North of Montana

by April Smith

  “I’ll take a black currant–boysenberry.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited.”

  “By who?”

  “Your boss.”

  “Someone under investigation?”

  “Could be.”

  “Someone on staff?”

  “Yes, Tom. We know all about that scam you’re running.”

  He smiles and raises his eyebrows over the Dos Equis.

  “Got me.”

  “You can run but you cannot hide.”

  We stand there looking out to the ocean and I’m the one who feels like an idiot because I’m dressed, don’t ask me why.

  The tide is coming in faster now. The boulders Tom climbed over are almost totally obscured by foamy surf, which makes it harder for a second figure, a woman, to make her way around the jutting cliff, clear the rocks, cross the sand, and join us.

  “Meet Maureen.”

  Also naked.

  Maureen is a very thin redhead, too thin, as if she’s got an eating disorder. She has bony arms and flaccid thighs, two small mounds with flat nipples for breasts, but great hair. Ropes of terrific red hair whipping around in the quickening breeze.

  Maureen takes Tom’s hand and says nothing. I guess she’s shy. She reaches for a denim shirt inside the locker but instead of putting it on—as I hope she will—spreads it out and lies down.

  Tom grabs a towel and sits cross-legged next to her, his middle-aged form like a big pile of pearly white Crisco beside her delicate nymphette body. One meaty hand tips the bottle of beer to his mouth while the other smooths Maureen’s young freckled forehead.

  “You two look like you want some privacy.”

  “No, no. We’re just on a break.”

  “This is how they take coffee breaks in Malibu?”

  ‘Whenever possible,” Tom grins.

  “You both work for Jayne Mason?”

  “Maureen does her clothes.”

  “I have a friend named Barbara who, due to a tragic childhood deprivation, is obsessed about Jayne Mason and where she gets her clothes.”

  Maureen shrugs her bare shoulders. “She takes them.”

  “What do you mean, takes them? From a store?”

  “From the studio.” Maureen keeps her face to the sun, speaking without opening her eyes. “She’ll be like talking to a grip or someone, doing her Greta Garbo imitation, and I’m backing the car up to the dressing room and carrying out boxes of stuff.”

  ‘What kind of stuff?”

  “The stuff she wore in the movie. I guess it’s kind of like hers anyway.”

  “Does this behavior have anything to do with the drug problem?”

  “That’s over. She gave up drugs,” Maureen tells me in a solemn voice. “Big time.”

  Tom rolls over and props up his head on an elbow.

  “They all steal from the studio, Ana. Standard operating procedure.”

  “Someone will go, Where did you get that dress? And she’ll go, Oh, it’s from my personal designer, Luc de France, when it’s really from Twentieth Century-Fox. I love Jayne.” Maureen smiles into the infrared rays.

  I realize this girl can’t be more than twenty years old with about as many brain cells.

  “How long have you been working for Jayne?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a year?”

  “Isn’t that fast to be given such a big responsibility? Don’t they have union rules?”

  “Maureen’s an assistant,” Tom explains. “There’s someone else—or actually a few people—in charge of, you know—”

  “Designing, buying, fitting,” Maureen chants like a child at her lessons, “conceptualizing.” She waits. Her eyebrows frown. “I don’t really want to do clothes.”

  “No?” I drain the bottle.

  “I have a great idea for a screenplay.”

  “Little Maureen’s big dreams.” Tom strokes her hair affectionately.

  “Maaagda thinks it’s a good idea.” She opens her eyes just wide enough to glare at Tom.

  He smiles placatingly. I toss the bottle back into the cooler.

  “Why don’t you stay and join us?” he offers.

  “Join you in what?”

  “Whatever.”

  I look out at the ocean one more time. The waves are six feet high now, heavy and forbidding.

  “In another life. Nice to meet you, Maureen.”

  I walk back to the cliff, grab hold of the chain, and hoist myself up the stairs.

  When I get to the top, just a touch out of breath, I am startled to meet Jan, who is standing on the head of the promontory, wearing the upper half of a wet suit, hair streaming back over the shoulders in a stiff wind. He is looking at the ocean through a pair of high-powered binoculars.

  “Dolphins,” he explains as I pass, without taking his eyes from the glass.

  Clearly he is watching the naked lovers.

  TEN

  JAN DOES CALL to “reschedule”—and cancel and reschedule—maybe a dozen times. I keep working on my other cases but drop everything each time Jan says his boss is ready to meet. Once I go all the way to a fancy Italian restaurant at the top of Beverly Glen only to be told by the maître d’ that Miss Mason will not be able to meet me but I should go ahead and order lunch as her guest. I choose a seafood salad for $21.00 and when it comes, to my horror, a tiny naked octopus the size of a dime crawls out of the mixed greens to the edge of the plate and collapses onto the tablecloth.

  “To keep the calamari extremely fresh, the chef puts them into the salad alive,” the waiter explains, “and kills them with olive oil.”

  The next day I find a rubber octopus hanging at the end of a noose over my desk. What astonishes me is that one of them—probably Kyle—actually stopped off at a joke store and bought a rubber octopus. The merry pranksters also made photocopies of a picture of Jayne Mason and taped them on my wall: “Meet me at the Polo Lounge!” “Meet me in the bathroom.” “Luvya, baby!” “To Ana—My Dearest Friend.”

  It is now “absolutely set in stone,” according to Jan, that I am to meet Jayne Mason in the office of her Beverly Hills attorney a week from Monday. That settled, I am able to give full attention to deep intercourse with Les, a new mechanic at Marina All-Makes. I actually enjoy having work done on the Barracuda, it’s such a quixotic challenge to keep it running. Although he can’t explain why the headlight is shorting out he is telling me the smart thing would be to replace the entire wiring and light bulb assembly. It will cost around $300 and we’ll have to wait for parts.

  I become aware that something is going on at the far side of the bullpen, a small commotion over a mildly extraordinary event, as if someone had won fifty bucks in the lottery, but I am concentrating on Les, trying to control my irritation, appealing as he was at seven a.m. this morning in a filthy flannel shirt, ponytail down the back, long blackened fingers wrapped around a white paper coffee cup, aromatic vapors and stale breath commingling in the cold air.

  Maybe old Les was intimidated by the muscle car, or maybe he just had a hangover, but if he had applied a screwdriver instead of a screw job he would have seen that the headlight bulb is interchangeable with the one Chrysler uses in all its Dodge vans. You could pick the thing up for ten dollars in an auto parts store, but as I am trying to educate him the disturbance at the other end of the office has started to build and is coming toward me. Like a wave cheer in a baseball stadium people are standing up in tiers and within fifteen seconds everyone around me is on their feet.

  My first thought is that we are under attack, that some nut has managed to get through the security door, but nobody’s reaching for their weapon and no SWAT teams have arrived. “To be continued,” I promise Les and step around my desk to crane a look, only to find the view opening up as a sea of white shirts parts for Jayne Mason, who is walking right toward me.

  I don’t have time to wonder what she’s doing here. Frantically I rip the photocopies of her picture off the wall. Big flakes of p
laster come loose and fly into my eye. I stuff everything into the trash, trying to compose myself into the serious-minded FBI agent Jayne Mason has come to see. Then I realize a rubber octopus is hanging over my desk.

  I glance down the aisle. I can see Magda Stockman’s glossy black head above the crowd and the flash of gold earrings. She is subtly managing the flow of human energy around her client by positioning herself like a rock, keeping Mason in her lee while moving her along, protecting her from the onslaught while maintaining a benign expression and expertly scanning the room to anticipate what might be coming toward them next. Being almost six feet tall gives her the ability to see over the heads of many people.

  I calculate I have ten seconds before they reach me so I grab a scissors and step onto a chair, but two desks away the entourage suddenly turns left, continues to the end of the bullpen, and disappears into Galloway’s office. I climb off empty-handed, staring after them.

  Immediately Barbara Sullivan is on my back like a dervish, digging her fingers into my deltoids.

  “I got her autograph!”

  She sticks a legal pad under my nose. A carefully legible signature has been written across an entire sheet.

  Jayne Mason can turn a scrap of paper into a marquee, she can transform the day with a walk across a room. The woman is magical, and even I, a disbeliever, feel on the outs, hurt and inadequate because I am not on the other side of that door. “What is the big deal about Jayne Mason?” I mutter sourly.

  “Either you get it or you don’t,” Barbara sighs and hurries away. “I’m calling my sisters in Chicago—they’re not going to believe this.”

  She takes two steps, then stops herself and turns back as if suddenly surprised to see me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to get my headlight fixed.” I have already redialed Marina All-Makes.

  Barbara’s eyes grow round and horrified. “Why aren’t you in Galloway’s office?”

  “She came to see him, not me.” I offer a stiff smile.

  “Are you crazy?” She snatches the phone away. “Get in there.”

  “Barbara, I can’t just crash a meeting—”

  “You’re going to sit here and wait for a royal invitation?” Goofiness gone, her eyes are bright with the same fanaticism that comes over her whenever someone mentions Duane Carter’s name. “It’s your case, don’t let them ace you out.”

  “Obviously this thing has kicked up to a higher level.”

  Barbara grips my upper arm in a very unpleasant way. “Get in there, you dumb shit.”

  Her reaction seems excessive, but I say, “I’m going.”

  She releases me. It hurts.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I pick up a file and a half-drunk can of cola and sashay slowly toward Galloway’s closed door, lifting the uninjured arm to fluff at my hair, looking back once to find Barbara Sullivan glaring at me. The eldest of seven, she can be swift and severe. If I had a big sister like her, God knows where I’d be today, but it wouldn’t be here.

  • • •

  As I sidle into the room, Galloway booms heartily that he was just about to buzz me.

  He should have told me to bring my own chair because the place is crowded.

  Jayne Mason sits alone on the butterscotch plaid sofa. I can’t take my eyes off her face; naturally and perfectly formed, it radiates light just like her Manet. She is wearing a peach-colored chiffon dress with a scoop neck, long sleeves with lacy cuffs that flop over the hands, and a flounce at the knee and dyed-to-match high-heeled sandals. Maybe later she is going to a bridal shower.

  Magda Stockman is to her right in the armchair and two male attorneys, who, I am told, are from a Beverly Hills law firm, perch on typing stools that have been rolled in. Galloway lugs an ungainly black leather desk chair around and motions for me to sit. It’s one of those masculine “executive” numbers where the back is higher than my head, the seat swivels uncontrollably on loose bearings, and I feel like some bizarre shrunken monarch about to be dethroned by centrifugal force.

  All this time Jayne and Magda continue a private conversation.

  “It is truly astoundingly funny, it never stops,” Magda is saying. “I cannot believe it will not be a huge success.”

  “I hear it’s a four-hankie ending.”

  “No, it’s wonderful.”

  “I cry all the time,” says Jayne. “Why do I have to go to a movie to cry?”

  “He’s lovely in this picture, he’s a darling person. And they are so real together.”

  “We’re all flying back to New York on the same plane,” Jayne tells her. “Isn’t that cute?”

  Everyone in the room has been listening politely without understanding a thing. Finally Jayne Mason acknowledges the rest of us by asking:

  “Can I get some Evian water?”

  “We’ve got sodas in the machine.” Galloway nods in my direction. I raise my can.

  “The sugar would send me around the bend.”

  “We’ve got regular water.”

  “My nutritionist would have a conniption.”

  Galloway is looking a bit rumpled and both attorneys have begun to search for a phone but Stockman hasn’t flinched.

  “The water is coming, Jay.”

  Again I am impressed by the dark throaty voice that seems to match the authority of her big solid body and today’s olive brown suit with brass buttons and gold braiding on the sleeves, an elegant takeoff on an officer’s uniform (Barbara would know which designer). Her legs are stocky—peasant legs—she keeps them knees up, pressed together, in brown stockings and matching pumps with the signature Cs. The olive quilted bag with the gold chain also says CC. She is sporting more Cs than a caracara.

  While there is a nervous tenseness about Mason, Stockman is nothing but composed command. Her movements are resolute and unhurried. The black hair drawn back into the bow accentuates the cheekbones and knowing Mongolian eyes.

  “Really, we can get water,” Galloway is going on, rattled.

  “The hell with water, bring on the Scotch!” Mason cries cheerily and we laugh.

  “Did you say hello to our woman FBI agent, Ana Grey?” Stockman prompts.

  The movie star looks me in the eyes and extends her hand, instantly, subtly, putting me in my place. Make no mistake: we have been gathered here to serve her personal needs. I stumble out of Galloway’s chair. My hand is damp. Hers is trembling.

  “We’ve heard such good things about you,” she murmurs with a smile.

  It takes me by surprise. I can’t imagine what the good things were or who said them to whom.

  “We’re very pleased to have a woman on the case,” adds Stockman.

  “Ana’s here because she’s good, not because she’s female,” Galloway chimes in, placing a cigar in his mouth. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to light this.”

  “Oh, men and their cocks,” Mason declares. “I told Clark Gable, why do you smoke a cigar when you’re hung like an ape?”

  “Jay, don’t fib.”

  “Women don’t need to smoke a big cigar or carry a gun to prove they can come.”

  The two attorneys giggle quietly as if they’ve heard this kind of thing before. Galloway catches my eye with an amused look.

  “Not that we don’t need to protect ourselves, that’s another story,” Miss Mason continues. “Tell me, Ana, do you carry a gun?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she whispers, “you can protect us from the lawyers!”

  Everyone in the room is hooting and snorting as the door opens and Maureen, the formerly naked Maureen of the private beach, enters the office carrying a large bottle of Evian water.

  “Sit by me, sweetie.”

  Jayne Mason sweeps the folds of the dress aside so Maureen can be close. She is introduced as “the very talented girl who does my wardrobe, and a dear friend.”

  ‘We’ve met,” I respond, although from her vacant look I wonder if Maureen has a clue about
when and where. She is definitely, as they say, “in her own space.” Today she looks like an incarnation from another era with those extraordinary ropes of orange-red hair falling from a tortoiseshell comb, a vintage rayon dress loaded with amber necklaces and running shoes with thick socks.

  “I’m sorry, this is all they had at the 7-Eleven.” Maureen pulls a party pack of fifty plastic cups from a big canvas shoulder purse, plucks one out, and pours for Jayne.

  Magda Stockman now addresses Galloway: “In my conversations with the Director, he assured me that we would receive your most serious attention.”

  “You got it,” says Galloway. “Do you mind if we put this on tape?”

  “I was hoping you would, so we may all have a record.”

  Galloway places a Panasonic microcassette player on the coffee table and presses the On button.

  Magda nudges softly, “Jayne?”

  Jayne Mason stands up. Her eyes blink. Her hands find each other and clasp at the diaphragm as if she is about to begin a concert.

  “This man, this Dr. Eberhardt, got me addicted to painkillers.”

  She is moving now, turning to us occasionally, testing the swing of the skirt, adjusting her body to the space of the room.

  “Of course I trusted him, I was his patient. At first the pills helped, but he kept giving me more until I couldn’t live without them. I became a drug addict, I can admit that now without shame.”

  She lifts her chin, relaxing into the role.

  ‘What kind of pills were they?” Galloway asks.

  “Dilaudid.” She glances at Stockman for reassurance, then goes on. “He said they were generic Dilaudid from Mexico, that they were cheaper that way, although he sure charged me a fortune.”

  I follow up: “Where did you get these pills from Mexico?”

  She looks back to Stockman, confused. The manager answers for her smoothly: “He gave them to her in the office.”

  “He didn’t write prescriptions?”

  “Prescriptions would have been easy to trace. This guy is smart,” says one of the suits.

  “Not that smart,” says the other. “Dispensing a controlled substance from his professional office?”