“It wasn’t her fault,” Mrs. Gutierrez says sharply. “You can ask the lady. I have the address because I used to take care of the kids when Violeta worked there. Look. This is Cristobal and Teresa.”
Two children dash across the room. The little girl is maybe five, her brother three. She leads him by the hand to the refrigerator, which she tugs open after several tries, reaching for something.
“I’ll get it,
“Kool-Aid.”
Suddenly the apartment is flooded with unbearably loud Latin music coming from the open carport. I move the dirty beige fiberglass curtains aside to peer at two young fellows laughing, talking loudly, carrying a ghetto blaster, and unwinding a garden hose in the direction of a 1975 Dodge Dart with most of the paint honed off. They are going to wash that piece of crap using a half hour’s worth of city water in the midst of a serious drought. My neck is tensing up.
“Cristobal? Teresa? This is Senorita Grey. A cousin of your mommy and you.”
Facing me are two golden-skinned children with almond-shaped eyes holding plastic mugs in their hands. It is preposterous that they have anything to do with me. The girl, unsmiling, slides her eyes away. She is wearing pink shorts and a scrawny tie-dyed T-shirt that looks as if it might have actually survived the sixties. The boy’s green army fatigue shorts are way too big for him, folded many times at the waist and pinned with a big safety pin, no shirt at all.
“Do you know where my mommy is?” he asks.
“Your mommy is in heaven,” Mrs. Gutierrez says, ruffling his thick black hair. “I told you that.”
But the boy repeats his question imploringly, directly to me: “Do you know where my mommy is?”
Mrs. Gutierrez clucks her tongue with sympathy and scoops him up in her arms. “Come here, Cris. Want to dance with me?”
She tilts her hips this way and that to the music which is shaking the floor, bouncing the boy against her body and laughing a big laugh, grinning a big grin to his tiny bewildered simper.
“Teresa! Let’s dance! Let’s do some
The girl is standing before me, not moving, not looking exactly anywhere. Drawn to her, I kneel down until we are eye level and then without quite knowing it, brush her cheek with my hand. She drops onto all fours and crawls under the baby’s crib, curling up tightly with her arms folded, face pressed against the wall.
I feel a strange, distant portentous hum — then suddenly it is upon me with tremendous force: mixed with the pounding music, waves of heat ripple through my body along with a raw, unidentified fear. Panicked, I fight the urge to follow Teresa under the crib, to be small again in a small dark place, to seek the almost immaterial tininess of a dot of a spider who can wholly disappear into the safety of a crack in the tile, because if you are that small your pain must be small too, small enough to become inconsequential and, finally, gone.
The music has been turned up, incredibly, another notch. Mrs. Gutierrez gathers the papers and puts them back into the Bible. Speaking with a quiet intensity that penetrates the music she says, “Take this. It was Violetas,” and presses the book into my hand.
“Even if I could get the money … it won’t go to you.…” I am shouting, but Mrs. Gutierrez has surrendered to a faraway look and slipped into a smooth sideways step, the boy on her hip too stunned by the movement and the volume to cry. “The money will go to the children. And they’ll probably be put into foster care—”
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. Gutierrez to the dreams of the
FIVE
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,
