The Conversation

Body Count is a parlor game I invented a few years ago, and it’s not a good one. It grew out of my discovery that, in fact, a half dozen people I had known had been murdered. I say “discovery,” but it wasn’t something suddenly revealed. I just recalled one murder victim and then began to recall others. I recall them and then push them down again. This is the first time I have written about them, and I have changed their names to protect their survivors, if they have any.

It may have started with Sammy, a boy my age whom I saw infrequently when I was growing up in Palo Alto. I remember a skinny black boy with a big grin—a happy child. Many years later I was told by a girlhood friend of Sammy’s mother that his body had been found on the side of the highway—thrown from a car. Drugs, I was told.

Then there was Guy, the onetime boyfriend of my friend Keith. I was having drinks outdoors with Keith in San Francisco when I first saw him, weaving in among the tables astride a motorcycle. He was young, blond, haughtily handsome. I don’t know if we actually met then. Keith may have simply gone off with him on the back of his bike. We met later. I may have seen him only a few times and every time he seemed churlish. I learned a few months later that he and Keith had broken up and that Guy had moved to New York, where I was living. I did not see him, and the next thing I heard was that he had been murdered, perhaps by someone who had gone home with him.

I’m not at all clear what happened to Michael, whom I had met at an Actualizations seminar in San Francisco in the ’70s. He was a self-styled money guru and ran a new-age financial seminar in Marin County, in which I enrolled. I heard—and this may be only a rumor—that his lifeless body was found in the trunk of a car and that his demise had something to do with drugs. I wish I had some way of knowing the truth. I would be very pleased to find out that these really are just rumors. I found his pseudonym and his company on a long list of “suppressive persons and suppressive groups” published in 1991 by the Church of Scientology International, in connection with which anything is possible.

Likewise, I have no facts concerning Carl’s death. He had been a colleague of my father’s in Dallas and we had played tennis frequently. Before unleashing his cannonball serve, Big Carl would look cheerfully at the receiver and say, “Retty?” I’m not sure why I think this nice man was murdered. I remember being told that his body had been found in his apartment. Maybe he just had a heart attack. Maybe not.

Then there is the legendary Sofia, whom I met only once, when she cooked dinner for Joe’s friends, and I was among them. She had worked for Joe’s mother and then for Joe, but she was officially retired and living in Richmond with her second husband, Hector. They had come up to New York together on the bus and brought the chicken with them. James Beard had said that Sofia made the best fried chicken he had ever tasted. So I had known of Sofia, but this occasion was the one time I met her: a tall, strong black woman with a brilliant smile who loved to cook. Hector, I think, had had a stroke; he walked with a limp but helped Sofia serve the dinner. She outlived him, and then, one night, a burglar broke in to her home in Richmond and cut her throat.

I found out Sofia had been murdered when I started asking my friends if they had known anyone who had been murdered. When I asked Joe, he told me about Sofia. He also told me about one of the men who had worked in his building, a man who used to do odd jobs for Joe and whom he considered a friend. One day he was missing, and a week later his body was found in a bag in a marsh. Joe thought it might have been related to gambling debts but he wasn’t sure. One of the papers ran a story about it, saying the victim was Seinfeld’s super, because Jerry Seinfeld had bought an apartment in the building (although he did not, at the time, live in it).

Joe lived to be 84 and knew a lot of people and, consequently, knew people who had been murdered. Despite having had a stroke, Joe had no trouble recalling the murder victims. That wasn’t the case with a lot of people I talked to. I remember asking the doorman and elevator man in Joe’s building whether they had ever known anyone who had been murdered, and they both thought about it and shook their heads. Joe was with me and reminded them that their late colleague had been murdered. “Oh, yeah,” they said. They had suppressed the memory.

When someone close to you is murdered, you usually don’t forget it. With casual acquaintances, it’s easier to suppress the memory. But when I thought about it, I realized that murder is not that uncommon in the U.S., even when you don’t include manslaughter. My friend Arty was riding his bike when he was killed by a hit-and-run driver. That’s murder too (Murder Two), but I’m not counting it or suicide in Body Count—only Murder One. In 2005 the murder rate in the U.S. was around 5.6 per 100,000 persons, compared with 0.98 per 100,000 in the Netherlands. On the other hand, South Africa’s rate was 38.6. My acquaintance with murder victims indicates that I know 100,000 people or that I index way above the average in being acquainted with murder victims. I have met a lot of people in my life, but my acquaintance with murder victims probably has more to do with having lived in major metropolitan areas.

It is not unusual to know a murder victim. I think it’s much more unusual to know a murderer, except when one spouse kills another. In that case, if you knew the victim you probably knew the killer as well. You may have been in their home, and they in yours; your children and theirs may have played together. It cuts close. It’s more than spooky, and that’s one reason Body Count is a lousy parlor game.

I was visiting my friends Arthur and Zoë and sharing my thoughts about how much more common murder is than we tend to think and how people are prone to suppress disturbing memories. Then I asked them if they had known anyone who had been murdered. They seemed startled by my question, and Zoë said, “You know about Stefan, don’t you?”

“No,” I said, “what about Stefan?”

“Alice killed him.”

“I had no idea.”

Clearly, both Arthur and Zoë had been thinking that my train of thought proceeded from Stefan’s death. Stefan, unlike the other victims I have named, was someone I actually knew. He and his first wife, Karen, were close friends of Arthur and Zoë’s, and I saw them fairly often. I heard about the vacations the two families took together and saw the photographs. Arthur and Stefan had played together regularly in an amateur piano trio; Stefan and Zoë were colleagues in a counseling practice. Their lives were thickly intertwined, and because I was much in Arthur and Zoë’s lives, I knew Stefan and Karen’s children, who were about the same age as Arthur and Zoë’s children, and kept up with what was going on. I was even present, with Zoë (Arthur was out of town), at Stefan and Karen’s anniversary dinner. It was warm, celebratory. I recall that two of the guests had been up to the wine country and had brought back with them a bunch of tiny wine grapes that they passed around for everyone to hold and taste. I recall, too, that Stefan gave Karen service for 12 of a china pattern that he had not been able to afford when they were married. A lovely party. The following day, I flew back to New York, and Stefan told Karen he was divorcing her. When the divorce was final, Stefan married Alice, a younger woman who had at one time been his patient. (Karen also remarried and had a successful career as a cello teacher—and returned the china.)

Truth to tell, I liked Stefan and, at the same time, vaguely disliked him. I was not the only one to feel that way. He was charming and impenetrable, the way charming people often are. My feelings about him were, of course, colored by what I knew: his stupid infatuation with a young patient, his estrangement from Karen. He ended up having three sons with Alice, and I wonder what kind of a father he was to those boys. He may well have been a better father than Alice was a mother, but there was even some dispute about that among the sons.  The youngest found him, dead of knife wounds, in the pool house. Stefan had been afraid of Alice and had had a restraining order issued by the court to prevent her coming to the house. But she came anyway, relentless as a Fury, and found him there, asleep in the pool house, groggy from the sun.

At one time, when Stefan was first counseling Alice, he may have thought he could cure her. He did something unethical because he was pursuing what he thought was good. Of course, that’s why ethics codes are devised, to remind us that what we think is good isn’t.

Finding out about Stefan should have ended my parlor game but it didn’t. I continued to ask people if they had known anyone who had been murdered. They did or didn’t. I asked my question of two young men from the Netherlands, and whether it was because they were young or Dutch, they did not. Where murder is less common than it is in America, there are more degrees of separation between victims and the average citizen. In places like South Africa, where it is nearly eight times more common than in America, nearly everyone has a story. For my friend Jan, it was his wife’s aunt, shot point blank when she stumbled on a burglary in progress. Her husband and son had been tied up and gagged, but the burglars did not know that she was asleep upstairs. Apparently the dogs, whose vocal chords had been removed, woke her up with their pawing, and she went downstairs to see what was going on and startled the gunmen. The house was in one of the richest suburbs of Pretoria. “It gets worse all the time,” Jan said.

Some time after writing a first draft of this article, I remembered Terence, an actor I had seen perform and later had the pleasure of meeting in his home. One morning, a couple of years later, I heard on the radio that he had been killed in a car crash in the Dominican Republic. But he had been murdered by the young man he had adopted. The police had suspected the boy and his father but had gone along with the story to lull the murderers into false confidence that their plot had been successful. When the men were arrested, they confessed to the crime. According to the young man, he had been replaced in Terence’s affections by a new boy.

These could be considered cautionary tales, I suppose, but most murders seem completely irrational. You are living your life and the next thing you know, you’re caught in the crossfire.

A parlor game that isn’t amusing doesn’t catch on, which is why you haven’t heard of Body Count. People don’t want to think about murder, especially when it’s close to home. “It’s kind of like it’s bad luck,” Joe’s doorman had said—as if talking or even thinking about murder could invoke it. Death is usually frightening, but murder is the ultimate horror—a life cut short for no good reason.

What we hope and pray for is a death like the one Joe’s friend Basil had. He was in his 90s and had gone to lunch with Joe and Lola, two of his closest friends, at the Plaza Athénée. Afterwards, Joe was waiting with Basil while the doorman summoned a taxi, and Basil keeled over on the sidewalk. He died instantly of natural causes. Way to go.

P.S. I recently watched Milk on DVD and realized that Harvey Milk is yet another human being I had met who was murdered. I had not known him; I met him when I worked for San Francisco magazine and was selling advertising space to merchants on Castro Street. It was 1978, I was 27 years old, and Harvey had just been elected a San Francisco supervisor. He was holding court inside his camera store when I tried (feebly) to interest him in advertising on the Castro Street page with other merchants. I had not done my homework and was not prepared to debate with him; it seems clear to me now, in retrospect, that he would have at least enjoyed a debate, even if he would not have bought an ad. He said that whenever Tommy, the neighborhood florist, advertised citywide, the streets were clogged with cars and the result was bad for his business. I didn't have the wit to say, "Well, it seems as if it was good for Tommy's business. Perhaps you could have the same success, because camera buyers don't just come from the neighborhood. Certainly your customers have the same right to park on the street as anyone else." He might have appreciated the argument. Instead, I moved on, intimidated by Harvey's air of knowing more than anyone else in the room. I thought Sean Penn's performance captured Harvey's insouciance and truculence. With those qualities, Harvey made a difference in the world, and I am pleased to have met him.

Tags: Daniel D'Arezzo, murder, victims