The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  O’Donnell sent Neda into the house with a female cop to change out of the bathrobe and slippers that were now evidence, told Leon to follow her in and “see what you can squeeze from her between pals,” then sauntered with as much reluctance as he could feign toward the Channel 9 news van.

  * * *

  The path from the gate toward the main building led up a slowly rising, pleasantly winding walkway paved with smooth white stones and lined on both sides by an emerald-green lawn dotted with giant palm trees and white marble benches. On the left, a dark blue infinity pool lay above a sharp slope toward a terraced area with a tennis court and, below it, an orchard. On the right, a massive river gushed out of a set of polished black rocks and into a tropical pond complete with a bamboo bridge, waterfall, wet bar, fire pit, and a cabana.

  The front door was twelve feet high, made of black oak with shiny brass hardware; the foyer was as large as a decent-size hotel lobby. The family room, where Leon met Neda once she had changed out of her bloody clothes, was as large as his house. Divided into three sets of sitting areas, it was furnished with oversize armchairs, wrought-iron-and-glass coffee tables, heavy drapes and fine Persian rugs, and, here and there, mammoth books with titles like Tuscan Villas and The Jewels of Elizabeth Taylor.

  The house had been decorated by an Israeli man who pretended he was French, and who had become the flavor of the year among Iranian homeowners on the West Side. He was tall and glib and painfully transparent. He wore his shirts with the top four buttons undone, hoping to assume that Tom-Ford-on-the-big-billboards-above-Sunset-Strip look, but it was a close call with John-Travolta-in-the-disco-age. Since most of his clients were bored, middle-aged women with grown children, no jobs, and rich husbands who ignored them, Disco Tom regaled them first with stories of his own perfect marriage that involved, among many other romantic marvels, the daily presentation, by him to his wife of twenty-four years, of “a single black rose, raised in my own farm in Ecuador, and adorned only with a string of raffia tied in a bow around the stem.” Since none of his clients’ husbands were thoughtful enough to do the same, it was only fair that he—the husband—should pay through the nose for rugs and drapery instead. From there, Disco Tom was only too happy to provide the wives with exactly what he knew they wanted: they wanted exactly what their friends had, only better.

  Perched on a giant sofa with light-blue and lime-green upholstery, Neda looked like a small stuffed animal afraid it would be picked up by a maid and thrown in the trash before its owner could save it. She had traded her bathrobe for a black Juicy Couture sweat suit that she had bought at Cabazon Outlets outside Palm Springs the previous Christmas. She had cleaned the blood off her face and hands, but she hadn’t managed to rub the smell out entirely, and thus she remained: head slightly cocked to the right, hands abandoned on her lap, staring at the coffee table in front of her with that dull, steady gaze of the overly medicated or the lobotomized which she had perfected over the years.

  When he approached her, Neda looked right past Leon and offered a faint, friendly smile. “Welcome, sir.”

  * * *

  Neda told Leon she had no idea who would have wanted Raphael’s Son dead. It’s true he had “differences” with some people, but he was an observant Jew, she said, as if this alone might make him immune to harm. There had been a fight with the gardener, Gerardo, the previous week, over a $1,600 “landscaping” bill that Raphael’s Son had laughed at and thrown out—“Give me a break, all the guy ever does is cut the rosebushes down to the roots as soon as a flower is about to bloom, and he planted some impatiens where I told him not to—how does that make a leaf blower into a ‘landscape artist’?”

  There had been some yelling, Neda recalled, then Gerardo had quit, once again, and issued a warning: “You send me a check,” he had yelled in front of Neda and the maid, “or I’ll come back and make you pay!”

  Neda hadn’t seen Gerardo since last Wednesday; she didn’t know his last name and didn’t have a cell phone or a landline number for him. She thought, but wasn’t certain, that he drove a red, beat-up old pickup truck—every gardener in LA drives one—with a lawn mower hanging precariously off the flatbed, no insurance, no driver’s license, and why would you ask for a Social Security number when you already know it’s fake?

  She had no idea what country Gerardo was from, maybe Guatemala, or El Salvador, or Mexico. Yes, of course he was illegal, good luck trying to find a gardener who isn’t. Home address? What for? These illegals change domicile every five minutes, move out of one aunt or cousin or boyfriend’s house and into another, and they never give the employer the correct information anyway, just in case something comes up that would make them not want to be found.

  Neda didn’t remember how she had come to hire Gerardo. She thought the maid, Esperanza, might have recommended him. Esperanza herself was a cousin of someone who worked for one of Neda’s relatives. That woman, in turn, was hired from the bus stop on Sunset and Benedict Canyon, right in front of the famed Beverly Hills Hotel, where every Monday and Tuesday morning anyone looking for work waited on the sidewalk for potential employers to drive by and select from among them. Then again, Esperanza might have come from an agency, Neda said, though she had no idea what the name of the place would be, and besides, what’s the difference? Those agencies are here today, gone tomorrow. They’re one-room operations in some strip mall in the Valley; some Latina or Israeli housewife’s idea of taking advantage of other housewives’ naïveté. They open their doors at around eleven in the morning because the muchachas—the would-be employees—are often not early risers. Muchacha might mean “young girl,” but that’s how domestics refer to one another, even if they’re sixty years old. You never know their real age anyway, they lie about it like they lie about everything else, including having “papers.” The only people who even bother to ask for papers, or believe that the agency actually does the background checks it charges for, or—this is the most ridiculous thing—don’t realize that the “previous employer reference letters” the agency provides are all written by the muchacha’s first cousin or next-door neighbor, are young American mothers who refer to the maid as “the nanny.”

  Better realize you’re letting potential ax murderers and jewel thieves into your garden and bedroom than live with a false sense of security.

  __________________

  By midmorning, Neda’s shivers had stopped and some color had seeped back into her face. Drops of perspiration moistened her hairline and slid down her temples, and the scent of humidity mixed with dried blood rose from her like rot in an old, enclosed place. When she had answered all of Leon’s questions, she gave him permission to talk to her daughters.

  The older girl, Nicole, had bright red hair and hazel eyes, and the smooth, round face, impeccable white skin, and softly aquiline nose of the girls in dreamy fashion magazine photos. She was the type of child—quiet, kind, smart, and studious—most parents dream of having, then spend years worrying about: her quietness made her insipid, her kindness allowed others to take advantage of her, her intelligence frightened boys, and her studiousness meant she had no friends.

  Nicole was a senior at the Brentwood School. She got a near-perfect SAT score the first time she took the test, ran cross-country, and was a concert pianist. But she was always alone, at home or in the library, chewing at her nails and avoiding the gaze of others—crushed, it seemed, under a weight so exacting, she needed every last breath with which to fight it.

  She told Leon she had been at the library till nine o’clock the night before. She had come home through the garage and gone straight to her room, where she had stayed till she was awakened by Esperanza’s barking through the foyer as she spoke to the emergency operator on a cordless phone. Nicole hadn’t seen anyone when she came home, didn’t remember if her parents’ cars were in the garage. She had no idea who else was at home, but that again wasn’t unusual for their family.

  “We’re not the communicative type,” she explained. “M
ost of the time, everyone’s in their own room with the door locked.”

  She spoke with her eyes cast down and her skin blushing a faint pink. She hadn’t heard the crash that awakened Neda, didn’t know what time Esperanza started to scream. Asked if she had any idea who might have wanted to harm her father, Nicole studied Leon’s face, then shrugged ever so slightly and said, in a voice that was at once removed and ridden with heartache, “Everyone.”

  The younger sister, Kayla, was tall and busty, with long, shapely legs and wavy, light-brown hair. She sat on her bed wearing a pair of old Uggs, very short frayed shorts, and a thin, loose top that, depending on how she moved, revealed or covered the chai tattoo on the curve of her lower back. She had large brown eyes, still painted heavily from the night before, full lips, perfect teeth, a second tattoo on the tip of her left shoulder.

  She had been “out” till about three the previous night, first at one friend’s and then another’s, “and then we went to Hyde because my friends wanted to go but I don’t like that place. We got a table and ordered a magnum, but we got bored and left after a half hour.”

  A table at Hyde cost anywhere from $3,000 and up. The tab was picked up by Kayla’s friend Ati, the daughter of an Indonesian “industrialist” and her Russian racecar-driving husband. Ati and her brother lived together in a $12 million house in Beverly Hills. There was a permanent staff of five to tend to their needs, but they hadn’t seen their parents since Ati was nine years old. She had a yellow Ferrari Enzo; her brother drove a $1,700,000 Bugatti.

  From Hyde, Kayla and Ati and their friends had gone to the bar at the Roosevelt, but it was a Sunday night and nothing was happening. They headed home around two thirty, which was okay even on a school night because Kayla went to New Roads—“one of those places where parents park their kids just to keep them out of trouble during high school,” she told Leon. Her sister was the studious one in the family.

  As for her parents, Kayla thought they were both FOB—Fresh off the Boat—“Persies” with a totally skewed view of themselves.

  “They have this idea that we’re this nice, respectable, normal family, like all those other Persians,” she told Leon. Her cell phone vibrated in her hand every few seconds with a text or call, and she stopped to check the screen each time.

  “They don’t want me hanging out with my friends because it’s bad for their aabehroo, bad for my reputation, bad for marriage, bad for my kids. Except, Hello? We don’t have a reputation. Well, except a shitty one. People hate us. Even Americans who didn’t lose money to my dad have read about him and hate us. Little kids at Jewish day schools are telling each other jokes about us.”

  She got up from the bed, fished a pack of Marlboro Lights from her bag, and lit up.

  “Do you mind?” she asked Leon only after she had exhaled two long puffs.

  “So I say fuck my dad. I don’t give a shit what happened to him. He can be dead for all I care, he’s a jerk and a bastard and he cheated all his friends and even cheated on my mom God knows how many times, and she knows it too and doesn’t say anything, hasn’t once stood up for herself or my sister because, what do you know, it’s bad for our fucking nonexistent aabehroo.”

  __________________

  That word, aabehroo, is one of those for which no equivalent exists in the English language. It alludes to the impression that others hold of an individual’s virtue and respectability. To have aabehroo means that the world regards a person in high esteem. To lose it—or, more literally, to have it leave the person—means he will live in shame unless he somehow manages to get his aabehroo back. You may be born with aabehroo because of your family history, but holding on to it requires a great deal of restraint and self-sacrifice. It means making sure you do everything in compliance with society’s idea of what is right, that you live honorably and protect the sanctity of your family’s name and reputation. It means being capable of feeling deep, personal shame before an exacting, infinitely multitudinous jury.

  You have to have lived in a place like Iran, Leon thought, grown up with a strong sense of propriety and shame, and feared the judgment of others, in order to understand such a word. You certainly can’t imagine what it means, really, if you’ve lived most of your life in America. In this land of perpetual hope and endless good fortune, this country built on the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—where else in the world is happiness a right?—where even the dead look good and healthy, dressed up and painted and coiffed in the coffin as if on their wedding day, there’s no awareness, perhaps no need, nor would there be any tolerance, of that kind of sacrifice.

  Leon could see how Kayla, born and raised in Los Angeles, might throw the word around so carelessly or deride her parents for being concerned with the judgment of others. If not for his own Iranian past, he might share Kayla’s scorn.

  As it was, however, he had nothing but appreciation for this and other aspects of a culture that valued grace, harmony, and spiritual growth above all. Even this emphasis on aabehroo, while stifling if carried to an extreme, signaled the importance of individual righteousness to a society’s well-being. Raphael’s Son and his ilk were not representative of the Iranians Leon knew; they were unfortunate aberrations and as such, alas, stood out from the crowd.

  __________________

  Esperanza Guadalupe di Chiara Valencia had made such a spectacle of herself by the car that after taking her statement, Jose Montoya sent her to her room and asked another officer to stand guard until Leon was ready to talk to her. She had used that time to put on makeup and false eyelashes, and squeeze herself into a pair of faux 7 For All Mankind jeans. When Leon knocked on her door, she opened wearing a pair of sling-backs with four-inch heels.

  “I wear these at home,” she explained when she saw him looking at her shoes. “I can’t do work too well in higher heels.”

  Esperanza was the kind of maid who engaged in housework only when all other options had been exhausted. She liked to inform people that she had her own “staff” in El Salvador, plus a car, a swimming pool, and two dogs, and that she was often told she resembled Jennifer Lopez­—“only I have larger eyes.” Sixty years old and pleasantly plump, she kept pictures of herself and J-Lo in her wallet. Her bedroom at the Soleyman residence was decorated entirely in peach and gold, and smelled of face powder and hair spray. She kept the curtains drawn and screwed a pink lightbulb into the ceiling light fixture so that her image, when she looked in the mirror, was forever cased in a pleasant, if eerily Blanche DuBois–esque, glow.

  Esperanza told Leon she had worked for the Soleymans for three years and seven months. She previously had a rule of not working for immigrants, no matter what country they came from, because they were invariably more demanding and paid less than Americans, but she didn’t mind Neda because she wasn’t a nosy boss. Unlike other Iranians who employed many of Esperanza’s friends, Neda didn’t entertain seven nights a week, didn’t have sixty people over every Shabbat. She was quiet and minded her own business, barely leaving her room when she was in the house for fear, Esperanza guessed, of running into Mister. The only person Neda saw regularly was Nadereh—the therapist/life coach/yoga teacher who charged $300 an hour and didn’t make house calls.

  Esperanza knew about Nadereh through the network of maids who worked for other Iranian families on the West Side and who made sure nothing that went on in any house ever remained private. That’s also how she knew that Neda’s marriage to Raphael’s Son had been the scandal of its time, prompted, some said, by an unfortunate pregnancy resulting in the birth of their first daughter, Nicole. Esperanza had seen for herself that the marriage had been a bad idea indeed. The only time the two didn’t fight was when they weren’t talking to each other.

  “She cries and says, Aabehroo, aabehroo,” Esperanza summarized the interaction, “and he screams and says, Talaagh beguir.”

  She was about to translate for Leon the meaning of that last phrase—get a divorce—when a uniform knocked on her doo
r.

  There might be a witness—of sorts—who claimed he had seen everything, but he wasn’t willing to say what “everything” meant. He wasn’t going to talk to “any Podunk street cop.” The only person he would give a statement to was “the chief.”

  __________________

  The witness—bald with sunburned scalp, a long, oval face, and a blind right eye—was George P. Carter III, a.k.a. the Altoid Man. Something of a West LA institution, he had appeared on the scene in the mid-2000s—a tall, slim, and elegant figure with a closed eye and an affinity for spotless white sweaters and crisply pressed tan or light-gray pants. At the time, he was a PhD student at UCLA, had a Culver City address, and a seven-day-a-week surfing habit in Paradise Cove in Malibu. Then one morning he showed up on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Whittier Drive, across the street from the Beverly Hilton Hotel—the preferred venue for many a charity dinner, million-dollar bar mitzvah, and, throughout that decade, numerous Oscar luncheons—holding up a sign that read, LAPD blinded my eye and refuses to apologize or pay for it.

  The sign’s fine print described a weekend altercation between him and the police: he was driving in the area—the border between Beverly Hills and Century City—and the cops pulled him over for no reason; he objected, since “we don’t live in North Korea,” so they beat him, blinded his eye, and took him to jail. Afterward, they wouldn’t even apologize.