My dad had a neighbor in Baltimore whom I met over the cinderblock fence when I was home on leave from the Army in about 1991.
Dagmar was accepted into the family pretty rapidly after our first meeting because my family sucks in weird people and keeps them.
And Dagmar was weird.
She was about 41 when I met her and had several masters degrees that I’m not clear on. The only one I am clear on is that one of them was in Arabic studies. She had been married once to an Arabic man and had lived in an Arabic country. She said her husband beat her.
She was also still bogged down in student loan debt and worked as a temp to pay off the debt. In her sparetime she rescued dogs and delivered pizza.
She was actually very pretty in a dog-lady kind of way. I always thought she looked like a young Katherine Hepburn, covered in dog hair of course.
So over the years, Dagmar became a part of the family. She’d be at Sunday dinners and birthday parties and weddings. I would see her there when I came home for visits.
When she lived next door to my dad she lived with some guy who looked like Bob Villa, only with poofier hair.
Dagmar wanted children, but he did not.
One day during a visit home, I went over to her house and she revealed that after she and what’s-his-face would have sex, she’d scoop up his goo from her belly and put it into a turkey baster and freeze it for insemination at a later date.
I remember standing in her hallway and she was telling me of her clever plan as if it were completely normal. I would say things like, wow, well that’s cool. When, really, I was like, um, you’re a fruitbat.
Sometime in 1996, I moved back to Baltimore to live with my dad.
Because my dog had once eaten through my his basement door, the dog was not welcomed.
Dagmar was living a few blocks away at the time, and being the dog lady that she was, she offered to keep Xavy.
I was grateful.
I rarely saw her except when I’d go down to see Xavy. Once she came by and tried to convince my dad to buy into some prepaid attorney thing she was selling.
I was tending bar from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. at my girlfriend’s restaurant up the street. Every day I’d nap from 3 to 4 p.m.
On Feb. 21, 1997, Dagmar showed up at my dad’s house and woke me up from my nap.
“This guy I know named Ted was murdered,” she said.
She told me she and Ted worked together in this prepaid attorney deal. She told me he also had a radio show about the prepaid gig and that on Feb. 18, his son found him shot to death in his office.
Weird, I said.
Dagmar went on to tell me that the day after Ted was murdered, his friend called her work and accused her of killing Ted.
She was indignant.
Did you kill him, I asked.
No, she scoffed.
