason, with respect, can we cut to the chase?”

Galloway rolls his eyes. The two lawyers freeze on their stools as if a bolt of electricity has just shot up their butts, but Miss Mason and Ms. Stockman exchange a chuckle.

“I told you she was terrific,” the manager assures the actress. To Galloway, “Please tell your secretary Miss Mason will not be taking any more calls,” and nods toward her client to begin.

“I was doing a picture at Fox, a spy thriller kind of thing, and it was the scene after the cocktail party where they throw a bomb through the embassy window.… And I was dancing with Sean — what a love! — who plays my husband, the ambassador who gets killed.… We were rehearsing for the camera, dancing in front of the most beautiful marble fireplace, when I’m supposed to hear gunfire in the distance and break out of his arms — well, I took one step and suddenly my ankle went out and Sean tried to catch me but I fell right on top of my leg, all twisted. The floor was hard as blazes. What kind of floor was that, Maureen?”

“Teak.”

“Right onto the teakwood floor.”

“And you went to see Dr. Eberhardt?”

“They packed my leg in ice and put me in a limo and Maureen and I took off down Pico at about a hundred miles an hour, right, sweetie?”

“I felt sick at my stomach the whole time,” Maureen says in a soft, sweet voice. “For you. Because you were in such pain.”

“Thank you, darling.” Jayne squeezes her hand.

“Were you already Dr. Eberhardt’s patient?” I ask.

“That’s where fate steps in. Actually I’d never met Dr. Eberhardt. They wanted to send me to Cedars but I insisted on going all the way to Santa Monica to see Dr. Dana, a dear, dear old friend I’ve known for years. My driver was calling ahead on the car phone when they told him Dr. Dana had recently retired to Maui and this young Dr. Eberhardt from Boston was taking his place. By that time we were halfway there and I was in such agony and so mad at Dr. Dana for leaving me that I couldn’t think about anything else.”

“How was Dr. Eberhardt’s examination?” Galloway wants to know. “Would you say it was thorough and professional?”

“As a medical man, he’s absolutely wonderful. Very smart. Very well educated. And charming. He was moving my hip around and it hurt like hell and I said, ‘I’m really a big chicken, I can’t take pain,’ and Dr. Eberhardt said, ‘Don’t kid me. I saw you kick that gunslinger in the balls!’ Well, he made me laugh and I knew I was under his spell.”

“What was the diagnosis?”

“Troco-something bursitis of the hip. And I tore some cartilage in my knee.”

“What was the treatment?”

She turns to Maureen. “You were in the room. What did he say?”

“Rest, ice, and physical therapy.”

I wait a moment. There is silence except for the faint whining of the tape recorder.

“No pills?”

“What?”

“Dr. Eberhardt did not prescribe any pills for your bursitis of the hip at that time?”

Jayne Mason gives up her ownership of the room to sit on the edge of the coffee table and bend toward me until her face is about ten inches from mine. She smells of citrus and vanilla.

“I’ll be very honest with you,” she says. “He would not have given me those pills if I didn’t ask for them.”

“You asked for the pills?”

“Yes.” Her skin, even up close, is flawless. The aquamarine eyes are rimmed with green and unnaturally shining with large black pupils. “He gave me the pills because I told him I had to go back to work that afternoon.” She is speaking slowly and deliberately. She wants me to buy this — her bare-faced, up-close, not-ashamed-of-anything honesty.

“You mean so you could work on the movie, even though you were injured?”

“I’ve had a lot of problems in the last three years, Ana,” speaking intimately now as if we did in fact meet in that fancy restaurant up on Beverly Glen, two rich ladies sharing lunch while baby octopuses commit suicide off our plates. “I’ve been through two agents, I’m being sued by a so-called producer — I can’t tell you how difficult it’s been. I owe a lump-sum payment on a third mortgage to the bank—”

“Jay, let’s stay on track,” Stockman warns.

“This is the track. This is why he gave me the pills. I owe the bank five hundred thousand dollars. If I don’t pay it, I will lose my house in Malibu. I had to finish that picture — and believe me”—she stands restlessly—“it was a piece of crap.”

She frowns, thinking about the crappy picture, pouring Evian water while everybody waits.

“So I made a deal with Dr. Eberhardt. If he would just give me the pills so I could finish work, I would do ice packs, physical therapy, whatever he wanted.”

“Did he agree?”

“It was supposed to be for one time. But I was weak and he played into my weakness.”

“How?”

“If I had a headache, he’d prescribe pills. Then I’d get a reaction and he’d give me something else, until I became a dependent wreck. He never said, Jayne, be a big girl and go cold turkey. He was the doctor, I put myself in his hands. Finally I got into the Dilaudid and it became a chemical addiction beyond my control. The bottom line is I needed Dr. Eberhardt and his pills to get through the day.”

“Did you sleep with Dr. Eberhardt, Ms. Mason?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Did he ever send you roses?”

“I sent him roses,” she laughs. “I send everybody yellow roses, it’s my way of saying thank you. And he did fix my hip.”

“You must understand this man has destroyed her career,” Stockman intones. “Who will hire a known drug addict to make a movie? All this negative publicity has made her uninsurable and without insurance she cannot be employed to act. She has no source of income, and due to some unbelievably incompetent money management, Jayne Mason is in a serious financial crisis.”

Stockman fixes those knowing eyes on me — wolf eyes, when you look carefully, with that same predatory calm.

“But she has decided not to be a victim anymore. As a woman, you understand what courage that takes.”

Considering what I’m going through with Duane Carter, it hits home. “I’ve fought my battles.”

“We all have.”

Gee, I kind of like the feeling of the men in the room being excluded for once.

“Ana, I know you are going to make a difference — not only to Jayne, but to other women who don’t have the resources to stand up to exploitation.”

Stockman is as skilled a performer as her client, and I’m ashamed to say I fall for it. The flattery — of me, of each other — is finally as dizzying as the narcotic perfume of yellow roses and in an anodyne haze I promise to do my best.

As Galloway escorts everyone out, I compliment Miss Mason on her peach chiffon dress.

“Don’t you love it? It’s by Luc de France, my personal designer.”

“I’ve heard of him.” I smile at Maureen, who is still holding Mason’s hand like a child. There is nothing in her look to acknowledge the joke. But then, there is precious little there at all.

• • •

Two days later the Boston field office comes through with the gold. As a result of their deep background check they located a former patient, Claudia Van Hoven, who claims Dr. Eberhardt got her addicted to prescription drugs, exactly like Jayne Mason.

I am perched at an angle on Donnato’s desk so I don’t have to look at the picture of him and his wife.

“You know how long it takes to get approval for travel — but Galloway told me to get on a plane for Boston tomorrow and come back with Van Hoven’s testimony against the doctor. An hour with Jayne Mason and he’s like a puppy dog rolling on his back with his paws in the air. Get her anything. Do anything.”

Donnato’s looking through the latest stats on bank robberies in Orange County. They’re up.

‘Want some advice about Boston?”

I’m always eager for his expertise. “Tell me.”

“They have the best meatball subs in the world.”

I shake my head restlessly. “Galloway is treating me differently now that I’m working Hollywood.”

“This has nothing to do with Hollywood,” Donnato observes.

“Come on — if Joe Schmo called the FBI and said some doctor gave him too many Percodans, you think I’d be flying off to Boston on a background check?”

“It’s politics,” he explains patiently, “Magda Stockman is a major contributor to the Republican party. She hangs out at the Annenbergs. She was one of the private citizens’ who paid for the renovation of the White House under Reagan, don’t you remember? Oh, that’s right, you were twelve.”

“Still, when a person like Jayne Mason—”

Donnato interrupts, “Jayne Mason is another dippy actress and, believe me, Galloway would never roll over for a pretty face.” He holds up a hand to stop my protest. “Magda Stockman is the power player.”

He shakes his head sadly and goes back to the printout. “You ought to be reading The New Republic instead of Engine Grease World.”

“I like engine grease. You should give it a try.”

He pretends not to hear.

I laugh and slip off the desk. “I feel sorry for you, Donnato. Who will you have to abuse while I’m gone?”

“Only myself.”

• • •

This is wild. I get to go home early to pack for an eight a.m. plane to fly to a city where I have never been, on my own case, with no supervision except the SAC himself. My head is humming with what I need to bring and what the moves will be once I get there.

At this hour the lobby of the Federal Building is filled with great blocks of brownish yellow afternoon light but the press of humans has not slowed since I arrived this morning. The same impatient crowd waits to move through metal detectors monitored by two excruciatingly thorough security guards, and outside the line to get a passport seems longer and, if possible, slower.

The lobby is a place of crossroads where the course of each of the thousands converging from all parts of the world cannot be logged, but they have this in common: desperation and a seething frustration with the bureaucracy of the United States government, a combustible anxiety that makes me always stay alert when crossing these marble floors.

Maybe it’s that alertness, or perhaps a sixth sense when it comes to John Roth, that warns me he is close a split second before he calls out, “Ana.”

Yes, I’d caught the figure leaning against a wall, and known it was John despite the dirty hair down to the shoulders, raggy beard, and ripped jeans. The posture, the hungry gaze, cause my alarm system to shriek.

“You look good,” he says with a smirk.

“You look like Serpico.”

“Undercover narcotics. I like to run with the vermin.”

His shirt, missing a button, is open at the navel. The belly is concave, jeans hanging low.

“The fox guarding the chickens?”

“You’re looking at Mr. Straight.”

I nod. He looks like hell.

“Are you staking me out?”

“Just waiting. Indulging in a little fantasy.”

He takes a step toward me. I take a step back.

“I’ve got something for you.”

“Try it and I’ll bust you so fast—”

“No,” he interrupts, “it’s that Alvarado homicide.”

I stop my backpedaling but maintain a good eight feet between us.

“I went back on the street and tracked down that kid, Rat, the one who witnessed the drive-by. Turns out he was able to ID the car.”

“What jogged his memory?”

“He’s a male prostitute, I threaten to bust his ass, so he comes around. Turns out it was a gang hit but Alvarado was not the intended victim. A dope deal was going down a few feet from the bus stop. One of the suspects was marked by the Bloods. They missed. Ms. Alvarado happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You’re sure?”

“The kid is good.”

“What about the hands? Or did they blow them away just for kicks?”

“The autopsy report says amputation of the hands resulted from the victim attempting to protect herself from the bullets.”

He brings his arms up and crosses them over his face.

I can see it now, all too clearly. A car swings around the corner. Pop-pop-pop and street people with experience duck for cover. Violeta Alvarado, out there alone in the middle of the night, who knows why — but innocent, she was innocent—is struck over and over again. She tries to fend off the hits but they come with astonishing force and so unbelievably fast.…

“There’s no connection between Alvarado being killed and her working for the doctor. She just got caught in the crossfire. Happens every day.”

I say nothing.

“I did this because I thought that might mean something to you.”

The autopsy photos flip through my mind like a grisly pinup calendar.

“It won’t help on your case, but at least now you know your cousin was clean.”

I’m thinking of the way her little girl hid under the crib. And the boy, with his lost dark eyes.

“She was your cousin, right?”

I have not answered John for several moments. Now I cross the marble one square at a time, deliberately walking toward him until we are face-to-face.

“Yes, John. She was my cousin.”

In acknowledging this I find I have gained something. Relief. Confidence. I can stand here, this close, and hold the look of a man I have long dreaded in a frank, new way. I can see new things, like the fear in John Roth.

“Take it easy on yourself.” I touch his shoulder. “And thanks.”

“Hey,” he says, shaky, off guard, “I’m not a total fuckup.”

We look at each other one last moment, then I take off, out of the building and into the parking garage at a fast clip. My teeth are all gummed up from the two colas I had to get through the afternoon and I can’t stand wearing these tight panty hose one more minute. Inside the car I wrestle them off. Much better. I turn on the engine and back out, on my way to crucify Dr. Randall Eberhardt.

ELEVEN

BOSTON IS a massive traffic jam just like Los Angeles except here the cars are crammed together even more tightly, pushing through tiny, twisting, illogical roads that used to be cow paths.

Or maybe it’s just that I have arrived during rush hour in the middle of a spring sleet storm.

I am stuck on the ramp leading out of Logan Airport, watching the wipers of the rented Taurus sweep away crescents of slush. Through the momentary clear spots I strain impatiently to make out the road to Boston, to Randall Eberhardt’s past, which I had felt all along was going to be promising. But all I can see in the darkening evening are dazzlingly lit billboards for the New England Aquarium and Prince Spaghetti Sauce.

I am wrestling with the heater to get it to stop fogging up the windows. I have been waiting forty minutes to enter the Sumner Tunnel, watching hunks of soft ice picked up by the windshield wipers and carried lazily upward then sliding down into long melting peninsulas. If I were working the case with Donnato we’d be making jokes about this freaky weather, cozy in the warmth of the car like a pair of lovers sneaking away for the weekend; even the thought makes me burn with embarrassment as the traffic suddenly lurches forward.

The tunnel itself is no erotic experience but a narrow, claustrophobic gas chamber at the end of which is an incomprehensible tangle of overpasses that trick me into a blind detour through a neighborhood of weathered three-decker houses dominated by huge oil tanks. I get back on the overpass, panic when I see signs for Cape Cod and get off again, only to find myself in Chinatown. Finally I pull into a gas station and call Special Agent Lester “Wild Bill” Walker at the Boston field office, who tells me to stay put. He’s there in twenty minutes, climbing out of a green government car, a big man wrapped in raincoat and knit wool cap, coming toward me through the silvery falling globs of ice illuminated by my headlights like some kind of Eskimo dream bear. As I roll down the window he extends a gloved hand, the most welcome hand I ever shook, and that one gesture — my bare palm in his leathery paw — makes it clear how unprepared I really am for this trip.

“Where are you staying?”

“The Sheraton.”

“Follow me.”

He gets back in his car and we drive out of there. In a few minutes we are somewhere deep inside the business district, an untouched pocket of downtown where every building is not a skyscraper or cutesy renovated warehouse but an old brick factory or granite-faced office building. You can easily imagine, a hundred years ago, Portuguese fishermen selling haddock from pushcarts and scriveners arriving before dawn to calculate the earnings of great banks and behind those huge mullioned windows Irish girls stuffing mattresses in flurries of goose down. Commerce thrived along this crooked lane as it will tomorrow morning and for the next one hundred years, but tonight the street is utterly empty, utterly dark, except for the misty rose-colored fight of sodium vapor street lamps coming through the freezing rain.

“This ain’t the Sheraton, Wild Bill.”

We have parked a block apart and met on a street corner. I am keeping a hand on my purse, inside of which is the.357 Magnum.

“Thought we’d get something to eat,” he says.

The street is deserted and pitch black. Not an open liquor store. Not a lighted coffee shop.

After the long flight and the insane drive through the butt end of Boston, I am thoroughly disoriented except for one thing: I am here to nail Randall Eberhardt.

“I don’t have time for sight-seeing.”

But Lester is already striding ahead. He opens a door. Now I notice a smoky storefront window with people moving behind it. We enter warmth and cigarette smoke and a noise level equal to a commodities exchange.

It is a large bare room with a big old mahogany bar, dusty brass fans, a wall of mirrors that reflects the downtown crowd. Briefcases are lined up beneath laden coatracks. Everybody — male and female — is wearing a suit. I take off my raincoat and hang it on a peg. In my navy blues with the skirt primly brushing the top of the knee I look like every other female attorney and stockbroker there. I like the feeling. The convivial talk, the good, clean smell of whiskey make me feel very present, ironically more present than in my usual life in Los Angeles, where it takes all your energy just to stay on the grid. But there is another difference: in Los Angeles I live with the feeling of constantly being judged. Here nobody is watching. The relief is so profound that after five minutes of standing among this crowd of friendly strangers, my neck starts to relax all by itself, miraculously as loose and easy as a newborn babe’s.

Lester buys us Bloody Marys and we shout at each other until an overweight woman with pocked cheeks and teased yellow hair takes him by the arm, kisses him on the lips, and leads us to a table, upon which are a pair of plain salt and pepper shakers, an ashtray, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce. We both switch to vodka martinis and are immediately presented with a platter of freshly shucked clams. I decide to forget about jet lag.

Lester is an old warhorse who’s been around since Hoover, which is why they assigned him to this case. He’s through chasing gangsters. A background check on a Harvard doctor is just his speed. On an assignment like that you can stay loaded all afternoon. I realize when he’s on to a second vodka martini before we have seen menus that the reason he likes this place is not the authentic pressed tin ceiling but that it is far enough from Government Center so no agents are likely to come here and he can self-destruct in peace.

Red faced, it seems an effort for him to reach across his beefy chest to an inner pocket of a moss green plaid wool jacket and remove two sheets of folded paper.

“Think I’ve got what you need here.…” Smoothing them with shaky hands. “This Van Hoven gal.”

He pauses to lick his lips and take a kiss of vodka; yes, they are close friends.

“Everybody else says the same thing about Eberhardt — nice guy, smart, good athlete, good doc, that sort of crap. But this Van Hoven gal really has a hard-on for him. Says he ruined her life.”

“Is she good?”

“She’s a music student, plays the violin for chrissake.”

He gives me a strained smile: “Come on, Ana. I wouldn’t have drug you all the way to Boston if I didn’t think she was good.”

“I’ve got a lot riding, that’s all.”

“I’ve been doing this for a number of years, Ana. Don’t worry. I won’t let you down.”

I think of his big hand rescuing me from the freezing night.

“Anything on your computer about Eberhardt?”

“Criminal checks negative. No malpractice suits. A regular boy scout. In fact in 1985 the guy flew on a mercy mission to some damn famine in Africa.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t turn into an asshole,” Walker suggests encouragingly.

“Any background on his wife? Could she be tied up in this? Pushing drugs, spending his money?”

“What I got on his wife is that she’s a nurse. That’s how they got together, over at the New England Deaconess Hospital. Both local kids, grew up here. Except he’s Cambridge upper-crust WASP and she’s shanty Irish, no offense.”

“Why should I be offended?”

“Sometimes I put my foot in it. Thought you might be Irish.”

“No … but a lot of people think so.”

“Armenian?”

“Spanish, actually.” I feel myself blush. “Half and half.”

“A Spanish señorita. Or,” continuing at his courtliest, “shall I call you señora?”

“Señorita.”

He nods. For no reason at all, we toast.

When the waiter appears, Wild Bill tells him, “The señorita will have fish and chips,” which makes me cross my arms on the table, lay my head down, and laugh.

• • •

We are very drunk. The air is clear but a sheet of ice has formed on top of the sidewalk. We grip each other’s arms as we slide toward our cars. I am feeling a lot of affection for Wild Bill, dyed black hair and all. It takes me a while to maneuver out of the parking space, and when I do I discover that the road has glassed over as well. The green car is waiting for me at the corner of the deserted street, red taillights wreathed in white steamy exhaust. I smash right into it.

Wild Bill climbs out. “This is a government vehicle!” His arms fly up and back down to his sides. Then he shakes his head and skates back inside, slams the door, and we begin our slide across Boston. It feels like I am going sideways. There are wrecks at every intersection. The AM radio blasts an old Rod Stewart song, “Maggie May,” out the open windows and the heater is turned up to broil. I am reckless. I know nothing about this city except that it is complex beyond imagining. There are millions of beds in this city like cocoons in a butterfly colony and inside each one is a unique individual with a unique history about to be born or replicate itself or die except for me: I don’t have a bed, I think with boozy self-pity, skidding to a lopsided stop at a light on a corner before a row of darkened redbrick town houses. Behind one drawn parchment shade there is a warm light. Maybe there, in a room I will never see, in a city I know nothing about, a mother is awake nursing a child and the child is at peace.

Certainly not my mother, and not me. She was there, in the house, but vague. What the hell was she doing? I demand to know in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. The question arises, righteous and crystal clear. Why don’t I remember being held by my mother or soothed by her, why was I always alone in my room, listening to her cry? Because she didn’t want to have me, comes the self-righteous response. She was a teenager and pregnant and her lowlife boyfriend split. She was weak and couldn’t cope with having a half-breed brat. Only Poppy was strong enough to love me.

When we get to the Prudential Center, Walker waves his gloved fist out the window of the now battered and bruised government vehicle and heads off. I plunge into some mammoth underground garage and rise up again carrying my suitcase to a lobby like every other in America, then rise even further to a room with a stunning view of the city, hard white lights and provocative red ones; sitting down at a desk, inebriated, reaching for the phone instinctively, unreasonably, selfishly, from unutterable loneliness for the only one who loved me, dialing 8 for long distance and then the number where my grandfather lies asleep in the icy cold bedroom of the condominium in Desert Hot Springs, California, longing to wake him from his deep stillness and bring him back to me, but the phone rings emptily many times and I cannot.

I force myself to drink three glasses of water and strip down to my underpants before sinking into the thick soft mattress where I pull the sheet, blanket, and heavy bedspread over my shoulders and dream about the helicopter.

I am outside the Santa Monica police station holding my grandfather’s big warm hand. Everything is colored red by sunset light, like looking through the orange wrapper of a Charms lollypop. The President’s helicopter is landing in a storm of fine orange chalk, its huge belly pressing down on us — I am terrified that we are going to be crushed. The chopper touches down and JFK climbs out, floating along the steps, not waving, very sober, something is wrong. He is wearing a dark suit. His face is dead white and his head is mangled by bloody gunshot wounds. He is a walking corpse.

Beneath the heavy coverings I wake up frozen stiff, mummified by fear. The dream is not about JFK. It is about my father, bloodied and dead.

• • •

Wild Bill Walker and I are sharing a bench in a playground on the northwest corner of the Cambridge Commons. It is hard to tell which direction is northwest at nine in the morning with a hangover. I circled the park several times until sighting a big galoof sitting alone, looking like a bum with his big raincoat and cap, and realized that must be him. As we waited there under leaden overcast skies I began to envy that cap and the heavy black shoes with thick gum soles.

Claudia Van Hoven had insisted on meeting here instead of her place or anywhere else. She told Wild Bill she has a tiny apartment and her husband, a graduate student, works at night, sleeps during the day. With the baby, she told him, it’s hard enough.

The playing fields are bald stretches of half-frozen mud. I turn my face into a wet wind. We have now been waiting almost an hour and a half during which I have heard every detail of Wild Bill’s radiation treatments for prostate cancer five years ago.

Finally I stand restlessly. “This is fucked.”

“She’ll show.”

“Let’s go to her house.”

We are already through the iron gate of the park when I look back and see a slight woman in a long dark coat with a trailing red scarf wheel a stroller across the puddles and into the playground.

“That’s the lady,” Walker says with relief. “Told you she was good.”

We approach and shake hands all around. Claudia Van Hoven smiles brightly. She is younger than I am, early twenties, young enough to have smooth uncrinkled skin around the eyes.

“Have you been waiting long?”

I glance at Wild Bill, who I know would say nothing.

“We got here at nine,” I tell her.

Claudia looks worried. “What time is it now?” She checks her watch and makes a pained frown, as if just realizing she had lost something. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”

“My daughter has four kids, all boys,” Wild Bill says with a corn-ball wink. “Sometimes she loses entire days at a time.” He takes her elbow and eases her down on the bench, going on about his grandsons and getting her to talk about her baby. I’m starting to admire his style.

“What will happen to Dr. Eberhardt?” Claudia wants to know.

“He could lose his license to practice medicine,” Walker tells her gravely. “He could go to jail.”

She closes her eyes for a moment then looks off into the distance through gold-rimmed glasses; small, old-fashioned oval frames like they wore to sign the Constitution. She is bareheaded. The wind blows her straight shiny brown hair. It must look pretty when she bends to play the violin.

“Do you want to see him go to jail?” I ask.

“The angry woman inside me does.” She gives us a reassuring smile. “Not to worry — I won’t let her interfere.”

She has an artsy way of talking but seems sincere.

“Tell us how you became a patient of Dr. Eberhardt.”

She doesn’t balk at the tape recorder. She explains how three years ago last March she was crossing the street to go to a concert at the Gardner Museum when a kid in a Datsun Z nipped around the corner and bounced her off the windshield twenty feet into the air. She spent six weeks in the hospital in a body cast. Dr. Eberhardt was the senior orthopedist.

“He talked to me a lot. I was trapped in this cast and he talked to me, for which I was grateful.”

A tear forms and she wipes her eye. I am thrilled by the emotion. Save it for the witness stand, baby.

“I was worried I would never play again. He sat with me … and he promised I would.…”

Walker fishes out a pocket-sized pack of Kleenex and gives her one.

“I don’t know how long I was on medication in the hospital, but it was all those months afterward that he kept giving me pills.”

“What kind of pills, Claudia?”

“Dilaudid. Valium. Halcion when I couldn’t sleep. I was so doped up I couldn’t even listen to music anymore.”

“Were you able to go back to the violin?”

Claudia shakes her head. “She died.”

“Who died?”

“The musician inside of me.” She is pushing the stroller back and forth in short strokes. “I kept telling Dr. Eberhardt she was dying.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to be patient, that the healing process takes a long time, and gave me more pills.”

The crown of her head and the nap of the brown wool coat along her shoulders glisten with the first tentative drops of rain. The stroller cover is all the way down over the baby, who I assume is asleep since I have not heard or seen it. I can’t feel my fingers or toes. Walker writes in a small spiral pad.

“How long did this go on with Eberhardt?” he asks.

“For a year after I got out of the hospital. Then Allan came along and told me I should stay away from him, that he wasn’t good for me, he wasn’t telling me the truth.”

“Allan is your husband?”

“My helper.” A dreamy smile invades the tears. “My dear friend.”

“Did Dr. Eberhardt write prescriptions?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Where did you get the prescriptions filled?”

“Bay Pharmacy on Mass Ave.”

“Great.”

Walker says, “I‘ll check it out,” and makes a note.

“Were you addicted?” I ask. “Meaning that you couldn’t stop taking the pills if you wanted to?”

“Yes.”

I fix her right in the eyes. “Then how did you stop?”

“Allan helped me. That’s what he was there for.”

“Claudia, why do you think Dr. Eberhardt prescribed these drugs if he knew they could be dangerous?”

“I was depressed. My injuries weren’t healing. Maybe he thought I would make trouble for him.” She stands. “I’d better get the baby home.”

“It’s getting cold,” Walker agrees, a Boston euphemism for the onset of hypothermia.

“We’ll be coming back in a few weeks to take your deposition,” I tell her, walking toward the gate on numb wet stubs of feet. “And then we might ask you to fly to California at government expense to testify against Dr. Eberhardt. Would you agree to that?”

“The angry woman inside me can’t wait to get on the airplane,” Claudia says with a smile.

I turn off the tape recorder and smile back. “Bring her along.”

• • •

Walker and I are running for a phone booth in Harvard Square. Because they have made the Square a pedestrian mall and closed it to traffic, our cars are double-parked three blocks away. Hordes of students and homeless people seem intent on getting in our way. My plane leaves in a matter of hours and I still need to see Eberhardt’s former supervisor at the hospital.

“Too risky,” Walker is huffing. “Why I ruled it out in the first place. He’ll just get on the horn and tell your boy you’re onto him.”

“I’ll take the chance.”

“It’s foolish when we’ve got that Van Hoven gal all sewn up.”

“She’s not sewn up until we confirm her story.”

“Let’s get out to the airport, get something to eat.” Walker is plainly ready to quit. After all, it is past noon and we haven’t had our first Bloody Mary of the day.

A middle-aged woman has set down a canvas tote that says Save the Trees in front of a pay phone. I grab the receiver off the hook before she can remove her gloves, fiercely turning on Walker at the same time: “I’ve got to come back with something hard or they’ll skin me alive, do you understand?”

Dr. Alfred Narayan, chief of staff of orthopedics, will be glad to speak with us but is scheduled for surgery in forty-five minutes. No problem. We dash back to our cars and Wild Bill ably demonstrates how he got his name, leading me with red bubble flashing on a wild charge down Memorial Drive, across the Boston University bridge to Longwood Avenue. I have noticed horseshoe tracks embedded in the sidewalks of Boston at various spots where Paul Revere passed on his famous ride; well, they should have tire tracks to commemorate ours.

Dr. Narayan is waiting for us at the nurses’ station of the cardiac care unit: tall, aquiline, black curly hair cropped close, warm brown eyes, and pale brown skin. He is wearing a red silk tie beneath the starched white lab coat. The accent is not Indian but educated Oxford and he smells like lilacs during a wet English spring.

“This must be a serious business to send federal agents,” he says over his shoulder, leading us past gurneys and IV stands to the end of a hall.

There is no time for pleasantries.

“When Dr. Eberhardt was on staff, did he prescribe a lot of drugs?”

“Only what was called for.”

“Did he ever overprescribe?”

“Of course not.”

Walker: “Did you notice any drugs missing during the time he was employed?”

“No. We’ve never had a problem.”

The doctor looks back and forth at us, astonished by this line of questioning. Walker gives me a lugubrious shrug and turns toward the window where an electric trolley is passing beneath empty trees.

“Do you recall a patient named Claudia Van Hoven?” Dr. Narayan shakes his elegant head. “Three years ago,” I prompt anxiously, “she was hit by a car. Dr. Eberhardt took care of her.”

“I can pull the record.”

“That would be terrific.”

“You seem distressed,” he says with kindness. “Why not just ask me what you really wish to know?”

What I really wish to know is whether Dr. Narayan will leave his wife and fourteen children and live with me in South Kensington, but instead: “Was there anything in Randall Eberhardt’s behavior to lead you to believe he might have been exploiting patients?”

“ ‘Exploiting’ them?”

“Overprescribing drugs. Getting them hooked. Especially women. Making them dependent on him as a doctor.”

“Completely absurd.”

“Why? Health care fraud is a multibillion-dollar industry.”

“Randall Eberhardt is a talented, dedicated physician, sought after and respected. His work is impeccable, I’ll vouch for it personally. If you don’t believe me, have one of your own experts evaluate his charts.”

“Did he have any financial problems?”

“My God, the man comes from old Cambridge money. I can’t imagine it, no.”

Walker, seeing that I’m coming up empty and eager to get to the airport bar: “Thanks, doctor. We have a plane to catch.”

Desperate now: “What about his marriage?”

We are walking back down the corridor. Some poor person with rolling eyes is wheeled past us, wired and tubed.

“His wife, Claire, was a cardiac nurse on this ward. Their liaison was certainly the talk of the town at the time, but beyond that I’m out of my depth. Look — I’m being paged.” He calls to one of the RNs in green scrubs working a computer at the nurses’ station, “Kathy Donovan! Come talk to these people.”

Kathy Donovan sticks a pencil behind her ear and gets off the stool. She is what you would politely call “ample,” big bosom, big behind, walks like a Marine.

“Kathy knew Randall and Claire Eberhardt very well. Don’t hesitate if there’s anything else I can do.” Narayan shakes hands briskly and is off.

“How do you know the Eberhardts?”

“Claire and I grew up on the same block, two houses apart,” says Kathy Donovan in a husky voice. The Boston accent is blunt and unapologetic—“Claih,” “apaht.” “I was a bridesmaid at her wedding. Who are you?”

“FBI.”

She laughs uneasily. “What’d they do? Not pay their taxes?”

“Routine check,” Walker answers, baring his yellow teeth with a phony smile. He is really suffering from withdrawal now.

“We’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m on ‘til four. I could meet you after.”

That means I will miss my plane and have to catch a later flight or spend another night in Boston, neither of which I should do without authorization. But nobody is watching so I go with my gut.

“Fine. We’ll meet you after work.”

“Where?”

“Someplace we can get a meatball sub.”

• • •

As soon as we leave the hospital Walker peels off, claiming to be going back to the office to start checking for duplicate records of the prescriptions Claudia Van Hoven had filled at the Bay Pharmacy, but I am certain he ducked into the nearest sports bar and is still there.

I have some time, so I explore the area. You can see that a lot of professionals live around the hospital complex. I follow Huntington Avenue past fashionable old apartment houses — one like a Tudor mansion a block long, another with a fantastic Renaissance gingerbread roof — the people so conservative in their corduroys and backpacks and skirts down to the calf, the streets so clean and fancy-Dan it’s almost laughable to the dulled-out California eye, a cliché of the comfortable highbrow life, what do they do all day, go to the Boston Symphony? However, when I turn east on Massachusetts Avenue, according to Kathy’s directions, things change fast. I sit up and pay attention. Suddenly the income level has dropped like a plane catching wind shear, plummeting into poverty in the space of ten seconds.

The larger stores are all boarded up or barricaded by heavy gates, leaving Mom and Pop bodegas the only ones still open for business. Men sit in groups with their backs against the buildings or huddle in doorways of redbrick row houses scarred with graffiti. I look straight ahead because I don’t want to be a witness to a drug deal.

Suddenly figures are ahead of me. At thirty miles an hour I have to slam on the brakes. Two black teenage girls have picked this moment to waltz across the street against a red light, moving as slowly as humanly possible, close enough to my car to languorously run their long curved fingernails painted Day-Glo purple over the hood, challenging me through the windshield with burning eyes. I put my face in neutral and keep both hands on the wheel, although I know precisely where my weapon is on the right side of my belt and how long it will take to draw it.

I wait them out, aware of the screams of multiple sirens crisscrossing the neighborhood. Finally the girls realize I will not take the bait and run the rest of the way across the street, dodging speeding cars. I drive on but now I am alert and it stays with me all along Columbia Road, past torched buildings and vacant lots and the occasional graceful private residences, relics of a lost time, everything tarnished by a murky haze. The sky is a dirty white, lit from behind as if through a scrim. Here there is no long spring sunset. Instead, as the raw afternoon drains toward night, it seems that all the color is being sucked out of the world until the streetscape looks like a photo printed in metallic grays, the working-class enclave of Savin Hill perched on a rise over Dorchester Bay reduced now to silver faces of shingled homes with dead black window eyes, and tangles of tree branches in burned-out brown, only the signs of neighborhood bars lighting up the monotonous dusk with the promise of cherry red.

I park in front of St. Paul’s Church across from the Three Greeks Submarine Shop. A cold wind whips off the water. Ten blocks away the churches are storefronts with hand-lettered signs in Spanish; here they are Gothic brick but their rooflines are swayed as if their backs had finally been broken. I can see by the old ladies in shapeless coats and kerchiefs pulling empty shopping carts, and the ten-year-old American cars rotting away with salt, that this is a hardworking but tired place depleted by the endless Massachusetts recession, attacked by hostile neighbors, backed up against the bay with nowhere to go. It holds on only because its roots go very deep. Incidents of domestic violence must be through the roof.

Nurse Kathy is waiting for me inside the Three Greeks, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback of poetry by Robert Frost. She has changed from hospital greens into denim and looks like a female truck driver.

“I had to look in on my mother and father,” she tells me first thing. “Make sure they get their dinner.”

“You live with your parents?”

“They own their own house and they’re getting on. Frankly, they’re too old to move.”

She stubs the cigarette out in a gold paper ashtray and looks at me. Just looks. The place is overly warm and smells of yeast. I shrug out of my raincoat.

“So, Kathy,” I say pleasantly, figuring I’d better try to establish some kind of a rapport, “what do you like about being a cardiac nurse?”

“It’s intense. You’re on your toes. You have to make decisions quick, like if someone has ventricular tachycardia you have to decide whether to give them a precordial thump.”

She is showing off. The Robert Frost book is part of it. She is trying to say that she is really a smart, sensitive person trapped inside a toad’s body. Now she is giving me that toad look again. Sly. Unblinking. Hostile.

‘Was Claire Eberhardt a good cardiac nurse?”

“Very good.” She nods slowly. “She could take the pressure. She liked the adrenaline rush. Nice with the patients, a good care provider. But she was feisty. She’d argue with the doctors.”

“About what?”

“Medication. Whatever. If she thought the patient wasn’t getting what he needed. We get to know the patients a lot better than the doctors.”

“Did she argue with Dr. Eberhardt?”

“Why should she argue with him? He was taking her to California.”

“Is that the reason she got married?”

“I dunno.” Nurse Kathy laughs. “Seems like a good reason to me. Want to get something to eat?”

Donnato was right. The Boston Italian meatball sub made by a Greek in an Irish neighborhood is a unique experience. There is something special about the way the red sauce dissolves the bun into a spongelike mass and something exciting about the pursuit of the meatball when it drops out onto the paper plate, forcing you to get up and go to the counter for a fork with orange grease running down your chin, twenty napkins glued to your fingertips. I vow to bring one back on the plane and force him to eat it during a squad meeting.

“My parents’ house is around the corner from here.” Kathy settles back with a paper cup of black coffee and another Parliament. “Claire’s folks still live two houses away.”

“You two were best friends?”

“I wouldn’t say best. She hung out with the cheerleaders, with those freckles and that cute body. I hung with the nerds, obviously. But we went through a lot. We both grew up very Irish. Oppressively Irish. I even took a course in the sociology of drinking — I could discuss that deeply, if you’re interested,” she says with bitter irony.

“Sure.”

But she shakes it off. “Claire and I were both the first ones in our families to go to college. Then nursing school. There was never even a consideration that we could go to medical school.”

“But she got out.”

Kathy takes a long draw on the cigarette. “She got out.”

“And you hate her fucking guts.”

“I don’t hate her fucking guts,” she says, unnerved. “I wish her the best of luck out on the coast.”

I let her sit with her anger for a moment. Then,

“What if I told you Randall Eberhardt has been accused of overprescribing narcotics?”

Kathy answers quickly, unthinkingly, “I wouldn’t believe it.”

“No?”

“No. Randall’s a good guy.”

“You don’t think he might have changed out in California? Life in the fast lane?”

“Randall’s the type of person who is very happy with himself. Why would he change? Unless there was a money problem or something unforeseen. Or someone’s setting him up.”

“So maybe the person who changed was Claire.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe she wanted the fast life.”

“The thing Claire Eberhardt wants out of life is a good lay,” spits Kathy Donovan before she can stop herself. “In high school she was the first to lose her virginity.”

I nod, returning the bitchy sneer. “There’s always one.”

“She wasn’t actually a tramp. She had a boyfriend, Warren Speca. He’s out on the coast now, too.”

“In Los Angeles?”

“Pretty close to there. The girls in the neighborhood threw her a going-away party. We gave her Warren Speca’s phone number in — what? — Venice, California?”

“That’s right.”

“I wrote it on a prescription. ‘Rx for horniness — Call Warren Speca.’ She died. She turned beet red.”

“She still had the hots for Warren?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. They weren’t in contact after high school. For a long time nobody knew where Warren was. He was into some stuff”—this time she catches herself—“I shouldn’t tell you about. Anyway, my mother was talking to his mother and it turns out he’s an electrical contractor in this place called Venice, California. I mean it was a joke — the only person Claire ever heard of in California was her old high school boyfriend. I thought it was a hoot.”

I agree with her and force a smile, making sure to get the correct spelling of Warren Speca’s name. We have balled up our plates and napkins and tossed our cans of Diet Slice into the trash. I’ve got Donnato’s meatball sub triple-wrapped in aluminum foil inside a waxed paper bag. I thank Nurse Kathy for her help and move toward the door. If I leave now and don’t get lost I can make the last plane.

“So what’s it like in California?” she asks as we hit the night air.

“Great. You can wear a T-shirt in December. Are you thinking of coming out?”

I hand her my card. She studies it, intrigued.

“Who knows.” She pockets the card and looks at me for the first time in an unguarded way. “I promised myself next year I’m moving out to my own place in Quincy.”

• • •

I have noticed that violence happens very fast, faster than the way they stage it in movies, faster than you’d think of it in your imagination.

Moments after leaving Nurse Kathy, I am at a traffic light at Cushing Avenue. I look down for half a second, checking the map for the fastest way to the airport, and am rear-ended with enough force to throw me almost to the steering wheel before the seat belt locks. A moment later the front-seat passenger window explodes and I am smacked so hard on the shoulder by a brick that my arm goes numb.

Gloved hands reach quickly through the shattered glass and grab my purse off the passenger seat.

“Suck my dick!” howls a male voice, then he and the purse are gone.

I get out of the car with my hand on my weapon but the late-model Oldsmobile that whacked me is already disappearing into the night. I can’t make out the plates. I stand there in the intersection in a daze like any other victim, flexing my tingling right hand. I take off the raincoat and shake out shards of broken glass, picking them out of my hair. The lady two cars back pulls out and takes off, she wants no part of this. My federal ID and plane ticket are in the blue canvas attaché case in the trunk and thank God they didn’t take Donnato’s meatball sub. I get back in and toss the brick into the backseat. I am shaking like a dog. The pain is tightening my shoulder muscles into a spasm and my back does not feel great. I slam the car into gear and, swearing steadily, kick it up to fifty miles an hour as cold air pours in through the busted window, not stopping for traffic lights or asshole pedestrians, focused on only one thing: Get me out of this depressing fucking place and onto a plane for Los Angeles, knowing that Claire Eberhardt, leaving Savin Hill, was thinking the very same thing.

Forty minutes later, as I gimp toward the open door of the plane, I think again of Claire Eberhardt, possibly hurrying down this very same ramp, the toddler asleep on her shoulder, the little girl holding her hand. She believes she is escaping those dead-end streets, but instead arrives in California with the phone number of an old high school boyfriend written out like a prescription, a gift from the gals in the neighborhood. I begin to wonder if Warren Speca was the “wrong guy” she was talking about in the doorway, and if so, how many times she made the same “really bad” mistake.

If they had wanted to destroy her for saving herself and starting another life, they couldn’t have found a better way. That innocuous slip of paper was like a time bomb placed on the airplane. My buddies on the InterAgency Task Force Against Terrorism have come up with some pretty hardened amoral killers. But they are amateurs compared to the terrorists who operate with skillful deadly accuracy among our own friends; and, as I am soon to find out, within our own families.