North of Montana (15 page)

“Teak.”

“Right onto the teakwood floor.”

“And you went to see Dr. Eberhardt?”

“They packed my leg in ice and put me in a limo and Maureen and I took off down Pico at about a hundred miles an hour, right, sweetie?”

“I felt sick at my stomach the whole time,” Maureen says in a soft, sweet voice. “For you. Because you were in such pain.”

“Thank you, darling.” Jayne squeezes her hand.

“Were you already Dr. Eberhardt’s patient?” I ask.

“That’s where fate steps in. Actually I’d never met Dr. Eberhardt. They wanted to send me to Cedars but I insisted on going all the way to Santa Monica to see Dr. Dana, a dear, dear old friend I’ve known for years. My driver was calling ahead on the car phone when they told him Dr. Dana had recently retired to Maui and this young Dr. Eberhardt from Boston was taking his place. By that time we were halfway there and I was in such agony and so mad at Dr. Dana for leaving me that I couldn’t think about anything else.”

“How was Dr. Eberhardt’s examination?” Galloway wants to know. “Would you say it was thorough and professional?”

“As a medical man, he’s absolutely wonderful. Very smart. Very well educated. And charming. He was moving my hip around and it hurt like hell and I said, ‘I’m really a big chicken, I can’t take pain,’ and Dr. Eberhardt said, ‘Don’t kid me. I saw you kick that gunslinger in the balls!’ Well, he made me laugh and I knew I was under his spell.”

“What was the diagnosis?”

“Troco-something bursitis of the hip. And I tore some cartilage in my knee.”

“What was the treatment?”

She turns to Maureen. “You were in the room. What did he say?”

“Rest, ice, and physical therapy.”

I wait a moment. There is silence except for the faint whining of the tape recorder.

“No pills?”

“What?”

“Dr. Eberhardt did not prescribe any pills for your bursitis of the hip at that time?”

Jayne Mason gives up her ownership of the room to sit on the edge of the coffee table and bend toward me until her face is about ten inches from mine. She smells of citrus and vanilla.

“I’ll be very honest with you,” she says. “He would not have given me those pills if I didn’t ask for them.”

“You asked for the pills?”

“Yes.” Her skin, even up close, is flawless. The aquamarine eyes are rimmed with green and unnaturally shining with large black pupils. “He gave me the pills because I told him I had to go back to work that afternoon.” She is speaking slowly and deliberately. She wants me to buy this—her bare-faced, up-close, not-ashamed-of-anything honesty.

“You mean so you could work on the movie, even though you were injured?”

“I’ve had a lot of problems in the last three years, Ana,” speaking intimately now as if we did in fact meet in that fancy restaurant up on Beverly Glen, two rich ladies sharing lunch while baby octopuses commit suicide off our plates. “I’ve been through two agents, I’m being sued by a so-called producer—I can’t tell you how difficult it’s been. I owe a lump-sum payment on a third mortgage to the bank—”

“Jay, let’s stay on track,” Stockman warns.

“This
is
the track. This is
why
he gave me the
pills
. I owe the bank five hundred thousand dollars. If I don’t pay it, I will lose my house in Malibu. I
had
to finish that picture—and believe me”—she stands restlessly—“it was a piece of crap.”

She frowns, thinking about the crappy picture, pouring Evian water while everybody waits.

“So I made a deal with Dr. Eberhardt. If he would just give me the pills so I could finish work, I would do ice packs, physical therapy, whatever he wanted.”

“Did he agree?”

“It was supposed to be for one time. But I was weak and he played into my weakness.”

“How?”

“If I had a headache, he’d prescribe pills. Then I’d get a reaction and he’d give me something else, until I became a dependent wreck. He never said, Jayne, be a big girl and go cold turkey. He was the doctor, I put myself in his hands. Finally I got into the Dilaudid and it became a chemical addiction beyond my control. The bottom line is I needed Dr. Eberhardt and his pills to get through the day.”

“Did you sleep with Dr. Eberhardt, Ms. Mason?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Did he ever send you roses?”

“I sent
him
roses,” she laughs. “I send everybody yellow roses, it’s my way of saying thank you. And he did fix my hip.”

“You must understand this man has destroyed her career,” Stockman intones. “Who will hire a known drug addict to make a movie? All this negative publicity has made her uninsurable and without insurance she cannot be employed to act. She has no source of income, and due to some unbelievably incompetent money management, Jayne Mason is in a serious financial crisis.”

Stockman fixes those knowing eyes on me—wolf eyes, when you look carefully, with that same predatory calm.

“But she has decided not to be a victim anymore. As a woman, you understand what courage that takes.”

Considering what I’m going through with Duane Carter, it hits home. “I’ve fought my battles.”

“We all have.”

Gee, I kind of like the feeling of the men in the room being excluded for once.

“Ana, I know you are going to make a difference—not only to Jayne, but to other women who don’t have the resources to stand up to exploitation.”

Stockman is as skilled a performer as her client, and I’m ashamed to say I fall for it. The flattery—of me, of each other—is finally as dizzying as the narcotic perfume of yellow roses and in an anodyne haze I promise to do my best.

As Galloway escorts everyone out, I compliment Miss Mason on her peach chiffon dress.

“Don’t you love it? It’s by Luc de France, my personal designer.”

“I’ve heard of him.” I smile at Maureen, who is still holding Mason’s hand like a child. There is nothing in her look to acknowledge the joke. But then, there is precious little there at all.

•  •  •

Two days later the Boston field office comes through with the gold. As a result of their deep background check they located a former patient, Claudia Van Hoven, who claims Dr. Eberhardt got her addicted to prescription drugs, exactly like Jayne Mason.

I am perched at an angle on Donnato’s desk so I don’t have to look at the picture of him and his wife.

“You know how long it takes to get approval for travel—but Galloway told me to get on a plane for Boston
tomorrow
and come back with Van Hoven’s testimony against the doctor. An hour with Jayne Mason and he’s like a puppy dog rolling on his back with his paws in the air. Get her anything. Do anything.”

Donnato’s looking through the latest stats on bank robberies in Orange County. They’re up.

‘Want some advice about Boston?”

I’m always eager for his expertise. “Tell me.”

“They have the best meatball subs in the world.”

I shake my head restlessly. “Galloway is treating me differently now that I’m working Hollywood.”

“This has nothing to do with Hollywood,” Donnato observes.

“Come on—if Joe Schmo called the FBI and said some doctor gave him too many Percodans, you think I’d be flying off to Boston on a background check?”

“It’s politics,” he explains patiently, “Magda Stockman is a major contributor to the Republican party. She hangs out at the Annenbergs. She was one of the private citizens’ who paid for the renovation of the White House under Reagan, don’t you remember? Oh, that’s right, you were twelve.”

“Still, when a person like Jayne Mason—”

Donnato interrupts, “Jayne Mason is another dippy actress and, believe me, Galloway would never roll over for a pretty face.” He holds up a hand to stop my protest. “Magda Stockman is the power player.”

He shakes his head sadly and goes back to the printout. “You ought to be reading
The New Republic
instead of
Engine Grease World.”

“I like engine grease. You should give it a try.”

He pretends not to hear.

I laugh and slip off the desk. “I feel sorry for you, Donnato. Who will you have to abuse while I’m gone?”

“Only myself.”

•  •  •

This is wild. I get to go home early to pack for an eight a.m. plane to fly to a city where I have never been, on my own case, with no supervision except the SAC himself. My head is humming with what I need to bring and what the moves will be once I get there.

At this hour the lobby of the Federal Building is filled with great blocks of brownish yellow afternoon light but the press of humans has not slowed since I arrived this morning. The same impatient crowd waits to move through metal detectors monitored by two excruciatingly thorough security guards, and outside the line to get a passport seems longer and, if possible, slower.

The lobby is a place of crossroads where the course of each of the thousands converging from all parts of the world cannot be logged, but they have this in common: desperation and a seething frustration with the bureaucracy of the United States government, a combustible anxiety that makes me always stay alert when crossing these marble floors.

Maybe it’s that alertness, or perhaps a sixth sense when it comes to John Roth, that warns me he is close a split second before he calls out, “Ana.”

Yes, I’d caught the figure leaning against a wall, and known it was John despite the dirty hair down to the shoulders, raggy beard, and ripped jeans. The posture, the hungry gaze, cause my alarm system to shriek.

“You look good,” he says with a smirk.

“You look like Serpico.”

“Undercover narcotics. I like to run with the vermin.”

His shirt, missing a button, is open at the navel. The belly is concave, jeans hanging low.

“The fox guarding the chickens?”

“You’re looking at Mr. Straight.”

I nod. He looks like hell.

“Are you staking me out?”

“Just waiting. Indulging in a little fantasy.”

He takes a step toward me. I take a step back.

“I’ve got something for you.”

“Try it and I’ll bust you so fast—”

“No,” he interrupts, “it’s that Alvarado homicide.”

I stop my backpedaling but maintain a good eight feet between us.

“I went back on the street and tracked down that kid, Rat, the one who witnessed the drive-by. Turns out he was able to ID the car.”

“What jogged his memory?”

“He’s a male prostitute, I threaten to bust his ass, so he comes around. Turns out it was a gang hit but Alvarado was not the intended victim. A dope deal was going down a few feet from the bus stop. One of the suspects was marked by the Bloods. They missed. Ms. Alvarado happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You’re sure?”

“The kid is good.”

“What about the hands? Or did they blow them away just for kicks?”

“The autopsy report says amputation of the hands resulted from the victim attempting to protect herself from the bullets.”

He brings his arms up and crosses them over his face.

I can see it now, all too clearly. A car swings around the corner.
Pop-pop-pop
and street people with experience duck for cover. Violeta Alvarado, out there alone in the middle of the night, who knows why—but
innocent
, she was
innocent
—is struck over and over again. She tries to fend off the hits but they come with astonishing force and so unbelievably fast.…

“There’s no connection between Alvarado being killed and her working for the doctor. She just got caught in the crossfire. Happens every day.”

I say nothing.

“I did this because I thought that might mean something to you.”

The autopsy photos flip through my mind like a grisly pinup calendar.

“It won’t help on your case, but at least now you know your cousin was clean.”

I’m thinking of the way her little girl hid under the crib. And the boy, with his lost dark eyes.

“She
was
your cousin, right?”

I have not answered John for several moments. Now I cross the marble one square at a time, deliberately walking toward him until we are face-to-face.

“Yes, John. She was my cousin.”

In acknowledging this I find I have gained something. Relief. Confidence. I can stand here, this close, and hold the look of a man I have long dreaded in a frank, new way. I can see new things, like the fear in John Roth.

“Take it easy on yourself.” I touch his shoulder. “And thanks.”

“Hey,” he says, shaky, off guard, “I’m not a total fuckup.”

We look at each other one last moment, then I take off, out of the building and into the parking garage at a fast clip. My teeth are all gummed up from the two colas I had to get through the afternoon and I can’t stand wearing these tight panty hose one more minute. Inside the car I wrestle them off. Much better. I turn on the engine and back out, on my way to crucify Dr. Randall Eberhardt.