Dating Is Murder

“Okay, you, jump in your car seat,” Michelle said. She opened the Jeep and her son climbed in the back. She reached into her glove compartment, withdrew a business card, and handed it to me. “In case you find her and she’s in trouble. I did estate pla

Michelle’s words rang in my ears. I dialed A

No one picked up the phone.

The answering machine wasn’t on.

Mrs. Glück seemed, in fact, to have disappeared.

There were no horned frogs on my mural. I realized this as I changed into an old pair of Doc’s sweatpants at the Mansion. I was not fond of the grumpy, ca

I found a place over the vegetable sink for a Chaco horned frog, Ceratophrys cranwelli, and set to work. To achieve the mottled effect of the Chaco’s brown-on-beige markings, I needed a daub cloth, and I was searching the Mansion for a rag when I recalled something else about the Chaco. And about A

It was nearly the last time I’d seen her. She’d been looking through one of my frog books, lying on the floor of my apartment. “How do you call this one?” she’d asked. “Chay-ko, like the drug lord?”

I’d told her my guess was Chock-o, more Spanish-sounding, since the frogs were South American. And then, wondering why a drug lord would be a point of reference, I’d asked what her interest in Tcheiko was.

“He grew up in East Berlin,” she’d said. “We hear of him, even before-but he is so evil, this man, and scary-” And then she’d changed the subject, visibly disturbed. I’d wanted to tell her she wasn’t responsible for every bad egg who ever lived in Berlin.

I wondered about this now, thinking about the bedroom eyes I’d seen in International Celeb, but the thoughts troubled me, and I tried to focus on work. I tore off one leg of Doc’s sweatpants below the knee, creating a daub cloth. If I’d had a degree in graphic arts, maybe I’d be better equipped for this kind of work, instead of making up tools as I went along. Not that it was a big sacrifice; the sweatpants were spattered with saffron-colored paint and destined for the ragbag anyway. Which would please Fredreeq.

What wouldn’t please Fredreeq was me stopping for gas on the way home, in full view of Ventura Boulevard at rush hour, without changing back into my “good” sweats. While the gas pumped, I went for the squeegee. A dirty car is a moral issue in L.A., making my Integra a degenerate. A sports car pulled up behind me-strange, considering there were four empty self-serve islands at the station. I turned toward it.

The car was clean. Metallic. A grille like a flyswatter.

A man got out of the car. Tall. Very tall.

The Guy. The Mulholland menace. My heart started thump thump thumping away, the blood sprinting through my veins.

If I dove into my car and drove off, would the pump go with me or would the hose disengage, spraying gas all over Ventura Boulevard? What about my gas cap?

The man walked toward me. Long strides. Relaxed.

What should’ve concerned me was that we were the only ones here at the gas station-not counting the clerk inside, who wasn’t paid enough to intervene, should this encounter turn dangerous. What did concern me, of course, was how I looked.

He stopped in front of me, inches away, and settled against my extremely dirty car, hands in pockets. A beautifully casual pose, like a clothing ad.

“Hello,” I said. It came out crackly. I cleared my throat. “Hello. Again.”

“Hello.”

I could sense his body temperature. Standing this close to someone signaled impending contact: Teeth cleaning. An eye exam. Assault.

A kiss.

This preoccupation with kissing: could I be coming down with a psychiatric disorder, some late-onset obsessive-compulsive stress-induced-

“You’re dripping.”

“I beg your pardon?” I looked down to see the windshield squeegee raining soapy water onto my pants, my saffron-spotted sweatpants, cut off below the knee on the left side, as if I’d borrowed them from a peg-leg pirate.

He reached out and took the squeegee and set to work on my windshield.

I stood, lumplike. Another person would’ve asked what kind of stalker cleans his victim’s windshield, but not me because I was too busy watching his forearms flex. He wore a pale yellow dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His arms were muscular, ta

Why on earth was he doing this? Why wasn’t I asking?

He finished, returned the squeegee to its water pail, and instead of using the paper-towel dispenser, wiped his hand on the back of his pants, which made me like him more. They were beautiful pants, charcoal, well-fitting, knife-creased, worn with a belt I recognized as a Cartier. Not that I was staring, I told myself. It’s just sad, having a stalker so much better dressed than oneself.

“Shall I check the oil?”

I dragged my eyes from his lower anatomy to his face. “No, thanks. I already did that this year.”

He smiled. His face wasn’t hard after all. How had this happened? “I was wrong about you,” he said. “You’re a very good girl, aren’t you?”

I winced. Guys did not, in general, fall for very good girls, any more than girls went for very nice guys. I tried to keep the defensive note out of my voice. “Sometimes I leave shopping carts in the parking lot instead of returning them to their racks.”

An eyebrow went up.

“Sometimes I eat grapes in the produce section. I tell myself it’s to make sure they’re not sour, but after the first eight or ten, I lose credibility. Also, I read magazines I don’t buy.”

“Is all your bad behavior grocery based?”

“I don’t rotate my tires.”

We were flirting. How could we be flirting?

He disengaged the gas nozzle from the Integra with a little flip, sending drops of gasoline flying. It struck me how masculine a gas nozzle is, how feminine a gas tank-how had this escaped my attention my whole life, the sexual nature of pumping gas? He pressed a button on the credit card pad, screwed on my gas cap, then took the receipt that popped out of the machine and handed it to me. “Going home?”

“What?” I was completely distracted by the sex act I’d just witnessed.

“Go home. Take Sepulveda; Coldwater’s bad right now, Beverly Glen too. Freeway’s worse.” He went to the driver’s door and opened it.

I just stood, staring.

“Unless,” he said, “you need to stop at the store for a quick crime spree?”

I shook my head, less in response than to disperse the fog of bewilderment. I felt a horizontal gravitational pull toward him. I resisted it.

“Come,” he said.

I stopped resisting. I can’t say why. I got into the car, and he shut the door after me, gently, then leaned down and in.

“Who are you?” I said.

He smiled. That was it. It changed his whole face. “I’ll call you when you’re home,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

I did not go home. I might’ve had a mental disorder, I might’ve been under the effect of toxic gas fumes, but I’m not a lemming; I don’t just go home because tall, well-dressed strangers with strong opinions about routes tell me to. I went west on Ventura, because that’s the direction my car was facing, coming out of the gas station. When he passed me and speeded up, that metallic sports car weaving in and out of traffic like a movie stunt car, I did a clumsy U-turn and went on with my life.