Читать книгу Carolina Crimes - Karen Pullen - Страница 5

THE BAD SON, by Britni Patterson

It had been a bad night. Not only had I blown my cover to the person I’d been tailing for a week, but then I lost her immediately afterwards.

I was having my usual breakfast of Mini-Wheats, trying to decide whether to quit the case or hope for the best, when the morning news reporter’s deliberately regretful-yet-professional tones caught my ear. The top story of the morning was the brutal homicide of a Jane Doe who had been beaten to a pulp in front of the entrance to Umstead State Park off Harrison Avenue. The police were requesting help identifying her. I gave their sketch a look out of habit and dropped my cereal bowl. My target, Min-jun Kim, had been murdered.

Three hours later I was still sitting across from Homicide Detective Abram Shouft, a giant man of mixed Cherokee and German heritage with an impressive nicotine addiction and a lousy temper. His tiny office was dangerously full of files, empty to-go cups from Dunkin’ Donuts, and two hundred and fifty pounds of nicely-distributed muscle crammed into a suit. Most men look good in a suit, but Shouft would have been better displayed wearing nothing but a loincloth and the blood of his enemies. His face is a little too savage in its lines to wear civilization well. The visitor’s chair in his office was one object too many. I’m only 5’4”, but my knees were starting to ache from pressing against the desk.

Shouft is never happy to see me in a professional capacity. In his opinion, good private detectives should join the police force, the bad ones should be shot, and neither kind should ever be involved in his cases. I’m one of the best, so he’d like to resent me on principle. But when I have to deal with the police, I go through Shouft, because at least he doesn’t give a shit that I’m female, Korean-American, and have a worse temper than he does. There’s also the fact that he’d be perfectly happy to see me in a personal capacity, if our professional ethics and instincts for self-preservation could be surgically removed.

“Transgender?” Shouft asked for the third time. “So what do you say, he or she?”

“She. I don’t know what was still in her pants, but from six inches she passed.”

“OK. One more time,” he said.

I groaned. He ignored me. “So you were hired to follow the deceased, by a woman claiming to be the mother of the victim, because the victim had left home on bad terms and the mother wanted to be sure the vic was all right?”

“I verified her identity before I took the job.”

Shouft shifted in his chair. “By her, you mean the mother, right?”

“Yeah. Mrs. Kim.” Somewhere in her late fifties, built small and sturdy, with gray hair wound tightly in a bun. Small pudgy hands clenched tightly on her purse, trouble lines carved between her eyes and doll-size mouth pinched shut. Wearing black because her husband had died. Holding a check from the insurance company to prove she could pay me.

“And her son…daughter. Whatever. You followed her for a week, and then decided to approach her last night. Shitty surveillance tactic, Parks.”

“I thought there was a chance for reconciliation.”

“You stuck your nose where it didn’t belong.”

I didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question, and I half-agreed with him.

“According to this—” he tapped my statement with yellow fingertips “—last night, you approached Min-jun Kim at the club where she bartends. You didn’t tell her who hired you. You started talking about mother issues. Kim got agitated, swapped your tab with another bartender, and left work early.” He tapped the pages again. “That’s the last anyone saw her until the park ranger found her body.”

“Point of clarification, I didn’t know she’d left until the new bartender came over thirty minutes later.” I was being nitpicky, because I didn’t enjoy Shouft rubbing my screw-up in my face.

“Shitty surveillance work.” Shouft said again, savoring each word with all the righteous vindication of a Baptist watching a Catholic church burn down on bingo night.

“Blow it out your ass. I didn’t have to come down here and give you a statement or my notes.”

“You know, Parks, I can count on one hand how many times you’ve cooperated with this department. I don’t like presents, even ones with big shiny bows.”

“I’ll remember that at Christmas. Can I go?”

“Tell me why you’re feeling so charitable all of a sudden.”

I thought about it. The real reason was I felt like if I hadn’t slipped up, Minnie wouldn’t be dead. I would have seen whoever attacked her. Maybe I could have helped. She’d seemed like a nice enough person, and she’d made one of the best margaritas I’d ever had. If my notes and pictures from the week I’d spent hunting Minnie down could help the police, they were welcome to them. But I couldn’t blame Shouft for being suspicious that I had an ulterior motive. I’m not above seeing if I can get the police department to do my work for me, and he knows it.

“Call it good citizenship. Can I go?”

Shouft grunted and scratched his nose. He read my statement again. Finally he said, “We’ll call if we have more questions.”

I sighed and stood with extreme care. “Try not to make me regret my generous impulses.” I managed to get out without knocking over the files stacked behind the door.

I spent the next few days working on other cases. I never sent Mrs. Kim a bill, figuring that the loss of her only child before the reconciliation she wanted was a high enough price. Especially since I’d lost sight of Minnie long enough for her to get killed.

A week after Min-jun’s death, Shouft called. “Can you come down to the station?” Shouft never bothers with extra words like “Hi” or “How are you?”

“You know, these amazing inventions called telephones allow for conversations without costing me four dollars in city parking fees and thirty minutes of my time.”

“Just get your ass down here, Parks.” He hung up.

When I got to the station, I was directed down to the hall outside the viewing rooms. I found Shouft coming out of one.

“Come look at this guy. Tell me if you’ve ever seen him,” he said tersely.

I looked through the one-way glass into the room where a scrawny young man slumped, tracing a shaky fingernail on the metal table. He looked like Shaggy from the Scooby Doo cartoons, if Shaggy had been Korean and wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt. He had a mop-like haircut and a scraggly beard. His clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes had crow’s-feet in the corners—a tell-tale sign of the heavy weed smoker in someone under thirty.

“Familiar maybe, but I’m not sure where. I might have seen him at a bar or somewhere in passing. You understand I don’t know every Korean in town, right?”

Shouft pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Says his name is Jun-seo Lee. He signed in as John Lee.”

“That’s nicely Americanized. Still not ringing a bell.”

Shouft made a growly noise in his throat. “He says he killed Min-jun. Says he was in love with her.”

I gave Jun-seo a long look, before saying, “I didn’t see anyone stalking Min-jun but me. And Min-jun’s boyfriend is a white boy. Gerald something.”

“We know. The best part is that Lee’s got an alibi for the time of the murder and doesn’t even know it.”

“So he’s crazy. I’m not a psychologist.”

“Not crazy enough. He says he shot the vic, before beating her to a pulp with a tree branch.”

“Again, so?”

“So we never advertised the vic was shot. That was our little secret. You saw the news. Would you have known cause of death was gunshot?”

I frowned. “No.” My first thought had been that Minnie’s parents had been abusing the love-stick. Traditional Korean culture is heavy on corrective beatings to properly raise children. I was fourteen before I discovered other kids didn’t get welts for B’s in Pre-Algebra.

“He even got the bullet caliber and proximate location of the bullet wound right. And the tree branch is bang on too.”

“The alibi is that good?”

“He was dead in the back of an ambulance. Heroin newbie overdose. The medics got him back, but docs kept him on ice in a medical coma for twenty-four hours. Standard procedure. He checked out seven hours after Kim was killed. No way he did it.”

“So he knows who did and talked to them?”

“Wow, Parks. Come up with that theory all by yourself?”

“Don’t be a dick. You want to know if I’d ever seen anyone with this guy.”

“That’s right. And think fast. Our boy in there called the news before he turned himself in. We’ve got a roomful of reporters upstairs demanding to know if he’s been arrested while they’re writing the story on their phones.”

“Have you told him he has an alibi?”

Shouft nodded. “That’s the hinky part. He insists we’re mistaken, he killed Minnie. It’s the only time he got mad, because we called him a liar.”

“But you’re keeping him on ice so he doesn’t end up on the news blabbing details about the murder, or dead in a ditch from a ‘remorseful suicide.’” I made air-quotes with my fingers.

Shouft made that growly noise again.

“No lawyer?” I asked.

“One showed up, but he refused to see her.”

“Determined to be guilty, huh?”

“Yep. I’ll walk you back upstairs.” Shouft already had a cigarette between his lips, and his lighter in one hand. The new no-smoking-in-official-buildings policy was killing him.

I made Shouft validate my parking before letting him go light up. I sat in my car for a few minutes. It wasn’t my business anymore, but I found myself heading out to the cheap student housing near NC State where Min-jun and her boyfriend Gerald Beaumont lived.

Gerald had been lucky so far. No news vans clogged the parking lot of the apartment complex. I sat on the front stoop for two hours until I saw Gerald trudging up the street from the bus stop. He had curly brown hair over a face and frame built out of angles. He wasn’t handsome, but his face could be interesting with its lantern jaw and upturned nose. Every day I’d been watching, Minnie had met him at the bus stop and walked back to the apartment with him. He walked like he’d forgotten how to walk home alone so I went to meet him halfway up the driveway.

“Hey, Gerald,” I said. He stopped and stared at me through swollen, red eyes, as if unable to summon enough energy to care about a stranger approaching him.

“Hi…uh… Do I know you?” he asked.

“We haven’t met, if that’s what you mean. I knew Minnie. I’m so sorry for your loss.” He flinched and started walking again. I fell into step next to him.

“She didn’t come home, but I thought maybe she had to close,” he muttered. “I fell asleep. I woke up freaking out because she wasn’t home. You know how I knew she wasn’t home? First thing she does when she comes home after working, is she sets up the coffeemaker. She says I can’t make coffee—Said. Said it was like mud, so she would set it up, and I always woke up to the smell of coffee. There wasn’t any coffee smell when I woke up.”

“I understand,” I said. “My mother died when I was eighteen. She’d had a massive heart attack in the middle of the night. She always watched the seven a.m. news, so silence in the morning woke me up.” It was an old memory and didn’t hurt too much anymore, but I will never forget that lead-weight panic and disorientation while my subconscious screamed at me to wake up because something was terribly wrong.

Gerald shook his head. “I don’t understand how anyone could hurt Minnie. She was nice to everyone. Said you couldn’t judge people because you didn’t know how much crap they were trying to rise above. She was seriously Confucian.”

“It’s a Korean thing.” I said. “I suppose you knew—”

“I didn’t care,” he said flatly. “Minnie was an amazing human being, no matter what…what plumbing she started with. We were…you ever just feel better with someone? You know they’re the person who makes you right. That’s what Minnie was.” He stopped at his door, key in hand.

“Even now, you know, I think I’m going to walk in, and she’s going to yell, ‘Got you, fucker!’ and…and laugh.” He choked on the last words, his face contorting with the struggle to hold back the tears.

I waited until he regained control before saying, “I have a question, if you don’t mind. About a guy named Jun-seo Lee? I was wondering if he and Minnie knew each other.”

Gerald frowned. “Who?”

“He might have introduced himself as John or Johnny Lee. Scrawny Korean dude, shaggy hair, bad weed habit.”

Gerald sat down on the step. I knew he was only talking with me to delay going into a more-than-empty apartment. “Oh, him. He’s a friend of Minnie’s from way back. More like an adopted idiot brother, really. He comes over for food or money, or just to sleep, and she lets him, sometimes spots him a twenty if tips are good. His dad has some kind of terminal cancer. Johnny takes care of him so he doesn’t have a job or anything. He shows up when his dad gets checked into Wake Med for treatments. Most of the time he just sleeps until the hospital calls for pick-up. Minnie kept trying to get him involved in something besides being a nurse, and he kept saying he couldn’t leave his dad. Guy had no life.”

“Do you know why he might confess to killing her?”

“Why he…what?! No. I…I don’t know why he would do that.” Gerald looked genuinely confused. “The guy was baked most of the time. Maybe he finally blew a fuse, but he couldn’t have hurt Minnie. Minnie would have kicked his ass. You know, that’s the weirdest thing about…what happened.”

“What?”

“The way she was…hurt. Like hand-to-hand, up close? Minnie was second-degree black in Tae-Kwon Do. By international ranking, not some strip mall dojo. And she was ranked expert in some weird kick-boxing style on top of that. She won tons of competitions growing up. Her dad was Special Forces and taught her like, eighty ways to kill people with her bare hands. I never worried about her getting hurt. Never.”

I paused. “So if you had to make a guess as to what happened…”

“I’d figure you’d have to shoot her first, or she’d feed you your own arm. But then why bother with the beating? It’s just…it was so unnecessary.” He rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger. “I can’t imagine anyone hating her so much to…to do that. Everyone liked her.”

I frowned. I hadn’t seen any signs of Minnie’s martial arts training while I was watching her. It wouldn’t have been something a stranger would expect. “Thanks for talking to me about her. Have you had dinner yet? I’ve got a car and I’ll pay. It’s the least I can do.”

Gerald stared at me blankly, as if the concept of getting food seemed as incomprehensible as string theory. “I… No, thanks. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

I talked him into letting me order him a pizza, and I left.

On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jun-seo. It didn’t make sense that he’d suddenly jumped from marijuana to heroin and decided to confess to a murder he couldn’t have committed. Either would leave his father without a caregiver. On a hunch, I started calling funeral homes until I found what I was looking for.

“Yes, I’m afraid the funeral was yesterday. The wake was held early and the service was expedited. The son had an unbreakable commitment, but insisted on standing as chief mourner.”

“Do you mind if I ask if all the services are…taken care of? I know the family wasn’t well off, and I’d like to contribute, anonymously of course, if they need help.”

“Paid in full, but I believe the family asked for donations to a certain charity in lieu of flowers. I don’t have the details in front of me, but they’re on our website, under the announcements section. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful at the moment.”

“No problem, I’ll check there. Thanks for your help.” I hung up and leaned back in my chair, propping my feet up on the half-open bottom drawer of my desk.

Jun-seo’s father had died the day before Minnie’s murder, probably shortly before Jun-seo had overdosed. Before he’d confessed to killing Minnie, he’d made arrangements for his father’s funeral and burial, and stood as sangju, or chief mourner. Paid in full. Too quickly for a life insurance check. And Jun-seo didn’t have a job. So they were living off what, disability? Social Security? If Minnie was spotting him tips, they didn’t have family money. So where did the money for the funeral come from?

That answer came to me quickly. I called Shouft and got his voicemail.

“Hey. Jun-seo paid for his father’s funeral yesterday morning, in full. Find out who paid him to confess, and you’ll find your murderer.”

I sat at my desk for a while, thinking. Then I got my car keys. I couldn’t shake the thought that Minnie’s murder was caused by love, not hate. If I was right, then her death was my fault.

I knocked at the door that was still hung with a black wreath and the traditional funeral notice for Ms. Kim’s husband. A few minutes later, Mrs. Kim opened it. She looked even smaller and older than before, her hair still up in its tight bun, dressed in a housecoat and slippers.

“Mrs. Kim? I came to talk to you. About Min-jun, and Jun-seo Lee.”

“Jun-seo? He is a good boy. A good son. My son is dead. What can be said?”

“You wanted me to find Min-jun so he could stand as the sangju for your husband, didn’t you?” Korean culture dictates that the eldest male son is responsible for officiating at the death of a parent, in the role of the sangju. The sangju takes the blame for allowing their parent to die, so the spirit will not wander lost and angry. To have a funeral with no sangju is unthinkable.

“So? What does it matter now, why I wanted you to find my son?” she asked, turning to go back in the house.

“Min-jun refused, didn’t she, when you met her after work that night. From my reports, you knew where to wait. You asked her to come home, so your husband could be properly buried.”

Mrs. Kim’s mouth worked. “I knew they fought, but they were so close before…before the trouble. I never thought Min-jun would refuse to bury his father. It is wrong to hate your father so much. I did not raise him that way.”

“Your husband was ex-Special Forces. I’m sure he had several weapons around the house. Did you take one to protect yourself, so late at night? And when Min-jun refused and was going to leave, did you pull the gun on her? Tell her that she needed to listen? Needed to come home and do her duty?”

“Stop saying she. I had a son! That’s what Min-jun said. Said he could not stand as sangju, even if he wanted to, because he was no longer a man. My husband and I have no brothers, no other male relatives. It was Min-jun’s duty to bury us properly.” Mrs. Kim’s voice was sharp and painful, the authoritarian tone far too reminiscent of my own mother’s.

“Is that why you beat him after you shot him? To correct his behavior?” I could feel the old anger and resentment flaring up. Even after all these years, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d been raised strictly or abused. I’d never been hit without knowing exactly why I was being punished. Even so, I’d been hit well past the American definition of abuse.

“No! If I must bury my son, I did not wish him to be seen as…with breasts and puffed lips. I did not mean to shoot him. It was an accident.”

Guns go bang, I thought. “You must tell the police the truth. They already know Jun-seo couldn’t have done it. He was in an ambulance when Min-jun died.”

Mrs. Kim wrinkled her face into an expression of disgust. “Shameful boy! He should have told me that before I gave him the money.”

“He wanted to bury his father. He had no money to do so. He came to ask you for a loan, based on his childhood friendship with Min-jun. Instead, you gave him a job.”

She was shaking her head. “Disgraceful. He should have told me. Perhaps he was not a good boy after all.”

“Mrs. Kim…” I started, and then stopped. Because I was staring now at the little pistol she’d pulled out of the pocket of her housecoat.

“You are a bad girl. This is a house of mourning.” She squinted as the barrel waved slightly in the air.

“The police will be here soon.” I took a couple steps back. Rule of thumb: if there’s a pistol pointing at you, run. They’re inaccurate past fifteen feet in amateur hands. Problem was, I was only five feet away.

“They’re already here.” I heard a deep bass voice rumble behind me, around the cigarette I knew was in his mouth.

“Put the gun down, Mrs. Kim.”

Mrs. Kim lowered her arm when she saw Detective Shouft, standing out of the line of fire pointing his gun straight at her head. Obedient to male authority, I couldn’t help thinking, though with relief instead of my usual irritation.

An hour later, after Mrs. Kim had been read her rights and arrested, and the neighborhood was no longer lit by lights and sirens, Shouft came over to where I was leaning against the fence. He lit another cigarette from the end of the last one.

“Parks.”

“Shouft.”

“Feeling suicidal?”

“Not really.”

“I would have called you, told you she paid for Johnny’s father’s funeral.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Active investigation.”

He didn’t answer, blowing out a thin stream of smoke.

“Shitty detective work, Parks. You guessed.”

“Beat you here by ten minutes.” He made the growly noise that reminded me of a disgruntled bear. We stood in silence for another few minutes before he spoke again.

“Dinner?” His tone of voice was far too casual. I could feel my pulse quickening with the prospect of a familiar bad decision, the kind you don’t start regretting until you can’t get your underwear down from the ceiling fan.

“Only if you’re paying.”

“Breakfast?”

“Only if you’re cooking.”