Tolson and Paulson moved outside the basement door. They examined the grounds, the shaved bits of door around the lock, then came back in and looked around. Cushy, cushy sofas and a huge TV. Tolson walked around, Paulson behind him, briefly taking in the little kitchen and the bathroom, all very state of the art.
“You know how much that kind of shower setup costs?” Paulson asked. He was married and trying to renovate a house. “And the faucets. Way out of my range.”
“Pretty,” Tolson admitted. “Pretty stuff, all right.” He was not married. He had just suffered a breakup and was nursing a broken heart. He hadn’t even known she was unhappy. She’d told him that was because he wasn’t too smart.
They checked the victim for ID. There was nothing in his pockets. “This knife was just like this?”
The patrol cop told them it was.
Had the deceased dropped it that way when he fell? Odd.
They headed upstairs to talk to the family.
They tiptoed through the huge living room with its two levels to where the patrol cop pointed them, saying, “They told me they’d be in the kitchen.”
The kitchen was not exactly a kitchen. It was perhaps larger than the two-tiered living room. Its paned glass windows looked clean even by night, the paint on the wood perfect. It had clearly been added onto the house, using up part of the yard. It had a fireplace and a seating area with comfortable chairs, like a second living room. In a gazebo kind of thing at one end was a dining table and chairs. There were windows everywhere. These cats were in favor of windows. One arched window at the dining end looked out onto the hillside where outdoor lights showed there were terraced levels, all planted with colorful flowers — the slope was landscaped to within an inch of its life.
The dining table was glass too. Light. Light everywhere.
The detectives turned away from the view to find the family huddled in the back near the cooking area, comforting a young woman. They broke apart reluctantly to come forward. The father indicated the glass dining table, which seated eight.
Tolson said, “Fine. Yes, let’s sit there. We need to ask you some questions.” Five family members trooped in front of the detectives. They appeared to be father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, four of them huddling protectively over the fifth, the girl, so that at first the detectives couldn’t see her.
When they all got to the table where the family took separate seats, Tolson and Paulson got their first look at her.
She was the most beautiful woman Tolson had ever laid eyes on. She was like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth in those old, old movies — light eyes, dark hair, and lips, skin, that made his heart stop. She held a cloth to the side of her face.
“You’re hurt?”
She shook her head.
The father said firmly, “He hit her. The guy hit her.”
“Should you have medical help?”
She shook her head. Her brother sat next to her at the table but his shoulders were angled away from her — distancing himself for some reason.
Maybe she was famous, an actress or something — everything she did, even the way she shook her head, seemed watchable and interesting.
“I’m Detective Tolson, this is Detective Paulson. We’ll want your names. And then the whole story, from the beginning.”
The father’s name was Yousef, the son Javeed. The old baba, the mother’s mother, was Fatemeh, the mother was Malakeh, and the girl was Azita. The last name of the family was Samadi. Tolson laboriously copied these into his book and checked the spelling by reading each name back.
“This is your home? You live here?”
Everybody looked to Yousef Samadi, who answered. “Most of the year.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have other homes. We travel. I travel a lot,” Yousef explained, “but the children are in school so mostly they are here.”
“We went to Florida in January,” the son added.
“Oh, you mean a vacation?”
“A trip,” Samadi said. “I had some business there. I made sure they did their schoolwork. We have a home there.”
“You said homes? I suppose I should get it all down. Somewhere else?”
“Yes. In Iran, of course. Our main home. And we have an apartment in Paris.”
“I see,” Tolson said. “Would someone write the addresses for us? To make all this go quicker?”
Javeed volunteered to do that.
Tolson asked Yousef, “Your work is here?”
“I have several businesses. Not here, but I can work here by phone and computer.”
“What kind of business do you do?”
“Import.”
“I see.” Dope, guns, trinkets, antiques? “What products?”
“Carpets, rugs, beautiful things.”
Tolson nodded and turned to Paulson to bring him into the questioning phase. “Anything?”
Paulson said, “We’ll need to hear from the beginning what happened tonight.”
“Right,” Tolson said. “Go ahead.”
“We were in bed,” Yousef began. “The women were sleeping. They didn’t hear anything. Javeed was in his room. I thought he was asleep. But he was listening to something—” He made a gesture to his ears to indicate contempt toward MP3 players. “So he still didn’t hear. I was in my bed. I was watching my television. I thought I heard a sound. Highpitched. A voice. From the recreation room. I thought maybe an intruder, maybe a robber got hurt. But I knew sometimes my daughter went down there late, watching TV and doing her homework at the same time. I had to go down sometimes in the middle of the night to tell her to go to bed.” He looked around at his family. They nodded at him, some almost imperceptibly.
A knock at the front door and a simultaneous call on the police radio interrupted Samadi’s narrative.
“We’re here,” a crackling voice came through on the radio.
“What’s happening? Who is that?” Samadi held a hand over his heart.
“Our team. We have to get prints, photos.”
Azita put her hands over her face. Her brother nudged her. He said something like, “You might have to.”
Tolson saw a nasty bruise on her cheekbone near her ear.
Detective Paulson went to the door to let in the forensics team. Tolson got up too, to see who had been sent. Lucky. They’d got the best lab guys. He indicated the basement where the team should go. Then he and Paulson headed back to their seats.
“Why won’t they take the man away?” the wife was murmuring to her husband. “And the blood? I won’t ever go down there again. I want to move.”
“Let’s be patient,” Samadi said. “Let’s find out how they do it. They’re professionals.” He was an imposing man, not just because he was well-barbered and distinguished looking, but also because it was clear he was used to exercising his will.
Tolson answered formally. “We’ll tape the room off. When we have all the evidence we need, a team will come in and clean up. We can give you some names of experts at cleanup. You might want to change the carpet simply because... because you want to change it. But that’s to be decided by you later.”
Azita had begun crying.
“What is it?” Paulson asked.
“A man died in our house. It makes me feel... unlucky.”
“Unlucky?”
“And sad.”
“You were down there when he broke in?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You didn’t hear him breaking in?”
“I had fallen asleep. The TV was on.”
“I see. And then?”
“Something woke me. And I saw him. And I made a sound. And my father came down. When he saw the man he grabbed a baseball bat.”
“There was a bat there?”
“The whole corner,” Yousef interrupted. “You saw it. Sports equipment. I didn’t think; I couldn’t think. I wanted something that would be... far from my body and strong. I wanted to save my daughter.”