North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Coffee,” she decides. “Now. You?”

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

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

  She wiggles her fingers and makes a mocking spirit face.

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

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

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

  “I heard there was an accident.”

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

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

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

  “So you know them pretty well.”

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

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

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

  “How would you know that?”

  “It wasn’t hard to find out.”

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

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

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

  “Is he a big spender?”

  She snorts. “He drives an Acura.”

  “Have you ever seen him take drugs?”

  “Never.”

  “Has he ever offered drugs to you?”

  “I don’t do drugs.”

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

  “Never happened.”

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

  “Randall?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “You tell me.”

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

  I give her a goofy smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Her voice quavers.

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

  I sip the coffee, light and sweet.

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

  “Did she follow your advice?”

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

  ‘Why?”

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

  “Did you ask what was going on?”

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

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

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

  “Why is that?”

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

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

  A little girl bursts in.

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

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

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

  Diedre is followed by an older woman.

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

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

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

  “Good idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Was Claire jealous?”

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

  The phone rings.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why do I know that name?”

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

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

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

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

  “Wait for Dirk.”

  • • •

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

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

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

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

  FIFTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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