Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (3 page)

*   *   *

I couldn’t exactly leap from the table and follow Lusig to her car, so I texted Rubina to report that she’d left. I told her to let me know if she couldn’t get hold of Lusig, and after a minute, she ascertained that her cousin was on her way home. I convinced Rubina she could wait for my report until I was done eating. I finished dinner with Lori and called from the car. She picked up immediately.

“Did something happen?” she asked by way of greeting. “She’s in a terrible mood.”

“She did storm out of the restaurant,” I said.

Rubina sighed. “What did she do?”

I told her about the scene in the deli.

“I told you she was behaving strangely,” she said. “She’s always been a passionate sort of girl, but she usually has good control over her temper. She’s not one to make a fool of herself in public.”

“In my opinion, the waitress was being unreasonable and kind of insulting.”

“That’s no reason to make a scene.”

“Are you upset about the beer?”

“Yes.”

“I thought the occasional beer was pretty much harmless.”

“I know what it says on WebMD, but I also know many, many doctors who have had children. Every one of them abstained during pregnancy.”

I thought about nine months without alcohol, the first big sacrifice forced on new mothers. It seemed daunting to me, even with ordinary levels of stress.

“She said five drinks in the last three months. That doesn’t seem dangerous or anything.”

“It’s the attitude. She’s not acting like a woman putting another’s needs before her own. And I don’t really believe she’s been careful enough to count.”

“I don’t know, she sounded pretty indignant. I’ll bet she’s been counting, even if it’s with some measure of resentment.”

She sighed. “And who was this man she was meeting? Did he look suspicious?”

I almost laughed. There was something childish in the question. “His name is Chris. I was going to ask if he was someone you knew.” I paused and decided to add, “It sounds like he’s involved with Lusig’s missing friend.”

”She didn’t tell me she was meeting him.”

“Who did she say she was meeting?”

“A friend from college.” Rubina sounded dissatisfied. “Which wasn’t a wholesale lie. She and Chris were at USC together.”

“But not exactly the truth, I take it.”

“No. He’s Nora’s boyfriend.”

“It doesn’t seem off or anything, that her boyfriend and best friend would spend some time together.”

“Maybe not. But I know they aren’t close friends on their own.”

I pictured the two of them, Lusig with her tattoos and oily hair, Chris in his square gray polo shirt. They didn’t look like two birds of a feather. Then again, I thought of my friendship with Lori.

“Shared experience counts for something,” I said. “They both love Nora, and she’s gone now.”

“I would go as far as to say that they dislike each other.”

“She’s talked about him with you?”

“Many times. She adores Nora, and she has always thought Chris was a cold, condescending misogynist. Chris, on the other hand, seems to think Lusig is a deadbeat, a bad influence. He blames her for Nora dropping out of law school. I’m sure both of them have better shoulders to cry on.”

There was something suggestive in her tone. “What are you worried about, Rubina?”

“I just wonder,” she said. “Do you think she’s looking for Nora?”

“I’ve seen her one time. You’d know better than I do.”

“She was talking about her.”

“Yes.”

“And she was asking Chris where he thought she was.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But what else do you think she’d talk about with her missing friend’s boyfriend?”

“Nothing at all.” Her tone was clipped and a little impatient.

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “You think she was pumping him for information. She thinks he knows something.”

“Lusig must know Nora might be dead.”

“And if Nora was murdered…”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“You think she suspects him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But if that is the case, then she was going out of her way to meet a man she judged capable of murder. If she wants to endanger herself, that is one thing, but she is carrying my child.”

“Rubina, I think it’s important to maintain perspective here. She was getting dinner in a public place with a college classmate.”

“You’re right, of course.” Her tone was gentle but unyielding. “Still, there’s no harm in being watchful.”

Two

Chaz was in the office when I arrived the next morning, and I plunked into the chair across his desk with theatrical heaviness.

“It’s hump day,” he said with a
tsk tsk
. “Not slump day.”

I looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Would you rather I humped the furniture?”

He smirked and shook his head. “Did not think that joke through. Don’t go telling Art I harassed you.”

“Okay, likewise then.”

“So,” he said, after an appreciative moment of silence. “Why the sighs, Girl Detective?”

“I think I’ve been hired to find a missing woman.”

“Sure. We do that. But what do you mean, you think?”

“The client hasn’t come out and said so, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

I gave him a rundown of the case, and he nodded along, paying attention.

“It sounds to me like you’ve got a neurotic woman who wants eyes on her most prized possession. What makes you think she wants any more than that?”

“She may not
want
any more than that, but it sounds like there’s a big underlying problem. I mean, let’s say you have a big scary mole and you go to a doctor to get it removed.”

“Oh, you’re a doctor now?”

“Come on, Chaz, it’s an analogy.”

“You know what I got on the SAT?”

“What?”

He smiled expectantly and let out a loud fart. “Okay, proceed.”

I rolled my eyes. “So you have this nightmare mole, and you want it gone, but you kind of know there’s a good chance something else made the mole pop up in the first place.”

“Like cancer.”

“Yeah, or whatever. But even if it’s just a mole generator, what’s the point of just treating the mole? Wouldn’t you want to know the underlying cause? Isn’t that kind of why you went to the doctor in the first place?”

“Okay, even I can tell this analogy is a mess.”

“But you get what I’m saying?”

“I get it, but you’re not a doctor, and an endangered baby is more serious in its own right than an unsightly mole.”

“Do you remember Rusty Regan and the General? In
The Big Sleep
?”

“You always bring up that book like I didn’t read it thirty years ago.”

I nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Anyway, what about the Rusty general?”

“The General is this rich old man who hires Marlowe to investigate a blackmailer, but from the beginning, Marlowe knows this guy has a missing son-in-law.”

“Okay, that sounds familiar.”

“Marlowe thinks he’s been hired to find Rusty Regan, and the General keeps denying it and denying it, but of course, in the end, that’s Marlowe’s whole job.”

“So you think you’re supposed to find this best friend.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It seems more like the kind of thing you’d pay money for than stalking a pregnant lady. Pregnant women can’t be so hard to stalk on your own. You should see this girl. She is out to here.”

“Your client— Does she seem particularly interested in what’s happened to this girl?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Is she callous?”

“She reads kind of cold, and yeah, maybe callous, but that isn’t exactly it. She’s interesting. I don’t dislike her, but she is off. She has this almost socially feral quality, like she’s been caged in her education so long she doesn’t know how to deal with people.”

“She’s an actual doctor, right?”

“Dermatologist.”

“Zit zapper?”

“Sure, but do you know how hard it is to become a dermatologist? You have to crush med school for four years, and then get through a three-year residency. She was probably thirty years old before she even got to breathe.”

He shrugged. “She’s a smarty-pants like you, is that right, Yale-bird?”

“Much smarter than me, probably.”

“Don’t be so modest. She’s just less of a screwup.”

I frowned. I’d gone to an expensive prep school and an Ivy League college, and it was true that I’d never dreamt of becoming a PI when I grew up. I was an introverted kid who had no talents other than studying, and my strict mother gave me a narrow, exalted vision of my professional future. Lawyer, doctor, rocket scientist. Something to let her strut a bit around other Korean moms. My little sister Iris had been less of a nerd, and my mom would’ve been satisfied if she’d become the head designer for Louis Vuitton or Chanel.

None of that quite panned out. Iris killed herself when she was sixteen after a disastrous affair with her history teacher. I was a freshman in college, and it was something of a miracle that I finished school at all. I still loved my mom—I never blamed her for what happened, and I was grateful she didn’t blame me—but we weren’t close anymore. She’d also adjusted her expectations on every category of my life prospects. When I started working for Chaz, she’d been amazed that I had a job with health insurance. If I’d nab myself any kind of man, she’d probably shit herself for joy.

Chaz liked to joke that I was slumming it. Both he and Arturo, the other named half of Lindley & Flores, were products of the L.A. Unified School District. I met a lot of Angelenos in college—my school alone sent eight kids to Yale—but not a single one from our city’s giant public school system, where a quarter of the kids didn’t make it to graduation, let alone a four-year college.

Chaz wasn’t a dermatologist, but he was a success story, more or less. He had a bachelor’s degree from Glendale Community College, and he worked in IT for many years before he got into private investigation by way of computer forensics. He had a wife and two daughters, and he was one of the happiest people I knew. None of this prevented him from making fun of my expensive education, which I’d used to work as a part-time tutor before Chaz hired me to be his gofer.

“So, this doctor, what makes you think she’s looking for the girl?”

“Couple reasons. First, she keeps coming up. Her disappearance is the whole reason Rubina’s even worried about her cousin, and I can’t seem to untangle one girl from the other.”

“And let me guess.”

“What?”

“The second reason.”

“Sure.”

“You think you’re marked for the job.”

I had to smile. When I’d first met Chaz, I’d thought he was an oaf—he’d been tailing me, and I thought he looked like one of the bumbling stooges who got bumped in detective novels. He was bald and fleshy, and he wore high white socks with white tennis shoes every day. He acted like a textbook corny white American dad, telling bad jokes and embarrassing me at every opportunity. It was easy to forget how smart he was, and his quiet bursts of insight still took me by surprise.

“I’ve had a good break since my last gnarly case. It just seems like the universe has been a bit nice to me, don’t you think?”

“Maybe, but you’ve been unluckier than most,” he said. “We don’t catch a lot of homicides in this business.”

“I know,” I said, “but I have a feeling.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you do. Coincidentally, I think you want to go look for this girl.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m dying for excitement here. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.” He narrowed his eyes at me and I shrugged. “But I guess I can’t say I’m not curious.”

*   *   *

I googled Nora from my desk. I didn’t have her last name, but she was easy enough to find. There weren’t too many missing Armenian Noras in the L.A. area.

I found a spate of news articles on her disappearance, dating from almost a month earlier. As I read up, the facts started to sound a bit familiar, and I thought I might have heard about this case on the radio. The story hadn’t attracted a lot of national attention, but it wasn’t hidden under any rugs, either. I wondered if it would explode if a corpse showed up.

Her name was Nora Mkrtchian. She was a twenty-five-year-old L.A. native, the daughter of Armenian immigrants who’d left the Soviet Union in the late ‘80s. She ran a Web site called
Who Still Talks
, a popular niche political blog devoted to discussion of the 1915 Armenian genocide. The
L.A. Times
called her “a firebrand Internet activist” with a strong following among young Armenian Americans. She’d started
Who Still Talks
two years ago, when she was a 1L at Loyola Law School in downtown L.A. When she’d generated a following, she dropped out and devoted herself to the blog, posting several times daily while applying to graduate school for genocide studies.

She was last seen on a Friday night in February, when her roommate stated that Nora had appeared “agitated” before leaving the apartment for what was supposed to be only a few hours. Her car was still missing with her, but foul play was suspected.

If the police had any leads, they were evidently not sharing them with the press, but the political blogosphere was abuzz with speculation. Nora had been the target of some serious online harassment. This had been a constant throughout her blogging career, but it had intensified in the months leading up to her disappearance.

I found a link for her Web site and clicked through. It had a simple design, with a few slight embellishments that showed an effort at departure from the standard blogger template. “Who Still Talks” was printed at the top in a thick, crisp-edged font that suggested hip professionalism, millennial savvy, minimal bullshit. Then, in the middle of the page there was Nora, middle finger extended at the top of her last post. I started reading.

Hey guys, today we’re going to talk about me. “But, Nora,” you say to your laptop, “Don’t we
always
talk about you?” And because I can pretty much hear you, I’ll say: Yes, we do, to an extent. This is my blog house run by my blog rules, and in my blog house, we talk about things that are dear to my heart, and as we all know, I am a raging narcissist. You all know what I care about; my screaming Armenian blood, my conflicted feelings on System of a Down. You all might feel like you know me reasonably well, and you know what? You probably do.