Dirty Laundry (28 page)

“Grumpy?” Ichi glanced through the window at Tiffany. “She looks sweet.”

“Oh, little brother, how little you know the mind of a teenaged girl,” I said mournfully. “Let me help you pack up the car, Jae. Ichi, if the pizza’s shit, I’ve can make you a sandwich or something.”

Loading up Jae’s car earned me a brief kiss on the lips when I leaned through the driver’s side window to say good-bye. The kiss got me a disgusted hiss and an eye roll from Tiffany, who, in turn, earned herself a sharp look from her tight-lipped older brother. After promising to call me later, Jae backed the Explorer down the driveway and drove off.

“Have you guys been together long?” Ichi had snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking, and I jerked in surprise. Laughing, he put his hands on my shoulders to steady me.

“I don’t know,” I said sheepishly. “Not too sure when to start counting. I’ll have to ask him, but how the fuck do I work
that
into a conversation?”

I ended up making Ichiro a sandwich that would have done Dagwood proud. I then had to explain who Dagwood was, but his mouth was full of meat, bread, and cheese, so I don’t think it mattered whether or not he understood me. I sat down on the couch and began to flip through one of the books Hong Chul gave us.

“I probably should have called first,” Ichi said between bites. “You could have been busy.”

“Nah, I figured Mike was driving you nuts and Maddy was out saving the world, so you couldn’t hide behind her.” He laughed, and I knew I’d guessed right. My brother… our brother… liked to pry and poke. A few hours in his company and a guy would begin to wonder if he’d somehow stumbled into an odd CIA interrogation. “Coming over is good. We can do that get-to-know-one-another shit we’d promised to do.”

The folio I’d chosen was an address book. While the addresses were in English, the names themselves were in Korean. A few of the places were familiar, and I recognized Gyong-Si’s immediately. Hong Chul’s grandfather, Bhak Bong Chol, had been meticulous and kind of a stalker. Under Gyong-Si’s address, he’d listed who appeared to be the fortune-teller’s assistants, both past and present. The last name was the only one not scratched out.

“Terry Yi. And once again, why so many of the same last name? Too many Koreans are named Yi and Lee. It’s nearly as bad as Kim.” Ichiro gave me a look that damned me for being ethnocentric. “Look, I just have a hard time keeping track of who the hell is related to whom sometimes. My brain doesn’t work that way. Why did Bhak write that name in English instead of
hangul
?”

“Terry’s English? The word, anyway,” Ichi said around a mouthful of potato chips. “Kind of hard to write that in Korean.” He wiped his hands on a napkin and dug into one of the folders. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“Don’t know,” I admitted. “Bhak seemed to keep track of this fortune-teller from Seoul. Guy tries to pass himself as gay over here, but our English-named Terry told me Gyong-Si is about as gay as sugar is sour.”

“Maybe he’s bi?” My younger brother shrugged. “Or at least curious about guys. I am. Well, have been. About some guys.”

The chip I’d stolen from his plate caught somewhere in my throat and I choked, spitting up oily crumbs over Bhak’s papers. The sip of beer I’d sloshed into my mouth did little to clear it away, but the liquid washed away enough of it to let me speak.

“Wait, what?” Coughing, I glared at Ichi. “You’re what?”

“Curious… kind of.” He shrugged it off and went back to looking through the papers. “I’ve been with a couple of guys. Nothing too much, but it was okay. They weren’t anyone I was in love with or anything, so I think that would make a difference.”

“Jesus, does Mike know?” I finished coughing and rubbed at my chest. The spasm jerked my scar tissue into a twist, and a tingle of pain rolled through me.

“Don’t know why he would. It didn’t really come up.” Ichi frowned at something he was reading.

Whistling under my breath, I went back to reading through Bhak’s address book. “Dude, you are… a bundle of surprises.”

“My father puts it a different way,” Ichiro laughed. “But then he doesn’t know about the boys either. If he did, I think he’d drown me.”

We spent more time drinking beer and trying to read Bhak’s handwriting than matching up names to my flowchart. About an hour into the
hangul
and English ping-pong game, I stared down at the pieces of paper I’d taped together and tried to make sense of the lines and boxes we’d mapped out.

“Shit, he’s had… maybe… ten kids? Maybe? And no one’s tapped him for this?”

“This guy… Gyong-Si… he’s kind of a whore.” Ichi traced one of the lines. “Take a look here.”

My flowchart looked like I’d taken a pot of macaroni and thrown it down on the paper. I’d switched colors at some point to differentiate where he’d impregnated his clients. He had a red kraken leading out of his spot to the women he’d gotten to in Korea and a black octopus to his clients in California. One box had both a red and black line.

“Eun Joon Lee.” I whistled softly. “Fuck.”

“Considering he got paid by most of these women, pretty much… yeah. Wasn’t she one of the murdered women?” Ichi asked.

“I think that’s the only question I’ve got an answer to,” I replied. “Yeah, she was, but Bhak didn’t know she was pregnant.
I
filled in that black line. But he
knew
she’d gotten pregnant before. He might have been in touch with her here in Los Angeles. He’s got her address in his book.”

“So what happened to the baby?” Ichiro stacked up his notes and ran through them quickly. “Bhak doesn’t say anything about it. Just that she had a baby by him when they were both in Seoul. She must have been a kid. Maybe she lost it or something?”

“Gave it up for adoption? Like Madame Sun did?” I suggested. “But then why would she go back to him and get pregnant again? That doesn’t make sense.”

“
None
of this makes sense.” My brother rubbed at his full belly and belched, laughing when I chuckled. He grinned back at me. Nothing said brotherly bonding like shared gas. “So Gyong-Si’s got a lot of kids. Why would anyone care?”

“Jealousy?” I guessed. “Or maybe he’s got money someplace and someone’s trying to take out the competition? I don’t know, but it’s the only straw I’ve got to grasp. Nothing else makes sense.”

Ichiro’s phone sang out “Love Addict,” and he grimaced, pulling it out of his pocket. “Hold on. It’s our brother.”

“Yeah, I make that face
all
the time when he calls.” I gathered up the two empty bottles and paper plates. Stepping over Ichi’s legs, I nearly stumbled when he nudged my calf. Grumbling halfheartedly at him, I dumped the trash into the recycle container and came back into the living room, where he was packing up his stuff. “Heading out?”

“Yeah, he wants to go over a few contracts I had drawn up. I’m thinking of starting a shop over here. What do you think about that?” He looked like a little boy asking for a cookie. “Mind having your little brother around the city a few months out of the year?”

“Nah, it’ll be cool,” I replied. It would be. We got along well enough, and it seemed like we’d formed a half-assed alliance against our control freak older brother. “At least I’ll have someone else to read Korean for me. Pretty sure Jae’s figured out I’m only using him for his brain and not his hot body.”

“I’ll mention that to him the next time I see him,” Ichi teased, slinging his backpack over his shoulder.

“Thanks, ’cause I don’t want to ever have sex again.” I walked him to the door and stopped short when he pulled me into a fierce hug. It took me a moment before I thought to wrap my arms around him, but it didn’t seem like Ichiro noticed.

Pulling back, he slapped me on the shoulder. “It was good doing this with you. Gave me an idea about what you do. Next time, we go out and get you some ink from one of the guys I’m thinking about hiring. You can live in my world for a few hours.”

“No fucking way. I’d sooner get blown off through a glory hole at an orthodontic trade show.” I shuddered at the thought. “Dude, the only person I’d trust to put a bunch of needles on me would be you.”

That
little bit of sharing got me another hug, a fiercer lung-squeezing than before. Stepping back, my younger brother nodded manfully and patted my arms.

“Thanks,” he mumbled. “That’s the nicest thing someone’s ever said to me. Glad it came from you.”

“I meant it. You’re okay.” It was getting a bit too teary-eyed in the foyer for me. We weren’t totally comfortable enough with one another for me to break out the whiskey and get I-Love-You-Man drunk, but it was getting close. “I can’t kick the shit out of some stranger who fucks up my skin, but since you’re technically my younger brother, I can beat you and write it off as sibling love. You’re the bottom of the food chain now, Ichi. All part of learning how it is to be one of the boys.”

“And Maddy?” He crooked an eyebrow up. “She one of the boys too?”

“Fuck no. First, you don’t hit a girl,” I snorted. “Secondly, she can run you down like a cheetah and pound you into the ground with her purse. Don’t fuck with that woman. She carries cinder blocks around just in case she has to build a wall or something.”

I closed the door behind my laughing brother and headed back into the living room to soak in more of the Pastafarian Ouija board I’d created. The notes Bhak wrote down were sketchy. I had no idea when Eun Joon’d first gotten pregnant or even when she’d come over from South Korea.

“Let’s see, Eun Joon, you were… what, forty-one? Forty?” I didn’t know a lot about women, but it sounded kind of late to be having a baby. “Maybe you were pregnant before but lost the first baby, and getting a kid from your husband wasn’t happening. Did you go back to the guy who knocked you up before and then try to pass the baby off as Lee’s? Or can Lee even
have
kids? Then he found out about Gyong-Si and killed you.”

I really needed Wong to get back to me about Lee. The rut I was stuck in seemed only to get deeper and deeper the more I ran around, and I couldn’t see a way out. If I kept it up, I was pretty certain I was going to be buried under a pile of maybes with no clear answer.

My phone rang while I was staring at those damned red and black lines leading to Eun Joon’s name. Thinking it was Mike calling to yell at me for not coming with Ichiro, I let it ring a few times before picking up.

It wouldn’t do if Mike thought I lunged to answer the phone each time he called. That kind of thing led to a swelled ego, and his head was big enough without my help.

Except it wasn’t my bossy, overbearing older brother. Instead, the male voice on the other end of the phone had a harder edge to it, something cut from violence and tightly held back emotions. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then it kicked in that he was speaking a fast, guttural Korean I had no chance in hell of comprehending, even with my limited understanding of the language. To make matters worse, it sounded like whoever was calling was in the middle of an arcade.

“Whoa, hold up,” I cut him off. “First, English. Sorry, but my Korean’s only good for ordering off a menu. Who’s this?”

“Fuck, hold on. I… shit, hold on. I’ve got to get out of this room.” The chatter and beeping in the background faded, and all I could make out was the guy’s breathing. “Is this the guy who came to see me? Um… Cole McGinnis?”

“Hong Chul?” I hadn’t been around him long enough to recognize his voice, but he sounded rougher than I’d remembered. “What’s up? Got through a lot of your grandfather’s—”

“I didn’t call you about the damned papers, man,” he spat into the phone. “I called you because someone knifed my daughter this afternoon. What I want is for you to tell me who the hell is doing this shit so I can go return the favor. Swear to God, man. Abby dies and I’m going to fucking kill anyone who ever had anything to do with Gyong-Si. And then, I’m going to start in on his ass with a knife and see how he fucking likes it.”

T
HERE
is no longer trip than driving to a hospital. Especially when a little girl I’d just met lay on a table somewhere in the building with surgeons’ fingers inside of her guts. I stopped on the way to pick her up something to make her smile, blindly looking for something to stave off the wild dread running like a nightmare through my brain. All I could see in my mind were her tiny little flip-flops sitting on the porch and her little hands on her father’s face when she leaned in for a kiss.

I parked and wondered if I needed to hit reception up to see where Abby’d been taken, but I spotted her father first, his waxen face a spot of white in front of the building’s blue-gray stone blocks.

Hong Chul was standing in the large cement smoking circle outside of the hospital where his daughter, Abby, fought for her life. If I’d had any doubts of his love for his little girl, they were swept away when I saw the broken young father fighting to keep his hands from shaking as he lit a cigarette. I wanted to tell him I knew how he felt, but the hard look I got through a plume of menthol smoke told me he didn’t want to hear it.

So I didn’t say it.