North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Teak.”

  “Right onto the teakwood floor.”

  “And you went to see Dr. Eberhardt?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What was the diagnosis?”

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

  “What was the treatment?”

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

  “Rest, ice, and physical therapy.”

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

  “No pills?”

  “What?”

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

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

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

  “You asked for the pills?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Did he agree?”

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

  “How?”

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

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

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Did he ever send you roses?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “We all have.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

  ‘Want some advice about Boston?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Still, when a person like Jayne Mason—”

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

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

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

  He pretends not to hear.

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

  “Only myself.”

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You look like Serpico.”

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

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

  “The fox guarding the chickens?”

  “You’re looking at Mr. Straight.”

  I nod. He looks like hell.

  “Are you staking me out?”

  “Just waiting. Indulging in a little fantasy.”

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

  “I’ve got something for you.”

  “Try it and I’ll bust you so fast—”

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

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

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

  “What jogged his memory?”

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

  “You’re sure?”

  “The kid is good.”

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

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

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

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

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

  I say nothing.

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

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

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

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

  “She was your cousin, right?”

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

  “Yes, John. She was my cousin.”

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

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

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

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

  ELEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The Sheraton.”

  “Follow me.”

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

  “This ain’t the Sheraton, Wild Bill.”

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