Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery Read online

  “What do you mean, changed the way he talked about it?”

  He smirked. “He’s said that his opinion on Armenia has not changed, has literally referred people back to a prior time, when he was free to express himself. Which is something. We know he believes it happened. But it’s not the same as having the leader of the free world come out and proclaim himself. Do you know who the Armenian community’s favorite president is?”

  “Who?”

  “Reagan. Democrats and Republicans, all across the board. Because Reagan was a fierce advocate for recognition.”

  “And Obama is not.”

  “To his credit, he has given commemorative speeches on April 24.”

  “That’s awkward. How’s he refer to the genocide without referring to the genocide?”

  “Metz Eghern.”

  “Mets what?”

  “It’s the Armenian synonym. It means ‘Great Crime.’ But spoken by the American president, it becomes a euphemism. A dog whistle, even.”

  “The vocabulary matters.”

  “The vocabulary matters. Turkey’s decided that the word ‘genocide’ is a slap to the national face. I’m not ashamed of being Turkish, but I am ashamed of Turkey.”

  “Are you alone in this feeling?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve aligned your sympathies with the Armenians. But you can’t be the only one. How about other Turkish-Americans your age?”

  “Some of them agree with me. More and more every day, it seems like. There are a lot of us who stand for truth and recognition, who are just tired of being tied to the embarrassing stance of the Turkish government. But not all of us. I’m not friends with any overt genocide deniers, but some of my Turkish friends don’t like to talk about it at all.”

  “They must be aware of your views? What you study?”

  “Yeah, it’s strange. I have a handful of educated, liberal, Turkish-American friends who will talk your ear off about racial justice, feminism, you name it. But they don’t want to talk about the genocide. It’s too close to home. It makes the blood shriek.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They mumble, they say no one knows what happened. They speak in probabilities, allowing that atrocities ‘might’ have occurred. But they hedge, and they introduce the usual arguments, sheepishly. The things they heard from their parents when they were too naïve to know what not to ask.” He sighed heavily, his head lolling down before snapping back up. “It’s a legacy, is what it is, your classic inheritance of guilt. It’s terrible to say so, but I envy the Armenians.”

  “Have you tried that one on your Armenian friends?”

  “Oh, yeah, and of course it doesn’t go over well. But what would it matter to my life to have ancestors who died before their time? I would rather have an inheritance of steely pride and outrage than one of heartless criminality, one that can only be worn with shame.”

  “You said you envied the Germans, too.”

  “I do. But you know, they were no better. It’s just that they lost the war. They weren’t allowed to write history as they pleased. They didn’t have that kind of power. But the result was that the guilty generation absorbed the brunt of that legacy. The right people atoned, and their descendants here can sit in American classrooms and learn about the Holocaust without feeling personally blamed.”

  “Japan lost, too,” Rob offered. He was reaching for the Bloomin’ Onion with one hand, which had apparently been set on the table while Kaymak talked. “Not all losers do it right.”

  “But winners always do it wrong,” Kaymak continued. “What we have is a poisoned lie that’s been passed down from generation to generation, and to call it what it is is not only to spit on our ancestor’s graves, but on our own grandparents’. It’s to spit in the faces of our parents.”

  I nodded and he sat back in his chair, done with his rant. He snapped off a piece of Bloomin’ Onion and chewed it morosely, looking a hundred times drunker than he had a minute earlier. It was time to start asking harder questions.

  “What do you know about Deniz Kahraman?”

  “I know she’s married to Adam Kahraman, and that the two of them spend their time and money with this EARTH garbage.”

  “Did you know their kids go to school with the Turkish Consul General’s?”

  He stopped chewing. “What?”

  “Do you think it’s possible EARTH is a civilian cover for the Turkish government?”

  He laughed, loud and bitter, opening his mouth wide to a view of mashed batter and onion. “Of course,” he said. “Of course of course of course! It’s like the Turkish government has a Google alert for the phrase ‘Armenian genocide.’ And whenever it pings, they get their people ready.”

  “But you have no actual knowledge in this case, I guess.”

  “Look, have you ever heard of someone named Hrant Dink?”

  “Sounds familiar,” I said, reviewing all the new names I’d processed since taking this case.

  Rob piped up. “He was the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in 2007, right?”

  I looked at him and smiled. “You’ve been doing homework, too?”

  “Just a few long nights alone with Wikipedia.”

  “He was a newspaper editor. He wrote about Armenian issues, including the genocide, and he was prosecuted for ‘denigrating Turkishness,’” said Kaymak. “Then he was murdered. They caught the gunman—a seventeen-year-old nationalist. But the whole story never came out.”

  “You mean there was a second gunman,” I said.

  He scowled. “This is not some Turkish JFK conspiracy theory. There was almost certainly a government cover-up. Evidence was destroyed on the grounds that it constituted state secrets. There’s widespread belief that the Turkish Gendarmerie was involved, particularly the JITEM, the intelligence wing.”

  “So let’s say the government is behind EARTH, and that Nora went after them. Do you think that might explain her disappearance?”

  He shuddered, and I felt Rob wince next to me. I was asking Kaymak if he thought his girlfriend had been murdered by his parents’ homeland.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds way too plausible, but I don’t know.”

  He shook his head violently, then collapsed in on himself, cramming his face in his hands. This line of questioning was going nowhere—he didn’t know any more about EARTH than I did.

  I pointed to his glass of water. “Drink that, maybe. Get your head clear.”

  “My head is clear. It’s my heart that’s hurting.”

  “I’m sorry about Nora. I’m sure it’s been terrible for you.”

  “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since she disappeared. She wakes me up every hour, alternately blaming and begging for help. I don’t believe in ghosts, but she haunts me so systematically that I’ve started to believe in her death.”

  “The two of you were serious, I take it?” I decided to try out the past tense and see how he responded.

  “Yes, very.”

  “How did you meet?”

  He swallowed. His Adam’s apple was thick with a raw look, and it bobbed in his throat.

  “She messaged me. Online.”

  “Like on a dating site?”

  “No. She read a piece I wrote on my Turkish heritage and sent me an e-mail. She thanked me. She said I made her cry.”

  “I get the sense there aren’t a lot of Turks in her circle.”

  “I’m the first Turkish person she was ever friends with. And honestly, we were just friends at first. It was very innocent. We emailed about Turkish-Armenian issues and politics in general, and at some point we showed up in each other’s Gchat lists.”

  “I hate that, don’t you?” I turned to Rob.

  He smiled. “There’s a woman who interviewed me for a job I didn’t get whose name shows up in my list every day.”

  “Well it worked out for me,” said Kaymak. “Our e-mails were getting longer and longer, with more and more bits t
o respond to. Then one day, I was waiting for her to write when she just chatted me. I guess it was around then that I realized how much she was starting to mean to me.”

  “So you were AOL chat-room buddies or whatever. When did you decide to meet up IRL?”

  “Last April.”

  “Almost a year ago?”

  “April 24, actually.”

  I whistled. “Was that supposed to be romantic?”

  “Not consciously. We were both going to a memorial event, and we decided to go together.”

  “What about Chris?”

  He bristled at the first mention of Nora’s boyfriend. “Chris doesn’t care enough about history to spend his afternoons at events.” He hesitated before adding, “And he was working that day.”

  “Ah. So you met up at this event, and what, love at first sight?”

  “I think we were already in love by then. We just needed to be near each other once to know it.”

  “So you fell into each other’s arms. How sweet. But you knew she had a boyfriend?” I tried to keep my voice free of disapproval.

  “Yes. But she didn’t love him anymore.”

  “Then why didn’t she just leave him?”

  “It was complicated. He was completely dependent on her, to the point where she thought it would be kinder to stay with him than leave. And she couldn’t leave him to take up with a Turkish man without upsetting her family, friends, and fans.”

  “Did Chris ever find out about you?”

  “Not before Nora disappeared. But he must know about me now. The police asked me about him. I’m sure they asked him about me.”

  Chris hadn’t mentioned Kaymak when I’d cornered him, but maybe that wasn’t the kind of thing you shared with a total stranger.

  “Is Chris a jealous man?”

  “Yes. I’d even say very jealous.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Nora was always wary of me texting or even emailing her sometimes because she suspected Chris of going through her phone.”

  “Was he ever violent with her?”

  “No. I wouldn’t have let that stand.”

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

  He took a long, contemplative breath and let it back out. “The police asked me the same thing.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them what I know about Chris, anything they asked, but when it came to my opinion, which I don’t think they gave a flying fuck about anyway, I said I didn’t know.”

  Rob raised his hand, like I was the TA in the world’s weirdest seminar.

  “Go ahead,” I said, tempted to laugh.

  He nodded. “Narratively, it makes a certain kind of sense. The jealous long-suffering boyfriend discovers the love of his life has a different love of her life. Even if he never touched her before, he might lash out in the heat of passion.”

  I patted him on the back. “Very good, my dear Watson.”

  He made a short bow and broke off a piece of Bloomin’ Onion.

  “We have to assume the police have pursued this theory, and that the reverse theory has also been explored.”

  “Which is?” Rob asked.

  “That Professor Kaymak here was having second thoughts about an affair that could smear him with scandal at the start of his career. That maybe he was frightened by the intensity of things. Maybe she was pregnant. There’s no body. We don’t know.”

  Kaymak was turning a dark, ugly shade of red.

  “You said she haunted you. You said she blamed you.” I stared at him across the table. “What aren’t you telling me, Kaymak?”

  He closed his eyes, and his eyelids twitched like he was having a bad dream. “I didn’t hurt her,” he said. “I would never have hurt her.”

  “Then why do you feel guilty?” A minute passed, and I pressed him again, raising my voice. “What are you hiding?”

  “I was the last person to see her,” he blurted miserably. “At least as far as anyone knows.”

  “You saw her after Hanna Bloom?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “On the sixteenth or after?”

  “The night of the sixteenth.”

  “And you didn’t tell the police?”

  “I was scared. They were looking to hang something on me, and I didn’t do anything.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “If you really didn’t hurt her I won’t say a word to the police. Tell me what happened.”

  He took a long time to start.

  “She came over,” he said finally, “and I could tell right away she was riled up. Her eyes were red, and I thought she’d been crying.”

  “Was this about her stalker?”

  He nodded. “He’d been ramping up his assaults and she was scared, scared and angry. She said she wanted to kill him.”

  “She said something like that in her blog, too.”

  “I told her I wanted to kill him, too, that if I ever found out who he was, I’d wring his neck with my bare hands.” He looked at his hands as if assessing their power, then looked up at me. “She got real quiet for a while. Then she said, ‘What if I know who he is and where he lives? What if I could tell you?’”

  Veronica was wrong—the police hadn’t gotten everything. Not even close. “What did you say?”

  “I backed down. I said I was speaking figuratively.” He hung his head and his mouth opened in a dry sob. “That was the last time I saw her.”

  *

  We dropped Kaymak off at an apartment in Pasadena. I noted the address in case I needed to find him again.

  Given the intensity of the interview, we had failed to order steaks, and the Bloomin’ Onion had gone half uneaten. I made it up to Rob by taking us to an In-N-Out, which he declared outranked even Outback in the Irvine kid chain-restaurant hierarchy. We ate cheeseburgers sitting in my car.

  “I think he’s innocent, by the way,” he said.

  I laughed. “Yeah, me, too. Though he should probably have told the police about that last encounter.”

  “Yeah. I get why he didn’t, though. And it’s good news for you—it means you know more than they do. Maybe you’ll crack this thing after all.”

  “That’s the hope.” I took a bite of my burger.

  “You lead an exciting existence,” he said.

  “Beats being a lawyer, maybe,” I said, my mouth full.

  “Are you hiring?”

  “Maybe. Do you like your money in tiny amounts?”

  “I stormed out of big law, didn’t I?”

  “True. Do you like feeling like a night creature, creeping into strangers’ lives to dissect and occasionally ruin them?”

  “Well, now that you put it that way.” He smiled and shook his head before pausing and looking into my eyes. “Wait, do you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s an acquired taste, I guess, but yeah. I enjoy the job.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you ever been into puzzles? Like jigsaw puzzles?”

  “Yeah, sure, on a rainy day, when I was ten.”

  “But do you know the feeling? That singular drive to finish something just because you started it?”

  “You mean obsession?”

  I laughed. “Maybe. It might be obsession. I also happen to be pretty good at puzzles. Why did you go into law?”

  “Wanted to help people?” He made a sarcastic snorting sound.

  “Hey, genocide deniers are people, too.”

  “True, and so are corporations. But you know what I mean,” he said. “Poor people, oppressed people, more victim-side litigation, you know? People hate lawyers, but we really aren’t all bad.”

  “I know. I’ve known some lawyers in my time. A mix of types, like anywhere else.”

  “Some of us are assholes, I know that. But none of us went into law school thinking we’d like to help oil companies avoid liability for murdering seals when we grew up.”

  “So, at Thayer, you didn’t just sit in a circle twirling your m
ustaches and counting your money?”

  “Actually, it’s considered pretty gauche to do both of those things at the same time.”

  I laughed again. “So how’d you end up at Thayer?”

  “Paid the bills, I guess. Mostly of the loan repayment kind.”

  “Fair enough. So are you fucked now?”

  He shut one eye. “I wouldn’t go that far, but I’ll need to line something else up eventually. Sooner the better.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “No,” he said. “This whole thing has been so eye-opening. In law school I never forgot that there were people in the world doing crazy things—horrible things, sometimes marvelous things—that were completely foreign to my experience. We were always reading cases, which are really stories about people that become so big they can’t handle them anymore without an actual professional judge. Immigration and malpractice nightmares, obviously the whole range of criminality. I used to be able to see myself as a character in these stories, a hero, maybe, at least a sidekick. I thought I could help people, change lives, change institutions, change the world. And then I started working, and gradually, without my realizing it, my field of vision shrank. Within a year I saw nothing but the cases I was on, and these weren’t stories.”

  “Sure they were. Everything’s a story.”

  “Not in the same way. These were maybe news stories, industry-level stuff. I did some pro bono. Thayer paid lip service to helping the community, and I thought, going in, that I could do more. It was ‘unlimited’ after all. But in practice, it was clear I’d be fired if I did as much pro bono work as I wanted.”

  “That’s the job. You have to bill and bill.”

  “Exactly, and I had to bill so much I didn’t have time to sit back and mull over every little thing I was doing, or even the subtleties of the larger purposes I was billing to serve. I was miserable there, but for the wrong reasons only. Selfish reasons. Like, I wanted weekends off, and I wanted to sleep. I wasn’t thinking about the soulless nature of the work.”

  “Until you started drafting memos in defense of genocide denial.”

  “There’s only so much you can ignore, I think, and retain a strong sense of yourself. I started looking for legal arguments that fit the goals of this case, and I found a case that could help us and got excited. I caught myself halfway to pumping my fist, and all of a sudden I saw what I was doing. I’d let myself get lost in the neutrality of details, and the big picture came up and knocked the wind out of me.”