“Mm,” said Dagmar. She wasn’t paying attention; she was just relieved that she had avoided the Phantom of the Opera moment, the unmasking of Charlie’s mutilated face.
The car crawled at about ten miles an hour toward the San Fernando Valley. Dagmar thought of Charlie’s plaster white flesh and the horrible gouges of the shrapnel.
“Why did they do it?” she found herself saying.
“The Maffya?” Murdoch’s pinched mouth gave a twist. “Money. It’s why they do anything.”
“I mean,” Dagmar began, and realized that she had no idea what she had meant.
“I mean”-starting again-“why a bomb?”
Murdoch considered this. “Because the killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off,” he said. “A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.”
“But you need a lot of technical knowledge to make a bomb.”
“Not for a gunpowder bomb, and this was a gunpowder bomb.” She looked at him. “The smell,” he said. “That was powder.”
Dagmar didn’t remember a gunpowder smell, or any kind of smell at all, but then she supposed she could trust a police officer to know what gunpowder smelled like.
“You can legally buy up to a pound of smokeless powder at a time,” Murdoch said. “You can buy it at any gun store. You can buy it at Wal-Mart. For use in reloading ammunition.”
Dagmar thought idly about getting the players to track gunpowder sales in Greater Los Angeles.
“You can get a fuse from a model rocket kit,” Murdoch said. “You can find the instructions for the whole thing on the Internet.”
“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.
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!