“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:
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 passive 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.”