Mistaken Identity

The girl from the card club is like a displaced Ukranian model-actress, all long limbs and blonde hair and piercing eyes. I can’t figure out why should be working in a sleazy card club on San Pablo until she opens her mouth and I cannot understand a word she says. It is not just her indecipherable accent; she also seems completely unhinged. She must have mistaken me for someone else and she can’t seem to stop talking long enough for me to explain.

“I can’t believe it took you so long to come here,” she is saying right now. “Mike said you were coming in last week.”

Mike? Does she have me confused with Mike’s awful girlfriend? I open my mouth to try and explain but she of course starts talking again.

“I don’t want you to come here again,” she is saying now. “I get off at work at 11 pm. You live right by Geo Kaye’s, right?” This is a small, dark bar right across the street from my house, populated by art students and really old men from the neighborhood who show up around 2pm every day. I don’t even want to know why she seems to know where I live.

“That’s perfect,” she says. “Nobody will go there. I’ll see you at 11:30.” She runs back into the card club before I can say anything.

The Club

Lots of people think that Mike is hopeless, a disaster, the worst thing that ever happened to them. I personally think he just gets bored easily. Every few years, he gets to this point where he has a good job, an annoying but very pretty girl in a serious relationship with him, and a nice car — and this always dissolves all at once in a chaotic mix of restraining orders, unemployment, and God knows what else that leaves him living in his car for a little while before it starts all over again. I am sure that this is all that is happening now, so sure that my first move after the troubling encounter with the police is to head down to the card clubs around 40th and San Pablo. Of course, Mike adores gambling.

As I mentioned, I am a good girl. I have lived in Oakland for a hundred years and I have even noticed that some of the card clubs serve food 24 hours per day, but I have never set foot in any of them. That is why it is so weird when everyone at the card club turns around and nods at me when I come in, as though I am a regular.

I walk towards a counter to talk to a girl who is about my age. She looks horrified. “Not in here!” she says. The girl grabs my arm and takes me out back.

The Police Drop In

The police have never been in my house before. I am a rule follower, a good girl. I have no idea how to proceed.

“You have been identified as a person of interest in an investigation of a missing person,” the shorter cop says. Is he the good cop or the bad cop? Again, I have no idea.

“Am I under arrest?” I ask.

“Not yet, ma’am,” says the other cop. (“Ma’am? What, am I 60 years old? This has to be the bad cop.) “You have been identified as a person of interest and we would like to ask you a few questions in private.”

I assume this is my cue to kick Sarah out. “I will call you if I hear anything,” I say breezily to Sarah, who has totally forgotten about her missing fiancee and now looks like she is aching to get to a phone and tell all her friends about this new, disreputable turn of events. “Ta ta for now!”

I admit that now I am a little worried about my missing friend; also I am a little worried that I am about to be arrested for no reason.

A Friend Vanishes

Mike is one of those friends who disappears sometimes. We have been friends since third grade, but if you subtract his long absences from my life it is like we have been really good friends for about half of that time.

This is what I am trying to explain to his fiancee Sarah but, as always with girls like her, it is like I am speaking the wrong language. No doubt she has already decided that I am cold, heartless, not a real girl, and (they always get to this point with me eventually) A Husband Stealer.

“He has been gone for two days,” she is saying mournfully, smoothing her gauzy top over last year’s designer jeans. “He always calls.”

“Of course he does.”

“I just thought you, or one of the old crowd (which she always says with sinister emphasis), might have heard something. You don’t think he has cold feet about the wedding, do you?”

I am thinking: Yes, I think he does. I have had this conversation with two or three of my friends’ exes and it always turns out that they are fine, in the middle of a debauched long weekend, and have decided that that they are not quite ready to settle down.

This does not seem like the right thing to say to Sarah, however.

I am trying to figure out exactly what the right thing to say to her is when the doorbell rings and the police come in.