Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (33 page)

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 accident,” 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.”

“What makes you say that?”

“They don’t have a body, for one thing. That makes it hard to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt. But also, you have information that they want.”

He gulped, visibly, his Adam’s apple like something stuck in his throat. “I don’t know anything.”

“Sure you do. You have connections to some of the shadiest people in L.A. The kind of people it takes teams of police years of hard work to track down. You know the names and faces protected by other names and faces.”

“They’ll kill me.”

I shrugged. “You knew that might happen the minute you got in bed with them. Anyway, that’s your problem. All I’m trying to say is it’s not the end of the world.”

“But my wife—”

“Yeah, your wife’s going to find out. There’s no way around that.”

He stared at his empty glass. “Just do me this one favor,” he said, subdued.

“Maybe,” I said. “Depends what it is.”

“Let me tell them.”

“Them?”

“Ruby and Lusig. My family.”

I thought about it. I wondered if he could look them in the eye and confess. It sounded a whole lot harder than walking into a police station.

“Okay,” I said. “If you have the balls for that, I’ll hold out.”

It was strange, really, that I had any sympathy for this man. He was a murderer, yet he had been a murderer for as long as I’d known him. We’d lived under the same roof, and though I had no love for him, I had started to think of him as a reasonable, ordinary human being. I’d seen things about him that were interesting and true, that were a part of him apart from the desperate man who had killed an innocent woman. I couldn’t make the switch to seeing him as a stranger. It didn’t matter how little he deserved my compassion.

Still, I didn’t need to sit with him a minute longer. I swallowed the rest of my drink and left.

*   *   *

I checked my phone as soon as I got in my car. Rubina had texted me four times, asking me to follow Van. I’d have to wait to get back to her. I made sure the interview had recorded. It was all there—a thirty-five minute audio file with a full confession, ready to go.

I didn’t know how long Van would take to come clean with Rubina and Lusig. I couldn’t wait overnight to get the recording to Veronica. It was too big to e-mail her from my phone, but she’d have it before bedtime. At least before my bedtime.

I was relieved in a cowardly way that I wouldn’t be the one to tell Lusig. I knew she was torn by her desire to know, but I couldn’t help feeling she was better off in the dark. She’d entangled her life with Van. She’d trusted him. Maybe she’d even loved him. I couldn’t imagine how she might react.

And then there was Rubina. Poor Rubina. I didn’t even know where Van would start. What was worse, from a wife’s point of view—the seduction of a loved one or the murder of an acquaintance?

I kept trying to picture the scene of this confession as I drove home. I couldn’t do it. It was inconceivable.

I was turning onto my street when I realized—it was never going to happen. Van had doubled down.

At first I thought I’d run over a pothole. There was the loud pop, the sudden lurch, the same disorientation of being thrown while stable. I cursed and started to pull over. The car limped as I drove, dragging its busted tire like a mangled foot.

Then lights came on behind me, high beams come to life out of darkness, flashing to get my attention. I became sharply aware of the emptiness of the street. All this nightmare needed was a full moon and a sudden rain.

I reviewed my impressions of the last fifteen seconds. Had I heard a gunshot? I became sure that I had.

The car behind me continued to flash its lights. I couldn’t see much else. Not the driver, not the number of passengers, not even the make of the car. The dark and the light were blinding.

I took a deep breath, then another, making an effort to convince my body that I was in control. It helped. I made a mental list of immediate objectives: First and foremost, escape if possible; if I couldn’t outrun dedicated pursuers with a gimp car in a dark city, then the next best thing was to ensure my release.

I turned on my hazard lights and crept along the side of the road, slowing enough to indicate that I was rolling to a stop. I could tell from the sound and feel of my car that the back left tire had been blown to burnt rags. The road scraped against what remained, and I felt the rough, dry impact grate like nails on a swallowed chalkboard.

As the car rolled I got my phone out and called Veronica, pleading out loud for her to answer.

She picked up after the fifth ring.

“This better be good.” Her voice was hoarse and groggy.

“I found out what happened to Nora.”

I heard her scrambling to rise on the other end of the line. I had her attention. “Tell me.”

“She’s dead. Killed by a man named Van Gasparian.”

“Gasparian? Isn’t that the name of your client?”

“Yeah, her husband. I don’t have time to get into it. Listen, I’m in some shit. Where are you now?”

“It’s one o’clock in the morning, J.S., where do you think I am?”

“You live in Eagle Rock, right? If you leave now, you can get to Echo Park in twenty minutes?”

“The fuck’s going on?”

“I have a confession to Nora’s murder on tape. It’s on my phone. I wanted to send it right away but it’s too big.”

“Can’t you Dropbox it or something?”

I almost laughed. “No, not now. I have to concentrate on getting away from whoever just shot out my tire and is trying to get me to stop.”

“Where are you?” Her voice was taut. She wasn’t wasting any more time.

“I’m basically home, in Echo Park, on Santa Ynez. I’m going to try and get down to the lake, but I might not make it.” I only had two downhill blocks to go to Glendale Boulevard, which was a much busier street than mine, but I doubted I’d be allowed to get that far without a fight.

I heard the sound of a door slamming behind me. There was no longer any distance between my car and the one behind it. I’d slowed down enough that the pursuer could get to me on foot. “Come quickly. Bring friends,” I shouted into the phone.

I hung up. Veronica would come. I didn’t have time to dial 911. I slammed on the gas.

The engine roared, but after an energetic twenty-foot sprint, it was clear I wasn’t outrunning anyone. It didn’t help that the car behind me was still moving. There were at least two people coming for me.