BOOK EXCERPT : MY FATHER’S MURDER : A Son Sets Out to Find the Killers. What He Discovers Is the Father He Lost and a Hometown He Never Knew

On a cold January night in Fresno in 1972, when the tangerine tree in our backyard was pure sugar and the air smelled smoky and was full of fog, two white men in their early twenties walked into my father’s nightclub wearing gloves. It was Sunday and the bar was empty, and he was working on the quarterly taxes in a small office in the back. They ordered two draft beers, played a game of eight-ball that took them past the open door of his office, left, returned 10 minutes later and, without provocation or a demand for money, shot him to death. The only witness, a female bartender, was unhurt. They left behind two half-full glasses, absent fingerprints, and a dollar bill.

It was one of the most sensational murders in the history of our town, partly because my father, Ara Arax, had been a local football hero and a prominent grocer before he bought the bar. And it was never solved, leaving behind endless speculation about drug smuggling and corrupt police and the Mafia.

I tried to reconstruct my life but no one, not my mother or father’s brother nor the cops, could tell me how to put back the pieces. If there was a lesson to be learned, they didn’t know that either. So I did what any decent 15-year-old son would do: I ignored the rumors and made holy my father. In bed at night, surrounded by his athletic trophies, I devised ways to get even. I tried to picture the killers, not the two young men who gunned him down but the ones who presumably hired them. Did we know these men? Was it a plot dark and hatched? Or were they strangers bearing some petty grudge? I practiced the detachment with which I would coldly announce my name and calmly pull the trigger, and then I fell asleep.

Through high school and college and a career in journalism at the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Los Angeles Times, I never stopped fantasizing about revenge, even as the questions became more tangled. How could my father move so easily between worlds, the Little League diamond by day and the bar and its underworld figures by night? What side was he on and what did I, his oldest child, owe him? My father taught me baseball and football and table manners. He professed clean living, didn’t smoke or get drunk and hated drugs. But I was just a kid, what did I know?

On a foggy night in January, 1989, I quit my job and came home to Fresno to find the truth of my father’s murder. I returned a wary man, a husband and father, 32 years old, with an assumed name and the first gun I’d ever owned. I was hunting for more than killers. I was trying to understand a life, a family, a town. I wanted to know my father, shorn of rumor and myth. I wanted to reclaim that part of him, and me, that had nothing to do with murder.

We moved into one of the new gated apartment complexes built on fig orchard land. I checked the list of tenants before moving in. I burned my notes rather than trust the communal garbage bin.

Night after night I sat and lingered in the past. I discovered there were four murders in my family, one in each previous generation. Two of us victims. Two of us killers. Murder is what brought us to America from Armenia. Questions of murder have become questions of family and questions of family have become questions of history. Time has played its trick, Dad. The space between us has so narrowed that we are more like contemporaries now, more like brothers. To answer these questions, I am drawn back to where my knowledge of you first took shape, back to our origins, the birth of our people and family and me, back to where your fate became my fate and the murder was like a giant river that swelled through my life, you on one distant bluff and me on the other, carving a way across.

*

My father bought a bar in Fresno in the spring of 1965 when he was 33 years old and I, his “Markie,” was 8. He was a grape grower and a grocer. He knew nothing about bars. He told my mother not to worry. The bar business wasn’t so much a departure from the grocery stores, and The Apartments wasn’t so much a bar. It had been built as a cocktail lounge and dinner house and he would continue serving lunch and dinner. Grandpa Arax would count the money and pay the bills. Highway 99 would deposit a steady flow of customers.

The Apartments. The name confounded me. Instead of clearing up the confusion, Dad personalized it: Ara’s Apartments. I never understood why he kept the name and changed everything else. The food was the first to go.

The rhythm of the bar, its throbs and upside-down time, became the rhythm of our home. New music, the blue-eyed soul of the Righteous Brothers, blasted from the big Philco in our den. In the grocery business, Dad left for work in the early morning, hours before I awakened, and returned at dinner. We had him for the night. The bar, however, demanded his presence each night right after dinner.

I didn’t sleep soundly until I heard his key click in the side door, usually at 2:20 in the morning. If he hadn’t come home by 3 a.m., Mom chained the inside lock in protest. On those nights, he rapped on my window and I tiptoed down the long hall to let him in.

We lived in a housing tract in east Fresno: I and my father, my mother, Flora, my sister, Michelle, and my brother, Donny. The homes were modest, but enough of the lots remained empty that it felt more like country than suburb. Our backyard resembled a small orchard with almond and walnut trees that blossomed pink and white and volunteer figs that popped up everywhere in the mistaken belief that this was still farmland.

In a matter of three years, my father turned The Apartments into the hottest rock ‘n’ roll club between Los Angeles and San Francisco. At a time when other bar owners in the San Joaquin Valley settled for jukebox music, he brought in bands from the big city with names like El Chicano, Zebra and Ballin’ Jack. In the summer of 1971, Chuck Berry, paroled from prison, zonked on narcotics, duckwalked across the tiny stage in two frenzied shows.

The businessmen and attorneys who frequented The Apartments in the mid-’60s drifted away as the cocktail lounge became a nightclub. The customers now were an odd fusion of young whites, blacks and Chicanos who came to dance, bikers who came to brawl and hippies who came to extol the free love and drugs of the anti-war movement, minus its politics. It was an uneasy mix and Dad tried, desperately at times, to keep things calm. He tried bouncers and $2 cover charges. He tried his own fists.

Dad didn’t go looking for trouble, but he wouldn’t back down if it came his way. He had a soft face and velvety brown eyes that could surrender their gentleness in an instant. His two front teeth were gapped and he talked with a slight lisp. When he got angry or excited--the latter pretty much a constant state--everything came out in fits. I couldn’t always understand him.

To soothe my mother, he bought a vacant lot in north Fresno just off Van Ness Extension, the town’s most prestigious boulevard, and hired an architect to design a custom home with a private courtyard and swimming pool. Most of my schoolmates came from white-collar families. My father was the only bar owner. For a long time, I felt ashamed and pretended that Ara’s Apartments was a steakhouse. Once I reached junior high, with all my friends buzzed on Boone’s Farm Strawberry Ripple, the bar became something to actually feel proud about.

I began spending Saturdays there with Dad. We would arrive by mid-morning, the first to survey the damage from the night before. Five and ten dollar bills, the largess of drunks, lay crumpled amid the litter of cocktail napkins and broken glass and cigarette butts. A cousin or friend sometimes came along and we raced from opposite ends of the bar in a hunt for the most money. Dad let us keep whatever we found--until we began finding joints and little red and white pills.

Fresno was the downer capital of California, Dad explained. Something about the tule fog. The bar manager began coming to work loaded on reds. Cocktail waitresses turned tricks to support heroin habits. The uppers and downers and in-betweeners mixed badly with booze. Dad hired off-duty cops to guard the door, but the cops were too busy getting drunk or laid to help.

One Saturday night, the head of the Hell’s Angels in Fresno knocked the son of a prominent black businessman off his chair. When the black man tried to defend himself, two friends of the Hell’s Angel tore off the metal base of a table and began clubbing him in the head. Dad stopped them but not before the man had a busted skull. He nearly died.

Mom tried to shelter us. It was no use. Someone called and threatened to blow up the house, and she roused us from sleep and drove us to Aunt Jeanette’s. One Saturday afternoon, Dad refused to pay the handyman for a job half done. The big Okie stormed out of the bar cussing and grabbed a shotgun from his truck rack.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Please. My dad! My dad!”

“I’m going to shoot the c - - - sucker.”

Even at gunpoint, Dad continued to press his case. Grandpa stepped in and waved a fistful of cash in the handyman’s face. “We don’t want no trouble,” he said in an Armenian accent that seemed to calm the redneck. “Now please go.”

How did he not see it coming? How did we not see it coming?

Police called my father’s murder a hit but the two gunmen and the person or persons who hired them were never found. Because of the bar’s rough clientele, most of the speculation centered on drugs and drug smuggling, with Dad somehow involved. Absent a clear motive, the reason for the murder went down in our town as a transgression by the victim. However lopsided the response, people reasoned, Ara Arax must have committed his own flagrant wrong.

*

Every time I attempted in those early years to glean something about Dad’s life and death, my mother rebuffed me. She and other relatives believed that the murder was tied to the bar, and possibly to drugs. They assumed the best, that Dad had tried to stem the flow of the illicit traffic and was killed in a cross-fire between the cops and drug dealers. How they arrived at this I did not know, and they did not tell me. We kept on hearing all sorts of rumors to the contrary. That Dad owed vast sums of money to Fresno’s version of the Mafia. That he reneged on a drug deal at the last minute. Behind Mom’s back, I began posing questions to people outside the family and scribbling their answers into a small notebook I hid in my desk. I searched for clues inside Dad’s date books and business records.

Then came a surprising discovery. In the month before my father was killed, he had made repeated visits to the Fresno Police Department. A family friend who saw him there said he was upbeat and “looked like he was on top of things.” The friend assumed Dad was cooperating with a police investigation.

It was what I wanted so badly to hear, and I decided to call the detectives to find out more. Uncle Mike had equipped the telephone with an extra-long cord that stretched into the bathroom. I shut the door and dialed police headquarters and stuck a tape recorder to the receiver. I was doing a fine job leading up to the point of my call when Mom, apparently alarmed by the 20-foot cord pulled taut behind a closed door, barged in.

“What are you doing in here?”

I had managed to hang up the phone but the tape was still running. “I was talking to one of the detectives.”

She had scolded me once before about keeping the names of sources and suspects in my desk drawer. Now she was pleading.

“I don’t want you pursuing this. Please, Mark.”

I smiled.

“I mean it. Promise me you won’t pursue this. You can’t fool around with these people. It’s not worth it.”

“But it’s only one of the detectives.”

“Promise me.”

“OK, I promise.”

Promises . . . I often think back to my deathbed promise to my father, that half-pitiful child (I’m going to be a professional football player) and half-wishful adult (I’m going find the killers) and I wonder. Did that 15-year-old boy, hands clenched into fists, know something? Why had he assumed the cops would not find them? That it would be left to him?

I never made it to the college gridiron, much less to the pros. There wasn’t much market for a 5-foot-11 prep quarterback, heavy of foot, who operated best from the shotgun position. I told myself Dad would understand. It is that second half of my promise that I could never let go of, and that would never let go of me.

My mother died of cancer at age 51, 13 years after the murder. In one way her death freed me. Not only from the despair of her life and the hell of her dying but from the uncertainty of what must be done next. The way I figured it, I was no longer bound by my promise to her to leave the murder be. What had the years since high school been if not preparation for this journey? It was never far away: the taped recollections of family, the decision to become a journalist, the kind of journalist I became. So I would return to Fresno. I would resurrect the old questions, pursue the old rumors, hunt down the old names. I would find what I would find.

*

Not long after my homecoming in 1989, a friend at the Fresno Bee was able to obtain the full police investigation. A number of things became immediately clear. The prominence of the murder meant that every hype and thief who needed to curry favor with the cops passed along some two-bit street rumor. The detectives hopped from one outlandish theory to the next. One theory had my mother and a lover in Lake Tahoe getting rid of their obstacle. Another had my father hiding thirty grand for a big drug dealer and never giving it back.

The Fresno Bee’s Secret Witness reward only multiplied the number of bogus tips. When the composite of one of the gunmen appeared in the Bee, readers deluged the paper and police with the names of hundreds of look-alikes:

Check out the orderly at my mother’s nursing home, a guy named Christianson.

A repo man named Rogers is a dead ringer.

The gunman is my neighbor’s son who likes to throw bricks through the window when he’s high. If anything comes of this, please split the $2,000 between the Cancer Fund and the Heart Fund.

The report was replete with instances of sloppy and indolent police work. The first officer on the scene failed to accompany my father in the ambulance. My father’s strength and mental acuity had apparently lulled the cop into believing that the wounds were not mortal. Even if my father had wanted to make a dying declaration, or had some idea of the men responsible, there wasn’t a cop within earshot.

The police never bothered to interview many family members and close friends, nor did they talk to my father’s accountant and other business associates. Months elapsed before they even confronted some of the prime suspects.

The profile that emerges is of a gullible Ara. He carries a soft spot for hard-luck stories and is always slipping $100 to someone in a pinch. He has a vision of what people can be. If they play along, he helps them all he can. If they cross him, as often happened, he reacts with great indignation and occasional violence. The report mentions four such confrontations in the months before the murder, and police pursued the theory that any one of these incidents could have escalated into murder.

They also speculated about a marijuana smuggling ring, one of the nation’s largest, centered in Fresno. Several prominent citizens who frequented the bar were involved in moving the dope from Mexico to Fresno. Police wondered if my father may have helped finance the loads and was killed in a dispute over money. They also pursued the theory that Dad, loudly opposed to drugs, threatened to expose the involvement of patrons, employees or partners as a way to buy favor with law enforcement.

The problem with conspiracies was that once put to work they kept on accumulating, spilling everywhere and nowhere, an anarchy of affiliation. Journalistic training had taught me to question chance and coincidence and heed the pattern of conforming events. But it also imparted a healthy mistrust of conspiracies.

Then, deep in the file, I found four more pieces to the puzzle, revelations that provided some insight into my father’s last movements, if not his motive for visiting the police department.

--In late November, one month before the murder, Dad placed a phone call to Dick Walley, a veteran agent with the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. From a reconstruction of the notes, part of their conversation went something like this:

“Dick, I want you to know that some of my employees are dealing drugs and I’m dead set against it. My manager and another bartender are smuggling reds. Last week, they brought a bunch of pills into town and are selling them.”

“Are they dealing by themselves or through another group?”

“I’m not sure. I think they’re getting the stuff from Mexico. There’s a lot of s- - - going down there. I’d like to clean it up. But I don’t know what to do.”

--Three weeks before the murder, my father placed a call to the county building in Madera, Calif., where a major drug trial was about to take place. The hidden financiers of the ring included several prominent businessmen in town, one of them my father’s partner in a second nightclub. Because the number my father dialed was a general switchboard number, it was impossible to tell whom he talked to and for how long. As far as I knew, he had nothing going in Madera. No lawsuits. No traffic tickets.

The timing of the call--five weeks before the trial of the pilot who flew the load and his two accomplices--introduced a number of possibilities, most of them pointing to my father as an informant. Was he going to reveal the identity of the financiers?

--Twelve days before the murder, Dad placed a call to the state attorney general’s office in Sacramento--the last long-distance call on our phone records before the murder. Again, this was a general switchboard number. Whatever nagged at him, I reasoned, he didn’t stop with state agent Walley or high-ranking members of the Fresno Police Department. He pursued it with the state’s highest law-enforcement authority as well.

If my father had to be murdered, I told myself, I wanted it to be like this. No mere payback or everyday robbery. If he had to be murdered, why not murder as a metaphor for a time and place. I wanted to believe the best as his son. I knew none of this meant a thing unless I pursued my best instincts as a journalist.

This was the tension that I told myself would lead to a final discovery: a son trying to clear his father’s name. A journalist digging past the silence and rumor, myth and deceit. It was the accumulations of 20 years that separated me from my father and at night, after I had sifted its layers and tried to find sleep, I wondered if what I had unearthed would not kill me.

*

Even as a kid, I sensed that all was not right with my town, but like so much else about Fresno, I just assumed this was the way towns ran, and my town was no better or worse. It wasn’t until I discovered more about my father’s visits to the police department and then sifted through the old newspaper files that I began to sense there was a good deal more to Fresno’s past than I suspected.

What I began to document was an astonishing tolerance for police and public corruption passed from one generation to the next, Fresno’s patrimony. And unlike Philadelphia or Chicago or New Orleans or Birmingham, my hometown had succeeded in hiding its evil, or at least not owning up to it. It certainly wasn’t the world told to me by William Saroyan, that sweet mythical village of Ithaca, California, “East-West--Home is Best, Welcome Stranger.”

I wondered how a Fresno hardened to violence would react to me knocking at its door, especially the bar people who had seen more than their share of murder and mayhem in the years between. One of the first people I looked up, Dr. Fitzalbert Marius, the black surgeon who was our next-door neighbor in the 1950s, wondered about this, too.

We hadn’t talked in years, and I explained that I was home for a visit and wanted to ask a few questions about my father. Knowing me and knowing the profession I had chosen, Dr. Marius didn’t question my curiosity, though he did question where it might lead me and what I might find in a place gone numb to guns and shooting.

“Markie, with the depth of mayhem committed today, it makes what happened to your dad pale,” he said. “People have gotten callous.”

I wasn’t so sure he wasn’t talking about himself and what I did next was cruel. I made him recollect that Sunday night at the emergency room at St. Agnes, from the moment he got the call at church that my father had been shot to the last hopeless attempt at reviving him. His account was so vivid, in spite of the years, so much a protest against the diminution of murder, that it spoke as much about his regard for my father as it did about my father’s incredible will to live.

He was bleeding and he needed to go into surgery, but there was no blood. The hospital had failed to type and match his blood. All the time, Dad was chattering, chattering very rapidly. He kept asking if he was going to be all right, if he was going to make it. And he kept asking the emergency room doctors to call Dr. Marius. When his good friend finally strode into the room, Dad was so hopeful he raised himself off the gurney and shook his hand, and he shook it firmly.

The thing that amazed the doctors and nurses was, as he was going into shock, Dad remained lucid. My father was as white as a sheet, his blood pressure was zero and he was still talking.

“I think that’s what fooled us, Markie. He had such determination. He should have been up in surgery and his abdomen opened a long time ago. He knew this. I saw in his face. I saw . . . concern. I saw a man who had intended to see his kids grow up and be a grandfather. Yes, I saw that there came a time in that room at that moment that those things flashed through his mind: ‘This is never going to happen. I’m not going to be around here tomorrow.’ There was a look of disbelief: ‘No. This is not for real. This is not really happening.’ ”

I had once read that a gunshot to the gut was the most painful way to go, stomach acid spilling into blood, an incredible burning. An animal deserved better. Now I had this knowledge. It was a mockery--enough time to think he was going to make it, enough time to consider all the things he would miss.

He died as they were prepping him for surgery. “He had lost so much blood that there was nothing left for the heart to pump. He had an incredibly strong heart. He just didn’t have enough fluid to circulate.

“I was that close, Markie. The timing was off just a little. I stomped around and kicked the walls for weeks. That was my good buddy. I have to tell you that one of the skills blacks from my era have is you know the difference between sincerity and insincerity. Nobody can come up and fool you with a bunch of jive. I liked Ara right off. Many people you meet, you have to cut through the veneer to find out what they are. Not Ara. I never thought of your dad as white.

“When we moved next door, you were only a few years old, but already he was your hero. Months after [the murder], you still weren’t accepting. As far as you were concerned he was alive and he was going to come back. By some hook or crook or magic or miracle, one day your dad was going to open the door and walk back in. ‘See, I told you people.’ You went stark raving mad. Like someone cut off your arm or leg or gouged out your eyes. You were going to find the men who did this if it took the rest of your life.”

He had come full circle, to what he assumed was the point of my visit. But this wise man who had stood up to the racists in our old neighborhood, my father at his side, thought it best that I forget the murder, at least the search for the killers, and focus only on my father and me.

“Markie, people just aren’t going to hand you the answer because they feel bad or sorry for you. And even if you found the killers, you wouldn’t be able to resurrect him. His end doesn’t change. What you need to answer isn’t who killed your father and why, but a real understanding of who he was. That’s the end point. Who your dad was in relationship to you, not who your dad was in relationship to society. You need to find him in you.”

*

Tracy Stockwell, one of Dad’s old cocktail waitress, was embarrassed to see me when I finally tracked her down in Orange County. She told me she had spent the past two decades trying not to feel anything, medicating her brain and body with heroin, numbed against love and pain. She was a huge woman, tall and still carrying the weight of a recent pregnancy. Her swollen hands and feet bore the brunt of her disfigurement. Dr. Scholl’s medicated powder, her cutting agent, was eating away at her flesh.

I wanted to know why my father thrived on the praise and dependence of people who so often were weak, broken and so young. How he could surround himself with bar hoods and believe he wouldn’t get hurt. Not hurt his family.

“Your dad saw potential in all these guys. He saw what they could be if they weren’t throwing away their lives. You’ve got to remember, this was 20 years ago. Nobody knew just what a hold drugs could get on people. And your dad thought that, well, if you can just give people some hope, give them some money to start them off in a little business or whatever, that they’ll change.”

“What you’re saying is that he was stupid enough, gullible enough, to believe he could impose his morality on people who had a completely different ethic?”

“Because he was right,” she insisted. “He ended up very dead right. He had his convictions and he had the courage of his convictions, and he just didn’t realize how stupid and treacherous and petty people can be. Your dad was a man. And it was a lesser man that undoubtedly was the reason he was killed.”

I wondered out loud if her words weren’t too kind, and she bristled.

“I had enough respect for Ara not to bulls - - - his son. No reason to whitewash him. Your dad didn’t need to be whitewashed.”

She said she had failed my father, had failed his vision of what she could be. If he were alive today, he’d be disappointed in her, in all of them.

“I left Orange County in 1970 and moved to Fresno because I couldn’t stand my father. Your dad was my friend. The guy was real. He didn’t pull punches. He became my role model for what a father should be. Your father had balls. He stepped on somebody’s toes and they caused him to lose all of his. I loved Ara. There was nothing sexual, nothing illicit about it. Your dad was just a f - - - ing giant. He was a giant in my life.”

The praise of the wounded. I took it as his legacy, a salve for my own battered soul. Their stories, for the most part, shared the basic theme of innocence amid treachery. Others recalled the time Dad fired the band, a bunch of longhairs, for smoking grass during rehearsal. They said he refused to believe that his employees and patrons were dealing dope until the evidence stared him straight in the eye.

“Every few weeks, I’d get a call from Ara late at night,” George Carter, a well-known local defense attorney, confided over drinks. “He’d awaken me from a sound sleep with the same plea. ‘George, what are we going to do about the drugs and corruption in this town?’ ”

This time I interrupted the story. Please, no more Ara as moralistic prattler, babbling anti-drug slogans to the heavies. No more naive Ara. Virtuous Ara. It was too easy in the face of imponderables.

“Cut the bulls - - -, George,” I said. “I want a father. Not some f - - -ing saint.”

He shook his head and grinned. “I don’t get you, Arax. You push and push and push. Why can’t you believe your old man was a helluva guy. That he died on the right side. He cared about this town and wanted to clean it up. Why are you so sure we’re all lying? What’s wrong with you?”

And then one day I found myself sitting across the table from my father’s old lover. I had first heard about her years ago during the sometimes vile and violent arguments my parents would have in the early-morning hours--”the redhead,” my mother would hurl with contempt.

“It’s not red anymore,” she said softly. “A little gray and blond and brown now.”

Carole Dye had driven up in a shiny new black Cadillac Coupe de Ville laced in gold. She shimmered, too. All black and purple. Everything color-coordinated right down to her sunglasses and lipstick, shoulder scarf and nail polish. There was enough retained to suggest the beauty she had been. I knew what Mom would have said. Too much makeup. Too much hair. Too much gold and diamonds. Somehow she carried it off, just shy of garish. She was pretty and sweet and on her fourth marriage.

They met in 1966, a few months after my father bought the bar. She was working cosmetics at a Thrifty Drug Store and one of her customers was this blond bombshell named Patsy. One night, she accompanied Patsy to The Apartments and my father bought them drinks. They returned the next weekend and Dad asked Carole to dance.

“We danced the whole night and then he asked if he could see me again. I said, ‘I thought you were interested in Patsy.’ He laughed. ‘That’s way too much woman for me.’ We fell in love that night on the dance floor. I mean, it was just like that with us.”

She was 10 years younger but she wanted me to know that he was no sugar daddy. Except for one nice dress on her birthday and covering a few months rent for her and a child, he didn’t lavish gifts or expensive dinners. They mostly took long drives into the foothills and talked until 3 or 4 in the morning--the mornings my mother chained the door in protest, and Dad would knock on my window and I’d tiptoe down the hall to let him in.

She said they weren’t together long when my mother confronted Dad. Do you think you can afford a divorce? You’d better realize what it will cost you. The business. The kids.

“Never once did your mother say, ‘I love you, Ara. Don’t leave me, Ara.’ She wanted nice things and she wanted him to make lots of money. But big money didn’t matter to him. That’s why when I heard those rumors about drugs, it was very hard for me to believe.”

One night, my mother feigned a suicide attempt, swishing her mouth with whiskey and setting a vial of pills on the kitchen table. “Your mother didn’t drink but there was a bottle of booze out and she had taken some sips and maybe some pills. It scared us both to death. To think that it had come to this.

“We were sitting at our table and he said, ‘You don’t need all this hassle with me. I don’t want to deceive you. I can’t leave my family.’ There were tears, both of us. He wiped his eyes.”

Their physical relationship ended that night, she said, a year after it began. A few months later, Dad set her up with one of his bartenders, a clean-cut guy closer to her age. Six months later, they announced their engagement at the bar.

“Ara kept staring at me and we both, I know, were still in love. He said, ‘I’m so happy for you.’ He bought a round of champagne and came up and hugged me and kissed me and said, ‘I want you to be happy.’ ”

He called her at work and sent her flowers on her birthday. When her marriage broke up, Dad asked if he could see her again. This was a few years before he was killed and she met him at the bar and they drove all night in the rain.

“He took me by the house he built. I said, ‘It’s really pretty, Ara.’ And he said, ‘It’s OK. The old house was fine. But this is what she wanted.’ . . . I’m not blaming your mother, yet in a way, I am. If he had walked away from her, I just think he’d be here today. I know that sounds harsh. But he wanted to go back to the grocery business. I was in retail and we used to laugh about that. Starting over. The two of us.”

I began to recite my father’s explosive, brutal side, but it didn’t go very far. This was not a man she recognized. After all, they had known each other intimately only a year and it was long before the bar became violent. I didn’t bother to correct her, to tell her it was my father who instigated a new house, and when driving people by it for the first time, he took the long way down Van Ness Extension--a route paved with a wealth that could not be mistaken. She excused herself to go to the restroom, and I thought how easy I was letting her off. Here was the woman who caused untold grief, and I was laughing and sighing with her, a conspirator to her sweeter, gentler Ara. She had charmed the hour with her sentimental speculations. She had captivated me not unlike the way she had captivated my father that night on the dance floor. Oh, what would my mother think?

“You said you were nervous about today. Well, I have to tell you that I was nervous, too. Nervous about what I might find. ‘The other women.’ Maybe you couldn’t put a sentence together. Maybe my father meant nothing to you after all these years.”

“Mark, I can remember the first night I met him. It’s right here in my eyes. He came and sat down and our eyes met and I thought, ‘What beautiful brown eyes and long, curly eyelashes.’ I hope you put all this down and get this all clear in your mind. How many people can love someone and split up with someone and all these years later say, ‘Yeah, I love that person. I will always love that person.’ He’s in my heart. He will always have a place there. The compassion I see in your face, it’s the same that your father had. Exactly. And the tears you have in your eyes, I’ve seen in his. You have a lot of love. You have that of his.

“I will always remember his face. It was kind, very kind. It was like he could put his arms around you and protect you from the whole world and nothing could hurt you. That’s how I felt with Ara. Nothing or no one could hurt me. He made me feel very secure. He made me feel very protected. And I loved him very much.”

*

It would take me three more years before I found my answer. And when it came, it came all at once, in a series of encounters with people who had crossed paths with my father in the last week of his life and had been waiting all these years for me to find them. I discovered that my father was killed just before he was going to make a devastating disclosure about our town and some of its most powerful citizens and officials. Instead, the secret got passed to me, mine to tell.

Looking back over these years, I sometimes think that the greatest risk I took wasn’t endangering my life to solve my father’s life. The greatest risk is that a part of me actually believes that I have done right by him with this book, and that maybe he died so I could write it. And the words do not measure up.

We, the murder and me, twined a long time ago. I once thought if I found my answer, I would be free of it. But we are a perfect working team, parts indistinguishable. The murder has served as goad to whatever I have achieved in life. My reason for living the way I do. My excuse for hating the way I do. I could not be free of it any more than I could be free of them. Or them of me. I am your handiwork. Look at me. My mother, my father and then you. What do you think of your offspring?