Dating is Murder (6 page)

6

T
he West Valley
Community Police Station was on Vanowen Street just west of Wilbur, in a neighborhood that hadn’t changed its socks since the 1950s. Cramped bungalows occupied tiny lots, tract houses in need of paint jobs, the kind I might one day afford. Yards were area rugs of patchy grass, a far cry from the lawns of the Quinn estate in Encino. Probably the only thing these people had in common with the Quinns, in fact, was this branch of the LAPD.

If I hadn’t been obsessed heading to San Pedro, I was edging toward it now. The encounter with Marty Otis had intrigued Joey, but it disturbed me; I hoped that laying it out for the police would quiet my anxiety.

The cops were housed in a series of trailers behind a green public library. Next to the library was the future police station, surrounded by a construction fence, a municipal project that might or might not reach completion during anyone’s lifetime. Joey and I circled the block twice before we found the interim parking lot, on a side street called Vanalden.

The main trailer was packed, which was to say there were six other citizens in there. At the head of the line, a woman wept as an officer across the counter took notes. Across the room another officer struggled to find English simple enough to be understood by the carjack victim she was interviewing. Near some vending machines a third officer advised a middle-aged couple in matching leather jackets about their elderly parent who liked to help herself to periodicals at a newsstand. A fourth officer canvassed the line, directing people the way they do at LAX, expediting things on a busy day.

“We’re here to file a missing person’s report,” I said when he reached us.

“For a child?” he asked.

“No, she’s nineteen. No one’s seen her for several days.”

The officer looked up at me. “Mentally ill?”

“No.”

“Any indication she was the victim of a crime?”

Thoughts of blackmail crossed my mind, anonymous calls to her au pair agency, threats of deportation. “Not yet,” I said. “But she wouldn’t just walk away from her job and her friends.” And her computer.

“Not much we can do. People do wander off. With nothing to go on . . . got a photo?”

“We can get one,” I said.

“Well, bring it in,” the officer said, “but it may not help much.”

“Can we file a report?” Joey asked.

“Yes, you could do that.” His tone indicated that this would be a waste of everyone’s time, but he pointed us to the officer across the room.

This woman was crisp but friendly, probably happy to be hearing her native tongue. She asked questions and wrote down answers on the requisite form, a single sheet of white paper. It depressed me, the things we didn’t know about Annika. We put her at five foot three, 115 pounds, but her birth date, identifying marks and characteristics, even jewelry were trickier. I recalled a red watch and silver hoop earrings. Joey thought she had a birthmark on a forearm. Neither of us knew the name of her dentist.

“So what happens now?” I asked as the officer finished writing.

“We send it next door to a detective.”

“Can we talk to him? Her?”

“I’m not sure who’ll be assigned, and if they’re in right now. Anyhow, there’s nothing they can tell you.”

“But if we were really horrible people,” Joey said, “and made a big scene and started yelling and demanded to see a detective, what would happen then?”

The officer looked up. “Then you’d get to see a detective.” She stood and called to her colleague manning the counter, “Who’s around next door? Anyone?”

“Cziemanski,” an officer called back, without looking up.

“Cziemanski,” she said, and pointed to the exit.

Detective Cziemanski worked
in a trailer marked “Detectives,” at one of twenty or so desks crammed into a small area. The carpet was the same teal blue as the one next door, but less worn and dirty. Both trailers gave the appearance of having outlasted their intended lifespan and maximum occupancy by 25 percent.

“Shum,” Detective Cziemanski said. “Shum
-man-
ski. Not Chum or Zum or Sum or Chime or Zime. Here’s what happens: I take this report, I see there’s no clear indication of a crime, so I send it to Missing Persons.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Parker Center. Downtown.” He ran a hand through his hair, or what would have been his hair had he had any, which he didn’t. His skull glowed as if oiled, reminding me of the White’s tree frog,
Litoria caerulea,
which I’d been researching for the mural. “They put it in the computer. I never see it again. Your friend turns up in a week or a month, and—. Okay, are you the type, when you can’t make a dinner reservation, you call the restaurant to cancel?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay, so you call me up to say she’s back, or she’s living in Bali with her boyfriend, and I say thanks for letting me know.” He smiled. His smile made him look younger, too guileless for a detective. His baldness made him look older but made his ears more prominent, which made him look younger again. I put him between twenty-nine and sixty.

“So you don’t investigate anything, and you’re just talking to us now to humor us?” Joey said.

“Yeah, pretty much. Next door sends people here, we send them back. Which is okay, I like talking to you. You seem rational, you’re clean, you’re worried about your friend. You’re also good looking, both of you, but I’m not supposed to say that. I think you can sue.”

Joey smiled. “That’s why you’re working in a trailer. All those sexual harassment lawsuits.” Joey had family in law enforcement. She was right at home here, even drinking the coffee, which smelled like it had been brewing as long as Cziemanski had been on the force.

“And if Annika doesn’t turn up?” I said. “Same scenario, except we don’t call to cancel the dinner reservation? We just wait around, year after year?”

“Unless she’s a juvenile, a criminal, or very elderly,” he said, “I’m limited. There’s no law against disappearing. As long as you’re not wanted for a crime, it is, as they say, a free country. Now, you report a lost kid, or a mentally handicapped person, we’re out there in numbers and we stay out till we find them. Or let’s say your friend’s a victim of domestic violence, her husband threatened to kill her last week—I take it that’s not the case?”

Joey and I looked at each other and shook our heads.

“Does she have a drug problem?”

“Maybe,” I said, at the same time that Joey said, “No.”

He looked back and forth at us. “What’d you have in mind for me to investigate?”

“I guess I figured you’d check out her known associates,” I said. “On the other hand, we’re her known associates.” There was also Maizie Quinn, who might feel compelled to show the police the drugs under Annika’s bed, and Marty Otis, who’d describe her as a liar and a felon. What if Annika showed up tomorrow and found herself, thanks to me, facing criminal charges and deportation? Maybe I hadn’t thought this through.

“We have to look at the odds,” Cziemanski said. “This kind of thing, she’s off in some time-share she forgot to tell you about. That’s how it pans out, usually.”

“Unless you’re Chandra Levy,” Joey said.

“Who?” Cziemanski and I said it at the same time.

“A few years back. She slept with a congressman and disappeared, and it was all over the news for weeks. And she turned up dead.”

“Did your friend sleep with a congressman?” Cziemanski asked.

“No,” I said, at the same time that Joey said, “Maybe.”

He looked back and forth between us.

Joey said, “Would it help if she did?”

“Sure,” Cziemanski said. “It’d help more if she
were
a congressman. Anything to set her apart from the other forty or fifty thousand missing Americans. Not including kids.”

“Forty or fifty thousand?” I said. “And she’s not even an American.”

“Well, then. Unless she’s wanted for war crimes, it’ll be tough getting anyone interested. You two the only ones worried about”—he looked at his report—“Annika Glück?”

My heart sank. “Except for some odd people on an odd TV show. And her mother.”

Detective Cziemanski folded the report in half, then unfolded it and added it to the mess on his desk. “I’ve got your numbers. Let me know if anything else turns up on your end. Meanwhile, I’ll look into it. But don’t get your hopes up.”

We walked out of the trailer to Joey’s husband’s BMW, shiny and sleek, a standout in a parking lot full of trucks, minivans, and nonluxury vehicles. “Amazing,” Joey said. “You go in expecting to hear ‘Let us handle this’ and instead, they all but deputize you. What fun.”

“I hate when people say ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ ” I said. “It’s as bad as saying, ‘Don’t give up hope.’ You either hope or you don’t, but you don’t adjust yourself like a toaster oven.”

Joey clicked her key at the BMW. “I’ll tell you what he hopes. Cziemanski’s hoping for a reason to call you, because that cop likes you.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“His name’s Peter. I read his reports upside down. He’ll ask you to call him Pete.”

“I’m not calling him Pete. I’m immune to—I’m still recovering from—”

“Doc. I know. But consider this: all we need for Cziemanski to work Annika’s case is one or two suspects. So first we hand him the boyfriend—cops always suspect the spouse or the lover. Then we offer an alternate: Marty Au Pair. Give me a minute, I’ll make up something incriminating about him.”

“I’m all for finding the boyfriend,” I said. “But you’re wrong, Joey. It’s not suspects Cziemanski wants, it’s a crime. Dollars to doughnuts, nobody’s going to care about Annika Glück until we come up with a dead body.”

7

I
f there’s anything
trickier than finding a missing person, it’s finding the boyfriend of the missing person when all you have to go on is “Rico.”

We called Annika’s mother from Joey’s car, on the 101 freeway. It was three
P.M.
in L.A., midnight in Germany, but I figured Mrs. Glück wouldn’t be sleeping well, and I was right. All she could tell us about Rico, though, whose last name she didn’t know, was that he was a “goat boy.” There aren’t a lot of goats that need tending in Southern California, so I decided she meant “good boy.” I told her I’d call when I had news, and hung up before her lamentations could put me over the edge. I was worrying quite well on my own.

I tried Maizie Quinn, on the chance that she’d recalled Rico’s last name. A human answered—Lupe, the housekeeper, who said Mrs. Quinn was at her sushi class. When I hung up, my phone rang. I answered it and was met with silence, the kind that signals a telemarketer about to take a stab at your name. Did telemarketers call cell phones?
“Hello,”
I repeated.

“Wollie Shelley?”

“Yes.”

“Just checking.”

That was the whole conversation. I said hello again, then did something I must’ve picked up from the movies: I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it.

“What?” Joey said. “Who was it?”

“No idea.” I shook my head, disoriented. An electrical current of sorts was running through me, shaking me up despite the prosaic nature of the words. It jogged my memory. “Wait, I’ve got it. His last name. It’s Feynman.”

“Annika’s boyfriend?” Joey said. “Rico Feynman?”

“Well, she called him Richard. It was after one of our tutorials. We were at the coffee bar, and I was going to walk her to her car, but she was going to wait around, she had a date. I said, ‘A nice guy, I hope?’ Because we’d been talking about our tendency to fall for the wrong kind of guy, and she told me not to worry, this one was a fine man. Literally. That was his last name. Feynman. She spelled it out.”

“Did you meet him?”

“No,” I said. “I walked by the coffee bar an hour later and looked in the window. She was reading a book. I wondered if he’d stood her up. Did Annika ever talk about this guy to you?”

Joey took the Laurel Canyon exit south, toward L.A. “No, but I know she brought him to the set to visit. I heard Savannah talk about him. Did I tell you, Elliot and Larry want me on the set every night from now on? Like my presence will improve ratings. The only thing that will improve our ratings is Elvis showing up as a guest expert. Sorry. Is Elvis a sensitive topic? I saw you crying in the grocery store when ‘Suspicious Minds’ was on the Muzak.”

“No. That was just—Fritos. I used to buy them for Ruby; they’re hard to get in Japan.”

I missed twelve-year-old Ruby with a persistence that surprised me. I wondered if that’s why I was reacting so strongly to Annika’s disappearance—she’d filled that place left empty by Ruby. I missed Doc, too, but in a different way. It was no longer like an ice pick through my heart to think about the hundred or so sexual encounters with my ex-fiancé. Sometimes I had to work to recall the sound of his laugh, the way his hands looked on a steering wheel, the feel of his beard stubble against my face. I had no erotic stirrings for anyone else, though, let alone that rampant libidinous hunger, where you fantasize about the NBA, or random heads of state on the front page of the paper, or the checkout clerks at Costco.

Yet. Fredreeq said it would happen again. Joey too. That’s what friends do, they keep a grasp on reality when you’re stuck down some emotional rabbit hole . . .

“Joey,” I said. “Annika might not’ve talked to us about Rico, but she talked to friends her own age. The other au pairs. Glenda, the counselor, even complained about it.”

“Do you know their names?”

I racked my brain. Berta? “One took care of twins,” I said. “That’s all I remember. And I can’t ask Glenda—she was very nervous talking to me at all. She kept saying she was a volunteer, as if that were some neurological problem.”

“I’ll get her talking,” Joey said. “Tell me about her.”

Minutes later Joey was calling Williams-Sonoma, doing what she called gagging, impersonating someone on the phone. She adopted a British accent. “Ms. Nacy? I’m Caroline Maxwell-Grace, with the Department of State in Washington. Your name was mentioned by Martin Otis of Au Pairs par Excellence as an Outstanding Community Counselor. . . . Yes. . . . So we’re adding you to our list of national finalists, one of whom we’ll honor with a—an honorarium.” Joey slammed on the brakes, honking at a car coming to a sudden stop at Mulholland. “At a banquet. Attended by the secretary of state. . . . Pardon? . . . Funny how many Americans don’t know the secretary of state.” Joey turned to me, her face a plea.

I went blank. The secretary of state? I shook my head at her.

“As Henry Kissinger used to say, Beg pardon?” Joey looked at me again, eyebrows raised. “Cappuccino machine? I’m sorry, I already—ah. Aha . . .” Glenda’s voice could be heard chirping away. The car ahead of us inched forward. We inched too. Joey said, “Safe to talk now? Right-oh. I do apologize for calling your work. Now: we’re sending a field agent to California to gather testimonials, so which of your host families would you prefer us to interview? I understand there are three assigned to you . . .”

Horns honked on Laurel Canyon, angered by the standstill. “Mr. Otis
does
authorize you to make this decision, or he would not have had us—” Outside my window, a convertible was creating a new lane on the shoulder of the road. “By all means, confer with him, but my problem is, further delay may prevent my field agent reaching your people. You know what let’s do? I’ll order a cappuccino machine for my office staff. As you write up the order, think about which of your host families we should speak with. How does that sound?”

I rummaged through Joey’s bag for a credit card, and handed it over as Joey made up an address for the State Department. She repeated names and neighborhoods and thanked Glenda, ending the call. “She doesn’t have the numbers on her,” Joey told me. “We’ll try information. If they’re not listed, we’ll just have to bludgeon Marty Otis for them.”

In San Marino there was a listing for R. Dobbler. After a fast phone call and an illegal U-turn, we were headed back to the Ventura Freeway.

San Marino street
sweepers run a tight ship: no fallen leaf was allowed to loiter in the stately, silent residential neighborhood. “Is the whole town like this?” I asked.

“Smug wealth?” Joey nodded. “What do these people do? That’s what I want to know. Back in Nebraska, there’s money, but everyone knows where it comes from. You drive down a street like this, you say, That guy’s chief of staff at Saint Elizabeth’s, that family owns five car dealerships. . . . Even Beverly Hills, you can point to a house and say
Lethal Weapons Seven, Eight
and
Nine
bought that. Here, who knows? They must commute to L.A., right? There can’t be enough business here to support this.”

“The really rich don’t go to work,” I said.

“But these aren’t even the really rich, these are the medium rich. The really rich don’t have houses you can see from the street.” Joey shook her head. “I lead a life my family back home can’t comprehend, but next to this, I’m the working poor.”

The Dobbler family’s was a Spanish-style mansion. We parked in the driveway under a basketball hoop and stepped around bicycles and skateboards to the entrance. I was glad there were no signs of smaller offspring, being acutely baby-sensitive these days. Joey knocked on the rustic wooden double front doors with iron door knockers. The girl who answered verged on womanhood, in low-slung blue jeans and a peasant shirt. Her white-blond hair was a perfect match for her porcelain skin and pale eyebrows.

“I am Britta,” she said. “You are the friends of Annika?” Her accent was so like Annika’s it unnerved me.

We followed her to a large, antiseptic kitchen. We sat in a breakfast nook around an octagonal table set with five woven placemats. Britta didn’t offer us refreshments. She said she had only twenty minutes before the two Dobbler boys returned from swim practice.

“You’ve heard that Annika is gone?” I said.

“No, I didn’t hear this.” She seemed almost excited by the news. “She is sent back?”

“To Germany? No,” I said. “Why would you think that?”

A look of doubt crossed her face. “
Ja,
okay. I don’t know. I just thought.”

“That she was sent away? You don’t think she’d leave on her own?”

“No, of course not.” Britta opened her eyes wide. They were blue-green, too close together for beauty, but in combination with her white-blond hair, striking. “Her situation is very good, just one girl to care for, and the host family very nice. She can drive the car everywhere, whenever she likes.” This seemed to be a thorn in Britta’s side.

“You don’t get to drive?” Joey asked.

“The insurance is very expensive. So for some host families it is not expected that the au pair will drive. For example, here the housekeeper will drive the children to school and activities. Also, the housekeeper will drive me, for example to English class.”

I could see what a tragedy that could be, stuck without wheels in a neighborhood with all the excitement of a golf course. “So Annika was happy in the U.S.?” I said.

“Yes, why not? Everything was very lucky for her. She drove a car just for her, not even to share with the family. She never had to ask—if she had free time, she could just drive it.”

“And then there was Annika’s boyfriend,” I said, to distract her from her automobile envy. “She wouldn’t want to leave him, I suppose?”

“Rico.” She cheered up instantly. “Of course she would not leave Rico Rodriguez.”

“Rodriguez?” I said. “That was his name?”

“Yes.”

“Not—Feynman?”

“Who?”

I looked at Joey. “Another man she—was friends with. Also named Richard.”

“Rico’s forename is Richard.” Britta laughed. “But he calls himself Rico, to annoy his father. He says that Rico is the only Spanish word his father knows. He is so funny.”

“Is he a student?” I asked.

“Yes, at Pepperdine. He is very smart, but he has little time for studies, because he is popular and goes to many parties and has many interests as well.”

“Like Annika,” Joey said. Britta looked blank. “She had many outside interests too.”

“
Ja,
okay,” Britta said. “She has a car, you see.”

“So,” I said, “Rico has a lot of friends? Girls as well as boys?”

Britta nodded and smiled. “Everyone loves Rico. He is completely great.”

“Do you think Annika might be staying with him?” Joey asked.

Britta stopped smiling and considered this. Then she shook her head. “The university, it is strict Christian. The mans and the womans, it is not permitted that they are in the same room, for example, after midnight or perhaps one o’clock. So Annika would not be there. Also, Rico has roommates. There is no space.” The thought seemed to bring relief, and she looked at us again, awaiting the next question. She was an accommodating interviewee, I thought, and a remarkably incurious one. And one who knew a lot about her girlfriend’s boyfriend.

“Do you think Annika did drugs?” Joey said.

She found this startling. “Oh, no. Annika? She is very . . . I do not know in English.
Vernünftig.
You could say, rational. . . . But in any case, no drugs.” A troubled look came over her face. She nibbled on a nail.

“Would you happen to have Rico’s telephone number?” I asked.

Britta looked at her watch, a large-dial pink plastic job, as easy to read as she was.
“Ja,
okay. I be right back.” She took off at a jog, the sound of footsteps receding quickly.

“Well, there’s another neighborhood heard from,” Joey said. “She doesn’t think Annika’s a druggie any more than we do. And I wonder who this Feynman guy is. I don’t really see Annika playing the field.” She jumped up and opened a kitchen cupboard, revealing glassware. She closed that and tried another, a pantry jammed with enough food to keep a family of four snacking for a month. “Just curious,” she said. “Don’t you love how people eat?” She was headed for the refrigerator when we heard the footsteps returning. She took her seat.

“So where do you think Annika might have gone?” I asked Britta as she bounded in, a daisy-motif address book in hand. “We’ve talked to her mother. She’s not in Germany.”

“I do not know. Perhaps San Francisco. Or Disney World. Look, we made this picture only one month ago.” She handed us a snapshot of three people, arms around each other. I recognized Annika, her face turned away. The boy in the middle towered over the girls, smiling at a glowing Britta. He was out of focus but clearly tall and dark, and possibly handsome. I handed the photo to Joey. She took a look and handed it to Britta, who smiled and traced over it with one finger before placing it carefully back in the address book. I asked Britta if she had another photo of Annika; she didn’t.

She copied Rico’s number in loopy, back-slanted handwriting, and asked that we send him her love, and tell him he should call her. She also gave us the number for Hitomi, the au pair in Palos Verdes, but saw little point in us contacting her. “She is not social,” Britta said. “Also, she is Japanese.”

She did not seem especially worried about her friend and compatriot. She was, as Joey observed walking out to the car, considerably interested in the sudden availability of Rico Rodriguez.

The next day I would find out why.