Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

rodeo form. I had the kind of temperament that sometimes caused me to wake up in the middle of the night like this, my mind turned away from such pleasant memories. I went into the room now where I worked and took out one of the banker’s boxes stuffed full of documents I’d amassed while researching my book about my father’s murder. I hadn’t opened it in at least four years, and I was surprised by the dense profusion of its contents—folders full of newspaper clippings, FBI transcripts, photographs, rubber-banded stacks of notecards. There were the photocopied articles about the land business my father had been a part of for several years, the hundreds if not thousands of pages I’d read and reread. In 1975, my father was murdered when he had to testify against his former business partner in a probe that exposed an extensive pattern of bribery and fraud. More than thirty years later, I’d tried to understand why this had happened and why no one had ever been charged with, much less convicted of, my father’s killing. Grand Jury Witness, read the first headline in the pile, Is Slain Gang Style. I found the clipping but saw that the photograph of my father’s dead body had been whited out, which was strange, because I knew I’d seen it somewhere. I could remember the way the picture had been bleached by the microfiche machine, softened into an image of a man younger than I was, lying in a parking garage stairwell, his eyes closed, dressed in a suit, as if he’d fallen asleep there for some reason on his way to a wedding. It was four o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t stop looking for the picture, knowing it was somewhere in the folder. “You’re pressing the button,” my friend Simeon would say later, referring to this kind of compulsion. George Orwell, writing about why he wrote, said that “one would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon one can neither resist nor understand.” I finally found the photograph toward the back of the stack.

      It was late, a different weeknight, but the bar was close to home, nearly empty, and we liked to go there for the music. The singer had a voice that might have made him famous fifty years ago. He was a little paunchy now, graying, flourishing a white handkerchief he sometimes used to dab his forehead, singing a song about surviving, enduring. The drummer stayed just behind the beat so that the slow song had kick, the guitar player melting little country-and-western riffs into soul. It sounded like it was 1970 and instead of seven of us in the bar who knew some of the words it was a theater and there were many more of us. The world outside was on fire, it always was, and though the singer didn’t sing about any of that he alluded to it in the timbre of his voice. He sang about coming home to New Orleans—parochial, poor, beautiful, inescapable—and the part of the song that was celebratory was not false and the part that was sad was not weak. Sarah always liked the way his belly moved when he danced. I liked the sound of his band in this bar, linoleum on the floor, the low stage, the bulky metal chairs painted black, the song about a moment like this—the smoke, the liquor, the colored lights, time stolen from work and worry, not just surviving but something more than that, something that made you smile and cry at the same time.

      4

      I eventually saw a photograph of Damien Martin, the murder victim, about a month later, when I went with Deborah to the Old Records Office of the Jefferson Parish Clerk of Courts. I’d been spending a lot of time there reading Kendrick’s case file—“pressing the button,” as Simeon had said, driven on by some demon. At the Old Records Office, there turned out to be almost thirty photographs of Damien Martin, glossy 8-by-10 color prints, kept in a manila envelope in a cardboard box amid shelves and shelves of other evidence from other investigations. The photos were presented to us at a table by a sheriff’s deputy, who sat there silently as Deborah and I looked at them under fluorescent lights. There was a large blowup of Damien Martin’s bare foot on a backdrop of blue vinyl, the skin wrinkled and sere, a tag bearing his name and address and case number strung from the big toe. There was a gruesome picture of Martin’s head resting on a blood-soaked cloth laid atop a plastic sheet, a stream of blood issuing from his nostrils, his eyes blurry slits, maroon-colored spatters on his cheeks and nose. There were more than a dozen close-ups of the bullet wounds to his forehead, temple, and ear (small round seeping holes), and close-ups of the tattoos on his forearms (the name Katy, a cross surmounted by four stars). There were pictures of him sprawled dead on a table in the coroner’s office, still in a black Karl Kani T-shirt and black jeans, and there were pictures of his body in those same clothes on the linoleum floor in the kitchen at Athena Street, lying beside a bucket of joint compound and a mop in a plastic pail. There was a picture of Martin still alive, his two young daughters sitting on his lap, white ribbons in their hair, Martin in a gray sweater and an Adidas cap, his daughters in matching sweatshirts with giraffes on them, both smiling, one with a mix of missing teeth, baby teeth, and adult teeth, the younger one with almost no teeth yet at all. The deputy pulled more objects out of the cardboard box. There was a smaller manila envelope, this one containing the bullet fragments retrieved from the scene. He handed the envelope to me—I could feel the metal bundled tightly inside the thick paper—before I could think to refuse. He pulled out Martin’s black bucket hat, kept as evidence because it had a bullet hole in it where the crown met the brim, the edges of the tear stained brown as if singed. In the stack of photographs, I now saw, were several pictures of the hat resting on the kitchen floor, a yellow plastic marker labeled “P” framing the perforation. I thought of the smiling faces of Damien Martin’s daughters in the family portrait. They would be adolescents now, and likely had no idea that these artifacts of their father even existed.

      There was no reason to do this work other than the need to do it, out of some untenable faith in your own way of seeing. Over the course of several days, I’d read through more than six hundred pages of court documents that detailed Kendrick’s case, and I had been faced once again with the idea that he might simply be lying, that I had made a naïve mistake. That was why I’d asked the staff at the Old Records Office if I could get a transcript of the four taped statements he had made to the police. It turned out that I could not only get a transcript but could actually listen to the tapes themselves, the sound of the exact words in Kendrick’s own voice. That was why Deborah and I were there. I’d wanted her to come because I wanted to see how she, an outsider, would interpret what we heard. I wanted to know if the part of me that still believed Kendrick might be innocent was simply deluded.

      The deputy finally located the tapes in the box of evidence. I had the transcript before me, which I tried to place so that both Deborah and I could see it. The deputy loaded the first of four mini-cassettes into a small black dictation recorder, and I took out my notebook and pen and we began.

      This is a taped statement of Kendrick Donovan King, K-I-N-G. Black male, date of birth 9/20/82, currently residing 700 Avenue F, Westwego, his mother’s residence. Statement is being taken on August 30, 2003, at approximately 6:14 by Detective Ray Lagarde of Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Homicide Division in reference to item F-94857-02.

      lagarde: Mr. King, uh, is it not in fact true that, oh, maybe twenty minutes ago, sometime before 6:00 p.m. on this date, you called the detective bureau, looking for me?

      king: Yes.

      lagarde: Okay, and what caused you to do that?

      king: Well, because my mother had called me and told me that two detectives had come by the house. She said you gave her your card, so I called you right away.

      lagarde: And so, after a brief conversation, we came back here into this interview room.

      king: Yes, sir.

      lagarde: And I said that this was in regard to Damien Martin, who had been murdered the week before.

      king: Yes.

      lagarde: And I asked you if you knew him.

      king. Yes.

      lagarde: And you indicated that you did know him.

      king: Yes.

      lagarde: And I asked you if you had been around the building at all on the day of the murder, in the morning hours, in particular, on the day in question. If, you know, you could account for your whereabouts, during those morning hours. And what did you say?

      king: No, I wasn’t there during the morning hours.

      lagarde. Okay. That’s right. You indicated that you were not there in the morning hours.

      king: