The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  That one doesn’t count because no one died, and the DA didn’t even press charges against the wife because she was old and her husband needed her to come home and cook his meals. Since then, Iranian women have reached a milestone or two. They have become brain surgeons and CEOs, renowned artists and engineers and architects, but killers they were not and will never be.

  “I would go on,” Leon concluded his lecture, “but I see you’re pressed for time.”

  O’Donnell had checked his watch three times in the last three minutes. He checked it again and said, “Well, that’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve heard all day.”

  O’Donnell was a native of South Carolina, openly gay, and planning to run for a seat on the city council in West Hollywood. He knew many Iranians and liked most of them, couldn’t understand native Angelenos’ resentment toward what he saw as a rather worldly, often well-dressed, happily ostentatious group of people. O’Donnell himself was always shaved and showered and smelling like he’d just stepped out of a cool, fragrant garden. Even at work, he had a fondness for pink Façonnable shirts and lime-green Donna Karan cardigans, Hermès belts and Gucci loafers. He ate egg whites and yogurt for breakfast, quinoa salad for lunch, chicken breast and arugula salad for dinner, but he’d been to a few Iranian parties over the years and he liked the mountains of food, decadent desserts, and cascading flow of alcohol that were the staple. In one house, he was told that the tropical waterfall was made with stones imported from the Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina. Gianni Versace, O’Donnell had thought then, would have liked these people.

  Even before the coroner’s report came back, it was clear to O’Donnell that—judging by the amount of blood in the car, and by Neda’s cockamamie account—Raphael’s Son was dead and his wife had killed him. It was also pretty clear that unless a body was found or a weapon could be linked to both the killer and the victim, Neda was going to walk.

  That didn’t bother O’Donnell all that much. According to Montoya, a door-to-door inquiry from the neighbors had revealed that most of them had no idea who Raphael’s Son was, and the ones who did know him didn’t have one good thing to say. That meant there weren’t going to be any calls from powerful area residents to the mayor or the chief of police, bringing pressure on O’Donnell or the department to apprehend a killer. If anything, the homeowners would rather the cops go away and keep property values from slipping.

  Neda herself didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d kill again, or for the hell of it—meaning there wasn’t that much urgency to putting her away.

  As for O’Donnell, it was twenty minutes past one and he had a two o’clock Pilates appointment in Venice.

  __________________

  The last person to see Raphael’s Son alive, assuming one believed Neda’s story of having found him dead in his car, was his bookkeeper and personal slave, Edward Araxamian, in the Century City offices of Soleyman Enterprises on the evening of Monday, June 24, 2013. The building’s security cameras and sign-in log showed him arriving at work that Tuesday morning at 9:40 a.m., and leaving nearly fourteen hours later, at 11:30 p.m. In between (this according to the hallway and elevator cameras), Araxamian had taken eight bathroom breaks (he had an overactive bladder fueled by a constant stream of Turkish coffee which he made on a camping stove in the office kitchen), thirteen cigarette breaks (he also had a long-standing death wish that became more urgent the longer he worked for Raphael’s Son), and one lunch break (he bought a stale bagel from the Starbucks in the building lobby, took three bites, threw it away, and smoked two Marlboros instead). His key card had been scanned in the building’s parking structure at 11:34, and his image had been captured behind the wheel of the ancient blue Volvo station wagon he had bought in Orange County from a beautiful middle-aged woman named Marilyn; she had told him she was a poet and introduced him to her cat, and then she had voluntarily knocked off $1,000 from the asking price of the car “because I sense you’re under pressure.” She was right, if “under pressure” means wanting to set himself or someone else on fire several times a day.

  From the outside, the apartment building where Eddy lived appeared condemned and uninhabited. There were no balconies, and the windows had to remain closed to keep out the noise and pollution of the freeway, and because the frames would bend and stick too often. The intercom was left over from the ’70s. There were no names or apartment numbers next to the rows of buttons, probably because most of the tenants were in the country illegally and did not wish to be found.

  Leon parked his car at the 7-Eleven across from the building and dialed Eddy’s number. The phone was turned off, probably to avoid the rush of callers fishing for information about the case, his voicemail full. But the Bengali who owned the 7-Eleven told Leon that Eddy was home. The Bengali’s wife was Eddy’s mother’s emergency contact: bedridden and barely able to use the phone, the mother spent the entire day alone while Eddy was at work. The 7-Eleven was open twenty-four hours, and Eddy checked in with the Bengalis every time he left or returned home.

  “I’m very worried,” the husband told Leon when he inquired about Eddy. “He’s never missed work before.”

  In the front vestibule, the elevator, such as it was, had been broken since the day it was installed, so Leon climbed up three flights. He had to knock three times before a man’s voice invited him to “get lost.” Then he had to identify himself and threaten to keep knocking till the door fell open.

  * * *

  Edward Araxamian, a.k.a. Eddy Arax, Caucasian male, 5'11" and 143 pounds, suffering from high blood pressure, arrhythmia, major depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, lived with his sixty-eight-year-old, ailing, legally blind mother in a one-bedroom apartment in a three-story gray cement building one block down from the San Fernando Road exit off Route 134 in Glendale. His was not the Glendale of the twenty-first century, with its megamalls and overpriced sushi bars, Armenian-owned Persian bakeries with rows of marzipan in forty-two colors displayed in the window, and the original kebob place—an outdoor restaurant owned by an Armenian named Raffi that served only rice and kebob, none of the “Royal Persian Cuisine” of Westwood and Beverly Hills. Where Eddy lived, the landlord was an Armenian from the former Soviet Union (not to be confused with Armenians from Iran, since there’s a lot of bad blood between the two factions: the Iranians are gentle, law-abiding citizens; they’ll tell you that Soviet Armenians are thieves and cutthroats who give their people a bad name). Rent was collected every two weeks, in cash, and never claimed on a tax return. City inspectors—Latinos, for the most part, who depended on the generosity of the landlord to afford luxury cars for their wives—vouched for the safety of the building sight unseen.

  Eddy was a good and honest man with an astonishing memory, but he had no high school or college degree, and wasn’t trained to do anything except smoke and drink Turkish coffee. He was also adept at dodging bombs and sidestepping land mines, which he had learned by “serving” the Islamic Republic for three long years in the Iran-Iraq War until he nearly died from the effects of one of Saddam’s dirty bombs and received a medical discharge; but Los Angeles wasn’t exactly rife with demand for such skills. He spoke Persian with a heavy Armenian accent, and his English was elementary at best. He did, however, have command of a good number of words in Bengali.

  These language issues aside, Eddy was in the United States on a tourist visa that had expired six years earlier. Back then, he had spent a year looking for a bookkeeping job, but no American with two pennies in his corporate account was willing to trust a person who, when asked where he obtained his license, named a school that did not exist. The Iranian business owners he approached for jobs did not hold his immigration status against him; they were, after all, recent refugees themselves. What kept them from hiring him was that they couldn’t bear to look at his face.

  Thanks to Saddam’s dirty bomb, Eddy’s face, neck, and hands were a patchwork of light skin mottled with large yellowish-brown blotches. On
the right side, his upper jawbone had crumbled, so that the flesh of his cheek hung limply between his nose and ear, like plastic that had melted and cooled. On the left, his cheek had caved in because he had lost all his molars. The skin on his forehead was crumpled, and the front part of his scalp was all scar tissue. The only part of the face that had remained intact were his eyes, and these, anyone who looked at him long enough would see, were bottomless holes of sadness.

  It was the sadness, and the fact that he couldn’t read or write English, didn’t have a driver’s license, and radiated cigarette smoke, that prevented other Iranians from hiring him for an accounting job. They did, however, want very much to help Eddy, so they handed him “a small offering”—a hundred dollar bill, maybe, for his troubles. They might as well have spat on his father’s grave.

  __________________

  The apartment was small, and smelled like laundry detergent and fabric softener. An ugly brown leather couch doubled as Eddy’s bed. A round glass table, the kind sold in the small Korean-owned stores up and down Venice and Robertson Boulevards, functioned as dining table and desk. There was an ancient TV perched atop the arms of a dining chair, and a three-drawer plywood dresser, painted a faint pink with white plastic knobs, that leaned against the part of the wall closest to the kitchen area. The dresser looked like it had been salvaged from a little girl’s room and purchased in a yard sale. The kitchen consisted of a two-burner portable stove, a narrow refrigerator, and a washer and dryer all crammed into an alcove with a sink. The stove and a carving board sat on top of the washer and dryer; the top of the dresser served as storage space for cooking utensils and condiments. Eddy himself looked like he had had one Turkish coffee too many that day.

  “So what’s going on?” Leon said as he searched around for a place to sit. “Where’re you hiding him?”

  Eddy was not amused. “I already talked to the American cop.”

  “Who? O’Donnell?”

  “Whatever his name is. And some Armenian woman called too, but I told her to fuck off.”

  “But you don’t mind if we talk,” Leon said, apparently without irony. That showed what a lousy detective he was: you had only to see the way Eddy cringed at the very sight of Leon to realize just how much he did mind.

  In the bedroom behind Eddy, a woman moaned pitifully every few seconds.

  “Go ahead,” Leon nodded toward the door. “I’ll wait.”

  Instead, Eddy headed to the “kitchen.”

  “So is he dead or not?” he asked with obviously feigned indifference.

  The lab had determined that there was only one person’s blood in the car, and that it was Raphael’s Son’s. The coroner had decided there was too much of it for Raphael’s Son to have survived without an immediate and extensive transfusion. The forensic team had yet to find a single trace of the man anywhere outside the car.

  “What do you think?” Leon tested.

  There was the moan again. Eddy sighed and rubbed his left eye with his fist.

  “What the fuck do I know?”

  “If he’s dead, and you were the last to see him, I’d say you may know a great deal.”

  Eddy’s face flared with rage. “I hope he burns in hell, is what I know.”

  The rawness of the statement sent a shiver up Leon’s spine. He tried hard not to look away from Eddy.

  Eddy started to mash a cooked apple with the flat side of a fork. Cautiously, because it appeared too old and unstable to support his weight, Leon sat down on the arm of Eddy’s sofa bed.

  “So you do believe he’s dead.”

  Eddy opened a twelve-section, seven-layer pill container and took out a capsule, opened it, and poured the contents over the mashed apple.

  “This thing tastes like poison,” he said, mixing the powder much too forcefully and making sure he looked only at the plate. He added some sugar and what looked to Leon like chocolate powder, crushed the paste some more, then finally picked up the plate and a teaspoon.

  “I have to feed her this,” he said as he walked past Leon. Two steps later he stopped, let out what sounded like an ironic laugh, and peered back at Leon.

  “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead,” he said, “but if he’s dead, I’m willing to swear the Riffraff did it.”

  __________________

  The Riffraff Brigade—all verminous twenty-seven of them, plus their dull-witted spouses, innumerable children, woebegone in-laws, and ill-treated maids—had told the police they had spent the weekend at their recently acquired family estate in Rancho Mirage. They had left Los Angeles Friday at noon, in time to be safely out of their cars and ready for Shabbat before sundown, and planned to return on Tuesday morning.

  The occasion for the trip was to celebrate the purchase—$12 million plus change, all cash, thirty-day escrow—of the house that would henceforth serve as proof, to themselves if to no one else, of the Riffraff family pedigree and their old-money identity. That they had bought the house for less than it had cost to build was, of course, an advantage. That it was paid for by other people’s money was, to the Riffraff, just the sweet flavor of success.

  All this was noted in the report filed by Jackie Kevorkian, a detective with a fondness for black eyeshadow and long acrylic nails with square corners and red polish, who was always in a bad mood because she couldn’t get through one day without being asked, at least once, in jest or seriousness, if she was indeed related to Jack Kevorkian of the assisted-suicide fame. She wasn’t.

  The Riffraff’s weekend getaway, of course, could well be a foil: surrounded by a golf course, two waterfalls, two swimming pools, and four tennis courts, the estate was easy to enter and exit without detection. Because so many people would stay at the house at once, the temporary absence of one or two could have gone unnoticed by the rest. Because they were all liars and thieves and more putrid, even, than Raphael’s Son (he, at least, had the excuse of having suffered as a child), not one of them was above bearing false witness.

  Add to that the very relevant fact, well known in the community but not something the Riffraff would have volunteered to the cops, that the family’s ancestral trade, stretching back three hundred years and two ghettos, plus Cyrus Street in Tehran, was shechita—the kosher method of killing animals for human consumption—and you might have yourself some viable suspects.

  Shechita necessitates the use of a smooth, razor-sharp blade, a quick and continuous motion that severs the animal’s jugular vein, arteries, trachea, and esophagus at once, and the draining of the carcass’s blood.

  You didn’t have to be a Talmudic scholar to know this, or especially paranoid to buy into the theory that animals, like humans, have a soul; that shechita frees the soul and leaves only the flesh to consume; that animals killed any other way carry their soul in their flesh, from the slaughterhouse to the butcher shop and onto a man’s dinner table and, upon consumption, into the human frame where it—the beast’s unhappy, restless soul—will remain. But you did have to know the Riffraff well enough to realize that not one among them was brave enough to risk running into Raphael’s Son’s soul postslaughter—hence, one could argue, the single, smooth, and efficient cut to the throat, and the gallon of blood drained in the car before the body was taken away.

  * * *

  Leon knew the Riffraff well enough. As far as he was concerned, they were to Iranian Jews what the Oklahoma City Bomber was to the rank and file of the United States Armed Forces: a painful and tragic aberration. But perfidy alone wasn’t proof of homicide.

  “They thought he was going to throw them under the bus,” Eddy explained at the apartment. He stood above the hot plate where he had started to make a fresh pot of Turkish coffee.

  “They thought?”

  Eddy stirred the dark, viscous liquid.

  “Who gave them that idea?” Leon continued.

  Eddy shrugged, and kept stirring. After a minute he picked the pot off the hot plate and turned toward Leon. “His lawyers wanted to quit. He wasn’t giving them anyt
hing to work with and they said he was going to jail for twenty years and it would be bad for their reputation.”

  Without asking, Eddy poured the coffee into two small cups, put one on top of the TV for Leon, and picked up the other for himself. Leon ignored the coffee.

  “So he gave them his cousins?”

  Eddy downed his coffee like a shot of tequila, then felt in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “I have to go outside for a minute.”

  He couldn’t smoke in the apartment and couldn’t be around his mother with his hair and clothes smelling of tobacco. So he went downstairs every hour or so, inhaled two or sometimes three cigarettes at once, then came up and changed his shirt, washed his hands, and wet his hair before he tended to her again.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to quit?” Leon asked rhetorically, as he followed Eddy down the staircase.

  On the sidewalk, Leon waited till Eddy had lit up and sucked down a good lungful of smoke. “Okay. Come on,” he pressed.

  Eddy took another drag. His hands were shaking and his chest was so bony, Leon expected to see cigarette smoke flowing out of his torso. He was one of those people who seem to be perpetually on the verge of having a heart attack or a stroke, but who somehow pull through year after year, then finally die when no one’s looking.

  “I’ve been thinking this day would come,” he said, and inhaled another cigarette.