This Is Not a Game (37 page)

“It’s that easy?” Dagmar asked.

Murdoch’s unsurprised eyes gazed out over the hood of the Crown Victoria.

“Just google
Anarchist Cookbook,
” he said.

The trip to the North Hollywood Station took more than an hour. Dagmar thanked Murdoch for driving and got into her Prius. She didn’t feel like continuing the crawl along the 101, so she took back streets toward her apartment.

She realized she didn’t want to be alone in her rooms and wondered if she should stop somewhere and have dinner. But she didn’t have an appetite, so she stopped at a coffee shop and ordered a chai tea latte and bought a copy of that morning’s
New York Times
and read every page, even the sports news, which she usually skipped. The fact that none of the news was local was a comfort. She didn’t want to think about L.A. or the bombing or the wounds in Charlie’s bloodless body.

By the time she finished the paper, it was after dark and she felt the stirrings of hunger. She drove to a Chinese place and had twice-cooked pork, half of which she carried away in a white cardboard take-out box.

She went to her apartment and to her room. She took a shower, and when she finished toweling, her phone began its song. She looked at the display and saw that it was Siyed.

After the misery of these past few days, Dagmar found Siyed too pathetic a distraction to think about. She pressed the End button to divert Siyed to voice mail.

A few minutes later the phone chimed to let her know that someone had left a message. She turned the phone off.

Dagmar fell onto the bed and slept. She dreamed. Somewhere in her awareness was a sense of gratitude that she didn’t dream about Charlie, or his body, or what was behind the cloth tented over his face.

She dreamed about a lake, blue under blue skies. The shore was green with birch and poplar. It was a scene from her girlhood in Ohio, and in the dream she was a girl, gliding over a green lawn as she ran from a lakeside cabin to a sagging wooden picnic table. Little gold and brown butterflies flew ahead of her on tangled Brownian bearings.

Dagmar’s experience of the scene was strangely bifurcated. She was Girl Dagmar, running through the butterflies, and a smaller part of her was Grown-up Dagmar, the vigilant puppetmaster, supervising the scene to make certain that untoward, disturbing elements of her more recent past did not intrude.

Her father sat at the picnic table, smoking a cigarette, a glass of amber liquid by his hand. He wore cutoff jeans and a faded Metallica T-shirt. He wasn’t the sad, sly, frustrated man he became later, the man who pawned her computer to buy vodka, but a warm, smiling, benign parent whose breath was scented with tobacco and Irish whiskey.

Girl Dagmar hugged her father, climbed onto his lap. Grown-up Dagmar, watching the scene, felt a shock as she recognized Girl Dagmar’s Sport Girl denim skirt, with its narrow pockets and cartoony appliquéd bird. Girl Dagmar had actually worn that skirt.

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.

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.

 

Did any of us have anything to do with catching him?

 

The article doesn’t say.

 

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.

Mild applause. Kudos to the Clever, etc.

 

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!

 

??!!??

 

Did this happen before Tuesday evening? Because that’s when I had Litvinov under sur veillance.

 

This is weird. I was in that hotel just the other day.

 

Passing strange. Is this another piece of metafiction? I wonder if we will be asked to find the bomber.

 

If we’re going to solve anything, it better be after Saturday, when we have to sample every source of water in the world!

 

Looking at the article, it seems clear that Charlie Ruff is really dead.

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.

“Did that make you angry?” Kim asked.

What the fuck do
you
think?
Dagmar wanted to respond, but she settled for, “Yes.”

There were more questions about the state of her emotions, all of which seemed somehow askew, as if the detectives had never actually experienced emotions themselves and were trying to figure out what they were and how they worked. She began to suspect that her actual feelings meant less than the theory into which they could jack her answers. After a while, she worked out the equation into which they were trying to fit her.

E
+
R
=
3H.
In which
E
was emotion,
R
rage, and the rest multiple homicide.

She pointed at the transcription machine.

“Just have your transcript read, ‘Shaw shrugs.’ ” She looked at Murdoch. “Why don’t you ask me when I next heard from Siyed?”

Kim seemed a little taken aback by this, but Murdoch, without surprise, replied in his bland professional way.

“All right,” he said. “When did you hear from him next?”

“Just after Austin was killed,” Dagmar said. “Siyed sent me emails saying he was coming to Los Angeles to do a commercial and he wanted to meet me. I told him I wouldn’t be available.”

There was a flicker of interest behind Murdoch’s blue eyes.

“Do these emails still exist?” he asked.

“I think so. I’ll provide copies if so.”

She didn’t think there was anything in the emails that would send her to the gas chamber.

She said that more emails had followed, and phone calls. And a lot of flowers. She said she hadn’t responded to it, or had told Siyed to leave.

“I called his wife,” she said. “I told her that Siyed had gone crazy and that she should call him and get him to come home.” She shrugged. “I guess it didn’t work.”

Kim looked interested.

“Did you tell her that her husband was involved with you?”

“
Had been
involved,” Dagmar corrected. “And no, I didn’t.” She felt immediately that she’d given the wrong answer. The wronged woman might always make a good suspect.

“It’s possible that she knew anyway,” she said. “Siyed was acting pretty strange.”

Murdoch considered this.

“You didn’t at any time see Siyed in person?” he asked.

Dagmar took a breath. She’d been hoping this question wouldn’t come up.

“Yes,” she said. “A few days ago. He turned up at my apartment and tried to talk to me when I came home from work. I told him to go home, and the next day I called his wife.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me he loved me. He told me he had told his wife about us, but I later learned he’d lied about that.”