Spider Season (27 page)

I said Koreatown was fine. We set a time and place.

*   *   *

With her usual strategic savvy, she’d picked a barbecue place on Western Avenue, in the heart of what had become the city’s most commercially vibrant ethnic neighborhood. Half the signs were in Hangul, Korean-style restaurants and nightclubs were crammed into every nook and cranny, and there seemed to be a Korean bank on every other corner. There was money down here, lots of it, which meant the residents had to contend with the growing threat of gangsters from within and other predators from outside, who descended on the bustling streets after dark looking for a quick score.

I’d always liked Korean barbecue—the grills built right into the tables, the little side dishes that got refilled the moment they were empty, the spicy flavors that sometimes scorched your throat, the big bottles of OB beer to wash it down and put out the fire. There was decorum to the service that bordered on ceremony, but it never got in the way of the conversation or the joie de vivre, never crossed into the realm of stiff formality that could ruin a good meal and a good time, the way it did when Westerners tried too hard to put on a fancy dinner. Unlike some Asian groups, Koreans tended to be demonstrative with their passions, sometimes hotheaded, sometimes quick to tears, closer in temperament to Italians. In Koreatown, a meal out was as much about lively talk and fervent companionship as it was about eating and making nice. Maybe that was why Conroy had picked this part of town, I thought—to make me feel more comfortable, to loosen me up while she guided the conversation where she wanted it to go.

“You get down here much anymore?” she asked, when we were seated across from each other in a booth.

“Anymore?”

She reached into her handbag, withdrew her little recorder, and placed it in the middle of the table, with the mic pointed in my direction.

“As I recall,” she said, “you had a boyfriend who used to live down here. Jin Jai-Sik.”

I’d mentioned Jin Jai-Sik in the epilogue of
Deep Background,
because he’d played a role in the murder case twelve years ago that had brought Templeton and me together for the first time. Sleek, slim, darkly handsome, not unlike the waiter who’d just arrived at our table to take our order.

I let Conroy handle it. She ordered cuts of chicken and beef for the grill, plenty of side dishes, a large bottle of OB, and two glasses.

“No beer for me,” I said, weary of her repeated attempts to ply me with alcohol.

“I’m sure you can handle a glass or two,” Conroy said, “a big, strong man like you.”

I glanced away from her to the waiter. “Iced tea, thanks.”

“Afraid I’ll take advantage of you?” Conroy asked, purring like a puma.

I ignored it and repeated my beverage order, and the waiter wrote it down. He leaned across the table and fired up the grill. He had beautiful hands—long and slender, as smooth and pale as ivory—just like Jin Jai-Sik’s.

“So,” Conroy continued, “do you ever see your Korean friend?”

“Why the sudden interest in Jin?”

“You mentioned him in your book, which I’m writing about.”

“Not for a long time.”

“Another one of those people you let drift out of your life?”

The clever segue, I thought—Koreatown, Jin Jai-Sik, people I’ve abandoned. Conroy had made her first moves.

“Jin walked out of my life,” I said. “It wasn’t my choice.”

“But you didn’t fight to keep him. You let him go, didn’t you?”

“He was free to leave or stay.”

“People seem to come and go in your life, don’t they? Your son, Lance, for example.”

Ah, Lance. Of course—she’d seen the story on the Internet and the TV news shows, like everyone else. At least now I knew where she was headed. Or thought I did.

“You said you were writing about
Deep Background
. Lance wasn’t mentioned. We had no relationship when I wrote it. There’s no reason for us to talk about him.”

“You, your book—it’s all fair game in a profile, isn’t it?”

“Next question.”

“You won’t discuss your own son? Whose mother, your ex-fiancée, committed suicide?”

“Move on, Cathryn.”

The waiter returned with our beverages, setting his tray on the end of the table. I watched him pour frothy beer into a frosty glass and then caught Conroy watching me.

“Sure you won’t change your mind?” she asked. “That beer looks awfully tasty.”

The waiter placed the full glass and half-empty bottle in front of Conroy and an iced tea with a slice of lemon in front of me, and went away again.

“Since Jin is such a difficult subject for you to discuss,” she said, “maybe we should talk about your father. He’s fair game, I hope.”

“Go on.”

“According to your book, you admired a lot about him.”

“From all accounts he was a first-rate detective, who closed a lot of homicide cases. He was a good provider. And he could be a decent father, when he wasn’t drinking.”

“You had a genuine rapport with him?”

“We had some good times together.”

“When he wasn’t drinking?”

I nodded. “He was a different person when he drank. Some people can handle it. He couldn’t.”

“Is that why you’re so intent on staying sober? Now that you’ve got a son of your own?”

“I’ve told you, Lance is off-limits. Don’t push it, Cathryn.”

“Let’s talk more about your father then.”

“If you want to.”

The waiter came back with a platter loaded with choice pieces of beef and chicken, which he tossed on the hot grill using tongs. He pushed the pieces around, causing them to sizzle, then laid the tongs at the edge of the grill and made another departure. Conroy picked up the tongs and rearranged the meat to her satisfaction. Flames flared up. The aroma of sizzling meat filled the air.

“Did you love him?” she asked.

“It’s difficult to use that word, in light of what he did to my little sister, and the way he sometimes treated all of us.”

“But you felt love for him, up to the point when you found out what he’d been doing to Elizabeth Jane? The molestation, I mean.”

“I suppose there was some love in there, along with other feelings. Love’s obligatory, isn’t it, between parents and children?”

“Anger, because of the beatings you’d endured?”

“That’s all in the book. You can quote or paraphrase from it as you wish.”

“You never used the word
hate
in your book. Not when discussing your feelings for him.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “Is that a question you’re uncomfortable with?”

“I didn’t hear a question.”

She smirked. “Let me put it this way: Did you at any time harbor feelings of hatred toward your father?”

“I’ve covered all that in my book.”

“I’d prefer to hear it directly from you.”

“And I’d prefer to let my book speak for itself.”

“You’re saying that your book is a complete and accurate account of what happened between you and your father?”

I shot another glance at her recorder. Then I said very precisely, “I wrote my memoir as accurately and honestly as I was able, based on my personal recollections.”

“And that includes your description of the day you killed your father, the details leading up to and including his death?”

I swallowed dryly, took a sip of iced tea. “It includes everything in the book.”

“That day, you caught your father molesting your little sister.”

“I prefer the term
rape
.”

“You pulled him off her.”

“Yes.”

“The two of you fought.”

“Correct.”

“Your mother picked up the phone to call the police.”

“Yes.”

“He began beating her and you were unable to stop him.”

“That’s right.”

“You ran into their bedroom and got his .38 Detective Special, which was loaded.”

“Yes.”

“You returned and shot him.”

“Correct.”

“You kept shooting, until the gun was empty.”

“Just as I wrote in the book.”

“Then you beat him savagely with the butt of the gun, more or less mutilating his face.”

I nodded.

“Overkill, wouldn’t you say?”

“I was protecting Mom and Elizabeth Jane. I didn’t stop to assess the damage.”

“The killing strikes me as an act of pure rage, well beyond what the situation demanded. After all, you had the gun.”

“If that’s how you see it, Cathryn.”

“You were never charged. Your father’s death was ruled a justifiable homicide.”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s not what really happened, is it? It wasn’t a justifiable homicide, was it, Justice?”

The waiter returned with a tray filled with small side dishes, mostly little bowls, which he set one by one at the end of the table. Fried green peppers, kimchi, seasoned spinach, mung bean curd, crispy seaweed, seasoned eggplant, red pepper broccoli, one or two others. He also set two covered bowls of sticky rice on the table, one near each of us, and plates in front of us. He stretched across, grabbed the tongs, and turned the meat, causing it to sizzle and flame again. The air had become pungent from our little feast, but I wasn’t enjoying it much. I was fixed on Conroy’s last words:
But that’s not what really happened, is it? It wasn’t a justifiable homicide, was it, Justice?

The waiter asked if there was anything else we needed. I remained silent, staring across at Conroy, who busied herself with the food. She told him everything was fine and he left us.

“It’s a funny thing about memoirs,” she said, using chopsticks to lift some dried anchovy onto her plate. “They’ve fallen into such disrepute of late. The James Frey scandal. The hoax involving Laura Albert and JT LeRoy. The debunking of Norma Khouri’s
Forbidden Love
. The unmasking of Margaret Seltzer and Misha Defonseca. Any number of authors who’ve gotten caught exaggerating certain aspects of their lives, covering up important facts to present a false picture of what really happened, or fabricating whole cloth.”

Conroy glanced over as she placed some pickled garlic on her plate. “You haven’t lost your appetite, have you, Justice?”

I’d written hundreds of articles in my time, so it wasn’t difficult to envision the way her profile would take shape. Koreatown as a colorful backdrop leading to Jin Jai-Sik, a clever segue to other people I’d abandoned in my life, my refusal to talk about my own son, then a neat transition to father-son relationships and how I’d killed my old man. Along the way, she’d use the meal to structure this section of her story and punctuate it with certain points—my problem with alcohol, my attention to the handsome waiter, my loss of appetite in the face of troubling questions. It was the way many articles were crafted for structure and pace, the way character was revealed through action and detail, the way a story was built toward its big payoff. Conroy had honed her craft well, and had her strategy down cold.

She turned the meat one more time, let it cook another minute, then used the tongs to place steaming chunks of beef and chicken onto her plate.

“One tries to remember exactly what happened,” I said carefully. “But that’s not always possible. We can only write from fragments of memory, and we have fewer and fewer fragments as time goes by. In the end, a memoirist can only do his best.”

“Are you saying that you no longer stand by everything in your book?”

“I wrote what I remembered, to the best of my recollection.”

“Did you?” She paused with her chopsticks in midair, a sliver of sautéed zucchini trapped between the tips. Her eyes were steady, penetrating.

“Or did you write what you
wanted
to remember?”

“Is that your mission, Cathryn—to discredit
Deep Background
? Turn me into another James Frey? Get yourself some attention, booked on the talk shows?”

“You still haven’t answered my central question, Justice. Your father’s death was ruled a justifiable homicide.”

She set her chopsticks aside, placed her elbows on the table, propped her chin on her hands, and looked me straight in the eye.

“But it was actually murder, wasn’t it?”

I worked hard to show her a sturdy front.

“The police investigated,” I said. “The district attorney evaluated the evidence. The ruling was justifiable homicide.”

Her smile was small, taunting. “Of course, a homicide case is never closed, is it? New evidence can always surface, causing an old case to be reexamined.”

“That hasn’t happened.”

“I have an extremely credible source,” she said, “who tells me that you confessed to murdering your father.”

There it was. The whole game wrapped up in that one line. It hit me like a stun grenade. But she wasn’t finished.

“I’m told that when you went into your father’s bedroom and got his gun that day, you did it with the full intention of killing him. Not threatening him. Not warning him to back off. Not holding him at gunpoint until the police arrived. But pulling the trigger and making sure he was stone-cold dead. What happened to your little sister was horrible, but it was also the opportunity for which you’d been waiting a long time. It was a chance to kill him and get away with it, and you seized it.”

I removed my trembling hands from the table and hid them in my lap.

“And your source says I admitted to this?”

“That’s right.”

Ismael. He’d heard my confession five years ago when I was a lost and broken man, spilling my guts, baring my soul.

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Justice. You of all people know that.”

My face was hot, my stomach roiling.

“You’re really going to use this?”

“I’m in the truth business, Justice. Like you were at one time, before you decided that truth was dispensable. Of course I’m going to use it.”

I turned to stare out across the main floor of the big restaurant. It was a weekday, and most of the diners were Korean men in business suits. There was a lot of animated talk, punctuated now and then by laughter. On Saturday, it would be mostly couples. Sunday, families. Living in the moment, enjoying one another, making pleasant memories. I’d been down here on Sundays before, just to see families together like that, the way it should be.