Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (35 page)

*   *   *

I sat in the stairwell for a long time after they left, trying to breathe and collect the pieces of myself that had fled in the panic of a brush with death. I closed my eyes and started to imagine my funeral—the mournful faces of my scattered friends and family, Lori heartbroken, my mother destroyed. I had to stop when I got to the speeches. There wasn’t a person in the world who could eulogize me properly, who knew me well enough to encapsulate who I was, what I would leave behind.

I’d just put a target on Van Gasparian’s head. He might have been a murdering scumbag who’d tried to do the same to me, but I knew there was nothing noble about what I’d done. He was a husband and a brand-new father, and I’d orchestrated his execution.

I couldn’t tell anyone what had just happened. I would live out my life in the loneliness of an undetected killer. I thought about crying, then decided it was time to go home if I had nothing better to do than feel sorry for myself. I needed a drink and a cigarette, badly.

I walked down the staircase, back to dim-lit Los Angeles, the life and landscape I’d almost left behind. It held darkness, ugliness, corruption, and sin, but the choice was never clearer than in the moment I grabbed it—life, in all its horror, was a better devil than death.

I walked home through Echo Park, feeling the soreness in my shoulder, the wretched reliable thumping of my pulse. I took my time. I followed the sounds of the living night to my front door.

Sixteen

Veronica once told me that in order to become a homicide detective as a gay Latina, she had to be twice as good, twice as diligent, twice “the man” of every other cop in the LAPD, even as jealous colleagues tracked her rise with disdain and mumbles of affirmative action and PC bullshit. Which was how she’d gained a reputation as an abrasive, ball-busting hard ass, despite what I had always suspected was a pretty compassionate core.

And now, Detective Veronica Sanchez was rising from the curb in front of my apartment, arms open and shouting my name.

“Juniper Song. Holy shit.”

I let her hug me and spoke into her hair. “I thought I said to bring friends.”

“I did. I let them leave a while ago.” She laughed. “You’re a piece of work, you know that? I’ve been worried sick about you.”

“Want to come in?”

She followed me to my apartment, where I poured out two glasses of rye and lit a cigarette.

“What the fuck happened to you?” she asked, taking her drink without further comment.

“I got kidnapped,” I said. “These two men, they took me up a deserted staircase and we had a nice talk about whether they should kill me.”

“Are you okay?”

I shrugged and took a deep drag off my cigarette, letting the smoke go in a long white spiral. “I’m shaken up, but glad to be alive.”

“These men—was one of them Van Gasparian?”

I shook my head and steadied myself. “No. They were the men who murdered Nora Mkrtchian.”

Somewhere in my subconscious, I’d committed to this lie the moment I traded Van’s life for mine. If he survived the night, I could reevaluate, but for now, I would start the work of sanitizing his legacy. If Rubina and Alex had to lose their husband and father, they could at least remember him as something short of a murderer. I felt I owed him that much.

Veronica narrowed her eyes over the rim of her glass. I knew my new story would be a hard sell. “Really.”

“Van has a gambling problem,” I started. I would hew close to the truth to burnish the lie.

I filled her in on Van’s descent into debt, as well as how Seoul Tokyo BBQ really stayed in business. I told her about Van’s indefinite gig as a mob surgeon, bound to the men who’d almost killed me.

“These men, they have names?” she asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “Hong and Boris.”

There was a chance that Hong would find out I’d given their aliases to the police, but I couldn’t withhold everything from Veronica—I felt guilty enough as it was. I also doubted this would come back to me. There was no way Hong and Boris were their real names, and if the LAPD did find them, it wouldn’t be off of my information alone.

“Hong and Boris. No last names.” Veronica snorted. “Please tell me they at least have distinctive facial tattoos.”

I described the pair as well as I could, while Veronica shook her head.

“We’ll check out the barbecue joint,” she said, “but I’ll tell you right now, I doubt it’ll lead straight to your guys.”

“Why not?”

“What were you, born yesterday?” She chuckled. “I have a lot of choice phrases for you, but ‘born yesterday’ has never been one of them.”

“You’ll have to share your list sometime. For now, humor me?”

“You should hear Arturo talk about this,” she said. “It is fucking difficult to catch mobsters. They’re organized. They have experience. They know how to clean up after themselves.”

“I doubt Hong and Boris are the top guys or anything. They’re probably just triggermen. Boris, in particular, didn’t seem all that bright.”

“You don’t have to be a genius to get away with murder,” she said. “It’s a skill like anything else. You just need to know how to use it.”

“Maybe you’ll find them, maybe you won’t. But you’re closer now than you were ten minutes ago.”

“We haven’t talked about the murder,” she said, her tone colored by an unsettling note of amusement. “Tell me exactly how and why these goons offed your girl.”

She knew I was lying, on top of which I knew she knew, and she knew I knew. But I plunged on. She couldn’t prove it, and I’d stick to my story from now on.

“She found them through Van,” I began. “She wanted to go after Kizil, and she thought they might help. She wasn’t planning to pay them, so she tried a little light blackmail. She overplayed her hand.”

“You got this from Van?” she asked, leaning back in her chair.

I nodded. “I told you I recorded him. But that’s gone now. Boris destroyed it.”

“Why did they let you go?”

“I convinced them they had nothing to fear from me. I didn’t know anything about them, really, and I said it wouldn’t be worthwhile to kill me. I also might’ve mentioned I had just placed a call to a friend who happened to be a homicide cop.”

I willed myself not to drink just to cover the silence that followed. If anyone could deduce the terms of my bargain, it was Veronica, but even she could never prove it.

She sighed. “This sounds plausible and all, except you already told me you had Van Gasparian on tape confessing to the murder.”

“I said I had him on tape
telling
me about the murder.”

I knew she wouldn’t buy this version over the panicked phone call in her memory, but I also knew that she wouldn’t be able to play back the audio. If I’d called 911, I would’ve been recorded, but I’d called Veronica’s cell in the middle of the night.

She shook her head. “I don’t get you sometimes, J.S. I like you, always have. Always thought maybe we were similar. Me, I like to find the truth in things, and I’ve lied maybe five times in my life that I can remember, all of them to my mother. It’s not that I’m a great woman. It’s just that honesty is a virtue that comes easy. It’s just not that hard to live life without lying all the time, no matter what anyone says.”

“Sure,” I said, with a small wink. “Maybe modesty is a little tougher.”

She didn’t respond to the weak joke. “I don’t know why you need to lie. I don’t know what you get out of it. I really don’t.”

I didn’t protest, and we passed a few minutes in a fraught, sulky silence.

“Maybe you just have to take me with a grain of mystery,” I said with a conciliatory smile.

She laughed harshly and stood up, leaving her drink unfinished on the table. “Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.

“Me, too.” I stood up to follow her to the door.

She put her hand on my shoulder and patted it three times, somewhat begrudgingly. “But don’t call me again just to bullshit me. I’m not up for playing your fool.”

*   *   *

I slept poorly and went into the office the next morning after a hot cup of coffee with a little pour of rye. Part of me thought I deserved a day off after the night I’d had, but I knew I had to call Rubina. I had little desire to talk to her, but I had no choice. I guessed she’d been calling my dead cell phone all morning, maybe all through the night, too.

Chaz and Arturo were both in, and my heart cracked at the sight of them. Here were my colleagues, two good men who trusted me, and I’d shown up with another pack of lies on my back.

“Why do you look like you slept in a chimp cage?” Chaz asked. Arturo rolled his chair to his door to get a look.

“Had a rough night,” I told them. “But the case—the big one? It’s over. I’ll explain later. I need to call my client.”

I pulled Rubina’s phone number and dialed from my desk.

“Where is he?” she asked immediately.

“Back up,” I said. “You mean Van?”

“Didn’t you get my messages?” She sounded frantic. “He left the house late last night, and he never came back.”

“Oh, no.” I checked my voice for insincerity and felt immediately slimy. “He left to meet with me.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was urgent. Listen. I figured out what Van’s been up to, and it’s nothing good.”

I gave Rubina the same story I’d handed to Veronica, and in the retelling, I started to think about how easily it could have been true. Van’s gambling, Van’s mob connection—none of that could be hidden. I could only spare him his last inch of humanity, and even that only in the eyes of others.

By the time I was finished, Rubina was sniffling, controlling her tears with careful measured breaths. “They were going to kill you?” she asked, wanting to disbelieve. “Oh, God. Do you think they—” She stopped. She was willing me to interrupt her.

“Where’s his car? Weren’t you tracking it?”

“At the Mermaid Lounge,” she said. “He used to drink there all the time.”

I pictured Van drowning his miseries after I’d left, hoping to forget he’d killed Nora, that he’d sent two dangerous men to kill me. He must have stayed until closing—just enough time for Hong and Boris to get from Echo Park to Glendale. I wondered what went through his head when they greeted him outside.

“You should report him missing. The police will find him.”

“Like they found Nora?” she asked bitterly.

She had a point. If the police hadn’t found Nora, I doubted they’d be able to find Van, either. He would become one of the vanished, the indefinitely missing, and Rubina would live her life in haunted uncertainty, even if he were presumed dead. I couldn’t tell her that this was better than the truth.

“I’m sorry, Rubina.” I didn’t know what else to say.

I stayed on the phone with her for another fifteen minutes, answering questions and talking softly, waiting, scared for her to blame me. When I hung up, I was exhausted.

Chaz and Arturo were both in their doorways, wearing looks of open horror.

“You got all that?” I asked rhetorically.

I called Rob, later than I’d meant to, to let him know I was alive. We agreed to meet up later, and I tried to summon the usual excitement. It was muted, but to my relief, it was still there. Life went on, I knew, and I had to be grateful—for each day, each burst of feeling, and each person in it important enough to lie to.

Epilogue

In the end I told the whole truth to the one person who needed it—my friend and fellow sinner Lusig Hovanian.

She moved back in with Rubina, to help her cousin manage her confusion and grief as well as her baby. I stayed away from that house, but talked to Lusig almost every day.

On April 24, the centennial of the Armenian genocide, the memorial Nora Mkrtchian had fought for went up in a public park in Glendale. Thayer White had dropped EARTH’s lawsuit after Kizil’s murder heightened public attention, and EARTH itself seemed to dissipate, its unscrupulous battle lost. Over a month later, there were no leads on Kizil’s killer.

I skipped the centennial gathering, where Lusig and Rubina rallied with the L.A. Armenian community, baby Alex held close between them. Nora’s death was still not a public fact, but she was remembered at the centennial, along with the memorial she’d fought to support. I went to pay my respects a week later, accompanied by Lusig.

The memorial was maybe ten feet tall, much smaller than the monument I’d imagined. I had to wonder what all the fuss had been about, how this single statue could rouse the temper of an entire nation. It consisted of two bronze pillars leaning toward each other, their posture describing humanity. I bent down to read the inscription at the foot of the memorial:

I SHOULD LIKE TO SEE ANY POWER OF THE WORLD DESTROY THIS RACE, THIS SMALL TRIBE OF UNIMPORTANT PEOPLE, WHOSE WARS HAVE ALL BEEN FOUGHT AND LOST, WHOSE STRUCTURES HAVE CRUMBLED, LITERATURE IS UNREAD, MUSIC IS UNHEARD, AND PRAYERS ARE NO MORE ANSWERED. GO AHEAD, DESTROY ARMENIA. SEE IF YOU CAN DO IT. SEND THEM INTO THE DESERT WITHOUT BREAD OR WATER. BURN THEIR HOMES AND CHURCHES. THEN SEE IF THEY WILL NOT LAUGH, SING AND PRAY AGAIN. FOR WHEN TWO OF THEM MEET ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, SEE IF THEY WILL NOT CREATE A NEW ARMENIA.

“That’s William Saroyan,” Lusig said. “He was Nora’s favorite novelist.”

“It’s a powerful quote,” I said, straightening up.

She smiled sadly. “You know, this is my fourth time here this week.”

“Wow, really?”

“I guess I’m starting to accept that she’s gone. And this is where I come to see her.”

I nodded. “Makes sense. She fought hard for this.”

“It’s not just that. Nora’s parents won’t give her a funeral. They won’t accept that she’s gone.”

“She’s their daughter and there’s still no body,” I said. “Can’t really blame them.”

“Oh, of course I don’t blame them. I’m just saying, I know she’s dead now, and this is the closest thing she’ll get to a grave.”

We stood in silence for a while then walked around the park. It was a Saturday afternoon, warm and beautiful, and we were the only people treating the park like a cemetery. Families picnicked and dogs chased Frisbees. There were children everywhere, zipping around and running past the memorial without the slightest idea why it was there.