April Smith - North of Montana

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 .

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 hours 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.”