North of Montana by April Smith Page B

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