North of Montana

TWELVE

THE VISIBILITY over Los Angeles is a million miles, the air so smooth I feel as though I am gliding home in an armchair, one of those heavy green damask armchairs from the thirties with fringe along the bottom, sailing over the crystalline city of Oz.

The Russian immigrant cabdriver tells me, “They predict a socko storm,” which must be some lunatic misinterpretation of English because there can’t be rain so late in the season, especially on a night so clear. We are driving up Lincoln Boulevard with all the windows open. It is midnight and I should lie back and dream, but my mind is ready for the start of the day, churning with a catalogue of urgent tasks, from calling the credit card companies to checking up on Wild Bill.

The cab lets me off at the main entrance to Ocean View Estates, where I borrow twenty bucks for the fare from the night guard, Dominico, who has been here as long as I have. Carrying the overnight duffel, the blue attaché on the good shoulder, I walk the familiar maze of pathways to Tahiti Gardens.

The ritual is always the same: I’m glad to be home but instantly crave fresh air, opening the glass doors to welcome a humid breeze and the calming view of legions of sailboats peacefully moored under bright white spotlights.

Even after such a brief absence, my bedroom seems unfamiliar, a hotel with a few pieces of institutional furniture scrupulously dusted, on view for the next occupant; nothing personal or telling except a trace of White Linen perfume and an antique handmade quilt that covers the double bed.

If I were trapped in a fire and could save one thing, it would be this quilt. It belonged to my great-grandmother, Poppy’s mother, Grace, who was born in Kansas in 1890 and drove all the way to California in a Model T. The design is made of tiny hexagons in pale floral prints and you can plainly see the topstitching in coarse white cotton thread. The fabrics must have come from ladies’ house dresses and kitchen curtains that hung in farmhouses lit by kerosene lamps.

I remove my clothing, which smells like the inside of an airplane, and lie naked on this quilt, wondering about the circle of women who made it, imagining their fingers working all around the hem, callused fingers, lean hard fingers, joining scraps of fabric in weak yellow light; as long as they kept working they could hold in their hands the sweet connection of female companionship. Where is my connection?

I am thirsting for fresh orange juice. I am back in Los Angeles, back to the feeling of being watched, maybe by a camera mounted on a crane up there in the shadows of the ceiling, looking down at me on the bed. I should call Poppy. Outside the wind is nudging the brass chimes hanging off the balcony, sounding them like tiny warning-bell buoys for tiny distant boats. The camera is moving closer, a slow spiral ending with the pupil of my eye.

Why is there part of me that is always afraid?

I am drifting in the center of all those tiny hexagons. Is it Boston time or California time? Is it my empty body or Claire Eberhardt’s hungry body or Violeta Alvarado’s, cremated to ash?

Those mysterious faded aqua snapshots of her life are never far from my mind: brothers lined up in a solemn semicircle, Grandma Constanza holding a baby, the parrot. What would it be like to grow up in a house without walls? To sleep on a bamboo mat on bare ground, through a dry season of parched dust and a wet season of steamy rain — to live in a house that is open to it all?

Suppose I made the trip to El Salvador and located the Alvarado encampment? If I walked through that landscape, past male cousins stripping the kernels off dried corn with their fingers, females grinding it in a molino, patting the mixture into flat circles and baking them on a stone, if I finally came to Constanza and called her name, would she look up from the wood cooking fire at this strange foreign relative and panic … or would she simply go on making tortillas, not at all surprised to see me, or to hear the news she has feared since the day her daughter left for America?

• • •

I awake to rain needling the windows, turn over in the bed and reach for the TV remote. My shoulder is feeling better but my lower back is stiff and sore. Channel 9 unfolds on the screen. A strong Pacific cold front is driving sleet and showers along the entire West Coast of the United States. It is thirty degrees in San Francisco, hailstorms during the night. There will be two feet of new snow in Nevada by tomorrow and more storm systems are backed up over the ocean like airplanes at LAX. When I hear there is flash flooding in Palm Springs, I grab the phone and hit two digits for Poppy’s number, which I have stored on speed dialing.

“Poppy? How’re you doing? Staying dry?”

“I just spent a night in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

My grandfather has never been hospitalized in his life. He must have sliced his finger on one of those old-fashioned double-edged razors he has always used along with menthol shaving cream.

“Up around the eleventh hole I had a pain in my gut. They panicked and called an ambulance.”

“Jesus Christ, Poppy.”

“Well it was just a goddamn waste of time. They kept me overnight, couldn’t find anything wrong.”

“It must have been the night I called you,” I gush apologetically, “I was out of town on an investigation, and nobody picked up the phone. I feel terrible that you went through all that alone—”

But he interrupts, “What was so important at four in the morning?”

“I was lonely.” I laugh to take the edge off it, but when he doesn’t answer I feel compelled to explain to the silence. “I was drunk.”

There is a pause, then, “You’re a jerk.”

“Thanks, Poppy.”

His voice is strong, mine is shrunken and weak.

“Do you have a drinking problem?”

“No, I do not have a drinking problem.”

“Then don’t be a jerk, especially on the job.”

His belligerence triggers a sulky rage: “Nobody else seems to think I’m a jerk. They gave me a case that involves Jayne Mason.”

“What’s the case?”

“She alleges a physician got her hooked on painkillers he obtained from Mexico.”

“Did you get to meet Jayne Mason?”

“Interviewed her at length.”

“What was she like?”

“The woman of your dreams, Poppy.”

“We’d get along.”

They probably would. “It’s a prestige case. Came to us through the Director. That’s why I was in Boston.”

“You’d better bust your boiler on it.”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“And not be a jerk.”

No use. You can’t win. By the end of the conversation with Poppy I am spent. I sit on the edge of the bed naked and shivering, drenched with guilt because I got angry with him, chastising myself for not being there when he went into the hospital, worried about what these abdominal pains could portend … and filled with a new, inarticulate dread as icy as the cold rain.

• • •

I down three Tylenols and some instant oatmeal, pull on jeans and knee-high rubber boots, zip up the parka, tighten the hood, and slosh through the flooded walkways to the freezing cold garage where the Barracuda, standing in six inches of water, refuses to start.

“Stay home,” Rosalind tells me over the phone. “They’re asking federal employees to stay home unless they’re essential to their department.”

“That lets me out.”

She puts me on hold, then comes back on. “Except for you, Ana dear.” She continues, lowering her voice, “Special Agent in Charge Galloway just walked by. He wants you in here.”

An hour later Donnato inches his car along the narrow service road outside my balcony and honks. He must have badged the guard to get inside the complex. The downpour is so intense that just running out from the lobby completely saturates my jacket.

I jump inside and slam the door.

“So the Barracuda finally died.”

“She didn’t die, she just didn’t want to get her tires wet.”

“Why do you drive that wreck?”

“It’s romantic.”

“For the same money you could have gotten a cherry old Mustang.”

“Everybody drives Mustangs. Nobody drives a Barracuda with a scarlet paint job like some old floozy.”

“This is why I worry about you.” He hands me hot coffee in a paper cup. Suddenly I am hungry all over again.

“It smells like a bakery in here.”

“I got you Zen muffins.”

“You did?”

Zen muffins are huge heavy balls of blueberries and fiber that are sometimes the only thing I eat for lunch. It takes an effort to find them and I am touched. The inviting scent of coffee, the fogged windows and the rain outside, our wet overclothes — the way he won’t exactly look at me — slams me hard with the same illicit longing I had sitting in the car waiting to enter the tunnel in Boston, of Donnato and I as real lovers, each moment together part of the continuous invention of our own special world.

But in the next instant I am slammed hard the other way by the impossibility, the “jerkiness” of it, as Poppy would say.

“I should leave town more often,” I observe with wry sadness.

“Yeah, I miss your butt now that you’re on this glamour assignment.”

“Let’s face it: I am glamorous.”

He looks over. “Especially with that hood.”

I unzip it self-consciously. “I brought you back a meatball sub from Boston but left it on the kitchen counter.”

“Very thoughtful.” He is distracted now, backing out carefully, brushing the dark leathery leaves of holly bushes bright with rain. “I came to warn you Galloway is out for blood.”

“Whose? Mine?”

“Somebody’s.” We are at the entrance to the complex, facing an out-of-control blinking red traffic light. Five or six cars are stopped uncertainly, gray water up to their hubcaps. “I hope you got good stuff in Boston on that doctor.”

“It’s good,” I say with confidence, picturing Claudia Van Hoven’s touching tears in the park.

“It better be better than good. It better be excellent.”

“It’s superlative,” I snap, annoyed. “It’s the best fucking evidence any FBI agent ever came up with in the history of the world. Why does Galloway have a hair across, anyway?”

“He’s upset about the Cuban thing — where the young girl died?”

I stare at the rain. The Cuban thing was a major fuckup by agents in our field office; a public relations fiasco that won’t go away.

“I’m screwed.”

Donnato plows ahead through the flooded intersection.

• • •

Robert Galloway has made a career of being tougher than the tough guys. He has played chicken with Mafia dons. He has gone nose to nose against the ugliest teamsters in Kennedy Airport, worked deep undercover in the heroin trade along the piers of Manhattan. During his last years as an organized-crime specialist, he was forced to move his family from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania because of death threats against them. Finally the separation from his teenage kids became too much and he reluctantly accepted the promotion to Los Angeles, although he remains a purebred New Yorker who, I suspect, still believes we’re a bunch of nuts and fruits out here.

Galloway is an action man not suited to lying, which doesn’t make him the best choice to deal with the press. Instead of sleazing his way through the Cuban thing like any other bureaucrat would have done without a second thought, Galloway feels compelled to actually answer the question, which is the following:

Why did the FBI fail to save a twenty-four-year-old former beauty queen from Iowa from being stabbed to death thirty times with an eight-inch kitchen knife by her Cuban drug-dealing boyfriend when their Hollywood apartment was under twenty-four-hour surveillance by us and the entire crime, blow by blow, scream by terrified scream, is recorded on our magnetic audiotape?

“Galloway had a press conference yesterday. It did not go well.”

We are rocketing up in the elevator and I’m leaving that warm glow in my stomach from the coffee and the muffin somewhere down around the fourth floor.

“He told them the truth? That nobody was listening to the surveillance?”

“Yes.”

“Unbelievable.”

“It was a personal embarrassment for Galloway, after that big speech he made to the Bar Association about ‘the war on drugs will be won or lost in L.A.’ ”

“I guess we know the outcome.”

“You can bet the Duane Carters of the world are nipping at Galloway’s heels like a pack of Dobermans. Still,” Donnato shrugs, “I was saying to Pumpkin in the shower this morning, nobody can expect us to actively monitor every case every minute of the day.”

Silence between us as we cross the corridor.

“Married fifteen years and you still take showers together?”

Donnato gives me one of those endearingly painful smiles.

“She was gargling at the sink, okay?”

We punch in our codes and enter the Agents Only door.

“Gee, I kind of liked picturing you all soapy and slippery.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Donnato tells me.

• • •

Duane Carter’s door is open. He and two other guys are tossing a Nerf ball into a basket.

“How was Boston?” Duane calls.

I’m not about to say I got ripped off at a stoplight by some punk. “Super!” I give a big grin and the thumbs-up sign. He returns the smile like we’re best buddies.

I barely sit down at my desk when the phone rings. It is Jayne Mason.

“They’ve got a photograph of my tits.”

“Who does?”

“National Enquirer, Ladies’ Home Journal, how do I know who?”

Hearing that familiar voice speaking directly and intimately into my ear is like seeing her suddenly appear in the bullpen — as jolting a shock as the human body can bear.

“How did they get the photograph, Ms. Mason?”

“Yesterday, if you recall, was a stunning day before it started raining like hell, and I was sunbathing in the buff by the pool when a helicopter passes overhead. I know exactly what they were after.”

“Were there any markings on the helicopter?”

“It said KTLA.”

“That’s a television station.”

“Of course it is.”

“So it’s your belief that KTLA was taking nude pictures for the six o’clock news?”

“Please respect my intelligence.” I hear ice clinking in a glass. “All these cameramen freelance on the side. On their way to cover a traffic jam they fly over the home of some perfectly innocent actress and point their sneaky little zoom lens and imagine they can make an easy ten thousand dollars.”

I let out a whistle, mocking and low. “Really? That much?”

“For the right pair.”

I have to admit that now she’s got me thinking about her breasts. Is she embarrassed because they’re old and withered, or pissed off because they’re perky and firm and worth ten grand?

“I want the FBI involved.”

“We’re a federal agency, we only investigate federal crimes. We have no jurisdiction over something like this. I suggest you contact the local police.”

“But you’re my FBI agent.”

“Actually, I’m employed by the United States government, ma’am.”

“Oh, get off your high horse!” she says with a great deal of irritation and hangs up.

Next thing I know, Galloway, wearing a scarlet turtleneck, papers flying out of his hands, cigar askew between his teeth, grabs my arm, pulls me out of the chair, and steers me into his office.

“What have you got on the Mason case that’s so goddamn good?”

Oh, boy.

“I’ve got a former patient of Dr. Eberhardt, Claudia Van Hoven, who claims he overprescribed painkillers and got her hooked on them exactly like Jayne Mason.”

“Will she testify?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go for a warrant.”

He is reaching for the phone to call the U.S. District Attorney’s office.

“I think we should wait.”

‘Why?”

It is a hard moment. Galloway is champing at the bit. It would be easy to allow him to place the call and set a hundred wheels in motion, and lie back and take the strokes for doing my part, having completed the mission in Boston … but it would not be responsible. If he’s going to be muddled by emotion, then I’m the one who has to keep that clear head. We can’t both be running off half-cocked like my poor bank robber, Dennis Hill, tearing through the parking lot with a fistful of cash and a starter pistol, red-eyed and strung out, desperate to stay ahead of the demons.

“I don’t think we should go for a warrant without a full background check on the patient.”

“When will we have it?”

“I’m waiting for a call from the Boston field office.”

Galloway lets go of the phone. Behind him torrents of rain cascade down the steamy windows.

“I know you really want this case.”

“Jayne Mason is not a case. Jayne Mason is a goddamn complex political situation waiting to explode just like the Cuban thing.”

He reaches toward the coffee table, gestures in frustration.

“Where’s your lucky belt buckle?”

“Gone.”

Instead he grabs the remote, points it at a TV on the credenza, and savagely pushes the button.

In perfect synchronicity with his mood the local news is showing live helicopter coverage of a fifty-foot camper being swept out of a flooded trailer park and carried along by the deluge, smashing apart against a railroad bridge, the pieces washing out to sea. We both stare with fascination at the slow inevitable destruction.

Then Galloway gets out of the chair restlessly. “The Director is on my ass. The press is on my ass. The district attorney calls me at home—”

“Jayne Mason’s calling here.”

“What for?”

“She wants us to do something about helicopters flying over her property.”

This causes Galloway to almost twitch himself right out of his skin.

“We’ve got to resolve this thing before it gets out of control.” He picks up a handful of yellow messages. “This morning alone I got three phone calls from Mason’s personal manager.”

“I hear she carries a lot of personal influence.”

Galloway grimaces. A thin whistle escapes through his back teeth.

“You don’t know the half of it and neither do I.”

“What’s the half you do know?”

“I was briefed on Magda Stockman by, let’s say, an official source in the Administration when we got the case. She’s one tough cookie. Came over to this country from Hungary during the revolt in 1957, got a job in Macy’s Herald Square selling lipstick, had a knack for it, went on her own, ran a snooty beauty shop up on Madison, met some famous Broadway actress and became her manager.”

“Where’s the political influence?”

Galloway mouths the cigar. “That came from ratting on her old Communist buddies to interested folks in Washington.”

“You mean she wasn’t escaping from the Communists—”

Galloway nods. “She was one of them. A party member. But more than that, an opportunist.”

“So she came to America—”

“Greener pastures.”

Now we are nodding together.

“Isn’t it great?” Galloway grins like a carnivore. “I’ve got the darling of the Republicans on my back on top of all this other crap with the Cuban thing.”

“The Bureau’s looking at hard times.”

Suddenly he has stopped listening, absorbed by an anchorwoman on the TV screen wearing a low-cut electric blue suit with a lacy camisole peeking out underneath.

“There’s a lesson to be learned,” he muses. I politely wait to hear it: “Hollywood.”

I nod soberly.

Galloway turns from the television set, his face composed.

“Maybe I should put someone else on the Mason case.”

Icy fear goes through me. “Why? I’m handling it.”

He hesitates. “I wish the hell you didn’t remind me of my fourteen-year-old daughter.”

“I’m not your fourteen-year-old daughter. And don’t worry — I won’t get pregnant.”

Galloway laughs. Or at least his tight shoulders heave up and down in a fair imitation. He’ll ride with me. For the moment.

“What else do you have cooking on this doc? What other sources can be approached and remain confidential? Neighbors who can’t stand the guy, disgruntled employees, the gardener, the mailman, a love affair, what?”

“If it’s there, I’ll find it.”

They have gone back to live coverage of the storm. A lone fireman is stranded in a flat plane of green water, holding on to a post with one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other.

“I want hard evidence by the end of next week. If he’s guilty, let’s put him away,” Galloway grunts.

“Done.”

His eyes go back to the man trapped in water up to his chest.

“Poor bastard.”

“Don’t worry. The chopper’s going to pull him out.”

But Galloway does not look convinced.

THIRTEEN

I GO BACK to my desk and have a long conversation with the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise, arguing that it is imperative to first complete the background check on Claudia Van Hoven to be certain she will make a sound witness. To this end, I leave an urgent message at the Boston field office for Wild Bill.

Following up on Galloway’s idea to look for someone close to the doctor who would be motivated to talk, I go through the file again and come to the printouts subpoenaed from the phone company. During a period of several months a whole lot of calls from the Eberhardt home were made to a local 454 number listed as belonging to Theodora Feign. After highlighting them with a marker it becomes graphically clear that Ms. Feign is linked to the Eberhardt household in some way: for one week alone there are twenty pink lines.

The Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise and I are working on the same wavelength. We agree that since the calls were placed from the residence during the day they were most likely made by the wife, maybe to a girlfriend, maybe her only friend in California, someone the displaced nurse from Boston could unload on about how lonely she is over in the contemporary Mediterranean on Twentieth Street.

Theodora Feign could be the kind of source Galloway is looking for. But if I call her cold, she could easily turn around and tell bosom buddy Claire the FBI has been asking questions about her husband, thereby blowing the entire operation and busting me back to desk duty.

To be safe, I should talk to someone who has knowledge of Theodora Feign’s relationship with the Eberhardts. Who would know?

It was obvious from cruising the streets that there was a dual society north of Montana, upper-middle-class whites and working-class Hispanics living in parallel worlds. While the white women are absent you can see the housekeepers gathered on shady corners of those lush residential streets with crowds of strollers and babies, gossiping in Spanish like there’s no tomorrow, and it’s a safe bet, I explain to the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise, that the gossip has to do with the white women and how much they pay and how they run their households and who has an unhappy marriage and who is good friends with whom.

If Theodora Feign were close to Claire Eberhardt, there’s a good chance her housekeeper, Violeta Alvarado, would have known, and maybe Violeta talked about it with her good friend, the older woman in the building who was also from El Salvador and baby-sat for her kids; a comadre who understood and cared.

I dial Mrs. Gutiérrez’s number and say I have questions concerning my cousin. What kind of questions? she wants to know. Oh, about her life, how she came to America. Pleased that I am showing interest in my family, Mrs. Gutiérrez agrees to meet on Sunday.

Of course that stuff about Violeta is a lie, what I’m really after is information on her employer. Hanging up I glance smugly at the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise, but sense disapproval: it knows I am lying only to myself.

• • •

Sunday afternoon we get a break in the rain and although it is overcast and fifty degrees I grab the opportunity to put the top down on the Barracuda, bundling up in boots, a leather bomber jacket, aviator sunglasses, and a Dodgers cap turned backward. When I pull up in front of Violeta Alvarado’s apartment building, Mrs. Gutiérrez is already waiting out front with Teresa and Cristóbal.

The children barely murmur a response when I say hello. I thought they’d get a kick out of riding in the convertible but they say nothing. The wind whips their glossy black hair but their faces remain blank.

Mrs. Gutiérrez and I exchange a few words in the front seat about whether it will rain again tomorrow. As I accelerate down Sunset Boulevard she clutches a large white pocketbook to her bosom, cupping the other hand over her ear as if to stop her lacquered hairdo from blowing.

What now? Do I try my few words of Spanish to get a conversation going? Put on a Latino station? Would they enjoy that or be insulted? Finally the uneasy silence is more than I can take and I shove in an old Springsteen tape, withdrawing to my own space — my car, my Sunday, my music — for the twenty minutes it takes to get on the freeway and off again at Traveltown in Griffith Park.

The damp, smoggy air on the other side of the Hollywood Hills smells like cigar smoke and old rust. Despite the uncertain weather the parking lot is half full. We pass beneath some frail eucalyptus trees and through the gate, finding ourselves at a tiny railway station where a tiny steam-driven train has just rolled in.

“Do they want to go for a ride?” I ask Mrs. Gutiérrez.

Teresa shakes her head no. Her brother simply holds her hand. He is wearing a new Ninja Turtle sweat suit.

I notice some outdoor tables. “Are they hungry?”

“They have lunch but maybe they like to eat.”

We make an unlikely contingent, me in my leather and baseball cap, Mrs. Gutiérrez who is wearing turquoise flowered leggings and a big red sweater the size of a barrel, and the two orphans.

I buy nachos and microwaved hot dogs. We are surrounded by birthday parties, mostly Hispanic. Teresa and Cristóbal eat slowly and carefully, as if they had been taught to appreciate each bite, staring at the wrapped presents, a piñata hoisted into a tree, a portable grill laden with smoking pieces of marinated meat and long whole scallions, releasing the aroma of roasted garlic and lime. Each group seems to include ten or twenty family members, good humored and relaxed. The birthday cakes are elaborate, store bought. Teresa is watching without envy. Without any discernible emotion at all.

“Mamá!” Cristóbal suddenly exclaims, excited, pointing.

“He think that lady look like his mother.” Mrs. Gutiérrez strokes his head. “Pobrecito.”

A pretty young woman, who might in fact resemble a reconstruction of the decimated corpse I saw in the autopsy photos, is holding a baby while unwrapping aluminum foil from a tray of fruit. She laughs and nuzzles the baby, who grips the wavy black hair that falls to her waist.

“Does Cristóbal understand …?” I find it hard to finish.

“He know his mommy isn’t coming back.”

Cristóbal tugs at his sister’s arm. She continues to chew uninterestedly as if he were pointing out a passing bus.

“Do you remember if Violeta ever talked about a friend of Mrs. Eberhardt’s named Theodora Feign?”

“You mean Mrs. Teddy?”

“Could be.”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Claire and Mrs. Teddy were very close. And Mrs. Teddy’s housekeeper, Reyna, was also close with Violeta.”

“So the four of them got along.”

“Not so much anymore.”

“No?”

“Mrs. Teddy is very mad with Mrs. Claire.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know, but Violeta was sad that she didn’t get to see Reyna anymore. And the two little girls liked to play together.”

“What happened? Did Teddy and Claire have a fight?”

“Oh, yes. They don’t talk to each other anymore.”

This is good news. It means I can approach Theodora Feign with confidence. As far as I’m concerned, the afternoon is over. I get up and stretch my back, staring idly at a dense rose garden sprinkled by a few light drops of rain. Returning to Mrs. Gutiérrez I inquire politely,

“Did Dr. Eberhardt send you that check?”

“Yes, he do, and I buy new clothes for the children.” She nods proudly toward Cristobal’s bright green sweats. “Then I write to the grandmother to ask what she want to do. Maybe she come here, maybe the children will go back to El Salvador and live with her and their big brother.”

“Violeta had another child?”

“Yes, you saw him in the pictures. The baby that the grandmother is holding, that is Violeta’s oldest son. She left him to come to this country.”

“How could she leave a little baby?”

“To make a better life,” Mrs. Gutiérrez explains with an ironic lift of the eyebrows. “She work to send money home to take care of the son and the grandmother. Inside”—she taps her heart—“she miss her mommy.”

She clicks her purse open, discharging the scent of face powder, and removes a fat roll of folded tissues.

“Now the boy must be eight or nine years old. He doesn’t even know he lost his mommy yet.”

There is nothing between us but a gentle splatter of raindrops — on our hair, the bench, on a hundred fading roses.

Mrs. Gutiérrez bends her head forward and presses two tissues against the corners of her eyes. It is as if Grief himself has taken a seat between us on the cold concrete and put his mossy arms around both of our shoulders. I can feel the weight of the children’s loss. My own heart tightens with the same bereavement, the kind that bubbles up from time to time and overwhelms you in an instant. Within myself it remains mysterious, an underground spring without a source.

“It was Violeta’s dream for the family to be together.”

“Were Teresa and Cristóbal born in this country?”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Gutiérrez. “The father left.”

She sniffs and snaps the pocketbook shut.

“If they were born here, they are American citizens, wards of the U.S. government. That means the government will take care of them.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez is as immovable as the poured cement table. “That is wrong.”

“It’s not up to us. It’s the law.”

“The law is wrong.”

I take a sip of sugary lemonade. I don’t want to get into an emotional argument. I am an agent of the federal government — obviously I believe that society has the obligation and compassion to care for those of us who are lost, or damaged like Teresa, with the face of a pupilless angel carved in stone. The drizzle has passed, the burn of the sun presses through a thick layer of cloud. I can see it is painful for her just to be sitting here outside her secret places in the apartment, alone and unprotected in the dull glare of this world.

“When is your birthday, Teresa?”

She looks at Mrs. Gutiérrez and says nothing.

“Come on, you must know your birthday.”

She whispers a date.

“What would you like for your birthday?”

“I would like a bed,” Teresa answers without hesitation.

“Don’t you have a bed? Where do you sleep?”

“Under the kitchen table.”

I look away, squinting into the brightening distance, thinking that although these sunglasses are supposed to afford the best UV protection, the lenses are not nearly dark enough — not dark enough at all.

Teresa’s eyes are on her empty plate.

“Want another hot dog?”

She nods. I buy two of everything the lousy little snack bar has: popcorn, ice cream sandwiches, tortilla chips, and watch the children work their way through it all.

“Tell them to go and play.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez repeats my request in Spanish, but the children do not move. There’s not a hell of a lot to do in Traveltown if you are not part of a big exuberant family on a picnic. I wish I’d known that when I picked it from the front pages of the phone book. You can run through a transportation museum housed in a dark old barn and see a horse-drawn fire engine from 1902 or climb on engines of defunct trains like iron behemoths sunk into the mud. Teresa and Cristóbal don’t want to do anything. They cling to Mrs. Gutierrez’s hands, squat down, and wrap their arms around her chubby knees.

“Tell them to play,” I repeat with an edge.

She speaks more sharply and they drag reluctantly toward the trains.

“If the family cannot be located, Teresa and Cristóbal will have to go into foster care,” I tell her, speaking slowly, with absolute level conviction, as clearly and emotionlessly as possible, the way you advise a criminal of his rights. “I will notify the proper agencies myself.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez takes a sharp breath and covers her mouth with both hands. Her broad square nails are earth-red, three or four dime-store rings on pudgy fingers.

“I love these children!” she cries. “I thought you gonna help.”

“We have to do what’s right.”

“What is right?” Mrs. Gutiérrez asks. “Violeta wanted to make a better life. To make money in America to send back to her child. She was only eighteen years old. She got on a bus from Mexico City to Tijuana and she was raped by the men on that bus, each in his turn, right there on the floor. Is that right?”

“That’s why we have the law.”

“She just left a baby. Her breasts were full of milk. The law means nothing.”

Cristóbal and Teresa have been screwing around behind the bench and finally Mrs. Gutiérrez can’t stand it anymore. She gets off to see what they’re up to, then comes back dragging Cristóbal by the arm.

“This lady is the police,” she says smartly, presenting him to me. “Show her what you did.”

Cristóbal refuses to look up. Mrs. Gutiérrez yanks his hand out of his pocket. He is clutching a plastic car worth about sixty-nine cents.

“From the birthday party over there.” She shakes him roughly. “Little thief.”

She glares at me. Since I know what’s best for the children, obviously I will take care of this.

I lead him across the plaza. “We can’t take things that aren’t ours,” I explain gently.

We come upon a broken piñata, some candy, and a few small toys left scattered on the damp grass.

I march him up to the father of the birthday party. “Cristóbal took this, but he knows it isn’t right and he wants to give it back.”

The boy remains rigid, the car in his hand at his side.

“It’s okay, let him keep it,” the man says.

Cristóbal breaks from me and tears back to his sister.

“Thank you,” I say desperately. “Thank you very much.”

I mean it. I am tense, and despite the rawness of the air, drenched with sweat. I didn’t want to take away his wretched little car. I don’t want to be here at all, but I have promised the children of my cousin, motherless and fatherless and sunk in unhappiness, maimed by malnutrition of the soul, an afternoon in Traveltown. And the pony rides are yet ahead.

FOURTEEN

DURING THE NIGHT another storm blows in. Monday morning the sky is white, the light is brown as I head toward Teddy Feign’s house through dense unrelenting curtains of rain. I choose not to detour past the Eberhardt residence on Twentieth Street or Poppy’s old place on Twelfth, sticking to the main thoroughfare, San Vicente Boulevard, where it is slow going, dodging around stalled cars and palm fronds that have been blown into the road. Several delicate coral trees have been completely upended, roots clawing the air, finished.

I take a right at the light on Seventh Street heading for Santa Monica Canyon. Going down the hill the wimp-ass government Ford loses traction and skids for several long seconds, lurching to a stop just short of a traffic sign, with two wheels stuck in the mud. I fight to maneuver back onto the road but the strength in my arms isn’t enough and my hands slip painfully along the steering wheel. I sit there, steaming. If I have to call a tow truck it will be an embarrassment and a huge waste of time. Just then the back of my neck prickles up. Something is approaching fast from behind. Instead of slowing down a Range Rover speeds past, intentionally swerving through a puddle and spraying the windows with a noisy mix of pebbles and water the color of bile. The driver, wearing a baseball cap, never looks back.

A rock gets caught in the wipers and etches a half circle across the glass with a chilling nails-on-chalkboard scratch. Enraged, I blast it loose with a plume of bright blue windshield cleaner and jam on the gearshift.

Easing back and forth between first and second gear, concentrating on nothing but the whining tires, I rock the Ford gently in the soup, straining for that first touch of friction, nursing it, feeling the tires finally catch and heave up onto the pavement, scooting across the curve into the canyon, cursing the Range Rover all the way. Only on the Westside would someone driving a forty-five-thousand-dollar vehicle feel the need to go out of their way to kick mud in your face.

Santa Monica Canyon is a tiny valley between the elevated flat-lands north of Montana and the southern bluff of the Pacific Palisades, two miles from the Eberhardt residence. At sea level and only blocks from the beach, its mouth is open to constantly flowing ocean breezes that become trapped between the canyon walls, creating a microclimate of uncommonly clear sun, deep shade, and fresh salt-kissed air. It has become an exclusive neighborhood for attorneys and people in television, but the most extravagant home is the one built by Teddy and Andrew Feign up against the hillside at the end of San Lorenzo Street.

It is an enormous Tudor mansion, half timbered with ashlar veneer of brown gray, an ivy-covered arch over the driveway. It has twin pent roofs, three large medieval chimneys, and diamond-shaped panes of glass in tall bay windows that make you think Snow White herself is about to flow out the door. In fact, if you don’t look at the Guadalupe palms across the street, the house gives a pretty good impression of Leicestershire, England, on a rainy day.

Opening a wrought-iron gate, I follow a flagstone path that has now become a running stream. Teddy Feign appears in short order, an attractive slender woman wearing high yellow boots and holding a mop. When I explain that I am from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and have questions about some acquaintances of hers, Dr. and Mrs. Eberhardt, her eyes brighten and she beckons me in. Like the driver of the Range Rover she appears more than willing to take a swing through the mud, if only for the opportunity of slinging it at somebody else.

I follow into the kitchen.

“Do you believe this? Could you die?”

We are splashing through a half inch of water that covers the oak floor. The somewhat amusing source of this minor flood is a utility closet where rainwater is pouring in through the light switches and cascading in shiny sheets down the walls. A young girl wearing a white pants uniform is methodically moving everything that was in the closet to another room. Brooms, a vacuum cleaner, piles of wet rags, detergents, flowerpots, tennis racquets, and a slide projector are piled on the counter as she retrieves them one by one.

Whereas the girl moves with deliberate slowness, her boss is going at a couple of thousand rpms.

“I’ve seen this movie, thank you very much, I don’t need to see it again.”

She swipes at the water, slams a bucket with futility against the wall.

“Last year during the storms we had a mud slide. At three in the morning that whole mountain came roaring down, I thought we were all going to die.”

Through generous windows, past a brick barbecue area and planters crammed with impatiens, I can see a hill bandaged by a sheet of concrete.

“It tore through here like a bulldozer, took off the whole back of the house. We just finished remodeling the kitchen a month ago. I am absolutely beside myself. Where is Dirk?”

While mopping at the water she picks up a radio phone and angrily demands that Dirk, apparently the contractor, be beeped, car-phoned, lassoed, or otherwise delivered to her door immediately.

I don’t dream about kitchens, but if I did, this would be the one. Teddy Feign, still yakking fiercely into the mouthpiece, gestures for me to sit on a comfortable stool, which even has a backrest, at an is land with two stainless steel sinks set in about fourteen acres of polished green marble. The room is so large you can hear the air rushing past tiers of glossy white cabinets. You can tell it is a brand-new kitchen by the scent of fresh paint and the hot white clarity of the recessed lighting — the bulbs haven’t been there long enough to get filmed over with cooking grease.

She hangs up and drums short perfect nails manicured in clear polish on the edge of the marble. (If you’re going to use clear, why get a manicure?)

“Coffee,” she decides. “Now. You?”

“Great. How well do you know the Eberhardts?”

“I was their spirit guide to the mysteries of the West Coast.”

She wiggles her fingers and makes a mocking spirit face.

“They had just moved here, they knew nobody. I introduced them, I had them for dinner, I made an open invitation to play on my tennis court, I even said they could use my pro for free—”

The woman can get out more words per second than rounds off an AK-47.

“I referred patients to Randall, let their kids swim in my pool, although that didn’t work out very well—”

“I heard there was an accident.”

Her version is uncharacteristically succinct: “Laura fell in, I wasn’t home, she was fine.”

Then she pauses to tick off the rest of her kindnesses:

“And I tried but did not succeed in getting Claire out of those plaid flannel shirts of hers from L.L. Bean.”

“So you know them pretty well.”

“Intimately. Before they dropped me, but that’s another story.”

She opens cabinet doors, assembling cups, coffee, and measuring spoons in rapid succession.

“I understand there’s been some antagonism between you and Mrs. Eberhardt.”

“How would you know that?”

“It wasn’t hard to find out.”

She regards me curiously and pushes the glasses up on her nose. They have heavy black frames like some dorky engineer would have worn in the fifties, but on her fair delicate face they look exceedingly hip. Although she must be close to forty her dishwater-blond hair is cut in a rock ’n’ roll shag. She is wearing a black cashmere sweater and tight black crushed velvet leggings. The only accent to break up all this basic black is a pair of round diamond stud earrings with stones the size of raisins.

“Would you say the Eberhardts are under financial pressure?”

“Sports injuries? Are you kidding? Randall’s practice is huge.”

“Is he a big spender?”

She snorts. “He drives an Acura.”

“Have you ever seen him take drugs?”

“Never.”

“Has he ever offered drugs to you?”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“Maybe he wrote a prescription for you or your husband for some sleeping pills as a favor.”

“Never happened.”

“Tell me about his character. Would you say he’s one of these doctors on an ego trip?”

“Randall?”

She laughs and pulls the levers on a big polished copper contraption for making cappuccino like they have in restaurants.

“The first time I met Randall Eberhardt he was running down the street wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants, waving a frozen pork chop.”

Steam spits from the machine and she flinches away, murmuring, “Thing is out to kill me.” Then, back in control of her coffeemaker: “I’d gone over to take Claire out to lunch and I was just getting out of my car when I saw a good-looking man with a very nice chest running down the street after a dog that had shown up in their backyard, some pathetic little runt Randall called a ‘homeless dog,’ because it had that empty look in the eyes you see in homeless people. It wouldn’t get close enough even to be fed and eventually it just ran away. Here was this lady he didn’t know from Adam getting out of a Mercedes in an Armani suit and here he was in grungy sweats running after a stray dog, not at all embarrassed, and I thought, What a lovely guy.”

The machine rattles and a rich intense aroma pours out along with dark coffee into two large white cups.

“In fact I can’t imagine what Randall could have done to interest the FBI.”

“You tell me.”

“Gee, maybe he smoked dope in the sixties.”

I give her a goofy smile.

“You were close to his wife until she dropped you, you said. What was that about?”

Teddy Feign frowns. She’s not getting what she wants from me but she’s in this, she’ll play it out a little longer.

“The first time I met Claire was in that closet. It was leaking then just like it’s leaking now.” She points accusingly with a spoon coated with foamy milk.

“After the mud came down it was still raining and we had to get plastic over the hill to keep it from completely burying the house. We needed bodies. It was six in the morning. I had Reyna call everybody we knew, including everybody in my daughter’s preschool class.”

Teddy Feign walks across the slick oak flooring in her rubber boots and sets the steaming cups on the counter.

“Claire Eberhardt was the only one from the class who came.”

Her voice quavers.

“We had my husband’s relatives helping out and some hombres he hired on the spot in front of a hardware store, and I came back from Zucky’s with lunch for everyone and I find this strange woman with long black hair in a velvet headband wearing a Fair Isle sweater, trying to sweep three inches of water out of that closet. I asked if we’d met and she told me she was one of the mothers from the preschool. We had called every one of the parents from Diedre’s class. These are people we had birthday parties with and play-dates with and movies and dinners …” She continues with evident pain, “I didn’t even know Claire Eberhardt, but she was the only one who got off their butt and came over here to help somebody else. I was so touched by that, I lost it. I started to cry. She’s a nurse, she can be very comforting. So we sat here and ate hot pastrami sandwiches and became friends.”

I sip the coffee, light and sweet.

“I really tried to help Claire. She was lost out here. Her husband was making money and she didn’t know what to do with it. I told her to get a housekeeper and not be so chained to the kids. But the truth is, she was chained to Randall. Totally dependent on him. Nurse and doctor, over and out.”

“Did she follow your advice?”

“Oh, drop dead, I was her best friend, she called me ten times a day! Our housekeepers were friends, our kids played together — but I’m so mad at her now.”

‘Why?”

“She just stopped calling. A cold shot out of the blue, right after Dee-Dee’s fourth birthday. Suddenly she started making up excuses and stood me up four times in a row. Remember in seventh grade when your best friend stopped talking to you for no reason? That’s how it felt, and it hurt.”

“Did you ask what was going on?”

“She said she was busy.” Teddy Feign shakes her head, “I’m busy. I gave up my Saturday to take her shopping. She buys all this great stuff at Neiman’s, takes everything back. Why bother?”

Teddy Feign rests her chin on her hand like a teenager, still stung by the rejection.

“Claire was stuck back in Massachusetts. Randall thrived in California.”

“Why is that?”

“Both his parents are doctors.” She raises her eyebrows. Do I get it? “We’re talking major pressure. Randall comes off low-key, but he is driven. I mean, look: they’ve been out here less than two years and already he’s one of the top orthopods in the city.”

The door swings open. Teddy Feign is so wound up she startles in her own kitchen.

A little girl bursts in.

“This is Diedre. Watch the water, honey.”

Diedre is wearing a pair of overalls and Minnie Mouse boots, and has a sassy chin-length haircut, along with a pint-sized sense of entitlement.

“Pleased to meet you,” she chirps with her chin in the air and I think, When she’s fifteen, Teddy Feign doesn’t have a chance.

Diedre is followed by an older woman.

“Reyna says we can play in the puddles,” the girl announces.

“Hey, that’ll be fun,” cries Teddy Feign, jiggling her daughter into a smile. She introduces me to Reyna, who shakes my hand. Plump, maybe sixty years old, Reyna is clearly a cut above the other housekeepers. She speaks without an accent and wears a tan belted dress with low matching heels, tinted brown hair, and fashionable glasses in gold frames.

“It’s almost stopped raining and Dee-Dee is tired of playing in her room.”

“Good idea.”

I like Reyna’s stately competence. I like the way she strokes Dee-Dee’s hair.

“Take a pair of my boots,” Teddy Feign offers. “Reyna and I have the same size feet!” She says this with a bright grin, as if that miraculous connection bridges all the gaps between them.

Reyna is matter-of-fact. “Thank you. Come on, Dee-Dee, let’s see which pair of Mommy’s boots Reyna can wear.”

She takes the child by the hand and helps her slide off her mother’s lap, leaving us with a polite smile.

I am glad my cousin had a friend like Reyna in America.

The rain has lightened to a fine mist with just enough force to put a slant into it. The air is saturated with humidity and outside the deep green foliage is motionless, drooping straight down with the weight of the water.

The flow down the walls in the closet has abated and the maid in uniform has one more armful of wet dish towels and pot holders to clear away.

“What do you know about Dr. Eberhardt’s relationship with Jayne Mason?”

“It was big news when Jayne became his client. She adored Randall, used him for every little thing. That’s the reason he couldn’t come to Dee-Dee’s party — he had to go out to Malibu because Jayne had the flu.”

“Was Claire jealous?”

“She didn’t know what to make of it. Whenever Jayne called the house she’d freeze. I told her to use the connection, but she didn’t know how. She’s just not political.”

The phone rings.

“Hi, doll, I’ll have to call you back,” Teddy Feign sings, full of cockiness, “I’m talking to the FBI.”

With all the solemn authority of the Bureau, I admonish her sternly not to go around blabbing our conversation to the world.

“I’m sorry.” She is immediately abashed, her fragile self-confidence fractured, “I promise I won’t.”

Embarrassed, she opens a drawer and pulls out an accordion-file envelope.

“Now I’ve got to get that electrician back to fix the lights in the closet again.” Pulling out a card: “Here it is: Warren Speca.”

“Why do I know that name?”

“Claire gave him to me. They went to high school together back in Boston. He worked with Dirk on the remodel.” Suddenly indignant about the unanswered phone call, “Where is Dirk?”

Now I recall Kathy Donovan telling me about Claire’s old boyfriend, how they’d given her his number out in Venice as a joke. So this is the second time Warren Speca’s name has come up in connection to Claire Eberhardt. One of the skills you learn at the academy is how to memorize an address off a card, upside down.

Outside we can see Diedre piling wet sand on the sliding pond of a redwood play structure while Reyna watches from under an umbrella, wearing a pair of knee-high riding boots.

“When I told her to take my boots I didn’t mean my four-hundred-dollar Ralph Laurens, Jesus Christ.” Teddy Feign sighs. Then, despairing of the water damage to her pristine walls and newly sanded floors, “What am I supposed to do?”

“Wait for Dirk.”

• • •

The route back along San Vicente is blocked by fallen trees. An emergency crew is diverting cars along the residential streets. I follow a long line of traffic moving slowly past Poppy’s old house on Twelfth.

The For Sale sign is still out front and the place looks even more shrunken and forlorn in the rain. This time I don’t stop, but a memory comes with me.

I am on my knees on the hardwood floor of the living room. It is a dark Saturday morning and I can see the rain through the lace curtains on the narrow windows on either side of the front door. Yesterday I was five minutes late coming home from school and my grandfather is punishing me by forcing me to kneel in front of the television with the set turned off so I cannot watch my favorite programs. My mother comes and goes past the doorway but says nothing. I stare at the empty green screen. My knees ache. They have been pressing against the hard wood for a long time.

Suddenly I am pulling in to the garage at Bureau headquarters in Westwood. I don’t know how I got there or how, in the dry safety of the car, my cheeks became so wet.

FIFTEEN

IN LOS ANGELES there are seven days out of the year that are so spectacular you feel lucky to be alive … and to own a convertible that is running again.

The days come after a rain or a fierce blow by the Santa Ana winds has blasted all the muck out of the basin. On those days you understand why eighty years ago they could shoot movies here all year round — because every morning they woke up to a world already lit with desert clarity. The natural light was so pure and abundant it could reveal every orange tree in a distant grove or every close-up nuance in an actor’s face.

Today is one of those seven days. I leave the government car and take the Barracuda so I can hit the freeway with the top down. Looking inland you can see snow-capped peaks sixty miles away; sailing west every discrete fold in the Santa Monica Mountains is visible, every window in the towers of Century City shines. The sky is filled with the rare sight of white and charcoal clouds thick enough to cast rippling shadows across a sparkling metropolis newly born.

I am exhilarated also by the news from Wild Bill Walker that he has finally “gotten past a tangle of red tape” and gained access to the prescriptions that Randall Eberhardt wrote for the accident victim Claudia Van Hoven. He had to subpoena the records, but he said the pharmacy was going through their computer files right now and promised to fax me copies immediately. I am pleasantly inflated by the image of myself laying hard evidence on Galloway’s desk before his deadline of the end of the week. Another faultless performance by Ana Grey.

I could sit in the office and stare at the fax machine or get out into the air, so I decide to spring myself on Warren Speca, who has not been returning my phone messages, to see if he has inside knowledge of the activities of his old high school girlfriend and her doctor husband. If not, I’ll take a walk on Venice beach and look at the ocean.

Speca Electrical operates out of a bungalow on one of the canal streets. Nurse Kathy back in Savin Hill, Massachusetts, would be amazed to see that there really are canals in Venice, California. There used to be bridges and gondolas as well and an opera house that was meant to bring culture to the wild Pacific edge of America, part of Abbot Kinney’s sweetly literal idea that if you built a town that looked like the Italian Renaissance, a Renaissance would occur.

God knows dreams die hard every day out here on the frontier but Venice was one of our saddest losses; although The Pike amusement park in Long Beach went down to shorefront developers, Venice was a much grander idea. But the canals were poorly engineered, either from ignorance or greed (it didn’t say in The History of Our State of California, which I had to read in Poly), and almost immediately the sea began to reclaim them. Abbot Kinney’s waterways to culture filled steadily with silt until they became standing pools of stagnant waste and were declared a health hazard in the twenties and covered over with asphalt.

Warren Speca’s tiny yellow house is perched at the edge of one of the remaining canals. Today the water is filmed with a rainbow slick of oil and the banks are swarming with ducks, the grass bleached white from their droppings. Across the way is a spate of expensive condominiums, but on the canal side a row of bungalows that must have been built in Abbot Kinney’s day has resisted development. Judging from the deteriorating wood and peeling paint and oddball toys and rusty garden equipment scattered across the backyards, they must be rentals owned by one stubborn or crazy landlord. Like Speca’s cottage, they all have security bars covering the windows and doors, which detracts considerably from the vintage charm.

I follow the sounds of an easy-listening radio station to the driveway, where a Toyota 4×4 is humming and a man in worn jeans and cowboy boots is loading up the last of his toolboxes and slamming the door.

“Mr. Speca? Could I talk with you a minute? My name is Ana Grey, I’m with the FBI.” I show him my identification.

He turns the engine off. As he’s climbing out of the cab, he looks beyond my shoulder at something behind me that has suddenly caught his eye. I spin reflexively, expecting a gang-banger from the Shoreline Crips.

“Is that a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda?” he says, walking right past me.

“Actually it’s a 1970.” We are standing in the street as he inspects the car.

“Nice paint job. Is it yours?”

“Yes, it’s mine.”

He doesn’t seem surprised or make anything out of it. “What’ve you got there, a 440 four barrel?”

“I looked for a six-pack but I couldn’t get air conditioning. Tell me you’re into ‘cudas.”

Warren Speca goes to his truck and comes back with the latest issue of Hemmings Motor News. I can’t help it. My heart jumps.

“My favorite bedside reading.” He thumbs it so I can see all the turned-down pages.

“Mine, too.”

“Think of all we’d have to talk about in bed.” He runs a gaze across my chest and meets my eyes with an amused and frankly randy look. “What do you get for mileage?”

“Thirteen. But that’s not why you own one of these cars.”

“I dig it.” He digs it all right. He has prematurely gray hair in a military buzz cut and soft full lips with a sensual curve to them. Weathered cheeks, eyes buried in sun creases. It’s those lips, like Paul Newman’s in Sweet Bird of Youth, that have allowed him to get away with what he’s been getting away with since high school; lips that whisper an insistent invitation to meet with them and break all the rules.

“Pretty good maintenance?”

“Not too much goes wrong. The alternator failed during the rain. The battery dies on you, things like that.”

“But I bet it’ll do the quarter mile in the fourteen-second bracket.”

“I’ve had it up to a hundred on the freeway at night.”

Warren Speca is fingering the red leather on the driver’s seat. “Naughty girl.”

“It was a high-speed chase through five counties ending in a four-way shoot-out, you know how it is.”

He smiles. “Like that TV cop — what was his name — drove a car like this?”

“Mannix.”

“Was it exactly like yours?”

“Exactly.”

Warren Speca looks at me and then at the car, nodding slowly. “I am truly impressed.”

“Well, I’m impressed,” I chatter on, believing that I’ve got him heading down that garden path. “You’re the only one I’ve ever met who knew that Mannix drove a Barracuda.”

“I used to watch a lot of television in the sixties. Used to do a lot of other things, too.”

“You and Claire Eberhardt?”

His eyes stay steady. “What about Claire?”

“When you guys went to high school together, I can see you two drinking beer, smoking whatever, spacing out watching TV.…”

His hands go into his front pockets. “All right. What the fuck is going on?”

I knew he’d come on like this sooner or later, so I just stay smooth.

“We have no interest in what went on before. We want to know if you’re in contact with her now.”

“Why?”

“Routine background check on the Eberhardts.”

He waits a moment, looking for something in my face. Apparently I give it to him because he says, “I don’t think so,” and walks down the driveway back to his truck.

“What’s the problem?” I find myself going after him.

“No problem. I don’t have to talk to you, so have a nice day.”

He backs the Toyota out.

“By the way”—he leans from the window—“Mannix drove a Hemi ’cuda.”

“I knew that,” I say, cheeks burning.

He ticks a finger back and forth reproachfully and heads off down the street.

• • •

I know I will get Warren Speca. He can’t just challenge me and drive away.

I go back over the notes I took with Nurse Kathy in the submarine shop. She said Speca was “into some stuff she wouldn’t tell me about. I swivel up to the computer and run the criminal checks. Before I can take another sip of foul end-of-the-day coffee all the information I need comes up neatly on the screen.

I wait until nine o’clock that night to catch him at home. He picks up the phone with a dull, unguarded “hullo.”

“Hello, Warren. It’s Ana Grey with the FBI.”

“I knew you’d call.”

“You did?”

“You want to ask me out on a date.”

Instantaneously discarding several other possible responses: “Actually I’m calling about your State of California conviction for possession of marijuana and cocaine with intent to distribute.”

“Ancient history … but what about it?”

“I’ll bet when you applied for your state contractor’s license you left out the fact that you are a convicted felon.”

There is a pause, then, “I don’t get it, Ana. Why are you threatening me?”

“I want to talk to you about Claire Eberhardt.”

“I’ll talk to you if I can have an attorney present.”

“Of course you can have an attorney present—” I am bluffing, the last thing I want is some lawyer getting on the horn to the Eberhardt’s lawyer. “But this isn’t about you, Warren, it’s about Claire and her husband.”

“I‘ve got nothing against Randall,” he says with dark defensiveness.

“Most people think Randall Eberhardt is a solid citizen, but I get the feeling you know differently.”

Warren Speca agrees to meet me in the bar on top of the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica the following afternoon.

• • •

The only way to get to Toppers bar is to ride the exterior elevator that climbs up the side of the hotel like a glass slug. Two nineteen-year-old secretaries are giggling and covering their eyes as the machinery shakes and whines and we rise slowly above palm trees and rooftops to a dreamlike suspension twenty stories above the ocean. I don’t like it too much, either.

The doors open and I find myself in a Mexican cantina of whitewashed stucco edged with indigo blue. Above two curved doorways it says in faded pink paint, “Acapulco” and “Santa Cruz”—one leads to a restaurant with pink tablecloths, the other to a bar covered by a bamboo roof. Warren Speca is sitting at the bar sipping a drink and wearing a big Mexican sombrero covered with tiny round mirrors.

A bartender with a dark moustache and slicked-back hair can’t hold it in anymore and just cracks up.

“Está loco.” He nods toward Warren, who grins boyishly, the string dangling below his chin.

“What’s in that drink?” I ask.

“Nothing. Soda water. I just wanted to get in the mood.”

“For what? A bullfight?”

Warren slings the hat to the bartender, who hangs it back on a hook, still chuckling.

We take a window table in the cocktail lounge with a view of white and beige buildings with red and orange roofs stretching all the way to the tree line north of Montana.

The waitress brings me a nonalcoholic margarita over lime-scented crushed ice in a stemmed glass as big as a soup bowl.

“I’m out here in California minding my own business when I get a call from this lady Teddy Feign whose house got creamed by a mud slide.”

“She’s got more work for you. She’s going to call.”

“That’s cool. So she says Claire Eberhardt recommended me, an old friend from high school. I don’t actually grok to the fact that Claire might be out here on the West Coast, I figure it’s some damn thing through our mothers. If you think Jewish mothers are bad, you don’t know the Irish and Italians. You’re not Jewish, are you?”

For a moment I’m stopped by a surge of anxiety, but I push through it: “My father was from El Salvador, my mother was American.”

It’s out on the table and it’s not so bad.

“This turns out to be a major job and Mrs. Feign is pressuring me to finish so I start working weekends. She has this gigantic birthday party for her kid and a hundred of their closest friends, and I’m outside screwing with the circuit breaker when these two French doors suddenly pop open and Claire Eberhardt comes flying out. I mean flying. They were dummy doors that were never supposed to be used, but what did Claire know. So she goes flying into a ditch and I help her up and it’s Claire McCarthy from Savin Hill. She’s put on a little weight but there’s no doubt about it. She’s so embarrassed and fucked up she doesn’t recognize me — truthfully, it’s been fifteen years — so I let her go.

“Later on, I walk into the kitchen and there she is looking out the window at the party like a wallflower — and Claire was never a wallflower — tears streaming down her face. She sees me and tries to cover it up.

“ ‘Claire McCarthy,’ I say. ‘What’ve you been up to? Tell me you don’t recognize me.’

“Finally she gets it. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing here, she says, then I remembered I gave Teddy your number. Why didn’t you say something outside when I was doing my Chevy Chase routine?’

“ ‘Didn’t want to embarrass you.’

“ ‘I must have looked like an idiot.’

“I go, ‘No, you only looked scared.’

“So then I ask about her parents who are major alcoholics and we start talking and I tell her I’m in the program now, I don’t drink, which blows her mind, and to cheer her up I point out this fat guy out there at the party wearing running shorts and a sweatshirt who’s worth sixty million dollars.

“ ‘Thinks up one TV show, now he’s worth sixty million. Go over there and rub against him, maybe it’ll brush off.’

“ ‘You rub against him,’ she says.

“ ‘I tried but he wasn’t interested. Hey, for sixty million I’d do just about anything.’

“ ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

“ ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t. What do I care? It’s only money.’

“But Claire’s staring at all those people again and getting teary, feeling pathetic about herself because her daughter’s already part of the crowd and Claire knows she will never fit in.

“ ‘That’s my daughter, Laura. She’s best friends with the birthday girl. She loves California.’

“There’s this huge fancy birthday cake on the counter, so I take my finger”—he demonstrates on the edge of the cocktail table—“and wipe it all around the edge, and rub the chocolate frosting into my gums and I say to Claire, ‘You can’t take these people seriously.’

“She looks at me and picks off one of the flowers from the cake and puts it into her mouth and I know right then and there we’re going to sleep together.”

• • •

“Did you and Claire Eberhardt sleep together?”

“Two and three times a week. Mostly in my place, although once we made it in her husband’s bed. I thought for about thirty seconds she was actually going to leave him for me.”

He smiles ruefully.

“Was she in love with you?”

Warren Speca folds his arms and tips back in the chair with bare knees apart, squinting toward the haze moving in over the sea. He’s come from work and is still wearing beat-up shorts, heavy boots, and crew socks.

“The thing she loved most about me — unfortunately — was when we’d lie around afterward and talk about the old neighborhood. She’d get into these memories, did I remember what she was like when she was twelve, that sort of crap. Of course the sex was pretty good too.”

I can’t help knowing that it was.

“She hated it out here. People like Teddy Feign scared the shit out of her, but she felt a lot of pressure to be like them. She was glad for an excuse not to hang out with Teddy anymore. She had a much better time with me,” he adds, with a teasing grin.

“So where was all this pressure coming from?”

“Dr. Randall, where else? I always thought the guy was a snob. Here was his wife drying up inside and he’s out playing Doctor to the Stars.”

“With Jayne Mason?”

“Dig this: he had a pass for the security gate, a key to the front door, and Jayne Mason used to pick him up from his office in her limousine and take him around to charity dinners and the movies.”

“Were they having an affair?”

“No, just for the hell of it. She gave him the key for emergency house calls.”

“Why Randall?”

‘Who knows. Because she felt like it and he was star-struck, like any dope just in from the boonies. For a doctor, I’ve got to tell you, he wasn’t very smart. I’ve done a lot of work for movie stars. It doesn’t take many brain cells to figure out all they want to do is use you.”

“So you think Jayne Mason was using Randall Eberhardt.”

“Using him how?”

“To get drugs.”

“No, to me it was just the opposite. He was trying to get her off drugs. I’ll tell you something.”

He swirls the sugar in a second iced tea.

“Claire came to that birthday party alone, right, and met me and the rest is history. The reason why Randall wasn’t there and couldn’t come was because he had to go out to Malibu to take care of Jayne Mason, who supposedly had a cold.”

He leans forward and taps a finger on the Mexican tile inlaid in the tabletop.

“Claire told me later when he got out there he found Jayne Mason lying in bed, completely naked, covered with her own feces and vomit.”

He taps each word for emphasis: her own feces and vomit.

“It’s a good thing he had that key because she’d almost OD’d on downers. That’s when he checked her into the Betty Ford Center.”

I think about it.

“Then where did she get the drugs?”

He shrugs. “She must have a street connection somewhere.”

I nod. It’s a good guess, an educated guess you might say. But if Randall Eberhardt weren’t supplying Jayne Mason with narcotics, why is she going after the doctor now, as if her life depends on it?

• • •

To the west a gray mist has blended the ocean with the sky, creating a curtain of fog. The surf looks mild and green in the late afternoon light, playful, benign. Bicycle wheels spinning along the bike path, tiny as gears in a watch, throw off faint metallic sparks of light.

“Are you still seeing Claire?”

“It ended a couple of months ago when she decided she was still in love with Randall. No surprise. She could never let go, she clings to him like a life raft.”

“How did it end between you two?”

He rubs a knuckle across his short hair.

“Pretty bad. She was at my place, late getting home, she calls Teddy Feign’s because Laura was over there playing with their little girl.…” He sighs. “And she finds out over the phone that Laura’s fallen into the pool and almost bought the farm.”

I’ve put the pen down and stopped taking notes. My heart is beating faster because I know from his dread tone of voice — and because I shouldn’t be here in Claire Eberhardt’s place, feeling what she must have been feeling sitting across from this hunk Warren Speca — that we are about to make an abrupt turn onto a dangerous track.

“We jump into my truck and race over to Teddy’s house. Claire’s saying the Our Father all the way. Teddy wasn’t home at the time. The housekeepers already called 911 and the street was jammed with paramedics and cop cars. You don’t want to ever come home to that. Claire gets out of the truck and almost faints into the arms of this black woman cop. I don’t go into the house — what am I doing there, right? — but Claire comes back out to tell me Laura’s all right, she never even lost consciousness. Turns out it was the housekeeper’s fault.”

“Which housekeeper?”

“I forget her name.”

“Was it Violeta?”

“Yeah. Violeta.”

I feel a dull thud in the chest, the way you do when you hear something bad about someone you have come to like.

“Did you know Violeta?”

“Uh-uh. I think I ran into her once, when I showed up at Claire’s.”

“When was that?”

“One time toward the end. We didn’t see each other for a month after the thing with Laura, then Claire told me it was over.”

“Why? Guilty conscience?”

“Yeah, she thought it was all her fault, but also she claimed going through it with Randall brought them together.” He makes a wry sideways frown. “What can I tell you? The thrill was gone.”

He flicks the empty glass forward with thumb and forefinger.

“This is the first place I took her when we started being together.”

We wait for the elevator in front of a large antique mirror in a wooden frame painted with roses. Warren Speca has put on a baseball cap that says Warner Bros. Studios. I look at us in the mirror. The bartender is slipping a pot of chili into the steam tray in preparation for happy hour. The elevator arrives, empty. We step inside.

“The first time we kissed was right here.”

We stand in silence as the capsule shimmies and starts its descent, the way they stood, close together, awkward and lusting.

If he surprised me with a kiss the way he first kissed Claire Eberhardt, I know it would be just a brush, a tease, nothing you could take offense about, the way it was for her: a token from an old friend, remembrance of the days in high school when they weren’t afraid of what they didn’t know, when they rushed headlong into it all — a summer night in a moving car and all the windows down, intoxicated by the syrupy vapor of Southern Comfort and the jumbled weedy smells of a pitch-dark country road. The headlights off, blind, picking up speed.

SIXTEEN

THE NEXT DAY I get some disturbing information from Boston.

“Bay Pharmacy searched their records back to 1985 and the only prescriptions filled by Claudia Van Hoven were for an eye infection and some female problems,” Wild Bill says casually over the phone. “Even so they weren’t written by Randall Eberhardt.”

“Maybe she went to another drugstore and didn’t remember the name right.”

“I‘m checking into that now, little señorita.”

Suddenly I’m not buying Wild Bill’s jocularity. The breathless quality of his voice betrays fear, which is instantly communicated to me in a rush of adrenaline.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“Yes, we are.” The panic mounts quickly. “She was lying to us out there in the park.”

“Now that doesn’t make any sense at all.” The more he tries to be reassuring, the more I know the ship is sinking fast. “Why would she make up something like that?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, but we’ve got to find some other substantiation to her claim that Eberhardt overprescribed. Otherwise we have no corroborating witness.”

“I hear what you’re telling me.”

“Did you pull her hospital records?”

“Haven’t had a moment—”

“I’ll do it,” I say abruptly, cutting him off with the touch of a button.

Four minutes later I am talking to Dr. Narayan, Randall Eberhardt’s former boss at New England Deaconess Hospital. He says he will pull Van Hoven’s chart by the afternoon and his lovely measured English accent is filled with promise. In my experience even the most educated people find it a turn-on to ride posse with the FBI.

The Bureau requires us to pass physical fitness tests every six months and you get three hours a week built into your schedule for exercise, so it isn’t goofing off for me to walk across the parking lot to the Westwood Community Recreation Center on Sepulveda and do a twenty-two-minute mile in the public pool. I am so wired there is nothing else but to hurtle myself down a tunnel of water as fast as I can, focusing on the big cross on the opposite wall, taking pleasure in the neat flip turn and the rhythm of the push-off and the glide and the power that comes from those abdominals I’ve been crunching every night; today I have power to spare and even welcome the challenge of the lady in the orange bathing suit paddling down the center of the fast lane, which adds another 10 percent of effort to the workout.

I return to the office with wet hair and all cylinders firing smoothly. After a good swim I am loose enough to cope with anything, which is fortunate because Rosalind has a message waiting for me to call Dr. Narayan in Boston.

“Claudia Van Hoven was treated here for fractures and trauma sustained in an automobile accident,” the doctor tells me enthusiastically. “Before that she had a long history of psychiatric treatment for all sorts of illness from depression to schizophrenia until finally she was hospitalized at Ridgeview Institute in Georgia and accurately diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, which we used to call multiple personality disorder.”

“Hold it. You’re telling me she’s one of those people who takes on different voices and personalities?”

“Right.”

“Isn’t that kind of far out?”

“Dissociative identity disorder is probably more common than you realize. It’s a mechanism for the psyche to avoid trauma by literally becoming another person. In Ms. Van Hoven’s case it seems to have begun in early adolescence, stemming from sexual abuse by a neighbor. From the looks of this record,” he goes on, “twenty-three separate personalities have been documented in the patient, including an aggressive male named Allan.”

“She said Allan was her helper.”

“Yes, some patients refer to certain alters as ‘helpers’—that is, helping personalities. Did you notice any switching when you talked to her?”

“Switching?”

“Did you actually see her become somebody else through a change in voice pattern or physical attitude—”

“Jesus, no.” A chill goes through me.

“Interesting.”

Struggling to get back to understandable reality, “Can we believe what she told us about Dr. Eberhardt?”

“That would be tricky.”

“But she seemed totally rational. She was intelligent and shy — said she played the violin.”

“That was probably her personality named Becky.”

“Becky! What is this — the Twilight Zone? Look, she had a husband and a baby. She was wheeling a stroller.”

“Did you actually see the baby?”

“No. But it was starting to rain,” as if that explains anything.

Dr. Narayan’s tone is gentle. “I’m sorry to tell you that I doubt very much if there even was a baby in that carriage.”

The idea that she was out there in the cold pretending to be taking care of a baby — and that I bought it — leaves me awed. Finally:

“In your professional opinion, given her condition, is there any way Claudia Van Hoven could make a credible witness in a court of law?”

“Ultimately? Not a chance.”

I hang up the phone and take my head in my hands, hoping to crush my temples together into an unrecognizable mass. The sleeves and chest of the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise hanging on the coatrack nearby are puffed out and stiff as if filled with expanding hot air.

I have no corroborating witness.

And Galloway is expecting results tomorrow.

I could whine to my boss that I had been guaranteed the Van Hoven gal was good, but that the old drunk in Boston screwed up by not checking her out. As angry as I am right now, I can’t bring myself to give up Wild Bill. A letter of censure would only jeopardize his retirement and besides it would not solve my problem, which is to present hard evidence of Randall Eberhardt’s guilt.

For a long time I sit there with my mind scrambling like a rat inside a wall pawing with needle nails. I make notes, I make charts, but I can’t see how to make a case against the doctor. All we have is an actress’s unconfirmed story. Then the phone rings and it is Jayne Mason herself.

She is the last person I want to talk to. I’m not interested in helicopters flying over her property, or maybe this time it’s a late garbage collection she wants me to fix.

Surprisingly, she is totally contrite. She needs to talk to me but doesn’t want to go into it further on the telephone, may we meet?

Since, the last time, it took about a month to arrange a meeting and then she showed up a week early and at a completely different location, I am somewhat grouchy and suspicious of the entire venture, but she promises her car will pick me up in front of the Federal Building at 4:45 that afternoon, and it does.

• • •

It quickens the heartbeat to walk past the crowd to a shiny black limousine waiting just for me. Heads turn. I feel giddy and a dufus grin has plastered itself across my face.

Tom Pauley opens the door with a knowing nod. It’s not like climbing into a car, it’s like entering a room, a room that smells of lipstick and fine leather, with pearly white panels of light glowing around the edges, a chrome shelf holding crystal decanters with silver tags around their necks — Whiskey, Rye, Gin. I can stretch out my legs and still be miles away from the state-of-the-art console with built-in TV, VCR, CD player, and tape deck, above which a sheet of dark glass separates us from the driver. There are two telephones, a fax, and even a clip-on holder for what looks like a long test tube that holds one yellow rose. As we leave the curb a row of glasses tinkles against a mirrored backlight and a pile of scripts slides across a miniature kilim rug, spreading itself out like a fan.

“Thank you for coming, Ana, dear.”

Jayne Mason, fully made up with Parisian red lips and dark shadowed eyes, hair pinned up in a twist, briefly puts her hand on mine, then turns back toward the window with a pensive stare. She is wearing hot pink silky trousers with white heels and a hot pink silk T-shirt underneath a white blazer with the sleeves pushed up. There is a multitude of gold bangles on each wrist and around her neck a pearl choker with some sort of sparkly thing hanging off (it’s hard to see in the soft light). She looks like she means business, in a Palm Springs sort of way. Sitting so close I can catch her body scent — like a lingerie drawer spiced by a clove sachet.

It is easy to picture how Randall Eberhardt was drawn into this sultry female womb, accompanying Miss Mason to exclusive fundraiser dinners, wheeling around town in a private bubble, protected by one-way tinted glass. As I observe a group of office workers waiting for a light to change on Wilshire Boulevard, I realize that the ability to see people when they can’t see you is usually reserved for us law enforcement types; what a thrill it must have been for the doctor to share the privilege.

Then Jayne Mason begins to sing. Her head is still turned away from me and the voice is musing and low, as if I weren’t there:

“In the wee small hours of the morning / While the whole wide world is fast asleep …”

So this is what all the attention and fussing is about, why people put up with the silliness and the excess, why Magda Stockman has chosen to place her body between Jayne Mason and the rest of the world, why someone like my grandfather could actually be moved by a performance: this gift.

I steady myself as the limousine rocks gently around a corner, listening to Jayne Mason’s voice, unadulterated and flawless; for this moment, one of the elite.

• • •

We enter the Century City Shopping Center by some VIP entrance I never knew existed, parking behind another limousine, this one a double stretch in white. Jayne Mason puts on big dark glasses and fits a pale straw fedora over her French twist.

“Forgive me. I have to check one thing,” she says as Pauley comes around to open the door.

So I get out and follow. On the escalator I say, “If I’d known we were coming here, I would have brought my humidifier,” which of course makes no sense to her but she isn’t interested anyway, eyes on the widening bright space above us.

Once we hit solid ground she’s off like a smart missile weaving through the crowd toward a predetermined target. I have to quicken my pace to keep up. I’ve never seen a woman move so effortlessly in high heels. She is fixed dead ahead and pays no attention to the stares that come her way, shedding them off like raindrops from a nose cone. The nice thing about Century City is that it is an open-air mall and you get sunshine and updrafts and outdoor food stalls and guys selling cappuccino from wooden carts — but all of that goes by in a zip. The target is Bullock’s.

She pulls the chrome handles on the glass doors and strides across the cosmetics department on the first floor.

I guess she’s looking for a certain type of perfume because we make the circuit in about thirty seconds, past brass-trimmed counters, beautifully made-up salesgirls, customers, glossily lit displays, collections of fancy bottles, the two of us reflected in mirrored posts — she in vivid white and pink, me in khakis and a blazer — and gone. Overly sweet hot air envelops us and disperses in an instant as she hits the glass doors again and we’re back out on the sidewalk.

“I guess they didn’t have it.”

“No.”

“Want to try somewhere else?”

“If it’s not at Bullock’s, it’s nowheresville,” she says despondently.

We pass a chocolate shop and a place that sells dishes, keeping up the sprint.

“What did you want to talk about?”

“I did want to talk but now I’m not in the mood, are you?” she asks intimately, as if we’re on a shopping spree and maybe we should have some tea and rest our feet.

“Actually, yeah, I’m ready to talk anytime. It’s my job.”

We’re passing a complex of movie theaters.

“Have you seen Days of Thunder?” she asks.

“Not yet, but I like Tom Cruise.”

A modest crowd is lining up to buy tickets for the early bird shows. Without another word, Jayne Mason walks ahead of everyone, shows the cashier some kind of card, gets two tickets with no exchange of cash, and we’re off on another escalator up to the lobby.

This is definitely a left turn in the proceedings.

“I’m not sure I can do this—”

“Oh screw that,” she says. “Let’s go look at Tom Cruise.”

So we do. We actually do. We sit there and eat popcorn, Jayne Mason and me. It’s my kind of movie, full of bravado, and I enjoy it tremendously.

“ ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,’ ” Jayne Mason observes as we step out of the theater. “That was my line in a picture I made with Stewart Granger. Now he was a dreamboat.”

It is dark. Small white lights entwined in the trees and colorful banners flying off the Food Market create a carnival effect. People sit under yellow umbrellas eating teriyaki and kebabs and cheeseburgers at outside tables with their jackets buttoned up on this cool early summer evening, shoppers whisk by with floating white sacks. I feel flushed with the excitement of being on a first date: I like this person. I want to know more.

“Let’s eat. Someplace wonderful,” Jayne decides, and I acquiesce happily, enjoying the extraordinary experience of walking beside a world-famous movie star and the secret pleasure of knowing we are going back to a VIP entrance where we will get into a private limousine and be driven across the city to someplace wonderful.

• • •

We pull up at an Italian restaurant with a modest neon sign and a small green canopy. Tom Pauley gives a wry salute as we leave him back at the car. What a job. No wonder he’s down at the beach whenever possible. Inside there’s a cozy bar hung with clusters of half-size Chianti bottles and a huge photo of JFK. The walls are covered with movie posters and head shots of Lucille Ball, Don Rickles, and President Eisenhower, among others. I don’t see Jayne Mason in the crowd.

A slump-shouldered gentleman in a worn tuxedo says, “Good to see you again, Miss Mason,” and leads us into the main room, which is awash in soft orange-red light. The sweeping curved banquettes are orange-red and an assortment of ginger-jar lamps with linen shades have orange-red bulbs. Most of the tables are empty and white napkins are standing up throughout the restaurant like a herd of rabbit ears.

We pass a display case filled with models of trucks and pictures of that same slump-shouldered gentleman, thirty years younger, with the Pope. We pass two geezers complaining about losing at Santa Anita, and a decked-out blonde with some sleazeball type talking real estate deals. The waiters seem too old and depressed to notice their famous customer, but then I recognize an actor from a cop show and figure this must be a Hollywood hangout, the real thing.

“I’ve never had good luck with men and so I’ve always had to fend for myself,” Jayne says suddenly.

We are sharing an appetizer of fried zucchini, which, truthfully, they do better at T.G.I. Fridays. Jayne is drinking vermouth and I’m enjoying my 7UP and the clown art on the walls.

“My third husband, the used car king, was the final straw. He treated me like a piece of dirt under his feet. I used to wonder why the manicurist came out of his office wiping her lips.”

She pours us each more water from a small ceramic pitcher in the shape of a rooster head, which is the signature piece of the restaurant.

“He was the one who spent all my money. We were divorced in 1959. What else could a gal from Oklahoma do, flat broke with two children to support, except sing and dance her little heart out? So I did dinner theater, regional theater, hotel bars, any gig I could get, from Vegas to Palm Beach to Poophead, Iowa, and back. I did that for years, then I met Maggie Stockman.”

“She’s a smart lady.”

“She has no life,” Jayne says. “Her clients are her life.” Mason points the broken end of a bread stick at me. “She is an angel sent from heaven. Excuse me.”

On her way to the ladies’ room she passes a husband and wife wearing formal clothes. It is amusing to watch them trying to say, “That’s Jayne Mason,” without moving their lips.

She returns with fresh lipstick and Magda Stockman still on her mind.

“Maggie was the one who told me I should do drama. She convinced Joe Papp to take a risk with A Doll’s House and it changed my life, not only because it was wildly successful, but because it changed my thinking about myself.”

“You knew you were good.”

“I knew I was an actress. I left Ninety-first Street, rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, and within three years I won my first Oscar. You see, it’s all about self-image. We can’t let anyone take that away from us.”

A mumbling waiter brings two plates of Manicotti Dolly Parton. I had stared at the menu, confused by the Shrimp Angeli Mickey Rourke and the Chicken Dabney Coleman, and decided to get whatever she was getting.

“I’m sure you’ve heard terrible things about me — that I’m late on the set, that I’m drunk or high or rude, but let me tell you, the crew loves me.” She drains the drink and says it again, “The crew loves me” with too much emphasis and I wonder if the cocktail is already getting to her.

“I’m having a wonderful time,” I say as we dig into our fat creamy noodles, “but what does this have to do with Randall Eberhardt?”

She folds her hands on the tablecloth so the bangles splay out with a golden splash. “This is why I am so passionate about bringing this man to justice. Despite everything I have learned, I am still a sucker for the male animal, and Randall Eberhardt took advantage of me all over again. I’ve worked too hard.”

She accepts another vermouth. “I’m sure you’re too smart to fall for that kind of thing.”

“Not necessarily.”

“How do you handle men?”

“I avoid them at all costs.”

Jayne throws back her head and laughs. “Oh my dear, we don’t want to do that.”

“It works.”

She regards me quizzically, then hunches her shoulders in the white cotton jacket and works for a while on the Veal Johnny Carson.

“My third husband, the used car king, once secretly filmed us making love. Not many people know that. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find someone you can trust?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Magda’s the only one who’s stood by me all these years. Thank God for her and my children and grandchildren. I’ve had a rough time of it, but I still believe in romance.”

She catches the indulgence in my smile.

“I’ll bet you think it’s silly to wear all this makeup. I don’t do it for men, I do it for myself. I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and keep putting it on and putting it on until I see something looking back.”

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

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

“I think I saw that one.”

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

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

“Give yourself the magic, Ana.”

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

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

“Did you enjoy dinner?”

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

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

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

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

Pauley pulls the limousine into traffic.

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

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

Like Randall Eberhardt, I have totally lost my bearings.

• • •

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

“For me? Are we getting engaged?”

I put the vase down.

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

“Why?”

“Because I’m such an understanding person.”

“You?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who did?”

“Liza Minnelli’s father.”

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

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

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

“That was Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette.”

“Can’t be.”

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

“But Jayne Mason said it happened to her.”

“It didn’t.”

“Maybe she got mixed up.”

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

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

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

“What’s the matter?”

“She just takes things.”

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

“Maybe she was acting.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Maybe she’s crazy.”

“She’s not.”

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

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

But I have processed it all too quickly.

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

“The doctor?”

I nod. I think I’m going to cry.

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

SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

“Why didn’t you go to a wire before?”

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

“You still don’t.”

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

“Without approval?”

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

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

“Way out of bounds.”

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

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

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

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

“It’s a risk.”

“A controlled risk.”

Donnato shakes his head. “Not my thing.”

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

Donnato drains the last of his lemonade.

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

“Good for her.”

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

“Is he having a tough time?”

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

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

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

“I’ll partner up,” he says.

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

“We think so,” the girl responds warmly.

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

• • •

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

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

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

“I need five minutes of your time.”

“Can I call you back later?”

As usual my assertions are meaningless.

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

“Security National?”

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

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

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

“Can we talk about this later?”

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

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

“What do you mean, ‘cancer’?”

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

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

“It sounds serious.”

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

“What’s your cover?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They keep you running, don’t they?”

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

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

“Probably saved your neck from getting whiplash.”

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

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

“What’s important, doctor?”

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

“And making a lot of money helps.”

“I like making money,” Randall Eberhardt admits with easy candor, rubbing the side of his nose. “But I don’t care about ‘stuff,’ which means in this town people look at you like you’re some other life form.”

“I know. You’ve got all those film stars showing off all over the place.”

“I actually enjoy entertainment people. I’m basically a boring uncreative jock, so I find them fascinating.”

I can see why Jayne Mason liked to take Randall Eberhardt around in her limousine. In the still close smog of Los Angeles he is an impertinent gust of a crisp New England fall. And cute, too.

He continues to ask questions, writing down Amanda Griffin’s answers with a Mont Blanc pen held between large powerful fingers. There is no gray in his hair; he carries his age and stress in deep brown bags beneath his eyes. It is now my job to discover what other darkness might be hidden there.

“I need some painkillers, Dr. Eberhardt. My back is killing me, I can’t sleep.”

He puts the chart down and climbs off the table.

“Let’s take a look.”

I get up and stand in the middle of the floor.

Our voices are being transmitted to Donnato’s ear and simultaneously onto magnetic recording tape, a manipulated dialogue that will be studied later as if it were scientific fact.

But the tape cannot document the illicit thrill of his warm, firm fingertips as I stand naked before him, turning as requested so he may part the gown, so my vulnerable bare back may be exposed and spine examined by his intelligent hands slowly, curiously, piece by piece. Can a healer locate the site of one’s pain just by touch? Perhaps Dr. Eberhardt will discover mine. Not Amanda Griffin’s, but Ana Grey’s. It must be there in the bones, only to be read.

I am staring at the striped aqua wallpaper. My Poppy was examined in a medical room like this, a professionally designed environment meant to be dim and soothing to the patient who is being told the bumps in his neck are cancerous, while the desert sun hurtles itself against the tinted window like a fireball from hell.

Randall Eberhardt’s thumbs are pressing the trigger points along the top ridge of the pelvis and around the curve of the hips expertly, knowingly, putting my mind into a trance. Does it hurt when I do this? Yes. No. Playing along the tendons of the back of the neck, chin falling forward, the medicine man touches my naked body while Donnato listens in the car, like having two lovers at the same time, one man caressing you while the other man watches.

He puts his hands around my waist and tells me to bend over and touch my toes. The gown falls away and my bare buttocks are pushed up toward him and exposed. Gently he gathers the edges and holds them closed. Sweat falls from my armpits to the floor in large audible drops.

On the table now, lying flat, he is holding my foot with instructions to press against his hand. My fingers tear the tissue paper beneath me, telling him how much it hurts, everything hurts, I am breathless.

A memory comes of a time once before when I was this vulnerable and defenseless. I am in the backyard of Poppy’s house on Twelfth Street. It is night and I can’t see very well except when headlights rake through the cracks in the wooden fence as cars pass in the alley. I am again between two males, both of whom love me and want to possess me. One is my young immigrant father and the other is Poppy.

They argue in loud voices. They pull my arms in opposite directions. My father wins and holds me to his chest in the most forceful sense memory of him I have ever experienced. My arms are wrapped around his neck and my legs are around his slight waist and I am clinging to him with my entire being. I want my father at this moment, as I lie here as a patient, now. The yearning is so intense that it burns through my most present emotion, which I thought was sadness concerning Poppy’s diagnosis. As the sadness dissolves I can see it has been nothing but a curtain to mask my true sentiment about my grandfather, a feeling that hurtles at me now like that comet from hell smashing through the tinted window glass: I wish Poppy were dead.

The thought propels me off the table and sends me reaching for my clothes.

“What is it, Amanda?”

“I feel much better. Whatever you did to my back, it worked.”

“I don’t think I’m that much of a genius.”

I am hooking on my bra at top speed under the gown. Dr. Eberhardt has one hand on the doorknob. He’s uncomfortable watching me dress.

“See me in my consulting room.”

“I don’t think I need to, thanks.”

He frowns, worried.

“Something’s going on here. Let’s talk about it.”

My first clear thought: he’s found us out. And then, oh, God, this is all on tape.

“I was really in shock after the accident but just talking about it helped.”

Randall Eberhardt is standing close enough to show his concern and far enough away to give me space. His brown eyes have lost their academic preoccupation and are communicating sincerity and calm.

“Your back looks fine. Your muscle tone is excellent. You don’t need X rays or physical therapy or any of that stuff. I’ll bet you can beat this thing by yourself.”

“But the pain comes back at night.” I am doing my job like a robot broken into pieces still making meaningless sounds.

“Try aspirin and hot baths.”

I have pulled on all my clothes except the panty hose, which I have jammed into the shoulder bag. I am wearing a wool skirt with no underpants and bare feet in heels.

“Is that all you can give me?”

“Amanda, if you are having a problem with drugs, I would like to refer you to a clinic.”

• • •

I climb back into the car.

“Let’s go.”

Donnato takes his time rewinding the tape.

“That was the worst performance by an undercover operative I have ever witnessed.”

“So I won’t win the Academy Award, let’s go.”

“I want you to hear yourself.”

“No”—I close the lid of the briefcase—“thanks.”

Still Donnato doesn’t start the car.

“He made you by the end of it.”

“No way.”

“He knew you were not a patient, that you were looking for drugs. That wasn’t the plan.” Donnato’s voice is rising in an unsettling way.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ve seen you perform some pretty reckless acts lately. I’ve seen you try to destroy your telephone—”

“Donnato—”

“I’ve seen you get into a pointless fight with Duane Carter and then threaten a lawsuit that could totally jeopardize your career, and now, after you drag me into it, you abort an undercover assignment.”

“An unauthonzed undercover assignment.”

“Even better.”

“That’s why you’re mad. I dragged you out here and now you’re all … nervous.”

“I am not nervous, Ana. I have concerns about your stability.”

I am quiet. I take two deep breaths. “Just before I came here I found out my grandfather has cancer. I know it shouldn’t make a difference on a case, but it did and I’m sorry.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“You know Poppy. He’ll beat it.”

“Good.”

But still Donnato does not start the car.

“I’m concerned that you’re over the edge emotionally. It comes from being hypervigilant and eating soup at midnight and not having a life. If it’s too much, be a grown-up and get help. That’s what Harvey McGinnis is there for,” he says, referring to the shrink the Bureau keeps on retainer for agents who have gone around the bend.

“Harvey McGinnis wears a skirt,” I retort. He does, he puts on a kilt for Christmas and for funerals when he gets to play the bagpipes.

“I care about you and you are being a wise ass.” His cheeks are flushed, he is furious. “If you wig out again, I will have to notify Duane Carter that you should be evaluated as to your ability to carry a weapon.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I found out what I needed to know, so just lighten up.”

Finally he turns the engine and we drive. Neither of us says anything more all the way back to Westwood.

I am glad he doesn’t know about the locked cabinet. Now the only way to bust into it would be with a court order.

But I don’t need a court order. I don’t need to look inside the cabinet, I don’t even need the taped conversation to support the findings of my investigation.

Because I knew, from the moment he laid his doctor’s healing hands on me, that Randall Eberhardt is innocent.

EIGHTEEN

I PUT ON the navy blue suit and go to see Galloway.

“I have been unable to substantiate Jayne Mason’s claims against Dr. Randall Eberhardt.”

Galloway has the blinds closed against the early afternoon glare. He is sitting stock-still, one elbow resting on the arm of the chair, two fingers propped up on the side of his head with a tense look as if he’s got a killer headache.

“Keep going.”

“A deep background check on the doctor turned up negative. A current investigation proved negative.”

“Keep going.”

His sullen passivity is unnerving.

“There is no evidence of illegal narcotics, of a Mexican connection, previous infractions, or other patients with the same complaint. All we have is Jayne Mason’s story, which remains unconfirmed. She has also been found to lie about facts concerning her own life, which casts doubts on her character. And”—I pause—“I have reason to believe she stole your belt buckle.”

“Now you’re blowing my mind.”

“Sorry.”

Galloway delicately shifts the heavy weight of his head to two fingers of the opposite hand. “What about that lady back in Boston?”

“She … didn’t turn out to be good.”

I am suddenly mumbling as if my lips were shot up with Novocain, so Galloway asks me to repeat what I said and I have to say it twice.

“Since Jayne Mason’s allegations against her physician have been investigated,” I continue, “and no evidence of criminality has been found, I recommend that we drop the case. I’m sorry. That’s not what you want to hear.”

“Stop being so sorry.”

“I took it as far as it goes.”

Then there is silence.

“Let me ask you something.” His eyelids lower like a drowsy crocodile. “If the doc is clean, why is Mason going after his balls?”

“I don’t know.”

“He fucking her?”

“I don’t think so. I think she’s just …”

“Nuts?”

“No, an actress and a known drug addict.”

He nods with understanding. He knows an addict is an addict and it doesn’t matter if she’s paid five million dollars a picture; like Dennis Hill on cocaine and Wild Bill Walker on booze and John Roth in bed, her existence is simply about feeding an insatiable maw.

“She needs the power.”

Galloway only grunts.

“I’m writing a report but I thought you’d want to know the results ASAP because of the … political situation.”

After a moment Galloway stands, smooths his hair with both hands, and tugs back and forth on the belt of his slacks like an old man trying to get his undershorts to lie right after a long sit.

“I’ll take care of it.”

He seems refreshed. Out of the uneasiness. Resolved.

He even tells me I did a good job.

When I relate the play-by-play of the meeting to Barbara she gives me a high five, certain I will be getting my promotion to the Kidnapping and Extortion Squad by the end of the month.

• • •

But an hour later I receive a phone call from Magda Stockman.

“I have just spoken with Mr. Galloway and I am quite upset. Why did you close this case?”

“There wasn’t a shred of evidence to indict the doctor.”

“Not enough evidence? We gave you times, dates, dosages—”

“I’m sure you know it takes more than one person’s accusations to make a case in court.”

“There is something here that is not right.”

“I was the chief investigator and I’m satisfied the case should be closed.”

“I am not satisfied in the least.”

“That’s your privilege.”

Stockman has refrained from raising her voice, still speaking in a deep monotone of authority, the Henry Kissinger of personal managers: “We feel enormously let down by you, Ana.”

“We do?”

“We believed that as a woman you would understand the deeper issues.”

“As a woman”—I am spitting mad and having a hard time censoring myself from being slanderous—“I think you and your client haven’t got a clue about the deeper issues.”

But she just rolls on in that smooth, inevitable tone:

“We must prevent Dr. Eberhardt from doing this again. Jayne wanted to keep everything quiet and discreet but the time has passed for discretion. I’m going to recommend that my client file a lawsuit against Dr. Eberhardt today and you can be certain the whole world will know about it tomorrow. I hope you don’t get caught in the crossfire, Ana. I wouldn’t want that to happen to someone as bright and promising as you.”

When I hang up, the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise gives Magda Stockman the finger. Hey, it wasn’t me.

• • •

The next day I am awakened at five a.m. by the beating of my own heart. I lie on my stomach, face in the pillow, my whole body vibrating to a bass percussion as if listening to a pair of kettledrums through stereo headphones.

With the Mason case on ice I had decided I would leave work early and go over to the bank, get the papers from Poppy’s safe-deposit box, and be on the freeway heading out to Desert Hot Springs before the traffic. It is going to be a long and stressful day, I rationalize, maybe that is why I woke myself up so painfully prematurely, to get ready.

But I am in such an edgy state that the only possible thing to do right now is to swim. I figure I can make the 5:30 a.m. workout run by the Southern California Aquatics Masters at the Santa Monica College pool. Believe it or not, fifty people show up regularly before dawn. You can swim to compete or to stay in shape or just because you are terrified that you are losing control of your own thoughts.

I bundle up in sweats and swing the Barracuda out onto Washington Boulevard. It is still dark and maybe fifty degrees and riding the empty streets matches my restless mood. I change in the un-heated locker room, listening to the chatter of some UCLA students for whom this first swim of the day is just a warm-up for their friendship. They will breakfast together and meet later tonight to run a 5K. Alone, I stalk outside into the chill. The lights are on in the huge outdoor pool, all the swimmers gathered at the wall in Day Glo-colored caps, a bright vivid Kodacolor against the white steam rising off the surface into an indigo sky.

Then we are ten lanes of synchronized elbows and feet, neat masses of churning water chugging back and forth to a rhythm set by the coach. I am part of the pattern and nothing more, two swimmers behind the leader, five seconds apart, four laps in ninety seconds repeated six times and on to the next set. Halfway through the workout my mind gives up and accepts the beat. The panic subsides, at least for an hour.

I return to my apartment to take a hot shower and grab some things for the trip out to the desert and already there are two messages on my answering machine from the dispatcher, saying that Special Agent in Charge Galloway is looking for me.

Now the pounding of my heart makes sense. It is as if my body woke up this morning knowing the Mason case was not over yet.

Forty minutes later my hair is still wet and I’ve still got owl eyes from the imprint of the goggles as I hurry breathlessly into Galloway’s office. He had been calling my machine from his car and was tied up in traffic, so I get to stare out the window at the full-blown bright day for twenty long minutes until he strides inside, closing the door with a slam. He is clenching a dead cigar in his teeth and his arms are full of newspapers which he tosses at me all at once.

I fumble through the headlines:

JAYNE MASON SUES DOCTOR; MALPRACTICE CITED

“MY DR. MADE ME AN ADDICT”—JAYNE MASON

“I AM A VICTIM,” SAYS JAYNE MASON IN DRUG-RELATED SUIT

JAYNE MASON ALLEGES DOCTOR PRESCRIBED NARCOTICS; FBI INVOLVED

I have just a moment to absorb the impact like a quick jab to the solar plexus when he grabs a chair and pushes it up close to me, leaning forward so our knees almost touch. I recoil slowly against the sofa.

“The case is reopened.”

“Because of the publicity?”

“You bet because of the publicity. I was on the phone with Washington past eleven last night. The Mason case is now a top story and it’s going to be played in the media like the National Anthem.”

“But we completed our investigation.”

“Apparently it wasn’t thorough enough.”

“Yesterday you thought it was fine.”

“I said apparently. It might have been good for us but it wasn’t good for them.” He jerks his head toward the window, indicating the entire civilian world.

“You know that stuff in the paper is a bunch of junk. It was planted by Magda Stockman.”

“That’s right. But I have to answer to the Director.”

“You’re going to reopen the case just for show?”

“Let’s say it was a good investigation, but it didn’t go far enough.”

“How much farther can we go?”

“Undercover.”

I blurt out. “We already went undercover.”

“When was this?”

“You may not remember.”

My forefinger is picking at a cuticle. Galloway is looking at me with the superior penetration of a law enforcement officer about to snag a suspect in an irrevocable lie.

“Help my memory, Ana.”

“I went undercover to see if the doctor would give me illegal drugs. He didn’t. In fact, he suggested I go to a clinic.”

“You did this without authorization?”

“Correct.”

“Who else was involved?”

“Nobody,” I lie. “I had a microcassette in my purse.”

I know my face is scarlet.

Galloway shakes his head in exasperation.

“Jesus Christ, Ana, all we need is to be sued for entrapment.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You realize I have to put a memo in your file.”

“That’s okay. My file is starting to look like target practice.”

Galloway stares at me.

“If you want me to manufacture something against the doctor, I’ll do it.” I meet his eyes.

“You’ll be out on your ass.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

Galloway stands up. ‘What do I want? What do I want?”

He spreads both hands in the air as if grabbing something ineffable, then rubs the tips of his fingers together as if it had just flown away.

“I see my mistake. Back in New York you and the media are family. Maybe not with every local bozo, but you and the TV news director and the cop shop reporter — you’re working opposite sides of the street, but after hours you’re going to meet in the same joint in Chinatown and eat egg foo yung. Out here nobody knows anybody, everything’s a national story because Los Angeles is the capital of the world, and everybody’s an adversary because they’re only going to be around five minutes, so they’ve got five minutes to score. It’s different …” He seems to be searching for the right word.

“It’s Hollywood.”

“What do I want?” He grabs one of the newspapers and holds it up in a crumpled bunch. “You see all this bullshit publicity of hers? I want to fight fire with fire. I want hot publicity for the Bureau on the same scale. Fanfare, visibility, the whole nine yards. I want the public to see we are doing our job.”

“The doctor may have been suckered in,” I say quietly. “Maybe she got him to write a prescription or two, but I’m telling you he’s clean.”

“Then let him come clean in lights. In lights across the fucking sky and we’ll be fucking out of it.”

I am sorry, more sorry than I could have ever imagined, that Galloway, for all his New York smarts, turns out to be a wimp like everybody else.

• • •

I call Poppy and Moby Dick answers the phone.

“What are you doing there?”

“I drove your grandpa for his treatment. He’s back now. He’s taking a nap.”

“What kind of treatment?”

“Radiation therapy.”

Hearing words of any sophistication coming from those beer-sucking lips causes you to sit up and make sure you’re still tuned to the right channel, but these words are truly terrifying, because they mean that even Moby Dick has been forced to learn a new vocabulary concerning my grandfather — the vocabulary of serious illness.

“Tell him I’ll be there soon, I’m just wrapping up a case. How’s he doing?”

“A little wiped but bad as ever. You know the Commissioner.”

• • •

Under the best of circumstances, a search and seizure takes a week to push through but I am empowered by fear. Aside from the excruciating pressure from Galloway I know I must go out and take control of Poppy’s situation as soon as possible, so I heave myself against the bureaucracy the way you would bench-press twenty pounds more than you were ever capable of before, on the exhale and praying for a miracle.

I bully and beg. Little by little we build momentum. I get the title report back in a record six hours. It confirms that the converted Victorian on Fifteenth Street is owned by the Dana Orthopedic Clinic, Inc., of which Randall Eberhardt is chairman of the board. I go in person to the Federal Building on Los Angeles Street and hassle with the forfeiture attorneys, leaving with the paperwork in hand that the U.S. Attorney’s office needs to issue a warrant and writ of entry, which will enable me to walk into Dr. Randall Eberhardt’s office and take possession of all evidence in clear view on behalf of the federal government.

Twenty-four hours later—fanfare and visibility—six burly federal marshals wearing bright orange raid vests converge on the doctor’s office as if it were a crack house in East L.A., accompanied by—the whole nine yards—a caravan of reporters and photographers and minicam crews from the local and national news who were leaked the information by our press relations department.

I have it on videotape, me leading the charge, Randall Eberhardt coming out to the reception area after his nurse has told him something unpleasant is going on.

“Good morning. I am Special Agent Ana Grey with the FBI. We have a seizure warrant for your office.”

The doctor looks at me quizzically.

“Don’t I know you? Did I ever see you as a patient?”

“It’s possible. May we come in?”

“No, you may not come in.”

“I have a warrant, sir.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the contents of these offices are now the property of the United States government.”

A search and seizure is generally the end of the line for the bad guys, because it means you have finally come around to collect the evidence that will indict them. They also don’t like it because someone is taking away their toys and they are used to being the one who take from others. They’ll rant and shout and deny or point their weapons or try to escape or break down and cry, but you rarely see a subject retain his dignity the way Dr. Eberhardt did that morning.

“Is this a result of the outrageous charges made by Jayne Mason against me in the press?”

“I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”

“I’d like to know,” he says evenly. “Just for my own personal sense of the absurd.”

“Maybe you would like to call your attorney.”

“Maybe so. I’ve never been in the center of a media circus before.” He picks up the phone but lowers it again without dialing when he sees the marshals heading for the examining rooms.

“Wait a minute, I have patients back there!”

I march past him like an S.S. commandant leading the infantry and Dr. Eberhardt’s confidence gives way to horror as he realizes these indifferent thugs are truly going to invade his world, the world of medicine, like Nazis tramping through the great libraries of Poland and burning them to the ground, a thousand years of reason perishing in the flames. Dread rises as Dr. Eberhardt begins to understand that reason won’t protect him here; a lifetime spent puzzling out the exquisite logic of the bones can also be obliterated by a single senseless act.

“There’s a locked cabinet back there,” I say.

All of us have assembled in the examination room where I once posed as a patient. It is crowded now with the federal marshals, Eberhardt in the white lab coat, and two thunderstruck nurses.

“May we have the keys?”

He nods and one of the nurses hands them to me.

It is close and hot with too much breathing. I reach toward the lock like an observer outside my own drama, hoping that in the next moment I will be proven wrong and lose all credibility at the Bureau, that Jayne Mason will be vindicated and the shelves will be stuffed with narcotics — not because I want to see Eberhardt suffer, but at least then all this destruction would be for a reason.

“Why do you keep this cabinet locked, sir?”

“I do a lot of work with children who have disorders of the spine.” Randall Eberhardt licks his lips as if they have suddenly become dry. “You know how kids get into everything.”

There is silent tense anticipation in the room as the door swings open. Inside is a collection of tiny teddy bears.

“My patients give them to me. I used to keep them on display but they started disappearing. Then some kid would get upset because his special bear wasn’t there on his next visit.”

In front of everyone I must examine the teddy bears as solemnly as I would any evidence. Alone, I think I would have banged my head against the door. There must be a hundred little cutesy figures of every conceivable material — clay, calico, metal, origami, even homemade teddies of pink cotton balls with wiggly plastic eyes.

I run a flashlight over the inside of the cabinet, feeling for false compartments as if I am firmly in charge here, then get up from my knees. “Let’s get started.”

As the marshals pack medical equipment and records into card board cartons, Dr. Eberhardt shoulders his way down the hall toward the sound of hammering.

He opens the front door, appalled to find that a locksmith is already changing the locks and another guy is nailing up a sign over the dove gray paint that says “Property of the U.S. Marshals.” Then, suddenly, he is confronted by a sea of cameras and questions shouted about charges by the actress Jayne Mason that illegal narcotics were dispensed from these offices, and that’s when the shock sets in.

He turns back pale and disoriented.

“This isn’t really happening to me.” His eyes are watery and enlarged.

I take his arm and steer him away with pity, remembering that he once put a compassionate hand on me, guiding him to a quiet corner of the waiting room, where he slumps into a peach and gray chair with a look of dissociation that comes from being deeply violated, when the only way to escape the torture of humiliation is for the body and mind to shut down; a look of passive despair I have seen before in victims of rape.