Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (13 page)

I separated out the true junk, and photographed it in a few wide group shots. I separated out the condoms, the receipts, anything else I thought might be of any interest to the client. I photographed these items individually. When I was done, I had Arturo scan over what I’d done, and he gave me leave to take out the bulk of the trash. The whole process took about an hour and a half.

He patted me on the back. “Thanks, Song. That was a big help. Do you think you’ve got time to write it up?”

I heard Chaz belly laughing in his office.

*   *   *

I was wrapping up the write-up and thinking about lunch when my cell phone rang, the caller ID showing an 818 number. I didn’t make a habit of answering unrecognized numbers—I’d gotten too many cold calls from Yale and the Democratic Party, asking for cash—but I couldn’t risk missing a call from Rubina or even Lusig.

“This is Song,” I said, with a sharp saccharine note of hopefulness in my voice.

“Hey, it’s Lusig. I’m sucking it up.”

“You mean you’re taking Rubina up on her offer?” I kept my voice neutral and pumped my free fist.

“That’s right. I dance for her and you dance for me.”

“Happy to.”

“I’d like to start as soon as possible. Are you free at all today?”

I didn’t have to open up a calendar to know my day was scheduled full of quiet, excluding whatever grunt work Chaz or Arturo might push on me. “Sure. Coffee?”

She laughed. “We can meet at a café, but Rubina doesn’t want me drinking coffee.”

“Really?” I said. “Okay, so you tell me. You can’t drink booze or caffeine. What exactly can you do?”

“I can eat like a beast. I feel deprived if I go two days without a bucketful of pastrami.”

We arranged to meet at Langer’s at one, leaving me about half an hour in the office. I finished the write-up and walked into Arturo’s office, trying not to beam.

“I’m on a job again,” I said. “It’s going to take most of my time, I think.”

Arturo raised his eyebrows to look up at me, more or less indifferently. “Good for you, Song.”

“I just e-mailed you the trash write-up. Do you need me to do anything else on that case? Protect this noble client from his temptress’s wiles?”

“You’re free to go, but don’t make me feel like I have to protect my client from you.” He pointed at me with a ballpoint pen. “Remember, you’re a professional. And none of us make our bread by choosing our own clients.”

I nodded, slightly chastised. “I know, Arturo. I was just trying to get off the hook, to be honest.”

He smiled. “I know that.”

“I have a winner here,” I said. “A case I can really get into.”

“Chaz told me about your missing activist. Congrats, Song. Don’t go crazy.”

I visited Chaz’s office next, letting loose my grin of triumph.

“Uh oh,” he said. “Looks like someone just handed this cat the canary.”

“I’m back on,” I said.

“I heard,” he said. “Hey, Art,” he called through the wall without raising his voice.

“Chaz,” Arturo called back.

“I’m happy for you,” he said, turning back to me. “I’m glad you have a proper avenue for your obsessions again. Juniper Song stressing out about men and children was a bit too
Twilight Zone
for my taste.”

I laughed and changed the subject. “You’re some kind of computer genius, aren’t you, Chaz?”

He gave me a broad, crooked smile that said he was in the mood to be flattered. “I don’t know about genius, Song. I can’t keep up with you kids these days. I haven’t made any apps.”

“I need a favor.”

“What else is new, huh?”

It was to my advantage that Chaz loved doing favors for the grateful. He had a paternal streak, and he cherished the idea of his own indispensability.

“Can you find anonymous commenters from a Web site?”

“What kind of anonymous commenters?”

“You know, the usual. Racist pests, harassers of women, the riffraff that hang out in the dark corners of the Internet.”

“Have you been reading the comments on YouTube?”

“On a political site. Nora Mkrtchian’s. Can you help?”

“It depends,” he said, twisting his mouth. “I’ll tell you right off the bat that sometimes it’s downright impossible.”

“I thought all this stuff was trackable. You know, like Edward Snowden and all that?”

“Do I look like the Pentagon?” He chuckled. “Even if everything is accessible to some people, which, I’m not sure that’s true either, I can tell you there are barriers for a working snoop.”

“Can you try?”

“What do you think?”

“You’ll try.”

“Anything for you, Girl Detective.”

*   *   *

I took the subway from Koreatown, something I liked to do when it made sense, maybe once every few months. Langer’s was in MacArthur Park, across the street from a Metro station. I liked to think the Metro station was built as a portal to Langer’s.

The train was dingy and somewhat crowded, with just a few empty seats on the far sides of passengers who looked like they’d sigh loudly if I asked to climb in. Some days I would have punished one of these commuters, but I was too restless to sit sandwiched between a resentful stranger and a subway car wall.

I held on to a pole and looked around as the train rumbled through its tunnel. The L.A. Metro was less essential to the daily life of many of its citizens than transit systems in comparable cities. Its lack of reach and general shittiness were, in fact, one of the greatest strikes against L.A. in the opinions of annoying outsiders.

A black-and-white sticker caught my eye on one of the windows next to an empty seat. I squinted, trying to make sure of the text, and then I made my way through the aisle. I looked at the scowling man beneath my nose. He was thickset with heavy eyelids, and he smelled less than fresh from a few feet away.

“Sorry,” I said. “May I?”

He got up—I’d known that he wouldn’t scoot in—and I crammed myself up against the window. On it was a bumper sticker, about three inches square, with white text touting
Who Still Talks
. There was another sticker next to it, which I hadn’t been able to read from a distance. This one had the URL for
Who Still Talks
written in one corner. The rest of it was devoted to the words
FIND NORA
.

I snapped a picture on my phone and wondered how these stickers were circulated and how many of them were around. I was not such a believer in coincidence that I thought I’d stumbled on a message, a clue designed to reach me alone. I wondered if Lusig knew about the stickers. It was even possible that she was behind their printing.

The train stopped a minute later at the Westlake/MacArthur Park station, and I made my way around my fellow commuters and got out into the sunlight.

MacArthur Park was a notoriously dangerous part of town still awaiting its turn to gentrify. The park had seen a lot of crime, and the wide lake, so pretty in daylight, suggested shady possibilities. In the public imagination, the lake was clogged up with bodies and discarded weapons. There was a seed of truth to this idea—the park was a bit of a gang-murder mecca in the ’80s and ’90s, and that was after the lake was drained in the ’70s, revealing hundreds of firearms like so many wads of chewed gum hidden under a used classroom desk. It was safer now, a bit revitalized in recent years. The Metro station was part of that. Still, it wasn’t exactly Beverly Hills. Street vendors sat on the sidewalk hawking $5 shoes and flammable toys, and I got one offer for a counterfeit green card on my way across the street, from a tiny, whispering, middle-aged Latino man. I would’ve been offended, but he offered me a driver’s license in the same breath, and I probably looked as foreign as I did underage.

Langer’s predated the gang violence by a few decades. It was a Jewish deli with the best pastrami in the States, about as historic a restaurant as you might find in L.A. The violence and recession almost drove it out of business, but the Metro came along to save the day. The deli drew a large lunch crowd, many of them in business casual, stopping in from downtown. It didn’t take the Census Bureau to determine that Langer’s had the highest concentration of white people in the neighborhood.

Lusig was already waiting when I walked in, tucked into a booth with her back resting against a wall. She raised her hand when she saw me, and I slid in across from her.

“Have you been waiting long?” I asked.

“Sweet freedom,” she said. “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes, just drinking it in.”

I nodded with sympathy. Rubina had her on quite the leash—I knew something about that, as part of its apparatus.

“I spent the weekend at her place, thinking it over. It wasn’t so bad, I guess. She didn’t drive me too crazy.”

“I’m glad you said yes.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see what my other options are. I can’t put myself in actual danger, and I don’t have the money to hire you myself. It’s just one more month. Or maybe this fucker’ll come early.”

I smiled.

“I don’t mean like
tomorrow
,” she added quickly. “You know, like two weeks early, when he’s still going to be safe.”

“Lusig, I’m not here to judge you. I live in a glass house with millimeter panes.”

We ordered big sandwiches, hot pastrami on rye with Russian dressing. She got extra pickles and a matzoh ball soup. She asked the waitress to make sure hers was piping hot, and patted her bulging belly in explanation.

“You can’t have cold pastrami?” I asked.

“Nope. No cold deli meats.”

“That’s rough.”

“Oh, yeah.” She pulled out her phone, fiddled with it a bit, and started reading off her screen. “Also forbidden—sushi, soft cheese, rare meat, hot dogs … Technically I can have a beer now and then, but not with Ruby playing goalie in my throat.”

“And do you crave all that stuff?”

“When I get rid of this thing, I’m wrapping a steak in salami and raw salmon, then swallowing the whole thing with a pint of whiskey.”

“For breakfast, I guess?”

Our food came and Lusig tore into her sandwich, murmuring, “God, this pastrami is saving my life.”

I smiled and agreed. “It’s legendary.”

We ate in blissful silence for a minute, then she showed me her phone. “Look at this.”

It was a standard smartphone screen with a background image of Lusig and Nora. They were smiling at the camera with their cheeks nearly touching. Lusig had her hand on Nora’s head, pulling her close to her side.

“The picture?” I asked.

“No.” She let out an awkward sigh of a laugh. “Right. I have a picture of Nora on there. I meant the apps.”

I looked at the colorful icons on the screen, and noticed six of them with the words “baby” and “mommy” in their titles. “Pregnancy apps. Hadn’t thought of that.”

“These are the best of them. I’ve probably downloaded more like twenty.”

I nodded. “Lot of work, huh?”

“I just feel like I need to convince you or something, that I’m not treating this lightly.”

“Sure. Don’t worry. I believe you.”

“Okay, good. But I also need to find Nora. I am very serious about this. It’s why I’m subjecting myself to Ruby’s regime.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Go for it.”

“Why you? Nora has family, a boyfriend, plenty of friends, it sounds like. Why does this fall on you?”

“Maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe it falls on everyone. But I know that my life falls apart without Nora.”

“That sounds dramatic.”

“It’s true, though. I didn’t even realize until she was gone, how much she held things together for me. I thought I had lots of friends, but I only had one I counted on, who loved and understood me.”

I nodded, and I knew I would go on a rampage if Lori disappeared.

“How long have you been sniffing around?”

“Just a couple weeks. I’ve been worried sick since she disappeared, but I kept believing she’d turn up, or at least that the police would find her. But then I started to get this feeling, like the momentum was draining away, and I read somewhere that most missing people are found within a short window of disappearing, if they’re ever found at all.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Seventy-two hours. That’s supposed to be how long it takes to track down the strong leads.”

“It had been a lot longer than that when I started looking.”

“What have you turned up?” I asked. “So I don’t duplicate your work.”

She frowned. “Not very much, to be honest. I haven’t wanted to do anything strenuous, so just a lot of Internet stuff.”

“I’ve done a lot of research on her, too,” I said. “Her site is fascinating, and it looks like she has a lot of enemies.” I had to watch myself to make sure I didn’t introduce the past tense.

“Are you talking about those anonymous Internet dickheads?”

“Yeah. Pretty intense.”

“Did you see that they found her address?”

“Actually, I’ve done some legwork since I last saw you.”

I caught her up on my meetings with Chris and Hanna.

She listened, chewing slowly, preciously, on her sandwich. When I was done, she asked, “What’d you think of Chris?”

“He was not super happy to talk to me. I caught him off guard.” I thought back to our conversation and remembered my mention of Lusig. “Actually, I’m sorry, but I mentioned I was looking for Nora in part because of you.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not worried about him knowing that. Did he say anything about me?”

“No. But I got the sense that this whole investigation got on his nerves. Offended him in some way. He even seems mad at Nora for disappearing.”

“Oh, his princess-in-the-tower shit?”

“What?”

“Chris thinks she would’ve been safe and happy if only she’d never left her house, at least not without him at her side.”

“Yeah, I got that impression. Is he kind of an asshole?”

“Maybe ‘asshole’ isn’t the right word. He means well. He’s just…” She shrugged and took a big, crunchy bite out of her pickle. “Look, he’s an idiot.”

“That’s a strong word.”

“It’s the right one. Everyone thinks he’s a brain because he went to Penn and has this job. Everyone thinks Nora’s an airhead because she wears a lot of eyeliner. No one knows anything, is the moral of that story. I happen to know Chris is as dumb as a rock’s ass.”