“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.
8
I started Thursday the way I started most Thursdays, picking up my Uncle Theo in Glendale and driving up the coast to Rio Pescado, the state mental hospital that my brother, P.B., called home. “Breakfast with the troops,” Uncle Theo called it, referring to the fact that while we were technically visiting P.B., in fact we were joined by several more patients desperate for visitors of their own. The faces changed regularly and so did the mental disorders, which made for a lively ninety minutes. P.B., with adult-onset paranoid schizophrenia, was one of the longest-term residents because of his participation in UCLA-sponsored drug trials. The drug trials were coming to an end, though, and he was scheduled to graduate soon to an outpatient program, a halfway house in Santa Barbara his doctor had pulled strings to get him into. Even with the added expenses, I was excited by the prospect. P.B., however, was anxious.