Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery

by Steph Cha

  “I do, I do. I was joking.” I threw up my hands. “Though, just so you know, if you were to breach protocol for my benefit, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

  “You’re a sweetheart, really, a goddamn peach. Unfortunately, I don’t have much to offer. If we had more on our end, your girl would’ve surfaced by now.”

  “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  “The case has stalled a bit, nothing really new over the last month.”

  “Are people still on it?”

  “Yeah, of course, but if you want to know whether our best officers are working night and day on this case and this case only, well, I can assure you that that’s not happening. Our city’s too big for that.”

  “Which is why my clients hired me.”

  “Now, I will say that this case hasn’t been ignored. We’ve poured a lot of resources into finding this girl.”

  “I can imagine there’s a lot of pressure when a pretty woman disappears. I know it made the news.”

  “Yeah, the media acted like she was blond or something,” she said drily. “Like a real white girl.”

  “Armenians are white, aren’t they? I mean, it doesn’t get more Caucasian than the Caucasus.”

  She chuckled. “I was mostly joking, but you know what I mean. Middle Easterners are all white, too, and, incidentally, about half of the Mexican population. My family splits for the census, not because we’re all different, but because we get to choose. Maybe if I weren’t so damn brown I’d be tempted to pass, too.”

  “You really think you get to choose?”

  “We all get to choose how people see us, to an extent, right? My cousin Elena, she’s a pale girl, married to a dude named Stephenson. She works for a startup and drives a Prius, listens to podcasts on her commute to Santa Monica. People are always surprised she’s Chicana. Bet that wouldn’t be the case if she’d pursued different stereotypes.”

  “You think Armenians code switch in the same way?”

  “Not exactly, but they can do things to play their whiteness up or down. I’d say disappearing while beautiful plays it up.”

  “Do you think if Nora had been blond, there would’ve been more pressure? That you would’ve had to find her?”

  “No, J.S. This is a high-profile case and it’s gotten its fair share of attention.” She leaned forward, fingers drumming the tabletop. “I’m not saying you won’t crack it wide open in your lonely little thinking chair, but I don’t think we missed any of the obvious angles.”

  “I’m not saying I’m smarter than a roomful of policeman, but you could be wrong even so. You’ve been doing this long enough that you must know that, right? Sometimes the light has to fall just the right way, through just the right crevice, and you don’t need genius to see it, but you do need to be around to catch that glimpse. I plan to be around.” I scratched an itch behind my ear and gave her a supplicating smile. “If you know some of those angles, maybe I can ask you a few questions?”

  “You can ask me anything you want.” There was a playful condescension in her tone. “Just like you can write Justin Bieber a fan letter. Whether I answer—well, okay, I’ll answer if I can.”

  “Did you guys know she was being harassed on her blog?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Juniper Song, come on. You probably figured that out within half an hour of googling her. Do you actually think the LAPD is run by monkeys?”

  “Fair enough,” I said, feeling a warmth rising in my cheeks. “And I assume, then, that you guys looked into this EARTH group? The genocide denial group she lambasted on her site?”

  “Yes, brain-dead as they are, my colleagues investigated the missing girl’s known enemies.”

  “Right,” I said, remembering Kizil’s hostile greeting. He’d been interviewed in some capacity. “How much attention was paid to Enver Kizil?”

  She frowned, both annoyed and thinking. “You’re throwing names at me now? I’m not even on the case. I’m going from memory of secondhand reports.”

  “He must be the L.A. liaison for EARTH. He’s the guy who meets the lawyers, that kind of thing, but probably not the heart of the operation. Too poor.”

  She laughed. “You need money to be a public nuisance?”

  “No, but you need money to hire an international law firm billing out at, like, $800 an hour. I doubt his rent is much higher than that for a whole month.”

  “We cleared a person of interest who might be your Kizil guy.”

  “You did? Based on what?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t download the file directly into my brain. But going on a hunch? Maybe I remember something about a strong alibi.”

  “That’s not enough. There isn’t even a strict time of disappearance,” I said. “You guys should bring him in again.”

  “Based on what?”

  I chewed my lip and remembered swinging from a tree branch off Kizil’s balcony. “I paid him a visit.”

  “And?”

  “I saw some things that led me to believe that he was stalking Nora. Not just on the Net. I mean, he had her address, went to her house. I’m sure your colleagues heard someone was doing that.”

  “What things?”

  “Will you just trust me? I don’t want to get into it.”

  She scowled. “I don’t like this. If you can’t tell me where it came from, I have to assume what you’re giving me is tainted in one way or another.”

  “I’m not handing you tainted evidence or anything. I’m just asking you to send your people to this place to find the evidence yourselves.”

  I watched her with a sense of unease. I didn’t need her to believe I met the most stringent of her cop standards, but I did need her on my side. She had to believe I was one of the good guys.

  “I’ll mention it, okay?” She stuck her chopsticks into a sliver of seafood pancake, using them like a two-pronged fork. “Got anything else?”

  I walked her through my work so far, and she nodded along, eating vigorously and smiling from time to time, fitting my statements into her view of the case. I could tell from the way she listened that she had a better grip on it than she’d led on.

  When I finished, she crossed her arms on the tabletop and looked at me, grinning.

  “What?” I asked, feeling defensive.

  “What about the boy toy?”

  “Oganian?” As the name left my mouth, I knew it was wrong.

  “That’s the boyfriend. Has it not crossed your mind that this girl could’ve been screwing someone else?”

  I saw her stream of selfies, their unabashed sexual potency. “She could have been, if she felt like it.” I bit. “Was she, or is this boy toy just hypothetical?”

  “Look at this smug smile,” she said, forming an impressively smug smile. “What do you think?”

  “Who is he?” I resisted the urge to point out that I’d had less time to piece the case together than the LAPD.

  “All right, I’ll throw you a bone,” she said. “You’ll like this.”

  I waited, but Veronica savored the pause. “Yeah?”

  “In the weeks before her disappearance, she was fucking her very own young Turk.”

  I tilted my head slowly, weighing the likely veracity of this new information. I had wondered how Nora could have a serious lover without her best friend being any the wiser. If he were Turkish, maybe that was something to hide. Still, I asked, reflexively, “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “I don’t gossip about this stuff. It’s serious.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Not much, but he was interviewed, and he was cleared of suspicion.”

  “Name?”

  “Taner Kaymak,” she said. “Spelled like ‘tanner’ with one ‘n,’ ‘kayak’ with an ‘m.’”

  I texted the name to myself. “What about Oganian, then? I’m assuming someone talked to him?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding? Of course. Cheating girlfriend disappears, you think you’re the only one who c
an spin a theory from that one?”

  “Hey, I said I assumed.”

  Veronica bought me a drink after dinner, so it was past eleven when I got back to Glendale. The house was asleep, and I decided to postpone updating Lusig until morning. I was fairly certain she didn’t know about Nora’s extracurricular romance, in which case the news was bound to disturb her.

  I opened up my laptop instead. It turned out Taner Kaymak was an easy find. He was an assistant professor at USC, with a full faculty page, and an active presence on every social media platform I knew by name. He was a historian with a hefty pedigree, Harvard undergrad, Berkeley Ph.D., tenure track. I didn’t know too much about academia, but I understood enough to recognize a big shot when I saw one. His scholarship focused on the Ottoman Empire, and he’d published extensively on the Armenian genocide.

  I saw the contours of a Romeo and Juliet romance. Young, beautiful daughter of Armenia. Brooding Turkish scholar seeking atonement in work and forgiveness in love. Fucking tragic.

  I decided to talk to Lusig before I tried to contact him. I got ready for bed and was already under the covers when my phone buzzed with a text from Robert Park.

  What’re you up to tomorrow night?

  I felt myself smiling. I realized I’d been waiting to hear from him again. I typed:

  I have plans,

  But maybe you could tag along.

  Ah, I guess it is a Friday night. What kind of plans?

  A community meeting in protest of that genocide memorial.

  Ha ha, okay, not what I was expecting.

  Want to go?

  Sure. Sounds romantic.

  There it was—a sign of unambiguous interest.

  I’d managed to stumble through most of my adult life without many flares of romance. My one good relationship had happened early, in college, and I’d ended it when the happiness of a whole other person became too much for me to handle. It turned out that the events in my life that formed me into a good detective had also hardened the softer parts of my person, the parts that could start to trust and adore in a way that overwhelmed suspicion. I felt like one of those TV clichés, the lonely hero who finds truths and changes fortunes, and ends the day in a quiet home with a drinking problem for company. Of course, those heroes were men almost by definition.

  Marlowe was always a cold customer when it came to matters of romance. He’d kiss a dame here and there, but his heart never fluttered, his palms never sweat. He certainly never kept his eye out for text messages. I had to concede I was more human than that. Rob Park had shown up to remind me.

  It’s in Glendale. We can follow it up with a candlelit dinner at the Outback Steakhouse.

  We can share a Bloomin’ Onion.

  Sounds like a dream.

  An ellipsis showed up in the text window to let me know he was typing. I watched it appear and disappear.

  About a minute later, he sent me a picture of Murry curled up on a dog bed, with an Outback Steakhouse cap perched on her head.

  I laughed.

  You just had that lying around?

  I’m from Irvine. That’s chain country. Bloomin’ Onion was my favorite food in high school.

  How’s that explain the early 2000s trucker hat?

  Birthday gift from the early 2000s.

  From who?

  We talked about Outback Steakhouse for another ten lines before the conversation shifted to high school, and stretched back between past and present as we grabbed for shareable anecdotes, offbeat details, pieces of insight and personality broken off in attempts to amuse each other. It wasn’t terribly personal, but it was exciting in a light, flirtatious way. I went to bed ready to see him again, a desire forming for something more.

  *

  Lusig slept in until one in the afternoon, around the time I started to wonder whether I should drag her out of bed. She was still in her pajamas when she stuck her head in my room, resting her body against the doorway.

  “So, how was dinner?” she asked, her voice croaky with sleep. “I wanted to wait up but I wiped out.”

  “I thought about waking you up.”

  Her eyes widened, instantly alert. “Did your cop friend come through?”

  There was no way around it—assuming Lusig wasn’t withholding key information from me, Nora had kept a big secret from her best friend. It was her right to do so, but I knew what it was like to learn a life secret about someone you love through other channels. I couldn’t strip this news of all taint of betrayal.

  “Sort of,” I said. “I learned something new that we should talk about.”

  Her eyes grew wide and attentive. “Is it serious?”

  “It’s another piece of the puzzle.” I rolled my desk chair toward the bed and patted the mattress, summoning her as a dentist does a child. “Come on, sit.”

  She moved cautiously to the bed and climbed in, digging her feet under the covers. “They didn’t find her or anything like that? It’s not that kind of news?”

  “No,” I said quickly.

  Her face relaxed in a way that showed relief and disappointment in equal measure. “Okay, what is it?”

  “I’m sure the cops asked you about Nora’s personal life. Her love life, I mean.”

  “Yeah. I told them about Chris, but they didn’t seem that interested.”

  “Did they ask you about anyone else?”

  “Why do you ask?” She pulled the covers up so they covered her knees. “Because they did, and I thought it was really weird. I said she didn’t have anyone else.”

  “Were you telling the truth?”

  “Of course I was,” she snapped. “Look, I can tell you have something to tell me, so just say it. I’m already feeling like an idiot. Don’t make it worse.”

  “The police seem to think she was seeing someone else.”

  Her face twisted with a look of disgust. “Really.”

  “You don’t seem that surprised, actually.”

  “So that was her secret. I should’ve known, that silly bitch.”

  “You knew she was hiding something?”

  She leaned forward, clasping her hands around her knees like she might spring apart if she let go. It was another minute before she started talking again.

  “I didn’t tell you this because I don’t like to think about it. But we weren’t on great terms when she disappeared.”

  “How so?”

  “She was being really shady. She flaked on me a few times like it was nothing, then didn’t bother to explain. Then when I did see her she just acted … She was fucking annoying, that’s how she acted. She told me, like, a month before she disappeared, that she had something she wanted to tell me. And then she got coy, and refused to go on. I was curious, but I dropped it, like a considerate friend. And of course she brought it up every time I saw her.” She laughed bitterly, and hot bright tears welled up in her eyes. “I miss her so much I almost forgot,” she continued. “She was a real bitch sometimes.”

  “No one’s perfect.”

  “Nora is far from perfect. She lives every day like it’s her fucking birthday and everyone else is just there for her party. I wonder sometimes if we’d be friends if we met today.”

  “But you are friends.”

  “Yeah, I love her and I’m going to find her and tell her all this to her face.” She took a deep breath, swallowing a sob.

  I rolled my chair closer to the bed and patted her shoulder. We sat like that for a minute while Lusig collected herself.

  “So,” she said, blinking and swiping at her nose. “Who is this asshole?”

  I retrieved my laptop from the desk and opened up the faculty profile. “He’s an SC professor. Taner Kaymak. Do you know him?”

  She grabbed it from me and pulled it close to her face, her forehead almost pressed against the screen. “He’s Turkish?” There was naked disbelief in her voice.

  “Yeah. He’s a history scholar,” I said. “For what it’s worth, he appears to know there was a genocide. I wouldn’t
be surprised if he met Nora through her site.”

  Lusig shook her head. “I assumed he wasn’t a genocide denier.”

  “Still shocking?”

  “Just kind of surprising,” she said. “I have to say, I know not every Turkish guy is an asshole, but I’ve never gone out of my way to be attracted to one. Is that terribly narrow-minded of me?”

  “I’m guessing your family wouldn’t like it if you brought one home.”

  “Yeah. I can pretty much guarantee my dad would disown me. I think even Ruby and Van would be scandalized.”

  I remembered an old conversation with my dead father’s sister when I was in my early teens. In her stammering hybrid of slow Korean and broken English, she explained what kind of men I should and should not date. Korean men were on top, followed by Chinese, who were, apparently, easily dominated and kind to their wives. Educated white men (“American” men, in my aunt’s coded shorthand) made up the last acceptable tier. At the very bottom, below the Mexicans and blacks, were Japanese men, even Japanese-American men named Tom, Dick, and Harry, born in L.A. in the 1980s. Blood grudges ran deep.

  “So even a liberal Turkish-American dedicating his life to the study of genocide … no?”

  “The best-case scenario but, still, a scandal next to an Armenian finance guy like Chris,” Lusig said. She shook her head. “I’m surprised she was cheating on him, but I’m not at all surprised she didn’t love him.”

  “You don’t know she didn’t love him,” I pointed out gently. “People cheat for all kinds of reasons.”

  “Okay, maybe I’m projecting,” Lusig said. “I never liked him, and I never thought they were quite right for each other.”

  “It does sound like she treated him poorly.”

  “He treated her poorly. I don’t blame her one bit.”

  I was almost touched by how quickly she accepted her friend’s behavior. “About Chris,” I said. “Is he the jealous type?”

  The conversation had picked up some of the excited pace of gossip, but my question stopped it dead. I was introducing murderers everywhere.

  “Yeah, definitely,” Lusig said after a pause. “But I don’t know if I’d say abnormally jealous.”

  “When you had dinner with him at that deli—wasn’t that to get information out of him?”