Free Dating is Murder by Harley Jane Kozak

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