North of Montana

men.

“I’m happy for you both.”

You couldn’t walk or even step on the balconies of the apartment building where Violeta Alvarado lived in Pico Rivera; they are purely decorative, as if a dozen grates of phony wrought iron and some Spanish-looking lamps could transform an orange stucco box into a hacienda. The building is typical West Coast tenement housing, a cockeyed design of stucco trapezoids overhanging an open carport, so that everybody’s windows open into everybody else’s and a central courtyard is created that magnifies and echoes every sound. Someone has wedged a bicycle between his window and the black metal filigree. Needless to say it is on the second floor — otherwise, the bicycle would have been picked clean through the bars like a skeleton.

Nobody is around this Monday morning. I am buzzed into the lobby through some warped metal doors and pass underneath a hanging sculpture that looks like the innards of a pipe organ, skipping the elevator because who knows what is lurking inside, trudging up two flights of metal stairs.

The apartment smells like roach spray and fish cooked in oil. The light-chocolate-colored carpet is thin and cheap and bunches up under your feet; if you don’t trip on the rug, you will over the children — five or six of them running between two small rooms.

“Is this Violeta Alvarado’s apartment?”

“Yes, but I am living here now.” Mrs. Gutierrez beckons me to a sofa in harshly textured pea-green plaid, the kind you would find in a twelve-dollar-an-hour motel room in Tijuana.

“Were you living with Violeta?”

“No, I had a small apartment upstairs. One room only. I called the landlord right away and asked if I could have this one.”

Mrs. Gutierrez fights a cigarette. She is buxom, with the most improbable hairstyle — dyed bright black, chopped short around the ears and teased high off the crown, then falling below her shoulders in a mantilla-like effect. She wears a yellow sleeveless dress that does not apologize for a stoutish body, the short skirt showing off bare round legs and feet with painted toenails in rubber thongs.

“So after Violeta was killed, you got her apartment.” I watch for her reaction.

She nods. “I had to call right away. Lots of people wanted it.” She is proud of herself for making a smart move. She is a survivor.

“Are these Violeta’s children?”

“Teresa and Cristobal are in the other room. I have a day care business. In San Salvador I was in charge of the kitchen of a very big hotel. I had a nice white house, a husband and two boys — all killed by the military.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t get that kind of a good job here. So these are the children I watch for the parents who are working.”

They seem clean and healthy and occupied with one another and the few frayed dolls and beat-up blocks they have to play with. I become aware of a biting, sour smell just as Mrs. Gutierrez rises, murmuring something in Spanish, and lifts an infant from a rickety wooden crib I hadn’t noticed that was stuck in a corner.

I stay where I am while she changes the baby on a card table, taking in the Japanese prints on the wall alongside paintings of volcanos, beginning to suspect that what I am seeing is simply what there is: no addicts, no hookers, no child abuse, no scam.

Mrs. Gutierrez props the baby up on her shoulder and gives it a few comforting pats. “I am very glad you came,” she says.

“I came to tell you to stop saying Violeta Alvarado was my cousin.”

The woman puts the baby back in the crib, opens a drawer in a wood-grained cardboard dresser, and removes a small black Bible stuffed with folded papers. She removes the rubber bands that hold it all together, carefully rolling them over her wrist so they won’t be lost, takes out a white business card, and gives it to me.

“This is why I know it is true.”

The card bears a gold seal and in discreet black type: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, Ana Grey, Special Agent, along with our Wilshire office address and phone number.

“There are a hundred ways she could have gotten my card.”

Mrs. Gutierrez points with a bronze-red nail. “Look on the other side.”

Turning it over I see the words “Immigration and Naturalization Service, 300 North Los Angeles St., 213-894 -2119,” written in my own hand.

“You gave this to Violeta when she first came to this country.”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“It was seven years ago.”

Mrs. Gutierrez folds her hands over her stomach and rocks back with a satisfied nod.

It could have been that when I was a rookie agent on desk duty a young Latina came tremulously to the FBI in the big skyscraper. Possibly she couldn’t speak English (animated now in imagination, a peasant girl, humble, a mass of black hair) and I slipped information on the U.S. Immigration Service to her through the slot, condescendingly, impatiently telling her to try somewhere else, too pumped up about the real challenges at the Bureau that lay ahead of me to listen or care what another confused immigrant was babbling about in Spanish, as she backed away in frustration from the double wall of bulletproof glass that protects us from the public.

The card that I hold in my hand seems to be evidence that we did once meet. I wonder if it could have happened that way, if my arrogance somehow caused a young woman to take a path that eventually led to crossfire and contorted dying.

Slipping the card into my jacket pocket, “How are we supposed to be related?”

“She told me once you are cousins through your father.”

“I don’t know a lot about my father’s side of the family.”

“I will show you.”

Mrs. Gutierrez wets her lips and shuffles through the papers, holding them at arm’s length and squinting.

“This is Violeta’s mother, Constanza. Probably she is your aunt.”

In the snapshot a middle-aged woman is standing alone in a cleared area that seems surrounded by luxuriant overgrowth. She has shapeless black hair and there is darkness under the eyes, but she is smiling warmly. She wears a black and white dress with pale orange blossoms and no shoes and is holding a baby.

“This is the house where Violeta grew up.”

It looks more like the unfinished frame of a house to me, made of bamboo sticks, cloth, and leaves with no roof or walls. There are pictures of Violeta’s brothers — more alleged cousins — husking corn, and a dim shot of a parrot in a palm tree, the colors faded to a uniform, dull aqua.

I shake my head. None of it makes sense.

“The police think Violeta was involved with drugs.”

“That is wrong.” Mrs. Gutierrez looks straight at me with clear brown eyes.

“They think that’s why she was killed.”

“The police are crazy. I know Violeta. She was afraid of the drugs. She didn’t want her children to grow up with the drugs and the gangs, that is why she was saving money to go back to El Salvador. She was a good person,” Mrs. Gutierrez insists, eyes swelled now with tears. “She loved her children. In our country there was a war, but she came all the way to the United States to be shot down in the street.”

She holds the cigarette under running water in the sink until it turns a sickly gray, then tosses it angrily into a metal garbage can.

‘Where did she work?”

“She was a housekeeper for a lady in Santa Monica. That lady owed her a lot of money.”

“What is a lot of money?”

“Maybe …” Mrs. Gutierrez puts a fist on her hip and looks toward the cottage cheese ceiling. “Four hundred dollars. Violeta was very unhappy. The lady was mean and she fired her.”

“Why?”