by Elle Johnson
Snaggletooth shook her head. “That ain’t gonna work.” She grabbed a roll of toilet paper from a stall and pressed a small stack of the rough paper towels, folded into quarters, over my bloody bone. Together they wrapped my hand like a trainer taping up a boxer before a bout. The gentle pressure of their attention was soothing.
“My cousin was killed this weekend.”
They looked at me to see if it was true. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
I nodded. Then the three of us watched silently as the layers of white wound round and round, covering my wound.
Chapter Eleven
April 6, 1981
When I got home from school I didn’t bother to go up to my room. I abandoned my book bag on one of the high-backed chairs next to the stereo and slumped down in the middle of the couch—chin on my chest, hands tucked underneath my thighs, legs extended. The blinds had been drawn, anticipating night.
My mother sat at the desk where she wrote checks and paid the bills. There were newspapers in sections on the carpet around her feet. The New York Daily News was spread open, covering the clutter of office supplies, a daily calendar, and the ragged notepads that lived on top of the desk. In the ashtray a lit but unsmoked cigarette had smoldered down to the butt and turned into a delicate cylinder of gray nicotine lace. I could tell my mother had been crying.
She turned on the reading lamp. “It was an accident. The boys who killed Karen . . . one of them called the Daily News. He said it was an accident.”
“It’s in the paper?” I asked.
“Right here.” My mother held up a corner of the flimsy newsprint for me to see. “They didn’t mean to shoot her. Sweet Jesus.”
I took the paper, skimmed it quickly until I saw the word. “Accident,” I said out loud, trying to process this new information. Karen didn’t have to die. The robbery should have been just another story, family lore retold with exaggerated details to the uninitiated at holiday gatherings or written into Karen’s college application essay as an example of her resilience and resolve. If a good girl like Karen could be killed in an accident, then anything could happen. There seemed to be no point in listening to your parents or doing as you were told. No point to even trying.
My father came down from upstairs. His slippered feet trod heavily on the carpet-covered steps, making the wood underneath crack and moan beneath his weight. He was home early from work. A bath towel was cinched around his waist, beads of water clumping his hair into errant tufts and clinging to his naked chest and biceps. He reminded me of a boxer in the middle of a bout, dripping sweat. He’d showered, which meant he was going back out. I wondered if he was going to the Bronx and if he was still on the hunt for the killers now that we knew it was an accident.
“You have a cigarette, Mel?” He held out his hand and hovered, waiting for my mother to do what he wanted. My teeth clenched. I felt a rising enmity toward my father. He couldn’t control what happened any more than Karen’s parents could. Why did I listen to him? Why did my mother?
My mother sighed and reached down for her pocketbook. She pulled out tissues, a ziplock baggie full of loose mints and sugar-dusted sticks of gum, the folded program from a Sunday church service past, then laid them out on the newspaper. She found her cigarettes, in a white pack with a gold crown and a blue seal. They were a hard-to-find brand called Herbert Tareyton, the original, unfiltered version of Tareyton, with the slogan “Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.” Instead of putting it in his hand, she held one out for my father to take.
“Here,” she said.
“Can I have two?”
“You may buy two. Yes.” She pulled out a second cigarette.
My mother charged my father twenty-five cents every time he bummed a smoke. His brand was Pall Mall in the red pack, but he was always running out. Hers was expensive and hard to find. She charged him to borrow the car, too. This started after he told her he wasn’t going to pay the monthly car note and insurance. Which was after she told him she was going back to work. My father didn’t need the car to get to work. He took the subway or the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan. She was the one who needed a car to commute to the schools out on the Island where she taught. But he forgot about visiting his mother on the weekend, trips to the hardware store, and getting back from the garden center with soil and mulch. She charged him by the hour, with a discount for half a day. She would pull out her composition notebook ledger and write it down in a running tab, then present him with an invoice at the end of the month.
This was my parents’ marriage. An endless tit for tat, the constant threat of “I’ll show you.” He did what he wanted but tried to control her every move. She punished him for making rules. The first time he told her he wanted a divorce, her only question was “When?” The next time, she stopped buying swiss cheese, rye bread, coffee, half-and-half—all the foods he liked. When he noticed we had run out, she told him, “Nobody else in this house eats those things. You said you were leaving.” The last time, she told him no, not until I was out of college. She said, “I’m not going to let you mess up that child’s life.”
My mother made my sister and me promise that if they ever did get divorced we would go with her. But what about Daddy? I thought, worried about what would happen to my father if he were alone. I’d heard it said a man without a family is a dangerous thing. Even with a family, my father was a caution. My mother knew this; maybe that’s why she ended every criticism with a compliment. “He’s a good father.” “A good provider.” “A good man.” She always said she was happy to be married. “To have you kids.”
My father was the only man my mother had ever been with. When my sister and I were old enough to know what those noises were coming from their bedroom, we giggled, then groaned with teenage disgust when it continued unabashed and unabated. My parents never walked anywhere together without holding hands. They said “I love you” and kissed instead of “Hello” and “See you later.”
They eloped on December 2, 1952. He cleaned the gutters. She vacuumed the rugs. He put up storm windows in the winter. She hung the heavy drapes for fall. He planted tulips each spring. She cooked every meal. My father was in charge of everything outside the house. My mother took care of the inside.
“Are you okay?” my mother asked. She caught me staring at them, though my gaze had drifted inward to my thoughts. I nodded yes and watched her wipe away tears. My father hadn’t cried again since that unguarded moment of raw pain when he’d first heard the news of Karen’s murder. I wanted to know how he felt now that we knew it was an accident. I knew my father would rather talk about stock dividends and politics, Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole, taxes, travel, and the land he owned upstate. When I was ten, I told him he needed to be saved to go to heaven—and he told me he didn’t want to talk about that ever again. He talked about God being a woman, Jesus being Black, and Castro outlawing racism. Then he talked about whitey, the Jews, and niggers. He talked about how he felt, but not about his feelings.
My father lit his twenty-five-cent cigarette and stood in the light streaming in the front door window. He squinted through the smoke and looked outside at the houses across the street.
I thought that if he couldn’t talk to me then, he never could. If he can’t talk to me now, I’ll never listen to him again. I asked, “How could they shoot her by accident?”
“Finger slipped. Gun had a hair trigger.” He said this like I would know what that meant. Then he shook his head. “That’s what happens.” Confusion creased his forehead. I could see his thoughts were churning. The idea of it being an accident bothered him.
Once my father and two other parole officers chased a parolee out of his apartment, down to the street, and through a series of alleys that led into a dark courtyard in the heart of the projects. The parolee had a knife and wildly slashed the air. He sliced through one of the parole officers’ coat sleeves, down to his s
kin. The parole officer drew his gun just as my father emerged, racing through a tunnel into the open night air of the courtyard.
“No, no!” he yelled at the parole officer whose gun was aimed and ready to fire at the knife-wielding parolee. “Stop, stop. It doesn’t have to be like this. It doesn’t have to end this way.” My father stormed over to the parolee, snatched the knife away, and smacked the back of his head. “What’s the matter with you? Do you want to die?”
My father’s parolees were young men like Karen’s killers. Angry and confused. Forever failing, full of excuses. These were the people he was paid to look after. They all said they wanted a better life. And it was my father’s job to help them. My father said he could not rehabilitate someone who had never been habilitated in the first place. Still, he showed up every day—showered, suited up, strapped—and he tried. I was proud of him for that.
It was easier when Karen’s killer was the sum total of his bad actions—a bad person who had done a very bad thing—and not the twenty-year-old air-conditioning-repair student who needed money so he thought to rob a fast-food joint. Not the damaged son, volatile brother, or wounded cousin of another family. It was easier when the killer was unknown. A monster. But no one is all good or all bad. We do the best that we can do. Even me, struggling not to be angry with my father. Trying to understand how the threat of violence that made my father seem strong was also his weakness.
I wanted to ask if he was still planning to kill the killers. All I got out was “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to the Bronx,” he said, and then walked quickly up the stairs.
Chapter Twelve
Thirty-three years later, Karen’s murder was back in the news. On November 12, 2014, my mother called to tell me there was an article in the New York Daily News about Karen’s killer coming up for parole. I wondered, with a sense of dread, if this meant the Daily News would publish an article every time the killer had a parole board hearing or only if he got out. Even though the Daily News had helped bring in one of the suspects, I still wondered who at the paper was keeping this story alive. Who else, besides family, was unable to let it go?
My mother promised to mail me the news article. It didn’t occur to her that I could just pull it up online. There was a picture of Karen’s Catholic schoolteacher looking both angry and sad, holding an old photo of Karen with her classmates. They were all sitting on the floor—some smiling, others laughing—all sprawled out on top of one another’s laps. “I do beseech you to deny parole to Mr. Ramirez,” the teacher pleaded in a handwritten letter to the parole board that the paper had photographed and put in a box next to the article.
Uncle Warren was quoted in the article as well. “They told us that any letter that comes in, they’ll put it in the pile. All we can do is wait.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen Uncle Warren in person. I had no memory of him after Karen’s funeral. He wasn’t at the family gatherings I attended. He and Aunt Barbara had separated, though they never divorced. I wondered if he knew whether or not my father had visited the parole board hearings for any of the boys who’d taken part in the Burger King robbery. I wanted to ask him, but I felt uncomfortable contacting a man I hadn’t been in touch with for the last thirty-three years, to bring up his dead child. It was clear from his quote that Uncle Warren wanted the killer to stay behind bars. He wasn’t alone.
According to the article, the parole board had been inundated with letters against granting parole. The hearing had been delayed six months due to the sheer volume of letters and an “outstanding litigation.” It sounded as though Karen’s killer had gotten into trouble in prison. Now I would have more time to research the young men who had killed Karen. To find out who they were then and now. I started by collecting all the newspaper articles on the case I could find.
An early article said the gunmen fired for no apparent reason. A subsequent article reported that the gunmen were “extremely nervous and on edge and didn’t seem that familiar in handling guns.” A policeman said, “It’s very possible that the gun went off accidentally.” Then a later article confirmed that a gunman with a Hispanic accent called the police on Saturday morning to say it was an accident.
From an article with the headline “Friends Mourn a Murder Victim, 16” I learned that a week before Karen was shot, she had told her close friends that she worried about her father because he was a city policeman in a city full of crime and violence. I found out that dozens of officers volunteered to work on Karen’s case on their own time without pay. Karen had started working at the Burger King around Christmas vacation, “and she really seemed to enjoy it.” One of the articles said, “Like thousands of other city teenagers, Miss Marsh worked part-time for pocket money and independence.” The week after Karen was killed, she was supposed to go on a school trip to Europe, she was saving her money to spend on the trip. One of the articles quoted Aunt Lorin. She said that Aunt Barbara had hesitated when Karen asked if she could get a job. “We’re a very close, careful family,” the paper reported her saying. “When the kids want to go to a movie or to a dance, we’d always take them and pick them up. But we knew we couldn’t ask the kids to live in a bubble.”
Nine days after Karen was killed, the gunmen were in police custody. Two of the accomplices turned themselves in. Nineteen-year-old Luis Torres, who waited outside in a car during the robbery, turned himself in to the 46th Precinct station house in the Bronx. Twenty-year-old Francisco Alemar, who had gone inside the Burger King with a handgun and made the anonymous call to the police, turned himself in to the Daily News.
There was a picture of Francisco Alemar sitting at a table across from the reporter. He looked like a young Edward James Olmos. Head full of hair, glasses, wearing what looked like a puffy down jacket over a dark V-neck sweater, with a white collared shirt underneath. The white collar is what got to me. It jutted out from his sweater in sharp, straight lines and framed his neck and face with respectability, dignity. He didn’t look like the monster I expected, maybe even hoped for. He looked professional, like an office worker or manager, not like someone who would carry a gun.
The article said he was in night school learning to be an air-conditioning technician. He had a job as a pleater in the Garment District of Manhattan, making $190 a week. A stone’s throw away from the parole office where my father worked. Alemar said he took a pay cut of $40 to get an entry-level job in his field. He said, “It was worth it for a career in the future. Look what I have done to my future now.” I wondered what kind of men they had become behind bars. What kind of men could they become, except for prisoners?
I thought of my father quoting his parolees: “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” They brought the guns to scare the kids into doing what they wanted. To exercise some control they might otherwise not have had.
The article said the police were not surprised the men turned themselves in, because an unnamed confidential informant (CI) had identified the triggerman, Santiago Ramirez. Police seemed to imply that even without the CI they would have found the triggerman. He was the spitting image of the composite sketch.
The police tracked down Ramirez across the country. He had fled the state and was hiding out with his grandparents in Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland, the happiest place on earth and only an hour’s drive from where I now lived. The article said Ramirez was “removed” from his grandparents’ house by “a team of heavily armed FBI men.” He was charged with second-degree murder and armed robbery.
The article went on to describe again what had happened the night Karen was killed. This time as I read, a detail caught my eye. One of the assailants was “said to have fired his shotgun twice as he fled.” This was news to me. Fired twice. I’d never heard that before. I looked back through the other articles, and to my surprise they all mentioned the same thing, but somehow I had missed it. “Fired two blasts from a shotgun.” “Fired two shots.” And perhaps the most disturbing description: “They were walking out wh
en the robber carrying the shotgun abruptly turned and fired twice.”
“Abruptly turned and fired twice” didn’t sound like an accident to me. I didn’t think it was possible to fire a shotgun twice accidentally. I’d learned how to shoot one while doing research for a TV show. As I remembered it, you had to chamber a shell in the shotgun before you fired, a deliberate motion that produces an unforgettable, threatening sound. It was hard enough to do it once, standing still, let alone twice, while moving, adrenaline pumping. Unless the shotgun was an automatic, but the article didn’t specify the type of weapon it was. Even if it was an automatic, the gunman would still have had to pull the trigger intentionally a second time. So how did the shotgun go off accidentally twice? What had really happened that night? I was starting to think that maybe I didn’t know the whole story.
Chapter Thirteen
April 7, 1981
I woke up Tuesday and thought, Karen has been dead for four days. The cut on my thumb was still raw, but a light scab had started to form. I ran my finger over it and considered picking off the thin layer of crystalline new skin, but didn’t. I wanted to heal. I got ready for school but couldn’t make it out of the house. My father had gone back to the Bronx the previous night. I could picture him and Uncle Warren cruising up and down the street, their faces framed by the front and rear passenger windows of some off-duty cop’s car, scowling into the night. Ready to jump out and scoop up anybody who looked like he might know something about the boys who killed Karen.
The previous day’s New York Times was still lying on the floor, folded over to the article with the headline “Police Seek 2 Gunmen Who Shot Teen-Agers in a Robbery in Bronx.” I read it several times and tried to absorb the understated violence of the words. The gunmen had forced their way into the restaurant, then fired as the pair was leaving the shop. The article referred to Karen as “the dead girl.” I read those words over and over. Dead girl. Dead girl. “Dead girl.” I finally said it out loud and saw Karen’s face smiling back at me from a memory.
