North of Montana

“Mrs. Gutierrez — 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.

THREE

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.

The job of the bank robbery coordinator is to find connections between the more than two thousand bank robberies committed each year in Los Angeles County. Most individual robbers will repeat ten or fifteen times for less than a thousand dollars a take, easily losing themselves in a tangle of freeways or a robber-friendly matrix of underinformed and understaffed law enforcement. Now that gangs have become involved, resources are stretched even thinner. Our conviction rate is not great. Often it is the Human Computer, meditating alone before this sorry montage, who provides a clue that leads to an arrest.

When I walk into her office, Barbara is reading People magazine with Jayne Mason on the cover and eating birthday cake from a big slab someone left in the lunchroom, deep chocolate with raspberry in the middle. She pushes a slice on a Mickey Mouse paper plate toward me along with a folded napkin and red plastic fork. I have brought my mug, knowing she always has fresh brew flavored with cinnamon perking along in her personal coffeemaker.

“I am absolutely devastated about Jayne Mason,” she says, not taking her eyes from the magazine. “My whole world just went up in smoke.”

I look at the upside-down photos, familiar as a family album. Even now in her fifties or sixties or who knows what, Jayne Mason remains one of our truly enduring movie stars.

“She’s a drug addict.” Barbara slaps her hand down and looks up with real hurt as if she’s been personally betrayed.

I sip the coffee. ‘Why is that a surprise? She’s an actress. Of course she’s on drugs.”

“Oh, come on! Jayne Mason? Every American girl’s prefeminist dream? You have to admit she’s exquisite.”

She flips the magazine around so I can see the famous black and white portrait of Jayne Mason taken when she was barely twenty, the amazing cheekbones then described as: “Pure as the curves of a Stradivarius … heartbreaking as the Mozart played thereon.”

Barbara is going on impatiently, “Don’t you remember those wonderful old sentimental musicals?”

“I hate musicals.”

“She was angelic. She always played the good-hearted farm girl whose pa just passed away or the poor street urchin who gets the swell idea of putting on a musical production, then finds out she has tuberculosis. But don’t worry — the handsome young doctor saves her life and she becomes a big Broadway star.”

I say nothing. Barbara glowers at me with frustration. “Your idea of a tearjerker is Terminator. ”

“That’s right. The robot dies and it’s sad.”

“She turned down the title role in Gigi—big mistake — because she was having a tumultuous affair with Louis Jourdan at the time.” The Human Computer cannot be shut down: “Her first dramatic role was Bad Men, a famous western with John Wayne.”

“Even I remember that. They were making love on the tallest butte in Arizona and supposedly they really screwed.”

“Look at this!” Barbara picks up the magazine and throttles it. “She’s an addict! Like every other sleazeball on the street.”

I swipe it from her and examine a photo of Jayne Mason taken just last week. She is getting into a limousine wearing dark glasses and a tailored white linen suit, clutching a bouquet of yellow roses, looking like she’s running for a plane to Rome rather than dodging reporters on the way to the Betty Ford Center.

Barbara sighs. “I used to wear a full slip underneath my Catholic school uniform because Jayne Mason looked so sexy and romantic in them. The first time I saw her on the Academy Awards I was three years old and watched every year since, hoping she’d be on. She was the queen of queens in the prom gown of all prom gowns. God, I wanted to be beautiful.”

But I am fussing over something else: “You can’t remember anything when you’re three.”

“I can.”

“I remember nothing before the age of five. The whole time we lived with my grandfather in Santa Monica is a blank.”

Barbara gives a wry look over her coffee cup. “Have you spoken to your therapist about this?”

“Why? That’s normal.”

But Barbara’s attention has returned wistfully to the magazine.

“I was so sorry when Jayne didn’t marry President Kennedy. They would have made the sexorama couple of the century. Nobody wears full slips anymore.” Then, without a pause, “When does Duane get back?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“We’re going to have something very special waiting for him.”

Barbara smiles. Small-boned, with curly reddish hair down to her shoulders, a pert nose, and wide-set blue eyes, she has an advanced degree in biology and looks about as much like an FBI agent as I do, especially with a Mickey Mouse napkin tucked into the neck of her yellow wool suit.

She places one of the surveillance photographs in front of me.

“Here’s your guy.”

There’s my guy in the baseball hat and two shirts standing in front of a teller’s window in California First Bank. He isn’t pointing a gun or doing anything even slightly dramatic. The photo is stamped UNSUB. Unknown Subject.

“And here’s your guy again.”

In a second photograph he is wearing different shirts, a different baseball hat, with the same puffy face and sagging eyes.

“Same M.O.,” Barbara continues, pointing with her fork. “The gun, the baseball hat, same instructions: ‘Give me your hundreds and no dye packs.’ ”

The second photo is stamped UNSUB, Bank of the West, Culver City Branch, 1984. I am astonished.

“How do you do that?”

Vitamin A.”

“How do you remember? Is there some kind of trick?”

“Sure there’s a trick.”

She stands abruptly, dumps our plates in the trash, and turns to me, arms folded.

“When I was a new agent, Duane Carter used to routinely get me up against a filing cabinet and suggest