Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery Read online

  “She’s pretty.”

  “It’s not just pretty, though that is part of it. She’s magnetic. I’ve always felt a little bit lucky to be her friend, maybe even possessive of her affection.”

  “Would that make you and Lusig rivals?”

  She smirked. “I get the sense that Lusig felt cheated when Nora and I started rooming together. It was purely circumstantial—I’m sure Nora would rather have lived with Lusig, given the choice. But it’s probably fair to say Lusig was jealous.”

  “I noticed Nora’s still listed on your apartment directory.”

  She stiffened a bit, adjusting her glasses to fill a pause. “She is, yes.”

  “Does that mean you haven’t filled the room?”

  “I have filled the room,” she said evenly. “Subletter moved in on the first.”

  I nodded. I registered just then that Hanna waffled between past and present tense when talking about Nora. “You don’t have to feel defensive,” I said. “She’s been missing a long time.”

  “It’s weird not to know,” she said. “Sometimes when I hear the key in the door I think she’s going to walk in like nothing happened and get upset that I thought she was dead.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  She took a deep breath, letting it out with a shudder. “Yes, I do. Dead, or as good as dead.”

  “Just because she’s been missing so long?”

  “That’s part of it. I’ve done the research. I know that when someone’s missing for over seventy-two hours, they’re often missing forever. And what’s missing forever but functionally dead?”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “She was in a state when I last saw her. Wild, agitated, on a mission. I was worried about her.”

  “Why?”

  “Not because I thought she would get killed or, Jesus, I would’ve stopped her. She just seemed a bit out of her mind.”

  “Do you know where she was going?”

  “I wish I did. I’ve been thinking about it nonstop. But all I have are guesses, and those haven’t done the police much good.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “That it had something to do with her stalker.”

  “Stalker? Just one? From what I gathered, she had several vehement admirers from the Web.”

  “She did. There was no way to count or keep track of them. And every one of them was completely vile. But there was one guy who kind of stood out from the rest.”

  I thought back on the stream of nasty comments—the tirades, the insults, the rape threats. They blurred together into a slimy pattern of malice and misogyny. Then I wondered what they might have said to her—done to her—if the whole of the Internet weren’t watching.

  “He found her in real life?”

  She nodded. “I don’t know how he got this address. That was the one thing we were truly afraid of—that one of these anti-Armenian groups would get ahold of our home address and make it public. That’s been known to happen. We were afraid we’d be raided, that we’d have to move. But that didn’t happen. Not on that scale.”

  “Just one person?”

  “We think maybe he saw her in real life. Her face was public, and she was easy to recognize. He could’ve seen her anywhere and followed her home.”

  “I was able to get this address pretty easily. If she wasn’t trying very hard to hide it, it would’ve been a cinch to obtain. It’s just how things are these days.”

  “That’s a scary thought.”

  “Most people are more constrained by the usual run of social norms.” I didn’t add that I wasn’t most people, in this case.

  “It started with letters. Crazy handwritten letters.”

  “Do you still have these?”

  She shook her head. “The police took those.”

  “Right,” I said. “They didn’t figure out who they were from?”

  “If they did, they didn’t tell me.”

  “What did they say?”

  “You saw the comments already, you said?”

  “Yeah, couldn’t look away.”

  “A lot of that stuff—accusing her of having an agenda, being a liar, and obviously a slut, too.”

  “That’s so weird.”

  “It is weird, but it’s also the most everyday thing on the Internet. If you’re a woman with an opinion in a public space, someone’s going to call you a slut. If you’re hot, anyway. If it were me I guess they’d just call me fat.” She shrugged matter-of-factly. “Nora’s hot. Worse, publicly hot. Worse, publicly hot and unavailable. She’s very much into displaying herself and being admired—it’s kind of her thing, this exuberant narcissism. It doesn’t bother me, but it enrages a lot of people. Men and women. But women don’t get scary in the same way.”

  “So this stalker—” I prompted.

  “He was scary. He hated her, and was clearly obsessed with her. He took the name-calling to a whole other level, every disgusting gendered insult you can lob at a woman, he lobbed right at her. And you could just tell, reading all these notes, that he had a serious, angry hard-on for her. As we all know, there’s no bigger whore than the hot girl who won’t sleep with the lonely guy on the Internet.”

  “But he wasn’t just a guy on the Internet. He was a guy leaving letters in your mailbox.”

  “And the letters got worse than the comments pretty fast. It was bad enough they were showing up, but he’d put in details about what Nora had done on a given day, where she’d been, what she’d been wearing.”

  “How fast was this escalation?”

  “He left the first note in early December. She got three more that month, then six in January, three in February, all before she disappeared. Every one this year included some kind of signal that he’d been watching her. The last few were dropped directly into our mailbox. None of them had return addresses, obviously, but the last set didn’t even have postage.”

  “Jesus, this sounds like a horror movie.”

  “It gets worse.” She pointed to a window facing onto the courtyard. “That’s our place. First floor. Convenient and vulnerable.”

  “What happened?”

  “This was just before she disappeared. Nora was up late, hanging out on our couch. It must have been around two in the morning. I was asleep in my room. And you know, she’d been jittery since the letters started, constantly looking over her shoulder, afraid to even go outside alone. But even she didn’t expect a face in her window.”

  “You’re kidding. He tried to break in?”

  “Not quite. He talked to her through the window.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She was sitting on the couch in just a T-shirt and underwear, with her laptop on her lap. We’ve had blinds since we moved in, and always kept them closed at night, but never got around to curtains. We didn’t realize you could see through the blinds if you stood with your nose right up against the window.”

  “That’s what he was doing?”

  “Had to be. We tried it the next morning. Closed blinds aren’t completely opaque, it turns out, but you need a straight downward angle to see past them.”

  “What did he say to her?”

  “Same shit, except more sexually explicit. She said he was moaning.”

  “What a fucking nightmare.” I shook my head. “What did she do?”

  “She just froze. When we talked about it later, she had all these ideas about what she should’ve done. Should’ve gone up to the window, smashed it and sent glass right into his eye. Should’ve grabbed a kitchen knife and gone out to the patio. Should’ve at least opened the blinds and looked him in the face, taken a picture or something to show the police. But in the end these were all fantasies.”

  “Like staircase wit.”

  “She couldn’t move, or even talk to him, let alone turn around and try to see him. She was literally petrified. She just waited for him to shut up, which he did, after about fifteen minutes. When she hadn’t heard anything for a long time, she got up and said o
ut loud that she was calling the police. She didn’t even try to get me until then.”

  “Makes me wonder what I would’ve done.”

  “Same. But the thing is, before this happened, I would’ve guessed Nora would kick his teeth in through the window, or at least come up with a great way to shame him, publicly and permanently online. I think she would have thought so, too.”

  “Did she end up calling the police?”

  “Of course. And they came, and by then he was long gone. Within a week, so was Nora.”

  “I can’t imagine they didn’t follow this lead when she went missing.”

  “They must have, right? But she’s still missing. There’s been no arrest, no word at all, and she’s still out there somewhere. How can that be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Some people are never found.”

  She sniffled, and in the half-light of the courtyard I saw her eyes fill with hopeless dark.

  We sat quietly for another minute, and I stared at the window. It was a black rectangle. I guessed it was curtained now.

  “Hanna,” I said, pressing my inquiry into the softness of her gloom. “Can I see the apartment?”

  She nodded with an air of resignation. “Why not. Who knows how many perverts have seen it, anyway.”

  She stretched her arms and cracked her neck, and I cracked my knuckles in unconscious response. The courtyard echoed with the sound of bones. When she rose, I followed, and she led me down a hallway that smelled like flowers and car freshener.

  Her apartment was at the end of the hall, and as I followed Hanna I saw her as a stalker might, framed by the close walls and closed doors of neighbors she might never see or know. Had someone walked this way before, hyped up on malice and anger and nerves? Did Nora see him coming for her, or did he deny her even that power?

  Hanna applied her attention to the door, undoing at least three locks with a series of brassy thuds and clunks. It took about thirty seconds—not a standard apartment setup.

  “Sorry,” she said, jamming a key into a tight lock with a metallic crunch. “I’ve been feeling a bit paranoid lately.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “These locks are brand-new. Nora and I talked about getting them put in but she disappeared too fast to do anything about it. Not that they would’ve helped her.” She shook her head. “You can’t lock yourself in a fortress forever, and it’s not like she felt especially safe inside. Someone wanted to get to her, so he got to her. We are all fundamentally unprotected.” She shoved the door open, speaking in a tone that suggested a mantra. “We are at the mercy of the decency of men.”

  I followed her into the apartment, her words playing musically in my head. It was a nice apartment, with a thickly decorated living room boasting full bookshelves and an assortment of picture frames hanging on the walls. Nora peered out from one of them, with her arm around Hanna. The rest were clearly Hanna’s pictures, showing a big family and an assortment of friends.

  “I took her pictures down,” she said when she saw me looking at the photo wall. “I thought they would creep out the subletter.”

  “Understandable. Is she here?”

  “No, Tinder date.” She sighed. “She’s kind of obnoxious, to be honest. She actually said to me, ‘I hope he’s not, like, a murderer.’” Her voice went high and she rolled her eyes.

  “Does she know about Nora?”

  “Yup.”

  I sucked air through my teeth. “That’s pretty bad.”

  She shrugged. “At least she’s too clueless to be uncomfortable here. She’s renting the room furnished.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t suppress a spike of excitement.

  “Yes, but if you’re thinking Nora’s room is as she left it, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Right.” I smiled and admitted, “That is what I was thinking, but only for a second.”

  She walked into a small bedroom and turned on the light. “This is it,” she said.

  The room was plain, with a bed and a desk and nothing on the walls. The bed was rumpled, but not by Nora. The desk held a laptop, also not Nora’s.

  I tried to gather a sense of her from the sterile remains of her room. I didn’t believe in ghosts, or ghostly remainders, but I thought I might feel something, a kinship, maybe, to tell me why I was there, to tell me where to go next.

  Instead there was nothing, just a temporary room belonging to a stranger. Wherever Nora was, it was clear she wasn’t here.

  “What’d you do with all her stuff?” I asked.

  “Police took anything they thought might help them. Her computer, her phone, anything she might have written on. The rest is with her parents.”

  “Where are they?”

  She hesitated. “Nearby. Glendale. But it’d be best if you didn’t bother them. I know you’re not in the tact industry, but they’re having a rough time, from what I could tell.”

  “When did you see them?” I asked, making no promises.

  “When I dropped off her stuff. They had already talked to the police, and were pretty devastated.”

  “Is Nora close to her parents?”

  “In her own way, I think. They wanted her to stay in law school, get a stable job, live with them until she married Chris. She didn’t do any of that, and she resented the expectations.”

  “Rebel girl.”

  “By their standards, definitely. But they love her. You should’ve seen her dad crying. It was like the dad in Twin Peaks.”

  “Bad example.”

  “Yeah, shit. Not intentional,” she said. “In any case, maybe hold off on interrogating them if you don’t know what the police are up to. No reason to make them run through everything twice if it isn’t necessary.”

  “That’s fair,” I said. “I guess I’m the third person to interrogate you.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind, really. I can handle it. Anything I can do to get her back.”

  *

  It was almost ten when I got home, exhausted by chasing a missing girl who wasn’t mine to chase. Lori was gone, at Isaac’s for the night, and I noted with resignation that her room was starting to look uninhabited. The desk was uncluttered and a stack of dresses lay on the floor, ready to be packed and whisked away. Pretty soon there’d be no sign of her left. Nothing to indicate that we’d spent two years sharing a wall.

  I woke up my computer and started the business of finding a new roommate. I’d never had to do it before—I’d lived alone since college, until I moved in with Lori. It crossed my mind that I could return to that solitude. I’d never hated it, really, and it was preferable to living with someone annoying. But there were practical concerns. The lease wasn’t up, and besides, I liked our apartment overlooking the Echo Park Lake. I was used to it, and I didn’t warm to the idea of leaving it behind.

  I posted solicitations on Facebook and Craigslist, seeking a roommate who could move in as soon as possible. I looked at other postings to get an idea of the format, and discovered a lot of optimistic people attempting to design their own roommates, as if they might get all the traits they asked for like toppings on a pizza. Sociable, cleanly, responsible. Educated, liberal, shared taste in music a plus. I wondered who I’d want to live with, and couldn’t think of a ready profile. I described the room and noted candidates must be okay with smoking.

  I hit Post and lay in bed, refreshing my e-mail and killing time before the trash pull. The apartment was peaceful and empty—I was aware all at once that I didn’t fill it. I closed my eyes and thought of Nora. I wondered if we would have gotten along.

  I waited for midnight to start getting ready. Arturo had given me a roll of white trash bags, a match for the ones I’d find in the bins—Arturo had done his research, at least. He’d lifted the lids before shoving the rest onto me.

  I changed into a sweatshirt and sweatpants, both black, and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. I gathered all the garbage and recycling in the apartment and stuffed it into two bags. I would need a lot
more volume.

  It was garbage day on my street, too, and I went down and raided two of the blue recycling bins on the curb. These bins weren’t clean or anything—the plastic containers collected a lot of dust, dirt, spiderwebs, plant life—but they beat plain old garbage. There were a lot of dog walkers on my block, and I knew the black bins got shoveled full of dog shit. This shortcut meant I would end up sticking some recycling bags in a non-recycling can, but I hoped it would all get sorted out in the end. Even if it didn’t, whatever altruism I had stopped short of lovingly subbing in garbage for garbage.

  I packed the new bags full of recycling, double bagging to protect from anything wet, sticky, or sharp, then loaded them into the trunk of my car over an extra layer of empty trash bags—protection from stains, spares in a pinch. I drove to Silver Lake and switched my lights off before turning onto the right block. There were no other cars driving by.

  I found the address, a small house up a hill about a mile north of the freeway. I parked in front of it—no one would notice my car without first noticing me, a dark figure raiding garbage in the night. The bins were where Arturo said they would be, and they were full past the brim, with bags spilling out and preventing the lids from closing.

  I brought the decoy trash from my car and placed it by the containers, where I was sure I wouldn’t mix them up with the real ones. Then there was nothing else I could do. I held my breath and dug in—the faster I got it over with, the less likely I was to get caught, not to mention the faster I’d get it over with. I filled the bins back up, using every bag I had and lifting a couple extra from a neighbor to pad the bottoms. Then I hauled the waste into my car, where it was sure to stink things up for a good while, especially since it would sit there ripening overnight.

  I tried to picture Philip Marlowe Dumpster diving, decided it didn’t fit his image. He dressed too well and cracked too smart. He would be the guy who shook his head at the other guy for spending his hours sifting through garbage when he could solve a mystery by drinking whiskey and evading seduction from dames.

  When I got home, I took a thorough shower and went to bed. I hoped to God that Rubina would call the next day.

  Six

  I was still tired when I woke up, just after nine. I made coffee and took my time getting ready for work. I tried to block out the garbage smell in my car as I drove to work.