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.
“Or he could be getting kickbacks from a pharmacy or an insurance company, but I checked out his bank accounts and credit cards and he’s solid.”
“Then it’s not about money, it’s about power.” Barbara’s eyes are bright with conjecture. “Can you imagine what it would be like for some boring straight doctor to have Jayne Mason under his total control?”
“Doctors are control freaks,” I agree, starting to make sense out of it.
“How could you even perform an
“I’ll let you know. I’m going out to Malibu this afternoon.”
Barbara punches herself in the chest and doubles up in a paroxysm of envy.
“Don’t worry,” I assure her as she continues to pant wordlessly, “I promise to get Jayne Mason’s lingerie closet on microfilm.”
• • •
I swing out of the tunnel at Ocean Avenue onto the Pacific Coast Highway and the sun hits me whap off the water, tall corridors of air suddenly open and unobstructed. Even the palm trees are tiny, way up there on top of the palisade, as I shoot along a narrow roadway with cars rushing at me sixty miles an hour in the opposite direction, no divider. I’m reeling from a sudden sense of space, distracted by surfer-dotted silver waves, RVs jammed crazily along the narrow shoulder, a continual jumble of low-slung houses with their backs up right against the road, thinking it must be death to turn into one of those precarious garages. The ocean chews at the shore on the left, and looking at the huge gouging claw marks that mud slides have taken from the hillside to the right, I remember boulders rolling onto the road during last year’s killer winter storms. The order of the world steadily uncoils as I head north, skimming the very edge of the continent like a top in dizzy balance between sanity and the unknown.
Just past Pepperdine University I leave all the crap behind — the Spanish-style malls and the beach traffic. The road narrows and becomes pastoral, horse ranches reaching up into the Santa Monica Mountains, spectacular vistas of the Pacific to the west with an occasional glimpse of surf curling up to a cove half hidden below rocky cliffs.
Arroyo Road comes up quickly, marked by a thin, weathered sign. After a hairy left turn across the highway I find myself on a dirt lane canopied by shaggy giant eucalyptus trees obviously planted a very long time ago. It is surprising how much land can be secreted away between the highway and the sea. A flimsy corral fence made of pipe runs along a meadow of high golden grass where two Appaloosa horses are grazing. I wonder about security.
