As if to confirm this, her number appeared on Rico’s wall, the 818 area code and Encino prefix I’d dialed so often in the last ten days it was committed to memory.
How much evidence did I need? Annika wanted a gun, wanted a lawyer, asked where to find drugs, had drugs under her bed, acted depressed and distant, had trouble with the German police… and had contemplated quitting Biological Clock, a job she’d once loved. If I couldn’t reconcile smart, smiling, happy Annika with the one I kept hearing about, maybe I was in denial. I sat up. I should be copying down these numbers. “Kevin,” I said, “ever hear Annika talk about someone named Richard Feynman? Or Marie-Thérèse? Britta?”
“Britta, yeah. She’s been over here a couple times. I never really talked to her. And who’s the guy you just said?”
“Richard Feynman?”
“Sounds familiar. Is he an astronaut or something?”
I tried to imagine Annika dating an astronaut. I thought she would’ve mentioned it. I said, “Did you tell the police about the argument you overheard?”
“No,” Kevin said. “They didn’t ask.”
He gave me a pen and paper and went on talking, about the girls who’d show up at Lovernich at all hours, girls Rico had invited over and forgotten about. I listened with half an ear, then no ear at all, because I found something on the wall, something I knew. Something I’d seen before. A squiggle. It was the logo on the pill that had been under Annika’s bed.
26
“I’ve seen this before.” Joey, in the passenger seat, studied the squiggle. “Somewhere. Not on a pill, either.”
We were still at Pepperdine, in a parking lot. The weather had changed dramatically in the last hour, from balmy breezes to cold rain, and I’d discovered something about the car I’d inherited from Doc: the defroster didn’t work. My windshield was fogged up, as transparent as an igloo.
“Could I take that to the cops?” I asked, checking the owner’s manual. “It links Annika and Rico. And this argument they had about getting in trouble-”
“The doodling’s meaningless without the pill. And what if the pill’s a No-Doz?”
“It’s gotta be Euphoria. The guy I met at Santa Monica College, Annika’s other tutoree, he said she was looking for Euphoria. If I had the pill, could we get it analyzed?” I thought of Joey’s brother, the cop. “Could Patrick help us?”
Joey snorted. “He’d yell at me for sending it through the mail, he’d say, ‘I don’t know how they do things out in La-La Land, but here in New York rules rules rules…’ I could swallow it myself and find out.”
“Detective Cziemanski,” I said. “My new friend. Maybe I could-”
“Sleep with him.”
“No. I’m never having sex again.”
“Really? Does this Simon guy know that?”
I pushed buttons randomly. The windows remained fogged up, despite a noise suggesting a defroster struggling for life. “I hate this car. I should never have ditched my Rabbit. Listen, I’ve known this man seven minutes total, so quit it. And Doc-”
In fact, my mental pictures of Doc were fading like fabric left out in the sun. It was easier to conjure up Ruby: the freckled face, the frizzy hair. When I tried to envision Doc, he was in shadow, turned away.
“I happen to like Doc,” Joey said, “but he’d be the first to tell you to move on. He was the first to tell you.”
“He didn’t mean move on to this guy. Simon would be the Rico Rodriguez of my life. All sexual heat and no substance. A professional stalker.”
“But you haven’t told the cops about him.”
“Like they’d care? Annika disappears, do they care? Rico disappears, they don’t even ask his roommates, ‘Gee, notice anything strange lately?’ Brace yourself, we’re going to open windows.”
A blast of cold air hit. I steered the car toward the campus exit. Joey wrapped her skinny arms around herself. “Kevin didn’t know Annika was missing, so what he heard didn’t seem relevant,” she said. “Hey, cops aren’t stupid and they’re not incompetent, generally, so whatever there is to find, they’ll find. Know what Lyle said while you were in the bedroom? Rico dropped out of poli sci to take chemistry, weeks into the semester. By special arrangement. And it was killing him, trying to catch up.”
“Joey, there you go! Rico was making Euphoria.”
“I think you need more than two months of chemistry to design trendy new drugs. And why would that make Annika disappear? Or her mother? You’re right, we have to find Annika’s e-mail buddy, Marie-Whatserface.”
“Dead end. I leave messages at the au pair agency and no one calls back.”
“What’s the number?” she said.
“In my backpack.” I wiped the clouded windshield with a Kleenex and took a left on Pacific Coast Highway. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, spending the day before Thanksgiving freezing in Malibu in slow traffic with Joey. Not that I didn’t love Joey. But I should’ve been with Doc and Ruby, watching cranberries… bake. Broil. Whatever it is cranberries do. Doc and I hadn’t even made it a year. We’d only gotten the minor holidays: Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Bastille Day-
A clipped New England accent came from Joey, startling me. “Mr. Otis, this is Elizabeth Atherton, with the Department of State. I’m here in California and I would appreciate a return call, as soon as possible, please, Thanksgiving notwithstanding.” Joey gave her cell-phone number, signed off, then punched a few more numbers and changed her cell phone’s outgoing message to one more suited to Elizabeth Atherton.
“What about everyone else who tries to call you and leave a message?” I asked.
“Let them wonder.” She then started dialing numbers I’d found on Rico’s wall. One was pizza delivery, one was cable TV, and one was no longer in service. Two were answering machines. There were four-digit numbers we thought were codes of some kind, until I realized Pepperdine used a common prefix for the whole campus. We tried preceding the numbers with 456, and it worked. Joey talked to three actual people. One guy said his ex-roommate had been buddies with Rico but had dropped out the previous semester. Another guy admitted to casual acquaintance but said he was late for class and hung up. A girl with a voice so loud Joey held the phone away from her ear said if we wanted to find Rico we should check under rocks or wherever it was snakes hung out. By now we’d progressed a few measly miles, not even to Tuna Canyon.
“Yikes,” Joey said. “Suspects abound. He’s a much better missing person than Annika. My favorite is Kevin, the pathologically nice roommate.”
My own cell phone rang. Joey answered without asking; she knew that driving, shivering, squinting, and cleaning the windshield while talking were beyond my capabilities. “Wollie’s cell phone, Joey speaking,” she said, then paused. “No. She’s having an automotive crisis.” Pause. “Defective defroster.” Pause. “Sixty thousand or so.” She leaned toward me, hair brushing my bare arm, then straightened up. “Sixty-two thousand, two hundred and thirty-four.” Pause. “Wasn’t her idea.” Pause. “I agree. Let me ask you, what are your intentions?” Pause. “Yeah?” Long pause. “Yeah.” I glanced at her. She was smiling. “Yeah.” She turned off the phone and turned to me. “He says to give him a call when you’re not driving.”
“Who?” The hair on my arms was standing up.
“Simon.”
“Okay, turn off that phone. Just turn it off.”
“And by the way, he’s a cop.”
I choked. “A-?”
“Not a regular cop. I just figured it out. He’s DEA. Your boyfriend’s a narc.”