Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery Read online

  “And do you crave all that stuff?”

  “When I get rid of this thing, I’m wrapping a steak in salami and raw salmon, then swallowing the whole thing with a pint of whiskey.”

  “For breakfast, I guess?”

  Our food came and Lusig tore into her sandwich, murmuring, “God, this pastrami is saving my life.”

  I smiled and agreed. “It’s legendary.”

  We ate in blissful silence for a minute, then she showed me her phone. “Look at this.”

  It was a standard smartphone screen with a background image of Lusig and Nora. They were smiling at the camera with their cheeks nearly touching. Lusig had her hand on Nora’s head, pulling her close to her side.

  “The picture?” I asked.

  “No.” She let out an awkward sigh of a laugh. “Right. I have a picture of Nora on there. I meant the apps.”

  I looked at the colorful icons on the screen, and noticed six of them with the words “baby” and “mommy” in their titles. “Pregnancy apps. Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “These are the best of them. I’ve probably downloaded more like twenty.”

  I nodded. “Lot of work, huh?”

  “I just feel like I need to convince you or something, that I’m not treating this lightly.”

  “Sure. Don’t worry. I believe you.”

  “Okay, good. But I also need to find Nora. I am very serious about this. It’s why I’m subjecting myself to Ruby’s regime.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go for it.”

  “Why you? Nora has family, a boyfriend, plenty of friends, it sounds like. Why does this fall on you?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe it falls on everyone. But I know that my life falls apart without Nora.”

  “That sounds dramatic.”

  “It’s true, though. I didn’t even realize until she was gone, how much she held things together for me. I thought I had lots of friends, but I only had one I counted on, who loved and understood me.”

  I nodded, and I knew I would go on a rampage if Lori disappeared.

  “How long have you been sniffing around?”

  “Just a couple weeks. I’ve been worried sick since she disappeared, but I kept believing she’d turn up, or at least that the police would find her. But then I started to get this feeling, like the momentum was draining away, and I read somewhere that most missing people are found within a short window of disappearing, if they’re ever found at all.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Seventy-two hours. That’s supposed to be how long it takes to track down the strong leads.”

  “It had been a lot longer than that when I started looking.”

  “What have you turned up?” I asked. “So I don’t duplicate your work.”

  She frowned. “Not very much, to be honest. I haven’t wanted to do anything strenuous, so just a lot of Internet stuff.”

  “I’ve done a lot of research on her, too,” I said. “Her site is fascinating, and it looks like she has a lot of enemies.” I had to watch myself to make sure I didn’t introduce the past tense.

  “Are you talking about those anonymous Internet dickheads?”

  “Yeah. Pretty intense.”

  “Did you see that they found her address?”

  “Actually, I’ve done some legwork since I last saw you.”

  I caught her up on my meetings with Chris and Hanna.

  She listened, chewing slowly, preciously, on her sandwich. When I was done, she asked, “What’d you think of Chris?”

  “He was not super happy to talk to me. I caught him off guard.” I thought back to our conversation and remembered my mention of Lusig. “Actually, I’m sorry, but I mentioned I was looking for Nora in part because of you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not worried about him knowing that. Did he say anything about me?”

  “No. But I got the sense that this whole investigation got on his nerves. Offended him in some way. He even seems mad at Nora for disappearing.”

  “Oh, his princess-in-the-tower shit?”

  “What?”

  “Chris thinks she would’ve been safe and happy if only she’d never left her house, at least not without him at her side.”

  “Yeah, I got that impression. Is he kind of an asshole?”

  “Maybe ‘asshole’ isn’t the right word. He means well. He’s just…” She shrugged and took a big, crunchy bite out of her pickle. “Look, he’s an idiot.”

  “That’s a strong word.”

  “It’s the right one. Everyone thinks he’s a brain because he went to Penn and has this job. Everyone thinks Nora’s an airhead because she wears a lot of eyeliner. No one knows anything, is the moral of that story. I happen to know Chris is as dumb as a rock’s ass.”

  I laughed. “Explain.”

  “You know how children have no concept of a world they can’t see? Chris is myopic like that. He can’t see more than one logical connection outside of what affects him. So, of course Nora disappeared because she disobeyed him.”

  “Do you think he had anything to do with it?”

  “I doubt it. He’s not savvy enough to keep someone hidden for this long.”

  “What’s your theory, then? You obviously have a head start on me.”

  “I think she went after her stalker.”

  “That sounds plausible,” I said. “Her last blog post sounded like a declaration of war. Is that what you’re going on?”

  “Basically.” She ran a hand through her short hair, then clamped it over her ear. “I don’t have proof or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Proof would be nice, I guess, but hunches are valuable, too.”

  “It would be pretty like her, I think, to go on the warpath. She can’t stand losing.”

  I nodded and took a bite out of my sandwich. I thought about what I might’ve done in Nora’s position, and decided a manhunt was reckless but certainly not unprovoked.

  “What were you doing in downtown yesterday?” I asked. “Did that have anything to do with her stalker?”

  She smiled, a little proudly. “I was trying to go undercover.”

  “Where?”

  “Did you read anything about this lawsuit?”

  “A little. She mentioned it on her site, I think. But remind me?”

  “Nora’s involved in this genocide memorial. It’s supposed to go up for the centennial, on April 24.”

  “Right,” I said. “I imagine this is a big deal?”

  “Yeah. There are a lot of Armenians in Glendale, and the memorial will be a big statement.”

  “And what, not everyone is happy with it?”

  “Specifically, there’s a brand-spanking-new corporation called Europeans and Americans for the Recovery of Truth in History.”

  “EARTH?” I snorted a little at the acronym. “Sure. What’s their deal?”

  “They were formed three months ago. Their first action was to sue the city of Glendale to get an injunction against the statue.”

  “Ah. So what is this, just three angry Turkish dudes?”

  “Something like that. But somehow, they managed to hire a super–white shoe firm to represent them.”

  “Which one?”

  “Thayer White.”

  I could see the name of the firm in crisp letters on the top of a downtown skyscraper. “So you were trying to go undercover there? What’s that even mean?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing too sophisticated. I just tried to look like I belonged there so I could get in and talk to a few of the lawyers involved.”

  “You know who’s involved?”

  “Yeah, it’s public somehow. The firm’s been getting some bad press for representing straight-up genocide deniers, and a couple of the articles I’ve seen have listed the names of the lawyers assigned to the case. To shame them, probably.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Two partners, two associates, it looks like.”

  “Give
me their names.”

  She pulled up an article on her phone and passed it to me, zooming in on the names. Alexander Crenshaw, Robert Moore, Harriett Lehr, Robert Park.

  My heart sank at the last one—the name was as Korean as soju and seaweed soup. I felt an instinctive scorch of shame. Korean-American misdeeds had a sinister way of making me feel bad about myself. I hated that. The average white dude didn’t feel compromised by the worst actions of his phenotype. Every white mass murderer was his own shitty island. Then again, no one judged white dudes as a homogeneous group. Minority sins had more of a smearing effect—it wasn’t just in our imagination.

  I copied down the names and handed the phone back to Lusig. “What made you want to talk to the lawyers?”

  “I have this feeling,” she said. “The harassment? It got extra bad after Nora went after the lawsuit. She tried really hard to make noise about it, and that’s when the threats starting coming to her house. I want to find out more about this EARTH group, and I have no names to go after except the lawyers.”

  I nodded. I might have taken the same track.

  “So, what happened?” I asked. “What was your plan?”

  “I knew where the office was, and I decided I wanted to talk to Alexander Crenshaw.”

  “Why him?”

  She shrugged. “First name on the list. Thought he might be the main person on it.”

  “Did you make an appointment or something?”

  “No,” she said sheepishly. “I realize now that I wasn’t thinking things through.”

  “What happened? You just walked in and asked to see Alexander Crenshaw?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I shook my head. “He’s a partner there, right? Big law partners are very busy, self-important people. I think it’s tough to get a walk-in appointment.”

  “I was hoping I could just get in and find his office, but the receptionist was pretty suspicious. She asked me if I was a reporter.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Right. I’m guessing they don’t have a great relationship with the press these days.”

  “Yeah. And I didn’t want to get into a whole scene so I just turned around and left. I was planning to regroup when you followed me to Rubina’s.”

  “Leave this to me. I’ll find my way to one of the lawyers. Probably won’t go for a partner, though. More likely to have a stake in the case.”

  “Good point.” She smiled. “Are you going for the Korean?”

  I nodded. “Have to exploit every angle, right?”

  “I get it. Armos are like that, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, we’re supposed to help each other out. If I’d seen an Armenian name, I would’ve thought, ‘Pay dirt.’”

  “And ‘traitor.’”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I get it, by the way. The historical anger.”

  “Korea’s been bent over a few times over the centuries, right?”

  “I’ve never lived in Korea. Spent two weeks there total, probably. No one there would see me as anything but American. That said, I know what it’s like to feel rage in my blood.”

  “Yeah. I haven’t spent any time in Armenia or anything, either.”

  “My grandparents lived through World War II. My grandma was too young, but her sister was a comfort woman.”

  “Jesus, really?”

  “Yeah, a bona fide sex slave. Or prostitute, depending on who you ask.”

  “Who says prostitute?”

  I shrugged. “The Japanese government, every other year or so.”

  “Oh shit, and I thought Turkey was special. What’s the deal there?”

  “They’ve had enough guilt or something. In any case, they’re not really sorry, and they haven’t fully apologized without backtracking immediately. Japan did some heinous shit, and there’s still tension with Korea because of it. It’s been, like, seventy years.”

  “It’s been a full hundred since the Armenian genocide.”

  “So it’s in ‘get over it’ territory, except no one ever apologized.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I don’t get. If it were easy to ‘get over’ something like that, like if it weren’t a big deal at all, then it should be just as easy to apologize. It’s not like the current Japanese prime minister went around raping all of Asia with his own ugly dick.”

  She laughed. “Sorry, I’m just picturing this old Asian dude fucking a gouged-out globe.”

  “At least that wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “What’s the plan of attack, then?”

  I shrugged. “It’s really easy to get an e-mail to someone. I’ll probably try and get in touch with Robert Park, go from there. Seems as good a place to start as any.”

  “That sounds good. I feel like we see eye to eye, you and me,” she said, her tone suddenly careful, self-consciously designating her words as segue.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said, waiting for her to continue.

  “Well, I had an idea, actually. I already ran it by Ruby and Van.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You saw how big their house is, right?”

  “Yeah, about ten of my apartments, it looked like, stacked two stories high.”

  “Well there’s an empty room next to mine,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “What are you proposing?”

  “I think it would be a lot better for everyone if you moved in for a while,” she said. “Until we find Nora. Or at least until the baby comes.”

  Her expression was expectant and sheepish, like she’d just asked me to the prom. I thought of my apartment, the space that felt vacant without Lori in it. Here was a guarantee of a new companionship, a reprieve from the loneliness I was unprepared to handle.

  But it also meant moving into a house of virtual strangers, one of whom I had good reason to believe was a crazy person, at least colloquially speaking.

  She saw my hesitation. “There’s precedent for it,” she said. “I googled it. Private investigators do on-site work all the time. You’d be like a bodyguard, kind of.”

  “How would that work?”

  “You can figure out the details with Ruby. But I think it’d be pretty simple, really. You use the house as your office, home base, basically. That way I can be involved without ‘putting myself in harm’s way’ or whatever.” She employed scornful air quotes.

  “So I’d have you watching me while Rubina watches you and watches me watching you.”

  She nodded slowly, untangling the pronouns.

  “That doesn’t sound like a party I want to go to.”

  “It might be the only way this works,” she said. “I don’t know if I can live there without a buffer.”

  “So this is your idea, not Rubina’s.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Look, I know it sounds like a clusterfuck, but it could actually work out nicely. Ruby doesn’t go crazy worrying about me, I don’t go crazy with her worry about me, you get paid more, and you get to work the case.”

  “Is this a condition?” I asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Of your living with the Gasparians. Of my helming the case.”

  “What if it is?”

  I shrugged. “I’m just curious.”

  “You seem like one of those obsessive detectives from the movies. Like, if you’re into a case, you get really into it.”

  “That might happen once in a while. It just means I’m good at my job.”

  She leaned in, sensing an advantage. “How often do you get a case this interesting?”

  “Once in a long while,” I conceded.

  “I get this feeling. Call it a woman’s intuition, or at least the ability to draw conclusions from the fact that you’ve interviewed her boyfriend and roommate since I last saw you.” She paused and looked at me coyly.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, waving a hand for her to go on.

  “You’re going to find Nora,” she said with a certainty that was meant, at least in pa
rt, to bolster herself. “You’ve already shown you’d work for free, and I think you’d meet any condition you had to.”

  I laughed. “Hey, hey, I don’t like to be bullied,” I said. “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t work for free. It’s a pretty idea, but this is the only job I have.”

  She sat back. “I know. And it’s not a condition. There are no conditions. I need to find her more badly than you do.”

  “I will do everything I can to make that happen.”

  “But, please, will you think about it?” she asked. “My body is weird, my cousin is crazy, and Nora is gone. We could be friends.” Her wild eyes took on a fervent glimmer.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “I just really need a friend.”

  Seven

  Lusig drove me to back to the office after lunch.

  “Want to come up?” I asked. “See where Rubina bought me?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ve never been to a PI office before.”

  The door to Lindley & Flores was open. Chaz was in his office. Arturo was not. I wondered if he was out somewhere, taking video of the poor young bride-to-be.

  “Who’ve you got there, Song?” Chaz called out.

  “This is my client Lusig,” I said.

  He came out of his office, looked at her pregnant belly, and nodded. “Ah, if I’d gotten a good look, I would’ve figured that out on my own. You’re the cousin.”

  Lusig smiled and put out her hand in a bold, exaggerated motion, a communication of goodwill. “Lusig Hovanian,” she said.

  “Chaz Lindley. This one taking care of you?” He gestured toward me with his meaty head and winked, though I couldn’t tell which of us he was winking at.

  “She seems to be doing better than I was.”

  “Ah, yes, Song tells me you were caught playing amateur sleuth.”

  She smiled sheepishly, with her teeth lined up.

  “Hey, no need to be embarrassed in this company. Song was an amateur. Who knows what she’d be doing now if I hadn’t found her.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Starving, probably. If not dead.”

  Neither of us mentioned that Chaz had likely saved my life when we first met. He knew it, and he knew I knew it, but it was a fact with enough weight to derail most conversations.