There’s only one thing left I have to tell. Dog tags.
Everybody gets two. If you find a guy that died quick and in one piece, more or less, you open his mouth, you wedge one of his tags between his teeth and you take his rifle or carbine or whatever he was carrying and you put his bayonet on it and you stick it into the dirt beside him and you hang the other tag on his weapon someplace, wherever you can put it. Then you move on to the next one. Sometimes you have to use a rake and a shovel. And before you zip the bag, the last thing you do is write on the paper that goes with it, A soldier known only to God.
So now, Oh-high-oh, maybe you can tell why after thirty days of collecting that kinda thing, I wanted to blow the back of my head off. Didn’t do it. Somebody knocked me down, beat the shit outta me. Smashed my nose, cut me all over my eyebrows, my cheeks. First time I saw a mirror, I looked at it and I said, Who is that? I really couldn’t tell it was me. And so here I am, Oh-high-oh, I just dumped it all in you. Cause I can’t carry it no more.
So far you haven’t said anything. I don’t think you’ll blab no matter what I tell you. I’m pretty sure you won’t. Not that I have anything else to say. I already told you the worst part.
A couple of hours later, Johnny stood and dusted off the seat of his trousers.
Then he stretched his arms up and said, See you, Oh-high-oh. Tomorrow, probably. Don’t worry if I don’t show up. Cause my dad and my mom, they’re already worrying about what’s gonna happen to me when they die. They think I don’t hear them whispering about it. Bad as their hearing is, they have to talk loud, so it’s easy to hear them. So, one day not too far down the road, I’m sure they’ll throw their hands up and say they can’t stand me anymore. Then they’ll call the cops. And the cops will do what cops get paid to do. Take me to some nuthouse. Make sure I don’t get loose.
I have to think of some way to make them understand I won’t hold it against them for calling the cops. That won’t be their fault, any more than any of the rest of this was ever their fault. Gonna be tough convincing them, though, cause no doubt they think I lost my mind, and as long as they think that they’re never gonna believe anything I say. And anyway, I haven’t lost my mind. I know right where it is. Same place it’s always been. Under my hair.
Remember what I said, Oh-high-oh. Cause I’ve just decided I’m never gonna repeat it. Not to anybody. In fact, I might never say anything to anybody again.
PART III
UNIVERSITIES, PARKS, RECREATION
INTRUDER
BY KATHLEEN GEORGE
Schenley Farms
They were partners. One was white, one was black; they got along and liked working together. They’d come up through the ranks at the same time, slightly competitive, mostly friends.
The call came at one in the morning. All the good murders happened at night. The 911 operator told them, “Schenley Farms Terrace. A guy hit an intruder over the head. Called here, we sent the paramedics. They’re saying the guy is dead. Patrol just got there.”
“Breaking news,” said Tolson, looking at his watch as he beckoned his partner down the stairs and outside to a fleet car. “Way too late for the eleven o’clock hash and nobody much watches the morning news, so we caught ourselves a break. I hate sounding dumb on the eleven o’clock news when we don’t know what’s happening.”
“You can manage to sound dumb anytime,” Paulson said. Tolson shot him a look and then Paulson laughed and asked, “Okay, what is it?”
“Manslaughter, probably.” Tolson gave the few details he had while he radioed patrol to call him on his cell.
Damion Paulson drove them, expertly shooting to the parkway and then passing everybody on the road.
Tolson’s phone rang, speaker on. The patrol cop had five minutes on them. “Anything you can tell us?”
“He’s dead. Mashed-up head and lots of blood. Man, he must’ve got hit hard. Family is all upset. Everybody is shaking and crying. They have accents. I don’t know what kind. They’re foreigners.”
“Okay. What else?” Tolson asked.
“The daughter. She’s something else. She looks like some kind of movie star. Like maybe Indian or something, but with light eyes. Maybe she’s somebody famous, I don’t know.”
Paulson was laughing silently.
“Anything else about the homicide?” Tolson pressed.
“Not yet. Just everybody’s upset. They’re talking in their language.”
Tolson hung up. “Check your prejudice at the door,” he quipped. He was serious, though. Now was not the time to fuck up. Respectful to foreigners was drummed into their heads. Also other lessons: Poor doesn’t mean dumb. Every poor dead son of a bitch was a human being.
“You ever hang around Schenley Farms?” Tolson asked Paulson, who had grown up near there, in the Hill District.
“Nah.”
Schenley Farms, they knew, had some fancy properties, but the fanciest mansions were closer to Oakland. Old money as well as some high brass from the universities resided there. Then there were the somewhat fancy houses on the steeper streets of Schenley Farms, and then way up above them was the beginning of “the hill,” a black ghetto. Five minutes later they were at the house. It was far from shabby.
A couple of TV news trucks were parked on the street. Tolson told reporters he passed, walking to the house, “We’ll have a statement for you in thirty minutes.” They went inside.
The inside of the house was super fancy. Glass, white, glass, white. Plush carpets. Tolson knew they were bringing in dirt and he felt uncomfortable. It was late May and the earth was moist. The patrol cop said, “Down here,” and led them down a set of carpeted steps to a finished basement that was basically a well decked-out apartment. The paramedics were standing around like oafs. The guy on the floor of this downstairs apartment was so totally dead—extreme measures definitely not necessary. He was a black guy, and they could see that he was wearing running shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt of a good quality, nice-looking things. A pocketknife lay near the body.
Tolson and Paulson moved outside the basement door. They examined the grounds, the shaved bits of door around the lock, then came back in and looked around. Cushy, cushy sofas and a huge TV. Tolson walked around, Paulson behind him, briefly taking in the little kitchen and the bathroom, all very state of the art.
“You know how much that kind of shower setup costs?” Paulson asked. He was married and trying to renovate a house. “And the faucets. Way out of my range.”
“Pretty,” Tolson admitted. “Pretty stuff, all right.” He was not married. He had just suffered a breakup and was nursing a broken heart. He hadn’t even known she was unhappy. She’d told him that was because he wasn’t too smart.
They checked the victim for ID. There was nothing in his pockets. “This knife was just like this?”
The patrol cop told them it was.
Had the deceased dropped it that way when he fell? Odd.
They headed upstairs to talk to the family.
They tiptoed through the huge living room with its two levels to where the patrol cop pointed them, saying, “They told me they’d be in the kitchen.”
The kitchen was not exactly a kitchen. It was perhaps larger than the two-tiered living room. Its paned glass windows looked clean even by night, the paint on the wood perfect. It had clearly been added onto the house, using up part of the yard. It had a fireplace and a seating area with comfortable chairs, like a second living room. In a gazebo kind of thing at one end was a dining table and chairs. There were windows everywhere. These cats were in favor of windows. One arched window at the dining end looked out onto the hillside where outdoor lights showed there were terraced levels, all planted with colorful flowers—the slope was landscaped to within an inch of its life.
The dining table was glass too. Light. Light everywhere.
The detectives turned away from the view to find the family huddled in the back near the cooking area, comforting a young woman. They broke apart reluctantly t
o come forward. The father indicated the glass dining table, which seated eight.
Tolson said, “Fine. Yes, let’s sit there. We need to ask you some questions.” Five family members trooped in front of the detectives. They appeared to be father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, four of them huddling protectively over the fifth, the girl, so that at first the detectives couldn’t see her.
When they all got to the table where the family took separate seats, Tolson and Paulson got their first look at her.
She was the most beautiful woman Tolson had ever laid eyes on. She was like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth in those old, old movies—light eyes, dark hair, and lips, skin, that made his heart stop. She held a cloth to the side of her face.
“You’re hurt?”
She shook her head.
The father said firmly, “He hit her. The guy hit her.”
“Should you have medical help?”
She shook her head. Her brother sat next to her at the table but his shoulders were angled away from her—distancing himself for some reason.
Maybe she was famous, an actress or something—everything she did, even the way she shook her head, seemed watchable and interesting.
“I’m Detective Tolson, this is Detective Paulson. We’ll want your names. And then the whole story, from the beginning.”
The father’s name was Yousef, the son Javeed. The old baba, the mother’s mother, was Fatemeh, the mother was Malakeh, and the girl was Azita. The last name of the family was Samadi. Tolson laboriously copied these into his book and checked the spelling by reading each name back.
“This is your home? You live here?”
Everybody looked to Yousef Samadi, who answered. “Most of the year.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have other homes. We travel. I travel a lot,” Yousef explained, “but the children are in school so mostly they are here.”
“We went to Florida in January,” the son added.
“Oh, you mean a vacation?”
“A trip,” Samadi said. “I had some business there. I made sure they did their schoolwork. We have a home there.”
“You said homes? I suppose I should get it all down. Somewhere else?”
“Yes. In Iran, of course. Our main home. And we have an apartment in Paris.”
“I see,” Tolson said. “Would someone write the addresses for us? To make all this go quicker?”
Javeed volunteered to do that.
Tolson asked Yousef, “Your work is here?”
“I have several businesses. Not here, but I can work here by phone and computer.”
“What kind of business do you do?”
“Import.”
“I see.” Dope, guns, trinkets, antiques? “What products?”
“Carpets, rugs, beautiful things.”
Tolson nodded and turned to Paulson to bring him into the questioning phase. “Anything?”
Paulson said, “We’ll need to hear from the beginning what happened tonight.”
“Right,” Tolson said. “Go ahead.”
“We were in bed,” Yousef began. “The women were sleeping. They didn’t hear anything. Javeed was in his room. I thought he was asleep. But he was listening to something—” He made a gesture to his ears to indicate contempt toward MP3 players. “So he still didn’t hear. I was in my bed. I was watching my television. I thought I heard a sound. Highpitched. A voice. From the recreation room. I thought maybe an intruder, maybe a robber got hurt. But I knew sometimes my daughter went down there late, watching TV and doing her homework at the same time. I had to go down sometimes in the middle of the night to tell her to go to bed.” He looked around at his family. They nodded at him, some almost imperceptibly.
A knock at the front door and a simultaneous call on the police radio interrupted Samadi’s narrative.
“We’re here,” a crackling voice came through on the radio.
“What’s happening? Who is that?” Samadi held a hand over his heart.
“Our team. We have to get prints, photos.”
Azita put her hands over her face. Her brother nudged her. He said something like, “You might have to.”
Tolson saw a nasty bruise on her cheekbone near her ear.
Detective Paulson went to the door to let in the forensics team. Tolson got up too, to see who had been sent. Lucky. They’d got the best lab guys. He indicated the basement where the team should go. Then he and Paulson headed back to their seats.
“Why won’t they take the man away?” the wife was murmuring to her husband. “And the blood? I won’t ever go down there again. I want to move.”
“Let’s be patient,” Samadi said. “Let’s find out how they do it. They’re professionals.” He was an imposing man, not just because he was well-barbered and distinguished looking, but also because it was clear he was used to exercising his will.
Tolson answered formally. “We’ll tape the room off. When we have all the evidence we need, a team will come in and clean up. We can give you some names of experts at cleanup. You might want to change the carpet simply because … because you want to change it. But that’s to be decided by you later.”
Azita had begun crying.
“What is it?” Paulson asked.
“A man died in our house. It makes me feel … unlucky.”
“Unlucky?”
“And sad.”
“You were down there when he broke in?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You didn’t hear him breaking in?”
“I had fallen asleep. The TV was on.”
“I see. And then?”
“Something woke me. And I saw him. And I made a sound. And my father came down. When he saw the man he grabbed a baseball bat.”
“There was a bat there?”
“The whole corner,” Yousef interrupted. “You saw it. Sports equipment. I didn’t think; I couldn’t think. I wanted something that would be … far from my body and strong. I wanted to save my daughter.”
“Save her?”
“He was holding her. He had a knife.”
“We saw the knife,” Paulson volunteered. “Beside the body.”
Tolson said, “So, you wanted distance from him as you hit him. But you, Azita, were in the man’s grip. There’s no blood on you. How is that?”
“There was.” She shuddered. “I showered. I changed clothes.”
“I see. Where are the clothes you were wearing?”
“In the garbage. My mother took them.”
“We’re going to need them,” Paulson said kindly. “You can’t do that. You can’t make those decisions. They’re evidence. Out back?”
The mother glanced at her husband, then nodded.
“I’ll tell the techs to get them,” Paulson said, again very gently.
Tolson asked, “How long before you called us?”
“Right away.”
“But the shower? Your daughter had a shower?”
“Maybe I sat with her for a few minutes to calm her, I don’t remember. There’s a shower in the basement. She used that.”
“The change of clothes?”
“My wife brought her fresh clothes.”
“We need to go to your living room and reenact. You should show us where you were at each point. But first, did you know the young man? Any of you?”
They all said no.
“Are you sure? Did you all look at him?”
“We didn’t let Javeed or my mother-in-law go down to look, but my wife and I saw him. He was not familiar.”
“Azita?”
“Please, no.”
“What?”
“I didn’t know him.”
“Did the man speak? What did he say to you?”
She hesitated.
“Azita?” her father prompted.
“He said, ‘I need jewels, money, cash, lots of cash, now.’ I said, ‘I can get you a little cash.’ But I made a noise. He hit me. He said, ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you.’ He pulled a knif
e. I kept talking, telling him we had some cash on hand, not much, but that I would find him something else of value. Then my father came down. The surprise made him … the man … turn from me. Then he turned back because … I don’t know, maybe he was going to stab me. My father hit him.”
“How many times?”
“Two.”
“Please promise me,” Yousef Samadi said suddenly, “that you will keep this out of the papers and the news.”
Tolson paused and looked at him, surprised. “There is no way I can do that. We have freedom of the press.”
“Please. Keep my daughter out of it. She’s young. She’s still in high school. Don’t you understand that? Please.”
“I’ll do my best on that end.”
The father sighed heavily.
They went into the living room and played out the scenario the girl had described—sleep, sound of break-in, scream, words of threat, knife pulled, father arrives, hit to the head. They played it a couple of times while the techs worked in the basement room. Azita did it beautifully. She turned like a dancer, got up off the sofa like a princess awaking from sleep in a Disney film.
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