Dagmar’s father kissed Girl Dagmar’s cheek, and she felt the bristles on his chin. A motorboat raced over the blue water.
Out of the cabin, with its asphalt-shingled walls, came Dagmar’s mother, carrying a plate in either hand. Grown-up Dagmar felt that her mother’s appearance was anachronistic-with her hair pinned back and her lipstick and an apron over the straight skirt that fell to below her knees, she looked like a late 1940s movie mom, not the Reagan-era parent that she actually was.
Dream Mom put the plates on the table, and Dagmar saw that they held sloppy joes. Grown-up Dagmar hadn’t eaten a sloppy joe since she had left Cleveland.
Girl Dagmar could smell the onions and tomato sauce. She slipped off her father’s knees and picked up her fork and ate.
The tastes of her childhood flooded her palate. Grown-up Dagmar approved.
The dream, or memory, floated serenely on. Grown-up Dagmar, watching from her corner of the sky, approved of everything: the lake, the motorboat, the spicy sauce on the ground beef, the soft texture of the bun. The sun on Girl Dagmar’s arms, the smile on her father’s face.
When she woke, she was smiling.
The sunny Ohio afternoon stayed with her as she rose, took her shower, and poured her first cup of coffee.
It wasn’t until she looked out her kitchen window and saw the parking lot with its flashing lights and yellow crime-scene tape that the last of the dream faded into the Valley’s hard, snarling morning light.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR This Is Not a Suspect
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
According to this online article from the L.A. Times, Arkady Petrovich Litvinov has been arrested in SoCal. So that thread of the game has now been wound up-assuming of course that it was really a part of the game somehow, and not a way of turning us into a posse.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Did any of us have anything to do with catching him?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
The article doesn’t say.
FROM: Consuelo
Not to brag or anything, but it was me.
I tracked him down at the Oceanside Motel in Santa Barbara. Dagmar alerted the police. I’ve posted a video of the arrest.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Mild applause. Kudos to the Clever, etc.
FROM: Hippolyte
Whoa! Next to Chatty’s article is this item, just posted, that says that the victim in the L.A. bombing this morning in the Figueroa Hotel has been tentatively identified as Charles Ruff, founder of Great Big Idea!
FROM: LadyDayFan
??!!??
FROM: Consuelo
Did this happen before Tuesday evening? Because that’s when I had Litvinov under sur veillance.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
This is weird. I was in that hotel just the other day.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Passing strange. Is this another piece of metafiction? I wonder if we will be asked to find the bomber.
FROM: LadyDayFan
If we’re going to solve anything, it better be after Saturday, when we have to sample every source of water in the world!
FROM: LadyDayFan
Looking at the article, it seems clear that Charlie Ruff is really dead.
FROM: Vikram
What difference does that make?
Dagmar’s car was in the part of the parking lot cordoned off by the crime-scene tape. Police cars with flashing lights sat parked in the street. Uniformed officers and detectives clumped in the parking lot, and a photographer’s flash briefly lit the palm trees near the street. An ambulance waited nose-in to the parking lot. Several of Dagmar’s neighbors, none known to her by name, stood outside the tape barrier, impatient to get to work.
“What’s happening? ” she asked.
“Sandy found a body,” someone said.
Dagmar felt her spirits deflate like the air sighing out of a tire. It was too much of a coincidence to believe that this brand-new dead person was not somehow known to her.
A whiff of the ginkgo fruit floated through the air and turned Dagmar’s stomach.
She looked at the detectives for Murdoch but didn’t see him. She called to one of the uniformed officers.
“Can I see the body? ” she asked. “I might know him.”
There was a consultation, and a young detective came over. He was Asian, with bad acne.
“You think you might know the victim? ” he said.
“I know lots of people,” Dagmar said.
“You can’t go too close,” the detective said. “We haven’t finished processing the crime scene.”
He held up the tape so that she could pass under it, and he took her elbow and gingerly took her past the trunk of her white Prius to where the body was visible between an old Buick and a Volvo station wagon.
Dagmar felt her vision narrow, darkness approaching from all directions, just as it had in the morgue.
“I know him,” she said. “Siyed Prasad.”
The detective produced a PDA. With his stylus he tapped a part of the screen that said Record, and then took notes on the screen.
“Could you spell that? ”
Dagmar spelled it.
“Did he live in this building?” the detective asked.
“No. He was an actor flown in for a commercial. I think he was at the Chateau Marmont.”
“Was he from India?”
“No. He was British.”
She kept looking at the body. It was tiny, crumpled between the two cars as if it had fallen there from out of the sky. Siyed wore a white shirt and white Dockers, both soiled with dirt and with blood. One foot was bare, and the sandal lay upside down on the asphalt a few feet away.
“How did you know him?”
For the first time she looked away from Siyed, into the detective’s hardened, acne-scarred face.
“He was stalking me,” she said.
The detective’s expression changed in some unfathomable but definitive way.
For the first time, Dagmar realized that she might be in trouble. There were three bodies, and she was the only connection between them.
If the police thought like police, which they most likely did, she had just jumped the quantum gap from witness to suspect.
“Could you call Detective Murdoch?” she said. “He knows me.”
“Do I need a lawyer?” Dagmar asked.
“Why would you think that?” asked Murdoch.
Dagmar looked at the interrogation room, the plain walls in depressing institutional colors, the metal table with its loops for handcuffs, the poster informing suspects of their rights, and the mirror behind which, if television was to be trusted, there was a camera.
“Why would I need a lawyer?” she repeated. “Let’s just say I’m getting that vibe.”
Murdoch and the Asian cop, whose name was Kim, had asked Dagmar to come to the station and make another statement. She had declined Kim’s offer of a ride and followed him to the station in her Prius. They’d provided the same equipment as last time, the lapel mics, computer, and screen that broadcast her words as text.
Vibe, she saw, was flagged as a suspect word. Vice, vile, and tribe were suggested as alternatives.
This interrogation was different from the other. The detectives were much more interested in her answers, for one thing.
“But,” said Kim, “why would you think-”
“I’m not going to speculate about my intuitions,” Dagmar said. “Why don’t you ask your questions?”
They complied. She told them that she had hired Siyed Prasad for a game called Curse of the Golden Nagi, which had ended five months before in India. She had to spell out nagi and explain what a nagi was. She told them she’d been sexually involved with Siyed but had broken it off when she’d discovered he was married.