Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (27 page)

“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 mustaches 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.”

“Is that when you quit?”

“It was the beginning of the end. I had to call my mom and go through a big existential crisis first. It’s not easy walking away from a six-figure job when you’re six figures in debt.”

“You’re six figures in debt?” An incredulous laugh sneaked its way into the question.

He smiled at me, a crooked smile showing a dimple and a sliver of teeth. “Whoops. I guess I should’ve kept that one in my pocket.”

There was something unbearably wonderful about him just then, something tender and thin and irresistible, like the bubbled surface of a topped-off glass, quivering on the edge of overflow. I reached for his hand, addressing this spark of longing—not sexual, exactly, but analogous at least, a fierce desire for contact, fusion. I hooked my index finger around his and held it tightly, as if I were holding him suspended at a great height. I didn’t have to wait long for the answering pressure, knuckle pushed back against knuckle. I leaned into him and he mirrored my body until our foreheads were almost touching. When we kissed it felt inevitable. My nerves flooded with relief.

We came up for breath, and he spoke with my face cupped in his hand, his words crossing into my mouth between parted lips. “Never thought student debt would be a selling point.”

“I’m a sucker for martyrs,” I said. “I’ve never been good enough to be one.”

Our burgers were cold by the time we separated. I felt flushed and silly, making out with a boy in an In-N-Out parking lot like I was in high school. We joked around while we finished our burgers, then I drove us back to the Gasparians’.

“I’d invite you in,” I said, “but I live with my clients.”

He grinned. “Next time.”

I watched him drive off, then started up the stairs to the front door. A large hand on my shoulder stopped me cold. It was followed by a blast of cologne and an oily voice, saying, “Don’t scream.”

His hand kept me facing forward, but I didn’t need to see him to recognize the thick-fingered Turk.

A chill ran through my body, followed by a deepening heat, my nervous system sounding the alarm. I’d gone looking for this man in a public place, and here he had me alone, in still suburban darkness, outside my clients’ home.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

He spoke quietly, but his voice sliced into me and lodged itself so his words seemed to reverberate in my own throat.

My wrist ached where he’d grabbed me, in fearful anticipation. I tried to find my voice, but I didn’t know what to say.

“I understand you’re looking for Nora Mkrtchian,” he said, speaking into my ear. “That is why you were following Kizil.”

I didn’t move or answer, and he went on.

“I never liked how he went on about that girl. He was too inflamed by her. I should have known he might bring trouble.”

I ventured a question. “You knew he was stalking her?”

“I knew he had taken too much interest in her.”

I swallowed. “Did he kill her?”

“He did nothing to her with my pardon,” he said, his tone genteel. “But regardless, Kizil was my man. He was my burden. Not yours.”

I felt my face slacken as I processed what he was trying to tell me. “Kizil was your problem. And you fixed him.”

“No,” he said. “Now you put words in my mouth. But it is true that the problem is fixed. There is no further need to pick at this wound. It has scabbed over. The scab has fallen off. There is no point in it bleeding out all over again.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“Yes. Your work is done. Further prying would embarrass us all. It would upset me.”

I remembered the power of his hand on my wrist, the cool way he looked into my eyes as he crushed me beneath his gaze. He had seemed so calm and unruffled, as if I’d barely qualified as an annoyance. I did not want to see him upset.

“If Kizil killed Nora, then where is her body?” I listened in horror as the question slipped out of my mouth.

His grip tightened on my shoulder.

“If she’s dead I need a body. I can’t just tell the people who love her, ‘This scary man says she’s dead and don’t worry about the details.’”

“That is not my problem,” he said. “That sounds very much like your problem. It is not the biggest problem you can have.”

“You can’t produce a body, can you?” I whispered. “You’re bluffing. You don’t know anything at all.”

“I know what I need to know. The rest is not your business.”

“But it
is
my business. It’s exactly my business.”

“I didn’t come here to argue with you. I came to relay my message, and I have told you everything that, in fairness, I believe you ought to know.” He let go of my shoulder.

I turned around and watched him walk down the street, rounding the corner out of my sight. I had no idea where he’d come from.

*   *   *

Lusig called my name when she heard me come into the house. I went to her room and found her in bed with a book. She put it down when she saw my face.

“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said. “Sit.”

My legs went limp and I sat down on her futon.

“I guess now is a good time to give you an update.”

I recapped the evening’s adventures, ending with the encounter on the Gasparians’ front steps. I left out one thing only—my suspicion that Kizil was dead. It seemed like too upsetting a prospect to introduce if it might not be true.

“You can’t tell Ruby all this,” she said, seriously.

“I brought a dangerous man to the house, Lusig. It may be the kind of thing I have to report.”

“No, you can’t do that. She’ll fire you.”

I thought about that. “Yeah, that seems likely.”

“So you can’t do it. You can’t do that to me.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and clasped her hands together. “I need you on my side. Please.”

Twelve

Rubina and Lusig had gone to a doctor’s appointment when I woke up the next morning, and I put off thinking about the man at the Gasparians’ doorstep. Instead I spent my Saturday morning debating whether to call Veronica. She called me first, just before noon.

I felt my pulse spike at the caller ID. I knew why she was calling—she’d found Kizil, probably dead. It wasn’t entirely impossible that she’d found Nora along with him, in whatever state she was in. I’d given her a solid lead after all.

“Hey, what’s up?” I asked, speaking too quickly.

Instead of talking, she took a deep breath and released a heavy, exaggerated sigh that took five whole seconds to complete.

“What? What is it?”

“J.S.” she said.

“V.S.”

“You fucking troublemaker.”

“Just get to it, will you? You’re making me nervous.”

“I got a new case today, thanks to you.”

There it was—Veronica was a homicide detective. She was crediting me for landing her a murder.

“Not Nora, I hope.”

“No,” she said. “Your missing girl is still your missing girl.”

“Then, who?”

“Your friend Enver Kizil.”

The confirmation still came as a shock. My shoulders slumped, and I sank into my chair. I didn’t like Kizil, thought he was a scumbag, maybe worse, but I was never happy to hear tidings of murder. I’d already come across more dead bodies than likely as a civilian, and I’d entered this case hoping I’d exit without seeing any more.

“We checked out his apartment yesterday. We searched the place, but he wasn’t there. Turns out, he was out getting murdered.”

“When? Where?”

“He was found a few hours ago in Redondo Beach, at the pier. Dead at least a day.”

“How was he killed?”

“Classic execution. Three shots to the back of the head.” She sighed. “Look, Juniper Song, we’re going to have to meet and talk about this in person.”

“Sure,” I said. “When are you free?”

She laughed huskily. “Free? This is work. You come into the office. Formal interview, the whole thing. As soon as possible is best.”

“Shit,” I said before I could stop myself. “Of course.”

“Relax. I don’t think you did it.”

“You sure?” I tried to sound light, but my voice came out clunky.

She ignored me. “When can you come in?”

Veronica worked at the station downtown, a place with bad associations for me and probably everyone else who went in without police colors. She met me outside and led me into a sparse interrogation room.

“Aw,” I said, going for levity. “This is where we first met, isn’t it?”

“Yup. You were a nightmare to interview.”

“You were poking around about my client.”

“I’m hoping you’ll be more forthcoming this time around.”

“Sure.” I thought about the shadowy Turk, the ominous smell of his cologne. “I have no loyalty to Kizil.”

“Do you want coffee or anything?”