Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery

by Steph Cha

  “So, when did it turn into a romantic encounter?”

  She bit her lip, thinking. I could see muddled thoughts crossing slowly, haphazardly across her forehead and eyes. “Not right away, but quickly. He came in, and we hung out in the living room. I remember he was wearing a jacket, and he took it off and hung it on the back of a chair. Like this.” She mimed placing a wide-shouldered jacket on the back of a chair with great care. “That’s when my heartbeat picked up on the possibilities.”

  “Why? Because he was peeling his clothes off?”

  She laughed. “No. This is stupid, okay?”

  “Sure. I mean you’re telling me about the time you fucked your cousin’s husband.”

  “Fair enough.” She squeezed her eyes shut and winced. “But the jacket. It was this nice jacket. Like, nice wool, not a wrinkle in it, neat lapels, whatever. And look, I’ve had some guys over at my house, okay? It’s not like I’d never seen a man in a jacket before. But the way he hung it was so precious, like he wouldn’t want to dirty my floor with his shit. Like he cared enough, or respected me enough, and I thought, What would it be like to live with a man like that?”

  “Did you consider that maybe he’s just fastidious?”

  “That’s not the point. It was visceral, okay?”

  “Sure. So what happened? He took off his jacket and you jumped on him?”

  “No, we sat on the couch and chatted for a while. We had a beer, nothing crazy. And then he told me how stressed he was about the IVF, and how Ruby had been just a crazy neurotic mess.”

  “Ah, the crazy neurotic wife. Maybe who didn’t understand him?”

  She looked at me with a touch of misery. “No, it wasn’t like that. Obviously, Van knows I love Ruby. He wasn’t trying to seduce me by pitting me against her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Jesus, that’s brilliant. He convinced you that a brief, functional affair might help Rubina.”

  “Don’t you see how that might have been true?”

  I tilted my head and gave her a gentle, skeptical look. “I don’t think that argument passes muster, and I’m a more lenient judge of these things when drunk.”

  “Maybe sober, you’d see the logic more clearly.”

  “No, Lusig. Come on.”

  She sighed. “I know, I know. But at the time, we convinced each other. We crossed a line, but at least part of my motive was pure.”

  “Lusig.” I laughed all of a sudden, the ridiculousness of her confession catching up to me. “Come on. You must know how insane this sounds.”

  She giggled reactively, and we fell into a call-and-response of weird laughter, getting louder and louder until club patrons started looking at us.

  “You’re right,” she said, wiping a tear from one eye. “It was insane. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Come on, let’s get some tacos or something. We’re at a nightclub with a metal detector, and people are staring at us.”

  We walked over to a stand called Tacos Mexico. It was five minutes away, on Broadway by the renovated Ace Hotel. The street was littered and a homeless man shouted at us as we walked by, his face distorted by anger that had little to do with us. Broadway was gentrifying in strange, random heaves, but it wasn’t the prettiest part of downtown to walk in at night. It wasn’t the safest part either, but I’d dealt with worse demons than the poor and schizophrenic.

  The taco stand was well lit and crowded, with a dozen drunk hungry twentysomethings lined up around the counter. I recognized two Asian girls from The Mayan—they’d been the only other ones. They looked at us, and I could tell they recognized me, too. One of them even gave me a quick nod.

  We ordered a mess of tacos, chopped pork and beef parts piled into hot tortillas. We received them with gratitude and loaded up on salsa, and after we paid we got lucky—one of the little tables opened up, and we sat down with our feast.

  She bit into her third taco and made a face. “What the fuck is this one?”

  I held a hand out and she passed it to me. I took a bite. “Oh, this must be the buche.”

  “What is that, a body part?”

  “It’s pork stomach, I think? Or intestine?”

  She stuck her tongue out and wiped at it, then picked up a carne asada taco. “You know we live in a country where you can just walk into a grocery store and buy bacon, right?”

  I shrugged and took a bite of her reject. “And we live in a city where you can eat buche tacos at two in the morning. Maybe you didn’t know this, but Koreans love innards. They’re one of our top-ten categories of drunk food.”

  “There are more than ten categories of drunk food?”

  “Most Korean food works as drunk food. The rest is hangover food.”

  She laughed. “Do you have anything left in that flask?” She pointed at my purse with the hand that wasn’t holding half a taco.

  “What, are you serious? You’re going to puke.”

  She shrugged. “Then I puke.”

  I shook the flask. It was mostly full. We’d only managed a few pulls in the cab on our way to The Mayan. I unscrewed the cap and took a sip. It wasn’t expensive whiskey, but it tasted like nectar compared to the drinks in the club.

  She held out her hands, cupped together like I might pour it directly into her palms. I passed her the flask and watched as she took a long gulp.

  “How do you know the IVF didn’t work?” I asked.

  She swallowed. “I may have stated that too strongly. I don’t know that the kid’s mine.”

  “But you think it’s likely?”

  “Given IVF success rates, yeah.”

  “So I take it you guys fucked more than that one time.”

  She nodded. “After that first time, pretty much all the way until I was pregnant.”

  “And then?”

  She drank from the flask again. “And then I was pregnant. That was that.”

  I remembered Lusig’s hostility toward Van, Van’s admonition against getting too close to Lusig. “That was that, huh?”

  “What could we do? I was never supposed to be the mother, and neither of us wanted to hurt Ruby.”

  “So,” I said. “What’s your plan? You and Van, both of you, are going to keep this a secret, from Rubina and Alex, for the rest of everyone’s lives?”

  “When you phrase it that way, I guess it sounds naïve.”

  “I won’t patronize you. You’ve held on to this secret for almost a year. You must have some idea of what a secret like that weighs.” I thought of the skeletons in my own closet, what I wouldn’t do to get rid of them. I knew the way guilt could gnaw at you, claim skin and soul, make you different from the inside.

  “It’s terrible. And I know I shouldn’t even have told you. I just…” She started to cry. “I haven’t had anyone else I could talk to since Nora disappeared. I miss her so fucking much.”

  Something tingled in my head, a missed train of thought, an alcoholic blip. I grasped for words, but I didn’t know how to comfort her.

  “I feel like I’m being punished, you know?” she went on. “I did something horrible to someone I love, and so the universe took Nora.”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” I said.

  She took another pull from the flask. “Please don’t tell her,” she said.

  Rubina was my client, and I knew that I owed her a duty of truth and loyalty. Still, I answered immediately. “I won’t.”

  Fourteen

  Lusig’s confession stayed with me like a hangover that refused to dissipate. I felt undeniably closer to her, bonded by the implied intimacy of her confidence. That feeling stayed with me even as I processed my sympathy for Rubina, my disgust at the facts of the affair. But that wasn’t all. The night’s revelations unsettled me completely, and I went back to them again and again, whenever my brain found time to be idle.

  I didn’t buy that Nora’s disappearance was cosmic punishment for Lusig and Van’s affair, but the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that th
ey were somehow connected. They were two enormously important events in the same small circle—I couldn’t believe that they had nothing to do with each other.

  As soon as my head cleared, it struck me that Nora must have known about the affair. That was an easy connection to draw, and it seemed like it must be meaningful. But it wasn’t sufficient. I thought about who else knew that secret—Van, Lusig, Nora, and now me. Did Rubina? And if she did, would she have wanted to punish Lusig?

  I was becoming less and less satisfied with Kizil as Nora’s killer. There were pieces of this story I could still uncover. I could feel the answers breathing near me, tantalizingly out of reach.

  When Rubina walked into the office days later, I felt like I’d conjured her with my renewed sense of mission.

  I stood up to greet her and she shook my hand.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said. “How’s Alex? Is he out of the hospital yet?”

  “Next week,” she said. “He’s in good condition, thank God. Would you like to see a picture?”

  She handed me her phone, open to a picture of a tiny, dark-eyed newborn in a blue cloth hat. I wondered if Rubina questioned his maternity, then noticed her watching me look at her son. I scrolled to the next picture and the next, and saw her nod her head with each swipe, tracking my attention with unconscious approval. Whether this child was Lusig’s or not, he definitely belonged to Rubina.

  “He’s lovely,” I said. “I’m glad he’s doing well.”

  There was a long pause as I waited for Rubina to tell me why she’d come. I doubted I was on the top of her list for visiting with baby pictures.

  “What can I do for you?” I finally asked.

  She bit her lip and I wondered what could make a woman like her hesitate.

  “It’s my husband,” she said.

  My heart leapt. “What about Van?”

  “I have reason to believe he’s been lying to me.”

  I kept my face neutral. “About what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  I started bargaining in my head. If she asked me point-blank about an affair, I would deny knowledge, but I wouldn’t pretend to look into it for her. If she didn’t, I knew I would never recuse myself.

  “Then why do you think he’s been lying?”

  “There’s some activity in our joint account that looks suspicious.”

  This took me by surprise—I’d expected lust and betrayal, but not money.

  “I’m not a financial expert, but what kind of activity?”

  “You don’t need to be a financial expert,” she said. “I’m not either. I hadn’t even looked closely at our statement for over a month.”

  “The activity started in the last month?”

  “Yes. Regular withdrawals of large amounts of cash. Five hundred here, a thousand there. About once a week.”

  “You’re sure Van’s the one making them, and not a thief with your pin number?”

  “I’m fairly sure. All the withdrawals come from the same ATM in Van’s hospital. Also, Van is much more attentive to our finances than I am. There is no way he wouldn’t have noticed if this were fraud.”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t want to speculate,” she said.

  “But you’re worried.”

  “Yes. I am. We have a child now. If Van’s developed a very expensive hobby, I need to know.”

  She was alluding to infidelity, but I didn’t think he was withdrawing large sums of money to give to Lusig. I decided not to press the question.

  “What would you like me to do?” I asked.

  “Monitor him,” she said. “He comes home late very often. Sometimes he stays out all night. It’s possible that he’s always at the hospital, and if that’s the case, tell me so, and I’ll confront him myself. If it isn’t, please let me know.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Tonight, if you can. He has an overnight shift. I’m using the same GPS tracker I used for Lusig.”

  *

  Van worked at the County hospital in Boyle Heights, and according to this tracker, he was at work when I left my place at six o’clock. I made camp at a nearby Mexican restaurant. I ate dinner and drank two micheladas before settling in with a book while I waited for movement. I was starting to think he was really on an overnight shift when he left the hospital at eleven o’clock.

  I tracked down Van’s black BMW 5 Series and followed it west from Boyle Heights, riding the 101 and the 110 to the bending dark of Olympic. I maintained a good distance between us, keeping my eye on the slick shark fin of the back antenna.

  He drove to Westlake, just outside downtown, and pulled into a parking lot off Olympic, lit dully by a glowing sign that announced Seoul Tokyo BBQ. I pulled to the curb and parked my car a half block up.

  I remembered the Korean barbecue smell that seemed to hang perpetually on Van’s clothes and considered the penchant some Korean business owners had for casually illicit activity—I’d seen the after-hours bars and indoor-smoking zones firsthand without really trying. Despite the mixed provenance of the name, I had no doubt that Seoul Tokyo BBQ was 100-percent Korean.

  I waited for a minute then drove around the block. The restaurant looked closed. There was no light coming through the windows, and if I hadn’t seen Van pull into the lot I might have thought it was empty. Then as I rolled past, I caught a telling glance of the parking lot—within a few spots of each other were a bright yellow Bentley and a red Ferrari.

  I couldn’t follow Van inside without being recognized, but I had to find out what was happening in Seoul Tokyo BBQ. I knew this much—if a Bentley, a Ferrari, and a lying doctor walked into a Korean restaurant after eleven on a Tuesday night, it probably wasn’t a Korean restaurant.

  I weighed the possibilities on my drive home, and decided it was either a brothel or a gambling operation, but that I’d put my money on gambling. I doubted anyone would shell out to get laid on a table, and gambling fit what I already knew about Van.

  I called Rob.

  “How would you like to go to work with me tomorrow?” I asked him.

  “I’m inclined to say yes, but what’s the plan?”

  “I need to check out an illegal casino.”

  ”Yes,” he said, with great enthusiasm. “I am all-in for this plan.”

  “Good. Are you okay with a little role-playing?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll be going as stereotypical Asian male with gambling problem, a perennial casino favorite.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll be fluttering my eyelashes as arm candy.”

  “You’ll be very convincing.”

  I laughed. “We’ll have to be.”

  “Should I bring money?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Bring lots of money. Stuff a clip full of ones if you have to. I want you looking like a jackpot.”

  “I can see this turning out badly.”

  “Don’t worry. Hopefully we won’t have to spend much, and I can reimburse you for what we do spend.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I think maybe we should smell like booze.”

  *

  I asked Lusig to lunch the next day, and we met up for ramen at a place in Little Tokyo. I hadn’t seen her since the night at The Mayan—she’d passed out drunk at my place, but left before I woke up. I wondered if she regretted telling me about Van, though I suspected she’d meant to ever since Kizil’s murder. I wondered if it started to bother her, too, a stone with the look of irrelevance, but too large to leave unturned.

  She showed up fifteen minutes late, looking unwashed and gloomy. Her face turned red when she saw me at the counter, and she walked over to me with her head tilted down, her greasy hair catching the light. She sat down next to me without giving me straight eye contact.

  She continued to act sheepish and weird through a half-muttered stream of small talk that filled the gaps when we weren’t slurping noodles.

 
; “So,” I said, when we were nearing the bottoms of our bowls.

  She noted the shift in my tone and her body tensed, waiting.

  “Do you regret telling me about—”

  She put up a hand. “Please, don’t even say it.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She took a long sip of soup, her eyes intent on it. “Yes and no,” she said, looking straight ahead. “I wanted to tell you. If I hadn’t told you then, I’d be gearing up to do it now. So, yes, I regret it, but only because I’m ashamed and I worry what you think of me.”

  “Don’t worry. I have no desire to scorn you,” I said. “But I have been thinking about what you told me.”

  She looked at me then. “What about it?”

  “Well, for one thing, why did you tell me?”

  “I told you. I just needed to talk to someone.”

  “Are you sure that’s all? It has nothing to do with the fact that you told Nora, and then she disappeared?”

  She sucked in her breath. “What are you saying?”

  “No, I’m not suggesting it’s your fault. But you did tell Nora, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she said, cautiously. “I told her probably three or four months ago.”

  “Who else have you told?”

  “Just you.”

  I nodded. “It’s a big secret for a missing woman to have in her pocket through coincidence.”

  She didn’t respond for a while, but her expression grew thoughtful and agitated, like that of a poker player warming up to a big call. “I know,” she said finally. “If I’m being honest, yeah, it’s been bothering me for a while. I didn’t feel right letting you walk away without telling you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “Because it didn’t seem connected to me. It still doesn’t. Sure, it’s a big secret, but it isn’t Nora’s secret. I just don’t know why it would endanger her.”

  “Maybe she was looking to tell.”

  “No. Never.”

  “But can we just pretend, for a second, that she was? Who would’ve wanted to shut her up?”

  Her chair squeaked against the floor as she pushed away from the counter. “This is dumb,” she said. “I should leave.”

  “Do what you want, but if you refuse to even ask questions, you’ll never learn anything about anything.”