Beware Beware (22 page)

“But she hates my guts.”

“Actually she kind of likes you. She said you were a ball buster. Then she said, ‘It's a good thing I don't have balls.'” He laughed as he delivered the line.

We hung up, and I called Lori to tell her I'd be home soon. I spent the rest of the drive thinking about how to break the news.

*   *   *

It was five thirty when I walked into our apartment, and Lori was already there, watching something silly on TV. She looked up when I came in, and put her show on mute.

“Long day?” she asked.

I was rarely home this early, but the day had been harder than any all-nighter, and I must have worn its strain on my face.

“Yeah,” I said. “I need a drink. Maybe you want something, too.”

“No thanks,” she said. Lori wasn't a casual drinker—it was an age thing, maybe. When I was twenty-three I only drank to get drunk, too.

I opened a beer and plopped down next to her on the couch. I took a cool gulp and put one hand on her shoulder. “Look. I have some important news,” I said.

I told her about Winfred, and she reached for my beer. She drank a third of the bottle in one thirsty swallow.

“He was here,” she said. “This morning, after you left. He was right outside, texting me to let him in, and I pretended I wasn't home.”

“Jesus, really? What a creep.” She winced, so I changed tack. “Lori, did you know he was part of a gang?”

She shook her head. “I had no idea, but I'm not that surprised.”

“Yeah, a guy who can attack a stranger for dating a girl isn't exactly bound by things like laws or social norms.” I sighed. “But here's a question: why is your uncle Taejin messing around with gangsters?”

She shuddered. “I don't know. Maybe he's short on money? It must be money, right?”

I thought about telling her I put Chaz on the trail, but it felt like an invasion, and I didn't want her objecting. “I don't have the slightest idea,” I said.

Then she cried for Winfred Park, her small shoulders shaking while big tears spilled from her hazy eyes. I patted her back and brought her a new beer, which she accepted with both hands. She had seen too much death in this lifetime, too much of it too close to home.

“Is it me?” she asked, her voice thick with snot. “Am I cursed?”

It was hard to deny that, in the colloquial sense, anyway. The week I met her, four men turned up dead, all murdered in her name. Her own mother pulled the trigger on one, and as a result she was stuck with me, cursed in my own right.

“No,” I said with a weak smile, denying it after all. “Whatever happened to Winfred, it wasn't your fault.”

“Maybe I secretly wanted it, and God listened to my heart and made it happen,” she said. “Just like with Greg.” And her face broke again for another round.

I assured and comforted her, shaking my head and cooing as I'd done countless times in the last year. “Even if it has something to do with you—and that's an
if
, you know? He was a gangster who beat up innocent people with no provocation. But even if, you didn't invite him into your life. He forced his way in. Frankly I'm relieved he's dead. It means he can't bother you anymore.”

She gasped between her sobs. “How can you say that,
unni
?”

“Easily,” I said. “He was scum, and I was happier before he showed up. You were happier, too.”

“But he was a human being.”

“So was Ted Bundy. Look, I'm not saying I would have killed him, or even wanted him dead, per se. But what difference does it make to me if he died or moved to Tampa? There are lots of dead people more deserving of my grief, and I don't even know them by name.”

She frowned, and I pushed my thumb into the crease in her forehead.

“Am I a bad person?” I asked her.

She shook her head with vigor, so that her curly hair whipped around her. “I didn't mean that,” she said.

“Go ahead and cry for him,” I said. “But when you feel better, don't feel bad if you feel light and free. Call Isaac. Work it out. You've done more for Winfred than he ever deserved.”

I sat with her, rubbing her back while she cried. When she was fresh out of tears, I made dinner, clumsily, with frozen rice cakes and a batch of sauce she'd already prepped over the weekend. Without discussion, we agreed to a bottle of wine, one of the fruity five-dollar chardonnays we picked up at Trader Joe's. Lori unmuted the TV, and we watched eight different couples find dream homes that fit their budgets. Her eyes, which always looked out of focus to begin with, glazed over from the wine and the repetitive drone of the TV.

She turned the channel and the screen lit up with a jolty reel of celebrity asses, every one of them young and female. Even with the volume low, I could hear the obnoxious voiceover, a fast-talking man using high-pitched tones that seemed to say, “Get a load of this” as swimsuit photos flashed across the screen. There was something frantic about the stream of images, and I wondered how many viewers tuned in to this garbage, getting their brains scrubbed to nothing while drool seeped from their mouths.

I kept one eye open for any mention of Tilley's murder, though I doubted this was the best source for solid breaking news. We watched a full investigative report on a starlet's “baby bump,” about the size and shape of a cheeseburger and a tall beer, not that anyone was calling for my professional opinion. Next came a horrible segment on a socialite whose name I hadn't heard since the turn of the century. She'd taken a video of herself sucking on the wide end of a Japanese eggplant, making bedroom eyes at what was clearly a bathroom mirror, an iPhone held unsteadily in her free hand. The video was sad and upsetting, and the gleeful babble of commentary was even worse.

I was about to ask Lori if we could change the channel when Theodore Tilley's face filled the screen. It was a mug shot. I turned up the volume.

It was clear enough that the story didn't match the mocking, sleazy tone of the show. The voiceover was replaced with something more somber, but nothing that would ever be confused with legitimate news.

My first thought was that Theodore had been arrested for Joe's murder, and before I could register any pity for the boy, a strong relief took hold of my body, relief that Jamie had been cleared. It was followed by a flinch of guilt, but I learned soon enough that all that feeling was wasted. Theodore hadn't been arrested for his father's murder—he'd been caught assaulting the prime suspect.

“Isn't that Jamie?” Lori asked. Her voice was animated for the first time all evening.

“Shit,” I said. “It is.”

“What's he doing on TMZ?”

“Sorry, Lori. Be quiet for a sec.”

The screen showed a picture of Jamie with Tilley, taken on some bright sidewalk on a happier day. This was followed by a picture of Jamie sitting on a couch, talking to someone out of the frame. I recognized it as his profile photo from Facebook. The montage unrolled slowly, with more pictures of Tilley and Theodore, interspersed with snippets of text, pull quotes from Twitter, and Web publications of varying reputability.

There wasn't much information available, and the TMZ reporter spent some effort trying to stretch out what he had in order to justify the length of the coverage. Jamie was attacked outside of his apartment in broad daylight, when he went out to walk his roommate's dog. Theodore had been sitting in his car waiting for him, possibly intoxicated. He chased Jamie down as soon as he saw him, and bashed him in the ribs with a baseball bat. He only had time for the one blow—two passing pedestrians had seen his swinging approach, and they caught up to him before he could inflict serious damage. Jamie was fine, from the looks of it, but Theodore was arrested.

The report ended with blatant speculation about Jamie's identity as the LAPD's person of interest. Theodore hadn't yet made a statement, but the motive was clear to the TMZ reporter, and to the mass of popcorn munchers across the world, shouting their predictions into the broad echoing theater of the Internet. Thor Tilla, they seemed to agree, was a thwarted avenger, a hapless Inigo Montoya going after the man who had killed his father, still roaming free on the streets.

I had to admit, the motive seemed to fit. Part of me had been hopeful that Theodore was the killer. He made sense as a suspect, and though I felt bad for him, I wasn't attached to his fate one way or another. I'd liked him fine, considering, but if he were a murderer, I'd been perfectly willing to give him up.

There was always the chance that this was all a stunt, designed to exonerate him preemptively in the eye of the public. But I doubted that. I might have believed him as an emotional killer, but I didn't see him pulling off anything quite complicated.

In any case, this didn't look good for Jamie.

“
Unni
?” Lori's voice broke into my thoughts with an insistent edge. “Jamie is involved in Joe Tilley's murder?”

I bit my lip. I hadn't told her much about my activities over the last few weeks. After all she'd been through, I wanted to keep her as far away from my work as possible. Not that I'd succeeded in insulating her from evil, but I hadn't wanted to involve her in the mess of a murder that had nothing to do with her.

She was looking at me now with a question in her unfocused eyes that turned, against my silence, to hurt. “This is why you've been working with him? Because he's a suspect?”

“Hey, don't be mad,” I said. “I wouldn't be helping him if I thought he did it.”

Her face tightened. I thought I'd never seen her so angry.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, spitting the syllables.

I wanted to get in touch with Jamie, and Lori was starting to grate on my nerves. “Oh, really?”

“I can bullshit just as well as you,” she said snottily.

I didn't bother pointing out this wasn't true, that even the way she said “bullshit” sounded odd and unaccustomed, like it had come experimentally out of a child's mouth.

“Why are you mad at me?”

She huffed out a scornful laugh. “You spent all night trying to make me feel better, and thank you, I appreciate it, I really do. But what am I, huh? After all we've been through, all
you've
been through, you can't talk to me?”

“Of course I can talk to you.”

“Yeah? Well I would've thought dealing with another murder might be something worth mentioning.”

She looked like she was about to cry, and I saw that she was right. I'd insulted her, even with my best intentions.

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you,” I said gently. “I didn't want to involve you.”

“Why not?” she asked. “We're supposed to be family now. You're supposed to let me into your life.”

“I know. I'm sorry. But this stuff is ugly, and it's better if you don't touch it.”

“Remember the part when Winfred stalked me and beat up my boyfriend and turned up killed? Remember that?”

“So why would you want to see more of that?”

“I don't! But you were there for me, and I want to be there for you. This is a two-way street,
unni
. I know you have some weird savior complex, but you need my help, too. You're even more
fucked
up than I am.”

Her words sunk into me at a tender point of entry. I wanted to defend myself, but there was some truth to what she said. I did think of myself as her protector—she was so fragile, so wounded and alone—and it struck me all over again how she reminded me of my sister. I was the strong one, the perpetual survivor. I was the one who could shoulder this weight.

“I'm not a child,
unni
.” She spoke softly now.

I wiped tears from my eyes with the corners of my thumbs.

“No, you're not,” I said. “But neither was Diego. He was a good man, and he died because of my big fucking mouth.”

“No, he didn't,” she said. “You have to stop with that. He died because somebody
murdered
him. It wasn't your fault.”

This was well-trod ground, an assurance that Lori had to give me once in a while. Still, I felt the warmth of it, almost painful, like bathwater poured over an open wound.

*   *   *

As it turned out, Lori didn't care much for the particulars, and when I told her I had to keep some things confidential, she didn't pry for the juicy details. She wasn't after gossip, though she admitted she found it exciting. She just wanted a sign that I trusted her at all. We talked until late into the night, about my involvement in the case, and my attendant feelings, my many anxieties. At some point I tried to get in touch with Jamie, but neither he nor Daphne answered my calls.

It was therapeutic, unloading on Lori, but when I told her I couldn't talk anymore, she agreed to turn the TV back on. When she stumbled on a half-hour infomercial for a juicer, I told her to stay on that channel.

I tried to tune into that low frequency, but I just couldn't empty my head. I hadn't told Lori what I'd found out from Rory Buckner, and I kept thinking about Daphne, naked and catatonic, violated by a man who had all the power she lacked. By the time Lori dozed off and I got ready for bed, I'd mulled over the scene so many times that I felt like I'd seen it with my eyes rather than Rory's. My emotions were exhausting and felt a lot like grieving, though no one had died and it had happened years ago.

Of course people
had
died, and now my mind found the image of Joe Tilley, soaking in blood. I felt a short jolt of vicious satisfaction, and thought about revenge.

As soon as the word entered my thought process, I knew I'd been avoiding it. If Joe Tilley raped Daphne, then he wasn't her benefactor, spurred to action by the lightest touch of blackmail. She must have hated him. She must have wanted him dead.