North of Montana

by April Smith

  “Police. Drop the gun.”

  Her head spins toward me in a shining blur of dark hair. I flinch but hold firm. My legs are planted and my arms are steady. I am going on reflex now, hundreds of hours of training enabling a bypass for the emotions clawing at the edges of my mind.

  “Put the weapon down.”

  Magda Stockman takes a step and Claire Eberhardt whirls, jamming the gun into her chest and forcing her back against a stone planter.

  “Put it down,” I say steadily.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Stockman rasps. “We have to call an ambulance.”

  To my right, out of peripheral vision, I see long cracks and a chunk taken out of the door. Inside the room Jayne Mason is down, sputtering and gasping and coughing up blood that splatters against long ragged fingers of glass.

  “Listen to me, Claire. I’ve already called for backup. The authorities are coming.”

  “Go ahead and shoot me.” Claire Eberhardt’s face is distorted in the light falling softly like snow.

  “You have too much to live for. Think of Laura and Peter. Peter’s only one year old. Do you want them to go through life without a father and mother?”

  I have taken a step closer. Her gun is still pinned against Stockman’s chest.

  “I have sympathy for you, Claire. I know what you went through. You can make this okay. Put yours down and I’ll put mine down and we’ll talk about it.”

  She only stares, malfunctioning.

  “Think about your children, that’s all you have to do.”

  Very slowly Claire Eberhardt bends at the waist and lets the weapon drop.

  “Madness!” Stockman cries, staggering toward the house.

  “You did the right thing,” I tell Claire Eberhardt quickly. “Now just relax.”

  We hear sirens and, shortly, the clatter of police radios outside the gate. With the subject neutralized and backup on site, I can get up close. Although I holster my weapon, my hand stays on it as I approach, keeping up a patter of soothing words. The gun turns out to be a little five-shot .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, just what a panicked doctor would buy to protect his home. It’s not very accurate past twenty feet. I kick it out of reach.

  I put a hand on Claire’s shoulder and she wilts under the touch, sinking down on the edge of the planter murmuring, “I’m sorry.”

  The locals take over. It’s not my jurisdiction. They handcuff the suspect and take her into custody. They administer CPR and call the paramedics, who arrive with a lieutenant from the homicide division of the sheriff’s department. We exchange cards and he asks that I report to the Malibu station to make a statement.

  I watch from the outside, through a big hole taken out of the door by the bullets, as the paramedics cut away the blood-soaked blouse covered with shards of glass and put patches on the victim’s chest in order to send the vital signs over the radio to a local ER. The beautiful face is relaxed, a normal blush going to pale, the eyes drowsily closed. One of the technicians pushes on the chest and air gurgles up through the blood. “Hemothorax,” he says. The homicide lieutenant wants to know the status of the victim in order to charge the suspect. The hospital radios back that there are no vital signs. There was a lot of damage. The actress probably died within minutes of the shots being fired. The charge is murder.

  The last time I am aware of Magda Stockman she is on her knees on the wet concrete, with her head down and hands clasped, weeping, “Oh my God, Jay, oh my God, Jay,” and it’s odd that the grievous sobs should sound exactly like my mother’s. I haven’t heard her voice like that, out loud, in my ears, for fifteen years. When they say her famous client is dead, Magda Stockman’s forehead lowers very slowly to the ground and she stays that way for a long time, bowed down in a pose of mortification, until someone drags her to her feet.

  I remember my mother crying and flush hot with fear.

  It woke me up in my bed. I wandered out to the hallway and she told me to put a sweater over my pajamas because, as strange as it seemed, we were going to the Pier for ice cream. I remember there were wooden cutouts of Mary and her lamb on the wall over my bed and I even had a black woolly lamb with a music box inside that played the song.

  I was clutching that lamb when I came out of the bedroom the second time, buttoned up in a sweater because I was a good and obedient little girl. There were voices and shouting in the backyard. I couldn’t find my mother so I went outside where my father and grandfather were arguing violently. My parents must have just driven in from Las Vegas, where they had gotten married, and Poppy must have been crazy with rage that this ignorant wetback dared to take his daughter, threatening him with the black policeman’s nightstick, jabbing it into the air.

  I got between them. My father picked me up and I held on, my legs wrapped around his waist, while Poppy tried to pull me out of his arms. They were both shouting at the same time. I fell into the grass and a car passed in the alley, spraying the yard with strips of light. In the strobing headlights, I saw. It was not some foreman in a bean field, it was my grandfather who raised his nightstick and smacked my father across the temple and around the shoulders and neck again and again until blood streaked his temples, he suddenly convulsed and collapsed and lay still.

  The engine roared, the loudest sound in the universe, as I scrambled into the car parked in front of the house where my mother had been waiting for me, squirming into her lap behind the big wheel, telling her what I had seen, perhaps, or maybe unable to utter a word, but whatever I said we did drive to the Pier that night, I remember how the sea wind cut through my sweater and how we sat on a bench and how, finally, she held me to her chest and cried. Whether she knew or suspected that her own father had killed her new husband, I’ll never know. I wonder how he disposed of the body but after all, he was a law enforcement officer, who better to conceal a crime? Maybe he dumped it up in Topanga Canyon, maybe he delivered it to the coroner’s office with a report about two drunks fighting in a Mexican bar, but Mother must have known that Miguel Sanchez left her because in some way he was defeated by Poppy’s rage and then she too succumbed to Poppy and lived her life in service to him until, apparently, it was meaningless to stay alive any longer, and whatever witness I might have borne to the incident I buried, for myself and, now I see, for her.

  “Ana. I’m here.”

  He is speaking very gently, maybe because he knows I am not at that moment on this earth. Slowly a high-pitched hum that has occluded my hearing subsides and the sounds of the waves come back, flat, regular, distant. I have been standing at the edge of the cliff.

  “I was just leaving the office when you called it in. Kyle and I hauled ass out here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We look out for our own.”

  I don’t respond.

  Mike Donnato puts his arms around me and I lean back against his chest, watching the long white line of the breaking surf against a charcoal sea.

  “Are you okay?”

  I shake my head no. Not okay.

  “What can I do?” he asks.

  I turn to him and we embrace fully, emotionally.

  “I’m here for you,” he whispers.

  I find his eyes in the dark. They are full of questions.

  Finally I say, “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s always a betrayal in it.”

  I pull away and don’t look back. Thirty minutes later I am at the Malibu station, making my statement.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SAC ROBERT CALLOWAY holds a news conference at our office to disclose the details of Jayne Mason’s death. He orchestrates it carefully, making sure the coroner himself is there and the L.A. County Sheriff and that they both take the proper tone of respect for the loss of an American icon. One of those doyennes of MGM musicals whose name I never remember—the one who’s eighty years old and still wears a pixie haircut—reads a statement announcing the creation of the Jayne Mason Fund for Gun Control. The press gets what it wants and treats Ga
lloway well. He leaves the podium looking quite pleased.

  Under the guise of being a law enforcement officer, Barbara Sullivan is able to attend the funeral—or at least claim a good spot alongside the security force with a clear view of the front steps of the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church. She says the high point was seeing Sean Connery, but there were enough Hollywood celebrities in attendance to stoke the tabloids for months. As in major presidential events, the media held a lottery to determine which journalists would be admitted to the sanctuary. No cameras were allowed but, from the plethora of “insider” photographs of the rose-strewn coffin, grieving ex-husbands (including the used car king), children, and grandchildren, one may conclude that plenty of invited mourners were packing Instamatics inside those black Chanel bags.

  Barbara returns from the funeral looking wan.

  “I was a witness to history,” she declares, busying herself hanging up the jacket of her dark gray suit, checking phone messages, and finally pouring her famous cinnamon brew into two dark blue mugs with the FBI shield.

  “No wise-ass remarks?”

  In better times I would tell her that her attachment to Jayne Mason is pathological, but I haven’t the energy. I just shake my head.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I just feel like crying all the time.”

  I shrug. Barbara’s blue eyes are kind. “It was a trauma.”

  “That part didn’t bother me.”

  “Oh come on, seeing somebody get shot? You should talk to Harvey McGinnis.”

  “You’re not the first person to suggest that.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t need a shrink.”

  “That’s what Patty McCormack said in The Bad Seed.”

  She sips coffee. I have no interest in mine.

  “Have you been swimming?”

  “No.”

  “At least go swimming.”

  “It’s hard enough just to get out of bed.” I stand. “Thanks for the java.”

  Big sister Barbara says, “This isn’t good.”

  “I’ll get through it.”

  Diligently I continue to work through the pile of bank robbery reports, taking refuge in the drone of it. I meet Donnato’s new partner, Joe Positano, one of those wound-up gung-ho jocks with a nerdy square face and ultrashort hair who thinks he’s going to save the world. I thought I’d be jealous but every time he and Donnato leave the office it’s a relief, until finally Donnato corners me at the front desk.

  “You’ve been acting like this is some kind of a high school flirtation.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” I squeeze past him. “Excuse me, I have to buy a Barbie doll.”

  He wraps his fingers around my neck in a relatively playful way and tugs me out the side door as if I were a wriggling puppy.

  But when we’re alone in the echoing stairwell the fun ends. We don’t kiss, we don’t even come close, in fact stand as far apart as possible, as if the air separating us had suddenly taken on the density of the atmosphere of Jupiter.

  “I’m leaving Rochelle. We’ve been talking about it for a long time.”

  “Oh Jesus, Mike.”

  “It’s going to be shit, pure shit for the kids.”

  He draws a sleeve across his eyes. Now mine are wet.

  “Don’t do this for me.”

  “Who said it had anything to do with you?”

  I move farther away, so my back is against the rough cinder-block wall.

  “I told you, I can’t. Whether you’re married or not.”

  A strange indoor wind is blowing up the stairwell creating an unsettling moan.

  “So everything that’s been going on is just—nothing.”

  Aching, “Not at all.”

  “Then what?”

  He has asked but now averts his eyes, undefended.

  “I don’t believe it’s possible.”

  “What isn’t?” He gives a small laugh. “Happiness? Trust? The future of the world? What?”

  Then he sees only silence.

  “Got it,” he says finally.

  I believe the best course of action is to leave it as it is.

  “If any of this between you and Rochelle was my fault, I am truly sorry.”

  I hurry down the stairs.

  • • •

  The alkies and I are all lined up in Thrifty’s on Santa Monica Boulevard in North Hollywood. They’re buying $3.95 pints of gin to get them through the night and I’m holding a pack of little plastic infantrymen for Cristóbal and a Barbie doll for Teresa, wishing I had the body chemistry to be able to get sloshed and like it. There’s a constant pain in my chest, as if someone had buried a pickax in there, and during the most banal conversations, like this exchange with Hugo the checkout guy (“Here you go.” “Thanks”), tears leak unaccountably from my eyes.

  I make it through the gauntlet of street beggars blocking the way to the car and slam the door, as if to keep the vapor of their destitution out. Starting the engine, I make a resolution to leave all this behind. When I see Teresa and Cristóbal I want to be upbeat, a role model, the one who shows them the positive side, the satisfactions and achievements of working hard in this society.

  Nobody answers the intercom but the lock on the lobby door is broken, so I pass under the organ-pipe sculpture up the metal stairs. It is six thirty at night and I’m hoping Mrs. Gutiérrez is at home serving a nutritious dinner, thereby not occasioning a call to Children and Family Services, but the pounding music that grows louder as I approach is stirring up an uneasy feeling.

  After I knock and give it a few good kicks, the door is finally opened by a belligerent, overweight teenage boy wearing a Hawaiian shirt and smoking a cigarette.

  “What’s going on?” he demands.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Gutiérrez.”

  “She don’t live here.”

  I block him from closing the door.

  “What the fuck?”

  I badge him. “FBI. Can I come in?”

  There are five or six other boys sprawled around the floor playing a video game, surrounded by cigarette smoke blended with who knows what else. They look at me and their eyes slide sideways and they joke to one another in Spanish. I take an aggressive posture and keep close to the door.

  “Where’s the woman who lived here?”

  “I told you, lady. She moved away.”

  “Whose apartment is this? Where are the adults?”

  “It’s my place,” says the smallest one, wearing red mirror sunglasses and working the controls. “Actually, my mom’s. She’s at work. The lady who lived here went back to El Salvador.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure.”

  He gets up and swaggers toward me as the others whistle and hoot, challenging him. I don’t like the building sense of dare and the ear-piercing mix of technopop and video chirp is making me nuts.

  “Do me a favor, take off the shades.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I want to see if you’re straight.”

  Tough guy: “I’m straight.”

  He removes the glasses, revealing himself to be about twelve years old.

  “It’s very important that you tell me exactly what happened to Mrs. Gutiérrez and the children.”

  “Nothing happened. We live across the hall, she’s friendly with my mom. One day she says she’s going to El Salvador because she’s taking some kids back to their parents or something—”

  “To the grandmother?”

  “Yeah, the grandmother. So we got the apartment and all the stuff in it for a hundred bucks.”

  The volcano paintings are still on the walls. The card table with its display of beer bottles intact. Teresa and Cristóbal are gone, erased.

  I notice the laminated picture of El Niño de Atocha in the kitchen leaning up against the yellow tiles.

  “She left that, too?”

  “I guess.”

  “You want i
t?”

  He shrugs. I take the picture and two stumps of votive candles.

  “Keep the music down.”

  • • •

  From the apartment house it is a two-block walk past dark empty lots and wrecked cars abandoned along the curb.

  The corner of Santa Monica Boulevard comes to life from the crime scene photos: a major street, a bus stop with a blue bench, a low building with bricked-in windows that turns out to be a recording studio. A few steps away a mini-mall with fast-food chicken, pizza, dry cleaners, and a huge flamingo-pink music store is jammed with vehicles waiting for parking spaces. Rush-hour traffic on the main streets is moving slowly, an unctuous flow of yellow headlights.

  If I looked hard enough, I could find the bullet holes in the bench and even in the masonry wall, but I don’t have the taste for it. I’ve been told Violeta was a religious person. Here is the congregation: young male runaways leaning into car windows hustling fifteen-dollar blow jobs. Here is the priest: a homeless schizophrenic wearing a child’s baseball jacket that comes down to his elbows shuffling along, pointing fastidiously to every square in the sidewalk. Here are the stained-glass windows: broken vials of crack glittering under orange street lamps. And instead of incense we are blessed with the profanity of car exhaust.

  Yet, I prop up the plastic picture of El Niño de Atocha on the sill of one of the bricked-in windows and ask him, the guardian of lakes, to bless this unlikely place where someone has drowned. I set down the candle stubs, memorials to Violeta and my father, ghosts whom I will never really know. Despite the horns and the roar of traffic like a jetway and pedestrians on every side, I close my eyes and stand there and actually pray to El Niño to keep watch over those who are lost. I pray that Teresa and Cristóbal will walk on a black sand beach where the warm water will be full of red snapper and shrimp, and that when they reach the clearing in the bush they will find an older brother who is kind and a loving grandmother waiting with open arms.

  Violeta’s Bible has been bumping around in my glove compartment. I finally lay it to rest on the window ledge.