Mrs. Gutierrez pays $20 for the spiritual consultation, $2 for a picture of El Nino, and $1.75 for a half ounce of red oil called Rompe Caminos, which Don Roberto says will “open up the four roads.” Looking at the bottle, I see the oil is manufactured in Gardena, California.
“And you,” he warns me, “if you continue to think of your cousin too much,
I don’t know if that means Salvadoran or dead, but Don Roberto recommends this remedy: Fill a container with a mixture of goat’s milk, cow’s milk, and coconut milk, available at Tienda Alma. Remove the petals from a white flower, add any kind of perfume I like and eggshells, ground up very fine. Step into a shower and pour the entire thing over my head. This will relax me and provide a “spiritual cleansing.”
Then I am to float a white flower in a glass of water and place the water higher than my head. The top of the refrigerator is ideal. Every four days I must change the flower, but I do not throw it
Still feeling unaccountably moved, I pluck a plaster saint dressed in blue robes from the shelf as a talisman, but Don Roberto refuses to sell it to me.
“You don’t need this. Perform the remedy I have given. If you have faith, it will work,” Don Roberto says, chopping at the words,
Outside I offer Mrs. Gutierrez a ride back to North Hollywood but, not wanting any favors from me, she says she prefers the bus.
‘What do you think?” I ask.
She is subdued. “I have faith on Don Roberto.”
“You know the children will have to go into foster care.”
She nods sadly.
“Barbie and I will see you on your birthday,” I promise Teresa.
She responds with that wonderful smile. “Thank you, Miss Ana.”
“And, Cristobal — I’ll have something for you, too.”
Still there is a tearing in my chest as I get Lack into the car, for what the children will go through, a merry- go-round of depleted social services until they get pregnant, get shot, or turn eighteen. But there is hope. There is me. I can make a difference. I can make sure they’re treated well. I can be their advocate. I vow to talk to their teachers. Keep them out of gangs. Take them up to the FBI office, like other agents do for their kids, it really makes an impression. I’ll treat them to the movies and the zoo. I’ll take my young cousins to the beach.
By now I have crossed back up to Jefferson, a bleak landscape of low brick industrial buildings with curls of razor wire on the roofs, bordered by chain-link fences plastered with posters for hair braiding and discount video games. Savage graffiti — huge letters, cyclones of letters — roils across rippled metal walls. A hundred Black Muslims crowd out of a small church onto the street, deeply different from the Latinos in El Piojillo, all of them a galaxy away from the lunchtime shoppers north of Montana.
If only a bit of red oil could open up the four roads. The roads are dead, like dead nerves that no longer connect, and there are so many Violeta Alvarados, rolling around like marbles in a heartless maze.
I swing onto the freeway, thinking of the dead sidewalk on Santa Monica Boulevard where she lay watching helplessly as darkness rose from the bottom of her vision permeating everything, mouth, nose, eyes, gradually ending in the sounds of this noisy world with a grand silence.
Then she is alone in darkness and after a while she can’t tell which is which — life being rolled away from her or a curtain lifted.
The pupils of her eyes jerk once, then stop.
Her body stops.
She knows she has drowned. The hands of the sea witch are wrapped around her ankles and this time she doesn’t have the strength to pull away. But no — it isn’t the sea witch! It is her own mother, Constanza, and she is lifting her little girl up from this terrifying lonely darkness to the safety of her shoulder where the world is secure and bright. What a relief that it is Mother, I think, passing a truck and flooring it to seventy. Mother, after all.
TWENTY-FOUR
I WISH I COULD SAY the mood in the office was radically changed by events concerning the Mason case; that people approached my desk with reverence and wonder at the turn it had taken, a Westside doctor dead by suicide, a major film star under a narcotics investigation. Maureen has given up the name of a dealer who turned out to be linked to the Mexican mafia, so one thing Jayne Mason did not fabricate was the fact that the Dilaudid came from Mexico. This is a good lead for Jim Kelly and the ladies and gents of the Drug Squad, but for the rest of the bullpen it is business as usual.
From the vantage point of my desk I make the observation that everyone’s got their own problems. Each agent out there is working forty cases and in my wire basket alone there are two dozen unfinished reports on armed bank robberies. But at this moment the only response I can muster to all this savagery is to sit here patiently linking one paper clip to another.
When Henry Caravetti rolls by in the electric wheelchair delivering mail, my interest peaks but not for long. It will take weeks to process the transfer to the C-1 squad, and I will probably spend the entire time planted right here, trying to work up the nerve to talk to Mike Donnato. We have been avoiding each other for days.
It’s going to be a very long paper clip chain.
The problem is … well, they don’t have a word for it for females, but I’ve heard male colleagues refer to the condition as “continuous tumescence.” It’s a localized sensation down there that flares into acute, unbearable craving whenever I catch a glimpse of, say, the small of his back and think about slipping my hands inside the belt and slowly pulling out the tails of the sweet-smelling denim shirt, feeling the warm skin, drawing my fingertips down the spine to that place where it tapers, just above the hard curve of the buttock. I’d better get up and walk.
The Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise gives a friendly nudge. Donnato is across the room with Kyle and Frank, wearing that denim shirt, a forest green knit tie, and jeans, standing in what strikes me as a very provocative pose, hands clasped behind his head, stretching the chest and armpits open, open, open. Stumbling forward I tell myself it is perfectly reasonable to join the talk, which is almost certainly about the coming matchup in the All-Star Game, getting myself psyched by rehearsing a line I read in the sports page about San Francisco’s manager, Roger Craig, and the A’s manager, Tony La Russa, who is a vegetarian.
Halfway there, SAC Robert Galloway prevents this potentially sweaty encounter by intercepting and escorting me into his office. I figure I might as well use the line on him:
“You think Roger Craig will pound La Russa into a veggie burger?”
“I’ll always have a sweet spot for Roger Craig,” Galloway says. “He pitched the first game ever played by the Mets and had the distinction of finishing the season with ten wins and twenty-four losses.”
Galloway picks up the NYPD detective belt buckle from the coffee table and hefts it in his hand, saying nothing.
I stand self-consciously in the middle of the room.
“Did Jayne mail that back to you?”
“I asked a captain back in New York to send a new one. Made me jumpy without it.”
“Great, because now you’re the picture of calm.”
Galloway’s fingers run uncertainly through his wavy black hair. Obviously something’s up.
“I want you to go back and talk to the widow.”
“Randall Eberhardt’s widow?”
“I want you to convey the sympathy of the Bureau concerning her loss.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“That we know her husband was innocent and we’re going to find the real bastards.”
