Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (8 page)

“Took a knee and everything? Were there other people around?”

“Yeah, they all clapped. Someone sent us champagne.”

I wondered if I was a bitter old lady for thinking that sounded like a nightmare. “Was it a total surprise?”

“No,” she said. “I mean yes and no. I didn’t know he was about to do it, but we’d talked about getting married.”

“I guess I knew that, but wow, still surprised.” I felt a slim needle of hurt push into my happiness. Lori had other girlfriends, and I had a feeling she gushed to them about Isaac more than she did to me. She must have edited herself in consideration of my spinsterhood. “Congratulations. That’s incredible.”

She was glowing. I laughed. “You should see your face right now.” I pulled up my phone and took a picture. “Here, I’ll send this to you and you can show Isaac.”

We started eating and she showed me her ring and gave me the details. I had never seen her so joyous, and I was happy, too. She deserved all the good in this world.

“So why the doomsday prep? Did you think I’d be upset?”

“No, I knew you’d be happy for me. It’s just…” She bit her lip.

“Don’t tell me I have to get married first like we’re in
The Taming of the Shrew
. Wrong genre.”

She laughed. “No, it’s just, we’re moving in together.”

I felt my smile crack. It was out of my control. “Oh. Yeah. Obviously. When?”

“As soon as possible.” She bit her lip again, and I stared at her crooked incisor. It had been the first thing I noticed when I met her three years earlier, the sweet humanizing flaw in her angelic face. “I’ll keep paying rent until you find someone, but I’m actually going to start moving out now.”

I was stunned, and as I sat there trying to process this change, Lori’s eyes started to fill.

I snapped back to attention and willed myself to smile. “Oh, don’t cry, Lori. This is really great news.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said, two big tears escaping down her cheeks.

“It’s not like you’re leaving the country. You’re moving into Isaac’s place?”

She nodded.

“I think I can manage visiting you downtown. It’s what, a mile from here? I can even walk. It’ll be good for me.”

“Will you be okay? What will you eat?”

I laughed. “I used to live alone, remember? I know my way around a microwave.”

Her face started to crumble, and I sang a line of Korean proverb: “If you laugh and cry at the same time, you grow hair on your asshole.” And she laughed.

*   *   *

We spent the rest of the night drinking and reminiscing, allowing ourselves to get downright sloppy and mawkish. We’d been through a lot together, after all.

I meant to fall asleep as soon as I hit the mattress, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed against the increasing burden of my dread. I was feeling grave, and that gravity moved through my body, building an ache in my chest and filling my limbs with a drunk, sluggish weight. I didn’t cry. I was determined to be happy for Lori, and I hated to indulge in self-pity. But I couldn’t fool myself all the way.

I wondered whether I was becoming a bitter lonely hag. I wasn’t even thirty, but my stars were aligning to form a convincing picture. I could count all my friends on the fingers of one hand, and when Lori moved out, I’d have to find a stranger to help pay the rent. Not only did I not have a boyfriend, it had been years since I’d even slept with someone I legitimately liked as a person.

It wasn’t too late, in theory, to meet someone, have kids, do the whole thing. Time wasn’t the issue, or if it was, it wasn’t the main one. The problem was more essential. Looking at my past and my present and extrapolating to my future, I just couldn’t summon up a visual of my life as a wife or mom.

I’d had one serious relationship, and I’d ended that unilaterally when I was a sophomore in college. That was almost a decade ago, and I wasn’t any closer to marriage, or children, or any of that other mid-phase stuff. I felt like an adult in my own way, but when I thought about my future I tended to see myself alone. I could get a dog one day, I supposed, but so far I’d proven incapable of keeping a plant without leading it to an early, brownish death.

My mind wandered toward my long-ago donated eggs. I’d given them so cavalierly, without any notion of attachment. But now that I was thinking about them out there in the world, I felt a strange hesitation and unease that hadn’t plagued me when I was twenty-two.

All my donations had been closed, an option I’d chosen with alacrity. The thought of maintaining fuzzy relationships with donee couples had made me feel too apprehensive. I might have felt differently if I’d been a true donor, relinquishing my eggs out of the goodness of my heart. As it turned out, I was more of a vendor.

Which was fair enough, really. Egg donation was a lot of work. There were countless e-mails and phone calls and a rigorous screening process. I submitted pictures, both current and ancient, and drilled through my medical history with an obsequious woman from the fertility center. She needed a promise of good, clean genes, and I did my best to oblige. I had to give up smoking for a year and paint optimistic pictures of my mental health. My sister had killed herself a few years earlier, and I hadn’t quite risen out of the anhedonic funk that followed. But I answered all questions honestly—there was no history of clinical depression in my family, at least—and at the end of the day, people wanted my Ivy League Korean eggs.

I spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices that year, and I never even had my own doctor. The actual retrieval took something like half an hour, but it was a bigger deal than I’d thought at first. All it took to give sperm was erotica, privacy, and a receptacle. I had to go under to let a doctor spelunk up my birth canal and retrieve my genetic material like it was made of diamonds. Actually, diamonds would have cost less by weight. Life being priceless, and all that.

Somewhere, years ago, women I didn’t know had stared at my picture, noted my SAT score, and we’d synched up our cycles so I could transfer a part of myself. I wasn’t romantic about progeny, but this was literally true. I’d parted with something internal, and I didn’t know what had become of it.

Schrodinger’s donated eggs: fertilized or not, children or waste matter.

I’d donated dozens of them. It seemed unlikely that not a single one had served its purpose. I envisioned the spread of my genes, my self, a secret army of my broken-off pieces that might linger behind me when I was gone.

I wondered how much of Nora was left in this world.

*   *   *

I woke up the next morning fresh off of a vivid dream about her. It was pretty uneventful, as dreams about missing strangers went. She was over at my place, and we were chatting about nonsense while she painted her toenails. I wasn’t even sure we were using actual words, until the end, when I asked her where she was and I woke up. Maybe if I’d stayed asleep a minute longer I could’ve changed careers and become a TV psychic.

It was later than I’d thought, almost ten, and Lori was already gone for the day. She’d left a note on the dining table saying there were bagels in the fridge. I was unreasonably moved by her handwriting. I hated to think about the headache and sadness of finding a new roommate to split the rent.

I scarfed a jalapeño bagel and headed into the office, wondering when I’d get a reprieve from case limbo.

I decided to give Veronica Sanchez a call. I had yet to make her regret giving me access to her cell number.

“Juniper Song,” she said, her voice pleasantly sarcastic. “It’s been a while since we tangled.”

“Did you miss the headache?”

“Now that you mention it.” She laughed. “How’ve you been?”

Veronica Sanchez was a murder detective with the LAPD, a sharp-eyed, quick-witted woman I’d met on one of my first cases as a private investigator. I’d been an uncooperative pain in the ass on that case, but by the end of it, Veronica and I had built a weird camaraderie. She didn’t know I’d protected a murderer, but for the most part, neither did anyone else. I’d had no real choice in the matter, not that that helped me sleep at night.

She used to work with Arturo, and she let some of the respect she had for him rub off on her attitude toward me. Over the last couple years, we’d developed a casual friendship that I enjoyed enough to let override my feelings of guilt. It also didn’t hurt to know a murder cop, with the number of murders I seemed to run into.

“Can’t complain,” I said. “Staying out of trouble, as you’ve noticed.”

“You didn’t call me for a pat on the back.”

“No,” I admitted. “I’ve stumbled onto something that might be in your department.”

“A murder?”

“Not exactly. A missing girl. I’m sure you’ve heard of her. Nora Mkrtchian?”

“Ah, the Armenian sweetheart. Where are you hiding her?”

“I wish I were hiding her. Then I could stop. I’m looking for her, sort of.”

“What’s that sort of?”

“Well, technically, I haven’t quite been hired.”

She chuckled. “But crime and intrigue are like magnets to your bit of lead.”

“Hey, be fair. I’ve been behaving myself.”

“And now you’re getting restless.”

I rolled my eyes. Veronica had a way of reading me that was uncannily intuitive and as smug as possible. If she liked men and Chaz weren’t married, I might have introduced them. They could have made a formidable team of annoying parental surrogates though, to be fair, Veronica was only in her late thirties.

“I’m being practical. I’m like a phone call away from being put on the case.”

“I guess it makes no difference to you that the LAPD is already on it.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘on it.’ There hasn’t been any progress, and she’s been missing for a pretty concerning amount of time. I just met her best friend. She’s been going crazy trying to track her down on her own. She didn’t seem particularly impressed with the heroic efforts of our boys in blue.”

“Another amateur sleuth, huh? I’m sure that’s what we all need.”

“Well she’s eight months pregnant, which is why I suspect I’ll be taking over soon.”

“Detective work is tough on the body. It’s best handled by old maids, huh, Juniper Song?” She clicked her tongue in a verbal wink.

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I’m practically drowning in husbands.”

“Ha, I wasn’t even speaking for myself. I got a nice lady. Young and pretty, teaches grade school.”

“Nurturing type. No wonder you’re so damn friendly. You must’ve met her last week.”

“It’s been three weeks. That’s three years in lesbian time.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “From the bottom of my heart.”

“How did we get on this topic?”

“You wanted to rub your happiness in my face.”

“Oh yeah.” She laughed.

“Joke’s on you. I’m happy you’re happy. Maybe we should get dinner this week, and you can tell me more about your happiness.”

“My happiness and maybe a little information, I take it?”

“How ungenerous,” I said, taking a tone of exaggerated indignation. “Don’t you miss my face?”

She sighed. “Sure. How’s Wednesday, seven?”

“Okay. How’s Korean food? My treat.”

“Perfect,” she said. “In the meantime, I guess I’ll see what I can do for you.”

*   *   *

I went into the office and found I had nothing to do. I had no other cases on my docket, and the phone didn’t ring all morning. There was no point trying to follow Lusig around—that jig was up, and I needed my cue to start dancing the next one.

Arturo came out of his office at around one in the afternoon. I had my head down on my desk, and I was listening to the amplified sound of my fingertips drumming by my ear.

“Hey, Song,” he said, his authoritative voice startling me upright. “Are you busy right now?”

I looked behind me and saw him standing in his doorway with the shade of a smirk on his face. I shook my head. He knew I wasn’t busy.

“What’s up?” I asked. “You have something for me?”

I felt a tick of anticipation. As the ex–homicide cop on our team, Arturo brought in the most interesting cases, discounting a few outliers. He handled death threats, high-stakes security; he tracked down missing people. If there was a single PI who embodied my old conception of what this job entailed, it had to be Arturo Flores. He was a handsome bachelor in his mid-forties, a little gruff, with a subtle, dry sense of humor, and an honorable streak the length of Los Angeles. He had the experience and air of competence to land quality work, and I’d learned a lot under his supervision on a variety of jobs. Chaz made a point of giving me chores and buffing up my basics, but Arturo passed me the sexy stuff. I always preferred Arturo work to Chaz work.

Arturo liked to use me as a tail because no one suspected the Asian girl, and he’d even gotten me to strike up conversations with targets, mostly in bars, with the occasional staged encounter at a bookstore or Target. On one long assignment, he’d had me move into an apartment in Reno and befriend a woman who’d worked for a building manager and run off after cashing a month’s worth of rent checks. I’d stayed there for over a month, gathering intel at gambling tables and feeling like a goddamn spy.

I hoped he had something good for me. I hoped it’d be good enough to let me forget about a missing activist. If I had a tail, it probably would’ve wagged.

“I wouldn’t ask if you had anything better to do, but…”

My mental tail stopped wagging; my expectations deflated like I was a disappointed heiress in an old English novel. Excitement converted to a sudden dread of drudgery, roiling in protest in my stomach. I could feel a bad task coming.

“… I need some trash pulled.”

I stifled a groan. I would’ve let it out if Chaz were the one asking, but I knew there was no complaining when Arturo asked for a favor. I didn’t point out that this was Chaz work.

Of the many boring and unpleasant things that came with the job, the trash pull was probably my least favorite. There was nothing metaphorical about the phrase, as I’d hoped when I’d first heard it—this trash wasn’t digital, it was actual garbage placed in actual garbage containers placed on actual curbs fronting actual homes. It looked like garbage, it felt like garbage, and it sure as hell smelled like garbage. Of course, the garbage sometimes contained valuable information, the kind of stuff private investigators might go to humiliating lengths to find. The other advantage was that this brand of stealth snatching was legally sound—trash was no longer private property once it hit the street for collection.