The Other Americans(13)
My mother glanced at me, a look of mild relief in her eyes; she wouldn’t have to meet or talk to someone new. From her file folder, Coleman pulled out another paper, and I noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick. It was a habit I had battled all through grade school and only conquered during middle school. The taste of the special polish I used to apply to my nails to make myself stop biting them came back to me now. Strong. Bitter. Lingering.
“I also have a preliminary report from CSU,” Coleman said.
I felt a surge of hope. Television shows had taught me that there were always clues in the crime scene, the autopsy, the lab report. I expected to hear about fingerprints, DNA evidence, shoe impressions, a cigarette butt carelessly tossed out of a window, a tire mark on the asphalt, a strand of hair retrieved with a pair of tweezers from the gutter. Instead, Coleman spoke of car paint. “Forensics recovered microscopic paint chips from the victim’s clothing, likely from the vehicle that struck him. White, it looks like.”
“How common is white as a color?” I asked.
“Very common, I’m afraid. For most car models.”
“So this is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Coleman’s face softened. “I wouldn’t go that far. We have to wait for the full lab report. Once they test the chips, they will be able to confirm the color, and maybe tell me more about their origin.”
“What about witnesses?” my mother asked. “Maybe someone saw something.”
“No, Mrs. Guerraoui. We canvassed the homes and businesses near the crime scene, but we haven’t found anyone who’s seen anything. I will continue to look. I will also put out a call for help in the Hi-Desert Star. That’s what the picture is for,” she said, tapping the photograph that my mother had taken out of its frame and left on the coffee table.
I remembered how well Jeremy Gorecki had spoken of this detective and, yes, she seemed very nice, and it was kind of her to come to the house when I’d called the police station for an update. Still, it didn’t seem that much was happening with the investigation. Three days had passed and in that time the killer could have hidden his car, painted it, disposed of it. Hell, he’d probably done all three. A tidal wave of grief washed over me and for a moment I felt unable to speak. Nothing about what happened made any sense. My father had often outrun disaster—the protests in Casablanca had moved him to California; the arson had made it possible for him to buy a diner. But now disaster had finally caught up with him.
Coleman closed her notebook and tucked her pen in her shirt pocket. “Thank you for the photo,” she said.
My mother reached for the pot. “More coffee?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Guerraoui. I’d better get going.”
“Should I call you again tomorrow?” I asked.
“You can. But I will call you if I have any news.”
I walked the detective to the door and watched as she backed out of the driveway in her cruiser. Gusts of wind blew dust and dirt across the road. In the distance, a coyote’s bark turned into a howl.
Driss
It was a Saturday. The Saturday before finals week. I needed a break from Kant and Schopenhauer, so I went to have coffee with my friend Brahim at a little patisserie in downtown Casablanca, near the Arab League Park. Brahim and I had met a couple of years earlier, at the publication party for the winter edition of the magazine Lamalif. We both had poems in that issue. Mine was terrible, I don’t mind saying that now, but his showed promise. He published a few more, he was thinking about doing a collection. For me, though, poetry was nothing more than a hobby, my mind was on other things: Maryam and I had a baby girl, and I needed to finish graduate school if I wanted to get a better teaching job.
What Brahim and I talked about that day, I can hardly remember. It was just an ordinary day, although nothing about that year had been ordinary—the war in the Sahara was dragging into its sixth year, the price of flour and oil had increased catastrophically, and labor unions had called for a general strike. Hardly a week went by that spring when someone didn’t organize a protest against the government. But I do remember we weren’t talking about politics, because we were preoccupied with our exams, hoping we’d pass all our subjects in the first session so we could have the rest of the summer to ourselves. We sipped our coffees, both of us taking it black and chasing it with water. We said goodbye to one another outside the café, and went our separate ways. It was already half past one, I realized suddenly, and I was late for lunch. My wife wouldn’t like it. I was walking down the Rue Gouraud when an old woman called out to me from an apartment window three floors above. “What are you doing out, my son?” she asked as she pulled her shutters closed. “Go home, there’s trouble.”
“Where, Auntie?” I asked.
She pointed toward the Boulevard Hassan I. Only half-believing the old woman, I ducked into the next building and went up to the roof to check for myself. Standing in the middle of television antennas, I saw army tanks driving down the boulevard in a column, headed toward a mass of protesters at the intersection. In the distance, plumes of black smoke rose in the sky. A terrible, familiar fear settled over me. How was I going to get home? Perhaps, I thought, I could walk back toward the Arab League Park and try to catch a bus or find a taxi. I crossed the length of the roof to see if the Rue d’Alger was still safe, but found instead that a Jeep with red and green stripes was idling on the pavement. Abruptly it sped up and struck two teenage boys who were running away from the boulevard, then swerved off and chased after another teen. A girl. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. From the other end of the street, a police van drew up to her, cornering her next to a pharmacy with a crescent neon sign. Then a policeman jumped out of the Jeep and started beating her with a truncheon. Blood pooled around her head like a halo.