North of Montana (2 page)

“On the ground. Hands behind your back.”

Now he’s proned out on the concrete and I get the handcuffs on him.

“Back into the car. On the front seat. Face down.”

He’s in. He’s down. And the adrenaline rush sweeps through. Suddenly I’m becoming sensory perceptive, feeling things I wasn’t feeling before, like the intense heat of the noon sun, the fact that I can’t catch my breath, sweat coursing under my arms and between my breasts.

And I still haven’t called the damn thing in.

Someone’s loping through the parking lot, past people who have frozen in place like odd statues all facing the same way.

“I can’t believe you’re still here.” It’s the bank manager, also breathing hard. “We’ve just been robbed again … and”—then, incredulously—“you got him!”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

I pick up the radio. At this moment I want to be very cool: “This is signal 345. A good 211 just occurred at California First Bank, 11712 Pico. I am 10-15 with one male subject. Would appreciate assistance to handle additional inside investigation.”

There is silence on the other end. “Say again?”

Well, that’s about as cool as I get. “
I got the sucker coming out of the bank!”

Another pause. Then: “You gotta be shitting me.”

I hear the information echoed on the police scanner as the emboldened bank manager, my deputy and new best friend, rescued from despair after seven robberies and bursting now with hope for civilization, scurries around the parking lot telling people to “stand away” from the crime scene and suddenly here comes the chopper and all faces turn toward the sky.

An LAPD officer hovering above us bellows through a bullhorn, “Are you okay?”

I give him the international okay sign—a tap to the top of the head—and he banks away as the crazy Latvian cop who has this beat skids through the parking lot with sirens screaming, along with about a dozen other boys from the Wilshire Division who want to see how their brakes and tires really work. It was beautiful.

•  •  •

The next morning is party time. My squad has a tradition of coffee and donuts at eight a.m. and they are ready for me when I drag myself in after staying at the office until almost midnight the night before pushing the paperwork through.

I get a round of applause and one of those three-foot-long green foam-rubber hands with the fingers forming “number one” and another thoughtful souvenir from the ballpark: a cardboard tray with a Dodger Dog still wrapped in the authentic aluminum foil bag, a double sack of peanuts, and my favorite malted ice milk melted to a fine lukewarm puree.

“We thought about you all nine innings,” says Kyle Vernon. “Of course, damned if we were gonna leave!”

The others laugh. They didn’t have to leave because I had it all tied down.

“Our supervisor’s out jerking them off in Washington, why should we miss Sciosca’s dramatic run in the bottom of the ninth?” says Frank Chang with a sly smile.

“His what? Oh
shit!”

Meanwhile Mike Donnato has been lying back in a chair, with tasseled loafers crossed up on his desk, and stroking his blond beard, which is on the way to gray. It is natural to be gathered around him; ten years older than me, he is the senior squad member and spiritual leader.

“So, Donnato,” I smirk, “how was Catalina Island? Nice and peaceful? Go scuba diving?”

He wrinkles his nose. “You got lucky.”

“You’re jealous!”

“You wait your whole career for a break like that. There is no justice.”

“But you and Pumpkin got to see some really neat fish.”

“If you don’t buzz off I’ll make you drive,” Donnato threatens lazily.

“Hey, I’m out of here.”

“You think this bust is your ticket to the C-1 squad?”

“I’m writing my request for transfer today.”

“Get in line, baby. Duane Carter’s really pushing for that transfer to headquarters,” says Kyle.

Duane Carter is the squad supervisor and not much liked.

“Carter’s pissed too many people off,” says Barbara Sullivan, our robbery coordinator, aka The Human Computer. “They’ll never assign him to headquarters, they’ll leave him here to rot.”

“You wish.”

“No, I don’t wish,” says Barbara, whipping the pearl she always wears back and forth on its gold chain. “If he’s going to rot, let him rot in hell.”

“Either way, Duane won’t make it easy,” says Kyle. “He likes torturing you slits.”

Barbara makes a face.

“His word, not mine,” Kyle shrugs.

“As an Afro-American, I would think you’d be especially aware of offensive stereotyping.”

“Forgive me.” Kyle matches her arch tone. “I have misplaced my gender sensitivity manual and I am at a loss as to how to reply.”

“Try this: ‘
Yo! Honky bitch!’
” says Frank, and we all laugh because we have just been through a multicultural awareness workshop that was one big snore.

“Carter won’t have a choice.” Donnato swings his feet to the floor and breaks off a piece of sugar donut in a matter-of-fact way. “It was the perfect bust.”

I am thrilled. “Thanks.”

His eyes are full of warmth. “You just earned your spurs.”

Rosalind, an administrative assistant who’s worked in this field office twenty years, comes up to our group.

“Ana? Can I talk to you?”

“Join the party.”

“Did you hear about Ana’s perfect bust?” Donnato calls. “If you haven’t, she’ll tell you.”

“Ana,” she repeats impatiently, “I have to talk to you.”

“You better mind.” Kyle smiles toward Rosalind, who is old enough to be his mother, but today she doesn’t want to play. Planted there in the middle of the room, I notice she has a peculiar look.

“What’s the matter?”

She leads me away. Her voice is low.

“A message came for you. It’s bad news, Ana.”

Something went wrong on a case. Which one? My brain is not functioning yet this morning. I’m still back in the parking lot playing Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

We step into a doorway for a shred of privacy. We face each other. She is even smaller than I am. She has to look up.

“Violeta Alvarado was killed.”

I must have stared like an idiot.

She gives me a yellow Post-it telephone message slip that says “While you were out …” with a Spanish name and phone number. I look at it but it makes no sense.

“Violeta Alvarado?”

Rosalind nods. Her eyes are moist and round with sadness, anybody’s sadness. Her eyebrows pinch together with sympathy that comes from having lost who knows how much in her lifetime.

She gives a little shrug. She understands my confusion. It is natural when you hear something like this. She takes my hand in both of hers.

“They said she’s your cousin.”

She watches me, patient, present, waiting for me to comprehend.

TWO

MY DESK is among twenty others lined up in pairs in a big open room called the bullpen. The light is fluorescent yellow and you can only see the outside world if the door to Duane Carter’s office is open and you can angle a view through his window of Westwood looking south.

But from where I sit all I get is a vista of a long metal coatrack against an anonymous beige wall. The single item hanging on the rack is an old tan sport jacket. Written across the back in black marker are the words Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise. The front of the jacket has been decorated by generations of agents with medals, advice, maps, and obscenities in everything from green ink to real blood (gleaned from a nasty run-in Special Agent Frank Chang once had with a stapler).

Since I look at it all day, I have come to think of the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise as a partner—a veteran who has been through it all, who knows our secrets and knows the answers but is bound to silence by the poignant dumb invisibility of a ghost. Who suffers more in his isolation? Him or us?

I phone the number on the yellow Post-it and get a loud Latino television station in the background and the voice of an older woman:
“Bueno?”

“Mrs. Gutiérrez? This is Special Agent Ana Grey with the FBI.”

She immediately begins talking with great urgency in Spanish.

“I’m sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”

“No?” Surprised. “No problem. I can speak in English. I am very sorry about your cousin.”

If my instincts were right about the dirtbag at the bank I am probably right again that this is some sort of a scam.

“Just a minute, ma’am. I don’t have a cousin named Violeta Alvarado.”

“Yes, she talked about you. You are the big cousin who works for the United States government.”

I blush at the thought of being anybody’s “big cousin who works for the government.”

“I’m sorry, but I have never met Ms. Alvarado.”

“I know you are the one. And right now, your family needs your help.”

She is so fierce, so absurd, that it makes me laugh. “It’s not my family! Look, I was born in Santa Monica, California—”

“And your father’s people come from El Salvador.”

Suddenly I am very uneasy. Nobody has mentioned my father in years. He was allegedly from Central America but I never even knew which country, since he abandoned us when I was a tiny child and was always a taboo subject in our home. My mother and I lived with her father, a police officer, and I was raised Protestant and white; you couldn’t get more white, all the way back to the curl in the horns on the headgear of our Viking ancestors. I happen to have thick wavy black hair but that’s as Mediterranean as I get. Hispanics are simply another race to me.

Colder now, “Why are you calling, Mrs. Gutiérrez? What do you want?”

“It’s not for me, it’s for Violeta’s children. They have nobody in this country to take care of them.”

Part of me is working hard to believe this is all a fake. Already I have come up with a scenario for how the scam must work: they find some indigent who dies. Call a relative (real or imagined) who has never met the person. Hit them up for “money to take care of the children.” Sooner or later somebody will send a check out of guilt. I start to take notes. Maybe this will warrant opening a case.

“Really?” Writing now, “And what are the children’s names?”

“Cristóbal and Teresa.”

“What is your relationship to the children?”

“I live in the building. I become very close with Violeta because we are both from El Salvador. I baby-sit for her children while she works. Only now there is no one because she is dead.”

“How was she killed?”

“She was shot down in the street, on Santa Monica Boulevard only two blocks from here. She was shot up so bad that her hands were gone. When they laid her in her coffin they had to put white gloves on the end of the arms.”

“What did the police say?”

“They don’t know anything.”

There is a breath or a sob and the woman’s tone becomes desperate: “Who will take care of the children?”

The professional response comes easiest: “I will put you in touch with a city agency—”

She interrupts: “The last lady Violeta worked for still owes her money. If you can get the money, I will take care of the children until they find a home not with strangers … but with family.”

The way she says “family”—with intimacy and conviction, the way religious people speak effortlessly of God—is embarrassing. My only living family is my grandfather and my lifestyle is aggressively without God: the furnished one-bedroom in Marina Del Ray. My 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible. Sixty, a hundred hours a week at the Bureau, a diet shake for lunch, and a mile in the pool every day. A career timetable so tight you could plot it on graph paper—a straight line to Assistant Special Agent in Charge or even the first female Special Agent in Charge of a cherry field office like Denver, which, because I am a woman, will require at least five more years of crossing each square perfectly, never one millimeter off; no messiness, no mistakes, no fat.

Reaching for my Rolodex, “I’m going to refer you to a social worker.”

“No,” insists this stranger with absolute authority, “it is not right. These children are of your blood.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Violeta and your father came from the same village.”

“Which village?”

“La Palma.”

“Never heard of it.”

“She told me it is a small place, maybe one hundred miles from San Salvador, with a black sand beach.”

Of the few fragments remaining of my father there is a relic as real yet mysterious as a shard of wave-polished glass: “
When your father was a boy, he played on a black sand beach.”

It shakes me.

“Mrs. Gutiérrez—I’m sorry, but I have to take another call. Good luck to you.”

I hang up and stare at the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise. The sleeves are empty. The heart, weightless.