Dating Is Murder

26

“I’ve seen this before.” Joey, in the passenger seat, studied the squiggle. “Somewhere. Not on a pill, either.”

We were still at Pepperdine, in a parking lot. The weather had changed dramatically in the last hour, from balmy breezes to cold rain, and I’d discovered something about the car I’d inherited from Doc: the defroster didn’t work. My windshield was fogged up, as transparent as an igloo.

“Could I take that to the cops?” I asked, checking the owner’s manual. “It links Annika and Rico. And this argument they had about getting in trouble-”

“The doodling’s meaningless without the pill. And what if the pill’s a No-Doz?”

“It’s gotta be Euphoria. The guy I met at Santa Monica College, Annika’s other tutoree, he said she was looking for Euphoria. If I had the pill, could we get it analyzed?” I thought of Joey’s brother, the cop. “Could Patrick help us?”

Joey snorted. “He’d yell at me for sending it through the mail, he’d say, ‘I don’t know how they do things out in La-La Land, but here in New York rules rules rules…’ I could swallow it myself and find out.”

“Detective Cziemanski,” I said. “My new friend. Maybe I could-”

“Sleep with him.”

“No. I’m never having sex again.”

“Really? Does this Simon guy know that?”

I pushed buttons randomly. The windows remained fogged up, despite a noise suggesting a defroster struggling for life. “I hate this car. I should never have ditched my Rabbit. Listen, I’ve known this man seven minutes total, so quit it. And Doc-”

In fact, my mental pictures of Doc were fading like fabric left out in the sun. It was easier to conjure up Ruby: the freckled face, the frizzy hair. When I tried to envision Doc, he was in shadow, turned away.

“I happen to like Doc,” Joey said, “but he’d be the first to tell you to move on. He was the first to tell you.”

“He didn’t mean move on to this guy. Simon would be the Rico Rodriguez of my life. All sexual heat and no substance. A professional stalker.”

“But you haven’t told the cops about him.”

“Like they’d care? Annika disappears, do they care? Rico disappears, they don’t even ask his roommates, ‘Gee, notice anything strange lately?’ Brace yourself, we’re going to open windows.”

A blast of cold air hit. I steered the car toward the campus exit. Joey wrapped her skinny arms around herself. “Kevin didn’t know Annika was missing, so what he heard didn’t seem relevant,” she said. “Hey, cops aren’t stupid and they’re not incompetent, generally, so whatever there is to find, they’ll find. Know what Lyle said while you were in the bedroom? Rico dropped out of poli sci to take chemistry, weeks into the semester. By special arrangement. And it was killing him, trying to catch up.”

“Joey, there you go! Rico was making Euphoria.”

“I think you need more than two months of chemistry to design trendy new drugs. And why would that make Annika disappear? Or her mother? You’re right, we have to find Annika’s e-mail buddy, Marie-Whatserface.”

“Dead end. I leave messages at the au pair agency and no one calls back.”

“What’s the number?” she said.

“In my backpack.” I wiped the clouded windshield with a Kleenex and took a left on Pacific Coast Highway. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, spending the day before Thanksgiving freezing in Malibu in slow traffic with Joey. Not that I didn’t love Joey. But I should’ve been with Doc and Ruby, watching cranberries… bake. Broil. Whatever it is cranberries do. Doc and I hadn’t even made it a year. We’d only gotten the minor holidays: Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Bastille Day-

A clipped New England accent came from Joey, startling me. “Mr. Otis, this is Elizabeth Atherton, with the Department of State. I’m here in California and I would appreciate a return call, as soon as possible, please, Thanksgiving notwithstanding.” Joey gave her cell-phone number, signed off, then punched a few more numbers and changed her cell phone’s outgoing message to one more suited to Elizabeth Atherton.

“What about everyone else who tries to call you and leave a message?” I asked.

“Let them wonder.” She then started dialing numbers I’d found on Rico’s wall. One was pizza delivery, one was cable TV, and one was no longer in service. Two were answering machines. There were four-digit numbers we thought were codes of some kind, until I realized Pepperdine used a common prefix for the whole campus. We tried preceding the numbers with 456, and it worked. Joey talked to three actual people. One guy said his ex-roommate had been buddies with Rico but had dropped out the previous semester. Another guy admitted to casual acquaintance but said he was late for class and hung up. A girl with a voice so loud Joey held the phone away from her ear said if we wanted to find Rico we should check under rocks or wherever it was snakes hung out. By now we’d progressed a few measly miles, not even to Tuna Canyon.

“Yikes,” Joey said. “Suspects abound. He’s a much better missing person than Annika. My favorite is Kevin, the pathologically nice roommate.”

My own cell phone rang. Joey answered without asking; she knew that driving, shivering, squinting, and cleaning the windshield while talking were beyond my capabilities. “Wollie’s cell phone, Joey speaking,” she said, then paused. “No. She’s having an automotive crisis.” Pause. “Defective defroster.” Pause. “Sixty thousand or so.” She leaned toward me, hair brushing my bare arm, then straightened up. “Sixty-two thousand, two hundred and thirty-four.” Pause. “Wasn’t her idea.” Pause. “I agree. Let me ask you, what are your intentions?” Pause. “Yeah?” Long pause. “Yeah.” I glanced at her. She was smiling. “Yeah.” She turned off the phone and turned to me. “He says to give him a call when you’re not driving.”

“Who?” The hair on my arms was standing up.

“Simon.”

“Okay, turn off that phone. Just turn it off.”

“And by the way, he’s a cop.”

I choked. “A-?”

“Not a regular cop. I just figured it out. He’s DEA. Your boyfriend’s a narc.”

The rain was having a hallucinatory effect. Headlights and taillights appearing smeared and dripping, a Dalí painting. “You mean-some kind of informant?”

“No. An agent.”

“He said that?”

“No, it just came to me. The way you described him, clean, clean-cut, weird. I thought ‘military,’ then ‘law enforcement,’ but that one remark, remember when he asked what you were doing on Temple Street? Why would he ask that? He follows you all over L.A. but he gets fixated on Temple Street. Why?” Joey bounced with excitement. “Because that’s where you don’t belong. That’s his turf, not yours-that’s the building the DEA works out of and he wanted to know if you’d made him.”

“If I’d what?”

“Made him. Found him out. Discovered his identity. They’re paranoid, those guys. He sees you downtown within ten miles of his office, he says, Me, it’s all about me, she’s following me.”

“That’s a complete long shot, Joey, it’s a huge leap of logic-”

“It’s not. I’m telling you, the DEA building on Temple Street, it’s-”

“Then he’s an informant,” I said, taking a vicious swipe at the inside windshield. “In a suit. White-collar informant, taking meetings in the building. Or a janitor. Or he works at the Music Center, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He can’t be in the DEA, he’s terrible at surveillance, I always catch him-”

“Oh, for God’s sake, he’s not surveilling you, Wollie, he’s courting you.”

“Plus he drives a really nice car. Too nice for a civil servant.”

“Look, it wouldn’t be my first choice, to fall for a narc, but that’s because I’m practically a junkie. You’re another story-you don’t even take aspirin.”

“It upsets my stomach. That’s not the point.” I stopped at the light at Topanga Canyon and turned to her. “I don’t know anyone like that. What would we talk about, someone who-does whatever it is he does for a living? Wiretaps and so forth.”

“Honey. How many of your acquaintances share your political values?”

I shrugged. “Lots. I don’t know. Most of them.”

“And how many of those people do you want to get naked with?”

I thought about it. The list was not long.

Joey smiled. “I rest my case.”

Three hours later I’d dropped Joey in Los Feliz, where her husband’s BMW was getting detailed, and got myself back to West Hollywood. It was now fully dark and pouring rain. I was inching closer to accepting Simon’s alleged profession. Since shooting up together wasn’t on my romantic agenda, what did I care?

But when had I acquired a romantic agenda?

Frozen and wet, I walked up the steps to my building. My down-the-hall neighbor was struggling with the front door, armed with groceries, and I ran to unlock it.

“Turkey?” I asked, nodding toward his grocery bag.

He groaned. “Darling, you don’t even want to know. Seventeen for dinner tomorrow. All male. All gay. And that dreadful little efficiency kitchen of ours. If you hear screams, that will be me. Drop in, if you like. Bring estrogen.”

“Thanks,” I said, stopping at the mailbox alcove. “But I’m working.”

I was glad Biological Clock was shooting. If you’re not with family on major holidays, people worry, calling to see if you’re being sufficiently festive, yelling at you if you eat Chee-tos for Christmas dinner. There had to be millions of others like me, orphans by circumstance, geography, or choice, but a cultural conspiracy was afoot to make us feel otherwise. Work, I decided, was the antidote.

I retrieved from my mail cubbyhole a huge assortment of holiday catalogs and some bills, and turned on my cell phone. It buzzed and pulsed, alerting me to all the unplayed messages acquired while it had been turned off. I ignored it. How had Doc talked me into a cell phone? They were more trouble than pets. My phone changed sounds, announcing an actual live call. All right. No point in putting it off any longer. “Yes. Hello,” I said.

“It’s Simon. Playing hard to get?”

I tried to conjure up Doc’s face, but Doc-in-my-head had gone out to dinner. “No,” I said. “I’m no good at that.”

“Lucky me. Okay. You had questions.”

“Are you a DEA agent?”

“Hell, no. Where’d you get that idea?”

I sank to my knees, picking up dropped mail. “Thank God. So what do you do for a living?” A blast of cold heralded the arrival of people dressed in pilgrim hats, doing a rock rendition of “Simple Gifts” in three-part harmony.

“Is there a church service going on there?” Simon asked.

“Of sorts. I’m in the lobby of my building.”

“Go upstairs. Call me in ten minutes.”

I didn’t dwell on how he knew I lived on an upper floor; I was too relieved to know he was not in the Drug Enforcement Agency. Relief is a beautiful, underrated feeling. I reached my apartment and stuck my key in the lock.

The door was already unlocked.

Uh-oh.

I hesitated, my hand on the doorknob, thinking, Maybe I left the apartment unlocked this morning while Ruta’s voice yelled, Run. Run while you have the chance.

Too late.

From the other side of the door a voice called out, “Wollstonecraft? Is that you?” A voice I knew as well as my own.

“Yes, Mother,” I called back, closing my eyes. “It’s me.”