Beware Beware Read online

  The car that crept into my rearview mirror was a yellow Ferrari, waxed to eye-searing brilliance, by my estimate not more than a day or two old. Jamie got behind the wheel, but I guessed the movie star was the legal owner.

  I left the lot before I imprinted my Corolla’s plates on their short-term memory and idled down the block for the thirty seconds it took for them to drive out.

  In my time with Chaz, I’d gotten a fairly good grasp on the art of tailing. My car was gray and forgettable, and I could follow any unsuspecting driver across the city without getting obvious. Flashy sports cars just made my job a little easier.

  It helped, too, that Jamie drove slowly. I guessed driving a celebrity’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle made one a little cautious. He avoided lane changes and signaled at every turn. I followed them out of Hollywood on Sunset, then up north toward Griffith Park and into the Los Feliz Hills, where the streets became smaller and strictly residential. The houses flanking both sides of the drive grew big and splendid, structures of alarming taste and beauty tucked into the hill like luxe pocket squares. I followed the Ferrari at a safe distance for as long as I could manage, then started to lose it in spurts as it climbed the hill. Just as I was about to give up and wait at the bottom, the car turned into a grand driveway.

  This belonged to a magnificent house, a Spanish-style mansion with a look of perfect preserved grandeur. It was a corrupt clergyman’s house, or a real estate king’s, or an A-list actor’s. The actual structure was a good quarter mile in from the street, obscured from most angles by a thick wall of brambly hedges manicured to a well-managed chaos. The better to block out cameras, I supposed.

  I passed the house after a quick disciplined gawk and parked uphill facing back down. Five minutes later, a dusty silver BMW nosed its way out of the driveway. Jamie drove, alone, looking exhausted.

  I laughed out loud, tickled by a sudden jab of recognition—Jamie looked familiar because I’d met him once before.

  It was a parking encounter a few months earlier, one of those silly interactions that happens every second in Los Angeles. I’d had a depressing day, one of many in a row, and Lori insisted on going out to dinner at a popular restaurant in Los Feliz. I searched for fifteen minutes before finding an empty spot. I signaled, finally triumphant, and a second later a silver BMW swooped in to take it. When the driver got out, I rolled down my window and said something impolite. He looked at me, and his eyes went wide. “Oh, shit, don’t tell me,” he said. “I ate your lunch right out of the fridge.”

  My anger deflated. “As long as you know what you did,” I said.

  He offered to move, and when I waved him off, he insisted. “I’m offering to vacate a parking spot. How often does that happen in this city?”

  Before I could decline more sincerely, he hopped in his car and drove away. That was all there was to it, but I remembered it clearly. It was a rare sparkle of decency that left a deep impression—an episode of mundane anger transformed in an instant to one of flushed pleasure.

  I was sorry when he left. I wouldn’t have minded getting his name. Now I knew—that was Jamie Landon, and I wasn’t exactly repaying his kindness.

  *

  I followed him back onto Sunset, the direct path from Los Feliz to his apartment in West Hollywood. The slow ooze of Friday traffic let me keep a loose, steady tail until we reached our destination.

  The neighborhood was not quite as royal as the one we’d come from, but it was pleasant, respectable, and I guessed the rent was moderately high. The building was old but well maintained, a one-story complex that might once have been a giant single-family home, parceled into a handful of units. The exterior walls were a bile-colored stucco, broken up by a few square windows. Jamie parked his car on the street, a lucky break for his tail.

  The clock in my car said 8:50 P.M. I called Daphne.

  “Well, he was at the Roosevelt,” I said.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Joe Tilley was with him. Jamie dropped him off at his house. I guess he’d left his car there. They’re close, huh?”

  “Joe likes Jamie. Their work is pretty intimate and they hang out often, from what I understand. I don’t know anything about them hanging out in a hotel together, though.”

  “Joe Tilley—is he a family man?”

  “He has a son and two daughters. None of his kids live with him, though.”

  “Wife?”

  “Number three. Willow Hemingway. Actress. C-list.” She spoke like she was directing me to an unattractive item in a mail-order catalog.

  “She’s at home?”

  “As far as I know.”

  I stretched the fingers of my free hand on the steering wheel, let the knuckles crack in percussive succession. “So he’s leaving her at home overnight to hang out with Jamie. Does he have a history of drug abuse?”

  “Might be his most famous relationship.” She drew in air through her teeth. “I guess they could be doing drugs together.”

  “I’ll keep watching him.”

  *

  I pulled out my laptop, found some unguarded wireless, and did a little background research. Internet stalking was the first and handiest tool for any private detective, and I made good use of it before and after I got the job. I wondered sometimes in an idle way if private detectives weren’t already going obsolete. Information was our primary ware, and it was plain enough that the Internet was bad news for all middlemen.

  I ran a search for Joe Tilley, figuring he’d be the easiest player to look up. I skimmed his long, detailed Wikipedia entry and scrolled through the column of his life’s work on IMDb. Everything Daphne had told me was publicly available, as was a surfeit of boring factoids made newsworthy by his fame.

  Jamie Landon had an IMDb page, too. Sparse, with a small headshot and a few writer credits in shorts and small productions. Nothing else really came up. No one cared where he ate his breakfast.

  I lingered on his picture and wondered if I should tell Daphne about the coincidence of our prior encounter. It was a funny story, but it was almost too trivial to mention. I decided against it without much thought—I only remembered him because I’d found him attractive, and there was no need for her to know that.

  I looked up Daphne next, more out of interest than anything else. I googled “daphne freamon artist” and the first result was a feature review in a prominent New York magazine. I whistled—Daphne Freamon appeared to be somebody. The review was fairly involved, and it included photographs of both Daphne and her paintings.

  Daphne was black, as it turned out, and my brain experienced a brief delay as it processed that minor revelation. I’d heard an uninflected accent, a nonethnic name, and pictured, without thinking, a white girl. I may have grown up Korean in Los Angeles, but my brain couldn’t quite shed those middle-American default settings. She hadn’t mentioned her race, but why would she have, anyway? It hadn’t occurred to me to mention mine. I felt a scorch of shame at my own surprise.

  She was also very pretty, but that part didn’t surprise me at all. I had a lot of Raymond Chandler in my PI training.

  The review was laudatory, though it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf. The critic was a white dude, and I couldn’t help but cringe at his lingering praise for the “lusty,” “voluptuous” “sensuality” of her work. I had a high school kid’s appreciation and understanding of art, but even I could see there was more to Daphne’s paintings than sexual heat. I found several of them all over the Internet, and spent a good fifteen minutes taking in her portfolio. The paintings were striking, haunting, bloody and visceral in bright splashes of color, and they made me feel uneasy. That probably meant she had talent. Good for her.

  Daphne was my age, and for a second, I wondered what I had done with my life. To my relief, I felt admiration rather than jealousy, a sort of creeping desire to be her friend.

  I googled myself—nothing at all. All things considered, a blessed result.

  *

  Daphne heard from Jamie an hour later, and she sent me home for the night. It was just after ten o’clock, and Lori was home, unusual for a Friday.

  She greeted me at the door, a habit of hers that put me in mind of a little dog. Lori would be something small and energetic, a Maltese or a Yorkshire terrier.

  “Are you home for the night?” I asked. She was in her pajamas, a blue-and-white pinstriped two-piece set with girly scalloped cotton shorts. She had a few of these matching sets, and she rotated them weekly sometimes. She saw little sense in washing her pajamas between wears.

  Lori and I had been rooming together for about six months, in a two-bedroom apartment in Echo Park overlooking the lake. The ad on Craigslist touted the lakeside location, the jogging path, the calming views. We were savvy enough to visit before committing a thing, and we found that the lake had been drained and fenced off months before. We wrangled down the rent and moved in. Half a year later, the lake was still a yawning dirt ditch, with no apparent signs of a return to glory.

  She nodded. “Have you eaten?”

  It had been a long time since I’d had a roommate, but I was getting used to it. Lori was messy but surprisingly thoughtful. Within the first month, we figured out our arrangement. Common areas were never cleaned unless I cleaned them, but Lori cooked all her meals for two. She was a good cook—she’d learned from her mother, and she could whip up a good Korean meal in minutes. I’d spent so many years dining like a bachelor—on Hot Pockets and yogurt and a lot of milk and cereal—I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed home cooking.

  My stomach growled on cue. I hadn’t eaten since lunch. Lori nodded and heated up a bowl of kimchi fried rice while I took off my shoes. She placed it on our dining table and sat down next to me while I ate.

  “Thanks,” I said. “No plans tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I thought I’d hang out with you.”

  “Don’t let me get in the way of your weekend. You see me every day.”

  She shrugged, and I saw in the way her eyes watched her nose that she had something on her mind.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She hesitated, bit her lip with her one crooked tooth, and gave me a dolorous, expectant look before sighing. “It’s nothing.”

  Lori was not quite a friend in the usual sense—she was flighty and giggly and twenty-three, the kind of girl I never got along with even when I was her age. But she was, I had to admit, something more important, a hybrid of little sister, daughter, and mother, slapped together out of mutual convenience and desperation. Less than a year earlier, her mother, Yujin, had been arrested for murder—a murder that I witnessed, and that had happened at least in part because I was there. It was a vision of hell that I’ll never forget, but it was much worse for Lori. Yujin was arrested on the scene, and Lori only saw her in prison these days. Yujin may have been one twisted mother, but she was the only parent Lori had.

  I made the decision to latch Lori’s life to mine. It wasn’t a hard decision, and it wasn’t one made entirely from guilt. When Lori and I met, I was virtually alone, my father and sister dead, my mother living with family in Texas. I’d had a couple close friends to sustain my social needs—I lost them both within days of meeting Lori. The trouble followed from her to me, but I knew it wasn’t her fault. I forgave what there was to forgive, as she forgave my involvement in the calamities that fell on her side.

  The truth was, we were both stranded, and we drifted together as naturally as a couple of ions. With her mother gone, Lori couldn’t stand living in her house by herself, and I started staying in Yujin’s bedroom. When it became clear that the house would have to be sold to cover legal costs, we signed a lease together and made things official.

  She called me unni like my little sister had when she was alive, and though I hardly knew her before we moved in together, she inspired the same range of emotions as real family. Among these, annoyance bubbled up the most often, followed closely by affection.

  “If you want to talk, we can talk, but don’t make me fish for it,” I said.

  “It’s just … boy stuff.”

  “Are things not going well with Isaac?”

  Isaac was Lori’s latest suitor, and they’d been hanging out with some regularity for the past few weeks. He was the first guy she seemed to like at all since last summer, by her admission, an unusual hiatus. It was understandable, of course—Lori attracted deadly men, and they’d brought her enough grief to send any woman running to the nearest nunnery. I was relieved when she started dating Isaac. He was a nice Korean boy, who wore polo shirts and went to church, who feared me a little, though not enough to keep him out of my home.

  “No, everything’s fine with Isaac,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

  “For now?”

  “No, don’t worry. It has nothing to do with Isaac.”

  “There’s someone else already, then?”

  That got a laugh out of her, and the tension in her face seemed to soften. “Not exactly. It’s just—there’s this guy who works with my samchun.”

  Taejin Chung was Yujin’s younger brother, Lori’s uncle. He was Lori’s only family in Los Angeles, at least outside of prison. He was divorced, with no children, and he and Lori were close. I’d only met him once. My picture of him was certainly colored by what I knew, but he struck me as a quiet, lonely man waiting for his life to spool out. He ran a body shop in Koreatown called T & J Collision Center, the initials scooped from his name to provide a thin illusion of all-American blandness. He worked with a small handful of employees, and he seemed to spend most of his time there. He even lived in a small loft above his office. Yujin had used this shop as a hiding place for the byproducts of her misdeeds. In a town like Los Angeles, cars were big giveaways when something went amiss. If a person was meant to disappear, a car had to disappear with her. When Yujin was arrested, the cops found two missing cars in Taejin’s garage—proxies for dead bodies, one of which was supposed to be mine. As far as anyone knew, Taejin was completely unaware of his sister’s crimes. I believed in his innocence, but I had little reason to want him in my life.

  “One of Taejin’s minions?”

  She shook her head. “I think he’s an investor or something. He loaned samchun some money.”

  “What’s he have to do with you?”

  “Well I met him today, at the shop.”

  “Ah, okay.” I laughed, getting it. “He liked you. What’s this guy’s deal?”

  “His name is Winfred. He’s probably thirtyish. Korean guy. Tall. Muscular.”

  “A dreamboat, huh?”

  She blushed. “No, he isn’t my type.”

  “You don’t like him better than Isaac, then?”

  “Unni,” she said, turning redder. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think I like Isaac a lot.”

  “What’s the problem then?”

  “When I was talking to Winfred, samchun was looking at us funny, like, watching us. I told him later that Winfred asked for my number, and he turned kind of pale.”

  “So he doesn’t like him. You’re basically his daughter, you know.”

  “I know, and at first I thought that was it. But then he told me to be nice to him.”

  “To Winfred?”

  She nodded, and something heavy sank deep in my gut.

  “Well be nice to him, then. It’s easy enough to be nice.”

  She nodded again.

  “And if you’re supposed to be much nicer, come talk to me. Unni’s got your back.”

  Two

  Lori and I spent the night in our pajamas, talking and watching TV. She told me more about Isaac, and I made us ice cream sundaes—my sole contribution to our culinary life. All in all, it was an above-average Friday night. My social life had never been vibrant, but these days, its embers barely glowed.

  When I woke up the next morning, I was ready to delve back into my new job. I worked the whole weekend, and Monday morning I reported to the office to share my findings with Chaz and Arturo. I didn’t have much, but I walked in as excited as I was nervous.

  At 9:30, Chaz sent an e-mail to me and Arturo requesting our presence at a debrief meeting in his office at 10:00 A.M., “to touch base on Ms. Song’s assignment.” I heard him giggle when he hit Send, and both Arturo and I submitted verbal RSVPs without leaving our desks.

  We gathered right at 10:00, and Chaz let me sit behind his desk while he and Arturo took the client chairs. I made sure they both had coffee when they sat down.

  “So,” Arturo started, “Chaz tells me he gave you your own client.” He eyed me over the rim of his paper cup. He wore his skepticism like a name tag.

  Arturo—or Art, as Chaz, and only Chaz, called him—intimidated me. He was one of the few people I’d ever known who had that particular effect. There was nothing physically imposing about him—he was five foot seven or eight, with a bit of a paunch, and, oddly, the sculpted calves of a furniture mover. He wore his straight black hair in a crew cut, and his face, brown-skinned and handsome, was clean shaven. His features were stern but not scary. He was younger than Chaz, but he was the one with gravitas, the straight man of the duo. If they were my workplace parents, then Chaz was my dad and Arturo, my father. I was afraid of disappointing them both.

  “I hope that’s okay,” I said. “Chaz thinks I can handle it.”

  “Don’t worry, Song. We already talked it out, and Art’s on board.” Chaz winked. “What have you got? Regale us.”

  I filled them in on Daphne and her request, and then I told them everything I’d learned about Jamie, both first-and secondhand. They listened dutifully while I ran through what I knew.

  Jamie was a Boston native who’d moved to New York for college with all of his optimism intact. He’d graduated from NYU with a mule’s load of student loans and bigger dreams than ever. Since the age of fifteen, he’d worked as a dog walker, a babysitter, a library clerk, a waiter, a bartender, a bookstore cashier, a substitute teacher, and now a ghostwriter, but his aspirations were for Hollywood glory. These brought him to Los Angeles, where he lived with two roommates, old friends trying to crack different parts of the same Hollywood game. One of them owned a basset hound, but Jamie was the one who walked her.