Dating is Murder (10 page)

13

A
s soon as
I turned up Larrabee, I became aware of him, the sound of his shoes on the sidewalk. The back of my neck tingled. My shoulders tensed. I speeded up. This made my own footsteps louder, so I focused on walking softly. Yes, there they were. Shoes. Hard soles on concrete.

I dropped my backpack, then crouched to pick it up.

His footsteps stopped. I turned.

He was ten yards behind me.

Waiting.

I froze.

What to do? My apartment was blocks away. My fingers unfroze, working the clasp on my backpack, searching for keys, feeling for the roundish one that unlocked the building—

Don’t go home. Then he’ll know where you live.

Ruta’s voice. It was the kind of thing she would think of, having spent World War II in Poland, hiding. Okay, Ruta, so what should I do?

Be still, like a little mouse.

I felt like a mouse, crouched on the sidewalk. Breathing fast, panting, trying to be still. What did he imagine I was doing, crouched like this? Could he tell I was watching, or was it too dark? Maybe he thought I was tying my shoe.

Why didn’t he approach me?

Was it the man from Hot Aloo? The blue-eyed man?

Or one of the men from Westside Pavilion? No, I didn’t want it to be them. And how many stalkers does one person need, anyway?

But was he stalking? He could be some guy with a perfectly good reason for lurking on Larrabee, wondering why a woman was crouched like a mouse on the sidewalk ahead.

Maybe the thing to do was walk over and say, “Hello, can I help you?” Joey would do that. Fredreeq would stand up and yell, “What the hell are you looking at, freak?” and have the whole neighborhood waiting for the answer.

I tried a whisper, to see if I could pull it off. “Hello.” It was a tiny, wispy sound. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hello.” Not much better.

He was looking at me. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. He wore a hat.

To confront, or not to confront? What were the guidelines? You didn’t confront an alpha male gorilla. Same with grizzly bears. I knew from experience not to confront a mentally disturbed person, or a violent drunk, usually. But with thieves, certain rapists, and serial killers, I’d read, you stand tall, look aggressive, and at the slightest provocation scream, “I have Mace!”

But he wasn’t provoking. He was standing, and if I screamed, “I have Mace!” I risked death by embarrassment. How could fear of making a scene rival fear of being murdered?

We were close to Santa Monica Boulevard, enough that people would hear if we struggled. But would they rescue me? And that meant going toward him. Sunset was where I wanted to go, the other way, north. But Sunset was far. I was in okay shape, but running is not my gait of choice, especially with a backpack and a portfolio. Unless he was elderly, he’d catch me. Or would he? Do stalkers catch, or just stalk? I looked north. Darkness. Why was Larrabee so dark, and why hadn’t I ever noticed this? What had possessed me to move here, anyway? Free rent. You get what you pay for.

A couple emerged from the darkness, probably from Betty Way. I’d always liked Betty Way.

I stood. I walked toward them. Their faces registered suspicion. They were women, each nearly a foot shorter than me. “Can I walk with you guys?” I said. “There’s a man following me.”

Suspicion disappeared. With words of reassurance, each woman took an arm, and we set off, toward Santa Monica Boulevard.

Something flashed as we passed. A gun, a knife, catching the light?

He called to me. A single word. It was just about the last word I wanted to hear from a stranger in the dark, and I kept walking, even when he said it again.

“Wollie.”

Book ’Em, D’Agneau
was what its owner, Lucien D’Agneau, subtitled “A Literary Emporium” on the sign. Like many of the neighboring establishments, it kept odd hours. My rescuers left me at the door, inviting me to join them at Girl Bar should I need an escort home.

I found Lucien in a corner of the store, advising a customer on contemporary lesbian poets. Lucien was a burly man in drawstring pants and Birkenstocks. His brick-walled room was stocked with avante-garde books, magazine, CDs, and greeting cards. There was a small bar in the back, but it had an exclusionary feel; no one worked it, and I’d never ask Lucien to pour me a drink unless I were a personal friend or making a hefty purchase, Lucien being a known despot.

“You,” he rasped, turning on me. “Yes?”

“I’m looking for a German-English dictionary. And anything you have on frogs.” When he beckoned me to follow, I added, “I’m Wollie Shelley. You carry my greeting cards, the—”

He turned. “The Good Golly Miss Wollies. You dropped by in September, didn’t you? With your uncle. When you moved to the neighborhood.”

“Yes. I’m actually seeking asylum tonight.” I told him about the stalker. “I mean, I do need a dictionary, but if I could also hang out awhile . . .”

An hour later we were still talking. Customers came and went and Lucien waited on them as if it were a big favor. They seemed to like this. Lucien, in turn, seemed to like me. He brewed me decaf and brought out liqueurs. We sat on vinyl-covered bar stools in the back of the shop, where I was able to see the door while staying hidden by a display rack.

“Your cop friend is correct,” Lucien said. “People disappear all the time. But you are also correct—the compulsion to look for our fellow man is primal. Those lost to us call with a mythic power. Think of Anastasia Romanov. Whatever happened to Sean Flynn?”

“Who’s Sean Flynn?”

“Sean ‘son of Errol’ Flynn, when I was young, was on the inside of cheap matchbook covers. You’d go for a match and read, ‘Whatever Happened to Sean Flynn?’ He was a photojournalist working for
Time
in Vietnam. The last we know is that he made his way from Phnom Penh into the Cambodian countryside. He and a friend rode motorcycles to a roadblock and vanished.”

“What do you mean, vanished?”

“Taken prisoner by the Vietcong. And, later, the Khmer Rouge, who presumably executed them. At the time, I knew none of this. Only his picture, black and white in those matchbooks. Gorgeous man. Well, consider his father. Also died too young, and what a waste, both of them. Sean was a Gemini, born on Memorial Day. Beautiful people, Geminis.”

“What did the matchbooks want you to do?” I asked. “Look for him?”

“I don’t recall. But people do look for him. Still. Sean Flynn was more famous in his absence than if he’d come home and carried on another fifty years. Now he lives on, eternally twenty-nine, a symbol of possibility.”

“Except to his mother. I expect she’d prefer fifty years of her actual son to a symbol.”

“I expect. In my fantasy he returned and fell for me.” Lucian sighed. “But realistically, he would then contract AIDS, another dead boyfriend to bury. Which raises another possibility. In my world, people disappear to die alone, spare their loved ones the hell of terminal illness. Could this apply to your little Teutonic friend?”

“Illness? I can’t imagine why she’d keep that a secret.”

“Pregnancy?” Lucien lumbered over to the front door and turned the Open/Closed sign over, so that Open faced us.

“Same story. We’d all have helped her, whatever it was. Why would she run?”

“My dear, what are you doing right now?” Lucien returned to toss off his Sambuca, the liqueur glass tiny in his giant hand. He disappeared through a door to a back room, still talking. “Running from some nameless person, who may not even wish you ill, but who nevertheless has the power to keep you away from your home and bed. In your imagination, a monster. And so you seek refuge with a stranger.” He returned with a coat, turning off lights. “Who shall now walk you home. You’ll wear my coat and we’ll find you a scarf and I’ll have my police flashlight and we shall encounter no one more startling than a cat.”

I stood, staring out the picture window. It was late. My mind was fuzzy with Sambuca.

“Children at play, birds of prey,” Lucien said, closing out his register, “and dogs may chase anything that moves. But in general, we are not pursued because we run; we run because we are pursued. Someone wanted something from this girl—love, money, her body, her mind. Find out what pursued your friend, and you find your friend.”

I couldn’t sleep.
I was no longer scared of the stalker—in a building full of people I felt safe, however illogically—but sleep eluded me, as it had done every night for the past week. I got out of bed and turned on the TV and bumped into the drafting table crowding the bedroom. I opened my portfolio and pulled out the sketch I’d been doing earlier. The karaoke frog.

I didn’t know yet where the greeting card was going—sometimes the caption comes first, sometimes the image—but I thought of Annika as I sketched. She’d loved looking at my frog books. It was she who’d pointed out that the male of the species is the one with the voice. Girl frogs don’t sing at all, at least at mating time. My karaoke frog should be male, then. What species?

The TV distracted me with a documentary on liposuction. I watched in mild horror until I realized that if I was going to watch bad TV, it should be my own bad TV. I popped in one of the
Biological Clock
tapes Fredreeq had given me with instructions to study the competition the way professional boxers do.

The tape wasn’t rewound, so I watched the closing sequence, a couple in silhouette on a beach at sunset. There was the same pulsing disco music the opening credits used, but with an announcer’s voice saying at auctioneer speed that no contestants would be forced to have sex or procreate as a result of participation in the show, that no opinions expressed or services described were endorsed by ZPX network or Bad Seed Productions, and that the voting process would occur on the
Biological Clock
Web site at the conclusion of the series.

I rewound to mid-show and watched Henry Fisher talk about his belief in the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. I rewound further and saw the episode’s expert, an adoption attorney, in conversation with Savannah Brook, the radiant redhead.

What, I wondered, was I supposed to gain by watching an inexpressibly lovely and effortlessly charming woman be lovely and charming? “I really want to adopt,” Savannah was saying, with just a hint of a southern accent, “particularly a special-needs child. But I also want to experience the miracle of pregnancy and childbirth. No matter what you accomplish professionally, for a woman, is there any force stronger than a baby?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t speak for other women, but I was right there with Savannah. The longing for a child was an ache in my stomach, a pain that woke me in the middle of the night and terrorized me, like sudden knowledge of my own mortality. I didn’t require a biological baby; Doc’s daughter, Ruby, would have done just fine. But Ruby had never been mine, as I was now finding out, which left me feeling fractured and empty.

No more dating men with children. No more near-stepchildren velcroed to my heart.

The phone rang. I stared, frightened. I didn’t want to answer, but I thought of P.B., Annika, even Ruby—anyone who might need me in the wee hours of the morning. I went to the nightstand.

“Hello,” I said.
Click.
A hang-up.

Heart beating faster, I replaced the receiver. After staring blankly at the TV, I went back to my greeting card. And discovered I’d abandoned the karaoke frog.

Looking up from my sketchbook was Annika’s face.

14

T
he ringing phone
woke me. “Wollie. I may have a match to the photo.”

I sat up in bed, disoriented. I had no idea who this was. “Okay. What time is it?” I said. And who was I saying it to?

“Eleven. Can you get downtown?” Cziemanski. It was Detective Cziemanski.

“Where downtown?” I went over and pulled back the drapes. Sunlight assaulted me.

A pause. Then, “The morgue.”

Downtown L.A. was
a place I rarely went. Not that there was nothing happening there. There was the Convention Center, some major conventioneer hotels, quite a few law firms and banks and museums and hospitals, Staples Center for sports fans, the Mark Taper Forum for theatergoers, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and Disney Concert Hall for music lovers, the fashion district, jewelry district, flower market, Little Tokyo, and Chinatown. There were government buildings: City Hall, the Civic Center, courthouses, the LAPD at Parker Center. And east of all that, at Mission and Marengo, there was the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner. The morgue.

Two buildings shared the parking lot. Following instructions on a sign, I parked, got a parking permit from one building, then returned to place it on the dashboard of my Integra, which was when I noticed Joey’s car parked next to a Department of Coroner’s vehicle. Thank God. I’d had the shakes since Detective Cziemanski’s call awakened me. He’d suggested having a friend go through this with me, since he couldn’t get downtown himself, and I was grateful for it now, entering the other building, white stone with the look of an old penitentiary.

Joey met me in the lobby with a smile. I tried to smile back. “Fifty-four minutes,” I said. “That’s how long it took. I hate how downtown streets are one-way—you’re supposed to somehow know that Flower runs south and Temple dead-ends—”

“Flower? What were you doing on Flower Street?” Joey asked.

“I got sucked onto the 110 freeway from the 101, I couldn’t get over in time and nobody would let me out of the exit lane and—”

“Never mind. You’re here. She’s here,” she said louder, to a woman in a reception cubicle. “My friend. She’s come to ID the body.”

The woman spoke into a headset and told us to have a seat. Neither of us did.

The lobby did not exceed my expectations. Pea-soup linoleum, a plastic coffee table simulating wood, a vase of artificial flowers. Joey studied photos of the Board of Supervisors in a glass trophy case. I wandered across the room, to a poster of a baby in the arms of a doctor. “Pregnant?” it read. “Confused?”

I moved closer. The baby looked new, too little for its diaper, but with a full head of velvety black hair. The poster was not, as I expected, endorsing prenatal care but urging readers to leave newborns (seventy-two hours or younger) with an emergency room employee rather than abandon them, since “A trash can or Dumpster is never a choice.” I studied the infant. He looked startled. He’s a model, I told myself, he wasn’t found in a trash can. But I noticed myself clutching my backpack, digging my nails into it—

“Wollie . . . Shelley?”

A young man with a clipboard introduced himself as Kent Something and asked us to follow him. He led us through a locked door to an elevator, another floor, and a long hallway, the linoleum changing color from pea soup to mustard to avocado.

We came to a room crowded with desks, files, and the detritus of an office that housed a staff of dozens in an area built to accommodate five or six, or perhaps a staff of five or six doing the work of dozens. Weekend stillness hovered like a fog layer. Kent took us to a room within the room, carpeted in the same dark teal the West Valley LAPD used. Was there a municipal contract with the Teal Blue Carpet Company? Kent asked me for identification. He had me sign my name, took my thumbprint with an ink pad, and then, satisfied that I was who I purported to be, told me that Mrs. Heike Glück of Moosburg, Germany, had, via phone and translator, named me her proxy, authorizing me to identify the body of her daughter, Annika. Then he walked out.

The room was very hot.

“When do we see the body?” I asked Joey. My mouth was dry.

“We don’t. I asked. It’s all done by photo.”

“Oh. Okay.” I studied my ink-smudged thumb. “That doesn’t sound so bad.” Except that I wasn’t ready. Is this where the staff ate lunch, on this old, beat-up table? Strange to think of people taking coffee breaks here, eating tuna salad, having an office romance in a place where other people faced the worst moment of their lives. Thank God it was me doing this and not Annika’s mother. Thank God she was too far away.

The door opened. Kent walked in with a file. An image of a greeting card started to form, one of my good-luck cards, but I pushed it aside.

Joey took my hand, gave it a squeeze, then let go.

Kent took a seat, opened the file, and picked up a single sheet of paper, to which was stapled a Polaroid. He kept it facing away from us. His facial expression was professionally neutral, signaling that this was not the aspect of his job he most enjoyed. “You understand,” he said, “this is a crime-scene photo. We don’t clean things up for the family, much as we’d like to.”

“Okay,” I said.

He put the report in front of me, the Polaroid in the upper left-hand corner.

She lay on grass, her dark hair fanned out from her face. She wore a white T-shirt. Her eyes were open. Her mouth was slack. Her skin was white-yellow, or maybe that was the quality of the photo. She had been lovely once.

Maybe. Hard to say, really.

My nose burned, then my eyes, and my vision blurred.

“It’s—” I cleared my throat. “It’s not her.”

Her name was
Jane Doe 132. They’d done tests, an autopsy, fingerprints. Now they’d leave her file open and periodically check the missing-persons database for women like her. They’d keep her until someone came looking, someone like us, worried about their friend, daughter, sister. If no one came, in a few years they’d burn her body and bury her remains in a common ground in a Boyle Heights cemetery.

Kent answered our questions, relaxed now, interested to hear that Joey had once worked in a morgue. Jane Doe, he said, wore a red watch, was in her teens or early twenties, and had dark hair, which was why the computer had alerted Cziemanski.

“She’s a head trauma,” Kent said. “Fell off a bike near UCLA. Bad year for coeds. Raves, suicides, drownings, cars wrapped around trees . . .”

“How do people die at raves?” I said.

“Ecstasy, usually. This year we’ve seen fentanyl. It’s an analgesic, highly toxic. Had a kid last summer try to get high drinking Goo Gone, a cleaning solvent. Mind gone.”

After a while we thanked him and walked out to the parking lot, into a Saturday afternoon full of traffic and sunshine and the noises of life.

I felt giddy with relief, but Joey was uncharacteristically morose. “What’s that expression about someone walking on your grave?” she asked. “Anyhow, I have to get home, I’m driving the BMW to Oxnard, but I want you to know—” She paused, looking toward the freeway. “I’ll help. With Annika. I want to find her.”

She’d been helping all week, I was about to point out, but she was already heading to her car.

I called Germany from my own car while still in the parking lot. It crossed my mind that my cellular bill was going to equal the gross national product of a small country, but when I told Mrs. Glück that it was not her daughter lying dead in the morgue and heard the ecstatic weeping that ensued, I decided it was a Christmas present to myself, a month early.