by G. H. Ephron
“Sounds like she was pretty protective.”
“She earned it,” he said. “You know about the holocaust?”
“Of course …” I started.
“Not ‘of course.’ I’m talking about the Armenian holocaust.” His look dared me to confess that I was pitifully ignorant, which I was.
“Not as much as I should.”
“At least you admit it. Everyone tiptoes around the Jews, builds memorials. Know what Hitler said before he invaded Poland, as he was telling his high command that it was okay to kill the Jews? ‘Who today remembers the Armenian genocide?’ That was in 1939, just fifteen years after the Turks annihilated three million people.” With a bitter laugh, he went on. “But never mind all that. These days, the Turks are our allies. Israel’s allies. The world chooses to get selective amnesia. Of course, Americans could care less. They don’t know the difference between a Czech and a Slovak, never mind between an Armenian and an Azeri. Jews, they get.” He glared at me. “But not Armenians.” He stared down at his hands, clasped together on the table, his fingers pulsing. “My grandmother remembered.”
“She was a survivor?” I asked.
“I supposed you could say that,” he said, giving me a sideways look. “She lived through it. But she never got past it. Her memories were as vivid as …” His voice trailed off. “She told me the stories of how she survived.”
“What kind of stories?”
“She’d recite them to me. How they hid. How their neighbors informed on them. How the Turks came to their house.” His eyes had glazed over. “How they took her mother …” There was a burst of static on the prison’s loudspeaker system. Nick shook himself. “She lost her father, her mother, her sister, two brothers. Plus aunts, uncles, cousins. But she had memories.”
“You learned about this when you were a kid?”
“My parents never used to talk about it. Not at dinner. Not in church. It was like it never happened. As if all those relatives, all those people never existed. But my grandmother told me, when it was just us. Over and over.”
We sat in the quiet for a few moments. I imagined Nick replaying the tapes his grandmother couldn’t help replaying over and over and that she’d now bequeathed to him. It began to explain his own paranoia, his distrust of authority, of people in general. I filed the information and moved on.
“Tell me about high school,” I said.
“BC High,” he said. I must have looked surprised, because he added, “Scholarship. They didn’t know quite what to do with me, an Eastern Orthodox kid in the bastion of Catholicism.”
“How was it?”
“That’s when I realized my grandmother was right. They were out to get me. I’d get beaten up all the time. This one kid …” Nick shook his head at the memory. “Bastard.” He gave me an appraising look. “Your friend Chip. He was my only friend. He was the only kid who wasn’t a Turk. He fought the other kids when they beat on me. I never forgot.”
“And college?”
“Harvard.”
Nick told me his years at Harvard were better. The students ignored him in his quiet separateness. From chess, he got turned on to computer games—first playing them all the time, then creating his own. He’d gotten a part-time job, programming for one of the hot technology companies near MIT. Later, he rented an office and started Cyclops Productions, then more space as his business prospered.
Becoming animated for the first time, Nick told me about Running Scared, the first computer game he invented that hit it big time. He took my pad and drew quickly, first strong outlines, then shading with the side of the pencil. He turned the pad and thrust it at me.
The figure looked like an elf, small with well-articulated muscles in his arms and legs. Huge eyes gleamed from under a hood. “Tell me about this guy,” I said as I examined the drawing. The creature reminded me of Nick when I’d first met him, his eyes peering out from under the baseball cap.
“He’s the Seer. He watches,” Nick said. “Players have to learn when to trust him. Sometimes he misleads them. But other times, he holds the key.”
I made a note to myself to find out more about Nick’s games. I checked my watch. Only twenty minutes before I had to head back to the Pearce. Nick had gradually opened up, his responses less guarded. It was now or never. “I need to ask you about your wife,” I said.
Nick tensed and shrank away, like I’d poked at a sensitive spot. I knew these kinds of questions could be a form of torture. I hated it when well-meaning people asked me about Kate. But this was different. It was my job to ask.
“Your wife worked?”
“Mostly she stayed home. Took care of my mother. Alzheimer’s.” His voice was a monotone and his body had stiffened, as if his back were broken and the least amount of movement would topple him over.
“Your wife didn’t mind doing that?”
Nick shrugged. “She’s a nurse,” he said, as if that explained it.
We were back to terse responses. “Mmm,” I said, taking a note. “Where had she worked as a nurse?”
“Brigham and Women’s,” he said. “Delivering babies.” His jaw clenched and unclenched. “But she didn’t want that for herself.”
“Want what?”
“Children. We agreed when we got married.” He blinked and looked away, holding back tears.
I was surprised by this intimate bit of information, which I hadn’t really asked for.
“You were working late Saturday night?”
He nodded. “Like I do most nights, in my basement office. I work best at night. Must’ve been around one when I came upstairs.” Nick stopped, staring into the space between us, like he was walking through this in his head. “I went into the family room to check that the back door was locked.”
“What happened?”
“The lights were off.”
“Um-hmm.”
“I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong except that I tripped over something. I fell, and the floor”—Nick closed his eyes and grimaced at the memory—“was wet.” He rubbed his palms on his pant legs. “Sticky. I got up and turned on the light.
“First thing I see, blood on my hands, on the wall, on the light switch. There’s a floor lamp, knocked over. That’s what I tripped over.” He quickened his story, rushing to the end. “Next thing I know, I’m outside, washing my hands in the pool water. Lisa is floating in the deep end. I know she’s dead.”
He stopped as if he’d come to the edge of a cliff and run out of words. I turned over his words in my mind. Next thing I know … I wondered if he might have slipped into some kind of a dissociative state, temporarily not there. In the kitchen afterward, he had seemed to drift in and out of awareness.
“Do you remember going outside?” I asked, trying to probe.
He sat still, thinking. “No. I remember turning on the light. Next thing I remember, I’m outside.”
“What happened after that?”
“My mother. She was standing on the deck, crying. Then babbling. Then she’s wailing like a banshee. ‘The Turks! The devils are coming,’ she’s screaming. Exactly what my grandmother used to say all the time.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“I was going to. But my mother was screaming and then … then … I had to find somewhere safe for her to stay. Right away.” Nick paused. “She had to eat something. God knows when she was going to get something to eat.”
“So you scrambled some eggs?”
Nick nodded. “And while I was washing up, I realized I had blood all over my shirt, my pants. I put mother’s favorite video on and took a shower. All I could think was, I had to make sure my mother was safe.”
It sounded as if he’d been confused, distracted. In shock. It explained why the frying pan had been washed but the plates and silverware hadn’t been. It began to explain the shower, and why he’d changed his clothes but not his shoes.
I’d heard of cases where a killer enters a dissociative, trancelike state after the
murder. A Los Angeles man killed his wife and children, then boarded a bus for San Francisco. He was picked up by the police at the San Francisco bus station, still wearing his bloody clothing. I supposed a similar thing could happen to a distraught husband upon discovering his wife’s butchered body.
“Do you think it’s possible that your mother might have witnessed the murder?” I asked.
Nick swallowed. “Oh, God,” he murmured. “It never occurred to me.” I found that hard to believe.
With advanced Alzheimer’s, even if Mrs. Babikian were able to express herself, it would probably be impossible to interpret her convoluted thoughts, to disentangle her inner world from whatever memories she had of real events. There was no telling what she might say, if and when the police questioned her.
“The police will probably try to interview her,” I said. “They may even have already done so.”
“Police? They won’t get near her,” Nick said. “She hates cops. Always has. Anyone in uniform.” His look turned worried. “It would upset her very much if they tried.”
I didn’t see any way of reassuring him. His mother was a potential witness to a murder. The police would have to do their jobs. I said, “I haven’t discussed this with Chip yet, but I think it would be a good idea for me to talk to her. It’s in your best interest to know what she says.”
“I don’t want you upsetting her,” he said.
“I’ll do my best. But she may have seen or heard something. Or thought she did.”
Nick gave me an stricken look. “You think I’m trying to cover up.
The door to the room opened and the guard came in. I watched as he shackled Nick’s hands. No, I thought. Someone trying to cover up doesn’t leave his bloody shirt hanging from the bathroom hamper, and doesn’t put bloody shoes back on after he takes a shower. Still, if he were innocent, then as vigilant, perhaps even paranoid as Nick seemed to be, why had he initially assumed that the killer was no longer in the house?
5
THAT EVENING, I met Chip and Annie at the Inman Lounge. The place had recently had a makeover, like a lot of dives in that neighborhood. The smell of stale beer was just beginning to grow back.
Chip was waiting for me at a table in the back. I sat and ordered a Bass. Chip passed me the newspaper. The Babikian murder was front page, with what looked like high school yearbook pictures of Nick and Lisa. Lisa had been a pretty teenager with long blond hair and a shy smile. I wouldn’t have recognized Nick. He wore a suit jacket and tie, and his hair was slicked down. He didn’t smile at the camera but he didn’t look overly sullen, and he sported a shadowy mustache.
I scanned the story. Even I was shocked by the graphic detail. The media really gets off on mutilation. I noticed there was no mention of the white mask Lisa Babikian had on when they pulled her from the pool. I wondered if that information had been withheld.
I turned to the continuation of the story. There was a picture of me and Annie by Annie’s Jeep at the murder scene, along with a sidebar about the defense team. I winced as I read the lead. “Is forensic psychologist Peter Zak revisiting his own wife’s tragic murder?” I closed the paper and wondered, not for the first time, if journalists ever think about the effect of their words. And for what? To titillate a public with an appetite for barbarity.
My beer arrived. Annie emerged from the shadowy back of the bar. She stopped and talked to the bartender. Showed him a piece of paper. He shook his head.
“Goddamnit!” she exploded when she reached the table. “This”—she threw the hot pink paper onto the table—“was in the men’s room.”
Chip and I looked up at her and chimed in unison, “The men’s room?”
“I’ve been having a little problem,” she said. The words came out staccato, and her face was tense. “Phone calls. Someone’s been sticking these things up in bars, mostly in the men’s rooms.”
The flyer was an invitation to anyone looking for a good time to call “Annie.” There was a graphic description of what was meant by a good time, and then Annie’s phone number. Worst of all, there was a picture of Annie looking like a biker’s moll in dark glasses, her leather bomber jacket, and jeans.
That explained the crank phone call I’d picked up at her house.
Annie glared at the paper. “Damn. I found these plastered in the men’s rooms in two bars in Central Square too.”
“Sounds like you pissed someone off good,” Chip said. “Have you called the police?”
“That’s what I told her,” I said. Annie glared at me. “Annie, maybe you should go in and talk to someone.”
“Really. It’s just a nuisance.” Annie crumpled the piece of paper and jammed it into her pocket.
Chip and I exchanged a look. “Sounds like more than a nuisance,” Chip said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she snapped. She must have seen my face and realized I was going to have a hard time doing that. “All right, all right. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll talk to Mac.”
Why couldn’t she have just called 911? As recently as a few months ago, Annie and Detective Sergeant Joseph MacRae had been dating. I wasn’t sure if he was still a contender or back to being an old friend.
“It’ll make me happy,” Chip said, who was extremely adept at reading silences. “There’re all kinds of lunatics out there. At least this one’s giving you fair warning.”
Annie sat and picked up her beer.
“One of us could go with you,” I said.
Annie sipped her beer and looked away. Vulnerability. As she would have said, it made her teeth itch.
Chip sighed. “Peter, how’d your meeting with Nick Babikian go?”
I told them about the two hours I’d spent with Nick, summarizing Nick’s version of the murder. “His actions do make a weird kind of sense,” I said. “A traumatic shock and the world careens out of control. It’s not unusual for people to fixate on something like feeding the dog or watering the plants, just to show themselves that they’re in control.”
I remembered my mother vacuuming the house for days after my father died. Never mind my own habit of working on my car whenever I woke up at four in the morning and couldn’t sleep because I knew my wife’s killer would be waiting to taunt me in my dreams.
I went on. “In Nick’s case, he fixates on getting his mother breakfast and then tucking her in somewhere safe. Says he doesn’t remember going outside.”
“Doesn’t remember?” Chip asked.
“Sounds awfully convenient,” Annie said. “I’m sure the DA will make sure the jurors notice that he was with it enough that the first thing he did was call a lawyer.”
“It’s unusual for someone with a paranoid personality to zone out like that,” I said. “If anything, he’d be the opposite—hypervigilant and focused, focused, focused. I think it’s more likely that it only seemed to him that one minute he was in the family room, the next he was out at the pool. In reality, he just focused on other things to put off feeling the pain.”
I went on. “He’s given me permission to talk to the psychiatrist they saw for couples therapy.”
“Couples therapy?” Annie said, incredulous. “He hardly seems the type.”
I agreed. Nick had said he’d done it for Lisa. I wondered what incentive or threat had been potent enough to drag a paranoid into couples therapy.
“Did Nick tell you about the security cameras he’s got all over the house?” I asked.
“Security cameras?” Chip asked, sounding more annoyed than surprised. “I knew he had them at the company, but I had no idea—” This wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to be finding out from me.
“He says the house is full of them. And there’s a room in the basement where computers collect the data. Says he’s got a similar setup at his company, and the police knew about it. He gave them video footage that helped them catch a burglar awhile back.”
Annie said, “I’ll see what I can find out. I’m pretty sure they didn’t find a surveillance setup.”
> “One other thing. His mother,” I said. “Nick has given permission for me to talk to her.”
“I got her admitted to Westbrook Farms,” Chip said.
I knew the place. It was one of the best-run residential elder-care facilities in the area, and they had a special unit for Alzheimer’s. “You were lucky to get a room on such short notice,” I said.
“With cash up front, it’s amazing how doors open,” Chip said. “I’ll set things up. What’s your take on Nick so far?”
I knocked back the last of my beer and thought about the insular life Nick Babikian had maintained. His life was work and family in a world populated by sinister strangers. “He thinks everyone is out to get him.”
“Paranoid.” Chip sounded pleased. At least it might be a line of defense.
There were plenty of diagnoses that involved paranoia. Paranoid personality. Or paranoid tendencies. If Chip was going to argue that Nick didn’t kill his wife, then one of those diagnoses could make his odd actions after finding his wife’s body plausible to a jury. If Chip was going to argue that Nick did kill his wife but there were mitigating circumstances, then a diagnosis of paranoid delusions was better, and Nick’s preoccupation with the Armenian holocaust was promising. But was that a core issue for Nick, so much so he saw the world about him as hostile, and all of his actions were based on the delusion that he was the “Armenian” in a world of “Turks”? Or had he simply taken the tale as metaphor: Yeah, the world’s a tough place and you have to watch out for yourself. At this point, I didn’t know.
What I did know was that Nick was some flavor of paranoid and definitely smart. It was a combination that could be lethal.
Annie and I lingered at the bar, ate a couple of greasy burgers and fat french fries. Reluctantly we went our separate ways. We both had work the next day.
