April Smith: North of Montana

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.

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.

After a moment I realize the intercom is in fact buzzing. Barbara Sullivan has something for me on the bank robbery.

ONE ENTIRE WALL of Barbara Sullivan’s office is covered with still photographs taken by surveillance cameras of bank robberies in progress. To the untrained eye, except for gross differences in gender and race and type of weapon, they all look pretty much the same and walking in there can actually make you feel nauseated, overwhelmed by the tang of film developer, confronted by a floor-to-ceiling sea of gray images, most so grainy and out of focus you need a magnifying glass to get any detail.

But to the Human Computer the surveillance photos are daily bread, to be carefully chewed, swallowed, digested, and turned into masses of information stored in the brain for instantaneous retrieval. The Human Computer forgets nothing, including the minutiae of one’s personal life. Before she got married to another agent, Barbara and I used to pal around police bars together and she can still repeat the time and place that I met every one of my liaisons. She even remembers their ranks and names.