North of Montana

NINETEEN

THE SECURITY NATIONAL BANK building on Wilshire where Poppy opened a savings account as a young Santa Monica police officer is now the Ishimaru Bank of California. It must have gone through several face-lifts since the sixties, but all the changes have added up to nothing more than a box made of beige bricks, inside and out.

I imagine the vault is exactly the same as when Poppy first deposited his important papers. You don’t move vaults around when you remodel. I’ll bet every day for the past thirty years the time lock has clicked at 8:45 a.m. and the manager has spun the wheel, grunting and pulling the door open with both hands, leaving it ajar for the public to marvel at six inches of layered steel. It’s still impressive, the way a mausoleum is impressive; the way you know, from the weight of the granite stones sealed together with mathematical precision, that inside this place nothing will change, ever.

A quiet pensive black woman with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and long crystal earrings checks my signature against a card and unlocks an interior gate. We pass through a massive doorway inlaid with a checkerboard pattern of brass and chrome to a small room lined with burnished gray doors on hinges. I hand her my key. She puts a blue heeled shoe on a stool to reach up and unlock number 638. Behind her is a sign that says “Emergency Ventilation” with a set of instructions. She steps down from the stool and places an oblong box on a desk inside a tiny cubicle with a door I can close for privacy, leaving me alone in the dead air.

I am stilled by a sense of dreadful sadness and it takes many moments to force myself to lift the long metal lid.

I had expected there would be nothing except the will rattling around in a cold empty box, but it is filled with an assortment of household stuff like a drawer casually pulled from a sideboard.

On top of the pile is a yellowed clipping from the Santa Monica Evening Outlook dated September 12, 1962. The headline reads, “ ‘MEANEST THIEF’ FEELS PANGS OF CONSCIENCE.” The article tells the story of a partially paralyzed baseball fan who was carried to his seat by friends to watch the “exciting game” in Dodger Stadium. He left his wheelchair at the top of the aisle and it vanished. After some publicity, it turned up days later just a few blocks from the Santa Monica police station with the following note:

I am that meanest of mean thieves who stole your wheelchair. I would like to offer an explanation if there can possibly be one. Yes, we did it as a practical joke, but I honestly thought the chair belonged to Walter O’Malley and was put there for an emergency. I still realize this offers nothing but a very low sense of humor.

I hope if at all possible you may find it in your heart to forgive me. I think I will have learned a great lesson from this “joke” that backfired. I am really not that sarcastic of an individual and hope that both you and God will forgive me for this prank.

Sorry

Accompanying the article is a photograph of Poppy with one hand on the recovered wheelchair. He looks young and vigorous with his crew cut and dark uniform. You can see the outline of the nightstick and the Smith & Wesson.38 on his belt. The caption explains:

PARALYZED MAN’S WHEELCHAIR, stolen while its owner watched last week’s game between Dodgers and Giants at Chavez Ravine, is inspected by Santa Monica patrolman Everett Morgan Grey. The owner has been offered a new chair by a rental firm.

What a poignant relic of a time when Santa Monica was a sleepy undiscovered seaside town and thieves had consciences and somebody thought that having your photograph in the local newspaper was an event of such importance that they entombed it in the bank.

Digging underneath my grandfather’s moment of glory I find silver dollars worn to the color of pewter and Kennedy fifty-cent pieces wrapped in tissue, still as shiny as new. There is also a series E savings bond from 1960 with the face value of $100 made out to me, a brown photograph with a white scalloped edge of my mother as a baby being held by her parents, my grandfather’s Last Will and Testament (naming me as the beneficiary of his estate), along with his birth certificate, my grandmother’s birth certificate and social security card, insurance policies from 1955, a small notebook embossed Your Child’s Medical History with a record of my childhood immunizations written in my mother’s hand, a spiral note pad containing a ledger of household expenses for the year 1967, and, inside an envelope, my grandmother’s gold wedding ring and a brooch with amber stones. Loose in the box are a small gold heart with an enameled pansy, some costume bracelets, and a thin string of real pearls that were given to my mother on her sixteenth birthday.

I touch these things and for a few moments my mother comes back to me, her quilted cotton apron, where I would sometimes be permitted to lay my head, woven with splatters of batter and oil, the residue of a hundred meals and a thousand washings — it was like inhaling the essence of comfort. I suddenly remember that her nylons smelled of tannin and autumn leaves, drying on the towel rack in the bathroom with the salmon and black tiles, and at her dressing table in the front bedroom where she kept her rings in a glass ashtray, my God, she used Chanel No. 5. Furniture polish. Meat loaf with green peppers. She wore wool skirts and see-through white blouses with tiny round buttons and demure ruffles when she worked as a receptionist for Dr. Brady, but what you saw underneath was the stern construction of slip straps. They were short-sleeved blouses that revealed the pale fleshy undersides of her upper arms, which now in this stagnant closet I recall with foolish tenderness.

She worked until noon on Saturdays and often she and I would take the Atlantic Boulevard bus past those mysterious landmarks of childhood — Peg’s for Perms, Bardlow Top Shop with a painting of a 1964 Mustang on a revolving oval — to a one-story dental building across the street from the Long Beach Mortuary, where I would spend three hours in a tiny back room, kitchen cum laboratory, waiting while she typed on the IBM and answered the phone, reading Superman comics and finding the hidden pictures in office copies of Highlights for Children—“Fun with a Purpose.” Mother would freeze those tiny cans of Mott’s apple juice and I’d eat my American cheese sandwich and suck out the icy slush with a straw, looking through huge dusty textbooks with close-up photographs of malformed gums. The place smelled like ether.

But when it was over we’d get back on the bus and continue downtown, where she would pay her bills at the electric and gas company offices, then continue on to Buffum’s and Sears and the tedious business of keeping up a household: getting extra keys made, buying shower curtains and aluminum pots, Mother asking my opinion about every tiny purchase because she could never make up her mind. The worst was Lerner’s, where I remember many excruciating hours playing beneath racks of blouses while she dawdled and agonized.

If I was lucky we’d end up in Woolworth’s or Kress, where I’d wander the flat wooden tables, drawn to cheap beach souvenirs like plastic wallets with photos of palm trees or figurines made of sea-shells, but what I lusted after most — and was never allowed to possess — were the medals of St. Christopher, which they kept in a locked glass case because every kid in Southern California wanted “a Christopher” like the coolest surfers wore.

I suddenly have the sense of sitting at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s spooning a black-and-white ice cream soda while Mother had cinnamon toast and coffee, sharing a guilty pleasure because it was just an hour until dinnertime. My mother rarely indulged either of us, maybe because in a way it would mean robbing Poppy of something, but those Saturday afternoons did provide an indulgence — being alone with her, away from my grandfather, which I now realize was the underlying reason we were so dumbly, unknowingly, happy.

Because at the other end of the bus ride, after carrying those heavy shopping bags past an oil rig that pumped day and night in a fenced lot in the middle of the neighborhood, we’d inevitably arrive at the one-eyed redbrick house on Pine Street. I saw it that way as a child because a loquat bush hid one of the two front windows and the other seemed to stare from between gray shutters with glassy spite.

The house was new when Poppy bought it, the only one on the street made of brick. It was buttoned up, closed off like a bunker, with a square green lawn mowed to anal uniformity, no ornamentation except a black mailbox on a post. One innovation of the sixties was a bright yellow all-electric kitchen with a clock built into the stove that of course ran on Poppy’s time: “Ask your grandfather what he wants for dinner …” “We’ll eat when Poppy’s ready …” Looking at the household ledger in the spiral notebook, I discover that for our two rooms in my grandfather’s spartan home, my mother paid rent, $54.67 a month.

I miss her then, I want those freckled arms around me, I want our bond, broken not only by her death but by a mysterious invisibility during my young childhood, to be healed. But how? Instead of coming close, I feel her fading away from me again, eclipsed as always by Poppy.

What was her shadowy life compared to the scary, exciting visits to police headquarters in the bold blue glass building on Broadway? Poppy would steer me through busy offices where everyone thought I was cute, then, if there were no prisoners, through the actual jail with its terrifying steel toilets. Waiting outside for him, I’d call out to his buddies by name as they climbed into their squad cars, running my fingers over a big brass plaque near the lobby, a bas-relief of a policeman sheltering a boy and girl, “Lest We Forget”—Long Beach Police Officers Association, with a kind of preadolescent sexual thrill.

Poppy took me trick-or-treating, Mother stayed home. He took me body surfing in the breakers off Shoreline Drive, bullying me to get up and do it again no matter how many times the waves sent me sprawling — where was she? Timid, passive, afraid, self-effacing until dissolving into a ninety-pound cadaver before my eyes. In the end her skin was actually green and she didn’t have the strength to roll over in the hospital bed, lying on her side facing away from me, one arm struggling to rise above the collapsed curve of her hip, one word, my name, spoken as I entwined those dry brittle fingers in mine at age fourteen.

And yet she is not completely gone and yet … perhaps I really did mean something to her. Who else would have saved the document I now hold in my hand, and for what purpose other than someday her daughter might find it, shoved way in the back of a safe-deposit box inside an unused birthday card inside an envelope? It is her marriage certificate, stamped by the City of Las Vegas, August 3, 1964. It states that on this day, Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey, my father and mother, were married.

I stare at it with only one wish: that the black woman with the ponytail will dig her blue heels into the beige carpeting and push that steel door closed and give the big brass wheel a good strong spin, sealing me and what I now know into a dark airless crypt, where secrets are buried precisely so nothing will change, forever.

• • •

When Poppy doesn’t answer my ring at the door I use my key. I find him sitting out on the balcony with eyes closed, face to the late afternoon sun. He looks the same. He is wearing his usual tan slacks and yellow polo shirt open at the neck, bare feet in flip-flops crossed up on a small plastic table. His square rugged hands — reddish and hairy with age — are clasped on his chest. His chin is sunk forward and he is snoring.

Even now another ancient admonition stops me from waking him up, “Grandfather needs his sleep.” I turn back into the condominium and start picking up coffee cups and glasses and carrying them into the kitchen. A few yellowish curds have collected on the brown Rubbermaid mat in the bottom of the sink near the wooden dishwashing stick with the soft cotton head Poppy has been using for years. I see those red soapy hands rinsing bacon and scrambled eggs off green melamine plates and a wave of revulsion as powerful as the Long Beach surf almost doubles me over. The cups chatter as I place them on the counter and walk back into the sun.

“Poppy. I’m here. Wake up.”

He opens his eyes and smiles. “The woman of the hour.”

I am cold. “Why do you say that?”

“You busted that sleazy doctor who was harassing Jayne Mason.”

“Something like that.”

“Hell, it’s all over the news. I’ve got it right here.”

He swings his feet off the small table and stands. Steadily, I notice.

I follow him through the sliding glass doors into the cool darkness of the living room. Sun spots are still swimming in my vision as he picks up a sheaf of newspapers and magazines from the top of the television.

“You’re a celebrity.”

But there is nothing congratulatory in the flat tone of his voice. He holds my eyes before handing me the papers and behind the handsome mask of strong nose and weathered cheeks is a baby-faced pout of envy.

Of course I am nowhere near a celebrity. I receive no personal mention in Poppy’s collection of articles from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the local Palm Springs rag. The FBI is said to be only peripherally involved. The big story is the million-dollar malpractice lawsuit being brought against “the sports injury doctor to the stars” by “movie queen” Jayne Mason with plenty of spicy comments from “superpower personal manager” Magda Stockman. The big graphic that has played in all the media is a split-screen image of Mason on one side and Eberhardt on the other. She looks beautiful and vulnerable, he looks hunched over and guilty.

“You don’t usually show much interest in my cases.”

“This one is different, it’s my gal, Jayne. That doc deserves to hang. What can I get you?”

‘Water.”

“Good idea. Dry today.”

He goes into the kitchen, I remain standing. When he returns with two glasses I drop the manila envelope I have been holding onto the coffee table.

“I got the documents from the safe-deposit box.”

“You didn’t have to make a trip. The U.S. mail would have been more than adequate.”

Is he deliberately undercutting me today, not thanking me for my effort, not acknowledging my accomplishments, or have these subtle put-downs and manipulations been going on for years? I can feel the tendrils of rage coiling around my throat, threatening to choke me off. I have to reach up and forcibly pry them apart to keep breathing.

“I made the trip to show my concern for you, Poppy.” I let the angry sarcasm hang there but he doesn’t hear it.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you?”

“Well, the radiation makes me drowsy and chemotherapy ain’t no day at the beach, but we’ll take that on when it comes.”

“What exactly is the diagnosis?”

“They call it a lymphoma.”

“What’s your doctor’s name, I’d like to speak to him or her.”

“No need for it.”

“You can’t go through this alone.”

“I’ve got friends in the complex. Lots of ladies want to look in on me.”

“Don’t screw with me, Poppy.” My finger is jabbing into the space that separates us across the living room. “I need to know your doctor’s name.”

“All right.”

Having won that bout, I spit a breath out between my teeth. I am still standing. He is sitting on the sofa with his legs crossed and eyes unfocused, a bleak inward repose as if I weren’t there.

I sit down in an armchair but it is too deep to get my feet firmly on the floor and too far from Poppy to force him to look at me. I try to drag it closer but the legs get tangled in the matted shag of the rug.

For a moment I am frozen like a diver at the edge of the board. As a child I would clutch, looking down at the water so far away. Once, when a line of kids behind me started hooting because I couldn’t jump off and I couldn’t step back, a lifeguard had to walk out, pick me up under the arms, and drop me into the pool like a slab of stone. She’s there now, the healthy well-muscled self taking firm hold of the shivering frightened self at last.

“When I was going through the safe-deposit box I found some things. Some jewelry, which I kept, and a marriage certificate between my father and Mom. You never told me they were married.”

“Who was married?”

“Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey. Do the names sound familiar?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’ve been thinking about this for the last two and a half hours, driving out from L.A. I’ve had a lot of time to go over it again and again and again. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you and Mom have lied to me about my father and my heritage and who I am and where I come from my entire life.”

At the end of it my voice betrays me by going weak.

“I told you to forget about that son of a bitch,” Poppy snaps. His eyes look black in the triangular shadow that cuts across the room. “He left you and your mother, can’t you get that through your head?”

“Apparently he didn’t leave because they ran away and got married. Maybe you didn’t know about it.”

Bitterly, “I knew about it.”

“Why did they wait until four years after I was born?”

We are facing each other squarely now. Poppy is alert and still as a snake.

“Let me take a wild guess.” I am feeling an enormous pressure in my chest, a miserable kind of total body ache. “You threatened my father and behaved like a raving bigot until finally you chased him away.”

“I’m the one who raised you!” Poppy shouts, causing me to flinch. “Damn you to hell.”

I say it again in a stronger voice, matching his: “My father left because you chased him away.”

“He was a lowlife beaner who knocked up my daughter, then this guy”—he pauses to shake his head and almost laugh—“keeps coming back and coming back … for five fucking years. Then he marries her against my wishes and that was the last fucking straw.”

“Maybe,” I suggest, “he fucking loved her.”

“You watch your tongue or I’ll give you the back of my hand.”

“And maybe … she fucking loved him.”

We stare at each other. I do not apologize and I do not back off.

“Let’s get it clear now, Poppy, because the sun is going down. Who was Miguel Sanchez?”

Glaring silence.

“Was he from El Salvador?”

“That was the story.”

“So he wasn’t Mexican.”

“What’s the difference?”

“How could Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey have possibly met in 1958?”

“She was stupid enough to let him sweet-talk her over at Patton’s pharmacy on Montana.”

“What was an itinerant worker doing in a drugstore on Montana Avenue? Buying hand cream?”

“His line to Gwen was that he was taking night courses in management at the high school.”

“So now he’s not a migrant laborer, he’s a Ph.D.”

“I’m the one who raised you.” His fist comes down on the padded arm of the sofa and bounces up.

“You stole me from my parents.”

“What’s the matter with you? Have you been smoking crack?”

I stand up with disgust.

“Your mother was a naïve silly girl and your father was trash. You think I wanted a little spic baby in the house—”

“Stop.”

“But you turned out to be more white than brown.”

“So you kept the half-breed bastard.”

“It was your grandmother’s idea, then she passed away. Now I was stuck with the two of you. You think your mother could have managed on her own?”

“She would have gone with my father and had a life, and I would have had my parents.”

“All you needed was me.”

I can only stare at him incredulously.

“You’re as naïve as your mother,” he explodes suddenly. “I had to send him away. He would have ruined your lives.”

“So you forced him to leave and made sure he’d never come back.”

“That part was out of my hands. The dumb son of a bitch got himself killed.”

I am silent. “How was he killed?”

“I told you he was a migrant worker. He talked back to the foreman one time too many, got into a fight, and got the shit beat out of him, that’s all.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Your mother was devastated,” he continues in a tight voice. “She never wanted you to know. She just couldn’t see that side of him, that he was a hotheaded arrogant bastard.”

“Where was he buried?”

Poppy scowls. “Who knows, probably in some bean field somewhere. They sure didn’t send him home with military honors.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I’m sick and tired of taking the blame.”

A chill passes through me, then something adjusts in my body like a joint that’s been out of whack for a few decades and subtly shifts back into place. I realize that I had always known my father was dead and that he had been killed violently. I have carried an image of him dying with blood on his face — I’ve dreamed it several times — so somebody must have told me or I must have overheard.

“Nobody’s blaming you.”

“Like hell.”

“Look,” I say softly, trying to be conciliatory, “give me the name of your doctor.”

“Next to the bed, but what’s the big deal?”

He picks up a magazine and lies down on the sofa. The shadow cuts across his body like a guillotine. He puts a pillow behind his neck to prop up his head and the sunset light, that amber light of nightmares, catches the worn blue eyes, which are looking at me now over the top of the page with uncensored hate.

I have nowhere to go so I go into the bedroom. The brown curtains are drawn, the maroon cover on the bed pulled tight. On the bedside table there are several new prescription bottles, a shoehorn, keys, and a bill with the name and address of an oncologist in Palm Springs. When I pick it up, I understand why my grandfather doesn’t want me to talk to the doctor. It means acknowledging that the famous omnipotent powerful Everett Morgan Grey, patrol officer, rescuer of children, protector of the superior race, is mortal.

Under “diagnosis” the doctor wrote, “Aggressive B-cell lymphoma.” Special Agent Charles Gonzalez, a nice man who worked the White Collar Crime Squad, was diagnosed with the same thing. I will be granted the shameful wish that came hurtling out of my subconscious as I lay beneath Randall Eberhardt’s hand: Poppy will be dead in a year.

TWENTY

SINCE WORKING the Mason case I have not been in touch with the guys on the Bank Robbery Squad, stranded out here in no-man’s-land waiting for my transfer, and now that I need someone to talk to, nobody is around. I wander through the bullpen like a lost soul, stopping at everybody’s empty desk, until realizing it is the last Friday of the month and they must be having their potluck lunch. I purge the vending machine of all its vanilla creme sandwiches to have something to contribute, but nobody is in the lunchroom, either. I figure they must have gone out to a restaurant until I notice a bunch of people are crowded into the small conference room with the lights out.

Peeking through the blinds I see it’s them all right, Kyle, Frank, Barbara, Rosalind, Donnato, and Duane sitting around the table with piles of goodies on paper plates. But instead of jokes and lively conversation everyone is turned intently toward the television where a videotape is playing of Ana Grey striding up the steps of the Dana Orthopedic Clinic followed by a half dozen federal marshals in orange raid vests. I had lent Barbara a cassette of the Eberhardt arrest given to me by one of the TV stations, not expecting her to make it the afternoon’s feature presentation.

When I open the door, they are surprised to see me in person.

“Take notes, guys. This is how it’s done.”

I unload my handfuls of vanilla creme cookies, then sit beside Barbara and pick a strawberry off her plate.

“Have some lunch,” offers Rosalind.

“I’m okay.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Barbara says of the tape.

“Hell no, I just hope you charged admission.”

We watch a close-up of Randall Eberhardt’s distraught face as I brush past him and the camera follows us down the hall. You’d think my buddies would cheer me on like they did the morning after I made that California First bust, but instead there is an uncomfortable tension in the viewing room, the way I guess it has to be when someone leaves a group and the group goes on without her.

“This will be very good for you, Ana. You look like a leader,” Barbara observes.

“Not like I’m about to wig out?” I turn in Donnato’s direction but he is back in the shadows sipping coffee. His silence is nagging. It seems like a long time since the potluck when he was fooling around, calling me Annie Oakley in black lace.

“No,” says Barbara, “it looks like you’re in control of a tight situation.”

“Pardon me,” chuckles Duane. “But this is not the invasion of Normandy, they’re enterin’ a doctor’s office, what’s he gonna do, zap ’em with his X-ray machine?”

Frank and Kyle give a couple of halfhearted guffaws.

“The media was there and Galloway made her point person,” Barbara answers crisply. “That’s significant.”

“Why so?”

“People around here are finally realizing that women can do the job.”

Another silence. Nobody wants to get into that.

“Duane thinks it’s a dog case,” I explain.

“There is no case,” says Duane. “Galloway and the Director are jerking each other off.”

“You’re jealous,” Barbara fairly purrs, fingering the pearl around her neck.

“Show me a case. What evidence was recovered from the search and seizure?”

Although I am pleased to see Duane irritated, I have to admit to everyone that we found nothing in the office to implicate the doctor and, in fact, the Assistant U.S. Attorney is scrambling to figure out if there’s anything to charge him with at all.

“See what I mean? Another pathetic dog-and-pony show.”

“In today’s world of media events and photo opportunities everything’s for show,” Kyle says slowly and reasonably. “Ana did what was required for the six o’clock news. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.”

The tape is over. Rosalind gets up and turns on the lights.

Duane Carter spreads his scrawny knees and leans his chair way back on its rear legs.

“I’d be scared shitless if I were you. The case is still open and you’ve got nada—”

Luckily I’m already there. I’d been thinking about Mason’s behavior when she came to our office and that night over dinner. The dilated pupils, the shaky hands, the discordant energy when she returned from the rest room had been working the back of my mind.

“We know Mason’s an abuser,” I cut in sharply, trying not to look at the aggressive display of crotch. “I’m running criminal checks on everyone on her staff. She’s doing drugs again and she’s getting them from somewhere.”

Duane suddenly tips the chair forward. Its front feet land with a snap. “Don’t you get it? They’re pulling your chain just to keep the pretty lady happy.”

“To keep her manager happy.” Donnato sends me a piercing look that says I warned you about this weeks ago but you insist on screwing yourself up. “She has friends in high places.”

This seems to make Duane happy. “You’ll be riding robbery again in a week and I, for one, can’t wait to welcome you back.”

He saunters out. Kyle shakes his head.

“Don’t say it,” Barbara warns.

All I do is give his empty chair a tiny little nudge with my toe.

“I’m a big girl now.”

Donnato slides the Tupperware bowl and the pair of black salad tongs into a shopping bag.

“Keep at it,” he tells me with about the same personal interest he would show in the guy mopping the men’s room floor.

I follow him out. He shoves the bag under his desk and looks up, not entirely pleased to find me standing above him.

“So how is Rochelle doing in law school?”

“She loves it.”

“But?”

“It’s an adjustment.”

“Sounds like more than that.”

He sighs impatiently. “It’s hard on everyone, okay? Suddenly she’s not around for the kids — I’m supposed to jump in and be Superdad, but how do I do that when I’m here until eight o’clock at night?”

“So who made the salad?” I say kiddingly.

“I did, that’s how bad it is.” He starts to twirl a silver letter opener around on his desk. “Law school is good for her. She should have done it a long time ago.”

However, one flick of a forefinger and the thing spins like a knife-sharp Ninja star.

I hesitate.

“You know Duane could be right. The Mason case could fall apart and I’ll be back riding with you, giving you a hard time, could you stand it?”

In the nanosecond it takes him to decide what to say, all hope dies.

“They’ve got me partnered with Joe Positano now.”

“Who is Joe Positano?”

“Rookie transferred from Atlanta. He would have been at lunch but he couldn’t wait to get his California driver’s license, poor ignorant son of a bitch.”

“That could change.”

“What could?”

“Joe Positano. If I came back.”

Again, the killer pause.

“Who knows?” Donnato says emptily, reaching for his shoulder holster and pulling his weapon out of a locked desk drawer. I feel awful.

“Are you still mad at me because of the undercover thing?”

Donnato puts his sport jacket on over the shoulder holster.

Abruptly, “No.” Then, relenting, “So what are you going to do?”

For a moment I hold his look.

“Return a humidifier,” I say.

There is nothing more. He gives me a laconic wave goodbye, and we separate.

• • •

I am sitting on a bench in the Century City Shopping Center finishing a Butter Brittle Bar from See’s Candies, a treat I used to sneak after school, and feeling depressed about every element in my life except the fact that at my feet is a new humidifier inside a glossy box tied up with string, so I will no longer wake up with a sore throat those Santa Ana mornings when the humidity is zero.

Small comfort.

The conversation I had with Poppy’s doctor was bleak. We are looking at months of increasing debilitation and pain. He advised me to take it one day at a time, which in a situation like this is all the human spirit can bear. And although I’ve tried not to focus on it, hearing about my father has brought that particular sorrow close enough to the surface to be almost audible, the whisper of water inside a cave.

I miss my squad and I miss Donnato. Our innocent, comfortable flirtation is over and things with the other guys will never be the same. It all started when I went after that bank robber on my own and worsened when I went off on the Eberhardt case. Is this what I get for following my ambitions like some fool greyhound let loose on a track? While everyone else has left the park, I’m still tearing after a fake rabbit.

In no mood to go back to the office, I pick up my package and wander past the shops, taking in the bright afternoon air, wishing I could think of something else to buy that would make me feel better. All I can come up with is a fanny pack.

I figure they might have one at Bullock’s, so I push the glass doors open and plod across the cosmetics department, asphyxiating on that cloying powdery smell, disoriented by the play of glossy white and gold surfaces reflected in the mirrored posts. It’s a hell of a heart-stopper to run right into Jayne Mason.

Not the real Jayne Mason but a life-size cardboard cutout, the same one I had seen in the den in Malibu, where she was wearing an evening gown and holding a bouquet. That one must have been the mock-up, because now there is printing across the bouquet that reads Introducing Yellow Rose Cosmetics by Jayne Mason.

A girl with immaculate makeup wearing a white lab coat with a fresh yellow rose pinned over the breast sees me staring.

“We’re having a special on Jayne Mason’s new cosmetics. With every twenty-dollar purchase you get a tote bag.”

I am struck dumb. An entire counter is stacked with samples of lipsticks, mascara, eye pencils, powder, blush, nail polish. The bright silver and yellow packaging features Jayne Mason’s signature, the same careful round lettering she wrote on Barbara’s legal pad that day in the office. The amazing thing is this elaborate and sophisticated display seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. It wasn’t here when Jayne Mason made her sweep of the cosmetics department. I realize now she had been checking to see if the line was in the store, disappointed when it was not.

And all this didn’t just spring out of nowhere.

“Who makes the actual stuff?”

“It’s by Giselle.”

I see now we are at the Giselle counter and Yellow Rose is a subdivision. Their perennial product lines, Youth Bud and Moonglow — which even I used as a teenager — are displayed around the corner. So Jayne Mason has become a spokesperson for a major cosmetics company; a deal worth millions of dollars that had to have been in place long before she met Randall Eberhardt — an arrangement she and her manager would likely go to great lengths to protect.

“Would you like a makeover, compliments of Jayne Mason?” the girl asks sweetly.

She indicates a stool beside the smiling cutout of Jayne.

I emit a high-pitched giggle that seems to go on for a long time. The girl blinks and takes a step back.

“She’s already done me, thanks.”

• • •

Even at four p.m. the bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel is crowded with an international mix of people bartering for goods and services, including a pair of young call girls doing business with some well-tailored Japanese. Somehow Jerry Connell and I recognize each other across the bazaar; I make him for the most nervous man in the room.

“I am not a happy camper,” he says as we shoulder our way through.

“Rocky flight from St. Louis?”

“Next time call before you call, okay? Say: Hi, this is Ana Grey from the FBI. I’m going to give you a cardiac arrest in about thirty seconds, just wanted you to know.”

He shakes his head and grins. Fair-haired with appealing blue eyes, he’s wearing one of those ultrafashionable suits that look retro and futuro at the same time — a subtle gray houndstooth with skinny lapels. I sneak a touch as I guide him to the last empty table: heavenly cashmere.

We both order Perrier. Connell is anxious and intense, talking compulsively.

“This is scary. Giselle is a tremendously important account. They’ve only been with our ad agency three years, and so far we’ve had just one slice of their business, but we’ve done well enough with the Moonglow line for them to take a flier on Yellow Rose.”

“Your agency came up with the idea to use Jayne Mason?”

“It was Magda Stockman’s idea. Have you met her?”

He squeezes the life out of the lemon wedge floating in his glass.

“I know Ms. Stockman.”

“She called out of nowhere, said she was Jayne Mason’s personal manager, were we interested in developing a line of cosmetics for Giselle using Jayne as a spokesperson. She flew out, made a very smart presentation, and the client bought it.”

“How was the deal structured?”

Jerry Connell can’t sit still. His knees are thumping up and down, fingers drumming the table. Now he’s fingering his string-bean leather tie.

“It’s a partnership arrangement between Jayne Mason and Giselle. They manufacture the cosmetics.”

“And Jayne—”

“She’s required to do some commercials, point-of-purchase displays, print ads, and one or two speaking engagements. It amounts to about a week of her time.”

“How much does she get paid?”

“I can’t tell you that …” He grinds at the lemon wedge with the ball end of a cocktail stick. “But it’s in the high seven figures.”

“For one week’s work.”

“We like to think of it as a lifetime’s worth of public recognition.”

“You’re in a pretty business,” I say.

“Almost as pretty as yours.”

He looks at me sideways. The agitation subsides. Jerry Connell is a polished, educated salesman with a lot at stake and now he is going to make his pitch:

“So you called, Special Agent Ana Grey, and I took the next flight out of St. Louis. In order to do that, I had to give up my haircut with Sal. Do you know how hard it is to get an appointment with that guy?”

“Your hair looks okay.”

“I have to protect my client. Tell me what’s going on. Do I have a major problem here?”

“I don’t know yet. When did Jayne Mason sign the contract with Giselle?”

“Two years ago. It takes time to gear these things up.”

“So the deal was in place when she went into the Betty Ford Center?”

“It was.”

Remembering Magda Stockman’s impassioned speech about how all the publicity around Jayne’s drug problem had irrevocably damaged her career, “Didn’t that worry you?”

“We were assured the thing was treatable and it would be handled with discretion.”

“But it wound up on the cover of People magazine.”

“Any time you go with a celebrity endorsement there’s a measure of risk. They’re unpredictable. They’re human.”

“But didn’t it bother your client that their spokesperson was a drug addict?”

“It wasn’t like she was mainlining heroin. This fancy doctor got her hooked. I think there was sympathy in the executive ranks.” He smiles engagingly. “Who hasn’t done a little Xanax to get through the day?”

I put my hands flat on the table and lock into his eyes.

“Did Magda Stockman make the statement to you that Jayne Mason’s addiction was the doctor’s fault?”

“Yes, and she said not to worry, he was being prosecuted for it.” Jerry Connell stares at me. “Isn’t he?”

“Not until we can find something to prosecute him for.”

He starts fiddling with the tie like it was a piccolo.

“Whatever. As far as my client is concerned, at this point it probably doesn’t matter.” He’s talking to himself. “The public perception is such that …”

He trails off, looking into the distance, calculating the public perception.

“Well,” he concludes, “Giselle is protected.”

“How is that?”

“Worst-case scenario: Mason is in breach of her contract. We pull the product, we sue, bam-boom.”

He slaps the table two times and seems ready to get back on the plane.

“I don’t understand. How would she be in breach?”

“We have a morals clause.

“Show me.”

• • •

Although it is almost eight o’clock at night in St. Louis the lights are burning at the advertising agency of Connell and Burgess. Somebody back there sends a copy of the morals clause in Jayne Mason’s contract through the hotel fax. I read it line by line as it feeds off the machine:

M. MORALS. If Spokesperson should, prior to or during the term hereof or thereafter, fail, refuse or neglect to govern Spokesperson’s conduct with due regard to social conventions and public morals and decency, or commit any act which brings Spokesperson into public disrepute, scandal, contempt or ridicule or which shocks, insults or offends a substantial portion or group of the community or reflects unfavorably on Spokesperson or Manufacturer, then Manufacturer may, in addition to and without prejudice to any other remedy of any kind or nature set forth herein, terminate this Agreement at any time after the occurrence of any such event.

I thank Jerry Connell and shake his hand, folding the thin paper and tucking it carefully into an inner pocket of my blue briefcase.

TWENTY-ONE

WHEN I ARRIVE at the office the following day I find Duane Carter sitting in my seat playing with my surfer troll doll, the one wearing a Walkman with fuchsia hair standing up straight.

“Stop fondling my troll.”

Duane grins.

“Get out of my chair.”

“That’s no way to address your supervisor.”

I drop the blue canvas briefcase onto the desk for emphasis. Unfortunately the force of the concussion causes my sunglasses to slip off my nose but I make a great save and continue to glower at Duane.

“You’re not my supervisor, now move.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. Catch this.”

He pushes the Calendar section of today’s Los Angeles Times at me. The whole top half of the page is taken up with a giant photograph of Jayne Mason sitting in her den looking vulnerable and funky and oh-so-real in a denim shirt and loose curls, huge eyes with no makeup, like she just came down from a breakfast of skim milk and toast to share her darkest troubles with you, the reader.

I have to stand there while Duane quotes from the article about how Jayne first became sensitized to victims of corrupt doctors who overprescribe narcotics in her therapy group at the Betty Ford Center. How as a result of the publicity surrounding the lawsuit, the investigation of Dr. Eberhardt has escalated to include the California Medical Licensing Board, which has suspended his license to practice medicine. Although the FBI continues to neither confirm nor deny its own investigation, it is bringing a supervisor who specializes in health care industry fraud out from headquarters in Washington, D.C., to review the situation.

“You’re off the case, gal.”

“Don’t believe what you read in the papers,” I reply coolly.

“Some of his colleagues at the hospital say your buddy Eberhardt was subject to bouts of depression.”

“Under all that stress, who wouldn’t be?”

“They say he’s a superachiever, always pushing for perfection, the type who can’t handle failure. Goes back to his Harvard Med School days. How does the media find out stuff we don’t?”

He enjoys my discomfort.

Looking down, I catch a paragraph stating that Dr. Eberhardt “remains sequestered in his north of Montana home” and is not available for comment on the advice of legal counsel. I can picture him and Claire quivering behind that huge door.

Duane stands up and hands me the paper. “It was a good shot. You’ve had a couple of good shots lately, but like I tried to explain before, you’ve still got some work to accomplish before you move on.”

“And how did you move on, Duane?” I am heaving rapidly, spitting resentment so it is hard to articulate the words. “I’ve been in for seven years, you’ve been in for eight. Tell me the secret of how you got so far ahead.”

He takes his time answering and when he’s ready he moves the black forelock aside, patting it down on the top of his head with pale fingertips like he’s sticking it there with glue.

“I made a deal with the Devil.” The look in his dark eyes is enigmatic. “When I was a teenager I wanted to get out of Travis County and have success at an early age, and one day I told that to the Devil, and here I am.”

“Really? And what did you trade with the Devil for your success?”

“That’s between him and me,” Duane answers without smiling and leaves.

I sit there for some time, awed by the realization that he was 100 percent serious.

When I switch on my computer the little box next to Mail is blinking, so I call it up and there are the results of the criminal checks I was running on everyone I could find who works, advises, profits, eats, sleeps, or plays within a hundred-mile radius of Jayne Mason. Everyone is clean enough, except for the limousine driver, Tom Pauley, who got into a little trouble with stolen goods when he was a state cop and had to leave the force.

I remove the morals clause from the zippered compartment of the blue briefcase, grab a printout of the report on Pauley, and run down to the SAC’s office.

• • •

Galloway gets up from behind the desk and comes toward me, gesturing apologetically with a cigar. “Sorry you had to read about it in the paper.”

“So it’s true? I’m off the case?”

“The Director saw Jayne Mason crying her eyes out on Donahue and went ballistic. He wants more firepower in terms of the media. It has nothing to do with you.”

I am silent.

“I’m putting in for your transfer to C-1. Congratulations.”

He waits for my reaction. When there is none he bends his knees, so he can hunch over and squint at me in the eyes.

“Am I crazy or were you all over me to get that transfer?”

“Right now a transfer is beside the point.”

I show him the fax and explain that because of this morals clause, scandalous conduct — like being a dope addict — could have jeopardized a multimillion-dollar contract. I tell him my belief that Mason was lying all along about Randall Eberhardt’s culpability.

But Galloway is not impressed with my beliefs.

“They brought in the big gun from Washington, let him handle it.” He’s standing up again, arm around my shoulder as he walks me to the door. “You did a good job with what you had.”

“Okay, you don’t like the morals clause—” I ball it up and toss it into the trash and flourish the printout under his nose. “How about this: new lead. Jayne Mason’s driver was busted for trading in stolen goods when he was a state cop.”

Galloway raises his eyebrows. “Stop the presses.”

“We know Mason is an abuser. I’m going to squeeze this guy and find out the real supplier, then I’m going to bust her for possession.”

“Holy shit.”

Galloway’s hand flies off my shoulder like it was a red hot frying pan.

“Ana, we’re getting off the track.”

“What if I can prove possession and trading in illegal substances on the part of Jayne Mason?”

Exasperated, “That is not the direction anyone wants to go.”

“I know, but—”

Galloway stops me with a finger to his lips. He speaks softly and slowly, bouncing the finger to the rhythm of his words like a nursery rhyme: “Let us remember the suspect in this investigation is still Randall Eberhardt. Now listen carefully and tell me the answer: How will this help our prosecution of the suspect?”

“Maybe it clears him,” I say.

• • •

It turns out that, despite whatever trouble “in the castle” between Tom Pauley and Maureen, during off-hours they have been living together in her rented apartment in Pacific Palisades, a comfortable suburban townlet just across the canyon from Santa Monica. Despite the mini-mailing of the main drag, it still feels like the fifties up here — families and ranch houses — which is why Maureen’s place is so unusual.

The house is on a winding street, behind a large sliding gate. I walk down stone steps to the sound of trickling water; an artificial stream pools in a stone basin covered by water lilies and populated by real live burping frogs. Straight ahead is a small wooden deck overgrown with magenta bougainvillea, a white wrought-iron table, and chairs overlooking the misty curve of Will Rogers Beach, the bluish mountains, and the silver ocean all the way out to Point Dume. The vista is priceless.

Although there are houses cheek to jowl along the street, in this glorious spot there is nothing but silence and wind through the flowers. It makes you hunger for Cheddar cheese and salty crackers and bourbon, watching the sunset on the deck. Turning back toward the house the view is equally charmed: gabled roofs, gingerbread trim, a Hansel and Gretel hideaway.

The door, carved of soft wood with Balinese figures entwined in dance, is slightly open. I knock, get no response, and walk inside.

“Hello? Tom? It’s Ana Grey.”

Nothing.

I pass a bedroom with rumpled sheets on a four-poster bed and clothes strewn over a worn Oriental rug. The air smells of sandalwood and sex. There is a dressing table loaded with antique perfume bottles, half of them knocked over and smashed. The closets are open and so are the drawers. Straw hats, dolls, and shawls are scattered everywhere as if picked up and tossed off their window seat. It looks like Tom and Maureen were robbed.

I become more certain when I enter the ransacked kitchen. A pot is turning scorched and black, all the water boiled away, the burner still lit. I turn off the flame, crunching over a box of dried spaghetti spilled across the floor. Someone hurtled a bottle of apple juice against the wall. Someone else was throwing cans. I hear a soft moan coming from another room. The adrenaline goes up, weapon comes out.

I move quietly down a hall that is decorated with ominous looking African masks to a living room with two windows of diamond-patterned glass opening to an ocean view. There are more masks, dolls with staring eyes and perfect china faces, secondhand sofas stuffed with pillows covered with chintz. A mobile of glass prisms in the window catches the sharp afternoon sun, spinning bars of colors over everything.

And in the middle of the dizzying rainbows, planted stock-still on those bowed naked sunburned legs, is Tom Pauley, wearing nothing but a white T-shirt, slowly masturbating.

He rolls his eyes toward me, red-rimmed. I catch the sheen of white stubble along an unshaven jaw.

“Ana,” he mumbles mournfully, “help me out.”

His thumb and forefinger move down the enlarged red-blue penis with a glistening drop of semen at the head. I reach over and grab a woolly afghan off a rocking chair and toss it to him.

“Jesus, Tom, cover it up.”

He holds the blanket in front of himself, sinks bare-assed onto the sofa, and starts to cry.

“What went on here?”

“We had a fight.”

“Where is Maureen?”

“Gone.”

Tom is bent over double, holding his head in his hands.

“Is she okay?”

He nods.

“You didn’t sock her black and blue, throw her over the cliff?”

“I wouldn’t do that. I love her, Ana.” He lifts his face to me. The puffy features are melted together, streaming with self-pity. “God, I’m a fat old fart.”

I holster the weapon and sit down to give him time to compose himself. The sofa is hard as a rock. It must be stuffed with horsehair or some other perverse material.

“Interesting house.”

“It was built in the sixties by a movie set designer.”

He takes a big breath, draws his thumbs across his eyes.

“Any connection to Jayne Mason?”

“No, Maureen’s been living here for years, long before she met Jayne.”

“How is Jayne? She must be busy, running from one talk show to another defending victims’ rights.”

“I couldn’t care less about Jayne Mason right now.”

“She cares a lot about you and Maureen. She was worried something like this might happen. She told me that night on our date.”

“Jayne tries, but she could never understand my feelings for Maureen.”

“Let’s talk about you. Want a glass of water?”

He shakes his head.

“Okay, let’s have a conversation about truck drivers who are allegedly robbed in remote areas of the California desert and a state cop who shows up on the scene and fakes a report so the goods can be fenced and resold, what do you think?”

He wipes his nose with the bottom of his T-shirt. “In the past.”

“Does Jayne know about your past?”

“Jayne thinks I’m the greatest thing since chocolate syrup.”

“Where does she get her drugs, Tom?”

He stands up, holding the blanket around his waist.

“No way, Ana.”

“Jayne thinks you’re a chocolate ice cream soda, but Maureen thinks you’re a big pile of shit.”

Getting upset again, “Leave me alone.”

I stand also. “Not a problem. I’ll ask your young friend for her opinion, which at this moment is not very high. I can see why you like little girls but, no offense, Tom, what do they see in you?”

A blush is growing beneath the white stubble.

“After trying to kill you with a box of spaghetti, I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to tell me how you supply Dilaudid and Dexedrine and Valium and cocaine and all the rest of it to Jayne Mason.”

“I have nothing to do with that.”

“But you know who does.”

His jaw tightens. His lips compress. The apartment suddenly seems very small, the doll faces fetishes, the Hansel and Gretel house a closed-in obsession.

“It must have been fun while it lasted, you and Lolita with the fourteen-year-old tits.”

“Go to hell.”

“New plan: you get dressed and we cruise over to Westwood.”

“What for?”

“The Bureau has a keen interest in this case and I’m sure this hotshot specialist from Washington would like to talk to someone who has intimate knowledge of what goes on in Jayne Mason’s house, maybe go over a little of your own past history.”

The rainbows spin over us.

“It’s not me.”

“Okay.” I let out a big, benevolent sigh like I’m finally letting him off the hook. Gently, compassionately, “Why don’t you put on some clothes?”

He picks up a pair of sweats from the couch, slips them on, and plops back down with a righteous look, rubbing the sweat from his temples.

“We know it’s Dr. Eberhardt,” I say, as if confiding a professional secret. “We’ve already busted his ass.”

Tom Pauley shakes his head, sneering. “That’s exactly the reason I hated the feds when I was a state cop. You guys are so fucking arrogant and so fucking wrong.”

I can see he’s got a bone to pick, so I hand him a great big turkey thigh: “We believe that we have an airtight case against the doctor.”

“He’s the one who wanted Jayne in Betty Ford, for Christ sake,” Tom blurts out. “Magda Stockman tried to keep her out.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Yeah, well I was there.”

“Bullshit.”

Now he’s on the moral defensive, red-faced and indignant: “Jayne almost offed herself with downers, okay? The doc comes out to Malibu and sees this and suddenly he gets it: the lady is an addict. He goes to her manager, who’s obviously the one who runs her life, and says, We’ve got to help this lady get off drugs or she’s going to die.’ Magda says, ‘I’ll do everything I can to help.’

“Jayne throws up for two days, she’s sick as a dog, they send me out at eleven o’clock at night to get some kind of goddamn tea. I have to drive all the way to Culver City to find an all-night health food store, and when I get back I hear them going at it in the den.”

“Fighting?”

“Jayne’s into that helpless little-girl thing, whining that she has to go to Betty Ford like the doctor says. Magda tells her”—imitating the throaty accent—“ ‘He only wants your money, Jay. Nobody loves you as much as I do.’ ”

“Magda was trying to save the contract with the cosmetics company.”

“Magda was trying to control Jayne, period. She heard from Maureen that Jayne was getting close to this doctor and it freaked her out. Who do you think convinced Jayne to cut the guy off at the knees?”

“All roads lead to Magda.”

“While Jayne was seeing the doctor, she tried to go straight but she was a mess — crying jags, migraines, panic attacks. Finally she went back to Maureen. Maureen didn’t want the responsibility so — you’re right — she took it to Magda.”

Finally the dynamic of that overwrought household becomes clear, but I want it from Pauley.

“Maureen didn’t want responsibility for what? Sorry if I’m being dense.”

“For getting Jayne high,” he exclaims with frustration.

There is silence. Rainbows turn slowly in the dust-laden air. Realizing what he has said, Pauley’s face crumples but stops short of tears.

“Maureen is Jayne Mason’s street connection,” I supply softly. “That’s why she’s kept around as a ‘wardrobe girl.’ ”

“She’s a cokehead,” Pauley says in a deep, choked voice. “As if you couldn’t tell. Magda had her on a golden string.”

“Paid for her habit?”

“You’ll never get Magda. That’s the beauty of it.”

I desperately wish I were wearing a wire.

“Unless you turn witness. Against Magda and Maureen.”

He doesn’t answer. The face is hardening now, the eyes two cold ovals of red.

“Let’s say in exchange for immunity from prosecution for any part you might have played in the sale or consumption of narcotics.”

“Jesus, Ana, that is total crap.”

‘We need your testimony.”

He thinks it over. After a moment, he slowly assents by nodding his head.

Just to make sure, “If you love her, why give her up?”

He seems different now, set, a grown-up man who realizes this is the last moment he may have to regain any control over the rest of his life.

“When you came out to the house,” he asks, “did you ever meet Jan, the brainless beach bum?”

The windsurfing instructor with the righteous calves who was watching them that day on the beach through a pair of binoculars.

“I remember Jan.”

“Maureen was fucking him the whole time.”

Tom Pauley sweeps a pair of undershorts up off the floor in an angry arc and stalks toward the bedroom.

• • •

Maureen huddles in the interrogation room bawling like a baby.

“I can help you,” Galloway is saying softly. “We can get you through this terrible situation, or do you want to wait until your lawyer gets here?” he adds, because the tape is running.

“This is going to kill my dad.”

Galloway hands her a tissue. I let him go for it. My job is to sit there with my legs crossed, projecting female sympathy.

“The best thing you can do for your dad is take care of yourself, Maureen. You haven’t been doing a very good job of that, have you?”

Maureen shakes her head. She’s so clogged up with tears she can hardly breathe. The wan cheeks are raspberry red.

“Tell us where you bought the pills.”

“I can’t.”

“Are you afraid of the dealers?”

She nods, pushing at the wet hair across her eyes.

“You have good reason. They’re bad people. But see”—here Galloway sighs like the problem is really his—“if you don’t give them up, you’ll go to jail and they’ll be out on the street doing business as usual. Is that fair?”

“It’s my own fault.”

I nod encouragingly.

“That’s true and eventually you’ll have to deal with that. But right now you can help yourself if you assist our agents in nailing these bastards.”

She’s silent.

“They took advantage of you. And Jayne.”

Shredding the tissue into snow.

“She said she’d take care of me,” Maureen whispers with her eyes down, “if anything ever happened.”

Galloway opens his arms and looks around the room. His eyes pop wide. “So where is she? You tried. You used your one phone call to get through to Jayne Mason so she could trot over here — where is she?”

“Her secretary said she’s in France,” Maureen answers in a high voice, “because she’s got this new makeup coming out.”

“And if she was around the corner? Maureen. Look at me.” Galloway touches her gently under the chin. “If she was around the corner, honey, would she walk into this office and admit that she’s a drug addict and she used you like a slave to get what she needs? Or do you think she’d deny it and employ her influence to stay out of Maureen’s little mess? You know Jayne Mason better than anyone. Tell me. Will she protect you like you’re protecting her?”

You can almost hear the small bones breaking. Maureen takes three or four choppy breaths. The rage is spent, the grief begins. She weeps quietly into two open hands realizing how profoundly she’s been betrayed.

When I leave the room, I run smack into Donnato.

“We got Mason’s supplier. It’s the wardrobe girl.”

“Congratulations.”

“Look.”

Special Agent Jim Kelly is striding toward the interrogation room. Jim is supervisor of the Drug Squad.

“She’s going to give up her street connections.”

“This could turn into a nice little narcotics bust,” Donnato murmurs wonderingly.

“That’s because I’m terrific.” I punch Donnato in the arm and laugh. “And now Galloway’s got something for the Director.”

“Not what they expected.”

“Better than they expected. I have to hand it to Galloway, he’s willing to go after Jayne Mason on possession. It’s a political hotcake, but talk about publicity for the Bureau.”

“You’ll close the bar at Bora-Bora tonight.”

‘Want to partner up?”

Donnato smiles at me for the first time in weeks. “I’ve got dinner, homework, and a science project on electromagnets.”

Rosalind comes up to where we are talking. She’s wearing that peculiar look again.

“Santa Monica P.D. on the phone for Ana. You weren’t at your desk. I figured I’d best come after you.”

I speak to an earnest young officer named Brandt who tells me Dr. Randall Eberhardt is dead. Since the deceased has been under investigation by the FBI, he thought I might be interested in coming down to Twentieth Street to have a look, as a courtesy, in the interest of promoting interagency cooperation.

TWENTY-TWO

THE MEW CONTEMPORARY two-story Mediterranean in the exclusive neighborhood north of Montana, five bedrooms, five and a half baths, gourmet kitchen, et cetera, is now skirted by yellow tape marking it as a crime scene.

Three Santa Monica police cruisers and an ambulance are parked at the curb. There isn’t a big crowd — maybe twenty-five neighbors, joggers, housekeepers with babies in strollers — because it is only 2:35 in the afternoon on a Wednesday.

I recognize a Metro reporter from the Los Angeles Times and there’s a kid from The Outlook, a streamlined edition of the same Santa Monica Evening Outlook that ran a photograph of my grandfather and a stolen wheelchair almost thirty years ago. The two crime reporters are scouts for the media, like a pair of ants roaming your countertop; next time you look, it will be swarming.

I badge the cop at the door and walk inside. From the number of people and their intensity, I know something bad is waiting at the top of the stairs. A Santa Monica police detective is on the phone yelling about the delay in picking up the body. I heard on the radio driving over that there was a four-car collision with fatalities on the 405, so the coroner’s office is probably all backed up.

I walk up the steps, past a ficus tree, toward the crystal chandelier so out of reach. I am stopped again by a cop.

“Where is it?”

“The bathroom.”

Your knees go weak but you go ahead anyway, knowing that what you will see will be awful. Randall Eberhardt made sure it would be as awful as possible.

First I see the metal gas tank rolling back and forth on the silver travertine marble floor. A plastic tube attached to the tank leads over the side of the oversize spa tub. You have to walk right up and lean over to see that the tubing leads to a hole in a plastic bag which he placed over his head. The face has turned blue from cyanosis, a small amount of vomit adheres the purple lips to the inside of the bag. The well-muscled naked body, also a bluish pallor, floats in eight inches of clear water. The gas tank rolls with an empty ringing sound on the cold marble as the body subtly shifts in the water. Lined up neatly around the outside of the tub are children’s bath toys — yellow rubber ducks and red pails with holes for pouring — all of it lit incongruously by warm afternoon sunlight streaming innocently through the bathroom window.

The crime scene guys are putting their triangular markers next to all the relevant objects: the small tank marked Nitrogen, the empty bottle of Valium — a prescription with Claire Eberhardt’s name on it — near the sink. The forensic photographer asks me to step aside so they can get the wide-angle view. I look at Randall Eberhardt’s nakedness floating in its marble sepulchre and it seems to be the effigy of all of our nakednesses — Violeta Alvarado’s, mine, Tom’s, and Maureen’s — and I am ashamed to be the one who has survived to look at it, the way I was ashamed to see my cousin in death. Then, suddenly, I am overwhelmed by an inconsolable heartbreak, as if that underground source of my own grief had split rock and geysered a thousand feet into the air.

I stumble back down the stairs and spot the new widow alone in the living room.

I sit on the sofa beside her and introduce myself as Special Agent Ana Grey.

“Have we met?”

Lying, “No.”

Her legs are crossed, ankles hooked around each other, arms holding herself entwined around the waist of her white tennis skirt.

“The police think it’s a suicide, but that isn’t true.” She snorts and kicks her twisted legs. “Randall would never kill himself.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Somebody murdered him and made it look like suicide.”

She is tearless, indignant, but looking down in that peculiar walleyed way.

“Terrible things have been happening to us. He’s been falsely accused, he’s been hounded, his professional reputation has been attacked. If somebody could do that to us for no reason, none at all, couldn’t they do this?”

“The police will complete a full investigation and an autopsy. Then you’ll know.”

She shakes her head. “They’ll cover it up.”

Her reaction is not uncommon in families where there has been a self-inflicted death. Denial. Paranoia. She can’t let go of it. Of course she can’t.

“If my husband were going to kill himself he would have used a gun.” One hand has gotten loose from her waist and is flapping side to side. “He just bought a gun because of all the robberies in the neighborhood. Doesn’t that make more sense?”

She is so encouraged by the logic of her theory that I let her believe in it for a while.

“He must have been murdered because otherwise he would have used a gun. Will the FBI get involved in that part of it?”

“I don’t think so, ma’am.”

“But he didn’t kill himself!”

Gently and firmly, “It looks a lot like he did.”

She stares at me a long time as if her ability to speak has become unplugged.

On the coffee table in front of us is a tennis racquet and white sweater and a pile of mail which she must have dropped coming in. On the cover of a catalogue from Saks Fifth Avenue is a picture of Jayne Mason’s face surrounded by yellow petals and the words “Jayne Mason Introduces Yellow Rose Cosmetics. Meet the star in person at our Beverly Hills store.”

There is the image of Jayne Mason’s perfect dewy face emerging from a pool covered with yellow blossoms.

Superimpose: Randall Eberhardt’s dead blue face inside a plastic bag … and what do you get?

“I’m very sorry for your loss.” I get up and walk out.

At the far corner of the bright street, Laura and the little Chilean grandmother are coming toward the house. Laura is riding a tricycle, the housekeeper pushing the baby in a stroller. Startled to see the police, the housekeeper puts her hand out to stop the child but she is already pedaling as fast as she can toward all the excitement, a look of anticipation on her simple face.

I too was five years old that night in Santa Monica when my father left forever. I turn around and thread my way back through the curious crowd, unlocking the door to the G-ride and wondering if, like me, Laura will teach herself to forget this day and everything that goes with it, and how long that kind of forgetting can last.

• • •

Once the freeways clear the drive out to Simi Valley only takes forty-five minutes, especially when you’re doing a steady seventy-five miles an hour. It is ten at night. The top is down on the Barracuda and I don’t care anymore.

Donnato’s house is one of a hundred in some new development, tract houses of the nineties with round windows that are supposed to make them look interesting. The only interesting thing about Simi Valley is the way it is backed up against the mountains, the very last finger-scrapes of the Los Angeles sprawl clawing its way north — you can’t get any farther from urban downtown. A lot of people still keep animals out here — horse people and breeders of Abyssinian cats who like to believe in their own freedom.

Donnato’s house looks cozy and domestic with the lights on and the garage doors closed for the night. I walk up and press the chimes. His wife opens the door. She is very attractive. A scuba instructor. Smart. Going to law school. But I don’t care.

“Hi, Rochelle. Sorry to bother you.”

“Ana! What’s the matter?”

“Small emergency. Is Mike in?”

“Sure. Can I get you anything?”

“No, but thanks.”

The air conditioning is on. The place has that plastic closed-in smell of new carpeting and new kitchen cabinets with cheap veneer.

Donnato comes downstairs quickly.

“Galloway’s calling everybody in.”

Donnato catches my eyes and holds them and sees the entreaty, and I believe his decision to go with me right then, to acquiesce to whatever crazy need has driven me out there, is the single most tender thing anyone has ever done for me.

“I’ll go up and change.” He’s wearing sweats.

“You don’t have to. It’s a stakeout in Inglewood, not a dinner-dance,” I say in a suddenly hoarse voice.

Donnato takes his gun belt from a locked box in the closet and grabs a heavy parka. His wife kisses him.

“Be careful, sweetie.”

“Always.”

We head out the door. “Nice to see you, Ana, except for the circumstances.”

I smile and wave.

We are outside. The door closes. We climb into the Barracuda.

I screech away from the curb with unnecessary violence. Donnato has shrugged into the parka and placed the gun down on the floor near his feet. He knows perfectly well there is no stakeout.

“She set the doctor up in order to sell lipstick.”

I don’t say anything else until we have driven through all the blinking red traffic lights of the dark empty town and taken the first freeway on-ramp. We’re heading west, that’s all I know.

“Jayne Mason is hospitalized at the Betty Ford Center for drug addiction. It’s all over the press. She’s got a secret multitrillion-dollar contract with a major cosmetics company but they’re getting nervous — who’s going to buy makeup from a drug addict? The deal is worth ten times more than anything she can make in the movies and she’s desperate for cash. Somebody’s going to take the fall for her addiction and it’s going to be Dr. Randall Eberhardt because he’s stupid and naïve and just got off the boat.”

Donnato sits there with his arms folded, a cyclone of cold wind blowing his hair straight back.

“That bitch manager is behind it.” I slam my fist on the steering wheel.

“Hard to prove.”

“I don’t care. With all the shit we’re getting from the wardrobe girl, I’m going to bust Jayne Mason, nail her on possession, Jesus Christ, who knows, maybe the family can sue for wrongful death.”

“You’re doing ninety.”

“He couldn’t take the humiliation. Offed himself with nitrogen gas. You know how? Very smart. The guy was smart. Hooks it up to a plastic bag, puts the bag over his head. He’s a doctor so he knows the buildup of carbon dioxide inside the bag would cause a panic reaction and there’s a good chance he’d pull it off in spite of himself — so he keeps on pumping nitrogen in there to displace the CO, that way he can keep on breathing until there’s no oxygen left. A little Valium to relax, a nice warm bath, death by asphyxiation.”

I pull off the freeway, fishtailing on the dusty shoulder, and brake to a stop. I don’t even shut off the engine, but jam the gearshift into park and reach for Donnato, sinking my fingers into the downy shoulders of his parka, pulling him toward me, trying to swallow his mouth.

We get out. We secure our weapons in the trunk. We are on a pitch-black road next to a pitch-black field somewhere on the outskirts of Oxnard.

We walk into the field over small dry gullies.

“What do they grow here?”

“Strawberries.”

We spread out a wool blanket from the days when I had Jake and Jasmine, two calicos, and, believe it or not, the smell of old cat piss can be terribly sad.

We can’t get close enough we can’t go deep enough we can’t connect with enough bare skin. It is freezing out there, we are naked and shivering inside our jackets, frantic in the midnight darkness as if there is no other hunger.

Donnato is above, I am crushing a handful of bleeding strawberries against his clenched teeth, he is deep inside me, holding me up under the shoulder blades so my head is hanging back and my hair is dragging in the dirt, when the helicopter passes not very far above us, slicing the air with vicious pulsing whips. I open my eyes to see the shape of its belly, I know it is a military transport because we are close to Point Mugu, but it doesn’t matter, I have passed through the realm of the rational into the amber twilight of my dreams. The roar hurts our ears and resonates inside our chest cavities and I am gripped by a primal fear, the way I was afraid of the chopper landing outside the Santa Monica police department, afraid of its raw male power which would soon overwhelm me. I wrap my legs around Donnato and scream his name into the howling abyss.

TWENTY-THREE

I WAKE UP ALONE in my bed at noon the following day, immediately seized by the same anxious fear. It was just past dawn when I pulled into the garage at the Marina and incredibly I was still obsessing about trying to make the morning swim workout at the college when my hands pulled the quilt over my head and my brain finally shut off.

Now my eyes are dry and burning and there is an awful pressure in my chest. Disoriented, I lurch into the living room and dial voice mail at the office in order to focus on what appointments I have blown for the day. There are several messages, including one from Carl Monte, a social worker calling about Teresa and Cristóbal Alvarado. With everything going on, it takes me by surprise but I call Mr. Monte’s office right back. They promise to beep him.

There is no message from Mike Donnato, but what did I expect?

I don’t know what I expected. I eat a grilled cheese sandwich and stir some cocoa powder into a glass of low-fat milk, staring dully at the billowing afternoon light outside the balcony. It has been a long time since I had sex and it is raw and sore down there, not your most romantic feeling. All I want to do is to sit in a hot bath.

I have noticed there is never any bubble bath around when you need it.

So I pull a bottle of dish detergent from underneath the kitchen sink and shoot a long stream of it into the tub, making mountains of sparkly white froth. I refill the bath with hot water three times until my skin is pink and tingly and the mirrors are all steamed up. I make a crown of foam on top of my head and put two silly mounds over my breasts like I used to do as a little girl, a bubble necklace and what the hell, a bubble beard, speculating on where Donnato is right now and if he is feeling as loose and full of wonderment as I. How will we be in the office? Will we see each other again? For the first time I can remember I have no control over what will happen next.

But that sublime balance on the razor’s edge of uncertainty lasts just a moment before I am suddenly flushed with violent panic. The memory of the dark belly of the helicopter bearing down on us in the strawberry field fills my head with terrible clamor and I almost vomit into the tub.

The phone rings and my heart convulses. Suddenly transformed to a female in a 1950s comedy (Jayne Mason could have played this role), I jump out, dripping suds, grab a towel, and spring for the phone, hoping to hear the voice of my beau.

It is Carl Monte.

“I’m a case worker at Children and Family Services,” he explains. “What is your relationship to the Alvarado children?”

“A distant cousin of their mother.”

“Do you know they are living with Mrs. Sofía Gutiérrez?”

“Yes, she’s been taking care of them since their mother was killed.”

“But she is not a blood relation?”

“No.”

“Does that make you the closest relative?”

“There are a grandmother, aunts, and uncles living in El Salvador.”

“I need to tell you that if the children continue to live in this country, they will have to be placed in foster care.”

“What happened?”

“LAPD was called because a neighbor complained about a loud television. The investigating officers found two unsupervised minors in the apartment and contacted us.”

I am dressing as we talk. “Are the kids all right?”

“They’re in good health, but we don’t consider Mrs. Gutiérrez a suitable guardian. For one thing her household income does not meet our standard. For another, it’s the law. Children can’t just live with any stranger who picks them up.”

I pull on jeans and socks. I understand the law.

“Unless you’d like to take them in yourself, Ms. Grey.”

“Me?” A shock goes through my chest. I look around the Marina apartment. “I couldn’t.”

“Then we will place Teresa and Cristóbal in an appropriate foster care setting.”

“For how long?”

“That depends. We’re always looking for a legal adoption.”

“What’re the chances?”

“There’s hope for the little one. The older girl has some emotional problems that might make her less desirable.”

“You mean they wouldn’t be adopted together?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, Mr. Monte, that bites the big one.”

He doesn’t miss a beat, asking calmly if I’d like to be informed where the children are placed. I say okay.

“For the moment we’ve allowed them to live with Mrs. Gutiérrez with home inspections twice a week, but she’s having a hard time understanding. She seems to hold you in high regard because you work for the FBI—”

I guffaw.

“So I was hoping you could explain this to her. Might make it easier for the children.”

Sure, I’ll talk to Mrs. Gutiérrez. Anything to avoid the office today.

• • •

They call it El Piojillo — a few square blocks around MacArthur Park that is not so much a flea market as another continent grafted between the Wilshire District and downtown L.A. What used to be a fashionable address for wealthy whites, where old people from a nearby nursing home could rest their wheelchairs in the shade of an elegant park, is now one of the most crime-infested parts of the city.

It is also a place where the size, spread, and density of the Spanish-speaking population becomes impressively clear. Streets in every direction are overflowing with crowds of Latinos threading past unlicensed vendors selling sausages, stuffed animals, cassettes of lambada music, running shoes, fruit smoothies, hot ears of corn. “Call Anywhere in the United States—25 Cents per Minute!” “Swap Meet!” in an old ornate movie theater. Video Hot, Winchell’s, Salvadoran and Guatemalan restaurants. Drug dealers. Day laborers in straw cowboy hats waiting on a pickup corner for a few hours’ work below minimum wage. On every block there is a stucco mini-mall with shoddy signage that looks as if it’s been under artillery fire, and most likely has: Carnicería Latina, Excellent Beauty Salon, Chinatown Express, Popeye Fried Chicken, Librería Cristiana. Driving straight through, I reach a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Echo Park and sigh with relief. Here, one hopes, the homicide rate doesn’t kick in until after dark.

Mrs. Gutiérrez and the children are waiting in front of the address she gave me. It turns out to be a botánica, a storefront that sells herbs, candles, and spiritual advice, now locked with a rusted gate. We are on a small commercial street. Next door is a grocery called Tienda Alma, then a Mexican bakery and a Thai restaurant. Not incongruously, somewhere nearby a rooster is crowing.

“Today Don Roberto doesn’t open until four. He is getting his apartment fumigated.”

“Who is Roberto?”

“The spiritualist who will answer our questions.”

“I don’t have any questions, Mrs. Gutiérrez. I know what needs to be done.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez gives an impatient tch-tch. With a dark and sorrowful look, Teresa lowers her eyes. I squat down and touch her hair.

“Your birthday’s coming up. I’m working on a Barbie doll, how does that sound?”

Her whole face lights up with a beautiful smile. She looks like a different kid. Unable to express herself, she runs around in a circle of pure glee, then grabs her brother’s hand and just as randomly runs into the doorway of Tienda Alma.

“She is such a pretty girl,” Mrs. Gutiérrez observes. “Just like her mommy.”

She is wearing lipstick and today, perhaps to visit the spiritualist, all white: an oversize white T-shirt, white leggings, and white mules. She looks the most together I have seen her.

“Mr. Monte wanted me to talk to you.”

“I already tell him that I write to the grandmother to see what she want to do. I waiting to hear.”

“Until the family is contacted, the children will have to be cared for.”

“I caring for them.”

“You leave them alone in the apartment.”

“Only one time, when I have to go to the store.”

“Teresa doesn’t even have a bed.”

“In my country we sleep on petate mats on the floor. What is more important — the bed or the love? Why you not understand about family?” she demands. “These kids are your family, but you don’t think so. You are too Anglo.”

‘What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just like Mrs. Claire,” Mrs. Gutiérrez goes on. “Her kind don’t understand. If Mrs. Claire didn’t fire Violeta from that job, the children would have a mother today.”

I take a very deep breath.

“Mrs. Eberhardt fired Violeta because her daughter fell into a pool and almost drowned while Violeta was jabbering with another housekeeper and not paying attention.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez shakes an angry finger.

“What you say is not the truth and a disgrace to the memory of your cousin.”

“I have noticed there is always more than one truth, Mrs. Gutiérrez.”

In answer she spits on the sidewalk and stalks into Tienda Alma.

The children are gathered around a cardboard Christmas tree studded with lollypops. I wander deeper inside, lured by the smell of spices. A rack holds packets of arnica, cinnamon stick, chile postila, anise, te de yerhabuena. There’s not much stock — a few coconuts, oranges with green spots, two kinds of bananas, pineapples, and flowers. Rickety shelves are stacked with cans of guava nectar, hominy, sardines, menudo, and corn masa and old gray plastic sacks of rice and flour. The lights are off.

Mrs. Gutiérrez is pulling the children outside.

“Is it okay if I buy them a lollypop?”

She only glowers. I give them each a dollar, then notice that behind the lollypop tree is a picture of a saint laminated in plastic, resting on an overturned blue milk carton.

“What is that?”

Mrs. Gutiérrez isn’t talking. A young woman comes out from around the counter.

“El Niño de Atocha.”

She moves the rack aside to reveal a painting of a young boy surrounded by heavenly objects and animals. In front of him there are candles and a dish filled with loose change, small plastic cars, rubber balls, and candy.

The girl, wearing a USC sweatshirt and silver star earrings down to her shoulders, speaks without an accent.

“El Niño is a saint who comes from a lake and helps drowning people, or those who are lost. We have a festival in Guatemala where every year we take him out of the lake and parade him through the streets in a big procession.”

“People leave him things?”

“For good luck.”

“Why the toys?”

“Because he’s a little kid. Roberto, next door, told my mother to make this for El Niño. Every other store on the street has been broken into except us.”

“You go to USC?” She nods. “And you believe in this stuff?”

“My mother has faith on Roberto. I didn’t used to believe, but people come to see him from Las Vegas, Texas, San Francisco.… He has a very great gift. They come sick and they leave calm.”

I drop some change into the dish.

“Isn’t that a funny place for a shrine?”

“A shrine can be anywhere. A lot of Spanish people make shrines in the place where someone has died, like in Baja, you see them along the road where people have been killed in car accidents.” She moves the lollypop tree back in place. “We keep ours here so people won’t steal from El Niño.”

Some saint, I think, following Mrs. Gutiérrez outside.

The children have trailed the sounds of the rooster to a tiny pet store crammed with aquariums and rank with the smell of tropical fish in stagnant water. Two roosters blink suspiciously from cages on the floor.

“Are those fighting cocks?” I ask the man.

He nods. Cock fighting is illegal, but the hell with it. The children are fascinated by a pair of parakeets. Although Mrs. Gutiérrez is keeping her back to me, I lay a hand on her shoulder.

“I want to know the truth about my cousin.”

The two of us step outside where the long hot afternoon sun smacks our faces with a direct hit. Mrs. Gutiérrez pats her white vinyl pocketbook several times. She is still seething.

“Your cousin was fired because she saw Mrs. Claire with a man who was not her husband.”

“When was this?”

“Violeta came back from a walk with the baby and a man was with Mrs. Claire inside the door.”

I remember Warren Speca telling me that he saw Violeta one time when he went over to Claire’s near the end of their affair. This must have been the time.

Mrs. Gutiérrez waves a hand in disgust. “They were doing bad things.”

I can see Warren Speca surprising Claire, emboldened by the fantasy that she will leave her marriage, pushing her up against the wall of her husband’s house and trying to make love right there, standing up, underneath the crystal chandelier.

Violeta came in. They were surprised but they no care. The man leave right away. Violeta is very angry. She is a religious person—”

Mrs. Gutierrez’s voice breaks. She wipes her eyes.

“ ‘You have a husband,’ she tells Mrs. Claire. ‘You sin against God.’ ”

The pocketbook opens and the pound-size roll of tissues comes out.

“Violeta says, ‘I love your children like they are mine. I leave my own children to work for you. I no lie to you but you lie to me. You are sleeping around like a whore!’ Mrs. Claire fires her on the spot.”

“She was afraid Violeta would tell her husband about the affair.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Gutiérrez blows her nose savagely. Her manner turns cold. She is going to tell me the facts of life:

“Mrs. Claire spreads this terrible lie that it was Violeta’s fault the little girl almost drowned. Violeta cannot get a job. She does not have a reference. She cannot pay the rent. Teresa has a bad ear infection and the clinic takes only cash. Violeta is terrified that she and the children will end up on the street or in a church basement with the homeless, or maybe the welfare people will take the children away. After many weeks she finds work at night, washing the laundry in a big health club in West L. A. Her children sleep in my apartment until she comes home at six in the morning. Only one night, she doesn’t come home.”

The crime scene photos tell the story. Violeta gets off the bus on a destitute corner before dawn, trudging past hustlers and dealers. By now the route is habitual. She’s almost home, she’s tired, her guard fails.

“This is why I say it was the fault of Mrs. Claire.”

I remember Claire Eberhardt’s overwhelming guilt the very first time I met her at the front door. She was acting like a suspect with something to hide: an illicit affair. A desperate cover-up that ended in ruin.

“Here also is the truth: the girl did fall into the pool, but it was Violeta who saved her life.”

My eyebrows raise in skepticism but Mrs. Gutiérrez nods many times.

A youngish man with dyed auburn hair walks up to us and unlocks the rusted gates.

Mrs. Gutiérrez makes a small deferential bow, as if to a priest. “Buenos días, Don Roberto. ”

He returns the formal greeting, pushes the gate open, and continues inside.

Mrs. Gutiérrez speaks with breathless urgency: “The only person who knows what is best for the children is the mother. The government of the United States will not decide. Don Roberto will ask the spirit of Violeta. She alone will tell us what to do.”

Hispanic workers are getting off buses, sending curious glances my way as they stop into Tienda Alma on their way home. Mrs. Gutiérrez has gathered the children. With a last look at the busy street bathed in setting sun, I follow the clap-clap of her heels into the darkened botánica.

• • •

Mrs. Gutiérrez, Roberto, and I sit in the back of the shop at a card table upon which is a small radio and a white candle. I wonder if we will hear Violeta’s voice through the speaker. Roberto is about twenty-five years old, a homosexual with a dark complexion, a hip haircut that is partially shaved at the neck and longer on top, and a gold hoop earring. He wears a silky tan shirt and brown pants, but something is out of whack. The body is out of proportion — arms too long for a stunted torso — and he has trouble speaking. One side of the mouth seems to be paralyzed and as he struggles to explain how he got his gift, fingers rub the forehead with frustration:

“My father and grandfather did this in our village. A hundred people would stand in line at the door. I learned from the age of seven.”

When it comes to spiritual advice the deal is simple: “You tell me the truth and I tell you the truth.”

He lights the candle.

Despite the battle-scarred exterior, the place has clean floors and a certain order, and smells pleasantly of lavender incense. Behind old-fashioned wooden counters are shelves filled with small square half-ounce bottles of red, blue, and green oils. Floor-to-ceiling cases are filled with eight-inch glass candles, each with a picture of a saint and a promise of luck or salvation or protection.

From the ceiling hang ropes of colored beads. Near the door are packets of herbs and spices, a model made of plaster of paris of a Native American chief, and an aloe plant, colored ribbons tied in bows on its spiky leaves. A display holds rosaries, statues of cows, pendants with single eyeballs looking out of black triangles, greasy little booklets about “Red Magic” and “Green Magic,” and on a revolving rack there are plastic pictures of all the saints, numbered for easy selection.

We have left Teresa and Cristóbal with the Indian chief and staring eyeballs to sit at the card table behind a partition. Behind us is a multilevel altar upon which have been placed glasses of water, candles, pots of chrysanthemums, and a dish holding three small eggs covered with colored confetti.

A lot of the reading takes place in Spanish with a few sidebars in English. Mrs. Gutiérrez talks about the situation of Violeta’s children. Don Roberto listens and asks her to write out her name and her mother’s maiden name on a pad. He counts up the letters in the names then deals that number of Tarot cards.

“Please think about the mother of these children, Violeta Alvarado.”

She obediently closes her eyes. I stare at the radio and conjure up the photo of the parrot. Then the feeling comes to me of holding Violeta’s small leather Bible in my hands; the dryness of it, like the poignant tiny body of a hummingbird I once found on my balcony.

Mrs. Gutiérrez is warned not to cross her legs or lean on the table as that would affect “the energy.” She must turn over two cards, right to left. The first is El Sol, The Sun.

“This card means El Salvador,” says Don Roberto.

The second, with a baby on it, represents America.

Yawning, he mixes the cards with great practiced sweeps and gathers them up again. He asks Mrs. Gutiérrez to pick sixteen.

“Now you must think about this person very hard.”

We are silent. Mrs. Gutiérrez bends her head forward in prayer. Don Roberto whispers, “I feel her spirit is very close. Tell us, mama, what is your wish concerning your two beautiful children?”

Solemnly Roberto spreads out the sixteen cards Mrs. Gutiérrez has chosen. He nods and she turns one over at random. It is the card called El Sol

A chill goes through my body like a temblor.

Roberto’s mouth twists with the effort of expressing what he sees. “The mother wants the children to come home to the grandmother in El Salvador.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez presses both hands over her heart.

“I always know that!”

He indicates that she turn over the card right next to El Sol. It is The Devil. Infierno!

“But”—the side of the face contorts and a stutter clicks out—“El Salvador will be a living hell.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez cries sharply, causing Teresa to look over anxiously from where she has been spinning the rack of saints.

“The children must stay here.”

“No!”

“It is best.”

She shakes her head and cries and grips Don Roberto’s hands. I am unnerved by the depth of her feeling.

The young man’s head twists close. “I will tell you about Violeta,” he says softly and with difficulty. “She is not at peace.”

All at once I know this is true, not only for Violeta but for legions of the dead. Legions of them.

“She had lighter skin than me,” Don Roberto goes on. “She liked to laugh. It is not certain that the children are of the same father.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez nods eagerly.

“There is another child, a lost child.”

The boy in El Salvador. Hot tears are in my eyes and I’m afraid I’m going to lose it.

“And she had a very great struggle in the water.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez lets go of his hands and sits up with wonder.

“Yes,” she says, “in a swimming pool.”

Don Roberto closes his eyes.

“Violeta is struggling in the water. Somebody is in danger. They are drowning. On the bottom of the pool Violeta sees una bruja del mar. A sea witch!”

Mrs. Gutiérrez gasps and a shudder goes through me.

“The witch has long white hair and blue eyes. It is a jealous witch and its hand is around the ankle of the one who is drowning, trying to pull this person deep into the water, away from all life.”

Don Roberto rubs his forehead and squeezes his eyes tight.

“Violeta is very afraid, but she has a good heart.”

Mrs. Gutiérrez gives a mournful sob.

“And because she has a good heart she does not leave the water but grabs the drowning person. And this time, this one time, the sea witch let go. The person is saved.”

• • •

Mrs. Gutiérrez pays $20 for the spiritual consultation, $2 for a picture of El Niño, and $1.75 for a half ounce of red oil called Rompe Caminos, which Don Roberto says will “open up the four roads.” Looking at the bottle, I see the oil is manufactured in Gardena, California.

“And you,” he warns me, “if you continue to think of your cousin too much, you will become like her.”

I don’t know if that means Salvadoran or dead, but Don Roberto recommends this remedy: Fill a container with a mixture of goat’s milk, cow’s milk, and coconut milk, available at Tienda Alma. Remove the petals from a white flower, add any kind of perfume I like and eggshells, ground up very fine. Step into a shower and pour the entire thing over my head. This will relax me and provide a “spiritual cleansing.”

Then I am to float a white flower in a glass of water and place the water higher than my head. The top of the refrigerator is ideal. Every four days I must change the flower, but I do not throw it down, I throw it up. In this way, Violeta’s spirit will rise, and if I do this for thirteen days, Violeta’s spirit will rest at peace.

Still feeling unaccountably moved, I pluck a plaster saint dressed in blue robes from the shelf as a talisman, but Don Roberto refuses to sell it to me.

“You don’t need this. Perform the remedy I have given. If you have faith, it will work,” Don Roberto says, chopping at the words, “like a miracle. ”

Outside I offer Mrs. Gutiérrez a ride back to North Hollywood but, not wanting any favors from me, she says she prefers the bus.

‘What do you think?” I ask.

She is subdued. “I have faith on Don Roberto.”

“You know the children will have to go into foster care.”

She nods sadly.

“Barbie and I will see you on your birthday,” I promise Teresa.

She responds with that wonderful smile. “Thank you, Miss Ana.”

“And, Cristóbal — I’ll have something for you, too.”

Still there is a tearing in my chest as I get Lack into the car, for what the children will go through, a merry-go-round of depleted social services until they get pregnant, get shot, or turn eighteen. But there is hope. There is me. I can make a difference. I can make sure they’re treated well. I can be their advocate. I vow to talk to their teachers. Keep them out of gangs. Take them up to the FBI office, like other agents do for their kids, it really makes an impression. I’ll treat them to the movies and the zoo. I’ll take my young cousins to the beach.

By now I have crossed back up to Jefferson, a bleak landscape of low brick industrial buildings with curls of razor wire on the roofs, bordered by chain-link fences plastered with posters for hair braiding and discount video games. Savage graffiti — huge letters, cyclones of letters — roils across rippled metal walls. A hundred Black Muslims crowd out of a small church onto the street, deeply different from the Latinos in El Piojillo, all of them a galaxy away from the lunchtime shoppers north of Montana.

If only a bit of red oil could open up the four roads. The roads are dead, like dead nerves that no longer connect, and there are so many Violeta Alvarados, rolling around like marbles in a heartless maze.

I swing onto the freeway, thinking of the dead sidewalk on Santa Monica Boulevard where she lay watching helplessly as darkness rose from the bottom of her vision permeating everything, mouth, nose, eyes, gradually ending in the sounds of this noisy world with a grand silence.

Then she is alone in darkness and after a while she can’t tell which is which — life being rolled away from her or a curtain lifted.

The pupils of her eyes jerk once, then stop.

Her body stops.

She knows she has drowned. The hands of the sea witch are wrapped around her ankles and this time she doesn’t have the strength to pull away. But no — it isn’t the sea witch! It is her own mother, Constanza, and she is lifting her little girl up from this terrifying lonely darkness to the safety of her shoulder where the world is secure and bright. What a relief that it is Mother, I think, passing a truck and flooring it to seventy. Mother, after all.

TWENTY-FOUR

I WISH I COULD SAY the mood in the office was radically changed by events concerning the Mason case; that people approached my desk with reverence and wonder at the turn it had taken, a Westside doctor dead by suicide, a major film star under a narcotics investigation. Maureen has given up the name of a dealer who turned out to be linked to the Mexican mafia, so one thing Jayne Mason did not fabricate was the fact that the Dilaudid came from Mexico. This is a good lead for Jim Kelly and the ladies and gents of the Drug Squad, but for the rest of the bullpen it is business as usual.

From the vantage point of my desk I make the observation that everyone’s got their own problems. Each agent out there is working forty cases and in my wire basket alone there are two dozen unfinished reports on armed bank robberies. But at this moment the only response I can muster to all this savagery is to sit here patiently linking one paper clip to another.

When Henry Caravetti rolls by in the electric wheelchair delivering mail, my interest peaks but not for long. It will take weeks to process the transfer to the C-1 squad, and I will probably spend the entire time planted right here, trying to work up the nerve to talk to Mike Donnato. We have been avoiding each other for days.

It’s going to be a very long paper clip chain.

The problem is … well, they don’t have a word for it for females, but I’ve heard male colleagues refer to the condition as “continuous tumescence.” It’s a localized sensation down there that flares into acute, unbearable craving whenever I catch a glimpse of, say, the small of his back and think about slipping my hands inside the belt and slowly pulling out the tails of the sweet-smelling denim shirt, feeling the warm skin, drawing my fingertips down the spine to that place where it tapers, just above the hard curve of the buttock. I’d better get up and walk.

The Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise gives a friendly nudge. Donnato is across the room with Kyle and Frank, wearing that denim shirt, a forest green knit tie, and jeans, standing in what strikes me as a very provocative pose, hands clasped behind his head, stretching the chest and armpits open, open, open. Stumbling forward I tell myself it is perfectly reasonable to join the talk, which is almost certainly about the coming matchup in the All-Star Game, getting myself psyched by rehearsing a line I read in the sports page about San Francisco’s manager, Roger Craig, and the A’s manager, Tony La Russa, who is a vegetarian.

Halfway there, SAC Robert Galloway prevents this potentially sweaty encounter by intercepting and escorting me into his office. I figure I might as well use the line on him:

“You think Roger Craig will pound La Russa into a veggie burger?”

“I’ll always have a sweet spot for Roger Craig,” Galloway says. “He pitched the first game ever played by the Mets and had the distinction of finishing the season with ten wins and twenty-four losses.”

Galloway picks up the NYPD detective belt buckle from the coffee table and hefts it in his hand, saying nothing.

I stand self-consciously in the middle of the room.

“Did Jayne mail that back to you?”

“I asked a captain back in New York to send a new one. Made me jumpy without it.”

“Great, because now you’re the picture of calm.”

Galloway’s fingers run uncertainly through his wavy black hair. Obviously something’s up.

“I want you to go back and talk to the widow.”

“Randall Eberhardt’s widow?”

“I want you to convey the sympathy of the Bureau concerning her loss.”

I want to throw a fit right there on the gold carpet.

“What am I supposed to say?”

“That we know her husband was innocent and we’re going to find the real bastards.”

He lowers the blinds against the morning glare.

“I’m lousy at diplomacy.”

“Just go see her, woman to woman. Keep it low-key.”

“Why do I have to do this?”

“Because it’s good for the image of the Bureau … and because it happens to be the right thing.”

He sits in the executive chair and studies the closed blinds. This is his way of taking responsibility for the grotesque raid on the medical office that may or may not have contributed to Randall Eberhardt taking his own life. Suicide is a mystery, we will never know; although I am deeply touched and admire Galloway’s humanity, I wish like hell he would write his own damn condolence card.

• • •

I wait until dark, in order to make the visit seem after hours, “low-key.” Boy do I not want to do this. The idea of offering sympathy to a woman who first cheats on her husband, then blackballs an innocent housekeeper for finding out, is absolutely loathsome. I plan to deliver the words and leave. Heading down San Vicente, I am pricked by just the slightest compulsion to drive by Poppy’s old place on Twelfth Street one last time, and I give in to the feeling completely, relishing the luxury of even the briefest detour.

But when I pull up to the house it is very strange: the lights are on and someone is walking back and forth inside.

I park at the curb and walk up the concrete path past the beech tree to the entryway, where I pause to fit my hand into the curve of the door handle, testing the sense memory, resting my thumb on the old latch which has been worn to a green patina. Reading Lock, it says. The round doorbell crusted over with brown paint doesn’t work but the door is unlocked.

I step inside to a small square room with oak flooring and a cast-iron register for gas heat. Immediately a rosy-cheeked lady wearing a blue blazer, with white hair in a long swinging braid, emerges from the kitchen extending her hand.

“Hi, I’m Dina Madison, Pacific Coast Realty, how are you tonight? Wonderful starter house, don’t you think?”

“It was a starter house. I grew up in it.”

“You’re kidding. If you’re considering it for sentimental value, grab it quick. I just showed the property to two Korean gentlemen who want to buy the place next door and tear them both down and build two smart houses.”

‘What’s a smart house?”

“Usually about five thousand square feet, five or six bedrooms, master suite, fireplaces, all the amenities. No backyard, but, that’s what you sacrifice.”

“I’ve seen them.” The Eberhardt house is one.

“I have mixed feelings myself,” she agrees, reacting to my tone. “I’ve heard them called anti-architecture. They’re too big for the lot and can be ugly as sin, but they sell in the millions of dollars, um-hum. People are always looking for new.”

The previous owners left an artificial tree.

“So you grew up here. I’ve been selling Santa Monica real estate probably since you were born. When I started in 1961, no new houses had been built north of Montana for ten years. People would leave their tiny California bungalows on small lots and buy a ranch house in the Pacific Palisades. They were looking for new. Montana was a funky little street, um-hum. You had the Kingsberry Market and Sully’s gas station. We used to have a lot of gas stations, as far as that’s concerned.”

“I’d like to see the backyard.”

I walk past her through a kitchen made of maple cabinets. I can’t bear to stop, to think of what happened here and what did not. A tiny Sony Watchman television plays on a chipped white tile counter.

“I take that with me everywhere,” she explains. “You spend so much time sitting in empty houses.”

She follows me to the back door, still talking.

“Do you remember the Chevron station on the northwest corner of Seventh and Montana? Then there was the Flying A station and of course then you had the Union 76 station at Eleventh. There was the Arco station at Fourteenth and you had another Mobil station up there …”

I let the screen door bang shut in the face of this eulogy over the lost gas stations of Santa Monica and walk down the steps into the backyard. A single floodlight mounted on a tall pole illuminates the faded polka dots of an umbrella set in a hole in the middle of a round table. I pull up a rickety metal chair and listen to the sound of the ocean breeze in the leaves and a child next door saying, “Ahh-ahh-ahh.”

My eye follows a ladder going up to the green shingled roof, where a rusty old TV antenna shows against the sky, undoubtedly the same one that used to bring me The Dick Van Dyke Show. A car passes in the alley and I notice there is a double fence, chain link leaning against a taller one made of wood. Maybe it was cheaper to put up the chain link to support the original rather than tear it down and build an entirely new structure, tight, with no space between the redwood planks, no chance of light strobing through as it used to do at night when we lived here. The clarity of the memory startles me. Did I spend a lot of time in the backyard at night?

“You probably don’t remember, but along the Palisades tract between Seventh Street and the ocean you could get a double lot for forty thousand dollars.”

I turn with a start toward the diffuse shape of the real estate woman standing behind the screen door.

“They started splitting those lots in the fifties and of course Lawrence Welk built his shining white tower and now you have what I call skyscrapers. We didn’t retain the respect for the Pacific Ocean that we should have, um-hum. What you see now as far as that’s concerned is Santa Monica rebuilding itself for the twenty-first century.”

I rise impatiently and push the door open. The real estate woman has turned toward the television on the counter, where the lead story on the local evening news concerns a small riot that occurred in Beverly Hills when Jayne Mason made an appearance at Saks Fifth Avenue to introduce her new line of makeup.

Nobody had imagined that two thousand women would line up to see her. Crowd control failed and a mob of middle-aged housewives ran amok through the cosmetics department. We’re watching this ridiculous footage on a silly little miniature screen and all this lady can say is “Isn’t she beautiful?” as Jayne Mason is shown throwing roses to the crowd. “She’s still the most beautiful woman in the world.” Fifteen seconds later the story ends on the solemn note that just days ago the doctor Ms. Mason had sued for overprescribing narcotics committed suicide. Again they flash that blurry hunched-over photograph of Randall Eberhardt, with the strong implication that he killed himself because he had committed health care fraud.

I am handed a sheet of paper describing the house and stating that it is priced to sell at $875,000. I ball it up and drop it into the artificial tree on my way out.

Unsettled and unhappy, I drive up to Twentieth Street and park in front of the Eberhardt residence, forcing myself to trudge up the walk. Whatever hostility I had toward Claire Eberhardt begins to fade the moment she opens the door.

She is gaunt, with dark puffy circles under the eyes. An old yellow button-down shirt hangs over the sharp bones of her shoulder blades. The cuffs are turned up, it is huge on her. Maybe it was Randall’s or maybe she has lost ten pounds in the last week. Behind her the house seems empty, just a television reverberating in the background, tuned to the same local news I had just seen over on Twelfth Street. I realize she has been watching her husband being brutalized by the media all over again.

I introduce myself once more because she is obviously too agitated to focus. When the word “FBI” penetrates, she starts to tremble.

“Why? What are you doing here?” One eye turns red and starts leaking tears. A shaking hand pats at her cheek.

“I was asked to apprise you of our investigation.”

“Why me?”

“We want you to know that your husband is no longer the target.…”

“No longer the target?”

“He’s been cleared of any wrongdoing. I hope that’s of some comfort to you.”

Confronted by her unresponsive devastated face, I feel like a total fool, retreating behind even more pompous language: “We are aggressively pursuing the real criminal who we hope will be brought to justice by the legal system.”

She’s not hearing me. She is numb, the words must be coming at her all scrambled.

“He killed himself.”

“I know.”

“The children are back in Boston with my folks. It’s funny, my daughter really loved California.…”

She is actually smiling. A horrible Sardonicus grin webbed with glistening strings of tears.

“… But now she’s afraid to be in this house. That little girl was her daddy’s princess.”

In the examining room Dr. Eberhardt told me about his daughter, a little monkey climbing up on a piano. I remember the easy tenderness in his voice.

“I just saw Jayne Mason on the news. She looked good. She claims she never had plastic surgery and Randall said it’s true. I bet she sells a lot of makeup. We always liked her in the movies, but, really, she has such an incredible voice. Even before she became a patient, we had all her albums. Brought them out from Boston.”

A spasmodic grimace.

“Will you be moving back?”

She doesn’t respond to the question.

“Did you know I got a call from a talk show? They want to do something on ‘wives of doctors who are criminals.’ ”

“That’s gross.”

“I told them Randall was not a criminal. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“We know that, Mrs. Eberhardt.”

“Jayne Mason did.”

Suddenly the perfume of night-blooming jasmine seems incredibly strong, embracing us both in its sickly burnt-sugar scent.

“What did Jayne Mason do that was wrong?”

Claire Eberhardt’s arms wrap around her waist against a wet sea breeze. The first time we met across this threshold we shared an understanding, nurse and cop, of the way the world works. Once again those imperfect eyes hold mine.

But all she will say is “Good luck,” and softly closes the door.

I walk back and get into my car and start the engine. As I am making a U-turn lights flash in the rearview mirror and I see Randall Eberhardt’s bronze Acura pivoting wildly out of the driveway. Its tires bump over the curb and the brights are on. First it seems to be coming straight at me and I am momentarily blinded. Suddenly the mirror goes dark and I realize Claire Eberhardt has turned and is heading the other way, toward San Vicente Boulevard.

I swing the Barracuda around and follow her down the Seventh Street incline to Chatauqua and onto Pacific Coast Highway heading north.

I keep thinking about that immigrant Japanese woman who was so shamed by a philandering husband that she walked across the sand right here at Will Rogers Beach, through the surf and into the Pacific Ocean, carrying both her young children. The children drowned, she didn’t. But Claire Eberhardt is alone in the car, maintaining a steady fifty-five miles an hour and stopping prudently at every red light. She keeps on going and I relax a little, thinking maybe she’s out for a drive to let off steam, but just past Pepperdine she turns left onto Arroyo Road, which leads to Jayne Mason’s property.

I am prevented from following by an entire motorcycle gang, thirty or forty of them mounted on their Harleys and strung out over a quarter mile, zipping by on the opposite side of the road like an unending pack of maddening bees. Stalled here with the turn signal flashing, my adrenaline pumps higher and higher.

A long time ago, it seems, I was in a free-floating situation like this in the parking lot of a bank. Civilians may have been threatened, I had no way of knowing, but I chose to ride it out on arrogance and guts without calling for backup. That time I was lucky. This time I pick up the radio.

“This is signal 345,” I tell the radio room at the Bureau office. “Request that you call the L.A. County Sheriff, Malibu station, and ask that they respond immediately to a possible disturbance at the Mason property on Arroyo Road. Make sure they know there’s an FBI agent present who needs help.”

The bikers pass and I dive across the highway, cranking the Barracuda up to fifty in second, bumping over the dirt road underneath the eucalyptus trees, along the dark empty meadow, until I see the guard gate coming up fast. Claire Eberhardt must have used her husband’s pass to get through because now the armature is down. Reasoning the barrier would delay the sheriff’s department, certain now that I don’t have a lot of time, I duck my head and crash right through it, catapulting the wooden arm up in the air and into the brush, hoping it didn’t damage the grillwork.

All of this has given Claire Eberhardt a good three-minute lead. I swerve over the gravel of the parking lot, sliding to a stop beside Magda Stockman’s Cadillac. The Acura has been left with the engine running. The front door in the white wall is ajar. She must have gained admission to the house with her husband’s key.

I run into the courtyard, which is underlit by just two sparse spots and wavering green lights in the pool. At the far end of the darkened patio Claire Eberhardt approaches the large figure of Magda Stockman. Stockman says something with a dismissive gesture toward the intruder, then bends over to pick up a coiled garden hose and hang it back on its hook.

I keep coming forward, calling out, “Claire!”

Someone pushes the sliding glass door open a little farther and says, “Hello out there. What’s going on?”

For an instant Jayne Mason is clearly visible standing on the threshold of the lighted room.

Claire Eberhardt pulls a gun and gets off two shots. The glass blows, a triple explosion that takes place in less than two seconds.

My weapon is out and aimed at the doctor’s wife.

“Police. Drop the gun.”

Her head spins toward me in a shining blur of dark hair. I flinch but hold firm. My legs are planted and my arms are steady. I am going on reflex now, hundreds of hours of training enabling a bypass for the emotions clawing at the edges of my mind.

“Put the weapon down.”

Magda Stockman takes a step and Claire Eberhardt whirls, jamming the gun into her chest and forcing her back against a stone planter.

“Put it down,” I say steadily.

“Don’t be stupid,” Stockman rasps. “We have to call an ambulance.”

To my right, out of peripheral vision, I see long cracks and a chunk taken out of the door. Inside the room Jayne Mason is down, sputtering and gasping and coughing up blood that splatters against long ragged fingers of glass.

“Listen to me, Claire. I’ve already called for backup. The authorities are coming.”

“Go ahead and shoot me.” Claire Eberhardt’s face is distorted in the light falling softly like snow.

“You have too much to live for. Think of Laura and Peter. Peter’s only one year old. Do you want them to go through life without a father and mother?”

I have taken a step closer. Her gun is still pinned against Stockman’s chest.

“I have sympathy for you, Claire. I know what you went through. You can make this okay. Put yours down and I’ll put mine down and we’ll talk about it.”

She only stares, malfunctioning.

“Think about your children, that’s all you have to do.”

Very slowly Claire Eberhardt bends at the waist and lets the weapon drop.

“Madness!” Stockman cries, staggering toward the house.

“You did the right thing,” I tell Claire Eberhardt quickly. “Now just relax.”

We hear sirens and, shortly, the clatter of police radios outside the gate. With the subject neutralized and backup on site, I can get up close. Although I holster my weapon, my hand stays on it as I approach, keeping up a patter of soothing words. The gun turns out to be a little five-shot.38 Smith & Wesson revolver, just what a panicked doctor would buy to protect his home. It’s not very accurate past twenty feet. I kick it out of reach.

I put a hand on Claire’s shoulder and she wilts under the touch, sinking down on the edge of the planter murmuring, “I’m sorry.”

The locals take over. It’s not my jurisdiction. They handcuff the suspect and take her into custody. They administer CPR and call the paramedics, who arrive with a lieutenant from the homicide division of the sheriff’s department. We exchange cards and he asks that I report to the Malibu station to make a statement.

I watch from the outside, through a big hole taken out of the door by the bullets, as the paramedics cut away the blood-soaked blouse covered with shards of glass and put patches on the victim’s chest in order to send the vital signs over the radio to a local ER. The beautiful face is relaxed, a normal blush going to pale, the eyes drowsily closed. One of the technicians pushes on the chest and air gurgles up through the blood. “Hemothorax,” he says. The homicide lieutenant wants to know the status of the victim in order to charge the suspect. The hospital radios back that there are no vital signs. There was a lot of damage. The actress probably died within minutes of the shots being fired. The charge is murder.

The last time I am aware of Magda Stockman she is on her knees on the wet concrete, with her head down and hands clasped, weeping, “Oh my God, Jay, oh my God, Jay,” and it’s odd that the grievous sobs should sound exactly like my mother’s. I haven’t heard her voice like that, out loud, in my ears, for fifteen years. When they say her famous client is dead, Magda Stockman’s forehead lowers very slowly to the ground and she stays that way for a long time, bowed down in a pose of mortification, until someone drags her to her feet.

I remember my mother crying and flush hot with fear.

It woke me up in my bed. I wandered out to the hallway and she told me to put a sweater over my pajamas because, as strange as it seemed, we were going to the Pier for ice cream. I remember there were wooden cutouts of Mary and her lamb on the wall over my bed and I even had a black woolly lamb with a music box inside that played the song.

I was clutching that lamb when I came out of the bedroom the second time, buttoned up in a sweater because I was a good and obedient little girl. There were voices and shouting in the backyard. I couldn’t find my mother so I went outside where my father and grandfather were arguing violently. My parents must have just driven in from Las Vegas, where they had gotten married, and Poppy must have been crazy with rage that this ignorant wetback dared to take his daughter, threatening him with the black policeman’s nightstick, jabbing it into the air.

I got between them. My father picked me up and I held on, my legs wrapped around his waist, while Poppy tried to pull me out of his arms. They were both shouting at the same time. I fell into the grass and a car passed in the alley, spraying the yard with strips of light. In the strobing headlights, I saw. It was not some foreman in a bean field, it was my grandfather who raised his nightstick and smacked my father across the temple and around the shoulders and neck again and again until blood streaked his temples, he suddenly convulsed and collapsed and lay still.

The engine roared, the loudest sound in the universe, as I scrambled into the car parked in front of the house where my mother had been waiting for me, squirming into her lap behind the big wheel, telling her what I had seen, perhaps, or maybe unable to utter a word, but whatever I said we did drive to the Pier that night, I remember how the sea wind cut through my sweater and how we sat on a bench and how, finally, she held me to her chest and cried. Whether she knew or suspected that her own father had killed her new husband, I’ll never know. I wonder how he disposed of the body but after all, he was a law enforcement officer, who better to conceal a crime? Maybe he dumped it up in Topanga Canyon, maybe he delivered it to the coroner’s office with a report about two drunks fighting in a Mexican bar, but Mother must have known that Miguel Sanchez left her because in some way he was defeated by Poppy’s rage and then she too succumbed to Poppy and lived her life in service to him until, apparently, it was meaningless to stay alive any longer, and whatever witness I might have borne to the incident I buried, for myself and, now I see, for her.

“Ana. I’m here.”

He is speaking very gently, maybe because he knows I am not at that moment on this earth. Slowly a high-pitched hum that has occluded my hearing subsides and the sounds of the waves come back, flat, regular, distant. I have been standing at the edge of the cliff.

“I was just leaving the office when you called it in. Kyle and I hauled ass out here.”

“Thank you.”

“We look out for our own.”

I don’t respond.

Mike Donnato puts his arms around me and I lean back against his chest, watching the long white line of the breaking surf against a charcoal sea.

“Are you okay?”

I shake my head no. Not okay.

“What can I do?” he asks.

I turn to him and we embrace fully, emotionally.

“I’m here for you,” he whispers.

I find his eyes in the dark. They are full of questions.

Finally I say, “I can’t.”

“Why?”

“There’s always a betrayal in it.”

I pull away and don’t look back. Thirty minutes later I am at the Malibu station, making my statement.

TWENTY-FIVE

SAC ROBERT CALLOWAY holds a news conference at our office to disclose the details of Jayne Mason’s death. He orchestrates it carefully, making sure the coroner himself is there and the L.A. County Sheriff and that they both take the proper tone of respect for the loss of an American icon. One of those doyennes of MGM musicals whose name I never remember — the one who’s eighty years old and still wears a pixie haircut — reads a statement announcing the creation of the Jayne Mason Fund for Gun Control. The press gets what it wants and treats Galloway well. He leaves the podium looking quite pleased.

Under the guise of being a law enforcement officer, Barbara Sullivan is able to attend the funeral — or at least claim a good spot alongside the security force with a clear view of the front steps of the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church. She says the high point was seeing Sean Connery, but there were enough Hollywood celebrities in attendance to stoke the tabloids for months. As in major presidential events, the media held a lottery to determine which journalists would be admitted to the sanctuary. No cameras were allowed but, from the plethora of “insider” photographs of the rose-strewn coffin, grieving ex-husbands (including the used car king), children, and grandchildren, one may conclude that plenty of invited mourners were packing Instamatics inside those black Chanel bags.

Barbara returns from the funeral looking wan.

“I was a witness to history,” she declares, busying herself hanging up the jacket of her dark gray suit, checking phone messages, and finally pouring her famous cinnamon brew into two dark blue mugs with the FBI shield.

“No wise-ass remarks?”

In better times I would tell her that her attachment to Jayne Mason is pathological, but I haven’t the energy. I just shake my head.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I just feel like crying all the time.”

I shrug. Barbara’s blue eyes are kind. “It was a trauma.”

“That part didn’t bother me.”

“Oh come on, seeing somebody get shot? You should talk to Harvey McGinnis.”

“You’re not the first person to suggest that.”

“So?”

“I don’t need a shrink.”

“That’s what Patty McCormack said in The Bad Seed.”

She sips coffee. I have no interest in mine.

“Have you been swimming?”

“No.”

“At least go swimming.”

“It’s hard enough just to get out of bed.” I stand. “Thanks for the java.”

Big sister Barbara says, “This isn’t good.”

“I’ll get through it.”

Diligently I continue to work through the pile of bank robbery reports, taking refuge in the drone of it. I meet Donnato’s new partner, Joe Positano, one of those wound-up gung-ho jocks with a nerdy square face and ultrashort hair who thinks he’s going to save the world. I thought I’d be jealous but every time he and Donnato leave the office it’s a relief, until finally Donnato corners me at the front desk.

“You’ve been acting like this is some kind of a high school flirtation.”

“That’s ridiculous.” I squeeze past him. “Excuse me, I have to buy a Barbie doll.”

He wraps his fingers around my neck in a relatively playful way and tugs me out the side door as if I were a wriggling puppy.

But when we’re alone in the echoing stairwell the fun ends. We don’t kiss, we don’t even come close, in fact stand as far apart as possible, as if the air separating us had suddenly taken on the density of the atmosphere of Jupiter.

“I’m leaving Rochelle. We’ve been talking about it for a long time.”

“Oh Jesus, Mike.”

“It’s going to be shit, pure shit for the kids.”

He draws a sleeve across his eyes. Now mine are wet.

“Don’t do this for me.”

“Who said it had anything to do with you?”

I move farther away, so my back is against the rough cinder-block wall.

“I told you, I can’t. Whether you’re married or not.”

A strange indoor wind is blowing up the stairwell creating an unsettling moan.

“So everything that’s been going on is just — nothing.”

Aching, “Not at all.”

“Then what?”

He has asked but now averts his eyes, undefended.

“I don’t believe it’s possible.”

“What isn’t?” He gives a small laugh. “Happiness? Trust? The future of the world? What?”

Then he sees only silence.

“Got it,” he says finally.

I believe the best course of action is to leave it as it is.

“If any of this between you and Rochelle was my fault, I am truly sorry.”

I hurry down the stairs.

• • •

The alkies and I are all lined up in Thrifty’s on Santa Monica Boulevard in North Hollywood. They’re buying $3.95 pints of gin to get them through the night and I’m holding a pack of little plastic infantrymen for Cristóbal and a Barbie doll for Teresa, wishing I had the body chemistry to be able to get sloshed and like it. There’s a constant pain in my chest, as if someone had buried a pickax in there, and during the most banal conversations, like this exchange with Hugo the checkout guy (“Here you go.” “Thanks”), tears leak unaccountably from my eyes.

I make it through the gauntlet of street beggars blocking the way to the car and slam the door, as if to keep the vapor of their destitution out. Starting the engine, I make a resolution to leave all this behind. When I see Teresa and Cristóbal I want to be upbeat, a role model, the one who shows them the positive side, the satisfactions and achievements of working hard in this society.

Nobody answers the intercom but the lock on the lobby door is broken, so I pass under the organ-pipe sculpture up the metal stairs. It is six thirty at night and I’m hoping Mrs. Gutiérrez is at home serving a nutritious dinner, thereby not occasioning a call to Children and Family Services, but the pounding music that grows louder as I approach is stirring up an uneasy feeling.

After I knock and give it a few good kicks, the door is finally opened by a belligerent, overweight teenage boy wearing a Hawaiian shirt and smoking a cigarette.

“What’s going on?” he demands.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Gutiérrez.”

“She don’t live here.”

I block him from closing the door.

“What the fuck?”

I badge him. “FBI. Can I come in?”

There are five or six other boys sprawled around the floor playing a video game, surrounded by cigarette smoke blended with who knows what else. They look at me and their eyes slide sideways and they joke to one another in Spanish. I take an aggressive posture and keep close to the door.

“Where’s the woman who lived here?”

“I told you, lady. She moved away.”

“Whose apartment is this? Where are the adults?”

“It’s my place,” says the smallest one, wearing red mirror sunglasses and working the controls. “Actually, my mom’s. She’s at work. The lady who lived here went back to El Salvador.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Sure.”

He gets up and swaggers toward me as the others whistle and hoot, challenging him. I don’t like the building sense of dare and the ear-piercing mix of technopop and video chirp is making me nuts.

“Do me a favor, take off the shades.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I want to see if you’re straight.”

Tough guy: “I’m straight.”

He removes the glasses, revealing himself to be about twelve years old.

“It’s very important that you tell me exactly what happened to Mrs. Gutiérrez and the children.”

“Nothing happened. We live across the hall, she’s friendly with my mom. One day she says she’s going to El Salvador because she’s taking some kids back to their parents or something—”

“To the grandmother?”

“Yeah, the grandmother. So we got the apartment and all the stuff in it for a hundred bucks.”

The volcano paintings are still on the walls. The card table with its display of beer bottles intact. Teresa and Cristóbal are gone, erased.

I notice the laminated picture of El Niño de Atocha in the kitchen leaning up against the yellow tiles.

“She left that, too?”

“I guess.”

“You want it?”

He shrugs. I take the picture and two stumps of votive candles.

“Keep the music down.”

• • •

From the apartment house it is a two-block walk past dark empty lots and wrecked cars abandoned along the curb.

The corner of Santa Monica Boulevard comes to life from the crime scene photos: a major street, a bus stop with a blue bench, a low building with bricked-in windows that turns out to be a recording studio. A few steps away a mini-mall with fast-food chicken, pizza, dry cleaners, and a huge flamingo-pink music store is jammed with vehicles waiting for parking spaces. Rush-hour traffic on the main streets is moving slowly, an unctuous flow of yellow headlights.

If I looked hard enough, I could find the bullet holes in the bench and even in the masonry wall, but I don’t have the taste for it. I’ve been told Violeta was a religious person. Here is the congregation: young male runaways leaning into car windows hustling fifteen-dollar blow jobs. Here is the priest: a homeless schizophrenic wearing a child’s baseball jacket that comes down to his elbows shuffling along, pointing fastidiously to every square in the sidewalk. Here are the stained-glass windows: broken vials of crack glittering under orange street lamps. And instead of incense we are blessed with the profanity of car exhaust.

Yet, I prop up the plastic picture of El Niño de Atocha on the sill of one of the bricked-in windows and ask him, the guardian of lakes, to bless this unlikely place where someone has drowned. I set down the candle stubs, memorials to Violeta and my father, ghosts whom I will never really know. Despite the horns and the roar of traffic like a jetway and pedestrians on every side, I close my eyes and stand there and actually pray to El Niño to keep watch over those who are lost. I pray that Teresa and Cristóbal will walk on a black sand beach where the warm water will be full of red snapper and shrimp, and that when they reach the clearing in the bush they will find an older brother who is kind and a loving grandmother waiting with open arms.

Violeta’s Bible has been bumping around in my glove compartment. I finally lay it to rest on the window ledge.

A tight bitter sadness stays in my throat all the way home. When I get back to the apartment, I find Donnato’s card wedged in the door. “Call me,” he’s written.

I don’t.

• • •

Six days later the transfer to Kidnapping and Extortion comes through. Even though I know most of the guys on the squad, the first morning is tense. There are new procedures, a slew of paperwork, a different schedule, and of course a whole new section of the law to memorize.

My desk is moved to the other side of the bullpen and I say goodbye to the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise. There’s no room in the new location, so I leave it on the rack, inscribing my addition in ballpoint pen to the timeworn layers of advice: “Always make backup disks.”

My first case on C-1 involves an attempt by a disgruntled employee to hold the owner of a stationery store in a garage for ransom. He escaped and ran to the house of a neighbor who called the police. The suspect is now in custody. Being low man on the totem pole, my assignment is to go back to the neighbor, who has already been interviewed twice, and verify certain facts in his statement.

The abduction took place on Sixth Street, just off La Brea. This time of day the straightest shot would be Santa Monica Boulevard, which is how I come to be passing that corner once again.

What I see causes me to veer out of traffic and park in the middle of the bus stop.

It is the stop for the same bus Violeta would have taken to work on the Westside, the one she stepped off that night, the Number 4.

Maybe she crocheted along the way, maybe she dozed — past McDonald’s, Crown Books, Lou’s Quickie Grill, the crimson Formosa Café, the Pussycat Theater at Genessee, the Jewish bakeries in the Fairfax district — but Violeta Alvarado always got on the Number 4 at the same place and got off the Number 4 at the same place and was unchanged by the journey. She wasn’t part of the scramble. She knew who she was. She had come to America, that was her journey, and it ended here, at an intersection of dead roads, surrounded by a group of leering stoned-out creeps — misfits, night people, the forgotten, the invisible, the diseased, the disenfranchised, the damaged beyond help — at the coldest hour, just before dawn.

I know that hour of the night and I know that crossroads. I believe I have spent most of my life in that time and place, surrounded by spectres, deathly cold. The difference between us is Violeta carried hope like a simple charm, it was given to her the day she was born on a petate mat in the jungle, a birthright as uncomplicated as sun glancing off the leaf of a bamboo tree, and now, in the light of just such an ordinary, evanescent event, that gift has been shown to me.

I get out of the car and walk slowly, wonderingly, across the sidewalk. The haunted are gone, or at least absorbed by the larger numbers of those who are getting on with business, despite the odds. Drawing closer I see that what I’d glimpsed from the road is real: the picture of El Niño de Atocha is still standing, and furthermore, the windowsill is full of amazing objects. People have left flowers, toy cars, candies, and coins. The Bible is there, untouched. Nobody has stolen from El Niño.

In the shelter of the ledge other candles have been added: good luck candles printed with pictures of saints as I saw in the botánica, a fat red and green one left over from Christmas, a ragtag collection of half-burned tapers standing in juice cartons or anchored in crumpled bits of aluminum foil. All are lit. Someone has kept them lit. For the first time I can feel my mother and father inside me together, then rising together from this tender company of flames; rising up.

I don’t know how long I stand there before going back to the car and picking up the radio.

“This is signal 345. Do you have signal 587 in service?”

Dispatch: “Yes, we do.”

I give my location. “Could you ask him to respond?”

“Is it an emergency?”

“Not an emergency. Just a miracle.”

I lean against the G-ride until Donnato pulls up ten minutes later, bubble flashing, swerving to a halt and further blocking the bus stop.

He throws the door open and hurries toward me with a worried look. I reach for his hand, in front of that doofball Joe Positano, and everybody.