Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery Read online

  A small tremor ran across his jawline. “I’m not hiding shit,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my face.”

  I retreated with a smile, one designed to be infuriating. “Fine,” I said, raising my hands. “Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  I turned around and he called after me. “I hope she is dead,” he said, almost shouting. “She was a dirty whore.”

  *

  I’d had the foresight to park under a tree a couple blocks away, where my car wouldn’t tip off my quarry, even if I had a pair of binoculars pressed on my face. I looked through them to see if I could catch any views of his apartment, but there was nothing visible past a crack in a shitty pair of curtains. His car was still parked in front—good news for me. I’d worried he’d lam it before I even got to my spying spot.

  I’d poked an active nest, and I was curious to see what Enver Kizil would do next. He was jumpy enough that I doubted he’d sit at home and do nothing for the rest of the night.

  Half an hour later, he came out of his apartment, dressed in a short-sleeve button-down over his tank top, which still showed over the top with the dark patch of hair. He wore chinos and loafers and looked like a sleazeball trying to look like something else.

  I kept a loose tail, as loose as I could manage without losing sight of him altogether. I’d tinted my windows like the creep I was, but there was no reason to take chances with a man with accurate paranoid leanings. I followed him across Torrance, driving down Normandie, one of the long streets that snaked south all the way from Koreatown. The blocks were long and unwalkable, occupied by warehouses bearing names like Sonic Industries, Global Accents.

  He pulled into a parking lot behind a bland beige building that looked more or less like a post office. It had a flagpole in front, with two flags flapping over a tired patch of lawn. The top flag was the old red, white, and blue. The bottom one waved the building’s emblem—a rhino’s head in silhouette.

  Apparently, this particular branch of the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club had taken over some vacated government building. It was a sad sight—at least the slime of neon indicated a measure of effort. This place made me think of sweaty undersexed bureaucrats, mournfully watching porn on their office computers.

  Kizil walked in with his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, with the hunched attitude of a man attending to shameful things. It was only 7:30, still a little early to be visiting a strip club, but I didn’t have much experience in that field.

  I wondered if my unexpected visit had spurred him into action. I’d seen enough Sopranos episodes to imagine a seedy strip club full of underworld characters transacting their business. It seemed more likely, though, that he was going to have a drink and ogle some girls, blow off some steam with some nipples in his face.

  It was too bad I couldn’t check. Even if I hadn’t imprinted my face in his head, there was no way I could follow a man into a strip club without drawing a little suspicion.

  But whatever he was doing, there was a pretty good chance it would take him a while. Ten or fifteen minutes, at least.

  I drove back to his apartment with a rev in my heart.

  I didn’t make a habit of breaking and entering, but I’d treated myself to a top-grade lock-picking set for Christmas. I hadn’t been able to use it so far—it was a toy, really, that I played with at home, and occasionally at Lori’s or Chaz’s. Chaz had raised his eyebrows when I first showed him my purchase, but he didn’t ask too many questions. He shook his head while I demonstrated its capabilities to his daughters, who screamed with delight as I broke into their make-believe dungeons.

  In theory, I would never use it for work. Lock picking was invasive and somewhat illegal. But it didn’t hurt to have the right tools in the box. Better to have an umbrella in the sun than a bare head in a storm. I was kidding myself, though. I kept the tools in my trunk, and I was always aware that they sat there.

  Enver Kizil was a creep. I knew that. He was a genocide denier at the least, and if he had anything to do with the Turkish men who mobbed Nora, a misogynist, a threatener, and maybe much worse. Creeps had rights, sure, but I wasn’t exactly the U.S. government. What happened between me and this creep was between me and this creep, as far as I was concerned. Or so went my rationalizations.

  I parked closer this time, just on the side street by the building, and walked up to his unit with my lock-picking kit in my purse. I wouldn’t know which pieces I needed until I got a look at the door.

  Locks were another one of those thin barriers that seemed naïve from where I was standing. After all, you could pay a locksmith seventy-five bucks to break into your home if you happened to misplace your key. I’d done it once, and the guy who showed up had been a rude red-faced racist who nonetheless got the job done. I had no doubt I could master any skill set he happened to have, and I was right. It cost less than seventy-five bucks to do it, too.

  This was the second time today that I was breaching Kizil’s faith in the public. I hoped he deserved it.

  The lock was uncomplicated, a basic pin tumbler that required one tool and a little feeble jiggling. The door gave in after thirty seconds, and I was back in Kizil’s apartment.

  The place had a fetid beery smell that I hadn’t noticed before. It smelled, more or less, like what I’d expect of a strip club. It was a small place, with old carpet and yellowing walls, a worn fabric couch at the center. There was a laptop open on the coffee table. Its screen was black.

  I sat on the most depressed portion of the couch and hit the space bar on the computer. It lit up with an impersonal whir of recognition.

  I braced myself for a high security, and was delighted when the screen resolved into an open web browser, with several open tabs. One of these tabs was a Gmail window.

  This could be a goldmine. I rubbed my hands together, ready to dive in like Scrooge McDuck.

  I went to the search bar and typed in “Thayer.” I was surprised when the search yielded no results. “Nora” brought a smattering of hits, but none pertaining to the right Nora. Then I remembered—the e-mail Rob had given me was from a Hotmail account. He used a different server altogether for his anti-Armenian activities. I tried the Hotmail Web site—a URL I hadn’t used since high school—but the log-in wasn’t saved. I went back to Gmail and tried a few more search terms. “Consul General,” “Mustafa Sahin,” “Adam Kahraman,” and “Deniz Kahraman.”

  The Kahramans showed up. No mentions of EARTH or Thayer, but two birth announcements, dated five and seven years back, as well as a long chain about a ninetieth birthday party for a family patriarch. I scanned through them and got confirmation for one link in the chain—Kizil and Deniz Kahraman were related.

  Energized after my initial disappointment, I opened a new tab and started to enter the URL for Who Still Talks. The address autofilled after I got to the second word.

  I felt a surge of adrenaline and opened another tab and started to google Nora Mkrtchian’s home address. Another autofill.

  He’d known where she lived. He’d looked up her address. Had he harassed her? Had he threatened her? Had he carried out his threats?

  I heard the throaty approach of a car engine and got up to peek through the window overlooking the lot.

  I checked my phone—he’d been gone less than twenty minutes. I cursed under my breath and darted back to the couch to formulate my exit.

  Lock picks, phone, everything I’d brought with me was safely in my bag. I stared at the open laptop, with its alert, manipulated screen. If I took this with me, he’d know I was here, and if there was anything worth finding he would make sure he found me. I cursed again and put the computer to sleep, leaving it more or less as I’d found it.

  I couldn’t leave the way I’d come without running into him on the stairs. I had to get out some other way, and I had maybe thirty seconds to get out of view of the front door.

  I bolted into the bathroom and found a window, but it was too high up to be useful. I tried the bedroom next.
/>   It was a small, messy bedroom, and that’s about all I had time to observe before setting my eyes on the little balcony beyond a pair of glass sliding doors. If I’d had more time I could have gone through this space with some proper attention, but Enver Kizil didn’t dally at his strip club.

  I heard the terrifying sound of keys in a lock and threw open the doors, slipped between them, and closed them behind me in one panicked motion. I didn’t hear anything else from the apartment, and I hoped he hadn’t noticed the telltale groan of the doors on their rollers.

  The balcony was enclosed in a wall of beige stucco, which served to block the apartment from the peering eyes of neighbors. Between me and the bedroom, there was nothing but glass. I hoped he was making himself comfortable on his sofa, but I couldn’t afford to be optimistic.

  I wondered what I’d do if he found me on the balcony. He’d be within his rights to cause some pain.

  There was a tree within reach of the balcony, a leafy tree with a lot of grayish brittle-looking branches. None of them were much thicker than my forearm, and I didn’t have too much faith in their ability to support my body for more than a couple seconds.

  Luckily, Kizil lived on the second floor, and the building was old and depressing, which meant low ceilings. I looked down and decided it was still a long way to fall, but I could probably land on my feet if I had any kind of stepping stones along the way. I climbed up the balcony wall and got my legs on its outside, balancing myself before reaching out for the thickest available branch. I grabbed onto it with both hands, testing its resistance by applying as much downward pressure as I dared. I didn’t have much more time to evaluate—I was better off betting on my agility than I was confronting an angry man as an invader in his home.

  I held on to the branch, scooted my ass off the ledge, swung, kicked off the tree trunk, and landed on a knee and a shoe sole. I wasn’t exactly a ninja, and my landing raised a fair amount of crash and thud. I got up and scrambled around the building, out of view of the balcony.

  I wanted to look back and see if he peeked his head out, but couldn’t risk lingering in his field of vision. I could only imagine him throwing open the balcony doors and whipping his head left and right to catch the long tail of my shadow, or the glow of two nervous eyes in the dark. The idea made my heart race.

  A sharp laugh escaped from my throat, and I covered my mouth with surprise. I’d broken into a stranger’s home and escaped by running down a tree like a clumsy squirrel. I felt exhilarated and entirely ridiculous. I’d fantasized about jumping off balconies before—planning heroic dashes on bad dates, and a couple times, wondering with rock-bottom melancholy if anyone would care if I broke a few bones or died. Here was a new skill to add to my résumé.

  I’d crossed a new line, but I didn’t feel like a criminal. Enver Kizil was a scumbag, with the address of the missing girl plugged into his computer. The discovery made me feel cold. Whether or not his behavior stopped with stalking, he had waived all claims to decent treatment at my hands. He wasn’t decent enough to respect anyone else’s walls. It was a waste of feeling to think any more about it.

  And besides, I’d done worse things to better people.

  I was about to get the hell out of Torrance when my thoughts wandered back to the strip club. Kizil hadn’t even stayed long enough to get a drink, let alone catch a decent show. I also happened to know that when he’d left his apartment he’d had some stress to share or relieve. The strip club was open to the public, even if I wasn’t quite the target clientele. I was free to walk in to see who I might find.

  The lot was full, and I wondered if every driver was inside the Spearmint Rhino. I parked next to a car with a decal of a naked woman in silhouette on the rear windshield, her upturned nipples shaped like spurs. I didn’t need to see the man who drove it to know I’d dislike him.

  I walked along the side street to get to the entrance on Normandie—there was no sidewalk, just patches of grass and dirt interrupted by driveways. There were no people on the street, but I knew from the traffic and the cars in the lot that the area was reasonably populated. I pictured warehouses packed with people, hidden away from the sun.

  I walked into the strip club like I was any old patron, and found myself face-to-face with a man in a polo shirt who asked for my ID. I handed him my driver’s license and he looked it over with a click of his tongue. “Twenty-dollar cover,” he said.

  “What? Even for girls?”

  He gave me a disapproving once-over and said, “Twenty dollars unless you work here, and I don’t think you do.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be offended, so I ignored the comment and forked over the money.

  “Want to make any change?” he asked.

  “Change?”

  “Singles, sweetheart.” He smirked. “Not a regular, are you?”

  I gave him a ten and he counted out one-dollar bills that had never been creased. They made a satisfying sound as they separated from their stack.

  The main room was dim but less dingy than I’d imagined. Instead, it had a tawdry look of aspiring corporate opulence, with chandeliers, gilt picture frames, and a leopard-print carpet. A stripper was dancing to Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” The place was busier than I thought it would be at dinner hour. The clientele was mostly male, but I wasn’t the only woman. I wondered what everyone else was doing there. I guessed there were some sad characters in the room, and that I was surely one of them.

  There was no telling what time it was in the outside world. The Vegas casino rationale must have applied to strip clubs with equal force: pretend time doesn’t exist, and vice finds its window yawns without end.

  I walked up to the bar and ordered a Jack and Coke. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  The bartender was a tall, busty woman poured into a corset, with tanned skin and long blond hair that was either a bad dye job or a bad wig.

  “Is it always this crowded this early?” I asked when I caught her eye.

  She shrugged, and her cleavage strained against her neckline. “Tits and booze always sell,” she said, not smiling. “That’s my motto, anyway.”

  “That’s what my mother always told me.”

  She gave me a blank stare and turned her attention to a man a few stools down from me. The smile she gave him told me I was taking the wrong approach. She must have taken one look at me and decided I wasn’t drooling for her. She was right, but I still resented the outcome.

  I addressed her again when she came back my way.

  “Are you from here?” I asked, feeling lame. I wondered if the men around the bar had better lines.

  “Florida,” she said. “But there’s no Hollywood in Florida.”

  I nodded appreciatively. “You act?”

  “Sure. Act, model. Whatever needs doing.”

  “Pretty-girl work.”

  She smiled now, a bit wryly. “Sure.”

  “Men must love you,” I said, going for a sincere, wistful tone.

  “They grab at my ass, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Listen, I’m looking for my fellow,” I said, with a girlish play for sympathy. “Have you seen a big Turkish guy in here, in the last half hour or so? Black hair, droopy eyes?”

  The bartender raised an eyebrow and shook her head, getting away from my question. The head shake wasn’t a negation, more a display of disapproval at my prodding ways. She wandered away and I left a dollar on the bar, a begrudging tip before walking to a vacant table.

  I’d never been to a strip club before, and I decided to get the lay of the land before I made any more bumbling inquiries. I sipped slowly at my Jack and Coke and watched the show.

  The stage was wide, with three poles and a lot of colored smoke that seemed to leak out of the floor and ceiling. A stripper danced in a black bikini and eight-inch Lucite heels, swiveling around a pole with the slinky grace of a circus performer. She pumped against another pole and slid her top down, tucking the fabric under her breasts. She danced to the rhy
thm of the music, though the song cut out every fifteen seconds when the DJ’s voice came over the PA to remind patrons to tip and to announce lap-dance specials. You could buy two and get one free—a deal that seemed to highlight how many of these men were here alone.

  When the song ended, she pulled her swimsuit back into place and ceded the spotlight to the next performer. The smoke changed color, and the new girl started dancing while the old one collected her tips from the floor. I felt a pang of vicarious embarrassment until I recognized the thoughtless, nonchalant look on her face. She could have been picking up photocopies, staring at a spreadsheet—this was just her job.

  I was nearing the end of my drink when a stripper came to my table. She was thin with big implants that stuck out from her body like a couple of softballs. I couldn’t tell her age or ethnicity—she could’ve been anywhere between twenty-five and forty, and was either Latina or Asian, possibly mixed. She was wearing a burgundy bra and matching panties, with a garter belt holding up fishnet stockings. Her shoes were enormous and silver.

  “Are you having a good time?” she asked, standing over me.

  “Yeah,” I said, floating an uncomfortable smile.

  “Is this your first time here?”

  I nodded and took another sip of my drink.

  “You have to get a dance, then.” She touched her top lip with the tip of her tongue.

  “Maybe later,” I said. “I just got here”

  “Okay,” she said, winking and fluttering one hand. “I’m Melody, if you want to find me later.”

  I sat still through a few more songs, but no more strippers came to offer me a lap dance, though there were at least six on the floor, working the room. They were more diverse than I thought they’d be—ethnically, sure, but in body type, too. The girls were all tall in their towering heels, but some were still taller than others. Most of them were thin, but some had guts and cellulite that they carried with as much unself-consciousness as they did their topless breasts. There was variation in these, too—Melody hoisted one of the only pairs of obvious implants, and the natural ones ranged from small and perky to ponderous and baggy. If I’d come wearing lingerie and a lot more mascara, there was no reason I would’ve stood out, as long as I didn’t try dancing.