Elkaim wiped the lenses on his glasses and put them back on. “I was very sorry about what transpired between you and your uncle.”
“I know, Mr. Elkaim.”
“Still, you should have visited.”
“I know.”
“Fathers and sons,” he said matter-of-factly, then sighed. “Forty years we benched together at Etz Jacob. We were the last holdouts for havdalah on Saturday night.”
“I know that meant a lot to him.”
“Herschel was the glue—the minion fell apart not long after he died.”
I tried to do the compassionate nod, but the family talk was plucking at my nerves.
I said, “Tell me about your visitor.”
Elkaim breathed deep with some labor. Then he asked me what I was afraid he’d ask. “What do you know of what happened to my son?”
“A little,” I said. “But I was very young—and it’s been a long time.”
“Yes. In any case, you are a grown man now. And there should be no secrets between us. I came to this country in 1979 on an employment visa. My late wife’s cousin got me an accounting job—at Globus. B pictures. I…we wanted our only child to grow up in a more peaceful country. And Emil—loved it here.”
“That I remember,” I said.
Then I blurted, “I adored him.”
Elkaim nodded without approval.
But I wasn’t exaggerating. To a little kid such as myself, scooter-riding up the block looking for the world, sixteen-year-old Emil Elkaim was something to behold. Tall, shoeless, with dark longish hair and a scruffy almost-beard, he looked like he just walked over from the Holy Land. But he wasn’t solemn. A wisecracker, a daredevil skateboarder and fence-hopper, it was like one day Emil just appeared out of nowhere—the teenage prophet—and all the kids flocked to him. On Saturday afternoons, these neighborhood hangdogs of every race and haircut all gathered at Fairfax High to chill on the bleachers with Emil strumming Beatles on a scratched-up acoustic, the whole gang singing around him.
“I believe he babysat you and your sister,” Elkaim said.
“A few times. He and his girlfriend took us to Disneyland once.”
Elkaim half-smiled at this long-lost memory. Then he spoke the facts flat and plain, like someone in a spelling bee.
“Emil turned eighteen on March 28, 1984. He was arrested April 10. He was not convicted—but he was the primary suspect in the murder of a drug dealer named Reynaldo Durazo. My son was awaiting trial in county lockup when an inmate murdered him—allegedly on the orders of the victim’s cousin.”
I could not find a word to say.
“A revenge slaying,” he went on. “And Emil’s girlfriend—”
“She—ran away?”
“Yes. A few months later. And she died of an overdose.” His black eyes bore into me like a telescope scanning for something just one yard away. “In 1987.”
“So awful, Mr. Elkaim, I am so—”
“In any case,” he interrupted as if to go on—but then he reached into his brown coat pocket and handed me a folded-up printout of a scanned photo: a fading Kodak shot of Emil and his girlfriend Cinnamon on the Santa Monica Pier, arm in arm outside the Skee-Ball Arcade. Emil was shirtless in flip-flops and cutoff jeans, his grin teenage goofy. Cinnamon was laughing too, in a white-and-yellow minidress that blazed bright in direct sunlight. But they looked more like sixties teens than kids of the eighties. It wasn’t quite how I remembered them. “What year was this taken?” I asked.
“1983,” he said. “In the summer. Her real name is Cynthia. Was Cynthia.”
“But everyone called her Cinnamon,” I said.
“That’s right.”
His old man’s nod packed a punch—regret, loss, guilty-feeling erotic charge, and the peculiar wistful hands-off pleasure some fathers get from seeing their sons with pretty girls. Then, as if to back off it, he said, “She…loved to sing with us. Shabbat, at the dinner table.” But she was something else, reflecting back the sunshine. Even from this faded printout scan of a faded snapshot, the feeling came back to me: these two were gone for each other, you could practically see little birds flying around their heads. I returned the printout, and he refolded it.
“Three weeks ago, a man came. On a Saturday in the morning. I was not expecting anyone. I came out of the shul here and sat with him in the lobby. He called himself Devon Hawley. He was perhaps in his fifties, maybe more. He claimed that he had known my son in high school. I did not remember him, but I had no reason to doubt him. He gave me this.”
Elkaim dug into his coat’s other pocket and pulled out a folded newspaper page. He opened it for me, a page-long article torn from the Downtown Courier—“Miniaturist is City Dreamer.” In the center of the article was a black-and-white photo of a cheery-looking bald man hovering over a miniskyline like a middle-aged Godzilla.
I scanned quick:
For Devon Hawley, Jr., the creation of finely detailed tiny cities is more than a hobby, it’s an obsession. In just the last three years, Disney, NBC/Universal, Pixar, and Netflix have all called upon Mr. Hawley and STEAM-WORLD STUDIOS here in DTLA, to design and photograph the backdrops for over a half-dozen blockbusters.
I looked up. “Did this man harass you?”
“Not in the slightest. He was very polite. Tall like the day is long.” Elkaim made a reaching gesture. “He was apologetic for having interrupted me and so forth. Quite nervous.”
“What makes you say so?”
“He spoke in a halting manner. He seemed to have a hard time looking me in the eye.”
“Isn’t it a bit strange that you didn’t remember him?”
“No, no, I don’t think so. My son had a life of his own—especially as a teenager.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what did this Hawley guy want?”
“He told me…that he could prove my son’s innocence. He said he figured things out.”
“Wow, all these years later?” I sat up, on instinct. “Did…did he say how?”
“No.” Elkaim pursed his dry lips, tallying some invisible calculation. “No, he would not tell me how he knew, but my lifetime of suspicions were confirmed. I always knew it was a mistake. My son was not capable of murder.”
“Of course, but—”
“The night they arrested Emil, he wept to me, he told me he was innocent. He would not lie to me about such a thing.”
I took it in—I knew I was on shaky ground. Everybody’s son is innocent.
“So…this guy just came here out of the blue, without any notice and—”
“But he was not rude about it. He simply said that he wanted to introduce himself and set up a time to speak, to share certain details. He asked if he could return the following Saturday—to take me to his studio, I gather to show me his…his files, his evidence. He begged that I tell no one. As I say, he seemed very nervous. But respectful about the whole matter. And then—” Mr. Elkaim raised his palms to the heavens. “—a no-show.”
I scrambled for words of comfort, came up short. “Maybe he got the dates wrong?”
