Berkeley Noir

The Law of Local Karma by Susan Dunlap

Gourmet Ghetto

When Sergeant Endo Maduri talked about the case later he’d start off, “That was the last time Shelby and I rode together.” It made the guys on the force uncomfortable, but Maduri didn’t care.

“Where’d you nab him?” Maduri had asked Callahan that night.

The patrol officer had the suspect on the ground. She jutted her chin toward Walnut Square. “On the walkway.”

Maduri raised an eyebrow. The original Peet’s Coffee and Tea sat at the corner of Walnut and Vine. The walkway looped behind it. “He the perp?”

“Witness said perp was in a brown hoodie, mahogany color.” She eyed the suspect’s puffy black jacket. “Close enough in this light?”

At five thirty p.m. chilly mist was turning to icy fog. The shops fronting the Walnut Square walkway were closed. Few Peet’s Coffee addicts even considered cutting through the walkway from Walnut to Vine. Even fewer were likely to clamber up the Everest of cement steps in the other direction.

Certainly not Jeremy Lampara.

Jeremy Lampara was not ascending any steps.

He was lying dead on the Vine Street sidewalk. White male, middle-aged, blood thick on the chest area of his camel’s hair coat.

“Camel’s hair?” Maduri said aloud.

“Classic Jeremy Lampara,” Detective Harry Shelby snorted.

“The flipper? The guy who owned that building over by campus? The place that got torched?”

“More to the point, someone got him.” Lampara wasn’t likely to get sympathy from anyone in Berkeley, least of all Shelby. Lampara was lucky anyone bothered to put a sheet over his face to keep dirt from blowing up his nose. Not that he was going to be blowing it again.

“Gonna be one bitch of a case,” Maduri said.

“Unless we can run down the perp pronto.”

“Perp’s gone.”

“Gate, gate, paragate.” Shelby liked to drop in Buddhist talk. Liked to make the team ask what it meant.

Maduri’d been on the team awhile. “Perp’s gone, gone, gone beyond, eh?” He motioned at the suspect Callahan was holding on the ground. “You sure the perp’s gone.”

“Twenty says he is. We’ll take your car.”

“Huh?” Maduri wanted to say: Take my car for what? But he wasn’t willing to give Shelby that too. He waited.

“Single witness, that kid over there,” he nodded at a thin, sandy-haired white kid in an inadequate white T-shirt and jeans, standing next to a blonde in a gray CALIFORNIA sweatshirt.

“We got just one witness? At Walnut Square? There are more people standing around holding lattes than that.”

“Not this late. But Brian Janssen is what we got. He saw the perp shoot, saw him run. We’re going to circle the area, hope he can spot him.”

Fat chance. If Janssen didn’t spot the perp, this whole investigation was going to be a field day for the press: Cops’ Cordon Catches Nothing! Cops on Scene 90 Seconds After Shooting; Killer Long Gone. Maduri could just imagine! Real Estate Developer Shot Dead Outside the Original Peet’s Coffee and Tea. There’d be columns detailing the laws Lampara had charged through like a rhino clearing a papier-mâché doorway. There’d be lists of the ordinances he’d skirted, interviews with the tenants he’d evicted, pictures of the buildings he’d demolished, op-ed after op-ed about the shoddy construction of his shoddy new condos. And the fire!

And then there’d be the Shelby connection. And the question: did Detective Shelby give Lampara’s killer a pass?

Shelby sighed. “Small chance, but all we’ve got.” He nodded toward the tall, skinny kid and said to Maduri, “Brian Janssen, nineteen years old, sophomore at Cal, lives up by campus by the building that burned. He saw the fire guys carry out the victim. Saw the vic’s cartons on the sidewalk soaked from the fire hoses. If the poor fuck’d left an hour earlier he’d be home in LA now.”

Maduri shot a glance to make sure no reporter had heard that. They’d be hard enough on Shelby if the perp vanished. From habit he slid into the patrol car and leaned toward the computer screen. Nothing there he didn’t know. He turned on the engine as Shelby lowered his butt into the car and shouted, “Left on Shattuck!”

Two cars, lights and sirens, squealed to stops across from Peet’s. The crime scene van idled in front. An unmarked Maduri knew to be the medical examiner’s blocked the sidewalk.

Maduri turned on the engine, checked the side mirrors then the rearview, and did a double take.

Janssen was in the backseat, with the blonde in the CALIFORNIA sweatshirt beside him.

“Who’s she?” he half shouted even though it was quieter in the car with the doors shut.

“Lisa Kozlovski,” the girl said.

“You saw the shooter too?”

“No, I was down the block, on Walnut, when I heard the shots. When I got here the man was dead. I mean, I think he was dead. He was on the sidewalk, all bloody. Dead.”

Maduri raised a questioning brow to Shelby.

“Mr. Janssen wanted Miss Kozlovski to accompany him. He thought it would be interesting for her.”

“Help me to think,” Janssen sputtered.

Maduri had to jam his jaws together. Half the department would be circling the area. Every cop of the force would be dragged back in. And Brian Janssen was like a twelve-year-old on a date. Like he had Maduri and Shelby driving him and his date to the movies. The girl was a knockout blonde, three levels above what Janssen could ever hope for. But suddenly the kid had a novelty to offer. Want to ride in the back of a cop car? In the cage? Look for a murderer? Maduri didn’t expect Janssen to spot the shooter — then again, he figured if this deer-in-the-headlights kid was managing to sit thigh-to-thigh with this blonde, he had to be sharper than he looked.

Janssen nudged her.

“Would you leave the doors unlocked?” she asked. “Uh... I’m a little claustrophobic.”

You, not him, huh? But Maduri just said, “Sure.” As he clicked the lock, a patrol car Code 3’d around the corner, its sirens screeching in Maduri’s ear as it passed inches away.

“Damn sirens,” Shelby grumbled. “Know why they blast your ears off?”

It took Janssen a moment to realize the question was to him. “Uh-uh.”

“New cars! They’re so airtight; music blaring inside. Drivers don’t hear the sirens anymore. Not ours, not the fire trucks.”

From Janssen’s guilty expression Maduri figured the kid was one of those drivers.

Dark night, pedestrians in black, some under umbrellas. The white Christmas lights snaking up poles turned the dark blacker. Maduri hung the left onto Shattuck. If the perp was planning to escape on BART he’d be running down Shattuck toward it, or jumping on a bus. Or hiding in the Arts and Crafts Co-op standing over a sculpture he had no intention of buying. Or he’d have hidden in the hundred and one spots BPD was not going to uncover on a dark, foggy December night. He’d have gone... anywhere.

Janssen would want to be the hero. Maduri slowed the car. “On the sidewalk, there! In front of the French Hotel!” He pointed to a white guy in a hoodie that could have been mahogany but was more likely black. “What about him?”

Janssen shot a glance at the girl before turning toward the window. Maduri noted Shelby’s mistake — he’d sat Janssen where he’d have a clear view out the passenger window. He should have put the girl next to window and let Janssen look over her since that was the way the kid was looking anyway.

But Janssen was staring toward the dark figure moving into the Andronico’s supermarket parking lot.

“What so you think?”

“No. Not him.”

Maduri caught the kid’s hesitation. “You sure, Mr. Janssen?”

Janssen shrugged. In the rearview Maduri could see him shiver and slide closer to the girl, who looked none too warm herself.

“Sorry about the car. Heater repair isn’t high on the department’s budget plans.”

Janssen started to put an arm around the girl’s shoulder but she gave him a quick head shake. “She’s from LA,” he said quickly. “It’s like Nome here for her, right?”

She nodded.

“It’s like Nome here period tonight,” Shelby said. Back at the scene, officers were standing in the cold, laboriously interviewing every man, woman, and child, writing every name and address, double-checking spelling, triple-checking e-mail addresses, getting colder every minute. Getting no closer to tracking down the perp.

“Mr. Janssen? That the killer?” Maduri said as a hoodie’d figure cut into the parking lot heading to the store or on out the other exit to Henry Street. Maduri hit the gas, swung a right, circled around and into the lot from the back. “There he is. By the first line of cars. Do you see him, Mr. Janssen? Is that the killer?”

Janssen dragged his attention from the blonde and looked out the window. “Nah, not him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not him.”

“Not him how?”

“How... what?”

Maduri glanced in the rearview mirror in time to catch the boy’s smart-ass grin; the sarcasm was for the girlfriend. Only witness, Maduri reminded himself yet again. Have to keep him on our side. “How’s the killer different, Mr. Janssen? Shorter, taller, fatter? More hair, less? Different clothes?”

“There was something... odd... about him. He was a little guy.”

“How little?”

“Five two, maybe.”

Five two doesn’t even make the chart! Probably he meant five six or five eight. Janssen was a good six feet. From his view anyone under five eight was a shrimp. “Short, huh? That all?”

“He seemed spooked, you know, like he couldn’t decide which way to go.”

“But he ended up running down Vine to Shattuck, right?”

Janssen just nodded, shrugged at the girl beside him.

“That right, Miss Kozlovski?”

“To this street? Sorry, I don’t know this part of the city. My boyfriend’s car—”

“Former boyfriend,” Janssen put in.

In the rearview, Maduri saw her jaw go tight. Janssen did not. The kid was, Maduri thought, an idiot. He eased the black-and-white out of the parking lot back onto Shattuck just as a fire engine hit the siren behind him. He jerked to a stop.

Shelby shot him a glance that said, You get to the point when you block out even that. Not good!

“The shooter, Miss Kozlovski, how would you describe him?” Maduri was yelling over the fading siren.

“By the time I got there,” she yelled back, “he was gone!”

“Citizens of Berkeley,” Shelby grumbled as the siren faded away, “they bitch about everything. But a guy guns a man down and trots off and not a single concerned citizen bothers to follow him.”

Maduri shot a panicked glance at the detective. Don’t give up, damnit!

As if she caught his vibe, Lisa Kozlovski said, “Maybe this will help. I heard someone say you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley—”

“Which you took to mean...?”

“Bigger. I mean like more substantial. I’d say bulky too” — she turned to Janssen — “don’t you think, Bri?”

Janssen hesitated as if he was scanning the still shots in his mind before agreeing with her. As opposed to the decision he was weighing. Hesitantly, he placed his hand on her thigh, the way Maduri used to test the burners for heat on the ancient electric stove.

“Mr. Janssen?”

“Yeah.”

The girl poked an elbow into his rib and he grinned, seemed to be squeezing her thigh, though Maduri couldn’t be sure. “Yes, officer, she’s right. He was stockier. That’s why it was so odd, see, that he was bouncing around trying to decide what to do. Only a minute. Less than that, I think. I was looking at the guy lying on the sidewalk.”

Maduri shot a glance at Shelby, but the detective was off in his own world.

Maduri pulled into the intersection and hung a left. Circling back on Walnut, paralleling Shattuck, eyeing the ivy-covered hurricane fence that surrounded a block of university plantings. Good place for a perp to leap into. But dicey if anyone spotted him. Maduri aimed the spotlight at the vines, on the small chance it’d jolt the perp. Nothing.

Janssen’s head was turned toward the vines, but what he was eyeing was the girl.

Look for the perp, damnit! Maduri forced himself to inhale slowly. “Mr. Janssen, I want you to do an exercise for me. While you’re scanning the sidewalks, run through what happened when you got to Peet’s.”

“When I arrived on the scene?”

“Yeah, exactly. But keep looking out the window.”

“Like patting my head and rubbing my stomach.”

Patience! “Sure. So...?”

“Well, you know, I got coffee and left and—”

“What was Peet’s like — crowded, noisy, half-empty?”

“Pretty empty. I only had to wait behind one guy in line before I ordered, and he was just getting regular, not like Lisa and her macchiato.” He grinned at her, raking his fingers softly up and down her thigh.

“Keep checking the sidewalk, Mr. Janssen.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“So you got your coffee—”

“Espresso.” His head twitched toward her but he caught himself before letting his gaze leave the window. “It was in a paper cup. I walked outside—”

“How did it strike you out there?”

“You mean, set the scene?”

“Exactly. You’re doing great.” The car was back at the Peet’s corner now, on Walnut. Crime scene tape was strung across the entry to the Walnut Square walkway. Tech lights shone off shop windows. The bark of radios cut through the buzz of talk.

Maduri hung a left onto Vine. Janssen was on the passenger side, looking toward the far side of the street across from Peet’s as he would have been when he came out the door with his espresso. In front of the coffee shop, the scene techs were laying down markers. Maduri didn’t want Janssen seeing that, coloring his memory of the scene.

An update flashed on the computer screen. Shelby’d read it, said nothing.

“So, Mr. Janssen, light? Dark, warm, cold, crowded...?”

“Well, you know, it was getting to be night. I remember now I was surprised. I mean I wasn’t in there more than a couple of minutes, but it seemed lots darker when I came out. And, you know, wet, like now. Like moist, but not raining.”

“You’re doing great. Were there people on the sidewalk?” Where was the suspect Callahan nabbed? Anyone else? Anyone who could be the killer?

“A couple, I think. Like I said, it was dark and cold and no one was hanging around, not like they do in the morning. These were, like, people going someplace.”

Maduri stopped at the light at Shattuck. “Where was Lampara, the victim? When you came out. Before the shots.”

“Dunno. He could have been... I didn’t pay attention to him till I heard the shots. Till I heard him groan. When I saw him go down.”

The girl squeezed his arm, but for the first time he didn’t seem to notice her.

“Tell me about it. See it. No, don’t close your eyes. See it in your mind. Keep looking out the window.” Maduri turned left onto Shattuck as he had minutes earlier. “That guy, in front of the Cheeseboard? Did you see him at Peet’s?”

“No,” Janssen responded so quickly it surprised him.

“Go on, Mr. Janssen. You walk out of Peet’s. You’re holding your cup. Did it have a lid?”

“It was just an espresso. I wasn’t going to be drinking it that long.”

“Okay, so you walk out...?”

“I come out the door there on the corner. I turn left, downhill. I get, like, to the Peet’s window, no farther. Like three steps from the doorway. I hear — wait! — I hear someone yell, ‘Mr. Lampara!’ and then the shot.”

This is it! Maduri struggled to keep his voice even. “What did it sound like? Man, woman, high, low, accent? Hear it now!”

Janssen was trying, trying to hear. Shelby was swallowing any reaction; Maduri’d seen him do that before when the witness was on the verge of something.

Maduri was trying not to tell Janssen not to squeeze his eyes closed.

Janssen was thinking.

“Don’t think! Remember!”

Janssen jerked.

Shit!

“Nothing special. I mean, it was like a growl, like right next to him. Just those two words: Mr. Lampara? Like a question.” Janssen’s jaw was quivering.

“Five thirty at night. How’d the killer just walk away?”

Did Shelby realize he was muttering aloud? Or was he just losing it?

Whatever. Maduri knew it was all up to him now. He checked the rearview. The girl was looking out the window; the boy’s expression was blank, his shoulder moving up and down in response to his hand on her thigh.

“I’m not surprised,” Shelby continued. “Lampara’s well known in this town. Well hated.”

Janssen and Kozlovski cocked their heads toward him. Almost in unison.

“You know what the Law of Karma is?”

“Sure,” Janssen said.

“Right. It’s the one law citizens in Berkeley respect.” Shelby uttered a weary chuckle. It was an old joke at the department. “I’ve been on the force a long time. I used to laugh when the new guys whined about driving up one block and down the next every morning, eyes out for a parking spot, them hauling themselves out of bed half an hour early to do it, to find parking within a mile of the station, then having to run to make the squad meeting. I didn’t respect the Law of Karma then, so I laughed. Then they bitch about coming back at the end of shift and finding a parking ticket on their windshields! Rite of passage, I’d tell them, and I’d still be chuckling when I walked the four blocks home to a sweet two-bedroom cottage I was renting there... Lampara, he taught me about karma. Evicted me. Flipped my house.”

Now Shelby drove an hour in traffic each way to the lesser house he could afford in the lesser town. The best he could say was that by the time he got there, he only had an hour or two to listen to the wife go on about the ugly streets, the bland neighbors, the boredom. The exile.

“Lampara was just beginning then,” Shelby went on in that musing voice, almost like he was inviting them all inside his head. “That was before he could buy four-plexes, eight-plexes, four-story places — and slumlord the tenants out. Mostly near campus. And then there was the fire last month, the grad student who died. You live near there, don’t you, Mr. Janssen?”

The girl jumped. Had Janssen squeezed her thigh that hard?

“You live near that apartment of his that burned, right? You must’ve heard the sirens, seen the engines roll in, the water, heard about the shitty wiring that sparked it. Didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but... Yeah.”

“You live across the street, right?” Shelby said. “Did you see the fire from your window, Mr. Janssen? Did you watch? Did you know the guy who died? In the flames? The smoke? Was he your friend, Brian? Did you see him at the window, trying to break the glass, Brian?”

Janssen was shaking, trying to get words out.

“Did you see his suitcase on the sidewalk? Taxi for the airport? To fly to LA? To get married? Did you see that? Did you know that? Did you, Brian?”

“Stop it. Just stop it, now!” The girl wrapped her arms around Janssen and pulled him to her. She was shaking too.

Maduri shot a glance at Shelby to see if the old guy had a plan or if he’d just lost it. If all those hours on the freeway had wadded into rage. Or if it wasn’t that. If, maybe, it was the boy who’d died in the fire. But all he saw was the back of Shelby’s head. Shelby was staring hard out the window, or just staring blankly. He said to Janssen, “Black, could be brown, hoodie ahead walking fast. What do you think?”

Now Janssen was staring hard, wanting it to be the suspect.

“Wait, wait! Slow down,” the girl said. “Think that’s him, Bri?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we get closer?”

“Not without spooking him.”

The computer flashed. Shelby leaned toward it. “Wait! They’ve got something.”

Janssen stretched up to look over the seat.

“The guy on the street” — Lisa Kozlovski pointed frantically at the window — “what about him?”

“The jacket!” Shelby said. “They found the coat. Puffy hoodie. Bloodstains.”

Maduri flipped on the flasher and siren and pulled into the left lane. From inside the car it shrieked so loud that Maduri wanted to slam his hands over his ears. “Where’d—”

“Behind a fence on Walnut. Brown hoodie. Reddish-brown!” Shelby was reading off the computer. “Go! Let’s go!”

Maduri hung a hard U.

The back door popped open.

Janssen slid across the seat, grabbed for the cage wire, caught himself.

Lisa Kozlovski was gone.

Maduri slammed on the brakes. The crash from behind shocked him, sent Janssen into the cage. Sent Shelby into windshield.

The EMT van didn’t stop. Maduri was trying to make the call; he was cradling Shelby’s head. Lights flashed white, red. Sirens screamed.

A patrol officer pulled up, Maduri didn’t get his name. He flipped him the keys, muttered “Witness” toward Janssen, and pushed into the van with Shelby.

Later, after Shelby went into surgery, after Shelby’s wife arrived from the distant town she hated, after a wave of cops flooded the waiting room and then another when they got off their shift at eleven, and after the surgeon came out to say that Shelby would live, but not walk — only then did Maduri think of Lisa Kozlovski and how easy it would have been for her to shoot Lampara, circle around through the Walnut Square walkway, chuck her mahogany hoodie, and stroll up to the scene.

And then — he shook his head — all she would have needed was a way to get clear of the scene, pick up her former boyfriend’s car, and drive off.

Wifebeater Tank Top by J. M. Curet

Identity Theft by Summer Brenner

North Berkeley

The first thing he did was cut her hair. He cut as gently as possible, but when she screamed and jerked away, nearly causing him to stab her cheek, he gagged her, then tied her hands to the back of a chair and her feet to a table leg. When he finished, there was a pond of hair at his feet. He swept and vacuumed and saved a few strands in an envelope. The second thing, he burned her clothes. The embroidered blouses and shawls, the hand-loomed pants and skirt, the head wraps, he had no choice. They were clothes that looked distinctive. They could easily be remembered. If she managed to get out, someone could identify her. People in Berkeley were curious about all things ethnic. No doubt a handsome young woman in ethnic garb, looking lost and far from home, would attract someone’s attention. If she didn’t stop them, they might approach her to ask where she was from. They might offer to get her help. Instead of her own clothes, he had bought jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters in the teen department at Macy’s. Dresses would have to wait. He’d bought socks in case her feet got cold, two pairs with rubber grips so she wouldn’t slip. A salesclerk picked out bras, panties, pajamas, and a fluffy robe. “Nothing sexy,” he told her. Later, when it was appropriate for her to go outside, he would get her a winter coat and a rain jacket. At the pharmacy, he purchased toiletries: sanitary napkins, rose-scented deodorant, dental floss, an electric toothbrush, etc. Next, he took away her flimsy plastic shoes. They aroused feelings of disgust in him which he couldn’t explain. Barefoot she was less likely to run away. He also locked up her jewelry (the gold earrings and shell and bead necklaces) and documents, including her passport. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy the documents. He told himself that entirely wiping away her past existence, like the name of her hamlet and family, was inhumane. He locked up the signed contract with her mother and the sales receipt for nine hundred dollars, which was a way to protect himself — that is, legally. Finally, he taught her yes, no, goodbye, hunger, and thirst in English and sign language.

In advance of her arrival, he’d had a portion of his attic renovated. The new soundproof walls had been painted pale blue, a color reputed to induce calm. He’d debated about a window, knowing that to gaze at trees and sky and hills was a great pastime, a source of spiritual renewal, especially for a child accustomed to the natural world. But in the end, he thought a window would only make her sad. The bed and dresser were new. The sheets were pima cotton, the duvet goose down, the pillows hypoallergenic. The bathroom had hot running water and a flush toilet, luxury conveniences for her. He’d considered installing a tub with the shower, but he feared she might try to drown herself. He placed a small bookshelf in the corner of the room with early readers, a pictorial dictionary, a simple atlas, and copies of National Geographic. He put a clock radio on the console and tuned it to KDFC, the classical music station. As far as he knew, she never changed the station or turned it off.

Most of the day, he sat near her at a small library table. They didn’t attempt to communicate, only sat. He read. He graded his students’ papers. He worked on the outline of a presentation he was to deliver at a conference in July. He wasn’t sure what she did. Eventually, he would find a way to have her tell him her earliest impressions. But for now, he hoped his presence was reassurance that he was taking care of her.

He prepared her meals himself. In the future, he might have to resort to frozen food, veggie burritos, Cheese Board pizza, or soup from Poulet, but the homemade fare was part of the way he welcomed her. He was a good cook, an avowed vegetarian since he read Lorca’s Poet in New York in college (“...the terrible cries of crushed cows fill the valley with sorrow where the Hudson gets drunk on oil...”). His students loved to be invited over for mushroom stroganoff and shepherd’s pie with green lentils. It was during his own lifetime that the preoccupation over food provenance had gone from fringe co-ops to mainstream. Berkeley had been in the vanguard of the food revolution. In the vanguard of many revolutions, he often said with pride.

She wouldn’t touch any of it. That he expected. His food and customs of eating were foreign. The last time he gave her something to eat, she’d slept for eighteen hours. Hoping to counter her fears, he set the table in her room for two. Two plates and bowls, two forks and spoons (no knives), linen napkins, glasses of water, cups of coffee at breakfast, iced tea at lunch, and a carafe of red wine at dinner with a single glass for himself. In the center of the table, he put a hand-painted vase with daffodils (in his humble opinion, the most cheerful flower in the world). At every meal, he demonstrated how to use the napkin and utensils. As he ate, he smiled. He made a grunt or two of pleasure. For three days, she ate nothing, but on the fourth morning, she unfolded her napkin and put it in her lap, then dipped her spoon in a bowl of hot buckwheat cereal that he’d mixed with manuka honey and roasted almonds. One spoonful, then another. After she finished, he patted her hand, conveying both approval and gratitude.

Meanwhile, he documented the details of their encounters in a database. He planned to write a book with the current working title of Pygmalion’s Paradox. But whether it was ultimately called Paradox or Plight was unclear. It was she who would determine the course of the relationship, and thus, the final title. She was the variable, he was the constant.

The long weekend was over. The days had passed without dramatic incident. She’d decided not to starve herself, which alone counted as success.

On Monday morning after breakfast, he made the sign for walking. On his fingers, he counted out the hours he’d be gone. Five or six. Then he pointed to the clock and tried to explain with the numerals when he would return. As he left, he bolted her door on the outside. It was a risk, he knew. If there were an earthquake, or fire, or landslide, she might not survive. Fire season was over, but with the recent heavy rains and flooding, and the ground hard from several years of drought, the runoff was tremendous. Two nearby streets had recently been blocked with debris. Asphalt had cracked and caved. A neighbor’s foundation had been compromised. Around town the roots of a dozen large trees had loosened, causing them to fall. There’d been one fatality when a tree crashed onto the roof of a moving car. Above Tilden Park, six families were ordered to evacuate before their houses slid down a hill. Where he lived, there were several tiers of houses above him, road after road that circled through the hills, each positioned with steep slopes into its downhill neighbor’s yard. And his house, built in 1898, was positioned at the lower end of the spiral with only brick pilings for a foundation. However, his house had survived earthquakes, fires, and landslides for over a hundred years. He trusted it would survive another day.

He put the Times into his satchel and walked down the hill, turning once to wave at the large brown-shingled house as if she could see him and wave back. From La Loma, he dropped onto Virginia Street where he paused to view the sparkling bay and dark hills of Marin. From where he stood, he saw almost nothing manmade. No sign of highways or blocks of commerce and housing, only the Golden Gate Bridge and perhaps a ship or barge. Bridge and barge were not enough to mar the view. Prelapsarian, he called it.

He entered campus through the North Gate. Rain-washed, it looked especially beautiful, everything shimmering in the cold blue air. The sylvan paths, the towering redwoods, the bare knobby limbs of the plane trees, and the Japanese magnolias dotting the grounds with their voluptuous winter blossoms. When the long, solemn chimes of the Campanile rang out like a muezzin’s call to prayer, he felt summoned to a higher purpose. The chimes, the brisk air, the pungent medley of bay laurel and wet leaves, the students on skateboards and bikes, the fresh, smiling faces, he was buoyed by their insouciance as if he’d fallen in love. He guessed it was the nearness of her.

His buoyance typically terminated at the entrance to Tolman Hall and the elevator ride to his office on the third floor. It galled him that the magnificent discipline of psychology, whose discoveries rivaled twentieth-century physics in its understanding of the universe of human behavior, was housed in one of the ugliest buildings on campus. And that mining, the most destructive of all human endeavors, should occupy the university’s most elegant building with palladium windows and a pantile roof. He took it as a personal affront, but when he remarked on this “disgrace” to the department head, his comment was deemed a joke. A good joke that passed among his colleagues so that they started to mutter disgrace under their breath whenever they passed him, and break out in laughter.

He was popular with students, his courses famous for their eccentric syllabi. The readings for this semester’s seminar, The Psychology of Slavery, included Story of O. In his generation, no other book was so eagerly devoured (except Laing’s The Politics of Experience). Now, it was a rarity to find a student who’d heard of it.

Today’s question under discussion — Are there happy slaves? — sprang from a chapter in Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom. Before Olmsted became the country’s premiere landscape architect, he was hired by the Times to chronicle the South and its peculiar institution. He wrote as a journalist, an agronomist, an abolitionist, and periodically described the plantation of a “good” master, whose slaves lived in sturdy housing with adequate food, bonuses in dollars and provisions, and free time to cultivate their own gardens and engage in crafts to earn extra money. Consequently, they worked harder, with fewer whippings, for their good master than their fellow immiserated slaves.

One student suggested that “happy slaves” was inherently racist. Another countered that slavery was colorblind until Europeans invaded Africa. A third remarked that in ancient texts, citing the Iliad and Gilgamesh, slaves were honored to serve a noble master, causing another to protest, “Those were servants, not slaves.” At one point, he suggested they unload the terminology of master-slave, and substitute it with free versus unfree. At the lowest end of “unfree” were war slaves, work slaves, prisoners, orphans, captives, even a battered wife or child. But what actually constituted free? What were its physical, mental, and ontological parameters? Or was it easier to define freedom by its restraints on the individual or collective, such as prejudices, expectations, prohibitions, impositions, desires, customs, and laws? These were questions that had absorbed him for the last two decades.

After class, the seminar usually adjourned for a few minutes and reconvened at Caffe Strada. “I’m sorry to disappoint you today,” he said, apologizing to the loyal group awaiting him. “But I have...”

“We understand,” a student said.

“A puppy,” he said.

“What kind? What’s its name?” they asked.

He was surprised by their enthusiasm.

“It’s a little mutt I’m taking care of... Aimee,” he said.

“If you need help walking Aimee or anything,” a girl offered.

Aimee was the name he’d chosen to call her. Not only was it his mother’s name, but those two long vowels (a and e) were sufficiently elementary for a dullard to pronounce, if dullard she proved to be. However, he was certain from the first and only time she’d looked him in the eye that he had read her correctly. And in making his final selection, it was not her lovely face, or sheen of her skin, or strength of her well-formed limbs, or straight white teeth, but the spark of a deep intelligence. What she had called herself and what she was called by family and friends — her name would be the last thing expunged. After months or perhaps years, the person of Aimee would override her past.

When he went to her mother to negotiate, by way of introduction, he’d announced to the family that he was a tenured professor at a university in California with a doctoral degree in psychology. He also mentioned he was an accomplished pianist and fluent in German and French. And although he had prepared an explanation of his intentions, no one was interested. He guessed they normally met hustlers and pimps and would assume he was a liar.

They were liars, too. He’d been told she was eighteen, but he estimated fifteen or sixteen; she was malleable and frightened, the youngest girl of eleven children.

“You making baby?” the mother asked, giving him a wink. Prostitution and fertility were the reason that men came.

Her question horrified him, as if he were a common trafficker. “No, thank you,” he said, baffling whoever heard him.

The lush mountains, the simple communal life, the tearful farewells, the exchange of money nearly changed his mind. But he rationalized. Throughout his life, for whatever he wanted, he’d been taught (albeit, expected) to rationalize.

Zipping his jacket, adjusting his blue-and-gold Bears beanie, and winding his muffler around his neck, he now walked out of the campus across Hearst Avenue alongside a mob of students en route to La Val’s for pizza and beer. He recalled the defunct art cinema behind La Val’s where he’d seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism thirty-plus years ago. At the time, he’d been interested in Reich and thought he might build an orgone box in his backyard. Another unrealized scheme.

“Dreamer,” his mother used to say instead of loser.

He continued to climb Eunice to Virginia, and struggling uphill, he reached the corner of La Loma and the small concrete staircase built as a parapet, its sharp right angle offering a corner where he could stand. Every afternoon, he stopped there to catch his breath and watch the western light on the water. He was always tired and less hopeful than in the morning.

“Aimee,” he cried softly, and hurried home.

Dear Fellow Graduates by Michael David Lukas

Indian Rock

First of all, I think it’s only appropriate for me to extend a hearty congratulations to my fellow graduates (and to all you proud family members)! I’ve been there with you these past four years and I understand how you all must feel, sitting up there on that stage.

But as much as I would love to recount all the ups and downs of the past four years, as much as I would enjoy reminiscing about Spirit Weeks past and shedding a tear over the last days of our youth, a higher duty calls me to task. What I present before you, in this, my last column as editor of the Berkeley High Jacket, is a tale that needs to be told, burns to be told, even if some people out there (Mrs. Eliason!) won’t be happy I’m telling it.

By now, some of you (especially all you proud family members) might be wondering: Who the heck is this guy? What is he talking about? I thought this was the graduation edition of the Berkeley High Jacket.

I can assure you that this is indeed the graduation edition of the Berkeley High Jacket. In the rest of these pages you will find the traditional fare for such an issuance. On pages 6–9, you can see where your dear child and their friends are going to college (as if you didn’t already know!). On pages 12–15, you can read a variety of melancholy farewells to our fair school. And so on and so forth.

If you would rather not read this story, you are obviously free to turn the page. But I can assure you that you will be glad to have read it.

The events in question began late one Wednesday night a few months ago (actually, technically, it was early Thursday morning). As the editor of this fair paper, it was my responsibility to drive the finished proofs down to our printer in Fremont once every other week. It’s a long drive, and on my way home, I would often stop at a little park near my dad’s house.

You may be familiar with Indian Rock, around the corner. You may also know Grotto Rock, a few blocks up the hill. Chances are, though, you’ve never heard of Mortar Rock, which is why I like it. There’s almost never anyone there.

On the night in question, I was coming home particularly late. The moon was high and white and the streets were empty. I parked across the street from the rock and climbed to the top, which is when I noticed the two men in a beat-up white Volvo.

There are any number of reasons why two men might be sitting in a beat-up white Volvo across the street from a park at two thirty in the morning. But these two seemed a little shady. They were both uncommonly large, with Nordic features and a slightly dented appearance that seemed out of place in the neighborhood. Was I stereotyping? Yes, my fellow graduates, I was. And, like any good Berkeley High student, I felt bad for succumbing to my biases. But as we will see, my biases, in this case at least, were spot on.

After sitting quietly on top of the rock for five or ten minutes (not smoking a joint or anything like that), I realized that there was someone else in the park with me: a tall, gangly man bent over a trash can. It took me a moment to process that this man, digging frantically through the trash in a public park at two thirty in the morning, was none other than my English teacher, Mr. Balz.

As most of my fellow graduates know, Mr. Balz is not your typical teacher. He can recite Beowulf by heart in Old English. He often delivers Shakespearean monologues from atop his desk. And once he dedicated an entire period of my Bible As Literature class to the poetry of Liz Phair. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Mr. Balz. (My own personal feeling is that he’s kind of a poser.) But I also don’t have any particular ill will toward him. And I’ve always thought that the jokes about his name are a little cheap.

So there we were. Me and Mr. Balz, staring at each other across Mortar Rock.

“Michael Lukas,” he said in the same voice he used to call my name off the roll sheet. “AP British Literature.”

There was a short silence, then a car door slammed and Mr. Balz took off running.

Those Scandinavians were big but they were fast. Half a block down the hill, the dark-haired one caught up with Mr. Balz and grabbed his shirt while the blond one tackled him to the ground. There were some grunts and a crunching sound as bone hit asphalt. Before Mr. Balz could shout for help, the Scandinavians duct-taped his mouth, bound his wrists, and carried him to the trunk of the Volvo. You could have been sleeping in your bed a few dozen yards away (perhaps some of you were) and not heard a thing.

If I were a less reliable narrator, I would tell you that I leaped into action right then and there. I would say that I put my dislike for Mr. Balz aside, hopped in my dad’s Subaru, and sped after the Scandinavians on a wild chase through Tilden Park. But the truth is, after watching all this transpire, after seeing my AP British Literature teacher tackled, stuffed into a trunk, and driven to who knows where, I did nothing.

I drove home and spent the rest of the night with my covers pulled up over my head, praying the Scandinavians hadn’t seen me or heard my name. Sometime in the dark hours of the morning, I decided that the most prudent course of action was no action at all. I would keep this whole thing to myself, wipe what I had seen from my mind, then finish up the school year and head off to college.

But, as Mr. Balz often said, the truth will out. That next morning, when I saw Sarah Meyers at the bus stop, I couldn’t help but tell her.

“Wait, what?”

“They put him in the trunk and drove away.”

Sarah stared at me, squinting, like she wasn’t sure I was even real. “What?”

Most of my fellow graduates probably know Sarah Meyers. For those who don’t, I would describe her thusly: She has bright red hair. She does not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. And she always keeps a box of Froot Loops in her backpack. She’s two parts Joan Didion, one part Simone de Beauvior, and one part Courtney Love. Some people say she took the SATs on acid, which may or may not be true. What I know for sure is that she aced them, and that she’s going to Columbia next fall on a full scholarship.

“Did you call the police?”

“I—”

“Did you tell your parents? Did you tell anyone?”

“I told you.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Clearly.”

She swung her backpack around and dug into the Fruit Loops. “Okay,” she said midchew, “here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to go over to his house and check things out.”

“Now?” I had a calculus test second period, we both did. More importantly, I didn’t want to run into those Scandinavians again.

“Yeah, now,” she said, already walking down the hill. “OR, do you not consider this an urgent situation?”

Mr. Balz’s house was on one of those tiny streets off Indian Rock Road, a three-story brown shingle with a front yard so overgrown you could barely see the house itself. The bottom-floor windows were all covered with sun-faded tapestries and the mailbox was stuffed full of junk.

“It was his grandparents’ house,” Sarah said, standing in the driveway. “I think his grandpa was a judge or some kind of politician?”

“Very interesting,” I said. “Now, how are we going to get in?”

Sarah gave a little smile and hoisted herself up over the fence. “I just might know where he keeps the hide-a-key.”

Most of my fellow graduates will probably have heard some of the rumors about Sarah and Mr. Balz. You might have heard that they went camping together last summer, took mushrooms, and stayed up late into the night reading passages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You might have heard Cindy Lee say she saw Sarah coming out of Mr. Balz’s house. I don’t know if any of these rumors are true. They probably aren’t. What I do know is that their relationship goes beyond what most people would think is appropriate. Sarah once told me she considered Mr. Balz “more of a friend than a teacher” and I know that he wrote her a recommendation letter that used the phrase beautiful mind at least three times.

“Is this how his house usually looks?” I asked once we were both inside.

There was mail scattered around the entryway. Half-filled mugs lined the stairs. And a huge oak dining table blocked the way to the kitchen.

Sarah turned and looked me dead in the eye. “How much of a slut do you think I am?”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I mean, you’ve been here before, right? You knew where the hide-a-key was.”

“I’ve been here twice. Once for a study group, and once to feed his cats when he was out of town. And yes, it does usually look like this.”

I followed Sarah up to the third floor and into a bedroom that seemed to be inhabited almost entirely by cats. There were litter boxes everywhere, little felt mice, and nests of old fabric. Two black cats stalked the edges of the room while an orange one stared down at me from the top of an eight-foot-high scratching post. I turned to say something to Sarah, but she was already crouched down in front of a small safe at the back of the closet.

“You’re going to try to guess the combination?”

She looked back over her shoulder, still spinning the knob. “I’m guessing it’s the same as it was when I was house-sitting,” she said. As she fiddled with the knobs, one of the black cats doubled back and rubbed its flank against her knee. “Two, two, seventy-four.” The safe popped open and she smiled to herself. “But at the length truth will out.” When I didn’t catch her reference, she explained: “Mr. Balz’s favorite line in all of Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Act two, scene two, line seventy-four.” She took out a sheaf of papers and leafed through them. After a few moments, she held up a manila folder. “Bingo.”

In the top right-hand corner was one word, written in Mr. Balz’s distinctive block letters: Evidence.

At this point we probably should have gone straight to the police. At the very least, we should have been more careful with the evidence. Instead, Sarah and I sat down in the middle of the floor and began going through the folder, piece by piece.

“This is what he was talking about,” she said under her breath. “He was always saying how shady Mrs. Eliason is.”

She laid out two pieces of paper (schoolwide test results, both reproduced here for your benefit) and was beginning to explain what they meant, how they might have been manipulated, and so on, when there was a crash downstairs.

“One of the cats?”

Sarah shook her head. “Come on.” She motioned for me to follow her upstairs to the attic, a dusty open room filled with banker’s boxes and old surfing equipment. Downstairs, there were the muffled sounds of conversation, then another crash.

“Did you take the files?”

I looked down at my hands. “I have these,” I said, still holding the two pieces of paper we’d been looking at.

“Great,” she said, jiggling one of the windows at the other side of the room.

“I thought you had it.”

“Nope.”

When the window wouldn’t open, Sarah wrapped an old wetsuit around her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Come on,” she said as she punched through the window and stepped out onto the roof. “Don’t be such a baby.”

For those of you who have never been on top of a roof, I will tell you this: two stories is a heck of a lot higher than you think. From where we were standing, Mr. Balz’s backyard looked like it was about fifty feet down. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. It probably is. In any case, it was not a jumpable distance, not by any stretch of the imagination. But don’t tell that to Sarah Meyers.

I can’t say exactly what happened next except that one moment she was peering through the sunlight in the middle of the roof. The next she was jumping into an overgrown hedge. There was a crash and a long silence. Then she crawled out from under the hedge. Her face was pretty scratched up and there was a massive gash on her hand. Still, she was smiling.

“It’s not as far as you think,” she called up.

“I don’t know. It looks pretty far.”

Just then, the attic door shook. There was a quick shout, a grunt, and the doorframe splintered. Another few seconds and there would be no more door.

My fellow graduates, I would like to tell you that I reacted to this situation with cool detachment. But the truth is, I fell. In the grips of fear and indecision, I lost my footing and slid to the edge of the roof, whereupon I somehow caught my arm on the gutter and dropped the fifty or twenty or fifteen feet to the ground.

I blinked. I was still alive, but my leg was on fire. No, it was fire. Molten pain.

“I think I broke my leg,” I said as Sarah helped me up.

“If you broke your leg you wouldn’t be able to walk,” she replied. “And anyways, we’re not walking anywhere. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

She dumped me into the backseat of Mr. Balz’s old Audi, and seven harrowing minutes later we arrived, mostly intact, at our destination: the Berkeley Police Department parking lot.

The woman at the front desk seemed to recognize Sarah. “Detective James?” she asked, and without waiting for Sarah to respond, she buzzed us back.

“Detective James helped me out when I was getting that restraining order against Tom Kantor,” Sarah explained.

“Oh,” I said, not sure how else to respond. I hadn’t heard about any restraining order. I just thought they had a bad breakup.

“He’s a sweetie,” Sarah said. “Not Tom — he’s a dick — the detective. A little rough around the edges, but very avuncular.”

When we walked into his office, the very avuncular Detective James was having a little nap, leaning back in his chair, his chin tucked into the soft pillow of his chest.

“What?” he barked awake, softening when he saw Sarah. “Meyers. That little pervert still bothering you?”

“No sir,” Sarah said. She was sitting up straight. Her eyes were open in a kind of vulnerable and hopeful tilt. “It’s something else, something about our English teacher.”

“Okay.”

She turned to me.

“So,” I started, “I guess it was, sir, I suppose it all began—”

“Son,” Detective James interrupted me, “take a deep breath. This isn’t story time. And you aren’t being interrogated. Just tell me what happened. Plain-like. Start to finish.”

“All right.” I took a deep breath. Then I told him everything: the Scandinavians at Mortar Rock, Mr. Balz’s house, the documents.

“And you gained entry to the house with a key?”

“Yes sir,” Sarah said.

“The location of which Mr. Balz informed you of previously?”

“Yes sir.”

“And the safe?”

“It was open,” Sarah lied without blinking an eye.

“The safe was open?”

“Yes sir.”

Detective James leaned back in his chair and held the documents in question up to the light. He thought for a few rattling breaths, then wrote a couple things on a yellow legal pad.

While he was writing, Sarah glanced down at her phone. Something she saw made her jaw loosen slightly. She drummed her fingers on the desk, as if trying to make out a difficult equation, then slipped the phone back in her bag.

“Here’s my number,” Detective James told me. He pointed to a yellowed stack of business cards on the corner of his desk and I took one. “Call me if you see those Scandinavians again.”

Sarah stood up and swung her bag around her shoulder.

“Wait,” I said, “don’t you need us to, I don’t know, help out?”

“Help out?” Detective James chortled a little. “No, son. We’ll take it from here.”

“But how—”

“Like I said, we’ll take it from here. The case is in good hands.”

“So that’s it?” I asked, standing in the parking lot with Sarah.

She didn’t say anything for a few moments. When we got to the sidewalk, she took out her phone and scrolled to the text she had gotten while we were in Detective James’s office.

Safeway. Tice Valley Road. WC. We have Balz. No Police.

“Who’s that from?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know where that Safeway is. My grandma used to live in the old folks’ home across the street.”

Back in the car, Sarah opened the glove compartment, found a Dead Kennedys tape, and popped it into the stereo. I wanted to ask what the plan was, whether we should call for some help, like maybe the police. I wanted to tell her to slow down, or at least to signal when she was changing lanes. But the music was too loud to think. All I could do was hold onto the armrest, watch the green hills of Orinda flash past, and let the lyrics drill into my skull.

“So what’s the plan?” Sarah asked as we pulled into the parking lot.

“Ride the wave,” I said, a lame attempt at sarcasm.

“Yes,” she said, patting my knee. “Now you’re getting it.”

She put the car in park and scanned the lot. “Over there.” She pointed at a woman standing next to a pile of watermelons by the front entrance. Then she jumped out of the car and walked straight toward her, paying no regard to cars or shopping carts.

“Mrs. Eliason!” she called out.

And there she was, my old biology teacher, the new principal of our school. Mrs. Eliason was just about the last person I was expecting to see in that parking lot. But neither she nor Sarah seemed very surprised.

“So nice to see you here,” Mrs. Eliason said, scanning the parking lot behind us. “You kids wouldn’t mind helping me with these bags, would you?” She pointed to the shopping cart next to her.

“Sure,” I said.

We each took a bag and followed her to her car.

“I hear you two have had quite the morning.”

Before we could respond, Mrs. Eliason opened up her new BMW. Sitting in the passenger seat was none other than Mr. Balz.

“Hey, guys,” he said with a weak little wave.

He seemed good, as good as anyone could be after being thrown in the trunk of a car and whatever else he had endured.

“If you don’t mind,” Mrs. Eliason said, motioning to the backseat, “I think we’ve had a little misunderstanding.”

I glanced at Sarah and she looked at Mr. Balz, who nodded.

“All right,” Sarah said, “this ought to be good.”

While Mrs. Eliason loaded her groceries into the trunk, Sarah pressed a few buttons on her phone. I thought she might be calling the police. In fact, she was turning on her phone’s voice recorder.

You can find a transcript of the whole conversation on page 4. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ll give you the overview.

It was all a big misunderstanding, Mrs. Eliason told us. What I had seen the night before was just a prank, a little thing that teachers do for fun. And the guys at Mr. Balz’s house, they were just trying to find his toothbrush. Mr. Balz nodded, but you could tell that he was just trying to make Mrs. Eliason happy. When we asked about the documents in Mr. Balz’s safe, Mrs. Eliason’s tone changed. She told us that no one would believe us, that she knew Detective James personally and that it would be easy to convince him that nothing untoward had happened, except for our false accusations and the documents we had faked. And, of course, something like that would most certainly reflect poorly on our academic standing, which would obviously put our college admissions in jeopardy.

She could ruin our futures with a few keystrokes. Or, she said, we could call Detective James right now and make it all go away.

“You have a choice,” she said. “Either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.”

Well, Mrs. Eliason, we’ve made our choice.

My fellow graduates, esteemed family members, after reading this article I hope you will be somewhat closer to the truth and can decide for yourself what you think.

Thank you for your time and congratulations again. This is your day. Enjoy it!

Frederick Douglass Elementary by Aya de León

West Berkeley Flats

Keisha waited until everyone else left the office. It was Friday night and nobody seemed to be working late. Still, she shoved her sweatshirt up against the bottom of the door, in case any light could be seen. Only then did she turn on the fluorescent light in the windowless copy room.

A few weeks before, she had swiped a contract on letterhead from a real estate agency. Earlier that day, she had borrowed a coworker’s computer to write the fake lease for a rental apartment. She had copied the language off the Internet, but was anxious about any spelling or grammatical errors. Especially because she couldn’t save a forged document on a company computer. She had sat at her data-entry cubicle during lunch, reading the words over and over until they blurred, proofreading it to the best of her ability.

That night in the copy room, she cut and pasted and made copies of copies, until she had a reasonable-looking forgery on fine linen paper. She squinted at it in the glaring fluorescent. It looked legit. It “proved” that she rented a two-bedroom apartment in Berkeley.

Keisha and her seven-year-old son Marchand lived in Holloway, a few towns north of Berkeley, just past Richmond at the end of the BART line. Holloway’s student population was nearly all black and Latino, but the teachers were predominantly white. All of the schools were performing far below the national average, and the district was on the verge of bankruptcy. Her son had been bullied by bigger boys, and one of the teachers had been fired for hitting a student. Apparently, the administration had tolerated it for years, but one of the staff had caught it on video, and it had gone viral on social media.

That was the last straw. Keisha wasn’t going to allow her son to be in a school where white teachers were physically abusive. But she couldn’t afford private school. Even a partial scholarship was out of the question. Bay Area rents were exorbitant.

When she first got pregnant with Marchand, she and her boyfriend had a great one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in Richmond. She was working at the law office doing data entry. Her boyfriend was working as a security guard at the mall. They had enough income to save for the baby. But one night, her boyfriend got stopped by the cops for no apparent reason. Ultimately, he was hauled off for resisting arrest and battery on an officer. The dashboard cams, however, had been turned off. They beat him badly enough that he was in the hospital for a week. Then he was locked up.

Keisha gave up the apartment and moved in with her mom in Holloway. She was numb with grief for the first couple weeks, then she cried for another month.

“Girl,” her mother had told her two weeks before her due date, “you need to stop all that crying and get ready to have this baby.”

Her ex-boyfriend’s mom called after the video went viral of the teacher hitting the student. “One of my friends from church called me,” said the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. “She asked me, Isn’t that your grandson’s school in Holloway?”

The two of them talked, and Marchand’s grandmother offered Keisha the use of her address to get Marchand into the Berkeley public schools. They had much better test scores, and Berkeley was the first district in the US to voluntarily desegregate in the 1960s. They wouldn’t have crazy racist white teachers hitting the kids.

The mother-in-law put Keisha’s name on her energy bill to document her residency, and Keisha breathed a sigh of relief.

But when she went in to the district office to figure out how to register her son for school, there was much more documentation required.

Only personal accounts will be accepted (No care of, DBA, or business accounts).

Keisha was bewildered by the list. She wouldn’t even be able to document her actual address in Holloway, let alone her baby daddy’s mother’s address in Berkeley.

As she stood there in the empty entryway for the Berkeley Unified School District, a mother and daughter walked in, a matching pair of strawberry blondes. The mother was talking on the phone, pulling the girl behind her. “...Which is exactly what I told him,” the woman was saying. “The rest of the PTA needs to get involved, because this is absolutely unacceptable. Hold on—” The woman stopped in her tracks and the girl, who was looking off into space, nearly collided with her. The woman turned to Keisha. “Where’s the Excellence Program office?” she demanded.

Keisha blinked, confused. “I don’t work here,” she said.

The woman stared at her for a moment, taking in Keisha’s multicolored extensions, tight jeans, and low-cut top. Then she turned away without a word, and put the phone back to her ear. “Where did you say the office was?” she asked whoever was on the other end, and headed down the corridor, dragging the girl behind her.

The strawberry-blond woman was the only parent Keisha saw that day. Obviously, this white lady wasn’t going to let her daughter get smacked by a teacher. Or go to an underperforming school. Keisha was determined to beat the list.

At work, she cancelled her direct deposit, and started having her paychecks sent to her mother-in-law’s house. It was incredibly inconvenient to have to take public transportation across three cities twice a month to get her check two days later than usual. Yet she and Marchand managed it, and his grandmother was delighted to see more of him.

But the rental agreement? That had proven to be the most difficult to fake.

“Number seventy-two?” The full-figured woman behind the counter at the Berkeley Unified School District office had large brown eyes, a neat bob hairstyle, and a weary smile.

Keisha stepped forward with her paperwork. After the look the strawberry-blond mom had given her last time, she’d had her braids done without colors and dressed in her interview suit. She wanted to look like she worked in San Francisco’s financial district or Silicon Valley. Like someone who could afford a two-bedroom apartment.

But now it was registration. The district office was full of Berkeley parents wearing jeans and T-shirts, cotton separates, and ethnic fabrics. Keisha felt overdressed. Still, she filled out the various forms to enroll Marchand in second grade.

When the woman called Keisha up to the counter, she pulled out her paperwork with what she hoped looked like confidence. Marchand’s birth certificate, her driver’s license, and each of the required documents from the list. Two were real, but the third one was the forgery.

The woman inspected each of them carefully. Keisha’s heart beat hard as the administrator’s sharp eyes got to the rental contract. As the seconds ticked by, Keisha grew increasingly certain the woman would call her a fake, or worse yet, call the police. Could she be arrested for this? But just as she began to brace for the worst, the woman smiled and said she would make copies for the file.

Keisha smiled back, relief washing over her.

The woman brought back the originals, stamped her copy of the registration form, and stapled it to a packet of papers. They were in.

Two months later, she got a letter at Marchand’s grandma’s house that the boy had been assigned to Frederick Douglass Elementary.

The first day of school dawned overcast and chilly, like so many Bay Area August mornings. Keisha and Marchand rode a BART train and a bus to Frederick Douglass. It took longer than expected, and they arrived twenty minutes after the start of school. Keisha found Marchand’s name on a list and hurried him down the hall to room 126.

The hallway was wide and bright, with daylight streaming in through the windows. At their old school in Holloway, there were always late families rushing in, parents hissing at their kids about what they should have done to be on time. But this school’s corridors were quiet and orderly. Keisha vowed to catch a much earlier train. She would get Marchand to school on time from now on.

The numbers of the classrooms were getting higher. Room 118. Room 120. Along the hallway wall hung a big banner that read, Every Month Is Black History Month, between pictures of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks.

When they got to Room 126, there was a poster of Frederick Douglass on the door.

Marchand tugged on Keisha’s hand. “Mommy,” he asked, “do they sometimes hit the kids here too?”

“Oh no, baby.” She kneeled so she could get down to his level, and put one hand under his chin. “Nobody gets hit here,” she said, glancing up at Frederick Douglass. It was the classic unsmiling portrait in a bow tie, with his salt-and-pepper hair combed back and a dark goatee. “That’s why Mommy worked so hard to get you into a good school. Now come on, sugar, we got to get you into your class.”

She opened the door with an apology in her mouth — full of late BART train and I promise to do better — but she was startled into silence. Twenty-three faces turned to her, expectantly. All of them were white.

Keisha felt disoriented. This was the first school district in the nation to voluntarily desegregate? This was a school named after the great black abolitionist?

Keisha looked closer. No. Not all white. That girl by the window with the blue hair was Asian. That boy on the far end might be Latino. And that girl looking up at her, with the sandy hair and the missing tooth, was definitely mixed with black. But every single kid in the class would pass the paper-bag test.

“You must be Marchand,” the teacher said warmly to her son. She was a slender young woman with a messy blond bun on her head. Miss Keller.

Keisha watched her son walk shyly forward into the class.

“Give Mommy a hug goodbye?” Miss Keller prompted.

Numbly, Keisha hugged her son and stepped out into the hallway, wondering what she had forged her way into.

Righteous Kill by Owen Hill

Gilman District

The Gilman District, newly named by realtors, was mostly industrial a few years ago. You’d go there for Urban Ore if you needed a broke-down couch to replace your more-broke-down couch. There was a body shop and a good Mexican restaurant, perhaps too good because it brought in too many urban pioneers on the hunt for good manchamanteles. From famous red mole to the Gilman District. There goes the neighborhood.

I had been coming to West Berkeley since the aughts, yes, for the mole, but also for the books. SPD for the poetry, and Jeff Maser’s place for used, rare modern firsts, just to browse and occasionally to sell something. I do a little book scouting, although not full time like in the old days. It just doesn’t pay, and I get a little freelance work as, believe it, an unlicensed detective, something I sort of backed into that now pays the bill at Berkeley Bowl and for the rent-controlled studio southside.

I finished my enchiladas and the imported Coke, then went by SPD to get Marvin some Kevin Killian and for Dino The Collages of Helen Adam, because he wouldn’t have heard of her but he would appreciate the way beauty recognizes itself, and he would love the captions, “remember how I warned you when you’re praying too late.” I don’t usually show up bearing gifts but Marvin had said, “It’s kind of a party,” and I knew Dino would be there, Dino Centro. O Dino Centro.

Walked a little farther, down to 10th Street where Marvin had bought that house, cheap, when nobody really lived down there. The neighborhood wasn’t especially dangerous, but dark, away from stuff, desolate as a staircase. Barely six figures at the time Marvin bought the house, just back from Central America. The money came from “somewhere” but “wasn’t much.” Marvin, the most Marxist of my Marxist friends, moving within and without radical subsets, dropping hints like, “I was in Athens and this crazy guy I know planted a bomb in a police station. I almost didn’t get through customs!” Marvin, homeowner. Lovable guy. Best friend.

I knocked, door open, walked in the house that smelled a little like a cat box. Furniture that recalled places where you lived in your college years. It was a nice house nonetheless, forties vintage, what they call Arts and Crafts though I think that’s a wider definition now than it was. Urban Ore and Ikea furnished, nice walls though, because for some reason Marvin liked to paint. This time the walls were very light with a bluish tint. I once asked Marvin what color it was and he answered, inexplicably, vanilla hots.

The “party” was mostly on the couch, blue Naugahyde, or, in the case of Dino, on the floor up against a matching ottoman. They were in black, awash in blue walls and furniture, except Dino, as usual, in seersucker. It was always seersucker or white linen, any season, with a gray sweater under the jacket in cold weather. It wasn’t cold so it was a blue oxford button down. Just Dino, Marvin, and Patti O’Hara. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years.

My first impression, after that couple of years, was that she had been working out. Muscles bulging from a black wifebeater. “Still boxing, Patti?” and she went into her stance because she did, in fact, do some boxing. So, my best friend and the two people in the world I would most like to sleep with. Okay, a party, I guess.

Marvin hadn’t yet read the Killian and so was suitably impressed. Dino: “I am astounded, dear Clay,” and then a wet kiss. Life is good sometimes.

Dino went into the kitchen and came out with a shaker. Negronis, my favorite drink, not really Marvin’s though. He favors bourbon-based cocktails. I wondered about the occasion. Was I the guest of honor? Decided to let that one go. Why argue with Boodles and Campari, and why interrupt Dino Centro midshake?

Cheese Board snacks and smart talk. Conversation turned to the high cost of living, everybody leaving Berkeley. Where do we go? Bay Area out, East Coast also too expensive, flyover states opioid and Trump-soaked. Emigrate? Marvin suggested Montevideo but not yet. Too many friends still here, and there were “battles to be won and lost.”

This from Marvin, soldier for the revolution even when there isn’t one.

And then, third drinks in hand, talk about the neighborhood, those cheap-rent war stories. You could get a whole house for a few hundred! I paid a hundred bucks, down the street, for a walk-in closet in a house full of commies! True civilization starts with cheap rent and ends with gentrification. I wasn’t aware that the CEO of TalkLike had moved into the neighborhood. This set off a negroni-infused discussion of “the pig down the street” at high volume.

“You have to see this place! From warehouse to palace! An oppressor work space in Berkeley. Fuck Berkeley.” From Patti O’Hara, leaning a little too close to my ear.

Marvin suggested that we all “go for a stumble” and have a look at the CEo’s “bunker.” We helped each other off the couch, Dino’s scent mingling with Patti’s in the warm late afternoon. We walked past SPD and in a sort of circular way toward Gilman. The gourmet burgers, the free-trade coffee, the vegan joint, the Whole Foods. Chunky guys with beards, buried in their devices.

It was looming, almost as big as the Whole Foods down the street. Truly bunker-like although too tall, maybe three stories. Military-style brushed chrome, brick facade, blackout windows. There was still a loading-dock entrance in keeping with the industrial chic. A place to house the Tesla, perhaps. Workers used to sweat in places like this. Now they’re luxury homes. Where are the sweaty workers? I wondered what it was like inside, curious, but also a little queasy, that way the hoi polloi view the aristocracy. And the poor love it / and think it’s crazy. We looked up at the thing like apes before a monolith, then walked silently back to Marvin’s place.

Plopped on the couch between Dino and Patti, the mingling scents a little stronger, feeling sleepy but a little excited. Marvin in the kitchen making coffee, humming, then, “Well, we could blow it up,” followed by, “You can’t blow up all of capitalism,” from Dino, who has a smidgen of the capitalist left in him.

Dino almost asleep on my shoulder, oxford shirt unbuttoned, Patti lying head in my lap, legs over the couch arm. Dino, “A little graffiti wouldn’t hurt,” then Marvin, booming from the other room, “A bullet in the head would send a better message,” and Patti, “Well, we all have guns.”

Coffee, kisses goodbye, and I returned southside, back to the Chandler Apartments, at the corner of Telegraph and Dwight. Fed the cats, worked at some poetry. A perfect Sunday.

Following Wednesday, I was out buying books and the phone buzzed. Dinner at Marvin’s. Got into the old Honda Civic and headed out to the Gilman District. Happy to find that it was the same group. Marvin cooking pasta. Eggs on the counter so I guessed carbonara. He was pouring an Italian white, kind of thin but in a good way. We started downing it like water. There was some music on and Dino and Patti were dancing. A nice group. Pasta and lots of jokes. Some pot with a silly name, something like Purple Urkel, but maybe I have it wrong. We were on the couch again, sides touching sides, and I was thinking about the different ways you can melt into somebody’s flesh, how the luckiest accident of birth is to be bisexual.

My brain came up for air. Marvin back in the kitchen making coffee. Said something about a neighborhood association, but not an official group. They would like us to talk to the CEO, a sort of delegation. I spaced out again since I don’t live in the neighborhood. My corner of Southside is still scruffy. Gentrification is months away. When I zeroed back in, they were talking about fleets of luxury cars and drones flown from the roof. The kind of thing you’d expect from techie CEO types. I was beginning to get bored, but then they asked me to go along because he had a bodyguard and an extra presence could help. I used to box Golden Gloves and I stay in shape, and occasionally I need to defend myself when doing my “detective” work, but I don’t look like a bouncer either.

I was feeling a little floaty and thinking that the walk would do me good. The Gilman District isn’t pretty. I guess somehow that’s part of its charm, or always was, but now it’s different. Couples making midsix figures or more sucking up the urban experience, then spitting it out cleaned up and with a get-off-my-lawn mentality. Live-work castles full of toys, set among the junkyards and bad roads.

For some reason we were walking close together, lots of touching. At some point I turned into Dino, kissed him, and all at once everybody giggled. I felt something hard in his pants — not the thing I was looking for, though. A handgun. Old joke. Dino lives, um, outside the law, so no surprise, but I was hoping for something sweeter.

And again to this palace that rose gleaming from the squalor yet was somehow uglier than the street where it lived. Patti stepped back and faced a security camera, announced us. Gilman District neighborhood watch. The warehouse-style door opened slowly, old-fashioned pulley, and it seemed that someone had called central casting and found a goon. Square jaw, shaved head, you know...

Patti sucker punched him, then kicked him going down. Great pair of boots! I wondered where she found them. The action seemed very stylized, or does now in retrospect, like a scene in a Melville policier. Her short hair shook just right and I zeroed in on the back of her neck. I wanted to fuck her.

They seemed to know the way upstairs. Recognizance? Looking back, I’m surprised that I went along. I’ve been through cases and capers with these people, but I didn’t even know the circumstances. I knew he owned TalkLike. Tried to remember his name. Something vaguely Swedish.

No need to describe the enemy. “You’re either at war or you’re not,” Marvin told me later. The guy had no idea. They played with him for a while, doing up the neighborhood association drag. We’d like you to turn down the security lights, we’d like to see you at the meetings. He smiled and clichéd for a while, then was “tired” and would like us to go.

I turned to go, then looked back and Patti was Ingemar Johansson, Hammer of Thor. She had donned a single black leather glove, left hand. Solar plexus, then again a kick to the CEo’s head. Dino pulled out the handgun. Three shots. Who would hear shots in a bunker? And then, who hadn’t heard shots in this neighborhood?

I felt some panic. I had touched the desk, possibly something else. Thought about DNA and started to sweat.

“Shall we go?” This from Marvin, and so we did, but not before Dino hit the bodyguard with a couple to the head. Did it kill him? Wouldn’t it have to?

We go, but not fast. Just walking. I shoot Marvin a puzzled expression.

“Don’t look so worried. A fixer will be along soon to clean up our mess, and, yes, they’ll break the cameras. It’s all set.” And then, walking ahead a little, “We piss on them from a higher place.”

It isn’t easy to get to Marvin’s roof, not simple like mine. You have to crawl out a window and lift yourself on a makeshift ladder, and after all that, the view isn’t much, just a bunch of buildings, the view of the bay blocked long ago by upscale rental properties. We did it anyway. It was a warm night, rare for Berkeley, and we needed a little air. We didn’t talk about what happened, we just sat there close until it got cooler, then went downstairs and showered. When there’s shooting and fighting, you need to wash it off. Marvin disappeared into the kitchen and I bathed with Patti and Dino. This was our after-party, skin and soap.

Came home late, fed the cat, looked out my window at the traffic triangle where Telegraph meets Dwight then runs south into Oakland. The usual scene, homeless guy playing conversational solitaire, a couple of sleeping dogs, a couple of lumps under ratty sleeping bags. I reflected a little on the day’s “work,” if that was what it was. Revolutionary fervor would have carried Patti and Melvin, but Dino must have been paid. My motivation was a mystery even to me. Sometimes you just go on your nerve.

I didn’t have occasion to see Marvin for a couple of weeks. When I did it was to do a book buy in Concord, art books and a few decent novels. After we did the deal, we stopped at a nondescript brewpub. “Okay, Marvin, what was up with the home invasion.”

A shrug, then, “It’s a small step away from your other adventures but we wanted to take you there. It isn’t your first righteous kill and it won’t be your last. You wanted it, based on the guy’s style and his toys. You got the gestalt and went along. If we weren’t old pals I’d say this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We will piss on them from a higher place.”

We finished our burgers and beer, got in his van, and headed back to the Gilman District.