North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

  “Nice paint job. Is it yours?”

  “Yes, it’s mine.”

  He doesn’t seem surprised or make anything out of it. “What’ve you got there, a 440 four barrel?”

  “I looked for a six-pack but I couldn’t get air conditioning. Tell me you’re into ‘cudas.”

  Warren Speca goes to his truck and comes back with the latest issue of Hemmings Motor News. I can’t help it. My heart jumps.

  “My favorite bedside reading.” He thumbs it so I can see all the turned-down pages.

  “Mine, too.”

  “Think of all we’d have to talk about in bed.” He runs a gaze across my chest and meets my eyes with an amused and frankly randy look. “What do you get for mileage?”

  “Thirteen. But that’s not why you own one of these cars.”

  “I dig it.” He digs it all right. He has prematurely gray hair in a military buzz cut and soft full lips with a sensual curve to them. Weathered cheeks, eyes buried in sun creases. It’s those lips, like Paul Newman’s in Sweet Bird of Youth, that have allowed him to get away with what he’s been getting away with since high school; lips that whisper an insistent invitation to meet with them and break all the rules.

  “Pretty good maintenance?”

  “Not too much goes wrong. The alternator failed during the rain. The battery dies on you, things like that.”

  “But I bet it’ll do the quarter mile in the fourteen-second bracket.”

  “I’ve had it up to a hundred on the freeway at night.”

  Warren Speca is fingering the red leather on the driver’s seat. “Naughty girl.”

  “It was a high-speed chase through five counties ending in a four-way shoot-out, you know how it is.”

  He smiles. “Like that TV cop — what was his name — drove a car like this?”

  “Mannix.”

  “Was it exactly like yours?”

  “Exactly.”

  Warren Speca looks at me and then at the car, nodding slowly. “I am truly impressed.”

  “Well, I’m impressed,” I chatter on, believing that I’ve got him heading down that garden path. “You’re the only one I’ve ever met who knew that Mannix drove a Barracuda.”

  “I used to watch a lot of television in the sixties. Used to do a lot of other things, too.”

  “You and Claire Eberhardt?”

  His eyes stay steady. “What about Claire?”

  “When you guys went to high school together, I can see you two drinking beer, smoking whatever, spacing out watching TV.…”

  His hands go into his front pockets. “All right. What the fuck is going on?”

  I knew he’d come on like this sooner or later, so I just stay smooth.

  “We have no interest in what went on before. We want to know if you’re in contact with her now.”

  “Why?”

  “Routine background check on the Eberhardts.”

  He waits a moment, looking for something in my face. Apparently I give it to him because he says, “I don’t think so,” and walks down the driveway back to his truck.

  “What’s the problem?” I find myself going after him.

  “No problem. I don’t have to talk to you, so have a nice day.”

  He backs the Toyota out.

  “By the way”—he leans from the window—“Mannix drove a Hemi ’cuda.”

  “I knew that,” I say, cheeks burning.

  He ticks a finger back and forth reproachfully and heads off down the street.

  • • •

  I know I will get Warren Speca. He can’t just challenge me and drive away.

  I go back over the notes I took with Nurse Kathy in the submarine shop. She said Speca was “into some stuff she wouldn’t tell me about. I swivel up to the computer and run the criminal checks. Before I can take another sip of foul end-of-the-day coffee all the information I need comes up neatly on the screen.

  I wait until nine o’clock that night to catch him at home. He picks up the phone with a dull, unguarded “hullo.”

  “Hello, Warren. It’s Ana Grey with the FBI.”

  “I knew you’d call.”

  “You did?”

  “You want to ask me out on a date.”

  Instantaneously discarding several other possible responses: “Actually I’m calling about your State of California conviction for possession of marijuana and cocaine with intent to distribute.”

  “Ancient history … but what about it?”

  “I’ll bet when you applied for your state contractor’s license you left out the fact that you are a convicted felon.”

  There is a pause, then, “I don’t get it, Ana. Why are you threatening me?”

  “I want to talk to you about Claire Eberhardt.”

  “I’ll talk to you if I can have an attorney present.”

  “Of course you can have an attorney present—” I am bluffing, the last thing I want is some lawyer getting on the horn to the Eberhardt’s lawyer. “But this isn’t about you, Warren, it’s about Claire and her husband.”

  “I‘ve got nothing against Randall,” he says with dark defensiveness.

  “Most people think Randall Eberhardt is a solid citizen, but I get the feeling you know differently.”

  Warren Speca agrees to meet me in the bar on top of the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica the following afternoon.

  • • •

  The only way to get to Toppers bar is to ride the exterior elevator that climbs up the side of the hotel like a glass slug. Two nineteen-year-old secretaries are giggling and covering their eyes as the machinery shakes and whines and we rise slowly above palm trees and rooftops to a dreamlike suspension twenty stories above the ocean. I don’t like it too much, either.

  The doors open and I find myself in a Mexican cantina of whitewashed stucco edged with indigo blue. Above two curved doorways it says in faded pink paint, “Acapulco” and “Santa Cruz”—one leads to a restaurant with pink tablecloths, the other to a bar covered by a bamboo roof. Warren Speca is sitting at the bar sipping a drink and wearing a big Mexican sombrero covered with tiny round mirrors.

  A bartender with a dark moustache and slicked-back hair can’t hold it in anymore and just cracks up.

  “Está loco.” He nods toward Warren, who grins boyishly, the string dangling below his chin.

  “What’s in that drink?” I ask.

  “Nothing. Soda water. I just wanted to get in the mood.”

  “For what? A bullfight?”

  Warren slings the hat to the bartender, who hangs it back on a hook, still chuckling.

  We take a window table in the cocktail lounge with a view of white and beige buildings with red and orange roofs stretching all the way to the tree line north of Montana.

  The waitress brings me a nonalcoholic margarita over lime-scented crushed ice in a stemmed glass as big as a soup bowl.

  “I’m out here in California minding my own business when I get a call from this lady Teddy Feign whose house got creamed by a mud slide.”

  “She’s got more work for you. She’s going to call.”

  “That’s cool. So she says Claire Eberhardt recommended me, an old friend from high school. I don’t actually grok to the fact that Claire might be out here on the West Coast, I figure it’s some damn thing through our mothers. If you think Jewish mothers are bad, you don’t know the Irish and Italians. You’re not Jewish, are you?”

  For a moment I’m stopped by a surge of anxiety, but I push through it: “My father was from El Salvador, my mother was American.”

  It’s out on the table and it’s not so bad.

  “This turns out to be a major job and Mrs. Feign is pressuring me to finish so I start working weekends. She has this gigantic birthday party for her kid and a hundred of their closest friends, and I’m outside screwing with the circuit breaker when these two French doors suddenly pop open and Claire Eberhardt comes flying out. I mean flying. They were dummy doors that were never supposed to be used, but what did Claire know. So
she goes flying into a ditch and I help her up and it’s Claire McCarthy from Savin Hill. She’s put on a little weight but there’s no doubt about it. She’s so embarrassed and fucked up she doesn’t recognize me — truthfully, it’s been fifteen years — so I let her go.

  “Later on, I walk into the kitchen and there she is looking out the window at the party like a wallflower — and Claire was never a wallflower — tears streaming down her face. She sees me and tries to cover it up.

  “ ‘Claire McCarthy,’ I say. ‘What’ve you been up to? Tell me you don’t recognize me.’

  “Finally she gets it. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing here, she says, then I remembered I gave Teddy your number. Why didn’t you say something outside when I was doing my Chevy Chase routine?’

  “ ‘Didn’t want to embarrass you.’

  “ ‘I must have looked like an idiot.’

  “I go, ‘No, you only looked scared.’

  “So then I ask about her parents who are major alcoholics and we start talking and I tell her I’m in the program now, I don’t drink, which blows her mind, and to cheer her up I point out this fat guy out there at the party wearing running shorts and a sweatshirt who’s worth sixty million dollars.

  “ ‘Thinks up one TV show, now he’s worth sixty million. Go over there and rub against him, maybe it’ll brush off.’

  “ ‘You rub against him,’ she says.

  “ ‘I tried but he wasn’t interested. Hey, for sixty million I’d do just about anything.’

  “ ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  “ ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t. What do I care? It’s only money.’

  “But Claire’s staring at all those people again and getting teary, feeling pathetic about herself because her daughter’s already part of the crowd and Claire knows she will never fit in.

  “ ‘That’s my daughter, Laura. She’s best friends with the birthday girl. She loves California.’

  “There’s this huge fancy birthday cake on the counter, so I take my finger”—he demonstrates on the edge of the cocktail table—“and wipe it all around the edge, and rub the chocolate frosting into my gums and I say to Claire, ‘You can’t take these people seriously.’

  “She looks at me and picks off one of the flowers from the cake and puts it into her mouth and I know right then and there we’re going to sleep together.”

  • • •

  “Did you and Claire Eberhardt sleep together?”

  “Two and three times a week. Mostly in my place, although once we made it in her husband’s bed. I thought for about thirty seconds she was actually going to leave him for me.”

  He smiles ruefully.

  “Was she in love with you?”

  Warren Speca folds his arms and tips back in the chair with bare knees apart, squinting toward the haze moving in over the sea. He’s come from work and is still wearing beat-up shorts, heavy boots, and crew socks.

  “The thing she loved most about me — unfortunately — was when we’d lie around afterward and talk about the old neighborhood. She’d get into these memories, did I remember what she was like when she was twelve, that sort of crap. Of course the sex was pretty good too.”

  I can’t help knowing that it was.

  “She hated it out here. People like Teddy Feign scared the shit out of her, but she felt a lot of pressure to be like them. She was glad for an excuse not to hang out with Teddy anymore. She had a much better time with me,” he adds, with a teasing grin.

  “So where was all this pressure coming from?”

  “Dr. Randall, where else? I always thought the guy was a snob. Here was his wife drying up inside and he’s out playing Doctor to the Stars.”

  “With Jayne Mason?”

  “Dig this: he had a pass for the security gate, a key to the front door, and Jayne Mason used to pick him up from his office in her limousine and take him around to charity dinners and the movies.”

  “Were they having an affair?”

  “No, just for the hell of it. She gave him the key for emergency house calls.”

  “Why Randall?”

  ‘Who knows. Because she felt like it and he was star-struck, like any dope just in from the boonies. For a doctor, I’ve got to tell you, he wasn’t very smart. I’ve done a lot of work for movie stars. It doesn’t take many brain cells to figure out all they want to do is use you.”

  “So you think Jayne Mason was using Randall Eberhardt.”

  “Using him how?”

  “To get drugs.”

  “No, to me it was just the opposite. He was trying to get her off drugs. I’ll tell you something.”

  He swirls the sugar in a second iced tea.

  “Claire came to that birthday party alone, right, and met me and the rest is history. The reason why Randall wasn’t there and couldn’t come was because he had to go out to Malibu to take care of Jayne Mason, who supposedly had a cold.”

  He leans forward and taps a finger on the Mexican tile inlaid in the tabletop.

  “Claire told me later when he got out there he found Jayne Mason lying in bed, completely naked, covered with her own feces and vomit.”

  He taps each word for emphasis: her own feces and vomit.

  “It’s a good thing he had that key because she’d almost OD’d on downers. That’s when he checked her into the Betty Ford Center.”

  I think about it.

  “Then where did she get the drugs?”

  He shrugs. “She must have a street connection somewhere.”

  I nod. It’s a good guess, an educated guess you might say. But if Randall Eberhardt weren’t supplying Jayne Mason with narcotics, why is she going after the doctor now, as if her life depends on it?

  • • •

  To the west a gray mist has blended the ocean with the sky, creating a curtain of fog. The surf looks mild and green in the late afternoon light, playful, benign. Bicycle wheels spinning along the bike path, tiny as gears in a watch, throw off faint metallic sparks of light.

  “Are you still seeing Claire?”

  “It ended a couple of months ago when she decided she was still in love with Randall. No surprise. She could never let go, she clings to him like a life raft.”

  “How did it end between you two?”

  He rubs a knuckle across his short hair.

  “Pretty bad. She was at my place, late getting home, she calls Teddy Feign’s because Laura was over there playing with their little girl.…” He sighs. “And she finds out over the phone that Laura’s fallen into the pool and almost bought the farm.”

  I’ve put the pen down and stopped taking notes. My heart is beating faster because I know from his dread tone of voice — and because I shouldn’t be here in Claire Eberhardt’s place, feeling what she must have been feeling sitting across from this hunk Warren Speca — that we are about to make an abrupt turn onto a dangerous track.

  “We jump into my truck and race over to Teddy’s house. Claire’s saying the Our Father all the way. Teddy wasn’t home at the time. The housekeepers already called 911 and the street was jammed with paramedics and cop cars. You don’t want to ever come home to that. Claire gets out of the truck and almost faints into the arms of this black woman cop. I don’t go into the house — what am I doing there, right? — but Claire comes back out to tell me Laura’s all right, she never even lost consciousness. Turns out it was the housekeeper’s fault.”

  “Which housekeeper?”

  “I forget her name.”

  “Was it Violeta?”

  “Yeah. Violeta.”

  I feel a dull thud in the chest, the way you do when you hear something bad about someone you have come to like.

  “Did you know Violeta?”

  “Uh-uh. I think I ran into her once, when I showed up at Claire’s.”

  “When was that?”

  “One time toward the end. We didn’t see each other for a month after the thing with Laura, then Claire told me it was over.”

  “Why? Guilty cons
cience?”

  “Yeah, she thought it was all her fault, but also she claimed going through it with Randall brought them together.” He makes a wry sideways frown. “What can I tell you? The thrill was gone.”

  He flicks the empty glass forward with thumb and forefinger.

  “This is the first place I took her when we started being together.”

  We wait for the elevator in front of a large antique mirror in a wooden frame painted with roses. Warren Speca has put on a baseball cap that says Warner Bros. Studios. I look at us in the mirror. The bartender is slipping a pot of chili into the steam tray in preparation for happy hour. The elevator arrives, empty. We step inside.

  “The first time we kissed was right here.”

  We stand in silence as the capsule shimmies and starts its descent, the way they stood, close together, awkward and lusting.

  If he surprised me with a kiss the way he first kissed Claire Eberhardt, I know it would be just a brush, a tease, nothing you could take offense about, the way it was for her: a token from an old friend, remembrance of the days in high school when they weren’t afraid of what they didn’t know, when they rushed headlong into it all — a summer night in a moving car and all the windows down, intoxicated by the syrupy vapor of Southern Comfort and the jumbled weedy smells of a pitch-dark country road. The headlights off, blind, picking up speed.

  SIXTEEN

  THE NEXT DAY I get some disturbing information from Boston.

  “Bay Pharmacy searched their records back to 1985 and the only prescriptions filled by Claudia Van Hoven were for an eye infection and some female problems,” Wild Bill says casually over the phone. “Even so they weren’t written by Randall Eberhardt.”

  “Maybe she went to another drugstore and didn’t remember the name right.”

  “I‘m checking into that now, little señorita.”

  Suddenly I’m not buying Wild Bill’s jocularity. The breathless quality of his voice betrays fear, which is instantly communicated to me in a rush of adrenaline.

  “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “Yes, we are.” The panic mounts quickly. “She was lying to us out there in the park.”