Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  After parking the car I told my partner, “You’ll have to wait for me.”

  Sirius didn’t even try to pretend he was disappointed but instead just curled up on the backseat.

  “I was at least hoping for an argument,” I said.

  He raised one eye and then closed it.

  The BHHS campus is sprawled out over a lot of acreage, and it took me a few stops and starts to orient myself. Anyone expecting a prep school for the rich would have been disappointed. The school was mostly nondescript, with little to distinguish it. The producers of the original Beverly Hills 90210 must have decided the same thing: they used the exterior of Torrance High School, which was some twenty miles away, for their shots.

  As I made my way to the administrative offices, I encountered more security guards. There was a lot of talking going on over walkie-talkies. The guards were intent on keeping the media away from the campus, which was more than all right by me. Even though it was early, teachers and students were already arriving on campus, drawn by news of Paul Klein’s death. Judging by its brightly lit offices, the school’s administration had arrived early to deal with the crisis.

  When I announced myself to a receptionist, she said, “The assistant principal is expecting you.”

  Even though I am closing in on the age of forty, the receptionist’s words took me back twenty-five years. They had been scary back then; there was a part of me that thought they still were. The only thing that had changed was the title: it was now assistant principal instead of vice principal.

  Most adults offer their first names when being introduced. Assistant Principal Durand did not. “I am Mrs. Durand,” she said.

  She was about my age, with short, dark hair set off by pale skin. The assistant principal might have been attractive if she smiled, but she didn’t. Maybe frowning was one of her job requirements. Maybe her night had been as long as mine. I keep hoping that one day I will arise reborn from my phoenix dreams instead of feeling like day-after barbecue.

  “I am here investigating the homicide of Paul Klein,” I said. “I’m going to need to talk to those individuals that might have known Paul best, including counselors, teachers, administrators, and of course students.”

  Durand folded and unfolded her hands several times before she responded with carefully measured words: “I will do what I can to help you, Detective, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable having you talk with students without first getting the permission of their parents.”

  I wasn’t surprised by her response. The first rule of school administrators is to avoid any possibility of a lawsuit.

  “Paul was an adult. Confidentiality laws shouldn’t factor in here.”

  “His eighteenth birthday was less than three months ago. Most of the students at this school are under the age of eighteen, and some of our Beverly parents might not like you talking to their children. School records are much like juvenile criminal records: they’re supposed to remain sealed.”

  “One of your own was murdered. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

  “Of course it does. I will try and work with you, Detective, but I must be mindful of that slippery slope.”

  “Did you know Paul Klein?”

  She nodded but didn’t elaborate.

  “When I was in high school, the vice principal was the disciplinarian of the school. Is that your role?”

  “That is just one of my duties.”

  “But if students are written up, or if there is trouble, you’re the sheriff?”

  “I would likely be involved in the process, yes.”

  “Did you ever call Paul into your office?”

  She hesitated and then said, “Not officially.”

  “But unofficially you did?”

  Weighing her words she said, “There was an instance where a student complained about his behavior.”

  “What were the circumstances?”

  “I was told that Paul was acting inappropriately toward one of our students.”

  “I’ll need you to be more specific.”

  “Paul and some of his friends were heard teasing a student. The complaint was secondhand, mind you. It didn’t come from the party being teased.”

  “But you talked to the student that was teased?”

  “I did. And it was that student’s wishes to not proceed with an investigation into the incident.”

  “In that case, you wouldn’t mind me talking with this student?”

  “I’ll have to consult with someone in administration and get back to you.”

  I sighed, hoping my dramatic posturing would get me somewhere. When it didn’t I said, “I assume you also talked to Paul about this incident?”

  She nodded. “It was his belief it was no big thing.”

  “Was the student being teased foreign born?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I pretended to flip through some old notes, looking for something. “Here it is,” I said. “One of Paul’s friends mentioned the incident. The young woman was Iranian, right?”

  “She was Persian, yes,” Durand said, emphasizing to me what must be the more politically correct term.

  “Are many of your students native to other lands?” I asked.

  “Almost a third,” Durand said. “At Beverly we pride ourselves on our diversity.”

  “You haven’t found any racial or monetary divide among your students?”

  “Beverly is a public school, and in real life it is nothing like how it’s portrayed in television and film. There are many apartments in Beverly Hills, and quite a few of our students come from families that are anything but affluent.”

  I pretended to look through my notes again. “I didn’t get the name of the girl Paul was accused of teasing. What is it?”

  “I prefer withholding her name until I get some directive from above.”

  I thought about sighing again but didn’t. Every day, the assistant principal probably dealt with much more talented actors than me. “Over the years did you have any other dealings with Paul?”

  Durand hesitated before speaking and then carefully said, “Last spring we talked after an incident in a lacrosse game. There was a formal complaint from another high school saying that one of our players head-butted a member of its team. The opposing coach suspected that Paul was the one that committed the offense, because earlier in the match he’d had a run-in with that player.”

  “Was Paul guilty of the head butt?”

  “He said he wasn’t involved, and that it was likely the other player was accidentally hit with a stick.”

  “What happened with the complaint?”

  “Our athletic director dealt with it, but as far as I know nothing came of it, since the victim couldn’t identify who hit him.”

  “Were Paul’s teammates questioned?”

  Durand nodded. “They all said the same thing, that it must have been an accidental stick.”

  “Sticks and stones,” I mused aloud.

  I didn’t continue with the rest of the nursery rhyme, because it’s bullshit and every kid knows it. Only a sociopath can declare, “Words will never hurt me.” Words do hurt, sometimes more than anything, which meant I would have to investigate the stick incident and the hurting words.

  I met with Frank Rivera in his homeroom. The room didn’t have a chalkboard and I wondered if they were no longer fixtures in high schools. There was a whiteboard and on it were class reminders. At least I didn’t have to worry about tomorrow’s quiz. There was a large map of the world on one wall. Next to it was another map that was labeled: The Black Death Project. The poster detailed the spread of the bubonic plague.

  Rivera was a history teacher and the lacrosse coach. He was a small, intense Hispanic male who liked to punctuate his points with an emphatic index finger. His favorite word was “heckuva.” According to him, Paul Klein was a heckuva leader, heckuva kid, heckuva player, and heckuva teammate. By the end of our talk, I was getting a heckuva headache.

  “I heard there w
as a complaint registered against Paul by another team last year,” I said.

  “It was dismissed,” Rivera said.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “The whole thing was a case of sour grapes. Their team lost.”

  “Did Paul head-butt their player?”

  Instead of answering, Rivera said, “Earlier in the game their kid basically coldcocked Paul. That’s what happened.”

  “And Paul avenged that?”

  Rivera avoided my eyes. “I am not saying that. I am just saying the bad blood started with them.”

  I left with the name of the other player, and the certainty that Klein had hit him when no one else was looking.

  There was a special assembly scheduled to start the school day at Beverly—the name everyone seemed to call BHHS. The assembly was only open to Beverly students, teachers, staff, and the special counselors that had been brought in. Because I wasn’t being allowed to attend, Mrs. Durand promised to post my name and number as the LAPD contact.

  With time before the assembly, I walked around Beverly’s grounds trying to spot Jason Davis. Emotional groups of students were clustered around the campus. One group was standing outside of the swim gym. Looming over it was a sign saying HOME OF THE NORMANS, with a painting of a knight atop a charger. I was tempted to take a look inside the swim gym to see if its interior had changed much since Frank Capra immortalized it in his movie It’s a Wonderful Life, but I didn’t want real life impinging on one of my favorite make-believe scenes. Jenny had loved that film, which now made it bittersweet for me to watch, but over the holidays I had found myself sitting down to it again. The scene filmed at Beverly Hills High School is where Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed are dancing the Charleston. The two are so intent on each other that they don’t even notice when the floor opens up underneath them. The couple fall in the drink, and then they fall in love. And that was how the swim gym was forever immortalized. I wished I was investigating the movie and not a murder.

  For the students of Beverly, there was only one topic of the day and that was the murder of Klein. Among the girls there was lots of sobbing, hugging, and comforting going on. The guys mostly shuffled their feet and looked grim. The outpouring of grief and expressions of shock were to be expected, given the circumstances. For many of these kids, Klein’s murder was their first encounter with death, let alone a crucifixion.

  Amid the more than two thousand students, I wasn’t able to spot Jason Davis, so I ended up calling his cell number. When he answered I could tell by the background noise that he was also on campus. “This is Gideon. I am at Beverly. Do you want to talk in person or over the phone?”

  “Phone,” he said, and then I heard him putting some distance between himself and others.

  “I need a name,” I said. “Who’s the Persian girl that Paul and your group were caught hassling and got him brought before the assistant principal?”

  Jason didn’t answer right away, and when he did he played dumb: “What Persian girl?”

  “Wrong answer,” I said. “Try again.”

  Jason’s memory improved. “Bugs.”

  “Her name is Bugs?”

  “It’s her nickname.”

  “What’s her real name?”

  “I am not really sure. I think her first name might be Dana.”

  “You know her well enough to harass her, but you don’t even know her name?”

  Jason didn’t offer a denial. He didn’t say anything.

  “Go get her name for me. And I also want you to take her picture and send it to me at this number. Do it surreptitiously, and by that I mean...”

  He interrupted. “I know what surreptitious means.”

  Of course he did. It had probably been one of his SAT prep words.

  “Do you know what expeditious means?”

  When he said, “Yeah,” I hung up.

  Two minutes later I heard the doorbell sound that accompanies my text messages. I hit Receive and saw that Davis had sent me a picture/text message. That was something I still hadn’t figured out how to do with my phone. He had written “Her name is dinah hazimi, or something close to that.”

  I studied Dinah’s picture. The girl hadn’t known she was in a camera’s crosshairs. Jason’s face shot wasn’t great, but it was enough for me to identify her. Dinah’s lips were pointedly pursed, but they didn’t hide what was under them.

  “Malocclusion,” I whispered aloud, wondering if Jason also knew that word.

  Dinah, known by the Agency boys as Bugs, had buck teeth.

  A steady stream of students had been going to and from a fenced-off site on Olympic Boulevard that was adjacent to the school. Their pilgrimage spot was a tower, but with the commencement of the school’s special assembly, the migration had stopped. Without any more students to film, and with their morning news segments concluded, the media and news vans drifted away. When I was sure there were no more cameras monitoring the site, I made my way toward the Tower of Hope.

  Hidden behind the tiled 150-foot tower was an active oil derrick. Over the years there had been a number of feature stories written about the well. The LA Basin is home to vast oil deposits, and Beverly Hills High School happens to be located on one of them. The derrick produces around five hundred barrels of oil each day, and BHHS is a beneficiary of the oil, receiving about $300,000 in royalties a year.

  In 2001, the formerly drab, gray structure hiding the derrick was transformed into what was called the Tower of Hope. The tower’s floral facelift came after thousands of teal-colored tiles—called Portraits of Hope—were affixed to the structure. Each of those tiles was hand-painted by terminally ill children being treated in Los Angeles hospitals. The tiles were a symbol of hope, and each of the four sides of the tiled tower represented one of four seasons of the year.

  That was the feel-good story. A few years later there was a different story, and the Tower of Hope became known as the Tower of You Better Hope You Don’t Get Cancer. Litigants sued the oil company, among them a number of former Beverly students, claiming that benzene and other chemicals released during drilling had resulted in a cancer cluster. The last I had heard, most of the lawsuits had disappeared. Throughout it all the derrick had continued pumping.

  The Tower of Hope was near to the track and baseball field. Paul Klein would undoubtedly have passed by it many times while running around the track. As I approached the tower, the handiwork of the students became visible. All morning they had been making a memorial for their fallen classmate. Laid out against the fence were flowers, stuffed animals, candles, drawings, cards, and pictures of Paul. The memorial stretched around two sides of the tower.

  Many of the candles were lit. I didn’t know if that was a good idea so near to an active oil well, but I didn’t extinguish them. There were hundreds of notes, cards, and drawings. The messages of sorrow, of words like “We will miss you,” and “We love you,” and “God bless you,” were everywhere. I walked by teddy bears, helium balloons, a few Stars of David, and some white lacrosse balls. There were also several piles of stones, and I wondered why those would have been left until I remembered that it was a Jewish tradition to leave stones at grave sites.

  I pulled out my digital camera and began snapping pictures of the makeshift memorial and afterward put on gloves and began sifting through the items. I had almost finished going through the items on one side of the tower when I picked up a large, handmade card on which an artistic hand had colored in the words “Gone but not forgotten.” As I opened the card, I expected to see more platitudes on the inside but instead found the scripted words “You made my life HELL, and now you’ve gone to hell. There is a God.”

  After returning the card to where I had found it, I took pictures from all angles. Someone had made sure their offering didn’t look out of place, but they hadn’t forgiven Klein even in death. I didn’t expect to find another needle in the haystack, but a few minutes later I turned over a blown-up picture that showed Paul running and saw that someone had
written in block letters “What goes around, comes around.” The block letters suggested to me that either the writer was male or someone trying to disguise her writing, whereas the handwriting on the card looked distinctly feminine. Amid all the adoration of Klein were two dissenting writers.

  I hadn’t brought any evidence bags, so I slipped the card and picture inside my coat. My timing was good; less than a minute later a squad car pulled up to the curb. Yes, Virginia, there really is a Beverly Hills Police Department, even though the entire city is less than six square miles in area and has a population of only thirty-five thousand people.

  An unmarked car pulled in behind the squad car and a suit emerged. The detective scowled at me for longer than necessary and then said, “Can I help you?”

  What he really meant was “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Nope,” I said, making an entry in my notepad.

  The suit continued to stare at me, and I continued to ignore him. Because the homicide had occurred in LAPD’s jurisdiction, we had the case, but that didn’t mean BHPD had to be happy about it. In fact, it was likely the suit eyeballing me was doing his own parallel investigation into Klein’s homicide.

  “I hope I don’t have to tell you that nothing is to be removed from this area.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said, hoping the items under my coat weren’t visible.

  I pretended to be inordinately interested in one particular section of the memorial and clicked away with my camera. Later, when I vacated the area, the detective would probably drive himself crazy figuring out what I had been so focused on. As I took my leave of the tower and started back toward the campus, I nodded to the two Beverly Hills cops.