Dating is Murder by Harley Jane Kozak Read Free Book Online Page A

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