The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [80]
He had been at his father’s side, watching and learning, since he was a kid. If only he were calling the shots now, the next move would be big. “I believe we can open a Zankou in every major city in America. But she doesn’t want to hear it, bro. I have to sugarcoat everything. I have to walk on eggshells.”
Walk on eggshells? Had he been walking on eggshells a few days earlier with his aunt?
“My aunt was totally provoking me the whole way,” he said. “They are making it like I beat her up, but I didn’t. They are insisting that I hurt her. And I didn’t hurt her. I lost—I lost my control, bro. I was mad. You know?”
So he hit her?
“I slapped her on the hand. It didn’t hurt, though, bro. I know it didn’t hurt.”
Now Steve wasn’t sure what to do. Should he stay with friends? Get a place of his own? Leave town? He packed his bags and headed north, past Santa Clarita and Bakersfield, straight up Highway 99. The grape fields all around him were in winter slumber, and he felt his mind begin to race. One image after the other, his life over the past ten years, came back to him. He saw Dikran, the older brother he so admired, walk into the bedroom they shared and whisper at night: “Steve, you’re going to hell if you don’t change your ways.” He saw the 777 Motel and the call girl and her pimp. He saw the courtroom in Van Nuys and the prosecutor making the tiniest of blunders. He saw his father lying on the couch, a hat covering his bald head, and his grandmother home from work, walking past him as if he were already dead. He saw his father burning the photo and telling him he would never forgive her. “God will forgive the devil before I can forgive my mother. Because this is a mother, not the devil.” He saw his father asking him for a slushy lemonade from the Muscle Beach shop at the Glendale Galleria. He saw himself coming back home, the lemonade still icy, his father gone.
He kept driving through the California farm fields until he reached Fresno. That night, sitting in a friend’s backyard, he heard the story about the Armenian kid who had stolen a crate of raisins in the 1920s. Fifty years later, at the church picnic, the old ladies sitting in their lawn chairs pointed to a boy standing in the shish kebab line. “See that young man,” one old lady said. “That’s the raisin stealer’s grandson.” No one needed to tell him the moral. He was the son of the Zankou Chicken mogul who had murdered his mother and sister and then had the decency to kill himself. What struck him wasn’t the story’s lesson—that you can never escape the past—but what the storyteller had left out. Did those whispers reach the ears of the raisin stealer’s grandson? Or was he lucky enough to be just outside their reach? Did he manage to live his life never knowing the peculiar bent of his patrimony? Steve wasn’t so lucky. He had heard the whispers, and it made him think about the son he might have one day. Would the whispers follow him? Or would his son know the story because Steve had chosen to tell it from his own mouth?
For three days, he ate white bean and lamb stew, drank whiskey, and imagined living in a place such as Fresno, the land of Saroyan, far from Zankou, far from family. On the fourth day, he climbed back into his car and headed home.
This time, as the highway opened up, his mind fixed on a different image from the past. It was 2005, two years after the murders, and the grieving was finished. The family had decided it was time to honor Mardiros and open a new store in West L.A. Because he was the son most like his father, the job was given to him. You find the location, his mother told him. You find the contractor. One day, the store half done, he found himself unable to get out of bed. For 90 days, he lingered in a state