North of Montana

by April Smith

  Then she is alone in darkness and after a while she can’t tell which is which—life being rolled away from her or a curtain lifted.

  The pupils of her eyes jerk once, then stop.

  Her body stops.

  She knows she has drowned. The hands of the sea witch are wrapped around her ankles and this time she doesn’t have the strength to pull away. But no—it isn’t the sea witch! It is her own mother, Constanza, and she is lifting her little girl up from this terrifying lonely darkness to the safety of her shoulder where the world is secure and bright. What a relief that it is Mother, I think, passing a truck and flooring it to seventy. Mother, after all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I WISH I COULD SAY the mood in the office was radically changed by events concerning the Mason case; that people approached my desk with reverence and wonder at the turn it had taken, a Westside doctor dead by suicide, a major film star under a narcotics investigation. Maureen has given up the name of a dealer who turned out to be linked to the Mexican mafia, so one thing Jayne Mason did not fabricate was the fact that the Dilaudid came from Mexico. This is a good lead for Jim Kelly and the ladies and gents of the Drug Squad, but for the rest of the bullpen it is business as usual.

  From the vantage point of my desk I make the observation that everyone’s got their own problems. Each agent out there is working forty cases and in my wire basket alone there are two dozen unfinished reports on armed bank robberies. But at this moment the only response I can muster to all this savagery is to sit here patiently linking one paper clip to another.

  When Henry Caravetti rolls by in the electric wheelchair delivering mail, my interest peaks but not for long. It will take weeks to process the transfer to the C-1 squad, and I will probably spend the entire time planted right here, trying to work up the nerve to talk to Mike Donnato. We have been avoiding each other for days.

  It’s going to be a very long paper clip chain.

  The problem is … well, they don’t have a word for it for females, but I’ve heard male colleagues refer to the condition as “continuous tumescence.” It’s a localized sensation down there that flares into acute, unbearable craving whenever I catch a glimpse of, say, the small of his back and think about slipping my hands inside the belt and slowly pulling out the tails of the sweet-smelling denim shirt, feeling the warm skin, drawing my fingertips down the spine to that place where it tapers, just above the hard curve of the buttock. I’d better get up and walk.

  The Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise gives a friendly nudge. Donnato is across the room with Kyle and Frank, wearing that denim shirt, a forest green knit tie, and jeans, standing in what strikes me as a very provocative pose, hands clasped behind his head, stretching the chest and armpits open, open, open. Stumbling forward I tell myself it is perfectly reasonable to join the talk, which is almost certainly about the coming matchup in the All-Star Game, getting myself psyched by rehearsing a line I read in the sports page about San Francisco’s manager, Roger Craig, and the A’s manager, Tony La Russa, who is a vegetarian.

  Halfway there, SAC Robert Galloway prevents this potentially sweaty encounter by intercepting and escorting me into his office. I figure I might as well use the line on him:

  “You think Roger Craig will pound La Russa into a veggie burger?”

  “I’ll always have a sweet spot for Roger Craig,” Galloway says. “He pitched the first game ever played by the Mets and had the distinction of finishing the season with ten wins and twenty-four losses.”

  Galloway picks up the NYPD detective belt buckle from the coffee table and hefts it in his hand, saying nothing.

  I stand self-consciously in the middle of the room.

  “Did Jayne mail that back to you?”

  “I asked a captain back in New York to send a new one. Made me jumpy without it.”

  “Great, because now you’re the picture of calm.”

  Galloway’s fingers run uncertainly through his wavy black hair. Obviously something’s up.

  “I want you to go back and talk to the widow.”

  “Randall Eberhardt’s widow?”

  “I want you to convey the sympathy of the Bureau concerning her loss.”

  I want to throw a fit right there on the gold carpet.

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “That we know her husband was innocent and we’re going to find the real bastards.”

  He lowers the blinds against the morning glare.

  “I’m lousy at diplomacy.”

  “Just go see her, woman to woman. Keep it low-key.”

  “Why do I have to do this?”

  “Because it’s good for the image of the Bureau … and because it happens to be the right thing.”

  He sits in the executive chair and studies the closed blinds. This is his way of taking responsibility for the grotesque raid on the medical office that may or may not have contributed to Randall Eberhardt taking his own life. Suicide is a mystery, we will never know; although I am deeply touched and admire Galloway’s humanity, I wish like hell he would write his own damn condolence card.

  • • •

  I wait until dark, in order to make the visit seem after hours, “low-key.” Boy do I not want to do this. The idea of offering sympathy to a woman who first cheats on her husband, then blackballs an innocent housekeeper for finding out, is absolutely loathsome. I plan to deliver the words and leave. Heading down San Vicente, I am pricked by just the slightest compulsion to drive by Poppy’s old place on Twelfth Street one last time, and I give in to the feeling completely, relishing the luxury of even the briefest detour.

  But when I pull up to the house it is very strange: the lights are on and someone is walking back and forth inside.

  I park at the curb and walk up the concrete path past the beech tree to the entryway, where I pause to fit my hand into the curve of the door handle, testing the sense memory, resting my thumb on the old latch which has been worn to a green patina. Reading Lock, it says. The round doorbell crusted over with brown paint doesn’t work but the door is unlocked.

  I step inside to a small square room with oak flooring and a cast-iron register for gas heat. Immediately a rosy-cheeked lady wearing a blue blazer, with white hair in a long swinging braid, emerges from the kitchen extending her hand.

  “Hi, I’m Dina Madison, Pacific Coast Realty, how are you tonight? Wonderful starter house, don’t you think?”

  “It was a starter house. I grew up in it.”

  “You’re kidding. If you’re considering it for sentimental value, grab it quick. I just showed the property to two Korean gentlemen who want to buy the place next door and tear them both down and build two smart houses.”

  ‘What’s a smart house?”

  “Usually about five thousand square feet, five or six bedrooms, master suite, fireplaces, all the amenities. No backyard, but, that’s what you sacrifice.”

  “I’ve seen them.” The Eberhardt house is one.

  “I have mixed feelings myself,” she agrees, reacting to my tone. “I’ve heard them called anti-architecture. They’re too big for the lot and can be ugly as sin, but they sell in the millions of dollars, um-hum. People are always looking for new.”

  The previous owners left an artificial tree.

  “So you grew up here. I’ve been selling Santa Monica real estate probably since you were born. When I started in 1961, no new houses had been built north of Montana for ten years. People would leave their tiny California bungalows on small lots and buy a ranch house in the Pacific Palisades. They were looking for new. Montana was a funky little street, um-hum. You had the Kingsberry Market and Sully’s gas station. We used to have a lot of gas stations, as far as that’s concerned.”

  “I’d like to see the backyard.”

  I walk past her through a kitchen made of maple cabinets. I can’t bear to stop, to think of what happened here and what did not. A tiny Sony Watchman television plays on a chipped white tile counter.

  “I take that with me
everywhere,” she explains. “You spend so much time sitting in empty houses.”

  She follows me to the back door, still talking.

  “Do you remember the Chevron station on the northwest corner of Seventh and Montana? Then there was the Flying A station and of course then you had the Union 76 station at Eleventh. There was the Arco station at Fourteenth and you had another Mobil station up there …”

  I let the screen door bang shut in the face of this eulogy over the lost gas stations of Santa Monica and walk down the steps into the backyard. A single floodlight mounted on a tall pole illuminates the faded polka dots of an umbrella set in a hole in the middle of a round table. I pull up a rickety metal chair and listen to the sound of the ocean breeze in the leaves and a child next door saying, “Ahh-ahh-ahh.”

  My eye follows a ladder going up to the green shingled roof, where a rusty old TV antenna shows against the sky, undoubtedly the same one that used to bring me The Dick Van Dyke Show. A car passes in the alley and I notice there is a double fence, chain link leaning against a taller one made of wood. Maybe it was cheaper to put up the chain link to support the original rather than tear it down and build an entirely new structure, tight, with no space between the redwood planks, no chance of light strobing through as it used to do at night when we lived here. The clarity of the memory startles me. Did I spend a lot of time in the backyard at night?

  “You probably don’t remember, but along the Palisades tract between Seventh Street and the ocean you could get a double lot for forty thousand dollars.”

  I turn with a start toward the diffuse shape of the real estate woman standing behind the screen door.

  “They started splitting those lots in the fifties and of course Lawrence Welk built his shining white tower and now you have what I call skyscrapers. We didn’t retain the respect for the Pacific Ocean that we should have, um-hum. What you see now as far as that’s concerned is Santa Monica rebuilding itself for the twenty-first century.”

  I rise impatiently and push the door open. The real estate woman has turned toward the television on the counter, where the lead story on the local evening news concerns a small riot that occurred in Beverly Hills when Jayne Mason made an appearance at Saks Fifth Avenue to introduce her new line of makeup.

  Nobody had imagined that two thousand women would line up to see her. Crowd control failed and a mob of middle-aged housewives ran amok through the cosmetics department. We’re watching this ridiculous footage on a silly little miniature screen and all this lady can say is “Isn’t she beautiful?” as Jayne Mason is shown throwing roses to the crowd. “She’s still the most beautiful woman in the world.” Fifteen seconds later the story ends on the solemn note that just days ago the doctor Ms. Mason had sued for overprescribing narcotics committed suicide. Again they flash that blurry hunched-over photograph of Randall Eberhardt, with the strong implication that he killed himself because he had committed health care fraud.

  I am handed a sheet of paper describing the house and stating that it is priced to sell at $875,000. I ball it up and drop it into the artificial tree on my way out.

  Unsettled and unhappy, I drive up to Twentieth Street and park in front of the Eberhardt residence, forcing myself to trudge up the walk. Whatever hostility I had toward Claire Eberhardt begins to fade the moment she opens the door.

  She is gaunt, with dark puffy circles under the eyes. An old yellow button-down shirt hangs over the sharp bones of her shoulder blades. The cuffs are turned up, it is huge on her. Maybe it was Randall’s or maybe she has lost ten pounds in the last week. Behind her the house seems empty, just a television reverberating in the background, tuned to the same local news I had just seen over on Twelfth Street. I realize she has been watching her husband being brutalized by the media all over again.

  I introduce myself once more because she is obviously too agitated to focus. When the word “FBI” penetrates, she starts to tremble.

  “Why? What are you doing here?” One eye turns red and starts leaking tears. A shaking hand pats at her cheek.

  “I was asked to apprise you of our investigation.”

  “Why me?”

  “We want you to know that your husband is no longer the target.…”

  “No longer the target?”

  “He’s been cleared of any wrongdoing. I hope that’s of some comfort to you.”

  Confronted by her unresponsive devastated face, I feel like a total fool, retreating behind even more pompous language: “We are aggressively pursuing the real criminal who we hope will be brought to justice by the legal system.”

  She’s not hearing me. She is numb, the words must be coming at her all scrambled.

  “He killed himself.”

  “I know.”

  “The children are back in Boston with my folks. It’s funny, my daughter really loved California.…”

  She is actually smiling. A horrible Sardonicus grin webbed with glistening strings of tears.

  “… But now she’s afraid to be in this house. That little girl was her daddy’s princess.”

  In the examining room Dr. Eberhardt told me about his daughter, a little monkey climbing up on a piano. I remember the easy tenderness in his voice.

  “I just saw Jayne Mason on the news. She looked good. She claims she never had plastic surgery and Randall said it’s true. I bet she sells a lot of makeup. We always liked her in the movies, but, really, she has such an incredible voice. Even before she became a patient, we had all her albums. Brought them out from Boston.”

  A spasmodic grimace.

  “Will you be moving back?”

  She doesn’t respond to the question.

  “Did you know I got a call from a talk show? They want to do something on ‘wives of doctors who are criminals.’ ”

  “That’s gross.”

  “I told them Randall was not a criminal. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “We know that, Mrs. Eberhardt.”

  “Jayne Mason did.”

  Suddenly the perfume of night-blooming jasmine seems incredibly strong, embracing us both in its sickly burnt-sugar scent.

  “What did Jayne Mason do that was wrong?”

  Claire Eberhardt’s arms wrap around her waist against a wet sea breeze. The first time we met across this threshold we shared an understanding, nurse and cop, of the way the world works. Once again those imperfect eyes hold mine.

  But all she will say is “Good luck,” and softly closes the door.

  I walk back and get into my car and start the engine. As I am making a U-turn lights flash in the rearview mirror and I see Randall Eberhardt’s bronze Acura pivoting wildly out of the driveway. Its tires bump over the curb and the brights are on. First it seems to be coming straight at me and I am momentarily blinded. Suddenly the mirror goes dark and I realize Claire Eberhardt has turned and is heading the other way, toward San Vicente Boulevard.

  I swing the Barracuda around and follow her down the Seventh Street incline to Chatauqua and onto Pacific Coast Highway heading north.

  I keep thinking about that immigrant Japanese woman who was so shamed by a philandering husband that she walked across the sand right here at Will Rogers Beach, through the surf and into the Pacific Ocean, carrying both her young children. The children drowned, she didn’t. But Claire Eberhardt is alone in the car, maintaining a steady fifty-five miles an hour and stopping prudently at every red light. She keeps on going and I relax a little, thinking maybe she’s out for a drive to let off steam, but just past Pepperdine she turns left onto Arroyo Road, which leads to Jayne Mason’s property.

  I am prevented from following by an entire motorcycle gang, thirty or forty of them mounted on their Harleys and strung out over a quarter mile, zipping by on the opposite side of the road like an unending pack of maddening bees. Stalled here with the turn signal flashing, my adrenaline pumps higher and higher.

  A long time ago, it seems, I was in a free-floating situation like this in the parking lot of a bank. Civilians may h
ave been threatened, I had no way of knowing, but I chose to ride it out on arrogance and guts without calling for backup. That time I was lucky. This time I pick up the radio.

  “This is signal 345,” I tell the radio room at the Bureau office. “Request that you call the L.A. County Sheriff, Malibu station, and ask that they respond immediately to a possible disturbance at the Mason property on Arroyo Road. Make sure they know there’s an FBI agent present who needs help.”

  The bikers pass and I dive across the highway, cranking the Barracuda up to fifty in second, bumping over the dirt road underneath the eucalyptus trees, along the dark empty meadow, until I see the guard gate coming up fast. Claire Eberhardt must have used her husband’s pass to get through because now the armature is down. Reasoning the barrier would delay the sheriff’s department, certain now that I don’t have a lot of time, I duck my head and crash right through it, catapulting the wooden arm up in the air and into the brush, hoping it didn’t damage the grillwork.

  All of this has given Claire Eberhardt a good three-minute lead. I swerve over the gravel of the parking lot, sliding to a stop beside Magda Stockman’s Cadillac. The Acura has been left with the engine running. The front door in the white wall is ajar. She must have gained admission to the house with her husband’s key.

  I run into the courtyard, which is underlit by just two sparse spots and wavering green lights in the pool. At the far end of the darkened patio Claire Eberhardt approaches the large figure of Magda Stockman. Stockman says something with a dismissive gesture toward the intruder, then bends over to pick up a coiled garden hose and hang it back on its hook.

  I keep coming forward, calling out, “Claire!”

  Someone pushes the sliding glass door open a little farther and says, “Hello out there. What’s going on?”

  For an instant Jayne Mason is clearly visible standing on the threshold of the lighted room.

  Claire Eberhardt pulls a gun and gets off two shots. The glass blows, a triple explosion that takes place in less than two seconds.

  My weapon is out and aimed at the doctor’s wife.