In My Father's Name: A Family, a Town, A Murder.

IN MY FATHER'S NAME
A Family, a Town, a Murder
By Mark Arax
Simon and Schuster. 399 pp. $ 24


ONE SUNDAY in 1972, when author Mark Arax was 15 years old, his father, Ara, responding to a phone call, went to the Fresno nightclub that he owned. In retrospect, Mark says he knew the news was bad when the telephone rang at 7:15. He wasn't wrong.

It was the bartender reporting that Ara had been shot several times; an ambulance was taking him to the hospital where he later died. The two triggermen were never found, and Mark found himself surrounded by speculation which shamed and infuriated him. His father was a drug dealer, rumors said, or a smuggler. His father had Mafia ties. "Absent a clear motive," Arax writes, "the reason for the murder somehow went down in our town as a transgression by the victim."

Seventeen years later, Mark Arax returned to Fresno, the scene of the crime, risking his marriage, his remaining family ties and possibly his life in order "to find the truth of the murder." That truth is recorded in this nonfiction book, In My Father's Name.

Because a murder is at its core, the book could technically be called true crime. It is more than that, however -- the way Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is more. Like Midnight, Arax's book is also about place. But freewheeling Fresno is unlike Savannah, and narrator Arax is nothing like the all-accepting Midnight observer, John Berendt.

Arax is charged, emotional, driven, a fiery descendant of the Armenians whose history he chronicles here. Like those ancestors, he is obstinate, bent on revenge. Early on he tells us, "There were four murders in our family, one in each generation. Murder is what brought us to America." As he recounts the blood feuds and bloody racial history of his people, we realize what the author doesn't seem to: his own obsession with case mirrors that tradition.

Still, he was able, while his mother, Flora, was alive, to put his obsession aside in deference to her. Almost at once after the murder, for instance, he learned that his father had been seen at police headquarters. When he tried to trace this lead, Flora begged him not to and he acquiesced.

That she would have this hold over him is amply demonstrated in the moving section dealing with her slow death from cancer. "She had lost thirteen pounds, now a few pounds shy of 100, and her eyeglasses kept slipping off her sunken face. She used an oral inhaler five times a day in the false hope that bronchitis caused the short breaths and pain." His father's death, so sudden, so quick, seems, by comparison, a relief. "I will always remember my father at his absolute best and my mother as an emaciated figure completely defenseless on a chair in the shower."

BUT HER DEATH frees him: "I was no longer bound by my promise to her to leave the murder be." He starts with the police report, which he'd never before seen. And there is his father conjured before him, "as he rested on both knees, turned a half circle toward the first police officer to arrive and lifted his shirt to show the belly wound." His dad took five bullets and was still able to tell the policeman what had happened.

What Mark Arax learns is maddening -- that because his father was so vocal, the extent of his injury was underestimated and surgery thus needlessly delayed, effectively allowing him to bleed to death. But he also discovers that the police investigation was cursory, with witnesses interviewed long after their memories were fresh and many leads not pursued at all.

Now, armed with a book contract and a leave of absence from his job as a reporter, Mark Arax undertakes his own examination of the life and death of his father. He sees himself not as a man obsessed, but as a "journalist digging past the silence and rumor, myth and deceit." There are several ironies in what he uncovers. First, that a suspicion he formed in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, seemingly groundless, is chillingly true. Second, that his own youthful flirtation with drugs and his father's discovery of that indiscretion had a great deal of bearing on his father's actions -- the very actions that prompted his murder.

And third, that the man at whose feet Mark Arax finally lays the deed had his own deep, psychological motivation. A blow delivered by Ara Arax, which another man might have been able to shrug away, resonated so deeply with this man that it marked Ara Arax for death.

In the course of In My Father's Name, Mark Arax does more than vindicate his father. He also makes peace, and, in doing so, liberates himself.

Carolyn Banks is the author of several suspense novels.

Photo, scott anger, Mark Arax.

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