North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

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

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

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

  She immediately begins talking with great urgency in Spanish.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Cristóbal and Teresa.”

  “What is your relationship to the children?”

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

  “How was she killed?”

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

  “What did the police say?”

  “They don’t know anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Violeta and your father came from the same village.”

  “Which village?”

  “La Palma.”

  “Never heard of it.”

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

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

  It shakes me.

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

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

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

  THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I hate musicals.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I can.”

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

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

  “Why? That’s normal.”

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

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

  “Day after tomorrow.”

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

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

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

  “Here’s your guy.”

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

  “And here’s your guy again.”

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

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

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

  “How do you do that?”

  Vitamin A.”

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

  “Sure there’s a trick.”

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

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

  “Barbara!”

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

  She whips the pearl back and forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Go with God.”

  • • •

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

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

  His eyes watch me. I see intelligence there.

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

  He doesn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

  I slip the photos back into the envelope.

  “You’ve got me on dick.”

  His first words. How charming.

  “Is that so?”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

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

  Dennis runs a hand through his greasy hair.

  “You know where I used to live?”

  “Paris.”

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

  “You must be a bette
r robber than I thought.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He bites a corner off the nail on his thumb.

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

  “Because I happen to love cocaine.”

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

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

  I stand up. “Let’s get a stenographer in here and get your statement.”

  “Statement on what?”

  “The other robbery.”

  Of course he hasn’t actually admitted to the Culver City job. I’m angling. I’m hoping.

  “I didn’t do another robbery.”

  I wait it out a moment, thinking, I’m getting somewhere with this guy. We have a rapport. I’ll come back—