I opened up my favorite frog book, and found it. No, there it was. Ninety centimeters. I had it right.
Uh-oh.
The measurement was not SNV, snout to vent, the standard frog measurement. My favorite frog book was illustrating a point, measuring the length from nose to… toe. Ninety centimeters stretched out.
I opened up a second book. The snout-to-vent measurement of a West African goliath is thirty centimeters.
No. No, no, no. I’d given the West African goliath the torso of a normal-sized human. No wonder he looked like a freak. He was a freak. A mutant. Ninety centimeters is three feet. Three times the size of any frog inhabiting the earth.
My hand went to my mouth, stopping my exclamation. Technical accuracy, my last defense for this monstrosity, was no longer on my side. It never had been. I’d made a large math error. Science error. Whatever.
The phone rang. I answered. It was my brother.
P.B. started right in talking about his halfway house, and I stood, thinking about paint. White paint. Somewhere in this house were extra cans of Blush White paint. I’d find a paint roller and put the West African goliath out of its misery. No bridal couple wanted to walk into their new home and face a frog the size of a Saint Bernard. Three to five coats of paint ought to do it. If I started immediately, if the pain was quick-drying-
Except-the goliath wasn’t alone.
Alongside him was another frog, so tiny as to be nearly insignificant. I’d forgotten he was here, having avoided the wall recently. He was a blue poison-arrow frog, Dendrobates azureus, brilliant blue with black spots, his arms and legs a deeper shade of blue, sitting on a leaf, preparing to hop off in search of something to eat. A happy guy. Poisonous, dangerous, but happy. Beautiful.
“-to Santa Barbara,” my brother was saying. “But she won’t come.”
“Um, what? Your… girlfriend?” I asked, distracted. “With the body dysmorphic disorder? P.B., if she’s a patient, she can’t come. Maybe when she’s healthier.”
“No. She’s out of the hospital, but she still won’t come. She says her upper lip is too big. She says everyone in Santa Barbara will stare at her when she eats, so then she’ll stop eating and they’ll hospitalize her again. She says in her own neighborhood they’re used to her, but she can’t start over in a new town, she’s too old.”
I closed my eyes, awash with guilt. P.B. had never had a girlfriend before. This was a big moment in his life. I should be celebrating. I should be taking the time to discuss the mental problems of a woman I’d never met, whose name I didn’t know, instead of wishing he’d get off the phone. If you can’t take time for the people you love, what’s the point? If I’d taken time for Annika, ten minutes one fateful night, everything might’ve turned out differently.
I told P.B. I’d happily pick up this girl every Thursday from wherever she lived and drive her up to visit him at his halfway house in Santa Barbara, every single week, and anything else he could think up for me to do. Anything except encourage him to stay at the hospital, because I didn’t believe it was the right place for him anymore, and staying wouldn’t help his girlfriend’s upper-lip problem in any case. He told me I sounded subnormal.
“I am subnormal,” I said. “People’s lives are at stake, and I’m stuck in Sherman Oaks with a blue poison-arrow and a West African goliath that I need to drown in white paint.” If I can send the FBI out for paint rollers.
“You can’t paint over them,” he said. “That’s murder-suicide.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the frog.”
Here we go. “The blue?” I asked, wondering why I’d even brought it up.
“No, the other one. The goliath. Female frogs are bigger than the males, you told me that. She’s big, she’s a girl; you’re big, you’re a girl. If you paint over her, you erase yourself. Suicide’s one thing, if you’re sad enough, but taking someone with you is murder. You don’t murder things, you save things. You put the blue next to the goliath as a talisman. You’re blackmailing yourself into staying alive.”
“P.B.,” I said, “I love you, but I don’t understand a word you just said.”
“I’m in a mental hospital,” he said. “Do the math.”
“Wise guy.” I hung up and started for the basement in search of paint, but my cell phone, now that it was on, had other ideas. It practically leaped out of my hand, frantic with unplayed messages.
“Hi, it’s Joey. Listen, something’s bothering me. Since Rico spent time around B.C., why is it the cops haven’t shown up there to question anyone? You think the Feds told them to back off? And check this out: Elliot’s at a meeting with Bing and Larry at Bad Seed Productions and he just called to say they need the whole cast and crew working tonight. How weird is that? And oh-we made the news this morning. That guy in San Pedro ran his videocam the whole time. Our housekeeper screamed and woke me up.”
“Wollie: Fredreeq. What in the name of Jesus Christ on the cross were you two doing? I swear, I leave you alone to rob one little office, and- There’s my other line. This is very bad for the show. Very, very bad. And we might be working tonight, did you hear that? Call.”
“Wollstonecraft, it’s Uncle Theo. Dear, I saw you and your friend Joey on the television this morning. Congratulations. It’s always so wonderful to see you.”
“Yeah, uh… hold on. Okay. Wollie? It’s Cziemanski. I saw that thing on the news and I’m a little-okay, I guess you’re okay. Call if you need anything. Well, I mean, not anything, but-okay. I gotta go.”
“Joey again. I forgot to say I didn’t find anything incriminating on Savannah, except that you’re right, she lies about her age. I have a photocopy of her driver’s license. She was born New Year’s Eve, the same year as you.”
I gasped. Savannah Brook was a Capricorn.
She’d put her astrological symbol on the drug she’d developed. Euphoria.
She was Little Fish.
One pill connected her, Rico, and Annika. And Simon knew this. But then why didn’t he know where Rico was? Or Annika?
Because he wasn’t looking for them. He wasn’t concerned with Little Fish’s victims; to him, Little Fish was bait. For Big Fish.
And when it was over? When the big meeting took place, tonight’s meeting, when Simon got what he needed, surely then he’d turn her over to the Sheriff’s Department-
Or not. I thought of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, a confessed killer, living in the witness protection program, having ratted out the mob. If Sammy could do it, why not Savannah?
The Feds could make a deal to get her to testify against Tcheiko, offer immunity, and turn a blind eye to the plight of one little German girl. Who wasn’t a citizen anyway, so who cared? Maybe to the FBI, it was the cost of doing business, a small price to pay for a guy everyone wanted. Savannah would get witness protection, but Annika and her mother-would they stay missing? Afraid of what Tcheiko or his compatriots would do if they surfaced? Assuming they weren’t already dead.
Simon’s conflict of interest. The thing that would so appall me I wouldn’t want to know him after tonight: that Rico, despite his prominent father, would never be found, or his case solved. That Annika would not be looked for, ever. Or her mother.
And everything I’d found was of no use to anyone because the Feds didn’t care and the cops didn’t know, and without evidence-
But I had evidence. I’d had it since yesterday. In my dirty, malfunctioning Integra.
And now I knew what to do with it.
I walked out of the Mansion, introduced myself to Esterbud, and asked him to buy me some paint rollers. He wouldn’t take the twenty-dollar bill I offered. Special Agent Alexander, he said, had told him he might have to do a paint run.
But the cab driver was happy to take my money, forty dollars of it, to get me home.
Only the pill wasn’t there. Not in the Integra’s front seat, not in the back. I found the Williams-Sonoma shopping bag that had been rattling around in the car for ages, I found coins, paper clips, a valet-parking receipt, but I couldn’t find the evidence Britta had so kindly donated to the cause. I tried sitting in the driver’s seat to re-create the circumstances of the flying pill, and I still couldn’t find it. It was here somewhere, someplace I couldn’t see without dismantling the car.