By Force, Threat, or Deception

On Friday the thirteenth, just twelve days before his forty-second birthday, a birthday he swore he’d never see, Don pulled out of his parking space at a job he hated and turned into eastbound traffic. As he headed down Detroit Avenue to one of his favorite bars, he turned on his headlights to combat the disappearance of daylight, on one of those winter afternoons when darkness comes before supper, when evening subsumes late afternoon, when all that is known of daytime bows to the early night.

As he drove toward the Driftwood Inn through the rain and snow, mixed and falling, perhaps Don thought of ways to spend the paycheck neatly folded in his wallet, or of his dream of becoming a painter; or maybe he conjured up images of his past: of his time as a dance instructor at Arthur Murray’s, guiding couples through the steps of the waltz or the gyrations of the jitterbug, or of his time in the service during the Korean War. Or maybe thoughts of his recent past crept into his mind with the stealth and skill of a cancer cell: of his leaving his kind wife and doomed marriage of twelve years, the look on the face of the ten-year-old daughter he loved as he drove away from their home, to his new home five miles away, with his belongings carefully packed in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental.

He had popped in the bar merely to have a drink and cash his check. Bars did that then. Maybe some still do. While he was in the bar, Don no doubt talked easily to strangers; he was friendly, well-liked by men and women. Especially women. They could always talk to him. And his dark brown hair, aquiline nose, easy manner and penchant for dressing above his means seemed to draw women to him. On this day maybe he bought a few drinks for friends, feeling that familiar working-class flush of Friday riches: riches tentative, hard won, well-deserved, riches here on Friday afternoon and gone on Monday morning.

When Don walked to his car, having stayed no more than an hour, just long enough to get out of the cold, have a warm drink, enjoy the reflection of himself in a barroom mirror, he made the mistake of letting strangers see his wad of money. As he braced against the light breeze blowing in off Lake Erie, two young men—two Hispanic kids, Spanish or Puerto Rican—surprised him. One pushed a gun in Don’s back and forced him into his car.

The men wound up at the northwestern edge of Edgewater Park in Cleveland at a place called Perkins Beach, where the lake became part of the night. Lake Erie’s latent waves crashed and fell against the rocky shore of Edgewater Park. The temperature hovered just above freezing. The older kid, the kid who did all the talking, got in the passenger seat; the other kid got in the back. The boy in back was only sixteen.

The punk sitting shotgun pointed a .38 in Don’s face.

“Hand over the money or I’ll kill you,” the punk said.

Don lunged for the gun. The kid fired: two bullets in the neck, one in the side of the face, one in the temple.

For years this was the story the family believed. A convenient story. Ugly, but safe. Horrible, but ordinary. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

Somehow I always knew much of what happened to my uncle had become a family fiction. Maybe it was the way the story never changed, as if one detail out of place would cause the entire narrative edifice to come tumbling down, resembling a collapsed cathedral, its glory betrayed by the sudden clutter of its bricks. It could have been the way my father, a former Cleveland homicide detective and my uncle’s good friend, mysteriously lost interest in the case. He simply didn’t want to know anything he didn’t want to know.

I, however, have never been able to let...