Dating Is Murder

“Last night?”

“Larrabee. Outside my-” Don’t say “apartment,” dummy. Maybe he doesn’t realize you live there. “-friend Hubie’s apartment.”

He said nothing.

“So,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

Mulholland was quiet. Then an owl hooted. He spoke. His voice was conversational. “I’d like to think I made an impression on you the last time we met.”

“You did.”

“Yet here we are.”

He had nice breath. That’s unusual, when someone’s very close to you and you don’t know them and you find their breath appealing. It happens with babies, of course, but not often with people over the age of four. “Okay,” I said, “I have a question. When you told me to back off, did you-”

“I said ‘back off’?”

I thought about it. “Or ‘buzz off.’ ”

“I wouldn’t have said ‘buzz off.’ ”

No, he wasn’t the type. He was the type who dresses up for an airplane flight. “Back off, buzz off, words to that effect,” I said. “You didn’t say what from.”

The blue of his eyes was purple in the dark. He smelled like soap, like he’d just showered. For Saturday night. Such an intimate smell. “From what,” I amended. Maybe if I could keep my prepositions in their proper places, my thoughts would follow.

“What is that you’re holding?” he asked. “Price tag’s still on it.”

I looked down at my hand. “This is a meat mallet. I’ve been meaning to return it.” I put the silver gadget back in the Williams-Sonoma bag.

“What were you doing downtown this morning near Temple Street?”

“Looking for the morgue.”

That surprised him. After a moment he nodded. “I want you to rewind a week,” he said. “Go back to Sunday.”

“Okay.” Sunday: paying bills, clipping coupons, researching frogs, that leftover piece of quiche, so disappointing because of the soggy crust…

“Now stay there.”

I stared. “What the heck does that mean? Stay in Sunday?”

He turned to check out the traffic, which did not exist, or maybe to check out the owl. The owl quieted. He turned back. “Monday you showed up on my radar. I want you to drop off again.”

“Why don’t you just turn off the radar?”

“You don’t turn off radar.”

“Fine. I’m not a radiologist-”

“Physicist.”

“-but you’ll have to get more explicit about this problem you’re having.”

He leaned in very close. “You’re the problem I’m having. Think about the bad things you do. Then stop doing them.”

I blushed. I didn’t even know what I was blushing about. “I… um.”

His eyes were looking at my mouth. Was there food on it? When had I last eaten? No, there was nothing on my mouth but a pair of lips. Could it be he was going to kiss me? Was there something I’d said that made him think I wanted him to?

Did I want him to?

And then he was gone, a shadow in the moonlight, heading back to his car. But there was an echo of the thing he’d said so softly I wasn’t sure if he’d said it or if I’d just thought it. Five words.

“Forget you ever met her.”

17

I drove toward West Hollywood in a daze. “Forget you ever met her,” he’d said.

Forget her? I couldn’t forget him, and I didn’t even know him.

I replayed our conversations. For some reason this man wanted me to give up looking for A

Okay, he was on my radar now.

The question was, Why was I on his? Why bother with me? It’s not like I was doing such a bang-up job of finding A

Unless I was closer than I knew. Maybe I’d ruffled someone’s feathers asking about her. Not Marty Otis: I couldn’t imagine this man, this blue-eyed force of nature, in the employ of rabbity little Marty.

But I didn’t have to worry about it tonight. He was done for the night, unless he suddenly remembered another cryptic utterance he had to make. I should give him my phone number, save him some gas. Maybe he had it, I thought, remembering the recent hang-ups.

Waitaminute.

The guy lurking last night on Larrabee-when I’d alluded to the incident, Mr. Tall had said, “Last night?” like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

He didn’t know what I was talking about. They weren’t partners.

Someone else was following me too.

The thought made me swerve. Get a grip, I told myself, clutching the wheel. I hated this Integra, Doc’s hand-me-down. It swerved too easily. I checked the rearview mirror. Yes, there was a car behind me. Two cars, four, endless cars, hundreds of people following me, a nocturnal procession. When we got out of the canyon into the flat part of Beverly Hills, my cell phone rang, alerting me to missed calls. Three. All from Fredreeq. I called her back, with compulsive glances into the rearview mirror.

“Joey told me we have another stalker situation,” she said. “She waited for you to call back and now she’s having sex with her husband, so I’m taking over. You home?”

“No. Car. Sunset. Beverly Hills. Fredreeq, I’m scared to go home. There was someone outside the apartment last night and-”

“I’ll talk you through this. Francis and I are at a bowling alley with Franceen’s sixth-grade class. We got eight more frames. That should get you parked and inside the apartment and you can check all your closets.”

“What if I don’t make it, what if-”

“I hear any screaming, I put you on hold and call 911.”

“That’s ridiculous, it’ll be too late-”

“It won’t be too late, because it won’t happen. I’m not saying you’re not being followed, but I know nothing bad will happen this week. I just did your chart. Nobody gets hurt with the two major trines you got going.”

Astrology. I have no firm opinion on its merits, but Fredreeq was willing to put my life on the line for it. She talked trines and sextiles and a bunch of other mathematical-sounding jargon while I made random turns on the sleepy blocks of Elevado, Linden, and Carmelita. Then I was back on Sunset, heading west, reasonably sure I’d lost anyone who wasn’t following me from a hot-air balloon.

I was still on the phone an hour later. I was in bed, holding a package of Pepperidge Farm cookies and dressed in my signs-of-the-zodiac fla

“Pick you up at ten-thirty tomorrow,” Fredreeq said. “Lights out now. No math, no frogs. You need your beauty sleep.”

I may have needed it, but not even the threat of waking up as Tammy Faye Bakker could get me to sleep at that moment. I said good-bye, the face of the blue-eyed man rising in front of me, as if he’d been lounging on the edge of my consciousness, eavesdropping, waiting to take center stage and obsess me some more.

I saw him in his polo shirt, and then in his suit. I saw him in the fluorescence of the minimall and the moonlight of Mulholland. I thought of all the ways I’d seen him and expanded on that, imagining him in a grocery store picking out produce, in a movie theater eating popcorn, in my kitchen.

I saw him in boxer shorts, kicking back on the sofa, watching CNN.

My God. I opened my package of cookies. What was happening to me?

My eyes wandered to a bookcase across the room, to a photo of Doc and Ruby. Black Irish, dark hair, infectious smiles, both. This is your fault, I told them. I wouldn’t be having these kinds of thoughts if you guys hadn’t left me.