Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  “But obviously, your ID was pretty convincing,” I say, slowly, not wanting to sound accusatory. “I guess I just wanted to know if you ever had any second thoughts about whether it was him you saw.”

  Henrietta puts her barely smoked cigarette out into a Taj Mahal ashtray, crushing it over and over, continuing to press it into the hard plastic long after the ember is extinguished. Smashing it for so long the white wrapping paper tears and what’s left of the threads of tobacco inside spill out.

  “Who you work for?” she asks.

  “I’m freelance.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I write for a few different places. The New York Tribune. A magazine called American Voice…”

  “The Trib?” She almost smiles. “I miss that shit. But I definitely don’t want to be in the Trib.”

  “Okay,” I say. “We can talk off the record.”

  She furrows her brow, considering something.

  “You recording this?”

  “No,” I say. “Totally off the record right now.”

  She nods, stares at the ruined cigarette. Finally, she says, “I didn’t see nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t see nothing.”

  “I don’t understand. You picked DeShawn out of a lineup, right?”

  She nods.

  “But you didn’t see him coming out of the house that night?”

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t see nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to keep repeating, but, like, how did you pick him out then? Your statement said…”

  “I lied.”

  “You lied? About seeing him?”

  “I wasn’t even in Crown Heights that night. I was up in Williamsburg with my roommate.”

  I stare at her a moment, my mouth open, my heart beating in my ears.

  “Did…? But … you testified…”

  “I lied, okay.”

  “Can I ask you why?”

  “None of this is going in your paper.”

  “Right,” I say, thinking: how can I get this in the paper? “We’re off the record.”

  “I had a trick,” she says. “He paid me a lot of money to say I saw somebody running out of the house.”

  “He told you to pick DeShawn?”

  “No,” she says. “He just said to say I was there and saw a black guy running out.”

  “Why did you choose DeShawn in the lineup?”

  She shrugs. “I was waiting in the precinct and they brought him in in handcuffs. I figured, you know, he’d done something.”

  I pause, not wanting to seem too enthusiastic.

  “I know you don’t want this in the paper,” I say. “But, what about going to the DA? DeShawn retracted his confession. I think the only real evidence they had against him was your ID. He’s been in prison for more than twenty years. You could get him out.”

  Henrietta pulls another cigarette from her pack. She looks at it between her fingers, twists it, brings it to her lips, lowers it.

  “I’m sorry about that boy,” she says. “It may not look like much in here, but this place, this job I got, this is more than I ever thought I’d have, okay? I been clean almost eight years. I got a church. I got a man, even.”

  The air-conditioning unit below the front window clicks on, blowing the thick curtains above it. I look at her and she looks at her cigarette. I suppose she doesn’t have to explain. Even if they can’t—or won’t—prosecute her for making false statements, DeShawn could sue her and take everything she has. I decide that, for now at least, it’s not my place, nor would it be effective, to try to convince her to “do the right thing”—because there are probably a lot of ways that it’s not the right thing for her. I try another tactic.

  “This trick,” I say, “do you think he was involved in the murders?”

  “I mean, I never asked, but yeah, obviously. That’s what I thought.”

  “Are you still in touch with him?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “Is he why you changed your name?”

  “Partly. I had a felony record. Couldn’t get no straight work. Not even cleaning rooms. So I can’t be in the paper. I’ll lose my job. Probably go back to prison on some paperwork shit.”

  “Do you know if he’s still in Brooklyn?”

  “I don’t think so. He used to send me postcards. Before I moved.”

  “Where were the postcards from?”

  “A bunch of different places. Florida. Chicago. Boston.”

  “Is there anything you remember about him that you could tell me?”

  “He was Jewish.”

  “Jewish?”

  “You know, one of those guys with the black hats.”

  PART 2

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1982–1991

  Southern California

  The first uniform he wore was for football. His mother signed him up for Pop Warner when they were still living in Fullerton. He put on the big plastic shoulder pads, and the jersey with the number, and the shoes with the blunt spikes, and he thought: this is who I am now. I am a Wildcat. He liked the fangs on the red and orange mascot and he wore the jersey to bed and to school so that the other kids would see and know. In school, everyone had their “thing.” Some of the girls carried baby dolls and pretended to be moms. Boys aligned themselves with professional sports teams or players that they imagined matched their personality: the more aggressive liked the Detroit Pistons; the preppies liked the Chicago Bulls. Even the teachers had costumes. Mrs. Ellis wore silver rings on all her fingers. Mr. Williams had a thick mustache he dyed orange for Halloween and pink for Easter. Mrs. Ito exposed her toes in Birkenstocks no matter the season. His father’s Ford Mustang, his mother’s diamond earrings, his sister Jessica’s stupid blue eyeliner—they were advertisements, he understood. They signaled membership in a group of like people.

  The boys in the Wildcats weren’t really like him, but they had a common goal and a common language, and that was enough for a while. He ran fast and hit hard, and his teammates and coaches cheered him on, patted him on the back, said “atta boy.” He liked that. If he knew what people expected, he performed well.

  The anger was always there, though, and there wasn’t always someplace to put it. He was nine when he clamped his hand around Jessica’s throat after dinner, pressing her into the wall of the bathroom they shared and squeezing, telling her in a steady voice that if she told anyone that he was still wetting the bed he could put a pillow over her head in the middle of the night and she would never wake up. He’d come up with the idea for the pillow when he pressed his own into his face the night before, nearly suffocating himself to silence the screams. If he hadn’t screamed he knew he would explode. But if everyone heard the screams he would have to explain. What’s wrong? It was not always a question he had an answer to.

  His displays of aggression were never public. Other boys got into playground fights, sloppily swinging at one another, sweating and shouting, red faced, clothing askew. He cringed when he saw those fights, embarrassed for the boys who rendered themselves so clumsy and out of control. Did they think they were scaring anyone? Did they think their careless display did anything but reveal their weakness?

  His father got the job at USC in July and their move to Los Angeles was rushed. He missed football tryouts and had to start seventh grade in a new school knowing no one. On the first day, he sat down alone near the back corner in science class, and a boy wearing a yarmulke took the seat next to him.

  “I’m Ethan,” said the boy.

  “I’m Joe,” he said. “I’m Jewish, too.”

  Ethan smiled.

  “What shul do you belong to?”

  “Shul?”

  “Synagogue.”

  “You mean temple? I don’t know. We just moved here.” Joe’s family went to temple once a year, on Yom Kippur. His sister complained that it was boring, but Joe didn’t mind. He liked the way the Hebrew sounded, and he liked that he got to wear
the little satin hat and she didn’t. He’d never seen anyone wear one outside of temple, though.

  “You should come to our shul,” said Ethan. “It’s cool.”

  When he got home, he told his parents he knew what temple they should join.

  “I don’t think so,” said his mother when he said the name.

  “Why not?”

  “That’s an Orthodox temple,” she said. They were eating dinner at the dining room table, boxes piled around them. Dinner was important in the Weiss family. His mother, Nora, read books about raising children and believed that eating dinner together helped create a strong family and healthy children. The meals weren’t fancy, or particularly tasty—macaroni and cheese, fish sticks, tacos, spaghetti—but she made an effort seven nights a week.

  “My friend Ethan goes there. He said it was cool.”

  “Temple is not cool,” said Jessica. She was so predictable.

  “They’re really strict, bud,” said his father.

  His parents hadn’t been getting along since the move. His mother complained that his father worked too much and neglected to help her establish themselves in their new home. She wanted shelves and paintings hung, and she wanted her husband to hang them. Joe offered to help but she told him that it was his father’s responsibility. Joe loved the new house. He got his own bedroom, which he was very thankful for. His mind was always going and he needed a private place to sit quietly and listen. Plus, there was a pool.

  “What do you mean, strict?” Joe asked.

  “I mean there are a lot of rules they think God wants you to follow every day.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” said his father, searching, “there are a lot of rules about food.”

  Andrew Weiss was raised in San Francisco by what Nora joked were “commie pinko Jews.” His parents were professors—him of European history, her of American literature—who fled New York City, the story went, after a political meeting they attended was raided by police wielding batons. Joe’s grandma and grandpa were atheists, and so was his father, but his mother believed in God. Before they got married, his father agreed to “raise the kids Jewish.” Most of it was harmless, he figured. All the “King of the Universe” stuff rubbed him the wrong way, but he kept his feelings to himself.

  “And you’d have to wear a yarmulke all the time,” said his mother.

  Joe shrugged. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Jessica, disfiguring her face the way only a teenage girl can. “Literally no one would be friends with you. You know that, right?”

  “That’s stupid,” he said. “My friend Ethan wears one.”

  “Your friend? You just met him. Let me guess, he was the only one who would talk to you?”

  “Shut up,” said Joe.

  “Stop it, you two,” said his mother.

  “He’s the one that said shut up! What did I do?”

  “Yom Kippur is soon, right?” asked Joe. “Couldn’t we just go once?”

  Joe looked to his father. He wanted him to make the decision. But his father looked to his mother.

  The family “tried” Ethan’s temple the next week, and everyone except Joe was in agreement afterward: this was not the temple for them. The service was too long, and there was too much Hebrew and not enough music. His sister pronounced all the kids “dorks,” and his mother kept harping on the fact that she was the only woman wearing pants.

  “It doesn’t make sense to belong to a temple where we’re so different from everybody else,” she explained.

  “I don’t think I’m so different. I liked it.”

  “What did you like about it, bud?” asked his father.

  “I thought it was cool how everybody was all into it. Did you see how they rocked back and forth sometimes?”

  “Totally freakish,” said Jessica. “It’s like they’re in a cult.”

  Joe wanted one of his parents to correct her. Sure, the rocking was a little weird, but if they were actually Jewish, why did it embarrass them? If they were gonna be Jewish, be Jewish. The way they tiptoed around their supposed identity was annoying. It made him think they were weak.

  The decision was made. The Weisses “didn’t feel comfortable there,” but if Joe wanted to go with his friend, that was fine. So the next weekend, Joe spent the night at Ethan’s house—which was much nicer than his—and in the morning they went to Hebrew school together. Ethan introduced Joe, telling the rest of the class that he had just moved from Fullerton. Joe appreciated that Ethan didn’t mention that his parents had tried, and rejected, their temple. The Hebrew school teacher asked Joe if he was bar mitzvahed.

  “No,” said Joe. “Isn’t that when you’re thirteen? I’m twelve.”

  “You have to study a lot first,” said Ethan.

  “I don’t mind that.”

  After class, the teacher introduced Joe to the rabbi, who said that he was welcome to join the class, but that he’d have to come for extra tutoring sessions to catch up. When he announced his intentions at home, the reactions were frustrating. His father said he wished he’d pick something more physically active as an after-school activity; his mother told him not to expect “one of those big crazy bar mitzvah parties;” and Jessica predicted he’d drop out within a month.

  But he didn’t drop out. He had always been good in Spanish class and the Hebrew came easily. His mother took credit for his apparent knack for languages. She studied abroad in Florence and took great pride in “keeping up her Italian.” More than once he heard her tell someone “he gets his ear from me.” Joe liked that she was proud. Feedback was important to him. It was hard to know how to feel without cribbing off other people’s faces.

  As part of the bar mitzvah curriculum, the rabbi took the class to visit different shuls—that was the proper word, Joe learned, not temple—around Los Angeles. In May of 1985, they visited the Chabad House. A bright-eyed young man with a wispy beard and a neat, black-brimmed hat gave them a tour. Joe thought the man, whose name was Shimon, was very impressive. His hat made him look important, and his wife, who gave the girls a tour, was pretty. He liked that they separated the girls and the boys when they went inside the shul for a prayer service. But in the backseat of the van on the way home, Ethan said he thought the Chabad people “went a little overboard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the men wear exactly the same thing,” he said.

  “So?” said Joe.

  “They don’t go to regular college, either.”

  “I don’t care about regular college.”

  “You don’t? I’m going to Yale, like my dad. Or maybe Dartmouth.”

  Joe shrugged. He didn’t spend much time thinking about the future.

  After his bar mitzvah, Joe started wearing a yarmulke every day. He told his parents he was joining the language club after school, but instead took the city bus to the Chabad House three afternoons a week. Most of the people riding with him were black, and he liked that his yarmulke marked him. He wasn’t just a white kid. He was a Jew. He was proud and learned and powerful.

  He planned his first attack for more than a month. He’d just begun his freshman year and the boys who teased him and Ethan in junior high were newly bold. One in particular, a blond kid named Matt who was popular because he made the varsity baseball team as a freshman, seemed to take particular pleasure in tormenting them. He made a game of trying to knock their yarmulkes off, sneaking up on one of them and whacking them across the top of the head in the parking lot, by the lockers, on the brown-grassed quad. He got Ethan’s far more often than Joe’s, but when Joe asked Ethan if he wanted to help him hurt Matt, Ethan said no.

  “What do you mean, hurt him?”

  “I mean punish him. Make sure he stops doing it.”

  “I told you I don’t want to tell,” said Ethan. Matt’s bullying embarrassed Ethan; it embolded Joe.

  “I’m not talking about telling, I’m talking about doing.”

  �
��I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  Joe didn’t push. He didn’t need Ethan.

  The idea for the padlock came from his father. About a week after Joe decided he was going after Matt, someone broke into two garages on the street where the Weisses lived. His father came home with a bag from the hardware store that included a lock for the broken side door.

  “This’ll do until I get someone out here.”

  Joe’s mother had been complaining about the door for months. She muttered sometimes that she wished she’d married a man who could fix things. After the handyman came, Joe took the lock from the junk drawer in the kitchen and put it inside a sock. He trailed Matt for two weeks and discovered that the time he was most likely to be alone was after baseball practice. Matt might play varsity, but he was only fourteen, so he couldn’t drive. Occasionally, he caught a ride home with an older player, but at least a couple times a week, big, bad, blond Matt Simmons could be found sitting on the curb outside the Language Arts building staring at the entrance to the south parking lot, waiting for his mom to pick him up. Joe simply stepped up behind him and swung. Matt must have turned slightly because the lock hit him in the eye. He grabbed his face and screamed, falling forward onto the blacktop. There was blood immediately, and Joe stood for a moment, watching the red pour through Matt’s fingers. His screams were high-pitched. He sounded like a bird—caw caw caw!—and his feet kicked and kicked.

  Matt was out of school for a month. When he returned he wore a black patch over the space where his eye had been. He was no longer on the varsity baseball team. Matt was never able to tell the police anything about whoever attacked him, but the story going around was that it was part of a gang initiation. The news was full of stories about the Bloods and Crips, and later that year the school amended the dress code to prohibit anyone wearing all red or all blue.

  Maiming Matt satisfied something inside Joe. He felt calmer, more confident, and he dove into his studies at the Chabad House, telling his parents that he was joining the debate team in addition to the language club. Shimon wanted to meet his family, but Joe made excuses. He said his parents were atheists and had threatened to disown him if he continued to “waste his time” with religion. He wanted to try on Chabad without having to explain it to anyone, especially his father, who was always so reasonable, so sincere and inquisitive, so genuinely interested in Joe, and so desperate to connect. But Joe did not want to connect. He told Shimon that his father had a temper and that his mother was vain and materialistic.