Dirty Laundry (19 page)

I also had nothing to connect Choi and Lee. Since Choi and Gyong-Si shared the same last name, there could have been something there, and my instincts told me Lee wasn’t carrying her husband’s bundle of joy. She’d probably fallen for Gyong-Si’s manipulations and found herself
enceinte
.

I was stuck with two suspects, Gyong-Si and Hong Chul, and with only the slimmest of motives when I had them. Now wasn’t the time to press Madame Sun on Gyong-Si. I’d have to wait until she’d had time to deal with her daughter’s murder.

“That man… the one James hit… he was going to kill me. I know it. James stopped him.” She met my gaze, her eyes drowning in her tears. “Do you think it’s over? The deaths? Was Vivian the last one? Do you think?”

“I don’t know that either,” I confessed. “If the man who attacked you today is connected to Vivian’s, the cops will find that out.”

“The police… they don’t agree this is all together… all connected. How can they not see this?” The tears began again, turning the pancake chasms on her face to rivers. “You have to find out who killed her, Cole-sshi. Someone
killed
her. How could they just…
take
her from me? Before I had a chance to make… it all better? I didn’t have a chance to get her to love me. Isn’t that what all mothers want? For their children to love them?”

I left Madame Sun in her son’s hands. James had nothing to add. Finding out Vivian was his sister had been a surprise, but he’d accepted her into his life because it made his mother happy. A good son, his mother’d said. The perfect Korean son.

It made me wonder what secrets he was hiding.

I
SPENT
the rest of the next day chasing down dead-end leads and paying bills. Wong wasn’t answering any of my calls about the case, and I was hitting a dead end on Gyong-Si. There was nothing on the Internet about why he left Korea, or if there was, it wasn’t in any language I could read. By midafternoon, Martin’s kids hit the office for a couple of hours, bringing with them a blueberry pie their grandmother, Claudia, baked for me. I thanked them profusely, and I got a patented Claudia smirk in return.

“Are you kidding? It’s all Nana’s doing,” Sissy snorted at me. “If she doesn’t go back to work soon, we’re all going to be rolling around like Violet Beauregarde.”

“That was my favorite book as a kid….” I trailed off when I caught the looks of confusion the teens threw me.

“There’s a book?” Mo cocked his head. “I liked the first movie. The remake was kind of weird, but hey, a river full of chocolate. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Yeah, um… okay.” I waved them off, feeling old. “I’m going to take my pie and go home now.”

People were starting to flow back into the neighborhood, coming home from their day jobs or from carting their children to soccer. The granola chick coffee shop across the street from my office was having a brisk business, the early tide of bearded hipsters and their fuzzy-armpitted girlfriends taking up most of the café’s outdoor seating. A particularly enterprising beanpole of a man had set up his guitar in the hopes of filling his case with tips. From the screeching twang coming from his instrument, he’d be there a long time before he made enough to get a single cup of joe.

Juggling the pie, I hopscotched over my front lawn, taking note of where the newly laid sod wasn’t catching. One of the bushes blown to ribbons by Grace Kim seemed to be thriving, sending out green shoots from its stubby branches. I patted it as I went by. The landscapers wanted to yank it up by its roots, but I’d wanted to give it a chance. We were both survivors, although from the looks of things, the bush was doing better than I was. My side ached a bit from sitting in traffic, and I promised my tense back and legs a run once I fed the cat and put away my pie.

That all went to shit when a car door slammed behind me and I turned my shoulders to see who it was, still tuned up to violence so soon after the shooting that took Claudia down. The sedan parked by my curb had the look of a rental car, a nondescript beige two-door chunk of metal no one with any personality would buy for themselves.

The car quickly faded from my attention. No, what held me firmly to the ground, clutching a plastic-film-wrapped pie as if it were my long-lost teddy bear, was the young man coming around the trunk side of the vehicle. The face he wore was a bit like mine but, more importantly, nearly an exact echo of Mike’s.

Lankier than Mike, he probably stood a few inches taller as well. Dressed in Doc Martens, jet-black jeans, and a gray T-shirt with the words
L’Arc
-
en
-
Ciel
on it, he would have blended in with the hipsters across the street, except that his jaw-length red-streaked ebony hair was clean and his chin was bare of any scruff. I couldn’t see a patch of his milky skinned arms through the tattoos running up from his wrists and disappearing under his short sleeves. They were bright, blending seamlessly from one image to the next, and in some cases, they shimmered together until I couldn’t tell what exactly I was looking at.

He drew closer, close enough to see we had the same mouth, and I fought the urge to throw the pie in his face. It was a good pie. No one could bake like Claudia, but right in that moment, it would have been worth it. I wasn’t ready for him. Not after the week I’d just had… the evening I’d had the night before and the day I’d spent wading through blood and other people’s dirty laundry.

“Hello, Kenjiro.” He slowed his approach, drawing up in front of me. It was impossible to read his face, but a hint of friendliness ghosted through his eyes. “I’m—”

“Yeah, I know who you are. I just wasn’t… expecting you.” That was the understatement of the year, but as Bobby would say, time to pull up my big-boy panties and man up. Jerking my head toward the front door of my house, I said, “Well, since you’re here, Ichiro, might as well come in for some pie, and you can tell me why you came over.”

H
E
WASN
’
T
what I expected. Actually, he was
nothing
like I expected. The tattoos, the silver rings on his fingers, and the bad boy cut of his scarlet-sooty hair was… odd and so not a part of the image I’d had in my mind for my mother’s youngest son. I wasn’t sure what to say as he watched me cut into the pie Claudia baked for me, pursing his mouth at its bright blue color. It was too odd to see parts of me and Mike on someone else.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had fresh blueberries before.” His English was nearly flawless but with an odd cant to it, different than Jae’s. It wasn’t hard to understand him. Just different. I wondered if our mother sounded like him. If I would have grown up listening to the peculiar cadence and somehow mimicked it in my own speech. “Not in a pie. It smells good.”

“Claudia, my… she’s kind of like an aunt… made it,” I replied. The whole scene was too domestic to be real. I plated a couple of slices, put them on one of the dining trays Jae liked to use, and pulled two cups of coffee from the brewing pot. I tossed a handful of the sugar packets and creamer cups I’d stolen from the front office onto the tray and jerked my head toward the living room. “Head over that way.”

Neko decided to join us. I’d say it was my stellar company, but the truth was, she liked sucking up creamer from the cups. I opened one for her, set it on the chest, and stroked her fur while Ichiro mixed up his coffee. He chucked her under the chin when she went over to investigate his coffee and smiled when the damned cat declined his advances, returning to her own creamer.

I flipped on the sound system, keeping the volume low. I skipped over the playlists until I found one of Jae’s and felt the tension slip down my shoulders and away from my back at the now-familiar burble of Korean playing through the house. Letting G-Dragon howl about getting his cray on, I settled back down, moving Neko’s tail out of my pie.

“I like that you named her Neko.” He leaned back, cradling his cup and studying the pie.

“She came that way.” I probably sounded like an asshole, and I still wasn’t sure where the whole
come on in and let me give you pie
courtesy came from. I blamed Jae. God knows, I’ve never been the crinoline skirts and pearls type. ’Course I’d never say that about him… out loud. “We’re working on our relationship. I expect her to be a pet. She expects me to be her slave. We’re trying to find a common ground.”

“I wish you luck with that, brother.” Ichiro saluted me with his coffee cup.

“Yeah, about that brother thing—” The pie didn’t hold my interest, which was a shame because I had a weakness for blueberries. Okay, a weakness for pie in general, but blueberries were up there. “How long are we supposed to have polite conversation before you tell me why you showed up here?”

“Depends.” He pursed his mouth, thinking a moment. “Are we going by American or Japanese standards?”

“How long would this shit take Japanese style?”

“We’d probably be here until one of us is a grandfather if we do this Japanese style. I say let’s go American… how long is that?” Ichiro grinned, and damned if he didn’t look like me right at that moment.

“Pretty much you thank me for the pie and then we get on with it.”

“Thank you,
oniisan,
for the pie. It is delicious.” He saluted me with a forkful of blueberries. Chewing around the mouthful, he continued, “So where do we start?”

“You know I don’t want you here… didn’t want you here.” I exhaled, confused and unable to unravel the emotions inside of me. Pushing my plate away, I leaned back and rubbed my face. I went for blunt honesty. It pissed me off that he was a nice guy. I wanted him to be an uptight fucking asshole, but the whole genial tattooed guy thing was throwing me off. I
wanted
to be pissed off. “I don’t know what to… do with you. I’m sorry. I’m just not ready for this. For you.”

“
Mikio told me you were direct. Actually, he said you were a blunt ass.” He cocked his head, catching my rueful smirk. “Ah, you probably don’t even think of him by that name. Mike, then. It’s hard to think of him with that name. I don’t think of you as Cole. All my life, you’ve been Kenjiro.”

“So you… knew about us, then?”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about our mother talking us up to someone else, much less to a brother she’d had with another man. She couldn’t have known anything about me. As far as I knew, she and my father had no contact. She’d literally packed her shit up and walked out of the door without looking back. The last time she saw me, I’d probably been spitting up formula and couldn’t see anything but blurry shapes.

“I knew.” Ichiro nodded. “She talked about you sometimes. Even if she had to leave you behind, she thought about you. So, I thought about you.”

“I’m… sorry she passed.” That was a truth. No matter who Ryoko McGinnis-Tokugawa was to me, she’d been
his
mother.

“It was hard,” Ichiro admitted softly. “She was never really strong. And when the cancer came, I think she just gave in to it. In a lot of ways, she was more a child to me than I was to her. Delicate—that’s the word for her. My father is very traditional. I think that made life easier for her. I, on the other hand, am the opposite. He’s probably trying to figure out where I came from and how the hell he can return me there.”

A woman like that wouldn’t have survived my father. My stepmother, Barbara, could at least hold her own with the dick. She even matched him punch for punch in the asshole department. Ryoko wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“Is that why she left us? Left my father? It was too hard over here?” It was the most pounding question in my head. I couldn’t fathom a woman abandoning her sons. It was what I’d struggled with ever since I’d answered Ichiro’s phone call a few weeks ago. The
why
of it bothered me, nestled into my brain, and grew burrs to hook into my thoughts.

“Living wasn’t easy for her.” He reached for his cup and cradled it, looking more like he needed to do something with his hands rather than needing a drink. “When a couple divorces… where I am from… one parent assumes custody of the children. Usually, the other parent doesn’t have contact with the children again. Or rarely. You are… registered… with a family’s lineage. The absent parent doesn’t have any say over you anymore.”

“They just walk out of their kids’ lives?”

“Yes, because they no longer are connected… bound to the children. It’s very ritualistic in ways. Mother would have followed that.” Ichiro picked a blueberry from his dish and chewed on it, sipping his coffee afterward. “Even if she didn’t want to, she would have left you to your father because that’s what we do. She was very Japanese. That’s all I can guess.”

“Did my father do something? Or did she just fall out of love with him?”

“I don’t know. She never spoke about your father or why she left him. But knowing my mother—our mother—she wouldn’t be able to survive outside of her own place.” Ichiro shook his head. “She wasn’t strong, Kenjiro… Cole. Physically. Emotionally. She always needed someone. In many ways, she was like a little girl. Your father’s career would have been hard on her. I can’t imagine her surviving here, but she carried you with her. So much so that I knew you.”