Mrs. Vondra
Pre-AP English I
Name:________________
Annotation Packet
The Hound of the BAskervilles
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COMPLETION
All
assignments
are completed
Most
assignments are
completed
Some
assignments
are completed
Little to no
assignments
are completed
THOUROUGHNESS
The student’s
annotations
are very
thourough,
eploring all
required
focuses in
depth.
The student’s
annotations are
somewhat
thourough,
eploring most
required
focuses in
depth.
The student’s
annotations
are rarely
thourough,
eploring some
required
focuses, but
not in depth.
The student’s
annotations
are not
thourough,
none of the
required
focuses are
explored.
The student’s
annotations
are very
thoughtful,
showing
excellent
THOUGHTFULNESS
analysis of the
“why” that
accompanies
the techniques
used in the
works.
The student’s
annotations are
thoughtful,
showing
analysis of the
“why” that
accompanies
the techniques
used in the
works.
The student’s
annotations
are sometimes
thoughtful,
occassionally
showing some
analysis of the
“why” that
accompanies
the techniques
used in the
works.
The student’s
annotations
are not
thoughtful,
rarely or never
showing
analysis of the
“why” that
accompanies
the techniques
used in the
works.
▶ Fact ▶Opinion ▶Tone
The Era of Sherlock Holmes
Although Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes over a 40-year period that spanned three distinct eras in British life (Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian), in the Holmes stories it is
always the late Victorian era. Holmes himself so completely embodies the values of this era, in fact, that he is regarded by many as "the perfect hero for his age."
A man who believed in reason above all, Holmes was ideal for his time -- a time in which science challenged long-held beliefs and the status quo was threatened by social and economic changes. Charles Darwin's 1859 The Origin of Species changed the Western world by calling into question the Biblical belief in creationism, and in its place suggesting that the
mysteries of the physical world could be explained by science. It was also an era of dizzying technological advance: in the 20 years between 1867 and 1887 alone, the typewriter, the
telephone, the gramophone, the telegraph, the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and the transatlantic cable were all invented. As critic Rosemary Jann writes,
"Through the character of Holmes, Doyle brilliantly popularized the century's confidence in the uniform operation of scientific laws that allowed the trained observer to deduce causes
from effects." Just as paleontologists could identify an organism from fossil fragments, so could Holmes reconstruct a crime by tracing physical clues and piecing together their meaning. Indeed, when Holmes and Watson first meet in A Study in Scarlet (1887), Holmes is busy in a laboratory where he has just discovered "an infallible test for blood stains." It is no
coincidence that Scotland Yard first adopted the new science of fingerprinting the same year that The Hound of the Baskervilles first appeared in The Strand. Scientific rationalism
was the order of the day, and Sherlock Holmes acted as its standard-bearer.
But Holmes's role as the consummate Victorian gentleman was equally important in making him a hero. Among the enormous changes wrought by the industrial revolution was an
expanding middle class with a growing concern about its place in society. That cliché of the detective novel, "the butler did it," arose from a real upper- and middle-class fear that
those under them would rise up in revolt. Holmes offered readers reassurance about traditional English values, especially useful at a time when England was beginning to feel uncertainty about its place in the world. With each crime he solves, the social order is restored, and proper class values are reaffirmed. There are no problems, he seems to indicate, that
can't be solved by the combination of keen reasoning, bravery, and civilized behavior.
Although Sherlock Holmes gradually evolves from a cold "reasoning machine" to someone more human, he always remains intellectually far superior to the ordinary man. Eccentric
but elegant, brilliant but frequently bored, Holmes injects himself with drugs -- then legal -- because, as he says in The Sign of Four, "I abhor the dull routine of existence." Holmes's
reliance on a "seven percent solution" of cocaine, or, occasionally morphine, for the stimulation and escape it brought was typical of the fin-de-siècle French and English writers
known as the Decadents. Hoping to shock the staid middle classes, these writers made fashionable the image of the brooding "sensitive artist" who, as Holmes himself puts it, loves
"all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life." Indeed, the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles particularly invigorates him when it is going
poorly since, as he says, "There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you." In the stories, Watson -- the solid, middle-class British citizen -- disapproves of Holmes's drug use. As Holmes became a more developed character with each story, Conan Doyle gradually dropped Holmes's use of drugs.
The overall tone of the passage is __________________.
(You may use your Yellow Pages to pick a word. Be sure to pick a specific tone word and not just the general “Positive”, “Negative”, or “Neutral”.)
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▶ Imagery ▶Facts (of the case) ▶greed
A Grieving Son's Journey
His father's unsolved murder haunted him for three decades. When the mystery was partly solved, he had to decide how far to search for the whole truth.
December 12, 2004 | Mark Arax | Mark Arax covers Central California for The LA Times.
One day not long ago, I drove into a valley deep in the mountains of Oregon, a swath of green pastures edged by wild blackberries and split by a creek that filled up a nearby lake. It seemed a pleasant enough place in the world, this hidden valley,
but I hadn't driven the 500 miles from Fresno simply to take in the fresh scenery. No, what I had come looking for were answers that had eluded me for 31 years. What I had come looking for were the secrets to my father's murder.
He had been gunned down by two strangers in his Fresno bar on a foggy January night in 1972. He was 40 years old and I, his oldest child, was 15. Somehow I knew that the cops would never solve the murder. That night in the emergency room, I
told my mother that I would. It was a promise I kept even after she died 12 years later and my wife gave birth to our first child.
All through my 30s, I searched for answers, tracking down barmaids turned junkies, a bouncer who rode with the Hells Angels, a bartender who became a hit man. I even wrote a book about my journey. But I never found his killers, never completely
put to rest the rumors of drugs and police corruption and a father who coached Little League by day and entertained Fresno's crooks by night.
Then in the spring of 2002, I was handed a new name: Sue Gage. She was the keeper of the secrets, I was told, the woman who had set my father's death in motion. Not long after the murder, she had left California and moved to southern Oregon.
She had been living in a tiny trailer beside a creek ever since, each year breathing a little easier as the trail that led back to Fresno and my father grew more and more faint.
I hadn't known quite how to act when I called to arrange a meeting. What tone of voice do you take when the person on the other end, frightened and cagey, holds answers to questions that have defined--twisted even--your entire adult life? What
words do you let tumble out?
And now I was headed down a last stretch of road toward her trailer, past Christmas tree farms and cabins with tin roofs that spewed thick gray plumes of smoke. As the hill dipped down into valley, the smoke became mist and the mist turned to
rain. Through the windshield splatters, I could see a tiny woman in a red turtleneck and jeans standing at the side of the road. The closer I got, the bigger her smile became. I didn't know what Sue Gage looked like. She had my father's face to know
me.
There was a time when I dreamed of nothing but such a moment. I'd sit in bed at night and stare at the police composite of one of the gunmen. He had slicked-back hair, high cheekbones, boot-shaped sideburns and a neat mustache. I spent years
lifting weights, transforming my body in anticipation of something primal that would surely come over me when I found him. I imagined how the perfect hardness of his face would melt when he realized that the man standing before him was the 15year-old son.
Now something else awaited me--not a man, but a woman who provided a gun and a half-baked plan. Two of her former boyfriends, all these years later, had come clean to the Fresno police. They recalled a minor league beauty with a cunning that
made dangerous men do her bidding. The woman standing in the weeds at the side of the road was someone quite different--a grandmother with a bad liver and a mouth full of bad teeth who feared that her past was about to find her.
Before I climbed out of the truck, I told myself the years in between didn't count, not to me or to my younger sister and brother. Sue Gage's greed, if that was all it was, had killed our father, sucked the life from our mother and had broken our youth.
She moved closer for what I expected was a handshake. Then the smile vanished. She turned cold. She stared at my hand, the one clutching a notebook and pen.
"Are you here as a son or as a writer?" she asked.
It was a plain question posed in a flat twang. Maybe she thought it deserved a plain answer. The answer was my life. I wanted to tell her that the son had become a writer on account of murder, that he had honed all the skills of journalistic investigation across a long career for just this one moment. Son, murder, writer--we were all one.
Before I could answer, she looked me straight in the eye.
"If you're looking to pin the blame," she said, "you've come to the right place.”
My father taught me that the seams on a baseball served a far greater purpose than stitching leather over cork. If you gripped the seams right, you could make a fastball jump. Years before suburban parents began hiring personal trainers to transform their kids' core muscles, my dad preached the wonders of a fit belly button. He'd grab a bat and demonstrate how the midsection was the secret to hitting a ball like Willie Mays.
"When you swing, you're throwing your back hip at the ball, right? But what you're really throwing is your belly button, Markie. Explode with your belly button."
My father wasn't the most patient teacher. His irritations, I figured, were those of a natural. He approached every challenge the same. He'd gather all his power in one spot and a split second later erupt in a great unloading. Only if you looked at his
mouth, upper lip curled tight under lower lip, could you see the quiet that held the fury.
One of the riddles of my childhood was finding ways to amuse this energy before it turned on me or my mother. Years later, my grandfather would talk about my father's powerful life force--hahvas he called it in Turkish Armenian--as if it were some
mythic gift and curse. His energy was something my grandfather clearly didn't share, much less understand, and he apparently never found a way to fully harness it.
My mother, Flora, worried that his epic gestures might one day consume us. In the mid-1960s, we lost our small chain of grocery stores after Safeway discovered Fresno. Dad took our savings--$25,000--and plunked it down on a restaurant and
cocktail lounge just off Highway 99. It had a strange name: The Apartments. My father merely personalized it. Ara's Apartments.
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Whenever Mom tore into him, her sarcasm dripped: "Big Ara. Ara's Apartments. Name in lights. Mentor to all the creeps and whores."
Maybe to spite her, he ripped out the kitchen and turned it into the hottest rock 'n' roll club between Los Angeles and San Francisco, even hiring Chuck Berry for a couple of shows in the summer of 1971. It's enough to say that my mother's fears
came true. The bar got rough, and the old clientele of lawyers, politicians and jocks disappeared. Fresno had become a western hub for narcotics smuggling. Crop dusters would finish spraying the cotton fields and make furtive runs to Mexico. The
Hells Angels moved the marijuana and pills from farm to big city. Our police chief, who was married to the town's biggest madam, didn't seem to notice. The smugglers were good about spreading their wealth. Nowhere did they spend more freely
than at my dad's bar.
When the phone rang that Sunday evening, I sensed some terrible news came with it. Maybe it was me, the nail-biting son forever worrying about a car accident in the fog. But I had seen signs of trouble in recent months. I had watched my father
lose his temper one too many times trying to keep his employees and patrons in line.
He wasn't supposed to work that night--the day after New Year's 1972--but a phone call had summoned him. I was going to come along, but he found me in the shower and worried that my damp hair might cause a cold. "It's chilly out there. Stay
inside," he said. "I'll be back in an hour." The hour passed. A female bartender was on the line. My mother screamed from the kitchen. "Your father's been shot. Your father's been shot.”
I bolted out the side door and ran through the fog to a friend's house down the block. I must have been howling because his brother thought a dog had been hit by a car. Five bullets had struck my father. He bled to death 90 minutes later at St. Agnes Hospital.
I was sitting in my office--the Los Angeles Times Bureau in fresno--on a sunny November day in 2000 when the phone rang. Sgt. Daryl Green from the Fresno Police Department introduced himself, then asked if I might meet with him and a detective named Bob Schiotis.
"He's been working on your father's murder. I know it's been a long time, but I think we've solved it."
"It's been 28 years. My God, are you sure?"
"It's quite a story. Better that we tell you in person. How about meeting us in an hour at the old Peppermill."
Before he hung up, he couldn't resist: "You should know that these guys were thieves. It looks like nothing more than a robbery gone bad."
Ever since that first night when my sister, brother and I crawled into bed with our mother, I had held on to the notion that he had been killed for a larger reason. Maybe it was nothing more than a kid's desire to turn his father into something grand-need I say heroic. But it wasn't just me. The detectives had assumed the same thing back then. They traced the murder to one of two motives: to make my father pay for an indiscretion or to silence him before he could expose something illegal. The
old detectives seemed certain that the gunmen had been hired to do the job.
The bar had never been robbed before. That night, no money had been taken from the till, and no demand for money was ever heard by the young female bartender, Linda Lewis. When I tracked her down 17 years later, Lewis related the same account she had given police right after the shooting:
It was 6:30 p.m., and the bar was empty when two men walked in. They looked to be from out of town, something in their fringed leather jackets and gloves. They ordered two draft beers and headed to the back room to play pool. Just across the
way was my father's office, the door open. He was sitting at his desk working on the quarterly taxes. They played a game of eight ball and walked out.
Ten minutes passed and the two men walked back in. The place was still empty. Lewis asked if they wanted another beer. One of the men gave her an odd look, and the other headed straight back to the office and began shooting. My father fought
back with everything he had. It took both gunmen to bring him down.
"Every single penny was in that register," Lewis told me. "I never heard a word from those two about money. They were there to kill him."
As I drove to the restaurant to meet Green and his partner that afternoon, I thought about all the relationships I had risked trying to solve my father's life. Murder has a way of changing what a town remembers about a man. Good as Ara was, people
reasoned, he must have been involved in something no good that got him killed. I heard the whispers at school and church: Ara was involved in the drug trade. Greed got him killed.
I spent seven years, from 1989 to 1996, writing a book that tried to find the truth. Over and over, my hunt kept leading me toward something big, a conspiracy to have my father killed. Perhaps sensing the police were not to be trusted, my father in
the winter of 1971 contacted a deputy district attorney and the state narcotic agent bird-dogging several drug rings based in Fresno. He confided that his bar manager and other patrons were smuggling narcotics from Mexico and he was "dead set
against it and wanted to cooperate." A few days later, he agreed to hold a fundraiser for a group of reformers trying to clean up City Hall.
"He was very angry and went on and on about the drug trade and how devastating it was to the kids," Linda Mack, one of the reformers, told me. "He said there were some very influential people in town making money on narcotics. He said the Police Department was corrupt and protecting the traffic. He said there were payoffs going on, and he was going to do something about it."
I had concluded that my father became a target for murder while trying to expose drug operations financed by prominent businessmen and protected by Police Chief Hank Morton and his top men. My dad wasn't involved in the trade but had heard
and seen plenty from behind the bar. His phone records showed that he placed a last call a few days before Christmas to the state attorney general's office in Sacramento. Whom he talked to, I could never determine. Then the tule fog set down, and
two men with the look of another place came and went like locusts, leaving behind two empty beer glasses and a cue ball smudged with fingerprints. I had done my best to put a face on the men who likely hired them and why, but my conjectures
weren't enough to send anyone to court. And so I left it there, believing I had cleared my father's name.
Now came this phone call from the Fresno police, four years after I had written "In My Father's Name," and I didn't know what to believe.
"We got a call six weeks ago out of the blue," Green explained. "Some guy got popped by drug agents in Orange County. He says he wants to talk about an old murder at a bar in Fresno. The killers were a couple guys out of Detroit. Not hired guns,
but thieves."
Green's voice wasn't smug, but what he was telling me, at least with regard to the murder, was that I had gotten it wrong.
Of course, robbery was a theory I had considered--and rejected--long ago. For me to accept it now, I had to be convinced that the Police Department's heart was in the right spot. For one, this was the same department whose century-long corruption I had detailed in my book. Police Chief Ed Winchester, who joined the force in 1967, wasn't pleased with my account of a department that helped cover up the murder.
As I pulled into the restaurant parking lot, I could see one of the detectives reaching into his car for a folder. He had brought the names, dates and motives from an informant in the clutches of the DEA in Santa Ana. The fingerprints from criminal files
in Michigan matched the fingerprints lifted from the murder scene. The case was all but closed.
"I hope you understand, but we can't give you the names just yet," Det. Schiotis said.
He was 50 years old with a paunch and bushy mustache, but you could still see the eager kid in him. A cop at the gym told me Schiotis was a quiet bulldog with the reputation of never lying to a suspect or a victim's family. The toughest cases went
to him, and he almost always found a way to solve them. Confronted with another long shot, his colleagues started to joke that the chances of solving it were "slim-and-none, and Schiotis.”
I liked him from the first handshake. He reached into the folder and took out two mug shots with the names covered up. That's when Green, wiry and hard-edged, the boss of the unit, addressed me.
"These are the guys who took your father's life."
I didn't have to look at the photos long. One mug shot matched almost perfectly a composite drawn from the barmaid's memory. I waited for something to bubble up, an emotion from deep back, as I stared into the faces my father had stared into.
Nothing came.
"They're heroin yahoos," Green said. "Both were in prison in Detroit and escaped. They came out to California in late 1971." One gunman had killed himself in 1982 by jumping off an 11-story building. The other was locked up in a federal prison in
the East for robbery.
"What makes you so sure of the motive?" I asked. "Detroit is a long way to come out to do a holdup in Fresno."
Green said the man in custody in Orange County grew up in Detroit. He not only knew both robbers but had lured them to California. In early 1972, they told him about a heist that had turned deadly at a bar in Fresno.
"They said they pulled a gun on the owner and what they thought was going to happen didn't happen," Green said. "He fought them."
"So they just happen to be in Fresno and find my father's bar on their own?" I asked.
Green believed someone had sent them--someone who knew there was a lot of money in the safe. I asked if the informant was reliable enough to take to court.
"Everything he's told us checks out. He knew all the drug smugglers. In fact, he was one of them. He said your dad never had a thing to do with their business. He was a good guy."
I didn't need a drug smuggler coming clean under duress to tell me what I already knew. Still, I felt my eyes tear up when he said it.
As we shook hands, Green told me the years of looking over my shoulder were over. "It wasn't a contract hit, Mark. It was just a fight."
A few weeks later, on the 29th anniversary of the murder, the police chief stood before a bank of TV cameras and announced that the Ara Arax case had been solved. I sat behind the reporters with my sister and brother and watched with a strange
detachment. Our father, to hear it now, didn't die a hero and didn't die a villain. He was killed for no other reason than his trajectory happened to cross the roaming of two Midwest robbers hoping to taste the California sun. Had he waited that foggy
night for me to finish my shower and dry my hair, their arc likely would have missed his. He would be alive today, playing golf and watching my son play left field.
As the cameras cleared out, my sister, Michelle, wondered how the police chief could call a press conference and put forward a motive on the word of one man. Yes, the fingerprints matched and they surely had the right shooters. But no one had
talked to two other people central to the crime: the getaway driver and a woman who fancied herself as a young Ma Barker and disappeared from Fresno years ago--Sue Gage.
And nothing the chief said went to the heart of the mystery: Why hadn't my father or the barmaid heard one word about robbery? Why hadn't a single penny been taken?
My cousin Michael Mamigonian, who cleaned the bar when he was in high school, laughed at the notion of my dad resisting a robbery. "Money didn't mean a damn thing to Uncle Ara. If these guys came in with guns and they're holding him up, he
would have given them all the money and a couple bottles of whiskey as they were running out the door."
The "Arax story" led the local TV news that night and ran across the top of the Fresno Bee the next morning. My father's face, his ample ears and double chin, smiled beneath a bold-lettered question: "1972 Murder Solved?”
In the spring of 2003, with the trial pending, my wife, Coby, demanded to know the same: "Seven years writing that book, seven years putting our lives on hold, and it still hasn't gone away?"
I had moved dozens of files out of storage and back into my office at home. Returning to my late-night habits, I added new names and dates to a 7-foot-long timeline. Coby no longer trusted my judgment. She was sure my obsession had gotten the
better of me. If I was truly considering her and the children, I would choose to let it go. I didn't see it that way, of course. My fixation on finding one clean answer may have seemed selfish and self-righteous, but there was really no choice in the mat-
ter. My father had been murdered, and I had spent the better part of my life turning this way and that way the question why--details I had gotten wrong, details missed, details yet to come. I couldn't very well stop now.
I had the names of four people I never had before--the two shooters, the getaway driver and Sue Gage. I went to the courthouse and pulled criminal files and began interviewing old barflies. To his credit, Schiotis never once told me to keep my nose
out of his case. The district attorney's office, in a move that miffed the detective, decided to strike an immunity deal with the getaway driver and Gage to shore up its case against the surviving gunman.
In the weeks leading up to the trial, Schiotis shared his own findings and tried to answer all my questions. He was the one honest, never-say-die cop I had been searching for. He, too, it turned out, wasn't convinced of the motive or whether others
had helped set it up. "I'm 70-30 that it's a robbery," he said, "but I won't know for sure until it's over."
Then, on the eve of the trial, he gave me this: The getaway driver's testimony was the most important, and the reason he decided to cooperate was because he had read my book. He had been filled with guilt for two years, looking for a way to unload his remorse.
"He came this close to calling you a few years ago and telling you the truth," Schiotis said. "When we knocked on his door, it all came pouring out. He said he remembered you as a kid in your baseball uniform at the bar. Your book helped solve the
case."
The trial that took place over six days last year told its own story. It began, oddly enough, with a German shepherd named Otto. Without him, I would never have had the chance to look Thomas Joseph Ezerkis--one of my father's killers--in the eye.
Otto was roaming the corridors of John Wayne Airport on June 8, 2000, when he detected an unmistakable odor coming from a black tote bag carried by Ronald Young, aka Detroit Ron. That Otto even picked out Detroit Ron--one of 25,000 passengers coming and going that day--was the first of many coincidences that broke open the case. Each coincidence joined up with another until happenstance became fate. Everything fit so neatly that I thought maybe Schiotis was right: The case was
God's little puzzle.
At first, Detroit Ron refused to talk about the $300,000 in drug-stained cash he was carrying. He may have looked like a has-been from "Miami Vice"--gray goatee, shaved head, Hawaiian print shirt and Docksiders--but he hadn't survived five decades of drug smuggling by snitching.
For months, he kept silent behind bars. Then his daughter died and her children needed him. His encyclopedic memory became a way out of his jam. If he was going to give up details on this new drug ring, he might as well talk about that old murder
in Fresno.
The death of Ara Arax--it, too, was happenstance.
The testimony from Detroit Ron and a host of other rogues would unfold just as the prosecutor promised. No fishing expeditions. No surprises. His only goal was to put Ezerkis, the surviving gunman, away for life. If that meant leaving out tantalizing
possibilities of other conspirators and motives detailed in my book, so be it. I was so grateful to be in a courtroom after all these years--close enough that I could hear the defendant grunt--that it hardly mattered. And so I took a seat with my family
and quietly watched and listened. It seemed like a birth of some sort. Here is what emerged:
Detroit Ron was serving a term for burglary at Jackson State Prison in Michigan in 1971. In the cell above him was Thomas Ezerkis. They had grown up together on the northwest side of Detroit. Ezerkis' old man was a legendary city cop. He had
five children and was extra tough on Tommy, the oldest son, who began injecting heroin at age 20.
In the prison yard, Ezerkis was all ears as Detroit Ron bragged about his California exploits. He had gone to L.A. in the mid-'60s and joined forces with a group of early drug smugglers, some of whom had grown up in Fresno. The wide open farm
town remained the base of their operations.
Ezerkis took a mental note of everything Detroit Ron told him. Then, in late 1971, he broke out of prison and headed to California to join one of the smuggling crews. Before escaping, Ezerkis got the phone number of Detroit Ron's old girlfriend--a
bombshell named Sue Gage who organized all the Fresno-to-Mexico runs for one group.
Ezerkis arrived in mid-December with his crime partner, Charles Silvani. They crashed at Gage's house in North Hollywood. To raise seed money for a load, they decided to pull a few robberies. Gage loved planning the logistics of a crime, but she
left the dirty work to her lovers. Her most recent boyfriend was a sweet-talking, no-honor thief from Fresno named Larry Frazier.
Gage and Frazier happened to be regulars at Ara's Apartments. It was Ara who taught Gage how to shoot pool with her left hand. When she drank too much tequila one night and fired a .357 magnum at Ara's phone--"because I couldn't get a dial
tone"--Ara got upset but then forgot about it.
Ara was sweet, but business was business. Gage had spent New Year's weekend at the Apartments before returning to L.A. Ara must have made five grand, she told Frazier. The cash sat in a safe behind the bar. How Gage knew this, she didn't
say, but she was certain that Ara would be there at 6:30 p.m. that Sunday to open it up--with the right persuasion.
Gage handed a stolen .32-caliber gun to Silvani. Frazier gave his stolen .38 to Ezerkis. Frazier then hopped into a stolen 1968 Mercury and drove Silvani and Ezerkis to Fresno. They arrived late that afternoon, Jan. 2. Frazier showed the two Detroit
men the bar and told them he'd be waiting across the street in a second car at the appointed hour.
At nightfall, they struck. It was misty outside, but Frazier could see the pair running out of the bar and climbing into the Mercury. Frazier gave the signal to follow him. He drove past the west side cotton fields where he grew up, miles and miles until
they reached the California aqueduct. There, beside the water that flowed to Los Angeles, Frazier learned the truth.
Silvani had confronted Ara in his office, but he never got a chance to say, "This is a stick-up." Ara exploded out of his chair and charged at him like a bull. Silvani was forced to shoot, but Ara wouldn't go down. Ezerkis had to step up and fire the .38.
Ara wrested away the .32 and shot Silvani in the tricep. The gunmen fled without any money.
Of all the testimony, Frazier's account of the killing struck me with the most force. My father bursting out of his chair, the panic that triggered a fury--it sounded like those old stories on the farm my grandfather told. I had seen it so many times
myself--at the golf course swinging his driver, in the living room pounding out his exercises, on the front grass teaching me baseball.
My father, hard as it was to accept, had been an accomplice in his own murder. He had misread the gun in his face. All the noise he was making about exposing drug rings and police corruption had put him in a state of mind where a robbery became the very murder he feared. It was the worst case of bad timing. In seven years at the bar, he had never faced the barrel of a gun. And now, on the heels of contacting state narcotics agents and the attorney general's office, comes the first gun.
He is waiting for that gun. He is braced for that gun. That gun shows up in the hands of a robber.
The crime eventually came full circle. A month after Dad's murder, trailing a string of robberies, Ezerkis found himself back at Jackson State Prison, where he confessed the entire episode to Detroit Ron.
It took the jury less than three hours to find Ezerkis guilty. Jurors later told me their only regret was seeing Sue Gage go free. At the sentencing, we decided not to give any victim statements. What chronicle of loss could we add that wasn't already in
the book? Ezerkis, though, had something to say to us. He turned around and gave us a full measure of his face.
"I know that losing a parent is a traumatic experience, especially under the conditions that they lost their father. But on the same breath, I gotta tell them that I didn't do it. That's all I gotta say."
The judge sentenced him to life. As we walked out, prosecutor Dennis Peterson, a kind man who felt conflicted about the immunity deal with Gage, patted me on the back. "That's it," he said. "It's that simple."
The packet sat on my desk for months after the trial. It was the testimony of the coroner who had taken the stand on a day I didn't make it to court. Truth be known, I didn't have the stomach to attend. I was afraid that one detail might stick--a line
from the coroner's notes or maybe the sickened face of a juror viewing the autopsy photographs--and screw up 31 years of healing. When I finally opened the packet and began reading the testimony, it became clear that neither side had bothered to
connect the coroner's dots. Had they done so, it surely would have complicated the robbery theory.
Of the first three shots that hit my father, at least one was fired from a longer range. This was almost certainly the first shot. Its angle is consistent with my father sitting in his chair and Silvani firing from a distance of 10 to 15 feet. He takes aim at my
father's head. Dad deflects the bullet with his wrist and it grazes the top of his skull, exiting in almost a perfect line out the back office wall.
This first shot, contrary to the prosecution's theory, showed that Silvani's intent was deadly from the outset. He began firing before my father ever made a single move. Dad's last words to the doctors said as much: "I was doing the books and two
guys came in and just started shooting."
The fatal shot in the stomach likely came next. It was fired close up at a considerable downward angle, indicating that my father was still coming out of his chair like a lineman driving out of his stance. The third shot also struck his abdomen, its slight
downward angle consistent with my father reaching a nearly upright position. Only then did he come face to face with Silvani, back him into the main bar area and take away his gun. My father fired once, but before he could fire again, the gun
jammed.
And then there were the other dots that the prosecution failed to connect--all the employees and patrons who lurked in the background of the story. How much coincidence was I supposed to accept? Gage happened to be working with the same
drug smugglers who were troubling my father. One of her cohorts, Mike Garvey, was my dad's bar manager. It was Garvey whose alleged drug smuggling in late 1971 had so perturbed my father that he contacted state narcotics agents. Garvey and
Dad got into a dispute that December, and Dad fired him. It was Garvey who talked to Dad on the phone just hours before the murder. How did Gage know the precise time he was going to work--on a day he seldom went in?
Why couldn't robbery and murder be part of the same plan? If they needed to silence my father, why not lure him to work on a slow Sunday evening, rip off the money and then shoot him?
I know it wasn't the simple answer. And the simple answer was almost always the right answer because it fit the small thinking of most criminals. But even Frazier, the getaway driver, had thought it was a hit after reading my book. When the detectives first interviewed him, Frazier said he had been "set up" to believe it was a robbery. The detectives told him he had to testify about what he knew back then, not what he had read in a book years later. So he gave the details of a botched robbery.
Inside a bird's nest of a trailer in the Oregon mountains, it didn't take long for Sue Gage to turn on me. She kept talking into my recorder about what a good man my father was. I kept pressing her about her close connections to bar manager Mike
Garvey and Fresno's drug smugglers.
This whole period was an aberration, she said. Her first husband died in 1967 while serving in the Navy. She had a baby daughter and was lonely, and a friend introduced her to the crowd at Dad's bar. Before she knew it, she was running between
Fresno and Hollywood, living with wanted men.
Then one day, with no warning, two guys from Detroit showed up.
"Detroit Ron sent them from prison without ever telling me. I let them stay at my house in Hollywood. Very nice and polite guys. And then Larry Frazier comes over and they start plotting. I figured they were going to rip off drug dealers."
She blamed herself for naively giving a gun to Silvani and maybe innocently mentioning that she had spent New Year's weekend at a busy Ara's Apartments. She said it was a week or two later, while attending a party in L.A., that she learned my
father had been killed. A group of Fresno outlaws was discussing the murder, and Frazier suddenly pulled her into a closet.
"He told me the two guys from Detroit killed Ara during a robbery. I didn't want to believe it. We swore to each other to never tell another soul. And I would have never told. I would have went to my grave."
I wasn't buying it.
"Frazier tells it differently," I said. "He says you put the whole thing together. You knew my father was going to be at the bar. You knew the precise time."
"That's a lie," she shouted. "Yes, I had a role, but my motivation was to get rid of those guys, to send them on their merry way with a gun."
"You set it up, Sue."
"Listen," she said, pounding the tiny table wedged between her bed and refrigerator. "I'm an old lady. I've had 26 years of being a good citizen, and I'll be damned if you're going to implicate me in a murder."
"You've already implicated yourself."
"I don't think this is a good idea. I thought I was seeing Ara's son. But you've got too much reporter in you."
"What did you expect? Your greed changed my life."
Her hard face twisted into a cruel sneer. "Get over it," she said. "Get over it. Dead is dead. My daughter doesn't even remember her father's funeral."
That daughter had the benefit of an answer. Her daddy died in an accident on a Navy ship.
"What right do you have to preach to me?" I shouted.
My right hand was poised just inches from her face. For the first time in my adult life, for the slightest moment, I wished I was someone else. Not a father. Not a husband. Not a reporter.
"Listen, lady, you've got a lot of gall. If my parents had raised a different son, you and I wouldn't be talking right now. Where do you get off sounding callous?"
"Callous?" she said, backing down. "That I am. That I am. I'm pretty shut off."
Her voice had softened, and I bored in. I described my father's talks with drug agents, how the first shot was fired at his head before he ever made a threatening move.
"What? No one ever told me that."
"Does that sound like robbery?" I asked. "Why was no money taken?"
"Wait, wait, wait," she said, looking confused. "There was no money taken?"
She seemed on the verge of going in another direction. I thought she might tell me that these guys returned from Fresno that night with some payment, after all. But she stopped herself short. And then it was as if she had entered a trance. There
was no shaking her out of it.
I got up and walked out the door. The rain had stopped, and she followed me all the way to the truck.
"My biggest crime was to keep you in the dark. I could have fixed all this when you were much younger. I could have come forward and fixed it, but I wasn't a snitch. I owed that to you. I'm sure you've had a long and strange journey."
Am I a son clinging to an end that wraps my father in glory? Is it true, as a friend says, that as long as I keep open the question of who killed him and why, I don't have to bury him?
I am now seven years older than my father was the night he left us. I have three children of my own, the oldest a daughter whose bedroom floor is lined with college applications. Whether she understands it or not, she has lived with the shadow of
my father's murder all her life. She was 2 years old when we moved back to Fresno to begin my search. How naive was my promise to keep the past separate from our lives, as if it could be stored in boxes and file cabinets and brought out at night,
when my daughter and wife slept and I was free to work on my puzzle. Yes, I did right by my father, but it came at a price that I, alone, didn't pay. The best of me was taken from my own family.
Even today, as a 47-year-old man, the role of Ara's boy, "Markie," still comes as easy to me as the role of husband or dad. But playing that grief-stricken 15-year-old kid is no longer befitting. Dead is dead. My mother would be happy to know that I
have made a life apart from the murder. I write and tend to my fruit and vegetable garden. My sister and brother honor our parents in their own way. Michelle teaches at a Fresno middle school and Donnie is the head football coach at our high
school alma mater.
They both wonder, for my sake, if I have put it away. Maybe I have.
Ezerkis now lives in one of the California prisons I write about, but I don't feel any need to confront him. Last winter, I picked up the paper and read that the bar, now known as Los Compadres, had been gutted by an arson fire. I didn't bother to drive
by for a look. A while back, a dentist friend called to say that one of his patients had new information about my father, but I have never dialed her number. Schiotis says my questions are good ones, and he needs to take a hard second look at Gage,
Garvey and others. "It's still open as far as I'm concerned." I like hearing those words, but I don't press him.
Some truths, I am reminded, can never be known. The truth of my father's murder is now less important to me than the truth of his life. I no longer believe that robbery means he died for nothing. What was in his heart at the end counts for something. His fervent wish was for the town he loved to be a better place. He was willing to risk a lot to see that happen. I no longer believe that all that I am is a response to the murder. The older I grow, the more I think that, simply, what I am, at the
core, is what I would have become had my father lived.
▶ mood ▶Narratior’s backstory ▶Supernatural
The Raven
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—
’Tis the wind and nothing more!”
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent
thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
The Black Cat
▶ mood ▶Supernatural ▶ shift
by Edgar Allan Poe
FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not
dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified
-- have tortured -- have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror -- to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my
phantasm to the common-place -- some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.
From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a
great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a
brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.
This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient
popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point -- and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.
Pluto -- this was the cat's name -- was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.
Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character -- through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance -- had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I
grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in
my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or
through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me -- for what disease is like Alcohol ! -- and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish -- even Pluto began to experience the effects
of my ill temper.
One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a
demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket ! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.
When reason returned with the morning -- when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch -- I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling,
and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.
In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at
my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of perverseness. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our
best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself -- to offer violence to its own nature -- to
do wrong for the wrong's sake only -- that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; -- hung it
with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; -- hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; -- hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a
sin -- a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it -- if such a thing were possible -- even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.
On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our
escape from the conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts -- and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I
visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in
great measure, resisted the action of the fire -- a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with very minute and eager
attention. The words "strange!" "singular!" and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal's neck.
When I first beheld this apparition -- for I could scarcely regard it as less -- my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the
alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd -- by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing
me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw
it.
Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat;
and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another
pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place.
One night as I sat, half stupified, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat -a very large one -- fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of
the breast.
Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it -- knew nothing of it -- had never seen it before.
I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once,
and became immediately a great favorite with my wife.
For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but -- I know not how or why it was -- its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings
of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually -- very gradually -- I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.
What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.
With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring
upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly -- let me confess it at once -- by absolute dread of the beast.
This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil -- and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own -- yes, even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed to own -- that the terror and horror with which the
animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the merest chimæras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted
the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees -- degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a
long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful -- it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name -- and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid
myself of the monster had I dared -- it was now, I say, the image of a hideous -- of a ghastly thing -- of the GALLOWS ! -- oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime -- of Agony and of Death !
And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast -- whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed -- a brute beast to work out for me -- for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God -- so
much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the
thing upon my face, and its vast weight -- an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off -- incumbent eternally upon my heart !
Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates -- the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of
all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.
One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by
the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.
This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well
in the yard -- about packing it in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in the
cellar -- as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims.
For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover, in one of
the walls was a projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up, and made to resemble the rest of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as
before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious.
And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crow-bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it
originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick-work. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself -- "Here at least, then, my labor has
not been in vain."
My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it, at the moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it
appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forebore to present itself in my present mood. It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night -- and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!
The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed
disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted -- but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as secured.
Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt
no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as
that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be
restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.
"Gentlemen," I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, "I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this -- this is a very well constructed house." (In the rabid desire to say
something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all.) -- "I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls -- are you going, gentlemen? -- these walls are solidly put together;" and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped
heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend ! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! -- by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of
a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman -- a howl -- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the
dammed in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell
bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and
whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!