by Jung Yun
“If you’re worried about what I’m going to say to him, you’re welcome to join us. I figure we’re going to have to work out some sort of—accommodation, right? Maybe it’d be nice for Ethan to hear what’s going on from both of us.”
It bothers him to think that Gillian might not trust him to be alone with their son, but his invitation is sincere. He wouldn’t mind if she was there. She deserved to see him try for a change.
“So…?”
“Kyung, it’s really not the best time.…”
Again with the long pause, he thinks. She’s not making this easy for him, but he reminds himself that people don’t switch on and off like machines. He’s given her no reason to respond differently.
“Well, how about in the afternoon, then? Would that be better than the morning? Maybe we can take Ethan to the park for a while. He likes it there—”
“No, Kyung. Stop talking about the park. It’s not that. It’s … They asked me not to tell you yet.”
“Who asked you? Tell me what?”
She covers the receiver with her hand, but he can still hear her moving around in the kitchen. There’s a clank of something that sounds like a pot, and then the hollow thud of a cabinet door. “Shit,” he thinks she says.
“Hello?” he calls out. “Are you there, Gillian? Tell me what?”
She clears her throat as she uncovers the phone. “I think you have a right to know, Kyung. They found him today.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“That man—Perry? Nat Perry? The police brought him in a few hours ago. He’s at the station in Marlboro.”
NINE
He doesn’t stop to think who “they” are until a few hours later. They asked her not to tell him yet. But when he pulls up in front of the station, he knows immediately. The three of them are waiting outside the main entrance. He sees Connie first, and then the huge outline of Tim. The third man is the detective from the funeral. Smiley, Smalley—he can’t remember and doesn’t care. Kyung walks toward them, not certain how to get past a barricade of men who clearly want to keep him out. He’s no match for any of them, not on a good day and definitely not now.
“Jesus. You look like hell,” Tim says.
“When’s the last time you slept?” Connie asks.
“I’m not sure.”
He wonders if his in-laws know they’re not going to be in-laws anymore. The relief, the satisfaction they must feel. It’s what they wanted all along. He expects to be told to leave, but no one says a word. They just keep staring at him, as if their silence alone will turn him back. Kyung looks at the cigarette butts on the sidewalk and grass. He tries to count them but keeps losing track. The spike of adrenaline that got him here is down to almost nothing now, and his mind is too scattered to connect one thought with the next. How does he get past them? How does he make them understand how much he needs to?
“I’m not sure if you remember me, sir. I’m Detective Smalley. We met a few days ago?”
The detective’s breath stinks of rotten eggs, but Kyung shakes his outstretched hand anyway. “Where did you find him?”
“He was holed up with a girl the entire time. Never even left town.”
“But the car—Lentz said you found it near Canada.”
“Why don’t we go upstairs and talk? You look like you could use a cup of coffee or something.”
Kyung glances at Connie and Tim, but neither of them do anything to prevent him from entering. Connie even opens the door and waves them all inside. They walk past the front desk, where the receptionist is sitting behind a wall of glass, yawning as she flips through a magazine. When she notices Connie and the detective, she pushes the magazine off to the side and covers it with an envelope. The four of them stop in front of the elevators where a large white plaque announces that visitors to the upper floors are required to sign in. Tim presses the UP button impatiently.
“Sir, do you know where your father is?” the detective asks.
“He’s not here already?”
“No. I called him after the arrest and he agreed to come by to make the ID, but he never showed up.”
Kyung responds without thinking. “He’s afraid, probably.”
“Afraid?”
“To see him again. I think most people would be.”
Detective Smalley doesn’t look like the type to be afraid of anything, actually. He’s old, but fit, with thick forearms and shoulders so broad, they almost look padded. Kyung notices a scratch above his left eye, bandaged but still bleeding through the gauze.
“Did he put up a fight?”
“They always put up a fight,” Tim says.
The elevator door opens onto a vestibule painted in a strange, medicinal shade of pink. Kyung grips the handrail as the car jerks its way up to the third floor, spitting them out into a narrow corridor. The station feels like a rabbit warren—big, but more broken up than he ever would have guessed from the street. The building is on his route to the grocery store. He never thought he’d have a reason to go inside, and a part of him still can’t believe that he is.
“Why didn’t you want Gillian to tell me you found him?” he asks Connie.
“Because it wasn’t worth bringing you in yet. The guy was out of his mind.”
“On drugs?”
“At some point, probably. But we were more worried about the booze. He said he’d been drinking for two days straight. We’ve had him in a cell sobering up ever since he came in.”
Something about this explanation doesn’t sit right with him. “So you didn’t want me to know he was here because…?”
Connie shrugs. “I thought you’d probably want to see the interview, but no one was going to get a word of sense out of him, not in the state he was in. I figured we’d spare you the wait.”
Kyung searches Connie’s face, then the detective’s and Tim’s. It doesn’t seem possible that they did this to be kind, but nothing in their expressions contradicts what he just heard.
“Meet me in number three,” Detective Smalley says. “I’ll bring him over.”
Connie, Tim, and Kyung walk single file to the end of the hall and squeeze into a small room with an oversized window. On the other side of the glass, there’s a table and chairs. On their side, there’s nothing.
“You reek,” Tim says, covering his nose. “How long’s it been since you had a shower?”
“Give him a break. You want a coffee or something?”
Kyung shakes his head. The space they’re standing in is no bigger than a closet. It’s warm—there aren’t any vents or air ducts anywhere—and Tim is actually right for a change. Kyung smells awful; the room smells awful too, like food left out in the sun to spoil. He leans against the far wall, trying to put as much distance between himself and the others.
“What kind of place is this?” he asks. “It’s like an alley in here.”
“We use it for lineups, mostly,” Connie says. “The regular interview room’s got mold in the ceiling, so we’re stuck with this. You understand how it works, right? They can’t see us through the glass, but we can see them.”
“I don’t care if he sees me.”
“Don’t be stupid, Kyung. John’s doing me a favor. I thought it might give you some peace to see this guy locked up, but you can’t go crazy in here.”
If there was ever a time for crazy, Kyung thinks it’s now. He has nothing to lose anymore. His mother is gone. His wife no longer wants him around. His child, he’ll probably only be allowed to see on weekends and holidays. His attempt to start over in California has been exposed as the fantasy it is. Before the attack, Kyung’s life was far from perfect, but now he has even less than what he started with, and that hardly seems fair. Without the Perrys, the stasis he lived in could have continued indefinitely, and he would have been glad to accept that safe place in the middle where nothing moved him too greatly or hurt him too much.
The door in the other room opens and a uniformed officer places a paper bag and a so
da on the table.
“McDonald’s?” Kyung asks, realizing that he hasn’t eaten anything since Erie. “You’re giving him food?”
“We have to,” Connie says. “He’s been in custody too long. Besides, it’ll help sober him up.”
Another officer leads Perry in, handcuffed from behind and shackled around the ankles. He doesn’t appear drunk so much as tired. Kyung always assumed he was a physically intimidating man, but Perry isn’t much taller than he is, only wider. His stomach is distended like a cannonball, and the ridge of his chest sags like old breasts through his T-shirt, which is stained at the neck and underarms, the fabric more yellow than white. The thought of such a filthy, disgusting man even looking at his mother, much less touching her, makes him want to hurl something through the glass and grab Perry by the throat.
“Knock it off,” Tim says.
“What?”
“The tapping. Stop it already.”
Kyung looks down. He didn’t notice he was tapping his foot on the floor. He has energy all of a sudden, too much to know what to do with. He crosses his arms and watches as the officer frees one of Perry’s wrists and cuffs it to the back of a chair. Perry sits down and opens the bag on the table. He unwraps a cheeseburger one-handed and scrapes the onions and ketchup off with a pickle, leaving them in a bloody-looking pile on a napkin. Then he leans over like a pig to a trough and alternates between his burger and fries, shoving them into his mouth in huge bites that Kyung wishes he’d choke on. The detective enters and sits down at the table to read him his rights, but Perry doesn’t seem to be listening. He eats his second burger exactly like the first, his eyes glassy, his hunger primal.
“I need a verbal response that you understand what I just told you and you’ve waived your rights to an attorney.”
Perry nods dumbly, his mouth still full.
“A verbal response.” Detective Smalley pushes the microphone and tape recorder toward him. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
His accent is unexpected, as is his use of the word “sir,” but Kyung remembers the mug shots that Lentz showed him. Perry’s a Southerner, at least he used to be.
“You put up quite a fight today.”
He shrugs. “I get that way when I drink.”
“But you did more than just drink, didn’t you? There must have been a couple dozen bindles in that apartment. It looked like you had a party or something.”
“What’s a bindle?”
“The little envelopes you buy meth in.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about those. I was just staying there—with the girl. It’s her place … her stuff.”
“Right. The girl.” Detective Smalley removes the rubber band wrapped around his folder and pulls out a sheet of paper. “Sharon Julie Andrews.” He chuckles. “Her parents had a weird sense of humor, didn’t they? Julie Andrews?”
“Who?”
“The actress? The little blond one? You know—The Sound of Music?”
The reference doesn’t seem to register. “I’m not sure I follow.”
There’s a slow, syrupy quality to Perry’s responses that almost makes him seem harmless, but Kyung isn’t fooled. He knows what this man is capable of. The last time his mother saw him, he looked like a monster.
“So is Sharon your girlfriend?”
“No, not really. She’s just a friend.”
“She must be a pretty good friend to drive the car you stole all the way up to Vermont. You know that’s how we found you, right? She just left a brand-new Lincoln on the side of a road and hopped the bus back home. Didn’t even stop to think that maybe she should have found a better hiding place for it. I bet you told her to wipe the prints, right?”
He waits for an answer, but doesn’t get one.
“Lucky for us, meth heads aren’t too thorough. Sharon left a couple on the armrest.” He laughs again. “It took us a while, but we finally caught up with her this morning while she was out trolling the park with the other junkies. Didn’t have her in a holding cell for more than a few hours before she started telling us all about you. It doesn’t really look like you’re going to be friends anymore.”
Perry balls up the wrappers from his food and puts them in the bag. He doesn’t appear fazed by what he just heard, not at all. “Can you tell me where my brother’s buried?”
Detective Smalley seems thrown by the question. “How do you know he’s dead?”
“Because I saw him. In the bathroom of that couple’s house. He was dead when I left.”
“You’re admitting you were there?”
Perry looks at him, exhausted and unwilling to play. Then he turns to the window, as if to address everyone standing on the other side of it. “I think you all know I was there. I’m willing to cooperate. I’d just really like to know where my brother’s buried.”
Tim nudges Kyung in the ribs. “This one’s finished,” he says, smiling. “He’s not even smart enough to lie.”
The detective thumbs through the contents of his file until he finds what he’s looking for. “It says here that your brother’s in a potter’s field out in Westhaven.”
“Five generations of us, all buried in potter’s fields.” Perry shakes his head. “Seems like a fitting end, I guess.”
Kyung should be relieved—relieved to be spared a trial, to know that Perry will spend the rest of his days in prison and then be buried in an unmarked grave like his brother—but he can’t summon anything resembling relief. A prison cell is hardly enough punishment for all the lives this man ruined. He wants Perry to suffer. He wants him to feel more pain, more regret, more loss, more everything. Multiply it tenfold and it still wouldn’t be enough.
“So tell me what happened.” The detective moves the paper bag off to the side and centers the microphone on the table. “Start from the beginning.”
Perry takes a long drink of soda and clears his throat. “My brother, Dell, and I—we’d been watching the neighborhood for about a week. We decided to hit the big blue house on the corner.”
“What blue house?”
“Maybe it was purple? I’ve been told I have trouble with colors.”
“You mean the house next door to Mr. and Mrs. Cho?”
He nods. “We’d been watching the old couple. Three nights in a row, the husband closed up his store downtown, but he never went to the bank afterward. Never went the next morning either, so we figured he kept his money at home.”
“Okay…”
“So that night—I don’t know, Wednesday or Thursday or whenever it was—we headed over there around dark. The plan was to say our car broke down, ask to use their phone or something, but just as we were about to go up the front steps, this little Oriental lady came flying out of the house next door saying ‘Oh, help me, help me.’ So we figured, why not? Anybody living in that neighborhood had to be rich.”
Detective Smalley scribbles a note on the outside of his folder. “So you’re telling me that a complete stranger just invited you into her house?”
“Her husband was beating the crap out of her.” Perry motions toward his face. “She was all banged up, her lip was bleeding everywhere. She needed help, I guess. Didn’t really seem to care who she got it from.”
The detective turns around and looks at the window, visibly startled. Even though he can’t see through the glass, he seems to know exactly where Connie is standing. He lifts his hand as if to scratch his cheek and discreetly points toward the exit.
Kyung immediately feels a tap, followed by a firm grip on his shoulder. The sensation snaps him back, back from a dreamlike state in which nothing he just heard seems right or real. What Perry is describing—it can’t be the way all of this started. It can’t be the cause of everything that happened afterward.
“I made a mistake,” Connie says. “You shouldn’t be here for this.”
“Get your hand off me.”
“Kyung, you don’t need to hear—”
“Get�
��your—hand—off—me.” He stares at Connie, suddenly feeling much bigger than he is, bloated with adrenaline and anger. “Off,” he repeats, not blinking or breaking until Connie removes his hand.
“So what happened after that?” the detective asks.
“We followed her next door and she let us inside. And there was furniture and stuff in pieces everywhere, like they’d been at it for a while. So for a second I thought we should just leave, but my brother jumped in and told her he wanted the money. There wasn’t much I could do after that but go along with it.” Perry seems almost irritated by this. “My brother was hard up for crystal those last few months. I kept telling him”—he raises his voice, thrusting his finger at the empty chair next to the detective—“‘You got to get off that junk. It does something different to your brain, but no. You can’t be fucking bothered to listen, can you? Always thinking about yourself.’”
Perry appears almost mentally ill, talking to the chair as if his brother were in it. He lingers there for a moment, finger outstretched, and then quickly turns back to his soda, emptying the cup in several large gulps. “So what else?”
“Go back to the beginning.… You’re saying all that damage in the Chos’ house—you didn’t do any of it? It was already there when you walked in?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we did a little of it. I honestly can’t remember. I was pretty far gone the entire time.” He shrugs. “Jesus. Leave it to us to walk in on the middle of something like that. We should have just taken off when we saw her coming.”
In the corner of his eye, Kyung notices Tim shaking his head.
“That piece of shit,” he mutters.
Connie elbows him. “Quiet, Tim.”
“Why? He is a fucking piece of shit.”
Kyung doesn’t know whether he’s talking about his father or Nat Perry, but from the look on Tim’s face, and Connie’s too, it no longer matters.
“Can I get another one of these?” Perry shakes his cup of ice.
“Hold on.” The detective finishes writing something on his folder. “So what exactly did Mrs. Cho say when she saw you outside?”
“What I told you before. She asked us for help.” He scratches himself under the arm. “I think she also said something like ‘Make him stop.’”