Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  The assembly was over and classes had convened by the time I returned to BHHS. I went to the administrative offices again, and after a five-minute wait was once again able to see Assistant Principal Durand.

  “Dinah Hazimi,” I said.

  Durand didn’t act surprised but did correct my pronunciation of Dinah’s last name, which was Hakimi. Then she said, “Dinah is a minor.”

  “Then call her parents and ask them if they’ve heard about the murder of one of your students. Tell them the police are here conducting an investigation, and that you’re asking parents if it’s all right if their child talks to the authorities.”

  Durand thought about that and then reluctantly nodded. She asked me to leave her office while she made the call. I sat in the waiting area, which offered a vantage point into her office, and watched her talking on the phone. I couldn’t hear what she was saying and wasn’t able to read her expression. The call was brief, lasting no more than two minutes, and then she motioned for me to return to her office.

  “Mrs. Hakimi said you could talk to her daughter. Before that happens, though, I am going to talk to Dinah, and I will tell her that she doesn’t need to sit down with you if she doesn’t want to.”

  Whatever the assistant principal told Dinah didn’t scare her off. Durand accompanied her to a small conference room where I was waiting. After making introductions, Durand left the room and I motioned for Dinah to take a seat across the table from me. She was shy, avoiding direct eye contact. The girl was five foot and a little change, and no more than a hundred pounds. Dinah was fine boned, with high cheekbones, glistening hair, pretty dark eyes with long lashes, and almond skin. If not for her pronounced front teeth, she would have been considered very attractive.

  At the start of our talk her hand self-consciously covered her mouth, but before long she seemed more at ease in my company and her hand dropped to the table. I think it was my scars that put her at ease. Misery loves company. Or it might have been that I started with softball questions.

  “How well did you know Paul Klein?” I asked.

  “Not very well,” she said.

  “What year in school are you?”

  “I am a junior.”

  “Did you have any classes with Paul?”

  She shook her head.

  “I understand you had a problem with Paul and his friends last year.”

  Dinah stiffened a little and then said, “Not really.”

  “Someone saw him teasing you. It must have been pretty bad. Kids don’t usually report things.”

  She shrugged, pretending indifference, but she had to blink away tears from coming to her eyes.

  “What was he saying to you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I think you do. And I think that wasn’t the only instance where he was bullying you, which explains why you left this at the oil well memorial.”

  I placed the handmade card on the table. Dinah’s hand covered her mouth, but she would have been better served to cover her eyes. The fright and dismay at her being discovered were clearly on display.

  “Tell me about the hell he put you through, Dinah.”

  In a small voice she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You seem like a smart girl. Why did you let yourself be a victim?”

  Her eyes sparked. “What was I supposed to do? He was popular. And if I had complained to the school, his pack of friends would have vouched for him.”

  “How long has the bullying gone on?”

  “Since my family moved to Beverly Hills in the ninth grade. Up until that time, I had never even heard the name Bugs Bunny.”

  My hand reached out to her card and gently traced the lettering where she’d written “You made my life HELL.”

  “It started during my first week at school,” she said. “I was trying my best to fit in. I was sitting in the cafeteria by myself, and that’s when this boy sat down right across from me. He was holding a carrot in his hand, and standing behind him were five or six other boys. ‘Eh, what’s up, Doc?’ he said to me. I didn’t understand what he was saying, so I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And then he said, even louder this time, ‘Eh, what’s up, Doc?’ And that got not only his group laughing, but what seemed like the whole cafeteria.”

  “Welcome to Beverly.”

  “He knew where I was the most self-conscious.”

  “How bad did it get?”

  “Bad. It was ongoing torture. I remember one day he and all his friends wore these Billy Bob teeth. And whenever he saw me, he’d open his mouth and show off his terrible teeth, and he’d shout so everyone could hear, ‘I want to marry you, Bugs, but you’re not my first cousin.’”

  “I am sorry.”

  “The more others laughed, the more it hurt. Last Halloween he came to school dressed as Elmer Fudd. He had this brown hat and baggy suit, and he kept coming up to me asking me if I’d seen any wascally wabbits.”

  “How often did he bully you?”

  “It varied. Sometimes a week or two would go by and he and his group wouldn’t bother me, and I would hope and pray that he was finally done with me, but it never lasted. He always came back.”

  “No one ever intervened?”

  She shook her head. “Everyone was afraid if they did he would go after them. And he was smart about the way he did it, making it look like a big joke.”

  “Were you his only target?”

  Another head shake. “There were others. Sometimes I’d see him going after them. I probably should have said something, but I never did. I was just happy that he was leaving me alone.”

  “I need the names of the others being bullied.”

  “There’s a ninth-grade boy named Sam Nahai that he liked to bother.”

  “Did Paul only target Persians?”

  She thought about it and said, “Mostly, but not all. He liked to give an overweight boy named Steven a hard time. Paul and his friends called him Chinny Chin Chin.”

  “Chin?”

  “He said Steven had more chins than there were in a Chinese phone book.”

  “So Paul was an equal opportunity bully?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. Persians were his favorite targets. He liked to speak with an accent and say he lived in Tehrangeles. And when he talked about Brownies, he always made sure you knew he wasn’t referring to Girl Scouts.”

  “What are Brownies?”

  “Brown Jews,” she said.

  It was clear I still didn’t understand, so she said, “The Persian community in Beverly Hills are Sephardic Jews. There are many Ashkenazim—European Jews—that look down upon us.”

  Klein, a Jew, was apparently an anti-Semite. I wondered if his bigotry had anything to do with his death.

  “What did you think when you heard Paul was crucified?”

  Dinah looked me in the eye and said, “I was glad.”

  “What else?”

  “I was relieved. It was a weight off my shoulders. From now on I’ll be able to look at a razor blade and see a razor blade.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He made me so miserable there were times I thought of killing myself.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I made a friend at the Community Crisis Line, a good man who made me think beyond the moment and look to the future. And now I have saved almost three thousand dollars. Soon I will be able to pay for my braces.”

  Dinah smiled and almost showed her teeth.

  CHAPTER 8:

  HIS PERSONALIZED LICENSE PLATE SAYS “SHAMAN”

  I worked the high school until midafternoon, trying to learn more about Klein. I also tried to get a lead on the identity of the second dissenting note writer. The assistant principal arranged it so that I could talk to Steven (Chinny Chin Chin) Needleman and Sam Nahai. Neither of the boys pretended to have any love lost for Klein, but neither struck me as the poison-pen note writer or the murderer. The boys hadn’t been bullied to the extent Dinah had, and both were pa
ssive sorts. Even while he was being harassed, Nahai said he had been able to put his situation into perspective. “I just remembered the words of my grandfather, who always said, ‘I was sad because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.’”

  Klein’s Jekyll/Hyde persona wasn’t something his teachers recognized. As far as they were concerned, he was an excellent student and a good citizen, albeit one who sometimes engaged in what one called “good-humored mischief.” Paul was apparently adept at masking his bullying and dark side.

  Neither Paul’s friends nor his enemies were aware of his dealing or using drugs. No one could explain why he was carrying OC or X. Planting drugs on a corpse made no sense, but then neither did crucifying a dead man.

  It was three o’clock when I met up with Gump and Martinez in downtown LA at the Eastside Market Italian Deli. Both detectives were going incognito to avoid the press and were wearing dark glasses, baseball caps, and windbreakers instead of their usual sports coats. Because we had missed the deli’s lunch hour rush, we were able to get a table by ourselves.

  Martinez and Gump both went with the DA Special, a sandwich with sausage, meatballs, roast beef, and pastrami. I had a sandwich for each fist—a tuna fish, and a chicken breast. That’s one of the good things about having a partner that likes just about everything. Half of each sandwich would go to Sirius.

  The two detectives hadn’t slept—not even a catnap—and it showed. When they removed their sunglasses, the deep bags under their eyes were only too apparent.

  Gump said, “Things were already fucked up enough before Hollywood and his press conference fucked us over that much more.”

  “Hollywood” was Adam Klein.

  “Because of Hollywood and his reward offer,” Gump said, “the phones are ringing off the hook, and the brain-dead media is more than happy to play along. The only thing that beats a Mob hit is a Mob hit with a crucifixion to boot.”

  “It’s a Roman thing,” Martinez said.

  “If anyone thinks Paul Klein was a martyr,” I said, “they’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  It was an inadvertent pun, but Gump and Martinez didn’t know that and they laughed. I told them what I had found out about Klein and produced the two poison-pen letters left at the oil derrick.

  “Klein might have bullied the wrong guy,” Gump said, “and gotten payback.”

  “That doesn’t explain the crucifixion,” I said. “Why would someone go to that kind of effort? That speaks to vengeance.”

  “The Mob wouldn’t have gone to that effort,” Martinez said. “The most they would have done was whack off his johnson and stick it in his mouth.”

  “Someone wanted to put Klein on display,” I said.

  To do that had required a lot of planning. Supplies had to have been brought into the park.

  “Those planks that were nailed into the tree were new,” I said. “The killer brought lumber up the trail. He would also have needed to bring nails, spikes, and probably a small sledgehammer. You don’t carry around those kinds of things without being noticed.”

  “He could have just said he was hunting vampires,” Gump said. “In this town, that would be considered a reasonable explanation.”

  “We already talked to a lot of the park regulars,” Martinez said. “No one remembers seeing anything out of the ordinary. But if our guy was wearing a backpack, it probably would have gone unnoticed.”

  “Did the ME tag anything unusual about the body?”

  “You ask me,” Martinez said, “I think we should put Hadji on the suspect list.”

  Hadji was the politically incorrect name of Dr. Rupert Singh, the chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. The name came from the cartoon Jonny Quest and referred to Jonny’s Indian friend.

  “Truth,” Gump said. “That man sure knows his crucifixions.”

  “Years ago the Haj wrote a paper for some medical journal,” Martinez explained. “He assisted in an autopsy of this two-thousand-year-old crucified corpse, and ever since he’s been hooked.”

  “More like nailed,” Gump said. “You know how he usually leaves all the cutting to others? This time he was waiting for us with open arms and an open scalpel. When I dealt with him in the past, he was about as talkative as his corpses, but this time we couldn’t shut him up.”

  “Yeah,” Martinez said, “Hadji said that whoever did the crucifying knew what they were doing.”

  “How the hell do you learn how to perform a crucifixion?”

  “Don’t know,” Gump said, “but it helps to have the right equipment. Doc says the killer used spikes that matched up pretty closely with the size and shape of what was used in the old days. We might have caught a break with that. The killer did his nailing with six-and eight-inch-spikes, and those aren’t the kinds of things you find at your average Home Depot. Spikes like that are used in heavy construction for driving through planking and timber.”

  “Or flesh and bone,” Martinez said.

  “It wasn’t only that he got the right spikes,” Gump said, “but he knew what to do with them. Hadji said the killer had to have studied crucifixions, because he drove in the spikes like he was some kind of expert. According to the Doc, if you don’t do your nailing right, you don’t support the body.”

  I had tried not to think about the surreal image of Paul Klein’s body. That was probably human nature, but I was an investigator. Klein had been so securely nailed into the tree everyone had wondered if they would need to cut down the oak in order to get his body.

  “He put the spikes between the carpals and the radius in the hands,” Martinez said, reading from his notes, “and then went in through the second intermetatarsal space in the feet.”

  Gump said, “Thank you, Dr. Martinez.”

  “Any time, Nurse Worsley.”

  I did a rim shot on the creamer with my pen. “At the crime scene we were wondering if it was possible for the killer to have acted alone. Did Doc weigh in on that?”

  “There were lots of ligature marks found on the victim,” Gump said. “Haj was pretty sure it was a one-man operation. He said the victim was hoisted up onto the tree and then strung up on the limbs and supports before any nailing took place.”

  “That would explain those rubbing marks we saw in the upper branches,” I said. “That would also be about the only way one person could hoist up that much dead weight. Klein probably weighed a buck seventy.”

  “You could get a job guessing people’s weight in a carnival, Gideon,” Gump said. “The vic was one-six-eight.”

  “Maybe that was the reason the killer went to the trouble of putting up the footrest and the seat rest. He wanted to have them to support the victim’s weight.”

  “You mean the suppedaneum and the sedile?” Martinez asked, again reading from his notes.

  “You might be Latin,” Gump said, “but you can’t even read Doc’s words right.”

  “Latin’s a dead language. Who’s going to tell me whether I’m saying them right or not?”

  “It’s not a dead language. It’s the official language of Vatican City.”

  “You must be almost fluent in it then, all those years you served under priests as an altar boy.”

  Gump blew Martinez a kiss and said, “Carpe denim—seize my jeans.”

  “Eat my shorts.”

  “I’d be afraid of crappy diem.”

  I’d had enough of the comedic stylings of Homicide Special and stood up to leave. “How many LAPD detectives does it take to nail a crucifixion case?” I asked.

  “Is there a punch line?” Gump asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  The three of us worked into the evening. Martinez spent most of his time putting the book together, while Gump and I pursued leads. If there was progress, it was the kind of which none of us was aware.

  The Crucifixion Killing, as it was being called, had the media doing cartwheels. The news of Paul Klein being found with drugs had somehow leaked out. The early reports that had portrayed h
im as the best and the brightest, as an athlete-scholar, suddenly changed. Reporters were now saying Klein was suspected of being a drug dealer.

  It was almost ten o’clock when I made it home. There were no clouds in the sky, but that only made it that much darker and colder. For a few moments, I sat in my driveway. I didn’t want to go into an empty house, and I was afraid of what my dreams might bring.

  January, I thought. The month was a black hole, and I didn’t have the gravity to resist its pull. Staying active wasn’t helping. Much as I didn’t want to admit it, the darkness was sucking me in.

  Sirius made a whining sound, and I reached my hand back to his muzzle. He was focused on something, and that’s when I noticed the lights coming from my next-door neighbor’s house. On a dark street there was one point of light. My neighbor’s living room curtains were open and the glow from inside his house dispelled the shadows. There was only the one car in the driveway, a Jaguar with the personalized license plate of SHAMAN.

  There was a reason my partner was fixated on the house. One of his favorite humans in the world lived there. As if on cue, my neighbor’s front door opened and he stepped out on the porch.

  “Let’s go see our favorite fakir,” I told Sirius.

  My partner didn’t need to be told twice and raced off for Seth Mann’s door.

  When Seth first moved in, I remember asking him what he did. “I’m a shaman,” he told me.

  Wondering if I’d heard correctly, I said, “So, on your mortgage application, that’s what you wrote down as your occupation? Shaman?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Maybe shamanism is a growth industry. Although his job isn’t run-of-the-mill, Seth has always been a great neighbor and friend. After Jennifer died he did all the organizing I couldn’t bring myself to do, and when Sirius and I were being treated in the burn unit, Seth helped us in every way imaginable. He even supplied the two of us with a homemade balm that he said would bring us relief. His potion smelled rank, but it did seem to have some healing properties, or maybe it was the beer that Seth invariably snuck in with his potion. Because Seth and Sirius are thick as thieves, whenever I leave town my partner vacations next door.