Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery Page 26

  I drank slowly while I waited, mulling over the facts as I knew them, trying to fit them into one coherent story. The loose threads were starting to come together, and my mind buzzed with a final sense of convergence that had been missing when Kizil was my primary suspect. I prepped my phone to record whatever Van had to say. I had a feeling I’d want to have it on tape.

  He arrived around a quarter after midnight, in a sweater and wrinkled slacks. He looked alert, but I guessed he’d run out the door as fast as he could manage without freaking out Rubina. He had the nervous air of a hunted man.

  I waved him over and he sat across from me, keeping his eyes trained on mine.

  “What’s this about?” he asked without preamble.

  I decided not to keep him in suspense. “I want to talk to you about your gambling addiction.”

  He blinked. “What gambling addiction?”

  “I followed you to Seoul Tokyo,” I said. “I know it’s not just a Korean restaurant.”

  “You followed me?” He rose in his seat, his voice prickling with anger. Then he slumped back down. “Oh, God. Ruby.”

  I didn’t confirm his wife’s involvement, but I didn’t have to. “Tell me about the gambling,” I said.

  “I need to talk to my wife,” he said, gathering himself up to leave. “If I have to have this conversation, it should be with her.”

  This was true enough, and if his gambling were the end of it, I wouldn’t have confronted him directly. But I couldn’t let him go now. “We’re having a conversation you won’t want to have with your wife,” I said. “You told me that if it ever came down to it, I should side with Rubina over Lusig. Does that mean you’d like me to tell her whatever Lusig tells me?”

  He stopped moving and gave me a long, searching look. “I need a drink,” he said, and walked to the bar to get one.

  I didn’t stop him. Given everything else, falling off the wagon was the least of his problems. And besides, he might talk more easily with some booze warming his gullet.

  I watched him take a shot and come back with a tall glass of what looked and smelled like straight vodka. He sat down wearily. “I knew the minute I met you that you would ruin me one day.”

  “I don’t traffic in anything as grand as that,” I said. “All I do is turn on the light.”

  “I knew,” he continued, ignoring my wisdom. “God, it was so fucking idiotic to begin with. She knew it was nuclear to send a private eye after Lusig. That’s why she didn’t consult me. If she’d asked my opinion I would’ve dissuaded her in a second.” He pressed a thumb deep into his brow. “But once she figured out hiring a private detective was something she could do, I knew it was only a matter of time before she put you to every possible use.”

  “It’s not my fault you have a mountain of shit to hide. And honestly, what did you think was going to happen? You’re married. Money problems don’t stay in the closet.”

  He took another sip of vodka. “I know. It was only a matter of time until this came out once I started using the joint account.”

  “Do you have other accounts?”

  “We have separate accounts on top of our joint account. I had a trust fund kick in when I turned thirty-five.”

  “Then why dip into— Right. You depleted it.”

  His expression was soggy with shame. He added another swill of vodka to the mix. “I grew up wealthy,” he said.

  “I’ve gathered.”

  “I understand that this isn’t sympathetic, but I truly did not know that money could be so finite. That everything I had could slip through my fingers so quickly.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “The same way it happens to anyone. I started gambling. I didn’t stop.”

  “When did you start?”

  “Not until a couple of years ago. After the house was bought.”

  “After you stopped drinking?”

  He nodded. “It seemed less harmful. We had plenty of money, and I was making more of it every day.”

  “You said you didn’t think you could have a family with an alcohol problem. It didn’t cross your mind that gambling might get out of control, too?”

  “You’re right.” He took another gulp of vodka and set the glass down hard. “I’m a failure of a husband. A failure of a father before Alex was even born. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “No, I don’t care how sorry you feel for yourself. I want to hear what happened.”

  I waited, and after a sullen minute, he continued. “I heard about this place, Seoul Tokyo. From a coworker. Korean guy with a high-roller dad. He was telling a fantasy story, the kind that happens once in a while if you play regularly enough. Heroic gamble, six-figure payoff.”

  “How much do you have to gamble to get a six-figure payoff?”

  “Six figures. Many, many times.” He laughed emptily. “I have stories like that, too. A few of them. Always told myself I’d quit if I was far enough ahead. Never fully believed myself.”

  “So you got into this place. Became a high roller. And then what, you ended up six figures in debt?”

  He nodded and drank. He looked miserable, damp with a nervous sweat.

  “But you’re still playing,” I said. “You’re paying for past debts, and still creating new ones?”

  “I’m not losing like I used to. If I pay a couple grand a month for a while, I will be in the clear.”

  “You were hoping Rubina wouldn’t notice a couple grand a month?”

  “It didn’t seem impossible.”

  “How can you possibly know you’ll pay it off if you keep gambling? You spent what must’ve been a sizeable trust fund. How do you know you won’t sink the joint account, hand over the house?”

  “I wouldn’t do that to Ruby,” he said earnestly.

  I almost laughed. “You don’t seem to have the best self-control.”

  “They won’t take everything,” he blurted.

  “And who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

  “Do you even have to ask? Some scary fucking people.”

  “Criminals,” I said. “The organized kind.”

  He nodded. “The casino extended me a line of credit. It didn’t occur to me to ask where it was coming from.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Maybe it did occur to me. But I didn’t want to know.”

  “How on earth do you know they won’t take everything?”

  “That wasn’t an option. So, I struck a deal to stanch the bleeding.”

  “Jesus. This is some Godfather shit,” I said. “Tell me how.”

  “One night I was at the tables, and I got called to the front of the house. This man I’d never met before told me to get in a car. I knew I couldn’t say no.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He calls himself Hong. Who knows if that’s his real name.”

  “Korean man?” I felt a twinge of disgust.

  “I don’t know. Korean, Chinese. Asian, yes. That’s about all I know. I don’t even know his role, except that he was sent after me.”

  “Was it just him?”

  “No. There was the driver. Boris.”

  “Hong and Boris,” I said, trying out the names. They sounded fake, placeholder aliases for an Asian and an Eastern European. “They just up and introduced themselves?”

  “I learned their names later,” he said. “Boris, by the way—I know what Boris does. He’s pure muscle. I knew that as soon as I saw him. I thought he was going to be the last face I saw on this earth.”

  “Where did they take you?”

  “I don’t know where, exactly. They blindfolded me. I thought I was being taken to be executed. I was begging for my life and no one was responding. I almost pissed myself.”

  “But they didn’t execute you.”

  “No. They took me to a house. When they took my blindfold off, I was looking at what I thought was a crime scene. There was blood on the carpet, and it was leaking out of a dead man.”

  “Only, he wasn’t d
ead,” I guessed.

  He looked at me curiously. “You see where this is going, then.”

  “You got lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you look at it,” I said. “The mob was in the market for a surgeon.”

  He nodded. “I saved that man’s life. Who knows if that’s a good thing. I never found out who he was.”

  “And I’m guessing they didn’t thank you profusely, forgive your debts, and drop you off to live in peace with your family.”

  “The way I understand it is they’d been looking for a surgeon they could trust.”

  “You mean a surgeon they could pinch by the balls when they held him in their pocket. Did they know what you did for a living before they extended that line of credit?”

  “Yes,” he said. He looked mildly embarrassed, and I pictured him pulling rank at a card table, demanding the respect due to his prestigious profession.

  “So you became the mob doctor. I’d think that’s a full-time job. Is it not?”

  “No. Emergencies only, and not all emergencies. Only injuries they don’t want taken to the hospital,” he said.

  “Injuries that imply criminality.”

  “It wouldn’t help anyone if they started to overuse me. As it is, I’ve already had to leave an overnight shift without any notice. That kind of thing draws attention. No one wants me drawing attention, at work or at home.”

  “You, least of all.”

  “Me, least of all.” He stared at his glass and took a long sip.

  “Have they ever had you kill anyone?” I asked.

  He wiped his mouth and curled his upper lip in a display of disgust. “Good God, no. I’m a doctor.”

  “We’re well beyond the scope of the Hippocratic oath here. Doctors have easy ways to kill people. I had to ask.”

  “I would never do something like that,” he said.

  I wondered if he’d convinced himself I wouldn’t ask about Nora. “Did you ever see anyone they’d hurt?”

  “I tried to learn as little as possible about what they did, who they hurt, if they hurt anyone at all.”

  I gave him a skeptical look. “You think it’s likely people are shooting at them and they’re not shooting back?”

  “Whatever they’re doing, I don’t see it.”

  “Nothing? In over a year of working intimately with a bunch of straight-up gangsters?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And now, what? You keep working for them until you die?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I need another drink.”

  He walked over to the bar, a slight wobble in his step, and came back with another tall one.

  “So,” I continued, “at what point did you decide it was a good idea to have a child?”

  “Never. But Ruby was insistent, and I’d held her off for too long already. I couldn’t say no without explaining, and then I would’ve risked losing her altogether.”

  I felt my first throb of real sympathy for Van—it hadn’t hit me until now that he was deeply in love with his wife. It vanished the next instant.

  “You’re a cold-blooded man, Van,” I said. “Did you even want Lusig? Or did you just know you couldn’t afford more rounds of IVF?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. He looked at his upturned hands, studying them with the earnest inquiry of a palm reader. They were capable surgeon’s hands, hands that Lusig had desired, had described as compelling. Hands that had taken what could never be given back.

  “I don’t know. There is no okay answer to that question,” he said. “I love my wife. Other than with Lusig, I have been faithful to her.”

  “Sure, you’ve never cheated on her, except with her cousin, who you were trying your best to impregnate.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t care about this pregnancy. It could have been okay. Lusig would never have told her. And Lusig knew why we were doing it, too. She wouldn’t have slept with me if it weren’t for Ruby.”

  “Neither of you were doing Rubina any favors. Lusig wanted to sleep with you. She just needed a reason to abandon her loyalties. And I’m sure you didn’t mind sleeping with the nubile little cousin, either. But Van—I didn’t ask you here to talk about your personal life.”

  Fear crept across his features as he watched the set of my face. His eyes froze in their sockets, their dark brown grown glassy as his pupils spread black.

  “You’re a killer, Van.”

  The bar seemed to go quiet around us, though no one was listening in. I waited for him to deny it, but he didn’t say anything at all.

  “I know Nora Mkrtchian went looking for you,” I said. “I talked to someone at Seoul Tokyo who said she was asking about you the night she disappeared. Hours after anyone else is supposed to have seen her.”

  He started to say something, but drowned it with vodka instead.

  “The management knows she was there, and they seem to want to keep things hushed up. Not great for business to bring homicide police down on a mob-run casino.”

  I sipped on my beer while I waited for him to react. He didn’t—he seemed to be watching me instead, abject but expectant, as if he were interested in seeing what might happen next.

  “She wanted your help, didn’t she? She was being hounded by a man who wanted to hurt her, and she went on the offensive. But she couldn’t do it alone, and the men in her life, the ones who loved her, weren’t going to help her go after him. She looked to you because she had more to hold over you than love. She had knowledge. She had the power to destroy you.” The story unrolled in my head as I spoke, the connections I’d been missing snapping into place. “And she knew more about you than even Lusig, didn’t she? She wasn’t blind to you at all. She found out about your gambling. She found out you were mobbed up.”

  I kept my eyes glued to his, and slowly, painfully, his face lost its rigidity and gave way to anger, sadness, and underneath it all, resignation. I waited, and this time he spoke.

  “She wanted me to help her solve a problem. That’s what she said.”

  “Her stalker.”

  He nodded.

  “She wanted you to put the scare in him. Threaten him. Beat him.” I remembered her anger, her fear, the way these feelings had pulsed through my body as I looked for her, chasing her to her destiny. “She wanted your help getting rid of him.”

  “She was acting crazy,” he said. “Completely insane. You should have heard her. She was talking about an execution.”

  “She wanted you to take him out personally?”

  “Either that or get someone else to do it. She kept saying, ‘I know you know people,’ like I could just speed dial a hit man for her.” He spoke with a show of moral disgust that I was supposed to share. I didn’t exactly condone Nora’s attempt to line up Kizil’s murder—an attempt that paid off, I had to note, in the end—but, given what happened to her at the end of that conversation, I couldn’t muster much fellow feeling with Van.

  “You could have helped her,” I said. “I don’t think you refused out of any moral compunction. But she threatened to tell Rubina about you and Lusig. She knew, and she would always know. So you killed her.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said, pleading. “I didn’t see that I had any choice, do you understand? You get to a point where you don’t have options, and you kick into survival mode. It’s almost … physiological. You get cornered. You lash out.”

  “No, drop this ‘you’ bullshit. You’re talking about you. You’re talking about what you, Dr. Van Gasparian, did when you were cornered. This isn’t a thought experiment. This is what happened. Tell me, what happened in survival mode?”

  He grabbed at his drink and glugged it down like water from a long-sought oasis.

  “I can’t say this out loud.”

  “She had you in a corner.”

  He nodded.

  “You did the only thing you could.”

  He nodded again.

  “You murdered her.”

  “It was an acciden
t,” he objected, a thin whine in his voice.

  “Convince me.”

  He looked around the bar. No one was paying any attention to us.

  He began in a whisper. “I just wanted her to shut her mouth. I…” He faltered and I waited a long time for him to go on. Then he reached across the table and sealed my mouth with one hand. “I put my hand to her mouth, just like this, and I held it there. I kept holding it there. And then, the way she looked at me.” He withdrew his hand and cradled his head, remembering against his will.

  “You couldn’t stop,” I suggested, breathing deeply.

  “I couldn’t. There was no turning back, do you understand? She would have ruined me.”

  He finished his drink in one last thirsty gulp. It didn’t matter, anyway. He could sober up in prison.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered, slotting his head between his hands.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me, Van. This is over. Tell me what I need to know.”

  “I don’t know!” He was still whispering, but his voice was raspy and emphatic. “I didn’t get rid of her.”

  “Your friends. Hong and Boris,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “So, never mind a little gambling debt. You now owe the mob for a covered-up murder. The only ways out of this pickle are death and prison.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “God,” I said. “Poor Rubina.”

  He perked up at her name, his eyes burning red and wet. “You can’t tell her,” he said.

  “This is not a secret you get to keep, Van.”

  “It was an accident!”

  “Then you’ll get convicted of manslaughter. Doesn’t change that Nora died at your hands. This is not a family matter. This is a criminal case, Van. You understand that, right?”

  “I know,” he said, grabbing his head. “I know that. I know it’s all over now. I’ll go on trial, my face will be in the papers. I’ll die in prison.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “It looks pretty bad, I’ll give you that. You don’t get to keep your life as is. You killed someone. You don’t deserve that. But my guess is you’ll take a plea, and I’ll bet it’ll be a sweet one.”