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 A

“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, A

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? A

A blast of cold air hit. I steered the car toward the campus exit. Joey wrapped her ski

“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 A

“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 A

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.”