North of Montana

“hullo.”

“Hello, Warren. It’s Ana Grey with the FBI.”

“I knew you’d call.”

“You did?”

“You want to ask me out on a date.”

Instantaneously discarding several other possible responses: “Actually I’m calling about your State of California conviction for possession of marijuana and cocaine with intent to distribute.”

“Ancient history … but what about it?”

“I’ll bet when you applied for your state contractor’s license you left out the fact that you are a convicted felon.”

There is a pause, then, “I don’t get it, Ana. Why are you threatening me?”

“I want to talk to you about Claire Eberhardt.”

“I’ll talk to you if I can have an attorney present.”

“Of course you can have an attorney present—” I am bluffing, the last thing I want is some lawyer getting on the horn to the Eberhardt’s lawyer. “But this isn’t about you, Warren, it’s about Claire and her husband.”

“I‘ve got nothing against Randall,” he says with dark defensiveness.

“Most people think Randall Eberhardt is a solid citizen, but I get the feeling you know differently.”

Warren Speca agrees to meet me in the bar on top of the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica the following afternoon.

• • •

The only way to get to Toppers bar is to ride the exterior elevator that climbs up the side of the hotel like a glass slug. Two nineteen-year-old secretaries are giggling and covering their eyes as the machinery shakes and whines and we rise slowly above palm trees and rooftops to a dreamlike suspension twenty stories above the ocean. I don’t like it too much, either.

The doors open and I find myself in a Mexican cantina of whitewashed stucco edged with indigo blue. Above two curved doorways it says in faded pink paint, “Acapulco” and “Santa Cruz”—one leads to a restaurant with pink tablecloths, the other to a bar covered by a bamboo roof. Warren Speca is sitting at the bar sipping a drink and wearing a big Mexican sombrero covered with tiny round mirrors.

A bartender with a dark moustache and slicked-back hair can’t hold it in anymore and just cracks up.

“Esta loco.” He nods toward Warren, who grins boyishly, the string dangling below his chin.

“What’s in that drink?” I ask.

“Nothing. Soda water. I just wanted to get in the mood.”

“For what? A bullfight?”

Warren slings the hat to the bartender, who hangs it back on a hook, still chuckling.

We take a window table in the cocktail lounge with a view of white and beige buildings with red and orange roofs stretching all the way to the tree line north of Montana.

The waitress brings me a nonalcoholic margarita over lime-scented crushed ice in a stemmed glass as big as a soup bowl.

“I’m out here in California minding my own business when I get a call from this lady Teddy Feign whose house got creamed by a mud slide.”

“She’s got more work for you. She’s going to call.”

“That’s cool. So she says Claire Eberhardt recommended me, an old friend from high school. I don’t actually grok to the fact that Claire might be out here on the West Coast, I figure it’s some damn thing through our mothers. If you think Jewish mothers are bad, you don’t know the Irish and Italians. You’re not Jewish, are you?”

For a moment I’m stopped by a surge of anxiety, but I push through it: “My father was from El Salvador, my mother was American.”

It’s out on the table and it’s not so bad.

“This turns out to be a major job and Mrs. Feign is pressuring me to finish so I start working weekends. She has this gigantic birthday party for her kid and a hundred of their closest friends, and I’m outside screwing with the circuit breaker when these two French doors suddenly pop open and Claire Eberhardt comes flying out. I mean flying. They were dummy doors that were never supposed to be used, but what did Claire know. So she goes flying into a ditch and I help her up and it’s Claire McCarthy from Savin Hill. She’s put on a little weight but there’s no doubt about it. She’s so embarrassed and fucked up she doesn’t recognize me — truthfully, it’s been fifteen years — so I let her go.

“Later on, I walk into the kitchen and there she is looking out the window at the party like a wallflower — and Claire was never a wallflower — tears streaming down her face. She sees me and tries to cover it up.

“ ‘Claire McCarthy,’ I say. ‘What’ve you been up to? Tell me you don’t recognize me.’

“Finally she gets it. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing here, she says, then I remembered I gave Teddy your number. Why didn’t you say something outside when I was doing my Chevy Chase routine?’

“ ‘Didn’t want to embarrass you.’

“ ‘I must have looked like an idiot.’

“I go, ‘No, you only looked scared.’

“So then I ask about her parents who are major alcoholics and we start talking and I tell her I’m in the program now, I don’t drink, which blows her mind, and to cheer her up I point out this fat guy out there at the party wearing running shorts and a sweatshirt who’s worth sixty million dollars.

“ ‘Thinks up one TV show, now he’s worth sixty million. Go over there and rub against him, maybe it’ll brush off.’

“ ‘You rub against him,’ she says.

“ ‘I tried but he wasn’t interested. Hey, for sixty million I’d do just about anything.’

“ ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

“ ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t. What do I care? It’s only money.’

“But Claire’s staring at all those people again and getting teary, feeling pathetic about herself because her daughter’s already part of the crowd and Claire knows she will never fit in.

“ ‘That’s my daughter, Laura. She’s best friends with the birthday girl. She loves California.’

“There’s this huge fancy birthday cake on the counter, so I take my finger”—he demonstrates on the edge of the cocktail table—“and wipe it all around the edge, and rub the chocolate frosting into my gums and I say to Claire, ‘You can’t take these people seriously.’

“She looks at me and picks off one of the flowers from the cake and puts it into her mouth and I know right then and there we’re going to sleep together.”

• • •

“Did you and Claire Eberhardt sleep together?”

“Two and three times a week. Mostly in my place, although once we made it in her husband’s bed. I thought for about thirty seconds she was actually going to leave him for me.”

He smiles ruefully.

“Was she in love with you?”

Warren Speca folds his arms and tips back in the chair with bare knees apart, squinting toward the haze moving in over the sea. He’s come from work and is still wearing beat-up shorts, heavy boots, and crew socks.

“The thing she loved most about me — unfortunately — was when we’d lie around afterward and talk about the old neighborhood. She’d get into these memories, did I remember what she was like when she was twelve, that sort of crap. Of course the sex was pretty good too.”

I can’t help knowing that it was.

“She hated it out here. People like Teddy Feign scared the shit out of her, but she felt a lot of pressure to be like them. She was glad for an excuse not to hang out with Teddy anymore. She had a much better time with me,” he adds, with a teasing grin.