Dating Is Murder

My nose was ru

Maizie stood. “She shouldn’t have raised such a selfish kid. I’m sorry for her, I truly am, but everyone’s got a mother-you can’t let that stop you. I have a child.” She glanced at her watch. She was like Bing, ready to yell “Cut!” the minute the conversation palled.

“Capricorn,” I said breathlessly. “Emma’s the Capricorn. The logo on your pills.”

Maizie smiled. “Yes. Emma.” There was a counter between us, a white counter, sparkling clean, no trace of the blood that must have spattered here from Rico Rodriguez going through a saw. “Because you know what real euphoria is? An epidural, after fourteen hours of labor. And then the prize. My Emma. Giving birth to my baby was the best day of my life.”

“Maizie,” I said. “She’s so wonderful.”

“Thank you. You’d have been a good mom, too, Wollie. I’m sorry, I had no idea you’d keep at this the way you did. And you figured out a lot. Surprisingly. Not to be offensive, but you just don’t look that smart. I think it’s your hair.”

“I suppose-” I cleared my throat. “If I didn’t want to take this-fen-”

“Fentanyl,” she said, and her hand once more reached into her denim apron pocket. She drew out the gun. It was small. Black. “It’s a twenty-two. It’s all I could find; Gene’s always walking off with the keys to the gun cabinet. It’ll do the job, I just can’t guarantee how fast, and you could be conscious the whole way out. And consider the mess. I don’t have time to clean and even if Lupe were here, I couldn’t ask her, she’s Catholic. And it’s loud. The room’s insulated, assuming the trapdoor worked. It should close automatically-” Maizie walked over to the spiral staircase, heels clicking across the white tile floor. I looked around frantically, but there was no place to run, hide, no door, nothing. A weapon, then, something, anything. I tried a kitchen cabinet. Locked. Each cabinet had little locks.

How had she pulled this off, how could no one know about this, the police, the FBI-

They did know. She hadn’t pulled it off. For the second time in an hour I felt like the stupidest person alive. Simon had tried in every way he could to prevent this. There was no crime going on at Biological Clock except bad TV; he’d “recruited” me to distract me. He’d done everything but glue my feet to Santa Monica Boulevard to keep me away from here.

But here I was.

Where was he?

The house must be under surveillance, bugged, the phones tapped-that’s how it worked, right? Agents must be in a van on the street, listening to everything we’d been saying, getting it all on tape, maybe waiting for the right moment to come rushing in-

Now would be a good time! I wanted to yell.

Maizie climbed back down the spiral staircase with a smile. “Okay, all insulated. Wollie, don’t be difficult. It’s like Emma’s pink medicine. She always thinks it will taste bad, but it doesn’t. This could be so easy.”

Simon wasn’t coming. Not that my opinion of men is low, but in my experience, the cavalry doesn’t show up just because you need them. If Simon was listening, he wouldn’t be listening, he’d be in here already, he’d be in here at the first mention of guns and whatever Maizie kept yapping about in that Tupperware. He wouldn’t use me for bait or for evidence gathering. He wouldn’t use me, period.

Simon! I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream, period.

He wasn’t here because he wasn’t listening, because this was a soundproof room, with no telephone, and a secret entrance that no one, not even a state-of-the-art good guy knew about. And they didn’t know I was here because my car was parked blocks away and I’d used the back-gate entrance that UPS knew about, but the FBI maybe didn’t, since my hostess had neglected to fax the FBI a map and, most of all, they didn’t know I was here because they all thought I was heading to Biological Clock.

“Shouldn’t we do this in your car, Maizie? Or mine? If you’re going to use my car to dump my body, wouldn’t it be easier if I’m already in it?”

“No,” she said, growing exasperated, “because then when I dump you, I’d have to drag you in one piece and it would attract attention. We went over that. Also, you’d be easy to ID, they could determine time of death-no. Trust me, it creates more problems than it solves.”

“I see.” I seemed to be both shivering and sweating now, and then I sneezed; it was as though my body were ru

I loved you too, Doc said back. I just loved my kid more.

“One last thing,” I said. “Where’s A

“Wollie, it’s so ironic. She killed herself. She left me a suicide note the day she left. I just couldn’t show anyone; it was too incriminating.”

That’s not true, I thought, wrapping my arms around myself to fend off hysteria. A

I held myself tighter and felt something in my jean jacket, in the pocket. Hard.

I slipped my hand in my pocket. Cold. One of the things I’d bought at Williams-Sonoma. The meat mallet. I could feel the tiny string on it, attached to the small rectangular price tag.

Words began to run through my head like voice-mail messages.

Crotch, neck, soft parts of the face. Seth, from Krav Maga.

I couldn’t do that. I don’t even do sit-ups.

You do what you have to do to stay alive. Ruta, my childhood babysitter.

A

If you’re not dead, you’re not done. Seth.

“Can I look at it?” I said, my voice squeaky and high, like little Emma. “The fentanyl?”

Maizie took a seat and pushed the small Tupperware container toward me.

My left hand worked the lid, my right hand staying in my pocket. I couldn’t believe she didn’t notice, but she didn’t. I was shaking so badly that when I pushed the Tupperware back across the counter, it wouldn’t go in a straight path. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get it open.”

Of course she tried to open it for me. She was a mom. The Tupperware lid was tough, though. She needed both hands to pry it off. She held on to the gun but, still, she used both hands, and so then she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at the Tupperware.

This was it. Now or never. A last voice played in my head. A moment. You can’t hesitate or you lose your nerve. The voice was Maizie’s.

Some force reached into my pocket and pulled out the silver meat mallet with my hand attached to it. I don’t know what you’d call it, some phenomenon of physics or biology stretching across a white Formica counter to bring the full weight of an arm onto someone’s neck, head, shoulder, ear, cheekbone, not once, not even twice, but enough times to make her fall from the stool she sat on, onto the white tile floor. When that happened, I stopped.

The blows stopped, but the cries didn’t, the raw sounds a throat can make, somewhere between a scream and a sob that I finally recognized as coming from my own body, not hers.