April Smith - North of Montana

There is a moment of stupefied silence. We were expecting Colombians, Mexicans, Crips, and Bloods.

“You’d have to be on Mars not to know Jayne Mason was in and out of the Betty Ford Center,” Galloway continues. “Well, now she claims she’s an addict because of this shyster M.D. named Eberhardt.”

Duane: ‘What’s the Bureau’s jurisdiction?”

“She claims the drugs he gave her came from Mexico.” Galloway tosses a file at me.

“Mighty thin,” observes Duane.

“Look at Title 18 of the Federal Code, Drug Abuse Prevention, or maybe 21, Wrongful Distribution.”

I am speechless.

I know perfectly well that I am obligated to tell the Special Agent in Charge immediately of my conflict of interest concerning this case. That my alleged cousin, who died under mysterious circumstances, worked for this very Dr. Eberhardt.

“Sounds like a case of medical fraud to me,” Duane persists, “which would put it under the jurisdiction of the White Collar Crime Squad, am I wrong?”

“Like I said before,” Galloway repeats sternly, “this came from the Director’s office.”

He has made the political significance clear to both of us.

“I will handle it with discretion.”

“Fuck discretion,” Galloway grunts. “Just get to the fucking bottom of this so I can appear halfway fucking intelligent.”

We file out. Duane is already through the doorway when Galloway touches my shoulder lightly. I turn. The cigar is back in his mouth.

“There’s no reason to file that lawsuit now, am I right?”

“I think you’ve been very fair.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Duane is waiting for me in the hall.

“Prestige case,” I say, tossing my hair.

“Dog case,” he replies with a great big happy smile and strolls away.

It doesn’t matter what Duane Carter thinks, this is my chance to advance a dozen squares on the achievement chart or even rocket off the chart — Jayne Mason, it has to be big — and the fact that I have prior knowledge of the players involved has pivoted in my mind from being a conflict of interest to an incredible advantage.

I am thinking about that day in the alley behind the orthopedic office when I saw Jayne Mason and the accused doctor together. She was dressed in red, breaking out of his grasp, striding toward the limousine. Now I remember something else. A fanciful detail. The doctor had been holding a rose. A yellow rose on a long stem. After the limo disappeared, he tossed the rose into the trash and the heavy door snapped shut behind him.

THE FIRST STEP is to assemble all the information on Randall Eberhardt, M.D., that currently exists on the hard disk and magnetic tape archives of the world.

I run his name through our in-house computer, which will turn up previous arrests anywhere on the globe and discover there are none. I check with the California Department of Motor Vehicles for citations of reckless driving, driving under the influence, or speeding, which are, again, negative. I subpoena the records and obtain a printout from the telephone company of toll calls made from both the medical office and the residence on Twentieth Street, looking for a pattern that would point to a drug connection, but all I learn is that the Eberhardts still make a lot of calls to friends and relations in Boston.

Our huge revolving “dead files” downstairs are records of every complaint we have received by a citizen over the phone or transom, and a thorough check by two of the brighter clerks yields nothing. The California Medical Licensing Board tells me no charges have been filed by any other patient regarding Dr. Eberhardt. They confirm that he graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Medical School and completed an internship and residency in orthopedic medicine at New England Deaconess Hospital. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Buckingham, Browne and Nichols, an upper-class prep school.

I contact our Boston field office and request a deep background check, emphasizing this is an urgent, high-profile case that came to us through the Director. The road back to Boston feels promising. Whatever the cause of Eberhardt’s deviation it must have been in evidence before the move to California. Maybe there’s a pattern. I put in a request for travel to the East Coast just in case.

All of that in place, I allow myself to return to the question of Dr. Eberhardt’s housekeeper and what I alone know about her. I have been keeping the envelope containing Violeta Alvarado’s meager archive in a desk drawer and sometimes find myself looking through it: a Bible, a few snapshots that tell of a journey to America, autopsy photos documenting a violent death. I have heard her described as a hard worker and loving mother and have seen her children, real enough. She might turn out to be a cousin of mine after all, but my job is to sweep all that sentimentality aside and look at the facts. The more closely I look the more convinced I become that LAPD Detective Sergeant John Roth’s theory has a strong possibility of being correct: that Violeta Alvarado was involved with drugs — perhaps on behalf of her former employer, Dr. Randall Eberhardt.

My work often requires me to make this type of construction, a model of human behavior, like the origami polyhedron that hangs on a string off Special Agent Michelle Nishimura’s desk lamp. I have watched her make the most amazing things out of paper, complex folds executed in sequence, the pure logic of the design giving strength to the most fragile of materials.

I have bounced my little spheroid, the possibility of Violeta Alvarado’s connection to the Jayne Mason case, off the mental wall a couple of hundred times and it still holds up, which gives me the nerve to call John Roth again.

It takes a few days for him to phone back because he is working undercover. His attitude is maddeningly the same:

“Why the fuck should I do you a favor?”

“Do yourself a favor and close a homicide for once.”

‘Why break my record?”

“Did you get the autopsy report yet?”

“No.”

“So what’s the status of the case?”

“It’s in the ‘Who Cares?’ file, as in, Who cares about a dead Mexican?’ ”

Something is blowing far away, not even visible on the horizon, detectable only in a subtle shift of atmosphere, from dry to humid, say, as aspen leaves flutter in the first omen of change.… And a strange quieting of the usual roar so that one note can be heard over and over, sultry and urgent.

My voice drops to a level warning. “She was from El Salvador and she had kids.”

“So do a million other dead Mexicans.”

“You asshole.”

He laughs with a wild stoned hysterical edge.

“It’s your own brilliant deduction, John. She was out on Santa Monica Boulevard at five in the morning. She was killed in a drive-by that looks pretty deliberate. Her hands were blown away, which means a hit.”

“Pretty good.”

“She was working for a doctor who’s been accused by Jayne Mason of overprescribing medication. She could have been a street connection for him. I’m asking you to reopen the case.”

“I’ve got a few other things going.”

“This is major.”

“So is my hard-on.”

I bite my lip. I need this badly.

“John. Cut me some slack here, okay?”

I wonder if the vulnerability is as obvious to him as it is mortifying to me.

• • •

“A doctor who overprescribes narcotics is like a fireman who sets fires,” Barbara declares. “One sick puppy.”

“Not necessarily. It could be very calculating.”

“You mean blackmail and extortion?”

We have met over the copy machine and are walking together down the hall.