by Mark Okrant

Prequel to the Kary Turnell Mystery series

Kary 101So you’re a reporter for the Globe. I’m flattered that one of the country’s leading newspapers wants to do this article. The way you’re looking at me, I sense you’re surprised by my appearance. A number of people say I look like the actor in that new movie everyone’s talking about . . . whatever his name is. Unless we’ve met at the university or at a golf course in the area, I don’t go out in public very much. When I’m not teaching classes or trying to revive my golf game, I covet my privacy. Most of the time, I’m sitting at home tearing my hair out. As you already know, I wrote a best seller several years ago, but haven’t been able to duplicate my success. I presume that’s why you’re here. What you probably don’t know is that I have a driving ambition to spend my time solving what the police term “unlawful premeditated killings of human beings,” or what your readers would call murders. I have to be one of the last guys you’d expect to have an interest in this. As you can see, I’m not a terribly imposing physical specimen. My eyeglasses are as thick as Coke bottles. I’ve never been in the military, and I absolutely hate guns. Furthermore, my experience at mixing with a tough crowd is limited to announcing a midterm examination to a classroom full of undergraduate students. I don’t mean to undersell myself, but self-deprecation has become a forte of mine in recent years. Don’t be fooled . . . I have a great deal of faith in my proficiencies. If you’re wondering how I might possibly contribute to a murder investigation, I advise you to heed my late mother’s advice: don’t judge a book by its cover. I presume you haven’t driven all the way up here to listen to me daydream. You’re more interested in how a one time New York Times bestselling author fell from grace, and what the future holds. This subject is painful to me. I’ve carefully avoided the public for a long time, but it’s time to let the world know what’s been going on with my life. Hopefully, doing this interview will prove therapeutic for me. Before we discuss the present, you’ll need a little history lesson. I was born and brought up in Philadelphia, the youngest of five children to two terrific parents, Henry and Lois Turnell. My father was a beat cop who rose quickly through the ranks and became a detective within five years. My mother was a housewife, which was the norm in those days. My two sisters, Mary and Pam, were the first in our family to attend college, and both are finishing long careers as elementary school teachers. My brothers, Hal and Steve, opened a hardware store in south Philly after graduating from high school. It was my father’s dream that all three of his sons would become police officers. Since neither of my older brothers chose to join his profession, it placed a good amount of pressure on me, as I’m sure you can imagine. I loved and respected my father. He was kind and supportive. Dad was a great role model: proud, courageous, not to mention rather intense. It wasn’t easy to let him down; however, I did come closer to making him happy than Hal and Steve. After spending two years at Princeton, I ended up getting my bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Temple. Before you ask why anyone would give up an Ivy education, I left Princeton to avoid building up loans I knew would be impossible to pay in fewer than two decades. While I was at Temple, I developed an interest in crime solving, in part from my father’s work. Most of the rest came from my love of reading murder mysteries. The truth is I became hooked on crime solving during the summer before my senior year at Temple. My father had a connection with Lucas Benhoff, the general manager at the Rittenhouse Hotel, which Dad used to get me a summer job. I take it you have heard of the Rittenhouse. It’s a four star, five diamond establishment. Guests from all over the world stay there—politicos, celebrities, and sports stars included. During that summer, I worked directly with Mr. Benhoff, and he became a sort of honorary uncle to me. That summer, there was a death at the hotel. A local celebrity with connections to the Philly mob was found dead in his bathtub. There were no signs of a struggle and it appeared that he had slipped and hit his head on the rim of the tub. The deceased had never been very popular with the cops, so they were just as happy to write it off as an accident. Of course, Mr. Benhoff wasn’t very pleased about this, as it meant his insurance rates, not to mention the Rittenhouse’s reputation for guest safety, would be affected. I had a great deal of admiration for Mr. Benhoff and wanted to help him somehow. Of course, since I was just a twenty year-old college kid with no credentials of any kind, neither he nor my father was about to allow me to become involved. After giving things a few days of thought, I decided to conduct my own investigation. In my mind, I’d learned enough from my father as well as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe to do an effective job. It still makes me smile to think how naïve I was. With a cheap spiral notebook and a mechanical pencil in hand, I wrote down five statements. Would you believe I’ve held onto this notebook all of these years?
1) be discreet, be very discreet
2) no person is too influential or insignificant to interview
3) deduction is at the root of crime solving
4) wear the fedora
5) I love historic resort hotels!
I felt it was important that I figure out how to interview people about the incident without letting anyone know what I was doing. That’s what I mean by discretion. If I failed in this, the person would certainly clam up and might even report me to Mr. Benhoff or my father. To my surprise, I was a natural at wheedling information out of people . . . the housekeepers, the food service staff, the doorman . . . even the wealthy couple staying in the room next door. I was able to get information from all of them, even when the police detectives couldn’t. What can I say . . . people trust me . . . that is, everyone except my own family. I find that rather ironic. Using the new information I’d obtained, I was able to deduce that the deceased had a visitor that night, a well-dressed man in a top hat who left in a hurry right about the time of the “accident.” When I shared this information with my father, he was at first non-plussed. Someone in his position could have been forgiven if he ignored or strongly reprimanded me. But my father was not built that way. He was equally proud of my initiative and unhappy with the detective who should have been investigating the incident. Of course, this episode served to heighten Dad’s resolve to recruit me for the police force. Armed with this new information, my father was able to move the investigation in the right direction and arrests were made. Upon hearing about this, I made the decision to adopt a Spade and Marlowe persona, and have been wearing a fedora since then. If there was one other thing that resulted from my time at the Rittenhouse, it was my obsession with historic resort properties. You’re probably wondering if my father finally was able to recruit me to be a cop. One of my numerous regrets is I didn’t join the force the way he wanted. Of course, Dad must have been disappointed, but he never showed it in my presence. Instead of wearing a badge, I applied those natural investigative skills, plus a recommendation from Mr. Benhoff, to get my first job . . . as a crime reporter for the Philly Inquirer. I honestly feel that joining the police force wouldn’t have succeeded for long anyway. In fact, I am certain that’s the case. I’m sitting here and looking at you, my young reporter friend. I’d surmise your age to be 30 to 32 years, and I’m usually pretty accurate about such things. Here’s my point in asking. This means you’re too young to remember the days before DNA became the end-all in major criminal cases. Our friends in Great Britain were the first to do this, and that was in 1986, not long after you were born. During my father’s day, crime solving was mostly about finding the suspect’s fingerprints on a murder weapon and gathering eyewitness testimony. A good detective depended much more on deductive reasoning—à la Sherlock Holmes—than young counterparts do today. Sometimes I think deduction is a dying art. To get back to my story, two things happened within a year of my graduation from Temple. Both of these were life-changing experiences. The first proved to be as wonderful as the second was disillusioning. Like any nerdy-looking guy, I experienced a form of separation anxiety following my graduation from college. It’s true that I was enjoying my job, but evenings meant spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, reading and watching television. One night, a former roommate called and asked if I would double date with him and his fiancé. Of course I said no thanks. He practically begged me to reconsider. He’d probably called everyone else he knew. It sounded like I was his last hope. For some reason, I accepted, albeit reluctantly. That change of heart proved to be the best move I ever made. My date, Nya, was an amazing woman . . . incredibly intelligent, funny, and with the face and figure of a goddess. Amazingly, she actually seemed to like my company. To make a long story short, she married me a year later. I might still be a crime reporter today if it weren’t for the birth of our first daughter, Sara, and the second event I alluded to just a minute ago. Not long after Nya and I were married, there was a killing in south Philly that had the entire metro area on edge. The young wife and mother-in-law of an eastern European immigrant disappeared from their apartment. Neighbors had heard shouting, then screaming. When the police arrived they found pools of blood everywhere, but the husband was nowhere to be found. Several weeks passed before my father and his partner, using an anonymous tip, learned that the husband was hiding in a vacant boathouse along the Schuylkill River. They caught the guy sitting in a parked car nearby, and arrested him after a brief struggle. Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment, my father made a rookie mistake. Dad neglected to read the man his rights before he opened the trunk of the car, where the perp foolishly had hidden the bloody murder weapon. It was a zirh, a Turkish kitchen knife. Within twenty-four hours after making the arrest, the two partners were being hailed as heroes. Unfortunately, fame was to be short-lived. It’s a fact of life that cases like this attract the attention of headline-seeking defense attorneys. And the perp in this instance was represented by one of the best. It didn’t take the lawyer long to learn about my father’s error at the crime scene. Within days, the barrister was working the press . . . successfully. In the end, the judge was given little choice but to side with the defense attorney’s arguments about abusing the Miranda Act. Of course, the case was dismissed. As a result, my father and his partner were suspended for three weeks without pay. I was devastated and refused to cover the story for the Inquirer. A few days later, I was accused by a crime reporter from a rival paper of being gutless and incompetent, “just like yer old man.” It was rather stupid for a journalist to get into the face of a cop’s kid. My father had sent all three of his sons to Kid Kallan’s Gym back in the fifties. It gave me great pleasure to cold-cock that prick. I wish that were the end of the story. Unfortunately, a year later to the day, the same guy who was set free murdered his second wife in cold blood. My father resigned in disgrace and, a short time later, collapsed and died while reading an account of the story in the Inquirer. Naturally, I knew my days as a crime reporter were numbered. With Nya’s encouragement, I gave the Inquirer my notice. Given my background and education, researching the impact of crime on society was in my blood. Besides, it was a way to honor my father’s memory. So, I returned to school and, shortly after the birth of my younger daughter, Amanda, earned my doctorate in Sociology with a specialization in Criminology. After a couple of years teaching at Dakota State, I was offered and accepted the position I now hold here in New Hampshire. One would think that my life at that moment was a bowl of cherries. Unfortunately, I couldn’t shake the way that murder case killed my father. A recurring dream—where the murderer walks by my father and me in the courtroom, with a vicious smile on his face—awakened me in a cold sweat for years. Then Nya came up with a brilliant idea. She told me I had to find a way to let the past go, to “cleanse my system,” she said. I reminded her that neither counseling nor good booze had helped thus far. So she recommended that I write a book about the entire incident. When I protested about a lack of time to do proper research, my brilliant wife looked at me and said three magic words, “Write a novel.” As I frequently do, I took my beloved wife’s advice and wrote a murder mystery, A Hot Night in South Philly. Amazingly enough, Random House published it. Hot Night was hailed for its realism. I was being mentioned in the same breath as John MacDonald. That thought still makes me laugh. For more than six months, I was on every major television and radio talk show. I actually needed to take a leave of absence from teaching to satisfy all of the requests for personal appearances and book signings. Random House even signed me to develop a series based upon the lead character in my book. Everything was going great. I had supplemented our income handsomely and, more importantly, rid myself of the nightmares. If only the cure had been permanent. It’s hard to describe just how great that experience felt, and painful to explain how circumstances changed so quickly. I went from riches to rags in the twinkling of an eye. I found myself in the midst of a prolonged, incurable case of writer’s cramp, missing deadline after deadline. Then the New York Times Review of Books labeled me a one-book wonder. It was humiliating. It’s funny, though; while I had lost the ability to write fiction, I was knocking out publishable articles in my field. The latter just didn’t prove satisfying, and I became obsessed with writing another bestseller. What a fool I was. I lost sight of what was really most important: my marriage to Nya and my role as a parent to two beautiful, terrific daughters. Nya’s place in my life took on the character of occasional-friend and fulltime therapist. On those rare occasions when I wasn’t consuming a lot of alcohol, we had meaningful conversations about Sara and Amanda, Nya’s own very successful career, candidates for public office, even the state’s decision to make tourism businesses pay to put their names on signs at the interstate’s exits. The one topic that we didn’t discuss was my writer’s block because those discussions led me to sulk and drink more alcohol. Things gradually became worse and, before long, I would stomp out of the room like a five year old. Then my mental state became really bad. I was drinking even more heavily. It didn’t matter whether there was whiskey, wine, or whatever in the house. Every wastepaper basket became littered with my empties. Nya asked me to go to counseling. After therapy failed, Nya knew instinctively I’d need to find solutions of my own; but I was in no hurry. Hell, at least when I was drunk, I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. Poor Nya; she wanted to live her life to the fullest, while I basically had ceased living mine. What I’m going to say next must be kept in strictest confidence. If you won’t agree, this interview is over. I’m telling you this so you can get a full sense of how my life devolved. Starting sometime in the mid-nineties, boozing began to undermine my roles as a husband and father. Fortunately for my daughter Sara, she was away from home by this time—first at college, then as a member of the workforce and as a wife. Poor Amanda bore the brunt of it. She was around sixteen when I started drinking. Let’s just say that, for all intents and purposes, Amanda was raised by a single parent. It would have been easier for her if I weren’t around at all. There’s no doubt that my relationship with Nya’s twin sister, Maya, is even worse. Nya and Maya probably wondered whether I was having an affair. While I can assure you that never, ever was the case, Maya still doesn’t trust me at all. I think the US and Cuba will resume normal diplomatic relations long before Maya and I do. Damn, it kills me that I’ve done this to my family! There is some good news to report. I’ve been working with a member of the counseling staff at my university for about a year. She helped me understand why I turned to the bottle in the first place. I finally realize that my drinking was a means to cover up terrible feelings of guilt—primarily about using my father’s misfortune as the subject of my best seller . . . if only the damned book didn’t take off the way it did. The counselor tells me that I developed a deep-seated need to punish myself. Meanwhile, instead of enjoying appearances on Leno and Letterman, I was scared shitless. I felt like a fraud, convinced that I’d never write another piece of popular fiction. That fear was palatable. Since I felt undeserving of past successes, booze became my way of cushioning the truth. This is extremely difficult for me to talk about, and it makes me physically ill to think about the hurt I’ve caused my family. I’ll tell you this, young man, I’m determined to overcome my demons. Thanks to frequent counseling, I’m making slow but steady progress. And, Nya, bless her heart, told me she’s noticed a change for the better in me. This morning, she said there may be some hope for us. When Nya told me that, I could have cried. She’s not making any promises, mind you, and I certainly don’t deserve any. My daughter Sara has been remarkably understanding, thank goodness, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon with either Amanda or Maya. No, I haven’t written a cogent paragraph of fiction since Hot Night was released. There just has to be something that will stimulate those old juices. Nya told me this morning that she’s committing to one last chance. She’s booked a vacation for the two of us at one of the wonderful historic hotels in northern New Hampshire—The Balsams. The place is even older than the Rittenhouse. I guess she’s hoping that somehow the charm and tradition will restore me to the man she married. We’re headed up there in a little over a week. No doubt you’ve heard that timeworn tautology, ‘new beginnings’. I’m determined that this will be ours.

The End

Share this: