In exchange for taking care of security, Ernie received a free room in the motel. There wasn’t much to do; he patrolled the property at night accompanied by Dufus, his standard poodle. Ernie was a big man. He’d played football at Cal State and looked like he still could. His presence on the grounds was enough to discourage wayward local kids from breaking into rooms. He didn’t call the cops when he did catch one. Ernie just found out who their parents were. The threat of telling them was usually enough. He ferried cash deposits to the bank in Lahaina, did background checks on new hires, and played chess with my father. I would sit next to my father and watch them play. At first, my father would tell me where to move his piece, and whisper in my ear the reason for the move: “I will let him take my knight, but it will double his pawn and he will regret it in three more moves.” Eventually, he let me make my own moves. It’s how I learned the game and got to be pretty good; it also cemented my own friendship with Ernie. One of these days I will tell Lieutenant Hagen that it was Ernie Saldana, not Angie Dickinson, who was my inspiration to become a cop. But that would mean telling her who I am and what I am doing on her police force.
Another memory: the drive from JFK, our Maui sunburned skin still peeling, clothes too thin for the cold of upstate New York. We lived in a two-story wood-frame house in Grahamsville, population less than a thousand people and a hundred miles too far from New York City to commute. Grahamsville was pure country; it had a gas station with one pump, a general store where you could find canned ham, hunting magazines, Powerball tickets, antifreeze, and, occasionally the New York Times. For everything else, there was a Walmart in Ellenville, fifteen miles away. It was dull but picturesque and had no amenities. There was a local joke the boys learned:
Tourist: “What is there to do here in the summer?”
Native: “There’s fishing and fucking.”
Tourist: “What about the winter?”
Native: “No fishing.”
Our house straddled a flat acre off the main highway, fifty yards up a dirt road my father called the damn thing. In the spring the road, the damn thing, turned to mud. By August, the mud dried out and even a gentle wind kicked up fine dust that coated cars and colored white sneakers brown. In winter, our neighbor Harry Dill plowed the snow so our cars could come in and out. Periodically, my father promised he would pave the damn thing, but he never got around to it. The house was a one-story ranch with nothing to distinguish it from any of the others built by Rondout Construction in the late 1950s, except for the sign that read dr. martin karim, general medical practice. The front door led into our living quarters, a side entrance opened into my father’s medical suite. He made house calls, turned no one away for lack of money or insurance. Often, farmers paid him in produce. We were never short of fresh vegetables, eggs, apples, and, in the summer, corn off the stalk. His suite had a small waiting room with a couch, a few chairs, a playpen, and a box of toys for the kids. The magazines were Scientific American, Jack and Jill, Time, and National Geographic.
Our mother, Gloria, was his nurse, paramedic, receptionist, and bookkeeper. She had a gift of calming children facing vaccinations, and she knew how to set a broken arm, do an EKG, and take X-rays, developed in a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom. As a rural doctor, my father was on call 24/7. If one of his patients was in an emergency situation, they either came to his office or he went to their house. Our meals were interrupted by house calls, vacation plans were canceled because a baby was about to be born, and we grew up knowing that our own family needs came in second. My father was aware of this, so when my brother, Sammy, was born, he started commuting to Albany Medical College to complete his board training in gynecology. As he was finishing, a young doctor just out of his residency in family medicine wanted a small-town practice. My father sold him all his medical equipment, closed his office, and took a job at Planned Parenthood in Albany, and we began to experience a normal life. There were adjustments, of course. My mother had to find a job, and the house felt a lot bigger without the medical suite, but for the first time, we had our father to ourselves on weekends—he could help coach Sammy’s soccer team and drive me to swim meets—and if we missed the bus, he could drive us to school. And there would be family vacations.
But most important, since I was too old to share a bedroom with Sammy, my father’s medical office was converted into a living space for me. My bathroom still smelled of X-ray film developer, and I was occasionally awakened by a knock at the side door: a car crash survivor with a bleeding skull, a woman holding a sick baby, or a man with chest pains who hadn’t heard the news that my father had given up his practice. I gave directions to the hospital emergency room in Ellenville to all of them. There was always a part of me that believed in vibes and ghosts. Living in a former medical suite, where lives had been saved, wounds sewn up, and bad news delivered, I slept fitfully, even though I was separated by only a few yards from my parents. I heard their conversations, their ambient life humming in nearby rooms. I was called to meals that had already begun. At night, I retreated to my apartment to sleep. The space was mine. I had my own entrance. I could smoke cigarettes, sneak in a boyfriend, play my music as loud as I wanted.
From my bedroom window, I had a view of the woods behind our house, a Catskill forest speckled with tall red black spruce, thick balsam fir, and slender mountain ash. Whitetail deer nibbled the tender branches of the apple tree my father planted on the edge of our property. One winter evening after dinner when it was my turn to take out the garbage, I saw a bobcat under a tree, its taut brown body against the white snow, paw raised, staring at me, evaluating me as friend, food, or threat. I wasn’t afraid. I tried to match its stare. After our staring contest was over, it leaped in the air and disappeared back into the alder brush.
On another evening, under the same tree in that Catskill forest, a man aimed his rifle and sent a bullet through our kitchen window, spilling my father’s brains onto the floor, splattering his blood on our white refrigerator door. Sammy and I were eating dessert—chocolate cake topped with vanilla ice cream—while our father washed the dishes. He had sent my mother upstairs.
“Gloria, darling, you cooked, I’ll clean up.”
My mother never heard the shot, only my brother’s scream. She burst into the kitchen, saw my father lying on the floor, turned off the kitchen faucet, swooped Sammy in her arms, and carried him out of the room. Like all murders, the bullet that ended my father’s life changed ours forever.
I was alone, the last human being in the world. An enormous pair of scissors had cut every string that connected me to all the people I loved and knew. My body felt like cigarette smoke. I thought I was going to rise and be sucked out of the room through the shattered window into the dark night, but nothing like that happened. My mother came back, took my hand, led me out into the living room. She sat me down next to Sammy on the couch, cradled us in her arms and called 911. I was sixteen. My brother, Sammy, was nine.
The police searched for the killer. They scoured the forest with bloodhounds, set up roadblocks, checked gas stations with CCTVs. They brought in the FBI, the New York State Police, and expert forensic people. The killer was smart. He’d come to the shooting spot in his socks, so there were no shoe tracks; he’d fired his rifle while sitting on a painter’s tarp that he’d taken with him, so there was no fiber analysis; he hadn’t eaten, smoked, or drunk anything while he’d waited. No cigarette butts, no half-eaten candy, no urine passed from his bladder. The shell casing was never found. The bullet that had opened my father’s skull was homemade; there was no tracing it. The killer was an expert at his profession. But so am I, and I’ll find him, the cowardly bastard. He murdered my father and destroyed my family. It will not be I alone am left to tell the tale. No. It will be I alone am left to get revenge, not on a dumb whale but on an intelligent human.
I became a police officer because Ernie Saldana told me I would have a better chance of finding the cowardly bastard if I did not follow my passion (or was it
my dream? I get them confused) and accepted early admission to Stony Brook, then went on to Cornell for a master’s degree and a PhD in English literature. Instead, I followed my rage. After high school, I commuted to Rockland Community College in Suffern for two years, got an associate’s degree in criminal justice, and went on to John Jay College of Criminal Justice for two more years; had odd jobs during the application process to the Long Island Police Department, making it through their Police Academy. I did three years of patrol duty, and now, I am a homicide detective less literate but armed with a Glock. If I happen to be walking on that wintry beach holding hands with Ryan Reynolds and meet this cowardly bastard, I will excuse myself from Ryan, lift my flared blazer, remove my weapon, and shoot the cowardly bastard in the abdomen. Then I will let him catch a glimpse of his bleeding entrails before I end his miserable life with a close-up round to his heart.
On second thought, I might just let him die in unimaginable pain as I continue my walk on the wintry beach with Ryan, while the cowardly bastard’s screams are drowned out by seagulls and breaking waves. Then perhaps I will go back to Stony Brook and restart my life in literary pursuits. Maybe.
My grief counselor suggested meditation. I do it often. My mantra is die, die, die, as I remember my father on the floor, Sammy screaming at his father separated from most of his head and therefore not his father but a horror movie, unrecognizable because he had no words to comfort his son, unrecognizable because he couldn’t get up and say, It’s all right, Sammy, darling. It didn’t happen. I’m alive and this is a dream and it didn’t happen. None of that happened, so Sammy just screamed and screamed until, as I said, my mother came in and picked him up in her arms and carried him out of the room.
Years later, my mother said she had been in rehearsal for the murder of her husband ever since our father made the death wish list of the Army of God. The New York Times said it was an anti-abortion group linked to violent extremists. Linked? Like the SS was linked to violent Nazis? Their website posted, He that hath no sword let him sell his garment and buy one. (Luke 22:26), and added, They who support abortion have the blood of babies on their hands. Their website celebrates men who have murdered doctors as heroes. My father’s killer hasn’t made the list—he’s still anonymous—but when he does, he won’t be alive to see it, thanks to me.
My mother saw herself as a combat wife: Grace Kelly waiting for Jimmy Stewart to come home from testing a new fighter plane, or was it Dirty Harry Callahan’s wife who watches him strap on his .44 Magnum and kiss the children good-bye and wonders if he will return? My father didn’t consider himself a hero; he was a doctor who thought women should make the decisions about their own bodies. He respected the autonomy of women, trusted them to decide what was best for themselves and their families. His parents emigrated from Iran; doctors who came to the US in the 1950s to escape the Shah. Like them, he worked hard to become a doctor, like them, he wasn’t going to let anyone tell him how to practice medicine whether it was members of the Peacock dynasty, SAVAK thugs, mullahs and their thought police, or here in America, the followers of the Army of God. I don’t know his name, the man who pulled the trigger—but I will find him—the cowardly bastard who killed my father with a sniper rifle.
At the Planned Parenthood clinic where my father worked, the staff was taught to identify suspicious phone calls, screen people who might be posing as patients but were really trying to infiltrate the clinic. Bomb threats were common; demonstrators copied license plates and addresses of staff workers, and, in my father’s case, the Army of God posted our home address on their website along with pictures of our family. Mine was from my junior high school yearbook, Sammy in his Cub Scout uniform—how did they get that? My father’s was photoshopped in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. The other doctors in the clinic were also targeted. One doctor had her car firebombed; nurses and office workers were followed; they all received phone threats, hate mail; they learned not to answer their phones, removed their mailboxes, and had everything forwarded to post office boxes. The bravest ones stayed on, and no one thought less of anyone who quit. On the Army of God website, my father was accused of murdering six hundred babies. When he was killed, a shadow image of the killer, “A Warrior for the Children” was posted. Still, there was no way to connect the assassin to the Army of God. I knew some of their names—the ones inside prison and the ones who were getting out; those who had threatened or attacked abortion clinics, Planned Parenthood sites; the crazies, the zealots; their lawyers, who worked for free; the clergy who praised them from their pulpits. But I was looking for a name, and the reason I became a cop had nothing to do with Angie Dickinson.
Ernie said, “You become a cop, get to be a detective, and you will have access to criminal databases. You will be able to see FBI and NSA files, and you can check other police department files. You are looking for a name, a person who probably lives in New York State, ex-military, someone who knew how to shoot, maybe even a cop himself, but smart enough to stay clear of the law.”
“I’ll find him, Ernie. I will.”
Once, my boyfriend, Bobby, said, “You are a revenge-seeking bitch of mayhem.”
“Apologize,” I demanded. “But just for the bitch part; the rest is accurate.”
Sammy and I got grief counseling. I don’t know how he could have been counseled for anything, much less grief. He fell into a catatonic stupor that lasted three months. When I came into his room, he’d sit upright on the edge of his bed, purse his lips, and stare into my face until I looked away. Sammy would twist his body and fall backward on to the mattress. Lying motionless on the bed, fists clenched at his waist, he’d stare at the ceiling. The meds, mostly benzodiazepines, got him moving again. He returned to middle school, where he was treated with extreme kindness, with the exception of Paul Singer, a bully who liked to whisper in his ear that Sammy’s father had been a baby killer who’d deserved to die. Paul’s own father was an alcoholic who beat him regularly and taught Paul the virtue of cruelty. The principal of the school intervened aggressively without the need of a threatening lawsuit from my mother. He got Paul into a mentorship program at his church and his father into AA. Paul came to see the error of his ways, and the bullying stopped.
Sammy refused to go to school, even after Paul Singer found religion and his father made amends. Sammy simply said, like Bartleby, that he would prefer not to. Mom got him into Jericho Pines, a private mental health facility in the Berkshires. Jericho charged seven thousand dollars a week, with a minimum six-week stay; if my mother’s cousin, Dr. James Andrews, hadn’t been the director of Jericho, my mother’s health insurance hadn’t reluctantly paid most of it, and a board of directors hadn’t forgiven the balance, Sammy would not have been there with other suicidal teenagers, some of whom had experimented disastrously with Schedule 1 psychedelics, most of them just rich and crazy—pardon my nonmedical terminology.
Sammy began to violate Jericho rules by walking away and occasionally trying to kill himself by overdosing on his meds.
His doctor said, “These are gestures, not serious attempts. He just needs time to heal.”
Unfortunately, Mom’s cousin Dr. Andrews said Jericho couldn’t keep him indefinitely, so we had to start thinking about alternatives. There weren’t any. That’s the thing about murder. You don’t just kill one person; you spread death in little ripples like a pebble tossed in a pond.
Of the three of us, Sammy suffered the most; he was the youngest, and we knew his pain would last the longest. It ended when Sammy was eleven, on one of his runaways from Jericho. A woman saw him standing in the road, just below the crest of a hill, but by the time she pulled over, an oncoming cement truck driver, not seeing him until it was too late, had crushed him beneath the wheels of his truck. My mother survived Sammy’s death, but not by much. Her heart stopped silently in her sleep, halted by grief and the belief that her love had failed her sweet Sammy.
I am bound to avenge my own losses—my father, my mother, but especially th
e misery inflicted on my little brother. The one who did this, the cowardly bastard, he will die at my hands when I find him.
I used to live in Eaton’s Neck, an arthritic finger on the north shore of Long Island. If I leaned over the balcony, I could see Connecticut across the Long Island Sound. Jay Gatsby and I had the same view; his balcony was bigger. The beach below was accessible by negotiating a weathered wood staircase. In the winter, on my days off, I would pry knots of black mussels from the rocks at low tide. The kitchen sink overlooked the water. There was no place for an assassin to hide and shoot me.
I bought the condo with my fiancé, Darren. He bought his half from me after I didn’t show up for our wedding. I tried, I really did, but at the last minute I realized I would be marrying a doctor. I couldn’t do it; I had already lost one.
Darren was finishing his surgery residency at Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. I was just out of the Police Academy. We met cute; he was speeding, I was on training patrol—after he talked his way out of a ticket, he asked if we could have dinner. We each liked the idea of what we each did for a living. He liked that I carried a gun in my purse, and I liked having a doctor around when I wasn’t feeling well. The trouble was we had impossible, opposing hours, Darren in his surgery residency and I as a rookie cop in the Long Island City Police Department with an obsession to find the man who killed my father.
Darren knew my tragic history. He was sympathetic, but he owned the soul of a surgeon: Diagnose the problem. If it’s a tumor, a torn meniscus, a bum hip, remove it, repair it, and heal.
“Move on,” Darren would say.
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