by Steph Cha
The office was cramped and chaotic. He was never sure what Manny did in here, but it was always a disaster, folders and papers piled up all over the place, even on the floor. Only the bookshelves were kept clear, for photos of grandchildren and an enormous tub of protein powder. Manny was going on sixty, with gray old-man eyebrows and cracked leathery skin, but he was still vain about some things. He had a proud, broad chest and the calves he’d cut as a mover, the muscles like baseballs in his short, powerful legs.
He picked a pile of junk off a chair and set it down on the floor. Shawn sat in the cleared seat while Manny took to his swivel chair behind the desk. The vinyl squeaked as Manny made himself comfortable. A lightbulb hummed overhead.
He leaned forward and stretched his neck from side to side. When it cracked, he sighed pleasantly and looked up at Shawn. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. That’s all,” he said.
Shawn nodded, relieved. “I appreciate that,” he said. “I’m alright. I’m sorry I took off like that the other day. And last Saturday, missing work—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Manny dismissed the apology with a stiff wave. Shawn saw with surprise that his boss was offended. “The shooting at the Korean place—that’s your cousin they arrested, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Shawn. He remembered how Manny had welcomed Ray, how disappointed he’d been when he decided to quit so quickly. He’d taken a chance on Ray, all because he was Shawn’s cousin. “He didn’t do it. Ray’s not—he’s not a violent guy. I wouldn’t have asked you—”
“I know, I know. Don’t worry, I believe you. And I don’t know Ray like you do, but he didn’t seem like the type to me either. Seems like the cops are just scrambling. They came asking about you, you know that?”
“I heard.”
“I told them no way was it you.”
Shawn could picture it easily: Detective Maxwell cornering Manny in this tiny office, asking loaded questions, holding up Shawn’s criminal past. The thought made him see red. Shawn wasn’t greedy. He didn’t need wealth, didn’t want fame or even attention. He didn’t resent that he moved furniture while fools ran the country.
What he wanted now was what he already had: his hard-earned plot of life, tilled daily with diligence and dignity. His family. His home. His job. Before last week, he’d been on steady ground, stable and happy for maybe the first time since he’d lost Ava. There were things he’d sacrificed in the name of that happiness. He’d learned to tamp down his anger; when his mouth watered with bitterness, he’d learned to clamp his teeth together and swallow the bile. He never bothered anyone, and it seemed fair that he be left alone in return. But here he was, all this shit occupying his thoughts, his time, following him to work.
“So Ava Matthews”—Manny hesitated, but only briefly—“she was your sister.”
Shawn cast his eyes down and nodded.
“I remember that shooting, man. The trial, too. It was all so . . .” Manny blew out air through his lips, unable to find the word. “I never put that together. Shawn.”
Shawn looked up.
“How long we known each other?” asked Manny.
“Seven years.”
“That’s right. Seven years.” He rubbed at his neck and shot Shawn a rueful smile. “You know, you can talk to me.”
“I—”
Manny stopped him with a good-natured laugh. “Jesus, you should see your face,” he said. “I’m not asking you to cry on my shoulder, okay? Your business is your business, and I respect that. But if there’s anything I can do, you tell me. If you need time off, or you need to run home—you do what you have to for your family.”
“Thank you.” Shawn didn’t know what else to say. He felt light-headed with guilt and gratitude.
“Just no more of this ‘sorry, boss, it won’t happen again, boss’ shit,” said Manny, gesturing toward the door. “Don’t martyr yourself. Your workers’ comp won’t cover it.”
He could tell there was bad news the moment he walked through the door. Aunt Sheila was lying on the couch with a wet cloth on her forehead, her feet propped across Jazz’s lap. Nisha was pacing around the kitchen, whispering furiously on the phone. The kids, even Monique, were out of sight. They must have been sent to their rooms.
Shawn rushed over and knelt by the couch. “Auntie,” he said. “Are you okay?”
She kept her eyes closed, but she lifted one hand, reaching toward him. He held it, and she squeezed, weakly. Her skin was cold and delicate, and he rubbed his thumb over soft, large veins, remembering with a shock that his aunt was an old woman.
He looked up at Jazz.
“She’s okay,” she said, with the calm assurance of a professional. “She just needed to lie down.”
“What happened?”
Jazz bit her lip and tilted her head toward Aunt Sheila: whatever it was, she thought it’d upset her all over again.
Nisha leaned out of the kitchen and beckoned him over with a silent wave. He rose, letting go of his aunt’s hand.
All the food was still out on the counters, uncovered and cooling—the meal had been interrupted. He found he wasn’t hungry anymore. Nisha grabbed his arm and buried her face in his shoulder. When she looked up again, her eyes were wide and wet. “Ray confessed,” she said.
“What?”
“Keep your voice down,” she whispered. “Ma almost fainted when I told her. She hasn’t been sleeping, Shawn. She’s been a wreck since they arrested him.”
Shawn took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. It seemed like the crises were piling up, back to back to back, out of his control. “What do you mean he confessed? Did you talk to him?”
“I did, just about the minute Fred called.” Ray’s lawyer—they were on a first-name basis. “I went right over there and made him look at me.”
“And?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t do it. I know my husband. I would know if he went and shot an old lady and came home to sleep in my bed. He just ain’t that good a liar.”
Shawn wanted to believe her, but everything she said was full of holes. Did she really know Ray as well as all that? He had to believe that at least some of his lies got past her. She was soft on Ray, sure, but Nisha was no doormat. She put up with Ray because she believed in him fundamentally, even when she shouldn’t.
He needed to talk to Ray. Stare him down and ask what the hell was going on. Shawn didn’t know everything about Ray, but he knew him well enough to smell his bullshit. He’d know if something wasn’t right.
Was it possible? Duncan had an alibi wrapped up and ready for Ray, but Shawn trusted Duncan about as far as he could throw the man. Ray had been acting shady since he started working at the bar, and Shawn wondered again if they had some kind of hustle going.
But a revenge shooting? That was like the old days, the drive-by days, when they were young and reckless, when everything went straight to their heads. Back then, fear was taboo, a sign you were soft, that you might roll on your homies when the heat turned up. Things were different now. Ray had a wife. Kids. He’d just gotten out of prison, and Shawn knew he didn’t want to go back. He couldn’t afford to abandon fear. And Ray just didn’t seem angry enough to shoot Ava’s killer after all these years, with nothing to gain but vengeance.
Then again, they hadn’t known where to find her—even Shawn had thought he’d moved on, in his way, before she came back on the map. Was it possible that someone told Ray where she was? Challenged him to do what should’ve been done? Who would’ve done it, and why would they have gone to Ray instead of Shawn?
“Then why did he confess?”
“People confess to shit they didn’t do all the time. You know that, Shawn.”
“I know people do that. But we’re not talking about people. We’re talking about Ray. Why would he confess to something he didn’t do?”
She was silent, and he knew she didn’t have a ready answer. He felt guilty for badgering her.
“Well, what did he say?
” he prompted.
“He wouldn’t talk about it. Can you believe that? He just sat there, hanging his head like a guilty dog.” She hesitated before speaking again. “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I wonder if the cops got to him.”
Shawn remembered the detective, the way he riffled through his notes, not reading what was in them, as if he knew they would say whatever he needed them to say.
“What do you mean, they got to him?”
“I don’t know, they beat it out of him or something. You know they do things like that.”
Shawn had seen cops do all kinds of crazy shit when they thought no one important was looking, and they never thought Shawn was anyone important. He’d been in dark rooms with policemen, too many of them to count over the years. Sometimes it was because he did something. Other times it was because they thought he did, or they thought he knew something, or they knew nothing and needed to bring in the nets.
There were a few times when they’d wanted answers he wasn’t giving them, and they got in his face, pushed him around; he could feel them aching to hit him. One pint-sized son of a bitch shoved his head against a wall—an accident, he said, the grin still on him. Shawn’s teeth were loose for days, clinging to gums that felt like sponge and tasted of fresh blood.
“Did he look like they beat him up? Cuts, bruises, anything like that?”
“Not that I could see, but you know they smarter than that. They use rubber hoses, or they don’t hit where anyone can see.”
This was a big case. He felt that; there was no avoiding it. Jung-Ja Han took people back to the early ’90s, when Los Angeles burned—it was just what they needed after the Alfonso Curiel shit. The cops had to be under pressure. To find their man, close their case. Deal with it fast and neat, before spark met powder keg.
But if they beat a confession out of Ray, he’d let everyone know it, starting with Nisha.
“He would tell you,” he said. “You know Ray won’t even suffer a headache in silence.”
“Maybe he was afraid they were listening,” she offered. “Or maybe it wasn’t a beating. But he looked bad. Like he hadn’t slept or eaten in days. Maybe they starved him, made him so tired and hungry he just caved. I don’t know, Shawn. But I know this stinks.”
Shawn nodded. It did stink, and he was afraid to see what was rotting under this flimsy cover.
Aunt Sheila mumbled something from the living room. They looked at each other—they’d been quiet, Shawn thought—then went to the couch.
Jazz excused herself to check on Monique, and Nisha took her place, massaging Aunt Sheila’s skinny legs as she sat down.
“Ma?” she whispered.
Aunt Sheila opened her eyes. “He couldn’t have done it,” she said, her voice dry and croaking. “Not my boy.”
“We know, Ma,” said Nisha. “We’ll get this sorted out.”
“They must’ve cornered him. That confession ain’t worth the paper it’s signed on, if he ever even signed it.” She blinked and the tears started coming. They rolled into the deep grooves lining her cheeks.
Nisha bent over her, stroking her hair. “Don’t you worry, Ma.”
Aunt Sheila turned to Shawn. She whispered, “You think he could’ve done it, baby?”
Shawn hesitated. “I don’t think so.”
She studied his face and found the uncertainty he couldn’t quite hide. She raised herself on her elbows. “If he did do it, he better not see one more day in prison. He ain’t killed no one, and he spent more time in there for his nonsense than that woman ever did for killing my little girl in cold blood. I’m not gonna let her take my boy away, too.”
He forgot sometimes that Aunt Sheila’s love was unconditional. She was so staunch, so morally unyielding, that he felt himself measured against some version of himself, an unassailable man who made all the right decisions, who’d made them all along. But she held tight to all her principles, and the most important of these was that family came first. It confused her, when this principle came into conflict with the others. She ran back and forth between denial and defense, exhausting herself to keep all the balls in the air.
Aunt Sheila wouldn’t entertain the idea that her baby girl could steal a quart of milk. But if she’d been a killer instead of a victim, Aunt Sheila would’ve worked as hard to keep her free as she did to procure her justice. And she would’ve believed she was right the whole way through.
He heard the unmistakable sound of the garage door rolling open, and for one bright moment, he thought it was Ray, coming home. Then he saw the door to Darryl’s room—it was open, just a few inches, where it had been closed before. He turned to Nisha, who was already looking at him with an expression of naked alarm.
Shawn bolted to the garage. He got there just in time to see Darryl start Ray’s car and throw it in reverse. He was too late to stop him from driving away.
Nineteen
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
It felt good to be at work, answering the phone, sorting prescriptions, the day floating by on dozens of small, impersonal interactions. She felt the protection of her ordinary competence, the bright, contained space of the pharmacy. Miriam was at home attending to their mother. Paul and Grace were back at Woori, relieving Uncle Joseph, who’d worked the store every day for over a week.
They didn’t speak much, and there was an almost normal quality to their not speaking. They were coworkers in their own spheres, with no need for polite chatter. These days, there was too much to talk about, but it was all too big to touch in the store, in front of Javi and their customers.
The detective came in late in the afternoon, just over an hour before closing. Paul noticed him before she did. She saw her father tense behind the register, alert as a guard dog, his mouth starting to curl. The bell rang as Detective Maxwell swung the door open and sauntered in, already looking around.
“What do you want?” asked Paul, by way of greeting.
“Hello, Mr. Park. I was actually hoping to speak with your daughter.” He nodded at Grace with his chin. “How’re you doing today?”
“I’m fine,” she said, as he approached the counter. “What did you want to talk about?”
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
She looked at Paul, who gave her a warning glare.
“I don’t know if—”
“It’ll only be a few minutes,” he said, cutting her off amiably. “But if you’d rather talk after you close up, I can wait.”
She saw Paul glance through the glass doors of the pharmacy, and she knew he was thinking about all the nosy Koreans. Detective Maxwell stood out at Hanin. A white man with the definite air of a detective on business. She could picture him waiting for her in the food court, seated alone at a wobbly Formica table in his tailored suit, flipping through his notes. Scanning the market, which was, after all, adjacent to his crime scene.
Paul grunted. “I can cover. Make it fast.” Addressing his daughter, as if she were the one in control.
Maxwell insisted on coffee, which they got from the Korean bakery.
“Tous Les Jours,” he said, reading the name on the sign. “French, huh? Like Paris Baguette.” He winked, and she smiled back, cautiously.
He chatted with her, asking about her job, where she went to school. He was friendly, almost flirtatious, and she braced herself for whatever it was he wanted from her. They sat down in the food court, and Grace tried not to notice the attention they drew.
“Ray Holloway confessed,” said Maxwell.
Grace bolted upright. “That’s great.”
“It is.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me? You didn’t have to come all this way.”
He was silent for several seconds, just watching her. She smiled uncomfortably, wondering what he was looking for. Then he leaned across the table, his eyes scanning the room like he was about to share a secret. “Your parents are holding out on me,” he said.
“What makes you think that?” She took a sip of her coffee,
in large part to hide her face, though she was sure she had nothing to hide. It wasn’t bad, actually, with the amount of cream and sugar she put in.
“How long you been working at Worry?”
It took her a second to realize he was talking about Woori. “Two years.”
“You ever get patients you just know are looking to score?”
“Once in a while.” She wouldn’t have thought so before, that there were Korean addicts. But she’d had a handful of suspect customers, a few of them showing up again and again with scripts cribbed from multiple doctors. They couldn’t hide their relief when their pills came through, and when Grace asked them questions, they invariably disappeared. “Why?”
“I’ve been doing my job for over ten years. It’s plain as day when someone’s trying to get one over on me. I don’t care if they’re suspects, witnesses, or even victims—they all lie.” He sat back and cracked his knuckles. “Your father’s worse than most.”
“Why would he lie to you?”
“He’s been lying to me from the beginning. I know that. He had things to tell me, if he wanted, and he didn’t say one word.”
“That was before,” she protested. Before Grace knew anything. Before it all came out.
“I saw cameras at the store,” he said, ignoring her. “Are they functional?”
They had security cameras set up in the pharmacy. Nothing fancy—her parents didn’t have the tech savvy. They were mostly there to discourage shoplifting. Grace had never seen the footage.
She remembered the video of Jung-Ja Han killing Ava Matthews. Grainy, blurred, and decisive. She should have thought to ask about the cameras. She would have, if she hadn’t been so distracted. Was it possible there was footage of Yvonne’s shooting? Paul hadn’t mentioned it, and he apparently hadn’t turned any recordings over to the police.
“I don’t know anything about those.” She spoke carefully, wary of a trap. “You’ll have to ask my dad.”
“I already did.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “He said they’re just for show. But I don’t buy it.”