Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery

by Steph Cha

  “What makes you say that?”

  “They don’t have a body, for one thing. That makes it hard to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt. But also, you have information that they want.”

  He gulped, visibly, his Adam’s apple like something stuck in his throat. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Sure you do. You have connections to some of the shadiest people in L.A. The kind of people it takes teams of police years of hard work to track down. You know the names and faces protected by other names and faces.”

  “They’ll kill me.”

  I shrugged. “You knew that might happen the minute you got in bed with them. Anyway, that’s your problem. All I’m trying to say is it’s not the end of the world.”

  “But my wife—”

  “Yeah, your wife’s going to find out. There’s no way around that.”

  He stared at his empty glass. “Just do me this one favor,” he said, subdued.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depends what it is.”

  “Let me tell them.”

  “Them?”

  “Ruby and Lusig. My family.”

  I thought about it. I wondered if he could look them in the eye and confess. It sounded a whole lot harder than walking into a police station.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you have the balls for that, I’ll hold out.”

  It was strange, really, that I had any sympathy for this man. He was a murderer, yet he had been a murderer for as long as I’d known him. We’d lived under the same roof, and though I had no love for him, I had started to think of him as a reasonable, ordinary human being. I’d seen things about him that were interesting and true, that were a part of him apart from the desperate man who had killed an innocent woman. I couldn’t make the switch to seeing him as a stranger. It didn’t matter how little he deserved my compassion.

  Still, I didn’t need to sit with him a minute longer. I swallowed the rest of my drink and left.

  *

  I checked my phone as soon as I got in my car. Rubina had texted me four times, asking me to follow Van. I’d have to wait to get back to her. I made sure the interview had recorded. It was all there—a thirty-five minute audio file with a full confession, ready to go.

  I didn’t know how long Van would take to come clean with Rubina and Lusig. I couldn’t wait overnight to get the recording to Veronica. It was too big to e-mail her from my phone, but she’d have it before bedtime. At least before my bedtime.

  I was relieved in a cowardly way that I wouldn’t be the one to tell Lusig. I knew she was torn by her desire to know, but I couldn’t help feeling she was better off in the dark. She’d entangled her life with Van. She’d trusted him. Maybe she’d even loved him. I couldn’t imagine how she might react.

  And then there was Rubina. Poor Rubina. I didn’t even know where Van would start. What was worse, from a wife’s point of view—the seduction of a loved one or the murder of an acquaintance?

  I kept trying to picture the scene of this confession as I drove home. I couldn’t do it. It was inconceivable.

  I was turning onto my street when I realized—it was never going to happen. Van had doubled down.

  At first I thought I’d run over a pothole. There was the loud pop, the sudden lurch, the same disorientation of being thrown while stable. I cursed and started to pull over. The car limped as I drove, dragging its busted tire like a mangled foot.

  Then lights came on behind me, high beams come to life out of darkness, flashing to get my attention. I became sharply aware of the emptiness of the street. All this nightmare needed was a full moon and a sudden rain.

  I reviewed my impressions of the last fifteen seconds. Had I heard a gunshot? I became sure that I had.

  The car behind me continued to flash its lights. I couldn’t see much else. Not the driver, not the number of passengers, not even the make of the car. The dark and the light were blinding.

  I took a deep breath, then another, making an effort to convince my body that I was in control. It helped. I made a mental list of immediate objectives: First and foremost, escape if possible; if I couldn’t outrun dedicated pursuers with a gimp car in a dark city, then the next best thing was to ensure my release.

  I turned on my hazard lights and crept along the side of the road, slowing enough to indicate that I was rolling to a stop. I could tell from the sound and feel of my car that the back left tire had been blown to burnt rags. The road scraped against what remained, and I felt the rough, dry impact grate like nails on a swallowed chalkboard.

  As the car rolled I got my phone out and called Veronica, pleading out loud for her to answer.

  She picked up after the fifth ring.

  “This better be good.” Her voice was hoarse and groggy.

  “I found out what happened to Nora.”

  I heard her scrambling to rise on the other end of the line. I had her attention. “Tell me.”

  “She’s dead. Killed by a man named Van Gasparian.”

  “Gasparian? Isn’t that the name of your client?”

  “Yeah, her husband. I don’t have time to get into it. Listen, I’m in some shit. Where are you now?”

  “It’s one o’clock in the morning, J.S., where do you think I am?”

  “You live in Eagle Rock, right? If you leave now, you can get to Echo Park in twenty minutes?”

  “The fuck’s going on?”

  “I have a confession to Nora’s murder on tape. It’s on my phone. I wanted to send it right away but it’s too big.”

  “Can’t you Dropbox it or something?”

  I almost laughed. “No, not now. I have to concentrate on getting away from whoever just shot out my tire and is trying to get me to stop.”

  “Where are you?” Her voice was taut. She wasn’t wasting any more time.

  “I’m basically home, in Echo Park, on Santa Ynez. I’m going to try and get down to the lake, but I might not make it.” I only had two downhill blocks to go to Glendale Boulevard, which was a much busier street than mine, but I doubted I’d be allowed to get that far without a fight.

  I heard the sound of a door slamming behind me. There was no longer any distance between my car and the one behind it. I’d slowed down enough that the pursuer could get to me on foot. “Come quickly. Bring friends,” I shouted into the phone.

  I hung up. Veronica would come. I didn’t have time to dial 911. I slammed on the gas.

  The engine roared, but after an energetic twenty-foot sprint, it was clear I wasn’t outrunning anyone. It didn’t help that the car behind me was still moving. There were at least two people coming for me.

  Chaz always insisted we didn’t need to carry guns. I’d disagreed in theory, but I’d never gotten around to getting the permissions I’d need to have one on the job. I kept a Taser in my glove compartment, but it wouldn’t do me much good with two attackers and a busted car. All I could hope to do was to Taser the guy on foot, and piss off him, the driver, and whatever other goons they had in tow.

  I went back to my cell phone. I might have time to dial 911.

  But now there was a face at my window.

  It belonged to an Asian man with a shaggy black beard shot through with a dozen strands of white. He was about forty-five, with coarse skin and narrow eyes. Chinese, I thought instinctively, though I couldn’t say why. On another street, at another hour, I might have thought he had a kind face, gentle and a little doughy, soft in the cheeks. But even Mister Rogers would have put the fear in me under these circumstances, and this was not Mister Rogers. This had to be the man Van knew as Hong.

  He tapped at my window and I tried to think of a way to avoid rolling it down. My tire was busted, but I was inside, everyone else was out. I didn’t want to create another breach.

  He sighed loud enough for me to hear through the glass. When he tapped again, the sound was heavier. I looked back up. He was tapping with a gun.

  I rolled down the window and waited for him to speak.

  “You seem to have a flat t
ire, miss,” he said, finally. His voice was smooth and calm, with the hint of an accent carried over from a childhood in another country.

  “It’s a little late for that script,” I said.

  “I guess you’re right.” He laughed, congenial and maybe a little embarrassed, as if I’d pointed out that his fly was open. “I’m not here to change your tire,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Why don’t you get out of the car?” he suggested, casually aiming the gun at my throat.

  I obeyed. It was clear in any case that the car was not going to get me out of there.

  The other car had stopped behind mine. It was a Crown Victoria with a dull blue paint job, nondescript aside from a family resemblance to a police car. Another man was emerging from the driver’s seat. He was big. The kind of big that suggests oafishness, thoughtless physical power—the childish strength of Lenny Small, the servility of Pinky to the Brain. He wore a scowl on an Eastern-European face, his eyebrows thick and blunt. Boris.

  “This isn’t exactly a fair fight,” I said, echoing Hong’s reasonable tone. “I mean, there are two of you.”

  “I’ll make you a deal.” He gestured at his sidekick with a long thumb. “If you want to challenge us in hand-to-hand combat, you can fight him while I watch.”

  I entertained a brief fantasy of kneeing his balls and running away, but I knew there wasn’t anything in it.

  “You might be interested to know that I’ve already called the police,” I said instead.

  The men looked at each other. “I’d like to take a look at your phone,” Hong said. I gave it to him and he thumbed the screen, finding my call history. “No 911 call.”

  “No, but check the time stamp. I called someone, didn’t I? I can assure you I wasn’t ordering pizza.”

  “Veronica Sanchez. Girlfriend of yours?”

  “You could say that. She’s also a homicide detective.”

  He thrust his tongue into a cheek, causing the beard beneath it to bristle. “Yeah? And what’d you tell her? Couldn’t have had much to say about us.”

  He had a point. I couldn’t have seen much before he approached me, and I was off the phone by then. I thought for a few seconds, about whether it would be wise to tell them I had police coming.

  Hong might as well have read my mind. “Are they coming here?” There was no trace of fear, or even anxiety, in his voice.

  I didn’t say anything, and he laughed, softly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re not staying, either way.”

  Raw panic ran through me, and I remembered other times when I’d been packed into strange cars by dangerous men. It was a scenario that never seemed to end very well.

  “It’s over for Van Gasparian,” I blurted out. “I told my friend he killed Nora Mkrtchian. I got that from his own mouth, and he might not have told you this, as he didn’t know, but I recorded his confession.”

  He stared at the phone in his hand. “On this thing?”

  I nodded. I was about to tell him that I’d already sent it to the police when Boris took the phone from his hand and smashed it on the pavement, crunching it under a heavy-soled dress shoe.

  There went Van’s confession. I wasn’t likely to get another, even if I did make it out of this night alive. I felt sick to my stomach, like my computer had crashed and swallowed my thesis. Only the recording was a bit more important than schoolwork.

  I kept my face as calm as possible, then morphed my expression into a smile. On the bright side, the giant’s big move had strengthened my bluff.

  “If you’d waited one second, you might’ve spared the effort and saved me a few hundred bucks,” I said. “I already sent it to the police.”

  Until a couple years ago, when I started this business, I’d always thought of myself as a bad liar. It was a skill I’d never put to the test in any serious way, and I just assumed, that given what I thought of as my forthright, bullshit-free nature, I would be unable to utter falsehoods without my better self getting in the way—if not by stopping me altogether, at least through a quiver in my voice, or a conscience-driven facial tic. If anyone had ever asked me, I would have said I was a terrible liar, and it would have been a standard humble brag, a baseless nod at my own integrity.

  Then one day, I started lying. Not pathologically, not when I could avoid it. But I compromised, and there was no way to take that back. I had my reasons, and in my softer moods, I let myself think they were good ones. The end result was no less dirty for my attempts at rationalization. There was a big lie to start, and it created the need for smaller ones. I told them to people I loved, to people I respected.

  I hated it. It made me vile; it changed me. But in a way it brought me closer to the truth of me. I learned one thing, anyway—it turned out I was a great liar, probably always had been.

  Hong stared at me for a full fifteen seconds, reading my face for a flinch or a tell. I didn’t give him anything. When he was finished, he smiled. His eyes narrowed even further, nearly disappearing amid a mirthful network of wrinkles.

  “How did you do that?” he asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

  I shrugged and hoped he’d defer to my millennial savvy. “Sent it to the cloud. You can do that from any smartphone. If your friend hadn’t brutalized mine, I could show you.”

  “It’s convenient,” he said, smiling steadily, “that I can’t call your bluff.” He gave his partner a strong pat on the back. It was less congenial than it was a threatening show of power, and it pushed the giant man in my direction.

  Anger flashed across his face as his footing faltered. He recovered quickly and walked right up to me, then smacked my face with the back of his hand.

  The shock of it almost dropped me. In my short career as a private investigator, I’d been grabbed, dragged, and held at gunpoint. I’d even been knocked out with a blow to the back of my head. But I’d never been confronted with anything as straightforward and openly violent as a hand to the face.

  The pain was stunning, bright and magnificent—it filled my whole head, from the ringing in my skull to the pulse in my lip to the tear in my cheek, where one jeweled finger had made first contact. My hands shot up to my face to assess the damage. The fingers at my cheek came away wet with blood.

  “No cause for that,” said Hong. He checked the time on his phone. There was a picture of a golden retriever on his lock screen. He was a regular sweetheart, this Hong.”We’d better get off this street, though. We can continue this conversation in the car.”

  Boris grabbed me by the shoulder with enough force to tack me up on a wall. Hong walked ahead and we followed him to the Crown Vic. Hong didn’t look back. Boris had me under control.

  He only let go to shove me into the backseat of the Crown Vic. I registered a throbbing soreness in my shoulder as I scanned my surroundings and noticed the car door was unlocked. I ran some quick calculations as Boris took the driver’s seat. Speed and distance and odds of survival. There wasn’t a straw to grasp at in sight. I let my head fall back against the seat.

  “Where should we go?” Boris asked Hong.

  “Echo Park, Echo Park…” He snapped his fingers. “Let’s go to that staircase,” he said brightly, as if he’d thought of the perfect spot to get lunch.

  They didn’t bother to blindfold me, and I took this as a bad sign. Boris drove silently while Hong fiddled with his phone. I willed myself to peek at his screen, which was how I learned he was playing Angry Birds.

  He didn’t look up until Boris stopped the car a few minutes later. We were still in Echo Park, on one of the hilly streets scattered with old apartment buildings. Hong got out first and Boris followed, dragging me with him.

  The street was dark and the buildings around us looked unoccupied, blind. We were parked at the foot of a long concrete staircase that ran up the hillside like a dirty zipper. There were dozens of these staircases speckled around the Eastside, free gyms for morning joggers that were empty at night. This one was more isolated even
than most, with nothing but ground and grass on either side. It was a nice spot to get up to no good. Hong did a lap up and down the stairs—making sure, I guessed, that there weren’t any high school kids fucking on the landings. When he was almost back to our level, he waved us over, saying, “The coast is clear.”

  There was a good chance I’d punch my ticket on this stairway, and I tried to make each step last as long as possible, trying to force time to expand to fill the needs of my mind, to allow for an arrival at a final kind of peace. It didn’t work.

  When we reached a high enough landing, Hong sat at the top of the steps and gestured for me to sit next to him. I obeyed, and felt Boris standing behind me like a pillar ready to fall down.

  “What did Van tell you?” Hong asked.

  “He told me what happened to Nora,” I said. “He told me he had friends in dark places who owed him a favor.”

  “A favor?” A note of contempt crept into his tone. The first hint of unpleasantness in his demeanor so far.

  The irritation felt like a step in the right direction. “Would that be a mischaracterization of your relationship?”

  He smiled wide. “What did he say about these friends?”

  I thought about our conversation, about the gambling operation in Seoul Tokyo Grill, his role as surgeon to the mob. Hong and Boris, named and described in recognizable detail.

  The recording was pure gold. It incriminated not only Van, but a whole ring of gangsters who had come in touch with him. I felt a powerful sense of loss.

  “Nothing,” I said, affecting suppressed exasperation. “He was vague. He kept saying he’d get killed if he said anything.”

  The giant made a gruff sound of approval, and I saw Hong flinch at the elbow, as if he might want to jab him in the ribs.

  All at once, the panic and desperation screaming in my head subsided into something quieter, something a little more relaxed and muffled. I saw my situation at a short remove—the distance between a player and her chessboard. I was in check, but not checkmate; I could force a draw with an ugly move. My split cheek throbbed with a vivid red pain. It was distracting, even in this moment, and I thought of the bleak lessons of 1984, the impossibility of heroism in the face of prospective pain.