Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  “Not really, though, right? I mean you didn’t actually deliver the human fetus.”

  “No. I guess if there’s one thing we did do right, it was that. Cleo had a Park Industries doctor perform the abortion to make sure it was done, but the anti-aging serum that Vera offered her was our proprietary technology, for our eyes only.”

  “You know that your boss’s wife is nuts, right?” I said to Kim. “I mean Wheeler is nuts, too, but it all starts with Cleo.”

  Kim’s robot face was back, but there were now cracks in that emotionless glaze. “That’s neither your concern nor mine.”

  Fatigue. That’s what it was. Brent Kim, as close to a Terminator T-1000 as a man can get, was tired. And I just realized why. “Why weren’t you at Ondaga Plain last night?”

  Breaking of the Kim façade, the sequel. He said nothing, but I felt plenty in that silence. I brought out my phone and queued up the freaky video I’d taken of the amrita ceremony between a meditating Krishvananda and a naked Cleo.

  “Why would you, the captain of the bodyguards, the one responsible for the safety and well-being of his boss’s wife, choose not to be by her side?” I clicked on the “play” button and turned the volume all the way up. The eerie female chanting turned into a grating metallic cacophony of sound.

  “Turn it off,” Kim said.

  “Maybe because you’d already seen enough of her madness and couldn’t subject yourself to one more nutjob outing?”

  Instead of grabbing my phone out of my hand and hurling it across the room, which I could feel was what he’d wanted to do, Kim held it and made himself watch the festivities. His eyes never blinked.

  He returned my phone. “I assume you’re smart enough to share this video with no one.”

  “It’s synced up in the cloud, as is anything that’s on my phone,” I said. “But no, I didn’t email it to TMZ.”

  “That’s not funny,” Kim said. “They would pay for this.”

  “All I care about, Mr. Brent Kim, is finding my client’s daughter, who may be in significant physical distress at this point. Everything else is a distraction. The only reason why I’m still pursing all this fucked-up shit is because there’s a connection here between this mess and my case. Understand?”

  Kim turned away from me and took out his own phone, a white slab encased in a black plastic case. He spoke quietly in Korean, which I knew enough to recognize but not enough to understand. Every time I hear that language, it slathers on a coat of guilt—and I’m not even sure what that guilt is about. A shrink would probably say it goes way deep, all the way to my abandonment by my birth mother. Probably does, but so what? How does recognizing the origin of a certain negative emotion help to alleviate it in the future? The point, the therapist would say, is not to alleviate it but let it pass through you.

  Before this could turn out into a full-blown psychoanalysis in my mind, Kim got off the phone.

  “Mr. Park would like to see you both,” he said. “I will drive you. It’s a three-hour trip.”

  “Doesn’t sound like we have a choice,” I said.

  “You do not,” Kim said.

  “But I have to teach my class this afternoon,” Collins said.

  He glanced at his watch, white face and black straps. “You’ll be back in time.”

  “But it’s after ten. If it’s going to take three hours there and three hours back, how can you say…”

  “You have my word that you’ll be back in time,” Kim said, and that was that. Collins led the way. I followed. We got in his white Mercedes with black seats. What else.

  78

  Much to Collins’ chagrin, we made a pit stop at my office. She and Kim waited in the car while I picked up the financial statements I’d left for Stacy. I was surprised and happy to see Craig, there, too.

  “How did your patent hearing go in Albany?” I asked.

  “Good, but never mind me and my boring work,” he said. “Seems like you made some massive progress since I left you.”

  “Less skill and more luck, but I’ll take it.”

  Craig pointed out the window at Kim and Collins, who were now standing outside the car, taking in the late morning Athena air.

  “I recognize that guy from Krishna,” Craig said. “He’s very polite.”

  “He could be the new Ms. Manners. The woman is Christine Collins, a professor at Llewellyn who’s had better days than this.”

  “So you are being chauffeured to…”

  “…New York City. Off to meet Won Ho Park, the head honcho of Park Industries. Can’t hurt to have hard evidence on hand. So is it indeed fishy, this special relationship between Llewellyn and Krishna?”

  “They’ve been moving liquid assets back and forth for the last two years,” Stacy said. “Imagine you have credit card debt between a Visa and a MasterCard and you use those blank checks they send you to alternately pay off the cards each month. The loan never goes away but you still have to pay interest, which still compounds and accrues. Krishna moved their fiscal year-end to the opposite of Llewellyn’s, which gave them six months to break apart the transactions. It’s actually kind of ingenious.”

  “And illegal?” I asked Craig.

  “Not outright thievery, but both institutions can be held accountable for a number of good faith violations. This will also trigger an IRS investigation for both parties since they are both non-profit entities, and the feds are certain to find even more issues. Stacy and I summarized our findings down to two pages with bullet points. If you give that to anyone who knows anything about financials, they’ll get a good read of the situation.”

  “Vachess Holdings?” I asked.

  “The architects of the scheme,” Stacy said. “Their fingerprints are everywhere.”

  “Brandon and Sabine Vachess. A lien was just placed against their business by their bank,” Craig said.

  “I love you guys,” I said.

  Stacy opened her arms for a team hug. “Now go get ’em, tiger.”

  79

  Brent Kim drove like the car didn’t exist. Or maybe more accurately, I couldn’t feel I was in a car. The Mercedes deserved some credit, as its all-leather seats were super plush, plus there was virtually no road noise, and the woody dashboard was a throwback of old tech via high tech, a touchscreen panel that wrapped around the entire length of the dash and simulated analog gauges with such startling clarity that I’d initially thought they were real.

  “Nice wheels, Brent,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said. Not much for conversation. Collins, depressed and tired after trying to kill me, lay on the backseat with her feet drawn in close to her body.

  We hit a hundred miles an hour on the New York Thruway at times. After the clock struck noon, Kim took the next service exit and drove up to the McDonald’s drive-thru window.

  “I will purchase six burgers, three with cheese and three without, plus three small fries and three small Coca-Cola beverages,” he spoke into the microphone.

  “But I wanted the Chicken McNuggets,” I said.

  “And a small Chicken McNuggets,” he added.

  “That was a joke,” I said, but he let the order stand.

  “I’ll eat it if you don’t want it,” Collins said, rising from her sad slumber. “I like McNuggets.”

  “Please distribute the meals to yourself and Ms. Collins,” Kim said after he picked it up from the window. “Leave one cheeseburger, one hamburger, and one small fry for me.”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said.

  It was like the most un-fun road trip ever, but there were few scents more irresistible than fast food from McDonald’s. All of us eagerly devoured our burgers and fries.

  “You don’t look like the type who’d frequent McDonald’s,” I said to Kim.

  “You are correct.”

  “Pretty good, isn’t it?”

  “Delicious to a fault,” Kim said.

  An hour later, we crossed the Hudson Ri
ver on the brand-new Tappan Zee Bridge—the Mario Cuomo Bridge, actually, but no one will ever call it that, ever—whooshing by the massive metal girders. Kim got on the West Side Highway heading north and we passed the piers off the Hudson River on our left. When he turned right on 57th Street, I glimpsed the green of Central Park peeking through the spaces between buildings. It’d been a few years since I’d been to the Big Apple, and its sheer density never failed to surprise me.

  Up ahead was a polished sliver of a skyscraper so tall that I could barely see its top.

  “That’s where Mr. Park lives?” I asked.

  “Central Park Tower,” Kim said. “The tallest residential building in the world.”

  We pulled into an underground garage. As soon as we were out, a valet came scampering from his glass cube to park the car. So this was how the one percent of one percent lived.

  Kim led us to the bank of elevators. He hovered a key fob near the panel and it automatically selected P. The one before that was 94, so the penthouse was on the 95h floor.

  The double-height foyer featured a wooden staircase that curved up and to the right in an angle imbued with craftsmanship and elegance. Behind the staircase was a window that ran up the length of both floors, the glass revealing the blue and white of the sky. As we ascended the staircase, it was like we were walking up air, like the god who lived in this urban palace.

  “Mr. Park is in the Entertainment Room,” Kim said. “It’s faster to take the elevator.”

  The doors were gold, and it was all mirrors and gold inside, too.

  “Nice digs,” I said.

  “The fruits of success,” Kim said.

  “I knew people lived in places like this,” Collins said, “but seeing it myself doesn’t make it any more real.”

  At the Entertainment Room, the city fully came into view through floor-to-ceiling windows, the autumnal sprawl of the Central Park trees serving as a base to the jagged skyscrapers beyond. There were six sofas, all white, all leather, and tucked in corners were more sitting areas, square white leather cushions that looked like fat marshmallows stuck together. It was a space large enough to comfortably hold a wedding, but right now, there was only one person, Won Ho Park, who sat on the sofa in the middle of the room wearing a black shirt and white pants, the opposite color scheme of his bodyguards.

  80

  Park sat in front of a wooden TV tray table, sipping a glass of red wine.

  It was comical to see such an ordinary piece of furniture in a place so extraordinary, especially amid such an impressive collection of artwork. Interspersed throughout the room were sculptures on white pedestals and a few full-sized statues, too. On the opposite side of the wall of windows were paintings by masters like van Gogh and Picasso, originals, no doubt.

  Fifteen paintings spanned across the length of the wall. In the center was a Chuck Close, one of his massive black and white photorealistic headshot paintings from the late 1960’s, this one of a hippie girl with straight hair and vacant eyes. Standing here, it was too much to take in—the view, the art, the space. Did Park even see the beauty that surrounded him? My guess was no. After a while, everything falls into the background, even the astonishing.

  “Thank you for coming,” Park said, rising. The man was as short as I was, but he possessed the voice of a giant, deep and resonant.

  “Impressive place you got here,” I said.

  “If money cannot buy impressive things, it is failing to serve its purpose.”

  He spoke with a heavy accent, but his English was excellent.

  From the handful of photos I’d seen of Park when I was researching Cleo, I knew he was a supremely confident man, but what those photos hadn’t picked up was his pervasive intelligence. It was in his eyes, peering at me as if I were an engine to be taken apart and then reassembled, to see how I worked. His cold gaze unnerved me. With his money and power, he could make all of this mess disappear. He could make me and Christine disappear. All the more reasons for me to stay as cool as possible.

  “So,” I said, then paused for dramatic effect, or at least what I’d hoped was one. “Care to share why you wanted to see us in person?”

  “I gauge best when I see people face to face,” Park said. “Brent told me you have a video in your possession. I would like to see it.”

  “Did he also mention this video is backed up on my cloud account?”

  “I know you are frightened, Ms. O’Brien,” Park said. “You are doing your best to mask it, and I applaud your effort, but the video. Now.”

  So much for my tough-gal act. I queued it up and handed it to him. Because there was no fabric at all in this room (no curtains, leather couches), the tiny speaker on my phone filled the cavernous space with the chants of last night’s participants. Park took a seat and watched from start to finish. If he had a reaction, I wasn’t seeing it. Was it because his wife Cleo pulled crap like this in the past and none of this was noteworthy? Or was it because Park was such a disciplined sociopath that nothing bothered him? Either way, I felt uneasy.

  “Thank you,” Park said, handing back my phone. “Now you, Dr. Collins. You are a professor at Llewellyn College?”

  “Yes,” Collins said, her voice barely audible. “Assistant Professor.”

  “Of Chemistry. And Brent tells me you were asked to dissect a porcine fetus, though the organs and such were presented as that of a human. This is true?”

  “Yes,” Collins said. I didn’t think it was possible for her to sound even quieter, but she did.

  “And you believe it is my wife who was the cause of this action?”

  Collins looked to me, then Brent, then back to Park. If there was a hole, she would’ve stuck her head in it. But there was no hole.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Park slowly turned his gaze to Kim, and even though that look wasn’t leveled against me, my stomach lurched a little on his behalf.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Park,” Brent said. “But she said differently a few hours ago.”

  Since he did save my life, I chimed in my support. “I heard her, too.”

  Park pushed his TV tray table aside, rose, and walked over to the windows. The sun slid behind a pocket of clouds and the city turned darker for a moment.

  “Dr. Collins, do you know why my wife wanted you to dissect the creature on her behalf?”

  “No,” Collins said.

  “Would you care to make a guess?”

  Collins looked like she might pee her pants.

  “Because she wants to be young,” I said.

  Park turned around.

  “Time,” he said. “The most treasured resource. I may have more money than most people on this planet, but my clock ticks down just the same as everyone else’s. As you can see from my home, I value beauty. And beauty is youth. Not entirely, but youth is an automatic kind of beauty, an effortless beauty, and even though my dear Cleopatra has taken to extremes here, I cannot fault her desire to be beautiful. No doubt her actions to achieve that elusive goal are misguided, but she is a living work of art, my living work of art. However, her ambition has caused grief to others, which shames me. This Vera Wheeler— even though my daughter is attending Llewellyn, I have never been to the school and have never met its leader. She seems to have made a particular friendship with my wife.”

  “Her friendship might be with your money,” I said. “According to these financial statements, you made a donation to Llewellyn last year?”

  “It is possible. I make donations to many charitable and educational causes. If one was made to Llewellyn, most likely it was initiated by my wife.”

  I located the bullet point Stacy had made for me on the financial statements. “It was for 1.5 million dollars.”

  “Unless it exceeds a hundred, I do not participate,” Park said.

  A man’s got to have standards, I guess.

  “Llewellyn is a debt-ridden institution of higher learning that’s being propped
up through financial shenanigans with the Krishna Center for Yoga and Wellness. I don’t know how much Brent told you about why I’m involved.”

  “A girl is missing, the daughter of your friend. Brent told me you were causing a fuss, making my wife and my daughter uncomfortable, which is why I wanted you to stop. But I can see you have just cause for your actions, and I am also appreciative that you kept this video to yourself.”

  Park clapped his hands twice, and through the hallway on the left, another man in the Brent Kim mold appeared. Park spoke in Korean, and the man nodded.

  “Will you get the helicopter ready for us, Brent?” Park asked.

  Kim nodded and left.

  “Helicopter?” Collins asked.

  “Brent told me you needed to be back at Llewellyn by 4 p.m. This way, I estimate you will be an hour early. I feel it is time that we reached the bottom of this issue, because this has already been a spectacular waste of my time. It shall take another fifteen minutes for Brent to get the copter ready, so please, look around and enjoy the art.”

  “Is it okay if I just sit here and wait?” Collins asked.

  “You are the driver of your own destiny,” Park said.

  A Manhattan palace, a helicopter, a man with a $100 million minimum to take action. A woman using pig embryos to stay young. What world was I in? I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What do you find humorous?” Park asked.

  “Oh, just life,” I said.

  “You are Korean, I believe,” he said.

  “I was adopted,” I said. “Back in the old country, I would’ve been called Shee-Bong.”

  “Brent tells me you have not been a detective for long.”

  “I was assisting my boss, the actual detective, but he passed away.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. But I must correct you, Shee-Bong. You are every bit an actual detective as any I have encountered.”