Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (23 page)

“Recovered?”

“Never recovered. In remission.”

“How long?”

“Two years. Ruby didn’t tell you about this, huh?”

“Why would she have?”

“Because it’s why we couldn’t conceive,” he said. “One of the reasons, anyway.”

I sat back, struck by his sudden display of vulnerability. “I didn’t know alcohol prevented pregnancy, Doctor,” I said, keeping my tone light. “That’s a useful thing to know.”

“An indirect reason, I should say. I wasn’t one of those movie alcoholics. I didn’t beat my wife, or lose my job, or brawl with strangers in bars. But in ways that were both subtle and not, alcohol was the central force in my life, and I felt like the other stuff was out of my control. It was all I could do to go to work and be home once in a while. I couldn’t start a family the way I was, and I refused to try, even when Ruby begged me. By the time I was ready, IVF was the only way to go.” He spoke calmly, without any intimations of self-pity or regret.

“Out of curiosity, why are you telling me this?”

He squeezed the wedge of lime into his glass. “I want you to sympathize with Ruby,” he said. “Everyone is always hard on her, but she’s been through a lot.”

“She is my client,” I said. “I’m paid to sympathize with her. You don’t have to worry.”

“I understand you and Lusig are getting along.”

“Thank God we are, given the circumstances.”

“Of course, and that’s fine. Lusig is a charismatic girl, and I understand that Ruby, in contrast, can come off as somewhat unreasonable. I just want to remind you that you’re not paid to sympathize with Lusig.”

I nodded, caught off guard, and took a sip of beer. “Okay.”

He smiled. “Don’t get stiff on me. I just want you to like my wife. We all have our burdens. Ruby only ever does the very best she can.”

*   *   *

Rubina was gone when I woke up the next day, and I decided I was glad to have missed her. I didn’t like that she’d sent her husband to talk to me, but I knew there was no reason to confront her. I also couldn’t blame her too much—despite their love for each other, Rubina and Lusig were positioned as antagonists, and I was more Team Lusig by temperament.

In my defense, though, the housing arrangement also threw us together. We were spending all our time getting to know each other, working toward a shared obsession. If we were partners in a cop novel, we would have been sleeping together by now. Rubina, meanwhile, showed a general lack of interest in anything but Lusig’s pregnancy. I updated her on Nora as a courtesy, but she wasn’t concerned about the details.

Lusig, on the other hand, listened in rapt fascination as I told her about my adventures of the previous night. I was taking her through Chaz’s work, following the links that pinned down Kizil, when an ad popped up on the side of my screen.

“What the fuck?” I said, turning it to her.

The ad showed a woman’s T-shirt with the words FIND NORA written in block letters across the front. I could buy it for $14.99.

Lusig laughed. “Oh, this is your first time seeing that?”

“What is it?”

“A fan must’ve made it when her disappearance was in the news more often. It’s through one of those custom T-shirt places. There are bumper stickers and posters, too.”

I remembered the sticker on the subway car window. “I’ve seen them around.”

“Creepy, isn’t it?”

By disappearing, Nora had filled the city. She was nowhere, and so she was everywhere, her remnants blown apart like a handful of ashes scattered in sympathetic winds. Her face was on streetlamps; she wedged herself between pages of books. Her name sprawled across the face of the Internet, its letters black, dead, unmistakable.

“She’d be happy to see all this,” said Lusig. “I hope she comes back and gets to enjoy it. She always fantasized about being remembered when she was gone.”

“Don’t we all do that? I mean we all know we’re going to die one day, and I think dreaming of our legacy goes with that territory.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Lusig asked.

“What?”

“After I have the baby and we find Nora, I think we should find out what happened to your eggs.”

I laughed uncomfortably. I’d flirted with the same idea, but was unprepared to commit to it. “I’ll think about it.”

“We have to,” she said.

“What’s this ‘we’?”

“I’ll help you, like you’re helping me. It’s not like I’ll have anything better to do.”

“There are literally a billion things that are better to do than tracking down children from closed donations. For example, we could do nothing.”

“Well, the offer’s on the table.” She winked. “Sorry for egging you on.”

*   *   *

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to focus on my actual case, scouring the Internet for additional appearances by Kizil, looking for any signs of confederates. I found no trace of the man at the Spearmint Rhino, but it felt good to immerse myself in the case. When Rubina came home, I left to meet Veronica Sanchez for dinner, at a Korean restaurant on Olympic.

Veronica had a thing for Korean food, and she liked having a Korean around to tell her what she was really eating. It was to her credit that she never joked about dog meat, but then again she was a Mexican-American lesbian so maybe she knew a thing or two about not being a jackass, of that kind, anyway.

We weren’t friends exactly, but we met up now and then for a beer or a meal. I could tell that she liked me in her begrudging, sarcastic way, and I had a fair amount of respect for her. It was also endlessly useful to know an active policewoman, and she knew she might see me when I grew greedy for information. I’d stored up some goodwill over the last year by using my access sparingly, and I was about to cash all of it in.

She was waiting for me outside the restaurant, wearing a polo shirt and khaki chinos, her casual weekend gear. She was a tall, thickset woman with short spiked hair and a broad face that was friendly in spite of frequent efforts at scowling toughness. She looked up as I approached her and shook my hand.

We made small talk and ordered a large spread of food, and within minutes our table was covered in dishes of varying size.

“So, who’s this girlfriend?” I asked.

She twisted her lips to limit the brilliant stretch of a beaming smile. “Who wants to know?”

“Oh, now you’re all coy?” I smiled back at her. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m just being friendly.”

“Not jealous?”

“Would it break your heart if I said no?”

“Her name’s Mary. She teaches special-needs kids, a real sweetheart. Plus she’s beautiful. Filipina, brown like me, yellow like you.”

“Sounds like a catch. No wonder you look so damn happy.”

She waved away the compliment. “How come you’re such a bachelor, Juniper Song?”

I shrugged. “Takes a lot of work not to be, and I guess it’s not my top priority.”

“It isn’t weak to like the company of others, J.S.”

“I know, V.S.” I grinned. “Good grief, you’ve had a girlfriend for five minutes and now you’re a guru.”

She laughed. “Not a guru, but I think we have a few things in common. We’re both stubborn women who value our independence. We’re nearly unlovable.”

“That’s some regressive shit, lady.”

“Oh, can it. It’s not because independence is unlovable. Just no one wants a closed-off partner.”

“I have an ooey gooey center. Everyone knows that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, it’s practically oozing out of you.”

“I did meet someone I could get to like recently,” I said. “Nothing’s happened but I have a good feeling, for once.”

“Good for you. Who is he?”

I let her quiz me about Rob, and I asked more about Mary in turn. I was happy Veronica found my personal life interesting—discussing crushes and significant others felt like a sign of friendship, as much as it had in middle school. It was also a trade of confidence I hoped would repeat itself when I needed more serious dirt.

“So, do you think you’ll marry your Mary?”

“We’re lesbians, not fucking morons. So too soon to say, but I do like her.”

“Do you want kids?”

“If I can have them without being pregnant, sure.”

“Hard to do as a woman, though there are ways.” I thought about my conversation with Lusig, then recognized a good segue to the business at hand. “Did I tell you about my clients?”

“The missing girl’s friends.”

“Yeah, more specifically though, it’s a tag team of expecting moms. Two cousins. The biological mom and the surrogate. Surrogate’s so full of baby you can practically see the thing swimming.”

“I did talk to some people for you,” she said with a yielding sigh.

I showed her my teeth in an eager mock grin. “So what do you have for me? Full copy of the case file?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’d like to believe you have a little respect for me.”

“I do, I do. I was joking.” I threw up my hands. “Though, just so you know, if you were to breach protocol for my benefit, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

“You’re a sweetheart, really, a goddamn peach. Unfortunately, I don’t have much to offer. If we had more on our end, your girl would’ve surfaced by now.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“The case has stalled a bit, nothing really new over the last month.”

“Are people still on it?”

“Yeah, of course, but if you want to know whether our best officers are working night and day on this case and this case only, well, I can assure you that that’s not happening. Our city’s too big for that.”

“Which is why my clients hired me.”

“Now, I will say that this case hasn’t been ignored. We’ve poured a lot of resources into finding this girl.”

“I can imagine there’s a lot of pressure when a pretty woman disappears. I know it made the news.”

“Yeah, the media acted like she was blond or something,” she said drily. “Like a real white girl.”

“Armenians are white, aren’t they? I mean, it doesn’t get more Caucasian than the Caucasus.”

She chuckled. “I was mostly joking, but you know what I mean. Middle Easterners are all white, too, and, incidentally, about half of the Mexican population. My family splits for the census, not because we’re all different, but because we get to choose. Maybe if I weren’t so damn brown I’d be tempted to pass, too.”

“You really think you get to choose?”

“We all get to choose how people see us, to an extent, right? My cousin Elena, she’s a pale girl, married to a dude named Stephenson. She works for a startup and drives a Prius, listens to podcasts on her commute to Santa Monica. People are always surprised she’s Chicana. Bet that wouldn’t be the case if she’d pursued different stereotypes.”

“You think Armenians code switch in the same way?”

“Not exactly, but they can do things to play their whiteness up or down. I’d say disappearing while beautiful plays it up.”

“Do you think if Nora had been blond, there would’ve been more pressure? That you would’ve had to find her?”

“No, J.S. This is a high-profile case and it’s gotten its fair share of attention.” She leaned forward, fingers drumming the tabletop. “I’m not saying you won’t crack it wide open in your lonely little thinking chair, but I don’t think we missed any of the obvious angles.”

“I’m not saying I’m smarter than a roomful of policeman, but you could be wrong even so. You’ve been doing this long enough that you must know that, right? Sometimes the light has to fall just the right way, through just the right crevice, and you don’t need genius to see it, but you do need to be around to catch that glimpse. I plan to be around.” I scratched an itch behind my ear and gave her a supplicating smile. “If you know some of those angles, maybe I can ask you a few questions?”

“You can ask me anything you want.” There was a playful condescension in her tone. “Just like you can write Justin Bieber a fan letter. Whether I answer—well, okay, I’ll answer if I can.”

“Did you guys know she was being harassed on her blog?”

She rolled her eyes. “Juniper Song, come on. You probably figured that out within half an hour of googling her. Do you actually think the LAPD is run by monkeys?”

“Fair enough,” I said, feeling a warmth rising in my cheeks. “And I assume, then, that you guys looked into this EARTH group? The genocide denial group she lambasted on her site?”

“Yes, brain-dead as they are, my colleagues investigated the missing girl’s known enemies.”

“Right,” I said, remembering Kizil’s hostile greeting. He’d been interviewed in some capacity. “How much attention was paid to Enver Kizil?”

She frowned, both annoyed and thinking. “You’re throwing names at me now? I’m not even on the case. I’m going from memory of secondhand reports.”

“He must be the L.A. liaison for EARTH. He’s the guy who meets the lawyers, that kind of thing, but probably not the heart of the operation. Too poor.”

She laughed. “You need money to be a public nuisance?”

“No, but you need money to hire an international law firm billing out at, like, $800 an hour. I doubt his rent is much higher than that for a whole month.”

“We cleared a person of interest who might be your Kizil guy.”

“You did? Based on what?”

“Like I said, I didn’t download the file directly into my brain. But going on a hunch? Maybe I remember something about a strong alibi.”

“That’s not enough. There isn’t even a strict time of disappearance,” I said. “You guys should bring him in again.”

“Based on what?”

I chewed my lip and remembered swinging from a tree branch off Kizil’s balcony. “I paid him a visit.”

“And?”

“I saw some things that led me to believe that he was stalking Nora. Not just on the Net. I mean, he had her address, went to her house. I’m sure your colleagues heard someone was doing that.”

“What things?”

“Will you just trust me? I don’t want to get into it.”

She scowled. “I don’t like this. If you can’t tell me where it came from, I have to assume what you’re giving me is tainted in one way or another.”

“I’m not handing you tainted evidence or anything. I’m just asking you to send your people to this place to find the evidence yourselves.”