Dating Is Murder

“In math, not German,” I said. “What was it you just said?”

“Oh.” He gri

Something nibbled at my memory banks. “How does it go?”

“Well, she told me not to try picking up German girls with it, they’d laugh at me.”

I smiled. “Why? What’s it mean?”

“Okay.” He smiled again, dimples showing. “Alle meine Entchen-that’s, uh, all my little duckies-Schwimmen auf dem See, schwimmen auf dem See-swimming in the sea, swimming in the sea-Köpfchen in das Wasser, Schwänzchen in die Höh, heads in the water, tails in the air. Okay, the plot’s weak, but you know what? It helped. I aced my German final. She’ll be so jazzed. Bin ich nicht gut? Hey, do you know, is she out of town?”

With a shake of the head, I told him what was going on, and watched his face fall.

“Disappeared? You’re kidding,” he said. “That is, like, so weird.”

“Yeah, it is weird.”

“Yeah.” He gazed off, clearly troubled. “The last time I saw her was right here. Well, there. In front of the bookstore. Man, you wa

“But-!”

“Can’t slow down,” he yelled over his shoulder.

I loped after him. I hate loping. It attracts stares. “Troy! Wait up!” I yelled. Also, I wasn’t in loping shape. Especially after Krav Maga.

Happily, Troy wasn’t in shape either. He slowed, I caught up with him, and we switched to racewalking. “Jeez,” he said. “Gotta get to… the gym… more.”

“Me too,” I said. “So what’s ‘really weird’ about A

He held up a hand, battling for breath. “Confidential.”

I said, “I already know she was looking for a lawyer, and a gun, that she worried about disappearing into the criminal justice system-”

He stopped. “No shit?”

I stopped too. Nodded.

“Okay, shit.” He was panting heavily. “Not good. I was the one who told her this could happen. This means-what? It means she did what I told her not to. Unless she’d done it already. You know, I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t talk about this.”

“Troy.” I fought for breath and patience. “I have no idea what you’re not talking about, but as I seem to be the only person in North America looking for her, anything you know-please. Please, please, please.”

Troy veered to the right, and I veered with him, still racewalking. We passed the facilities maintenance building. “Okay,” he said. “I told her about how my roommate’s brother in Chicago got in trouble with the Feds because he lent his cell phone to someone who was part of a drug deal that was going down. He disappeared-”

“The drug dealer?”

“No, my roommate’s brother. The Feds arrested him on conspiracy, and he didn’t get a phone call, so no one knew where he was. For, like, two weeks. Of course, he’s Iranian.”

“Your roommate’s brother?”

“My roommate too. Second generation. No accent whatsoever, and not even Moslem or Muslim or whatever, but they busted him anyway. He’s doing time now.”

“For conspiracy.” I was struggling to follow the story. “How’s this tie in to A

“Man, she’s German. The Feds totally have it in for Germans. And the French.”

“Why would she even come to their attention? She’s an au pair in Encino.”

Troy looked at me, then away. We’d reached an old, fairly ugly brick building. He took the stairs two at a time, and at the top grasped a railing to recover, breathing hard. Apparently he wasn’t here on an athletic scholarship. “She wouldn’t,” he said, “come to their attention. If she was smart. That’s what I told her.”

The conversation couldn’t have been less clear if it were in German. “Does this have to do with guns? Or drugs? Or a guy named Feynman?”

Troy said nothing. My heartbeat, already in the anaerobic range, beat faster. I could see him teetering on the fence: to tell or not to tell. He glanced inside the glass door of the building.

“Please, Troy,” I said. “I’m not the Feds, I’d never talk to the Feds, I’m practically a Socialist; heck, I’m a Communist. Well, in the area of universal health care.”

He looked at the people hurrying into the building, then back at me. “She wanted to know about-the drug scene on campus, how you’d score stuff. So I told her the thing with my roommate’s brother. I told her, Don’t even go there. Keep your nose clean.”

“What kind of drugs was she interested in scoring?”

“She said she was just asking, but why do you ask about them unless you want them, know what I mean?”

“Troy, what kind of drugs?”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “Euphoria.”

It was a sister drug to Ecstasy, only a warmer, fuzzier trip, he said, a way more happy trip. As my knowledge of Ecstasy was limited, this was not really helpful. I remembered when you got ecstasy through transcendental meditation, when a rave was a good review, when euphoria was a guy you liked liking you back. How i

Troy hadn’t done Euphoria himself, he assured me, but it was the Next Big Thing. Very hard to get. U4. He drew the nickname in the air with his finger. And then he went to class.

And I went to my assessment test. The office was open. I put drug thoughts aside long enough to state my intention to a girl in capri pants and an SMC sweatshirt, who led me into a small room and set me up at a computer terminal.

Fredreeq believed my stars were so aligned today as to make a multiple-choice test impossible to fail. I considered what Vaclav had suggested about religion, that mere belief conferred an advantage. Why not try to believe in astrology? I cleared my mind of its kaleidoscope of concerns and focused on the computer screen. Amazingly, I sailed through the first two levels of questions. A

What? I didn’t even understand the question. A buzzing sounded in my brain, a phenomenon that occurs when people talk to me about auto mechanics, computer programming, or compound interest rates. Next would come singing fairy voices and hummingbirds and bu

Concentrate, Wollie, I told myself. You’re a grown woman, you once operated a small business, you can set your VCR to record. How hard can this be, really?

I decided to pick the answer that looked prettiest: D. (csc2 ø) – 1

The next problem, number 14, asked, “From a point on the ground the angle of elevation to a ledge on a building is 27 degrees, and the distance to the base of the building is 45 meters, blah, blah, blah” and had a diagram next to it that looked like either a treehouse or a club sandwich. I chose answer B, for Believe in the Stars. After that, I didn’t bother reading questions; I just went straight for the answers. This astrology thing either worked or it didn’t.

In this case, it didn’t.

I headed to Rex and Tricia’s Mansion, fully depressed. Having flunked the assessment test, I was now doomed to take Maths 81 through 21, a course at a time, followed by endless science classes, which would keep me on SMC’s grubby campus until menopause set in.

At a standstill on the 405 North, I dialed Britta again, and this time she answered the phone. She couldn’t see me after three P.M., as personal visitors were forbidden when she was working. With difficulty, I persuaded her to see me in the next hour, while her charges were still in school. Tricia’s frogs would have to wait.