Beware Beware (6 page)

It took some effort to remember why I was there—just an investigator's apprentice checking out a boyfriend's bad behavior. Daphne wanted to know what kind of trouble Jamie was getting into, but she was afraid of drugs, not death. Then again, death was that final, bulging fear, just a scratch beneath the surface of every other.

As I sat and drank and simmered in thought, the people in the hotel lobby began to stir. My first thought was that a celebrity had walked in the door, but as my attention came alive I noticed sirens. The paramedics came first, then the police, all wearing dour masks on excited faces. I didn't stick around to see the reporters, but I knew they couldn't be far behind. They'd vie, every one, for the big break, the quote of misery from the manager, the unknown friend. Somewhere, maybe in that big house on the hill, Tilley's third wife was crying. I hoped numbers one and two found out before his death hit the news.

It was a sorry story, the whole thing, and I wanted nothing more than to see myself out.

 

Four

I called Daphne on my way home but she didn't pick up. I could think of a few reasons she might be busy, but I was worried, my nerves strung, plucked, and vibrating. I tried her twice more before I gave up and called Chaz instead.

I got him on his cell. One thing I liked about Chaz, he always picked up my calls.

“What's going, girl detective?” There was something about his cell phone that brought out the cheesiest qualities of his cool act.

“Oh, Chazzie. You don't even know.”

I'd been keeping him loosely posted on my assignment, but he gave me enough credit that he didn't press me for details—micromanagement was not, he claimed, his style. Some developments, though, deserved a full report to the boss. I suspected the death of a movie star in close proximity to my target had to qualify. I decided to give him the long version.

It felt strange to tell him Joe Tilley was dead. Chaz didn't care much about celebrities, but he knew who he was, and knew what it meant. Tilley was a big enough name to top the news, invoke speculations about rules of three. This was not a quiet story, and it would be everywhere in a matter of hours. When I told Chaz what had happened, the words buzzed on my lips and left a sting of shame. I had no particular feeling for the man, but I was in awe of his death and bothered by this reaction. He was more than an abstract to me, no longer a celebrity figure made inhuman by the waxy gloss of fame—yet I couldn't speak of him without feeling like a cheap purveyor of tabloid gossip.

Chaz listened, grunting here and there to let me know he was still on the line. When I was done, he exhaled like he'd been holding his breath for minutes. “So,” he said. “This girl puts you onto her cokehead boyfriend and you win the corpse lotto while you're on the job. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

He sighed. “I don't like it, Song. It's always bad news when someone turns up dead, and it doesn't help that this someone is famous as the Pope.”

“I am aware of this, Chaz.”

“And you haven't talked to the client yet?”

“She isn't picking up.”

“Well, let's just pray she got the answers she needed so we can get paid and move on with our lives.”

“Yeah,” I said, without conviction.

“Here's hoping, anyway.” He sighed again. “Maybe this isn't our problem.”

*   *   *

When I got home, Lori was out, and I cracked open a beer and sat down with my laptop. My workday had been short but tiring. I tried Daphne again, and this time my call went straight to voice mail.

The news of Joe Tilley's death didn't wait for morning. By the time I'd fed myself dinner, Twitter exploded with halfhearted eulogies, a hashtag in honor of the dead man. I scanned the RIPs, misspelled, articulate, glib, occasionally heartfelt. It felt eerie, seeing the online explosion, the frenzied dust cloud generated by the fall of a celebrity. It made me feel like I'd witnessed something large, that I was somehow privileged by this morbid brush with fame.

The few details were murky—found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room in Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Laguna Beach, cause of death widely speculated. No official statement. I pictured manager Alex, that angry man with his finger in my face. I guessed someone was still paying him to keep busy.

A celebrity death was a public event, and I could see it all, the way it would play out over the next week, the next month. There would be tributes, a memorial service on television, YouTube remembrances by famous friends. And in the meantime, there would be a toxicology screening, a coroner's report, a thorough police investigation.

I wondered where Jamie Landon would fit into it all. I wondered if the poor boy was ready.

*   *   *

I woke up early the next morning after a night of sticky dreams. Lori was in the kitchen—I could smell eggs frying from my bedroom.

The kitchen was narrow, with a refrigerator door that swung out the wrong way, blocking everything. I peered in from the threshold separating the kitchen from the living room, my hands on the sides of the doorless doorway.

Lori was folding an omelet onto a clean dinner plate, its yellow fluff studded with white and red and green. She was humming to herself, her face fresh, her tiny body tucked into her pinstriped pajamas.

I knocked on the doorjamb and she looked up with a surprised smile, her crooked tooth gleaming at me. “You're up early.”

“Slept badly,” I said. “Is Isaac here?”

Isaac had been over until I went to bed the night before. I'd heard the two of them laughing in the living room while I drank and read in bed. I had no desire to interact with other people after the events of the afternoon. Even their light, playful chatter sounded irritating and clueless and I resented them, these two innocent people who'd touched no dead bodies in the past twelve hours. I doubled my nightcap to drown them out, but I still couldn't get good sleep.

“Oh
unni
.” Lori blushed. “You know I wouldn't let him sleep over.”

I smiled. Lori was a virgin for Christ, and I teased her about this once in a while.

I took two Advils and caught her watching me as she cracked eggs for another omelet. “What is it?” I asked, wiping my mouth.

“Are you hung over again?” Her wide eyes held a gleam of importunity.

“I have a little headache.” It came out terse, and she looked back to the frying pan.

The eggs sizzled, cutting across the silence. Lori asked, “Did you hear about Joe Tilley?”

The name surprised me for a split-second, but of course Lori had heard through the usual channels. I never talked to her about my work. There were confidentiality issues, and on top of that, my job was a sensitive subject. I was shadowing Lori when we first met, and though we became friends as a result, that was not a happy episode in either of our lives.

“Yeah.” I nodded, and realized I hadn't checked the news in several hours. I tried to keep my voice nonchalant, with some success. “What's the latest? Are they calling it a suicide or what?”

“I don't think they know.”

She set a brand-new omelet on the table and waved for me to sit down. I did, and felt chastened as she asked me if I wanted coffee. “How's Isaac?”

“He's good,” she said.

“Things are going well, I take it? You guys are boyfriend-girlfriend and all that?”

She smiled and raised a knuckle to her cheek like she was taking its temperature. “As of yesterday, yeah.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “He seems like a swell guy.”

“He is,
unni
. Very swell.”

She chattered about him while I ate the omelet, and I gave her my full attention. It was nice to see her happy, and seeing it, this once, let me know how rarely she'd been happy as long as I'd known her.

I didn't know why, but it made me feel cautious.

“Whatever happened with that other guy? Did you talk to your uncle about him?”

She bit down on her lower lip and shook her head. “He's been texting every few days. I respond politely, but that's it.”

“You're being nice.”

“I think so.”

“If you think so, you definitely are. You haven't seen him again, though?”

“I haven't been by the garage in a while.”

Lori saw her uncle at least a couple times a week, and most of the time she met him at T & J. She'd been avoiding it.

“Lori—are you scared of this guy?”

“He makes me uncomfortable.” She shrugged and added “That's all.”

*   *   *

I must have drifted off, because when my phone rang, it yanked me awake. The screen showed a 917 number.

“Hello?”

There was a moment of silence on the other end, long enough that I thought I'd been dialed by accident.

“Hi, it's Jamie. From yesterday?”

I sat up. His voice came through sleep-deprived and frantic, but he sounded much more collected than I'd left him. “Yeah, hi, of course. How could I forget?”

He gave a pathetic laugh, half snort and half sigh. “Thank you. For helping me. That was really nice of you.”

The body in the bathtub flashed before my eyes, red and awful. “What did I really do?” I asked. “I'm guessing Alex handled the hotel and police and all that?”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, Daphne told me what you were doing for her.”

“I figured as much.”

“I don't care. I deserved that. I just—I want you to know that I'm not a bad guy. I mean sure, I get high, and I sling a little sometimes. But I would never hurt anyone.” A wheezing quality crept into his voice, and I wondered if he'd been crying, and whether he was about to start again.

“I didn't think you would, Jamie.” I prepared myself for any answer, and asked, “Why?”

“After you left, two cops came to the room and looked around. They questioned me up and down.”

“That makes sense. I think it's standard procedure to interview the person who finds the body.”

“But the way—the way they were questioning me, they thought I was this scumbag, I could feel it. Alex—he wanted us to clean up the room before we called the manager, before the cops would come, but I thought that was a bad idea, you know? Compromise the scene or something.”

“Sure.”

“You saw what the place looked like. It was trashed.” He cleared his throat. “They knew I was partying with him, that I was doing drugs, and the way they were asking me questions, I could see their wheels turning.”

“Oh, no. Jamie—it was a suicide. Wasn't it?”

He was silent for almost a minute. “They haven't ruled anything out.”

There was a part of me that had felt this coming the moment I heard that the man was dead. It was the reader in me, the perverse voice that sought out the direst contingencies in the corners of my imagination.

Joe Tilley was dead, and it wasn't a clear-cut suicide. If there was foul play, Jamie was fucked.

“You were with me. You saw how I was yesterday. Did I look like a guy who'd just murdered his friend in cold blood?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“I told the cops they should talk to you. Is that okay?”

“Of course. Anything I can do.” I chewed my lip and sighed. “Are they really treating you like a suspect?”

“They haven't come out and said so, but come on, yes. I mean, I was in the room with him,” he whispered. “There's my fucking alibi.
I was there
.”

I thought about Jamie Landon, snorting coke in his room while his friend lay dying beyond his door. I thought about where I would look, if I were a thinking cop. “So what is it you want me to do? Call in?”

“I'll have the police contact you. They'll probably want you to go in for questioning.”

A few hours later, I drove to the LAPD Detective Bureau downtown. I'd been to the building once before and I didn't like the place one bit.

“Thank you for coming in, Miss Song. I'm Detective Veronica Sanchez and this is my partner, Detective Milo Redding.”

Detective Sanchez was a big, sturdy woman, almost as wide across the waist as she was at the hips, with breasts suffocating beneath a buttoned-up navy blue polo shirt. I was five-foot-nine in my flat shoes, and she towered over me. She wore her hair buzzed to a few stiff inches that projected a monkish discipline. Underneath her hairline her face was soft, with sweet, droopy brown bloodhound eyes. She didn't smile, but she wasn't unfriendly.

She led me to an interrogation room, followed by Detective Redding, a small balding man with large blue eyes and a dark blond mustache. Detective Sanchez must have been the bad cop by default.

“Coffee?” he asked, before I could even sit down.

“Sure,” I said.

The coffee was weak and grainy, and I lapped at it without enthusiasm as Detective Sanchez watched me.

“State your name for the record, please.”

“Juniper Yoon-Kyung Song.”

“What do you do, Juniper Song?”

I bit down on the inside corner of my lip. There was no way this wouldn't come up. “I'm an apprentice at a PI office.”

Detective Sanchez raised one black eyebrow and turned her head to nod at Redding. “PI as in private investigator?”

I nodded.

“What's the outfit?”

“Lindley & Flores, in K-Town. It's a small shop.”

Sanchez tilted her chin, then her face relaxed. “How's Art Flores treating you?”

“You know Arturo?” I felt a flutter of kinship at the unexpected connection—I hoped she did, too.

“We used to work together. He quit the force in a blaze of glory. How's he doing?”

“Good, I think. I work for Chaz, mostly, but Arturo's a good boss.”

“Ah, the goofy one.” She smiled, and I saw her face change when she caught herself doing it. “And what do you do for Lindley & Flores?”