Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery

by Steph Cha

  “Yeah, but not—I just wanted to see if he knew where she was. I thought he might know more than I did.”

  “And why would he know more than you if he weren’t responsible for her disappearing?”

  “I don’t think he killed her,” she said quietly. “I don’t like Chris, but if that’s what happened to her, I’d put my money on someone else. This other guy—do you think he’s suspicious?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t reached out to him yet. I figured I’d see if you knew him first.”

  She blew out a sigh through pouting lips. “Isn’t it strange that when a woman disappears, we automatically list all the men who might have loved her?”

  I smirked. “It would be strange if it weren’t so logical. Can’t argue with the stats.”

  “I know the stats, but it still seems illogical. I would never consciously hurt someone I loved.”

  “Makes sense, in a way. When a man kills his wife or whatever, it’s often a crime of passion. Passion doesn’t go with indifference. And, well, men hurt women every day.”

  “I feel like a traitor, talking about her like she’s dead.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “We won’t get anywhere with our heads in the sand.”

  *

  While Lusig went to numb her worries with television, I went ahead and reached out to Kaymak. His e-mail was public, and I sent him a disingenuous note, expressing interest in his scholarship. I tracked down one of his publicly available articles, a slim piece of writing on Slate, and I went to town kissing his ass. I ended by asking him if he had a minute to spare for a coffee.

  His response came almost immediately:

  Dear Miss Song,

  Under normal circumstances, I’d be delighted to meet for coffee, but I am taking some time off from work due to personal calamity. (My life is falling apart.)

  Best,

  T.

  I read the short e-mail three times and wondered how many like it he’d sent in the last month. It sounded like Nora’s professor was having a calm but pervasive meltdown.

  I wandered over to the living room to update Lusig. She was sitting on the couch with the decimated remains of a Chinese takeout lunch spread out on the table in front of her.

  “I feel for him,” she said, shaking her head. “But if he feels that strongly about her, he’ll help. You should just tell him what we’re up to.”

  “That might be the right approach.”

  I drafted another e-mail reintroducing myself, with Lusig looking over my shoulder. I sent it off. There was no immediate response this time.

  Lusig sighed and sank down in the couch. “I feel so useless,” she said. “All I do is wait around, for this baby, for you. And now I’m watching you wait while I wait. I could explode.”

  “It’s part of the job, Lusig. Don’t worry. We’re getting places.”

  “If you say so. What else is on the agenda for today?”

  “We’re going to that EARTH meeting I told you about. In protest of the memorial.”

  She looked up in surprise and pointed at her chest. “We?”

  “No, don’t be silly. I’m hunting for criminals,” I said. “I’m going with Rob.”

  She laughed. “Wow. You might be even worse at romance than I am.”

  “Thanks.” I picked up a fortune cookie from the table and tossed it at her. “No eligible suitors in your life?”

  “They were circling the block before I got knocked up.”

  “But no one in particular?”

  “I was seeing this one dude, but it wasn’t serious. Nothing that could take this kind of weight.” She patted her stomach. “Once this baby’s out, it’s open season.”

  *

  Rubina relieved me at six, and Rob came at 6:30, as scheduled. I met him outside to prevent delay. The community center was less than two miles away, but I didn’t want to be late—as two Asians in a room full of Turks, I figured we’d stand out enough without drawing attention to ourselves.

  “You know, by the way, that this errand is for work, right?” I asked as we got in my car.

  “I figured you didn’t hang out with genocide deniers for your usual weekend fun.”

  “I should probably have mentioned this earlier,” I said. “But work has gotten pretty fucked up lately. I think we’ll be safe, but I don’t want you saying I didn’t warn you if something weird happens.”

  “This is all very enticing,” he said, opening the passenger door with exaggerated slowness.

  I told him about getting threatened at the Spearmint Rhino. “He wasn’t any Deniz Kahraman. Not her husband, either, unless I found the wrong millionaire Adam Kahraman on the Internet. He’s a new player, but also likely involved in EARTH. Kizil never showed up with a stocky Turkish guy, or had one waiting for him in the elevator bank? Bug eyes, heavy cologne, fingers thick as ropes?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell, but I can’t say I notice fingers on everyone I meet.”

  “I wasn’t checking for a wedding ring.” I held out my wrist, where the bruise had faded to a faint oxidized stain. “This is four days old.”

  “He did this to you?”

  “Yeah. And I’m hoping to see him again tonight. I didn’t get to ask him much the first time around.”

  “You sure he’ll be there?”

  “No, but more likely there than elsewhere.”

  “Kizil could be there.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he could. But I’m not scared of him.”

  “Why not? He could be a murderer.”

  “First, I know more about him than he does about me. Second, he’ll never get me alone.”

  “All right, then, boss. Let’s do this.”

  The community center was off Brand in a part of Glendale riddled with strip malls. The walls were peeling beige, the carpet worn down to its last threads. There were about twenty people when we arrived, arranged in stackable chairs with metal legs and thin cushions.

  As expected, we were the only Asians in the room, and we drew a few stares as soon as we walked in. I led the way to the refreshment table, where we filled paper plates with cube cheese and baby carrots.

  “Some party,” Rob whispered.

  “We should’ve thought to bring a flask.”

  We took two seats toward the back of the room, and I scanned the faces for the ones I might know. Neither Kizil nor the anonymous Turk were there when the meeting started, around 7:15, and I wondered if this was a waste of time. Then a thin, dark-haired, fox-faced woman positioned herself behind a wooden podium and cleared her throat, shushing the pockets of chatter around the room. It only took me a few seconds to place her.

  “Hello,” she said. “Thank you all for coming. My name is Deniz Kahraman. I am here on behalf of the Europeans and Americans for the Recovery of Truth in History. Welcome.”

  The crowd was too sparse to generate actual applause, but a few pairs of hands splashed together.

  “We are here to discuss a very grave matter, one that concerns the continued slander of our homeland and our blood.” She cleared her throat again. “As most of you surely know, the city of Glendale has elected to raise a memorial for the centennial of what they are calling, in so many words, the Armenian genocide. This action is invasive and unjustified, not to mention a sinful expenditure of taxpayer money. We at EARTH believe we have a moral duty to oppose this atrocity.”

  I had to stop myself from visibly wincing at that word. An atrocity—the erection of a memorial for a million victims of slaughter.

  She continued in this vein before laying out the basic threads of a legal argument, boiled down for delivery to a civilian crowd. It all sounded pretty bogus, but I sat and listened carefully. I could feel Rob next to me doing the same.

  When she finished her opening speech, Deniz Kahraman opened the floor to questions. There was a pause as it became clear the crowd was too small to generate lines at a microphone. A small elderly woman in the front row asked a general question about what she could do, and
Deniz answered it gratefully, paraphrasing a sizable chunk of her prepared speech. When she was finished, a man in the second row raised his hand.

  “I’m a Turkish-American,” he said, trying to find his voice. He paused, and when he spoke again, he was louder. “And I’m ashamed of what is happening here today.”

  “That is not a question,” Deniz noted drily. A quiver of anger passed across her face. “But I will answer it, regardless. Shame is what they want us to feel,” she said. “We are supposed to be ashamed of our blood, of our history, of things that were in contention a hundred years ago. How is this fair?”

  “I didn’t say I was ashamed of the genocide. I said I’m ashamed of this, right now. This attempt to deny history.”

  “We are looking for truth. We are looking for history. We are the thinkers, the only ones who are not content to accept the sourest version of Turkey’s past. In America, it is almost a crime to say that there are two sides to every story.”

  “But that’s because there aren’t two sides to every story. Sometimes there is one truth. This is one of those times. EARTH isn’t looking to tell a second truthful side—it’s trying to obscure the truth in favor of whitewashing history. It’s examining what happened under the guise of objectivity, but no one’s fooling anyone here. There’s an obvious agenda.”

  “Everyone has an agenda. You clearly came with one of your own.”

  “What I want is what every proud person of Turkish blood should want. I want to move on, and do it correctly.” When she didn’t interrupt him, he started again with more fervor. “No one hates Germany anymore. Not for their part in the Holocaust. They owned up to their guilt, and they were able to move on.”

  “The Germans?” she shouted in disgust. “You would compare us to the Germans? No, that is your first mistake. We are nothing like the Germans.”

  “You’re right, of course, and that is what I’m saying. The Germans did right by history. They acknowledged their sins, and the shame of their nation was absorbed by their people generations ago. When I see a young German I feel sick with jealousy.”

  “In the first place,” Deniz continued, ignoring the dissenter, “the Germans committed genocide. As I have already discussed, what happened between us and the Armenians was war.”

  He laughed. “War? What war? Let me ask you—when a husband beats his wife, is that a fight?”

  “I don’t see how this is relevant.”

  “Because this argument is classic victim blaming. The wrong was so great, that the only way to make it not a wrong is to villainize the dead. That is pure cowardice, an unwillingness to engage with guilt in a thoughtful, responsible way.”

  “We Turks are the only ones with any interest in examining the intricacies of this past.”

  “With what evidence?” He let out a single bark of a laugh, cutting off his own question. “No, forget that. I have a better question—why do you care?” He turned around and took in the whole room with a beseeching gaze. “Why did you all show up here tonight? To fight? For what? To maintain a lie a hundred years old?”

  “I might ask the same of you,” said Deniz Kahraman, who was growing pink in the ears. “You are the one crashing our meeting.”

  “Your meeting? I am a Turk. I care about truth in history.”

  “You came here to demonize our ancestors—your own ancestors.”

  “Who are dead! Why victimize the descendants of their victims? Why does this memorial offend you?”

  “The lie is an outrage to the blood.”

  “‘The blood’?” he asked, employing scornful air quotes. “Okay, how about this? Why does it matter to you personally, Ms. Deniz Kahraman. Did your mother not hug you enough? Does your husband find you sexually uninteresting?”

  He stood up pointing, with a wobble in his knees, and at that moment I knew two things. That this man was stinking drunk, and that he was Assistant Professor Taner Kaymak, Nora Mkrtchian’s sidepiece.

  “You should all be ashamed!” he shouted. “As a Turk, as a man, as a citizen of this earth, I am ashamed of you!”

  There was a long silence. Kaymak had crossed a line, and he was acting erratic enough to ignore, like a screaming paranoiac or a subway evangelist. I could feel the relief in the room as the genocide deniers decided he wasn’t worth their time.

  He stood looking for a few beats, then nodded as if he’d confirmed something within himself. Without being asked, he started toward the door.

  Eleven

  I weighed my options. I could stay through the meeting and talk to Deniz, or I could chase after Kaymak. Deniz had ties to the Consul General, and she might be the key to understanding the EARTH scheme. She knew, in all likelihood, where the money came from, and if I leaned on her, I could find out whether she acted on behalf of the Turkish government. But Kaymak was Nora’s secret boyfriend, and he was, from the looks of it, a volatile kind of guy.

  Deniz could wait. I tapped Rob’s knee and whispered, “We’re following him out.”

  Sometime before we caught up with him, Kaymak had found a bush to puke in. He was bent over its trimmed edge, grabbing his knees and hurling.

  I walked to his side and lowered my head to speak close to his ear. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to engage with crazies?”

  He stumbled and swerved to look at me. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m Juniper Song,” I said. “I emailed you earlier, Professor Taner Kaymak. This is my friend Robert Park. Pleasure to meet you.”

  He stared at me with his jaw slack. “How did you—”

  “I didn’t come here to find you. I came here to find Nora Mkrtchian.”

  “Nora—my Nora? You know where she is?”

  I had to admire the guy—he’d held out pretty well with the speech making considering he was too toasted to keep reasoning ahead of emotion.

  “No, I wish I did. I’m looking for her on behalf of Lusig Hovanian.”

  He perked up. “Lusig? She knew about me?”

  “No. The police told me about you.”

  “The police?” His eyes widened and then narrowed to slits. “Well next time you talk to them, tell them they know where to find me. I have nothing to hide.” He spat into his puke bush. “Those incompetent bastards. They can’t find her, so they come knocking on my door. I tell them everything I know, and they still can’t find her. And now what, they want more of me? Now that is a waste of taxpayer money.”

  “Relax, they’re not breaking down your door anytime soon. Though I’d watch out for the CHP if you’re going home like this.”

  He sat down on the curb. “I’m responsible,” he said. “I took a cab.”

  “You got wasted and decided to crash this community meeting? What the hell for?”

  “To give these fuckers a piece of my mind.”

  “You were doing okay for a while there. For what it’s worth, I’m on your side.”

  “Logic and justice and goddamn human decency are on my side. Scholarship is on my side. The only people not on my side are blind hateful scum like the people in that room.”

  “Not just politically. I’m looking for Nora. You and I—we want the same thing.”

  He cleared his throat noisily and spat again. “Do we?” he demanded, taking a step toward me. “Do you want her back so you can caress her again? So you can hear her sleepy voice in the morning?”

  Rob and I glanced at each other and raised our eyebrows in unison. I turned back to Kaymak. “You got me there, I guess. I’m not sexually invested in her return.”

  He grimaced, somewhat smugly, before recognizing the sarcasm in my voice.

  “All I’m saying is we’re on the same side. I want to find Nora. There is really no reason to antagonize me.”

  He hung his head, looking more drunk than chastised.

  “I’d like to talk. Maybe we can get some food in you.” I looked at Rob. “Maybe he’d eat a Bloomin’ Onion?”

  Kaymak’s head snapped up and he narrowed his eyes again before nodding.
“I would eat a Bloomin’ Onion.”

  We walked to my car and piled in. Ten minutes later, we were seated in a booth in an Outback Steakhouse.

  “I thought this was going to be our thing,” Rob whispered in my ear with mock petulance.

  “We can always come back to the Outback.”

  “Is that from a commercial?”

  “No, you think I could sell it to them?”

  Kaymak watched us gloomily and I decided this was not the best time to flirt with Rob.

  “So,” I said, turning my attention back to Kaymak. “Self-hating Turk, huh?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I’m kidding. But Deniz Kahraman seemed to think so.”

  “A lot of Turks would call me self-hating. Worse than that, too. A traitor.” He wiped his lips and leaned forward, growing more animated. “Do you know that my own mother wouldn’t speak to me for days when I first used the phrase ‘Armenian genocide’ in her presence?”

  “Just the phrase?”

  “The phrase is everything.”

  “I guess ‘genocide’ is a loaded word.”

  “I’m an academic, you know? Language matters to me, and this is something I’ve always known. But the fact is, language matters to everyone, all the time. And when it comes to defining anything sensitive? Language is everything. The vocabulary matters. Its provenance matters. This word—‘genocide’—it was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943, to describe what had happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. It’s fascinating that there’s a question today about whether this term defines the phenomenon it was conceived to define. But there is a question. It’s been forced on the Armenians, to prove that the death of a million people was genocide, not war. No one asks whether a million died.”

  He was interrupted by a cheery waiter in a red polo shirt who came to take our order. By the time he went away, Kaymak was itching to get back to his subject.

  “Obama,” he exclaimed, as soon as our menus were taken away. “Before he was elected, he publicly acknowledged the Armenian genocide, and he promised to formally recognize it as such when he was campaigning. As soon as he became president, he changed the way he talked about it, to the extent he’s talked about it at all. Turkey has too much power, believe it or not. They’re an American ally, and the U.S. is afraid of pissing them off.”