Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery Read online

  “But it’s good that you’re not doing that anymore,” Chaz said to Lusig, taking a more serious tone. “This job can be dangerous. Turns out people don’t like when you ask them questions and follow them around.”

  “Which is why I’m under house arrest,” she said. “Actually, I’m hoping to convince Song to join me.”

  He laughed. “Under house arrest?”

  “She wants me to move in with the whole family until the baby’s born.” I outlined her proposal.

  “What do you think, Mr. Lindley?” she asked. “Is that something she could do?”

  “Sure. That sort of thing isn’t unheard of, though the exact circumstances may never have happened before. It would really be up to Song, here. If she’s up for it, I think it’s a fine idea.”

  She flashed a bright smile at Chaz. “I should get going while I’m ahead.” She gave me a hug and trotted out the door, shouting, “Call me!”

  Chaz started laughing as soon as she was gone. “You sure pulled a strange one.”

  “You like her, huh?”

  “I do. She’s spunky.”

  “I like her, too. And this case is really interesting.”

  “It’s so interesting you’re going to move in with it, huh?”

  “I’m thinking it over,” I said. “You really think it’s a fine idea?”

  “It could be a good experience. And God knows you won’t be bored.”

  *

  Chaz left me in charge of the office to go home early—if I went along with Lusig’s scheme, he would have a lot fewer half days. There were no new clients all afternoon, and I set to work finding Robert Park.

  It took me a few strokes more than anticipated to find him. When I searched his name on the Thayer White Web site, I got zero results. This was odd, as the firm had a public directory, and I searched the other three lawyers and found their pages. They were all white, the two partners white men who had gone to top law schools.

  I knew it was futile to search just his name on Facebook or Google, but I entered it just to see what would come up. It turned out I had mutual friends with three different Robert Parks, and I didn’t even have many Facebook friends. Google showed me a sports writer, a TV actor, and a radiologist in Maryland, all within the first page of results. I added “Thayer White” to my search terms and found an article detailing his bio, torn, it appeared, from some now-defunct version on the firm Web site. Robert Park was a third-year associate, a graduate of UCLA Law.

  I had a different search term now, and googled “Robert Park” with “UCLA law” and found out he’d participated in the UCLA Law Review and served on the APALSA board in his second year. I also found a UCLA e-mail address.

  I thought it was unlikely that the address would still be viable years after he graduated, but I thought it might be a good handle to flush him out on Facebook. I searched the address and it took me to one of the three Robert Parks who’d popped up earlier. He was friends with one of my cousins. Of course. They probably went to the same church. Korean-American L.A. was small, despite our large population.

  I couldn’t see much of his profile—he had his security settings cranked to an intelligent level. I could see a cover photo of the ocean, and a square image of his face, too small to be useful. I could see that he’d gone to UCI for college, and that his high school was also in Orange County. He was two years older than me, judging from his class years.

  I couldn’t find an e-mail address, so I decided to message him through Facebook. It wasn’t ideal as tactics go—unsolicited Facebook messages tended to be weird and creepy. Still, it was worth a shot.

  I wrote:

  Hey,

  Sorry to message you out of the blue here, but I’m trying to locate Nora Mkrtchian, the Armenian-American activist who disappeared recently. I have a couple hunches. One is that you might be able to help me find her, even if you don’t know it. The other is that you quit Thayer White when you couldn’t deal with their bottomless moral bankruptcy. If I guessed right on that one, I’d really like to talk to you. My e-mail is [email protected]. Hope to hear from you soon.

  I reread the message a couple of times then hit Send. I hoped I was right about his quitting the firm. If I was wrong, there was no way he’d be willing to talk to me.

  I was sitting back down at my computer after a cigarette break when the message popped back up in my Facebook window. It was flashing—Robert Park had replied.

  Hi, Juniper. I know who Nora Mkrtchian is, but I’ve never met her, and am not sure if I’m the right person to help. That said, you’re right about me and Thayer. Uncanny guess. Are you police or something? I don’t know what I can do for you, but obviously would like to contribute to finding her if you think I have that in me. I will say, though, that if you’re a reporter I am not comfortable talking about my old job in the press.

  Best,

  Rob

  It had been about twenty minutes since I’d contacted him, a much better result than I’d expected. He could have been nervous, or just intrigued and unemployed. I had to remind myself that matters of crime and punishment were fascinating to people, not just people of interest.

  I wondered why he hadn’t emailed me when I’d given him my address, then realized I was still online on Facebook. I rarely used the messenger service, and I’d forgotten that it doubled as a chat. There was a green dot next to his name—I could continue this conversation right now.

  I started to write a formal response, and deleted it. Instead, I typed one word:

  › Hey.

  His response came immediately.

  › Hi.

  › Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, I’m not police or press, I’m a private detective.

  › Like Sherlock Holmes? Philip Marlowe?

  › Yes, exactly the same. Shoot up coke, solve murder mysteries.

  › Ha, that’s really cool. Where do I sign up?

  I smiled a little. The conversation had taken a friendly tone, one that didn’t always come with contacting strangers out of the blue. It felt a little strange to be chatting with someone I’d never met before. I knew it wasn’t unusual, but I’d never experimented with chat rooms or the varied online platforms for meet-ups or dating.

  I pressed on.

  › I’m helping Nora’s best friend, who’s really worried about her, and I was hoping we could talk?

  › You mean in person?

  › Yeah, I prefer face-to-face. It’d be lazy work if I just sat around chatting with people all day.

  I didn’t add that in-person interviews gave me a greater interrogative advantage, which I liked to think yielded higher returns of truth.

  › At the risk of sounding forward … What are you doing right now? Because I’m unemployed and have seen zero people today.

  I wondered briefly if he was flirting with me. I knew my profile was locked down pretty tight, so if he was throwing out feelers, it had to be purely speculative. The thumbnail of my profile picture didn’t give away much.

  › I’m free. I can buy you a drink?

  › Where are you?

  › Koreatown now, but I live in Echo Park.

  › I’m downtown. I can meet you at Mohawk Bend. My dog loves it there. Mind if I bring her?

  › Course not.

  › By the way, how do you know Nick Jeon?

  › He’s my cousin. You?

  › We went to church together back in the day.

  I laughed out loud, but didn’t say so.

  › Would you believe me if I told you that was my first guess?

  We arranged to meet at five thirty at Mohawk Bend on Sunset Boulevard. It was one of the new bars that sprouted in the gentrified soil of my neighborhood, built in an old Vaudeville theater, with craft beers and a patio full of rescue dogs. It was a nice walk from my place, and I stopped home to drop off my Langer’s leftovers and avoid dealing with parking. The weather was fine and I thought I could use the movement.

  I scanned the patio and spotted a
n Asian man with a sweet-looking pit bull mix at his feet, sitting alone at a table for two. He looked more or less like a thirty-year-old lawyer—clean-cut, with thick, black, slightly wavy hair, not a grain of stubble on his face; black plastic-framed glasses. He wore a gray sweater under a black fleece jacket. He had his head down, reading something on his phone.

  “Hi,” I said, tentatively. “Robert Park?”

  He looked up with a snap of his neck. “Juniper Song?”

  He had a pleasant, nervous face, with long, dark eyes and an expressive lower lip. He didn’t smile, but nothing about him read cold. The thought crossed my mind that my mother would love him.

  Except that he was currently unemployed, and who knew if he went to church anymore.

  “Song,” I said, shaking his hand. I sat down in the empty chair. “Sorry, have you been waiting long?”

  “Ten minutes, but I was early. I always set aside fifteen minutes for parking.”

  “That’s noble,” I said. “I always apologize when I’m fifteen minutes late because I couldn’t find parking.”

  He smiled then, showing a white slice of teeth.

  “Boy or girl?” I asked, pointing at his dog, who was staring at me with its tail thumping.

  “Girl. Her name’s Muriel but you can call her Murry. Like Furry Murry.”

  “Muriel? How’d you come up with that?”

  “My grandma’s name.”

  I laughed. Nowhere in the world was there a Korean grandmother named Muriel. “Bullshit.”

  “Okay, you got me. The shelter was calling her Cupcake, so I took matters into my own hands. She’s named after Muriel Spark.”

  I smiled. It was hard not to like a guy who named a rescue dog after a female novelist. “When’d you get her?”

  “This weekend. I’ve wanted my own dog since my childhood dog died, but couldn’t have one with the firm job.”

  “Congratulations. Pit and … beagle?”

  “Good guess. Wow, you really are good at this deduction stuff.”

  “She’s adorable. Can I pet her?”

  He assured me she was friendly, and I stroked her soft coat, which was white with brown splotches like the spots on a cow. I was still petting her when a server came and took our drink order. By the time our beers came, I was in good with Murry.

  “I looked you up, by the way,” he said with no more segue. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t a reporter.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You stalked me?”

  “You’re a private eye. I’d be surprised if you didn’t stalk me.”

  I shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  “What’d you find out?”

  “There are a lot of Robert Parks out there, so frankly, not much. What’d the Internet have to say about me?”

  “Some interesting stuff, actually. Your name came up in connection with the Joe Tilley case a couple years back. Pretty glamorous.”

  Joe Tilley wasn’t the first dead body that had shown up in my vicinity, but it was the only one people wanted to talk about when the news was no longer news. He was a major movie star, and every dumb blog wanted an angle on the story. My name came up with a hundred others, all dragged in with the season’s catch. “Trust me. It was the opposite of glamorous.”

  “I don’t know. I’m into the PI stuff. L.A. noir, all that. Are you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Chandler? Moseley? Ellroy?”

  “Yup.”

  “Robert B. Parker?” He flashed a wide smile.

  I didn’t mention that my snooping career started as a love for the literature. It seemed like it would sound more frivolous than it was.

  We talked about books and movies for a while, and I could feel him sliding into a sort of comfort with my presence. He was reasonably personable, and I got the sense that he found other people more interesting than himself. His manner grew more assured but subtly self-effacing, a combination that rendered him attractive.

  “So,” I said toward the bottom of my beer. “Why’d you quit your job?”

  “I thought you had that all figured out.”

  “All I said was ‘moral bankruptcy.’ Could be anything. Was it an oil spill? Mortgage fraud?”

  He smiled. “You know perfectly well it was something worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “I guess ‘worse’ is the wrong word. I’m a litigator, so I’ve done work for some pretty noxious clients, including a reckless oil company, by the way. In absolute terms, genocide denial might be less harmful than other wrongs I’ve worked to defend, but it’s more…”

  “Gross?”

  “Yeah.” He took a sip of beer and looked above him. “The thing is, if a big oil company ruins the ocean, it’s entitled to hire lawyers, to mount a defense, yeah, but also to get liability assessments, things that are a bit more neutral. There’s nothing behind that but money. No desire to corrupt the world, just an indifference to consequences and a strong adherence to the profit motive. This genocide memorial, though … My team was representing the plaintiff—the genocide deniers were suing. So it’s a frivolous, unnecessary suit that also happens to be hateful as hell.”

  “And now your name is associated with it forever, huh?”

  He shrugged. “I deserve it, I guess. I should’ve quit sooner than I did. It’s just hard to get off a track once you’ve been on it for so long, you know?”

  I nodded. “On the bright side, you’re one of many Robert Parks in the world.”

  “Yeah. It’s nice not being special.”

  “What can you tell me about EARTH?”

  “Technically? Nothing. Confidentiality and all that.”

  “But you quit.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m exempt from the rules.”

  I held eye contact through a long pause, and I knew that he’d acquiesce. “A woman is missing, Rob Park. I think EARTH might have something to do with it.”

  He sighed. “Well, I will say I didn’t come here expecting to say nothing. This is strictly, uh, off the record?”

  I held up my hands. “What record?”

  He bent over to pet Murry behind her ears, and when he rose again, he was ready to talk. “EARTH is this brand-new organization, founded by these three Turkish-American men. The purpose of the organization is, supposedly, the discovery and preservation of history, particularly Turkish history.”

  “A ‘let’s hear both sides of this terrible story’ kind of deal, then.”

  “Exactly. It has the sheen of fairness and reason, right? Because there are two sides to every story.”

  “Sure. But sometimes one side is the genociding side.” I shook my head. “And, of course, it’s just three extreme people hiding behind an acronym.”

  “There are more than three people involved, but yeah, basically. The organization was formed for this one purpose, and it’s small and scrappy.”

  “How heartwarming. The little hatemongers who could. Did you ever meet any of these clients?”

  “Yes, briefly,” he said. “Just one guy.”

  “Who?”

  “This man named Enver Kizil. He came in to talk to us once, and I was in the room, though the partner did most of the talking on our end.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Younger than you would think, for this kind of thing. Thirty-five? And maybe I was biased by what I knew about him, but I thought he looked ferociously angry, like if you punctured his skin, rage would flow out of him.”

  “Do you have a number or e-mail address I can reach him at?”

  “Sound like a guy you’d like to get to know?” He smiled and scrolled through his phone. “Here,” he said, holding it out to me.

  I copied the e-mail address on the screen.

  “Did he seem rich, by the way?”

  He thought for a second. “Not especially.”

  “It takes a lot of money to hire a big firm, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure how the billing worked, but I doubt Thayer was taking them on
pro bono.”

  “And EARTH is a small operation, you said.”

  “Yes, but they definitely have money. I think one of the more vocal members is this rich housewife and I wouldn’t be surprised if she and her husband were bankrolling.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I never met them, and I don’t remember their names,” he said. “To be honest, I didn’t look into it too deeply. If I’d made a point of knowing all the people I worked for over the years, I might have quit a lot sooner.”

  “You weren’t curious?”

  “I was, vaguely.” His lips formed a small frown. “You must think I’m a drone.”

  “No. You’re just not an investigator. I’m sure no one at that firm is motivated to put their assignments under a microscope. I wonder, though,” I said, leaning forward, “are you motivated now?”

  He blinked and gave me a stunned smile. “You want my help?”

  “Of course. I take help where I can get it.”

  “You know how to butter a guy up, huh?”

  He was laughing, and I laughed with him. “You seem interested in what I do,” I said. “You can join the adventure.”

  “Down the rabbit hole,” he said. “Okay, let’s say I am interested. What do I do?”

  “Find out who’s running EARTH.”

  “Easier said than done, probably.”

  “Sure, like anything else. But it’s doable. You know people there. Maybe you have some friends who’d help you out, ask around. You could probably even get back in the office if you wanted.”

  “Yeah, I can think of a few people to talk to.”

  “Harriett Lehr, for instance.”

  He laughed. “Sure. I won’t ask how you know about Harriett.”

  “Same way I know about you. It was in the news.”

  “Right,” he said, his face somber. “Poor Harriett. She hates this almost much as I do.”

  “She’s still there, though.”

  “I can’t blame her. She didn’t ask for this either.”

  “Maybe she’ll be up for answering a question or two. Off the record.”

  “What do I ask her?”

  “You seem like a smart guy,” I said. “There really isn’t that much to this shit. You just have to be nosier and more persistent than most people feel comfortable with.”