“Sounds like you know what you’re talking about. So did she meet this guy at school?”
“Now, that’s another thing. The girls need six units of college-level coursework, not aerobics or commercial auditions or whatnot but things pertaining to our culture. Annika wanted physics. I told her no, physics has nothing to do with America, so she went ahead and took it on her own, in addition to ESL. She wanted to do everything. I don’t know when that girl ever slept. She was a bad example for Britta and Hitomi, with her extracurriculars. I tell them, Do your job, help out with the dishes and such, but then enjoy yourself. You’re here to experience the American way of life, not run yourself ragged.”
For some of us, running ourselves ragged was the American way of life. “So what do you think happened?” I asked, hesitant now to mention drugs. An aproned woman headed our way and I grabbed a gadget from a rack. “Say, these are awfully cute. Like a little mallet. For meat, I suppose. What do you call these?”
“Meat mallets.” Glenda glanced at her fellow salesperson, then rubbed her eyes, leaving little dots of cakey mascara on the delicate skin underneath. “I couldn’t say where she is, with all her goings-on. I better ring you up.”
I started to tell her I don’t cook, but her boss was approaching, so I let her sell me three cheese graters and the meat mallet. “After all, everyone eats cheese,” she said.
“But you don’t think Annika met with foul play?” I asked, glancing out into the mall.
“Well, dear, with what you hear on the news these days, I’m surprised we all haven’t met with foul play.”
The Au Pairs par Excellence agency answered with a machine, a woman’s voice promising an end to my child-care problems once I made the decision to bring an au pair into my life. She urged me to check out their Web site and leave a message after the beep.
I left a message every half hour up until six o’clock.
The next morning, I started in again at nine A.M. Then I went down to San Pedro to find them.
5
Wednesday was another unseasonably gorgeous day. Joey and I could fully appreciate this along with everyone else on the 405 South because the San Diego Freeway was moving us along at the speed of barges. Which gave me time to wrestle with the idea of Annika being a druggie.
“I wouldn’t say an unidentified pill and an empty coke vial constitute a druggie,” Joey said. “Not where I come from.”
“You come from Nebraska.”
“Exactly. The decadent Corn Belt. Hey, you’re getting a little obsessive, aren’t you, going to San Pedro at this hour? What happened to your day job, your mural deadline?”
“Their floors are still wet. And I wouldn’t have to go to San Pedro if people would answer their phones. Thanks for the ride, by the way.”
Joey opened a window. Her Irish setter hair whirled around the front seat, a victim of the Santa Ana winds. “Thanks for qualifying me for the carpool lane.” She was on a mission to sell her husband’s year-old BMW. “Not one person answered Elliot’s newspaper ad,” she said, “so now we deal with the dealers. Today, Long Beach. Tomorrow, City of Industry. Don’t marry a man who needs a new car every year; life’s too short.”
“Why doesn’t he just trade it in?” I asked.
“He says it’s worth more than they offered. We went through the same thing last year.”
“Why doesn’t he just lease?” I asked.
“Who can say? Why does he do anything? Why invest in a reality TV show?’
“Okay, why?”
Joey changed lanes. “I like to think Biological Clock is a money-laundering scheme and my husband is stowing large amounts of cash in a Swiss bank, preparing to buy me a small village in Italy for our third anniversary. Elliot says it’s a case of Larry, his old fraternity brother, needing a partner in his production company. Swears it’ll pay off.” She changed lanes again. “That’s what he said about the race horse. And then it died.”
“And does this actually make you a producer, being married to an investor, or is that something Bing made up?”
“Both,” Joey said. “In one sense, there’s no limit to the number of producers on a show-it’s like ants at a picnic. You invest money or head the production company, you’re a producer; you find the writer or star or idea, you’re a producer; if you’re a big enough writer or star or director, you’re a producer, and maybe your agent and manager are too, along with your husband, girlfriend, maybe your mom. In the glory days, they all got screen credits. Now they have to fight each other for them.” Joey honked at a Ryder truck one lane over making a preliminary move to cut her off. “Anyhow, the real producer, in this case Bing, who hires the crew, does the budget, shows up on the set, that’s the lowest form of producer, which is why he resents me. I’m a producer-by-marriage, and also because I once made a lot of money by modeling and doing schlock TV, enabling my husband, who knows zip about show business, to invest that money in schlock TV. There’s a symmetry to all this.”
Eventually we found the car dealer, who made a lowball offer on Joey’s husband’s BMW, citing a scratch on the front fender the depth of a strand of hair. Joey argued that a jeweler’s loupe was required to see this, and heated words were exchanged before I dragged her away, to the western regional offices of Au Pairs par Excellence.
If there was a high-end section of San Pedro, this wasn’t it, a mile or two inland from the harbor. The storefront office was wedged between a Laundromat and a shoe-repair shop called the Leather Goddess. The office staff was a young woman behind a gray metal desk reading a copy of In Style magazine.
“Hi,” she said. “Are you guys the exterminator?”
My guess was, they didn’t get a lot of walk-in business. Desks, floor, and the top of the gray metal filing cabinet overflowed with boxes and stray papers. Novel filing system.
“No, we’re not exterminators,” I said. “I’ve called four or five times, but no one called back, so I came in person. I’m worried about one of your au pairs, Annika Glück, who’s been missing since Sunday. I want to know if you’ve contacted her mother or filed a police report.”
“Um, want to come back this afternoon?” the receptionist asked. “Marty’ll be in then.”
“No,” Joey said with a big smile. “We want you to call Marty and ask him to come in now. Unless you’d like to be the agency spokesperson. I write for the L.A. Times, and by this afternoon my article will be on its way to tomorrow’s edition.”
“Wow.” Her eyes sparkled and she sat up straighter. “You sure you want us? We’re just a branch office. Maybe you want to call main headquarters in New York-”
“No,” I said. “We don’t want to call anyone. We want Marty.”
She nodded. “Okay, I’ll do an SOS on his pager.”
I marveled at Joey’s improvisational ability. Joey calls it lying, but that’s because she’s modest. We sat on folding chairs along the wall, watching the receptionist page Marty, then return to her magazine. After a moment, she got up and looked through the glass door, staring at something. “I have a new car,” she said.
“Congratulations,” I said. Joey asked what kind it was.
“Honda Element. Orange. I hate parking it here. Those Laundromat people next door are really careless, they park too close and they bang it with their laundry baskets.”
The phone rang. Oddly enough, she didn’t answer it. The three of us stared at the message machine as a nasal voice expressed interest in an unspecified position and informed us she’d just had her teeth done and needed the extra money, which was the reason she’d decided to call. The receptionist replayed it several times, jotting notes on a “While You Were Out” notepad. Ten minutes later, a dirty white Mustang with a bad paint job pulled up. A man got out and peered at us through the glass doorway. He checked the soles of his shoes, the way you do when you suspect bubblegum or something worse, then walked in. The receptionist jumped up and handed him the “While You Were Out” message. He glanced at it and told her to take an early lunch. He was thirty or thirty-five, slim, in khakis and a button-down shirt, with slicked-back hair. A prominent Adam’s apple reminded me of the marbled reed frog, Hyperolius marmoratus. Because of my mural, most things these days reminded me of frogs.