“What you talking about?”
“I think you know,” said Paulson. “Drugs. Recreational drugs.”
“I don’t know about any of that.”
“You want to be obstructing an investigation?”
“Nope.”
“You want to think again? Place where the high school kids buy their stuff.”
“Upper Craig Street.” He gave a number. “Maybe there. You’re going to pin the blame on Jacob no matter what. This sucks.”
“His mother told us he was backsliding. What was he on?”
“Just weed. Just fucking weed. He stopped messing with the other stuff.”
“Ecstasy?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
The owner of the apartment on Craig was Amsel Dickens, a big, muscular African American. “I ain’t answering anything,” he said.
“We don’t want to bust you for the weed. We don’t care about the weed. The E. Any of that. Just want to show you a picture. Ever seen this boy?”
“Nah.”
“This girl?”
“No.”
“Willing to take a lie detector?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Look again. What about this guy?”
“Yeah. Now I see him, yeah.”
“He buy much?”
“Not too much.”
“You see a lot of him?”
“No.”
“Okay. Look at the girl again.”
Amsel looked hard, extra hard, as if it took awhile to study her face, as if she was plain and unmemorable. Tolson switched the picture they’d taken of Azita with her wounded cheek with another photo, her high school glamour shot — not that she looked shabby in the police photo. Amsel kept studying, looking this way and that.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tolson said.
“We’re going to end up not having any proof,” Paulson said when they were back in the fleet car.
“When did you get the feeling we were had?”
“Today. Breakfast, I was thinking, let them go, you know, the man was defending his house — but then I saw Wilson’s picture and I got a whole ’nother story going in my head.”
“You think race comes into it?”
“When does race not come into it?”
“I don’t know.”
“By now this Samadi’s lawyered up, I bet.”
“I’d say.”
“Cause we took the DNA. He didn’t like that.”
“He was believable. Very believable. Shaking and all. Maybe everything he said was true.”
“Maybe, yeah. We don’t want to be prejudiced.” Paulson smiled.
“Are we jumping on them?”
“Because they want to nuke the world? Because they have four houses and I can’t afford faucets for my one? I’m thinking it through.”
Later that day some results came in. They asked Mr. Samadi to come up to the office. They thought he would have a lawyer with him and were surprised that he didn’t. They sat with him in a nonthreatening meeting room and said, “Seems you hit the victim three times.”
“Did I?”
“All from behind.”
“I can’t remember. It’s a blur.”
“You were upset.”
“What man in his right mind wouldn’t be?”
“The knife had your prints on it, his prints on it. They were overlapping, like his then yours, then his, in that order. Can you tell us about that?”
“I did move the knife. He dropped it when I hit him and I shouldn’t have moved it, but I did — I put it near the body.”
“I see,” said Tolson. “So you were the last one to touch it?”
“I think so. I don’t remember. I was very upset.”
“The scenario we saw was not totally complete?”
“Look. What are you doing? I was protecting my property. I know enough about this country to know I have a right to that.”
“Your daughter’s fingerprints were on the man’s belt buckle.”
There was a long silence.
“I don’t know each move. She was defending herself. I’m sure she pushed.”
“What will you tell us about her DNA being found on the guy?” Everything stopped. Samadi froze momentarily. Tolson was police-tricking. The DNA hadn’t been tested yet. It would take weeks. His phrasing, he thought, was clever. He never said it was there, only asked what Samadi would say.
“If you had a beautiful daughter and she was being raped, what would you do?”
“Why didn’t you tell us that before?”
“Scum run the news here. That’s what you do in this country. American scum know nothing about a girl’s reputation, her honor. This is not something to broadcast.”
“Had he already raped her?”
“No. He had a knife. He had her clothes half off. He was holding the knife to her head and making her... kneel in front of him.”
They ran the questions a couple more times for consistency. “How about we take a polygraph and be done with this?”
“I think... I think I will consult a lawyer. I do not wish to be treated this way.”
After Samadi left, Paulson said, “I do have a beautiful daughter and if she was a teenager, I might lose it in a situation like that. I would try not to. But I might not be able to help myself.”
“Three times? From behind?” Tolson was never sure in the devil’s advocate game they played which one of them would take up which argument. This time they switched back and forth, each playing both “nuke the guy” and “foreign prince defends honor.”
“Maybe two.”
It took time.
Tolson’s personal life made a deeper dive in the interim. He tried to contact Jenna. She told him to get lost.
Meanwhile, they kept an eye on the drug house. They attended the Wilson boy’s funeral and talked to neighbors, school chums — everyone said Jacob was a sweet boy, not a criminal of any sort, just sometimes depressed. No job, hadn’t liked school, worked here and there, and got down on himself. He was handsome so he relied on that to pick himself up. Women. Adoration. Being loved. And that usually led to sadness because they invariably decided he had nothing to offer them.
“Hmph,” said Tolson.
Paulson said, “I feel for that kid. That could have been me if I hadn’t got it together.”
“You’re not so handsome. This kid was handsome.” Tolson grinned.
In the next week, they called neighbors at the Florida address. The telephone work was time consuming and seemed to go nowhere for days, but eventually they learned that the family had actually enrolled the kids in school last January. That was a little odd. It took them forever to find the school. The principal, when she answered, said, “Yes, I remember. I thought the children were charming. The girl was a stunner. But then the family whisked them out of school.”
Tolson put the call on speakerphone so his partner could participate. He asked, “You know why they didn’t stay in school? I mean, why start and stop?”
She hesitated. “I don’t want to say anything untrue.”
“Well, what part do you know?”
“I think... the father thought the girl was going wild.”
“Was she?”
“I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, if I looked like that, I would have a royal good time. Why shouldn’t women have the same chances to play that men do?”
“I totally agree,” Paulson put in. “This is Detective Paulson here. I know a lot of men who don’t agree, but I’m ready to say they have that right. She was what? Sixteen?”
“I think so. Yes, sixteen.”
When they ended the call, Tolson said, “You speak with a forked tongue.”
“How so?”
“Aren’t you the guy who said you’d kill anybody messing with your daughter?”
“Right. Various codes. What other girls can do, what your own daughter can do. Also what’s not okay to do under the age of thirty-five. After thirty-five, they’re on their own. If you ever have a daughter, you’ll understand.”