North of Montana Page 4

  “Is this Violeta Alvarado’s apartment?”

  “Yes, but I am living here now.” Mrs. Gutiérrez beckons me to a sofa in harshly textured pea-green plaid, the kind you would find in a twelve-dollar-an-hour motel room in Tijuana.

  “Were you living with Violeta?”

  “No, I had a small apartment upstairs. One room only. I called the landlord right away and asked if I could have this one.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez fights a cigarette. She is buxom, with the most improbable hairstyle—dyed bright black, chopped short around the ears and teased high off the crown, then falling below her shoulders in a mantilla-like effect. She wears a yellow sleeveless dress that does not apologize for a stoutish body, the short skirt showing off bare round legs and feet with painted toenails in rubber thongs.

  “So after Violeta was killed, you got her apartment.” I watch for her reaction.

  She nods. “I had to call right away. Lots of people wanted it.” She is proud of herself for making a smart move. She is a survivor.

  “Are these Violeta’s children?”

  “Teresa and Cristóbal are in the other room. I have a day care business. In San Salvador I was in charge of the kitchen of a very big hotel. I had a nice white house, a husband and two boys—all killed by the military.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t get that kind of a good job here. So these are the children I watch for the parents who are working.”

  They seem clean and healthy and occupied with one another and the few frayed dolls and beat-up blocks they have to play with. I become aware of a biting, sour smell just as Mrs. Gutiérrez rises, murmuring something in Spanish, and lifts an infant from a rickety wooden crib I hadn’t noticed that was stuck in a corner.

  I stay where I am while she changes the baby on a card table, taking in the Japanese prints on the wall alongside paintings of volcanos, beginning to suspect that what I am seeing is simply what there is: no addicts, no hookers, no child abuse, no scam.

  Mrs. Gutiérrez props the baby up on her shoulder and gives it a few comforting pats. “I am very glad you came,” she says.

  “I came to tell you to stop saying Violeta Alvarado was my cousin.”

  The woman puts the baby back in the crib, opens a drawer in a wood-grained cardboard dresser, and removes a small black Bible stuffed with folded papers. She removes the rubber bands that hold it all together, carefully rolling them over her wrist so they won’t be lost, takes out a white business card, and gives it to me.

  “This is why I know it is true.”

  The card bears a gold seal and in discreet black type: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, Ana Grey, Special Agent, along with our Wilshire office address and phone number.

  “There are a hundred ways she could have gotten my card.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez points with a bronze-red nail. “Look on the other side.”

  Turning it over I see the words “Immigration and Naturalization Service, 300 North Los Angeles St., 213-894-2119,” written in my own hand.

  “You gave this to Violeta when she first came to this country.”

  “I honestly don’t remember.”

  “It was seven years ago.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez folds her hands over her stomach and rocks back with a satisfied nod.

  It could have been that when I was a rookie agent on desk duty a young Latina came tremulously to the FBI in the big skyscraper. Possibly she couldn’t speak English (animated now in imagination, a peasant girl, humble, a mass of black hair) and I slipped information on the U.S. Immigration Service to her through the slot, condescendingly, impatiently telling her to try somewhere else, too pumped up about the real challenges at the Bureau that lay ahead of me to listen or care what another confused immigrant was babbling about in Spanish, as she backed away in frustration from the double wall of bulletproof glass that protects us from the public.

  The card that I hold in my hand seems to be evidence that we did once meet. I wonder if it could have happened that way, if my arrogance somehow caused a young woman to take a path that eventually led to crossfire and contorted dying.

  Slipping the card into my jacket pocket, “How are we supposed to be related?”

  “She told me once you are cousins through your father.”

  “I don’t know a lot about my father’s side of the family.”

  “I will show you.”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez wets her lips and shuffles through the papers, holding them at arm’s length and squinting.

  “This is Violeta’s mother, Constanza. Probably she is your aunt.”

  In the snapshot a middle-aged woman is standing alone in a cleared area that seems surrounded by luxuriant overgrowth. She has shapeless black hair and there is darkness under the eyes, but she is smiling warmly. She wears a black and white dress with pale orange blossoms and no shoes and is holding a baby.

  “This is the house where Violeta grew up.”

  It looks more like the unfinished frame of a house to me, made of bamboo sticks, cloth, and leaves with no roof or walls. There are pictures of Violeta’s brothers—more alleged cousins—husking corn, and a dim shot of a parrot in a palm tree, the colors faded to a uniform, dull aqua.

  I shake my head. None of it makes sense.

  “The police think Violeta was involved with drugs.”

  “That is wrong.” Mrs. Gutiérrez looks straight at me with clear brown eyes.

  “They think that’s why she was killed.”

  “The police are crazy. I know Violeta. She was afraid of the drugs. She didn’t want her children to grow up with the drugs and the gangs, that is why she was saving money to go back to El Salvador. She was a good person,” Mrs. Gutiérrez insists, eyes swelled now with tears. “She loved her children. In our country there was a war, but she came all the way to the United States to be shot down in the street.”

  She holds the cigarette under running water in the sink until it turns a sickly gray, then tosses it angrily into a metal garbage can.

  ‘Where did she work?”

  “She was a housekeeper for a lady in Santa Monica. That lady owed her a lot of money.”

  “What is a lot of money?”

  “Maybe …” Mrs. Gutiérrez puts a fist on her hip and looks toward the cottage cheese ceiling. “Four hundred dollars. Violeta was very unhappy. The lady was mean and she fired her.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Mrs. Gutiérrez says sharply. “You can ask the lady. I have the address because I used to take care of the kids when Violeta worked there. Look. This is Cristóbal and Teresa.”

  Two children dash across the room. The little girl is maybe five, her brother three. She leads him by the hand to the refrigerator, which she tugs open after several tries, reaching for something.

  “I’ll get it, corazón,” Mrs. Gutiérrez calls. “What do you want?”

  “Kool-Aid.”

  Suddenly the apartment is flooded with unbearably loud Latin music coming from the open carport. I move the dirty beige fiberglass curtains aside to peer at two young fellows laughing, talking loudly, carrying a ghetto blaster, and unwinding a garden hose in the direction of a 1975 Dodge Dart with most of the paint honed off. They are going to wash that piece of crap using a half hour’s worth of city water in the midst of a serious drought. My neck is tensing up.

  “Cristóbal? Teresa? This is Señorita Grey. A cousin of your mommy and you.”

  Facing me are two golden-skinned children with almond-shaped eyes holding plastic mugs in their hands. It is preposterous that they have anything to do with me. The girl, unsmiling, slides her eyes away. She is wearing pink shorts and a scrawny tie-dyed T-shirt that looks as if it might have actually survived the sixties. The boy’s green army fatigue shorts are way too big for him, folded many times at the waist and pinned with a big safety pin, no shirt at all.

  “Do you know where my mommy is?” he asks.

  “Your mommy is in heaven,” Mrs. Gutiérrez says, ruffling hi
s thick black hair. “I told you that.”

  But the boy repeats his question imploringly, directly to me: “Do you know where my mommy is?”

  Mrs. Gutiérrez clucks her tongue with sympathy and scoops him up in her arms. “Come here, Cris. Want to dance with me?”

  She tilts her hips this way and that to the music which is shaking the floor, bouncing the boy against her body and laughing a big laugh, grinning a big grin to his tiny bewildered simper.

  “Teresa! Let’s dance! Let’s do some merengue.”

  The girl is standing before me, not moving, not looking exactly anywhere. Drawn to her, I kneel down until we are eye level and then without quite knowing it, brush her cheek with my hand. She drops onto all fours and crawls under the baby’s crib, curling up tightly with her arms folded, face pressed against the wall.

  I feel a strange, distant portentous hum—then suddenly it is upon me with tremendous force: mixed with the pounding music, waves of heat ripple through my body along with a raw, unidentified fear. Panicked, I fight the urge to follow Teresa under the crib, to be small again in a small dark place, to seek the almost immaterial tininess of a dot of a spider who can wholly disappear into the safety of a crack in the tile, because if you are that small your pain must be small too, small enough to become inconsequential and, finally, gone.

  The music has been turned up, incredibly, another notch. Mrs. Gutiérrez gathers the papers and puts them back into the Bible. Speaking with a quiet intensity that penetrates the music she says, “Take this. It was Violetas,” and presses the book into my hand.

  “Even if I could get the money … it won’t go to you.…” I am shouting, but Mrs. Gutiérrez has surrendered to a faraway look and slipped into a smooth sideways step, the boy on her hip too stunned by the movement and the volume to cry. “The money will go to the children. And they’ll probably be put into foster care—”

  I finger the worn dry leather of Violeta Alvarado’s Bible, giving up, drowned out, having lost the girl to her inexpressible grief and Mrs. Gutiérrez to the dreams of the merengue.

  FIVE

  WE HAVE REASON to believe the “JAP Bandit” has struck again. This slurring appellation was bestowed by squad supervisor Duane Carter on a woman in her thirties who dresses well with lots of gold jewelry, has long manicured nails, and happens to like working the Valley. Her M.O. is to blend in with the clientele and take the tellers by surprise. We think she has about a dozen robberies to her credit, Washington Savings and Loan in Sherman Oaks being the latest.

  Donnato and I respond to the 211 and get there about the same time as the local police. We are just beginning to interview the witnesses when my beeper goes off. When I call the office, Rosalind says that Duane Carter wants to see me immediately.

  My message to him is basically to take a flying leap since we’re in the middle of an investigation. I don’t exactly speed back when we are finished three hours later, either. I am chatty. Donnato is subdued.

  “After a few years on C-1 I’m going to put in for transfer to headquarters. I always wanted to live in Washington, D.C.”

  “Washington is shit city during the summer.”

  We are stuck on the 405 freeway going south, a solid motionless curve of cars in both directions between dry brown hills.

  ‘Worse than this?”

  Donnato doesn’t answer. I let it go. He lives in Simi Valley in a house he had to borrow from his in-laws to finance. On a good day it is an hour’s commute to Westwood; tonight he will fight the traffic going north all over again, opposite to the way we are heading now, and when he gets home at eight or nine o’clock he will spend an hour doing homework with his oldest son, who has a learning disability and is a source of constant anxiety.

  Donnato married a girl from Encino fifteen years ago and stayed married to her. They were having a rough time and separated for about six months when we first became partners, but Donnato and I were new to each other and he didn’t talk about it. Also Donnato is one of the most moral people I know (“I live by a code,” he once said, not joking) and I think, as unhappy as he was, he refused to be disloyal to his wife. When they got back together there was general relief that the Rock of Gibraltar was still standing and, as if to make a statement about their marriage, shortly thereafter Rochelle and Mike won their event in our annual Bakersfield to Vegas Run. Every time you go by his desk you have to look at that photo he has propped up of the two of them drenched in sweat, kissing over the damn trophy.

  “Don’t fuck with Duane Carter,” he says finally, out of the depths of a moody silence.

  “What’d I do?”

  “I heard you on the phone being Miss Hey-I’m-On-A-Case. Don’t tease. Carter’s like a cornered rat.”

  “Why, because he’s dying for a promotion?”

  “He wanted Galloway’s job—he wanted to be in charge of the entire field office. Look at it from his point of view—a Catholic from New York, no less, holding him down by the throat.”

  “Galloway seems to have gotten the picture pretty quick.”

  “Galloway’s on pretty thin ice himself. He’s been out here eight months, keeping low, just trying to avoid mistakes. Carter makes him nervous.”

  “I have nothing to worry about from Duane Carter,” I say confidently. “The California First bust speaks for itself.”

  Donnato only grunts. I turn on the radio but he isn’t interested in “Sports Connection” and turns it off, watching quietly out the window while I buck and inch along the endless choked artery, cars cars cars cars as far as you can see.

  • • •

  Duane Carter is in his office doing paperwork when I finally get there, feeling that whatever it is might go down a little easier if I say something halfway conciliatory:

  “Sorry it took so long, the traffic was unbelievable.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Duane is from Austin, Texas, with one of them cute accents to match. On another man that drawn-out lazy boy intonation might be charming—echoes of cowboys with hearts of gold—but on Duane it is menacing and icy, a gunman with no regard for human life. When Duane levels that slow-moving good-ole-boy stuff at you it’s like he’s taking his time pointing a .45 at your forehead. I would call him a sociopath but he doesn’t like people.

  And nobody much likes him, probably because he has no facial hair. He looks like a stunted adolescent: a fifteen-year-old with cottony pale skin, a large soft body hunched over at the shoulders. He’s got a round face, straight black shiny hair—one forelock always hanging down—and his eyes are also black, impenetrable. He went to good schools, has a law degree from Georgetown, but there’s still something dangerous and unpredictable about him, a backwoods brutality at odds with all the book learning.

  A male agent told me Duane once confessed to having been a virgin when he got married. He says he is no longer practicing but came up through the ranks when the “Mormon mafia” ran the Los Angeles field office. They got shaken loose when a class-action discrimination suit filed on behalf of some Hispanic agents broke up the power structure and now the place looks like a poster for Brotherhood Week. That was before my time. Some of the guys enjoy hanging out with him because of his Japanese sword collection, but for a woman, walking into his office is like entering a deep freeze. I imagine the carcasses of former female agents swaying on elaborately wrought scimitar-style hooks.

  “Where were you yesterday?”

  I have to think. In Violeta Alvarado’s apartment.

  “North Hollywood.”

  “What you got working over there?”

  “Personal business.”

  “On government time?”

  I should just take the hit and let it pass, but I am miffed that my boss has been back two days and intentionally not said anything about the most amazing arrest of the year.

  “If you look at my time card you’ll see I was on duty all last Tuesday night writing up my affidavit on the California First Bank bust. I’ll probably log a hundred ho
urs on it.”

  Duane just sits there bouncing a tennis ball on his desk and watching me with glittering eyes.

  “I looked at your time card. I looked at your affidavit too, why in hell do you think I called you back from the Valley this afternoon?”

  The fear grips me. “Why?”

  “You fucked up, lady.”

  “How?”

  “You sit there and you think about it. I’m gonna take a leak and when I get back I know you’ll come up with the answer because you’re a bright little thing.”

  He leaves me paralyzed in the chair, stung by a primitive humiliation, like he is going to take a leak on me.

  By the time he returns my palms are damp and I am breathing harder. “I did everything right and by the books.” Then, blurting it out like a child: “It was a perfect bust.”

  Duane settles himself behind the desk and starts bouncing the tennis ball again.

  “It would have been perfect,” he answers levelly, “if you’d told anyone else what was going on.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t call in a 211 in progress.”

  I laugh. The relief is so profound I feel like taking a leak myself.

  “Is that it?”

  “You didn’t know what was going down inside the bank.”

  “I had no way to know.”

  “Exactly right, which is why you should have called in. You placed yourself and the public in unreasonable jeopardy.”

  I can’t help scoffing. “It turned out fine.”

  “It just as well could have turned to shit.”

  “Well, it didn’t. I live right.”

  My arms are folded and my legs stuck out in front of me. Defiant now. Catch me if you can.

  “I’m glad you’re taking this lightly, Ana.”

  “I don’t take anything lightly that has to do with my job, but I think, with respect, Duane, you’re overstating the situation.”

  “I don’t. You showed poor judgment. That’s my assessment.”

  His use of the words “judgment” and “assessment” just about causes my heart to stop. “Judgment” is one of the categories of our semiannual performance appraisals. If he gives me poor marks in judgment, it will derail my progress in the Bureau for years.