North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

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

  • • •

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

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

  “I just spent a night in the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

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

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

  “Jesus Christ, Poppy.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Thanks, Poppy.”

  His voice is strong, mine is shrunken and weak.

  “Do you have a drinking problem?”

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

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

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

  “What’s the case?”

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

  “Did you get to meet Jayne Mason?”

  “Interviewed her at length.”

  “What was she like?”

  “The woman of your dreams, Poppy.”

  “We’d get along.”

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

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

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “And not be a jerk.”

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

  • • •

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

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

  “That lets me out.”

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

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

  I jump inside and slam the door.

  “So the Barracuda finally died.”

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

  “Why do you drive that wreck?”

  “It’s romantic.”

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

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

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

  “It smells like a bakery in here.”

  “I got you Zen muffins.”

  “You did?”

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

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

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

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

  “Let’s face it: I am glamorous.”

  He looks over. “Especially with that hood.”

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

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

  “Whose? Mine?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m screwed.”

  Donnato plows ahead through the flooded intersection.

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “Unbelievable.”

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

  “I guess we know the outcome.”

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

  Silence between us as we cross the corridor.

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

  Donnato gives me one of those endearingly painful smiles.

  “She was gargling at the sink, okay?”

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

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

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

  • • •

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

  “How was Boston?” Duane calls.

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

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

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

  “Who does?”

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

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

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

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

  “Were there any markings on the helicopter?”

  “It said KTLA.”

  “That’s a television station.”

  “Of course it is.”

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

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

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

  “For the right pair.”

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

  “I want the FBI involved.”

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

  “But you’re my FBI agent.”

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

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

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

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

  Oh, boy.

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

  “Will she testify?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go for a warrant.”

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

  “I think we should wait.”

  ‘Why?”

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

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

  “When will we have it?”

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

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

  “I know you really want this case.”

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

  He reaches toward the coffee table, gestures in frustration.

  “Where’s your lucky belt buckle?”

  “Gone.”

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

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

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

  “Jayne Mason’s calling here.”

  “What for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s the half you do know?”

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

  “Where’s the political influence?”

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

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

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

  “So she came to America—”

  “Greener pastures.”

  Now we are nodding together.

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

  “The Bureau’s looking at hard times.”

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

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

  I nod soberly.

  Galloway turns from the television set, his face composed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “If it’s there, I’ll find it.”

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

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

  “Done.”

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

  “Poor bastard.”

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

  But Galloway does not look convinced.

  THIRTEEN

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