Dirty Kiss Read online

  “Because for a traditional Korean family, being gay is very shameful,” he replied. “Just be discreet.”

  “Who am I going to tell?” I exhaled hard, letting my temper ride over me. “Shit, the widow. I’ve got to talk to her. Does she know?”

  “Probably not before, but considering where he was found, she does now.”

  I took out another copy of the suicide note from my stack of case papers, staring at the scribbles as if I could somehow glean what had been going on in Hyun-Shik’s mind when he’d killed himself. “Scarlet said that they don’t distribute pills there. What was on the autopsy report? Anything come back from tox?”

  “Nothing yet.” Mike shrugged, pushing away the paper plate that held his dinner. “They took some tissue and blood, and the body was cremated right afterwards.”

  “If you were running a whorehouse, wouldn’t you keep track of all of the rooms?” I cocked my head at my brother. “I mean, that’s your income there. How long did it take before someone noticed that he wasn’t coming out of the room? And who was with him? That guy Jin-Sang, or someone else? Do you know?”

  “Nope, it didn’t come up. I couldn’t get a lot out of his father, but to be honest, I didn’t try. His son just died.” Another shrug, this one more troubled. Mike hated mysteries, where I loved to hammer at them until I found an answer. For my brother, the perfect life included no surprises. “The only thing I can do is ask his father, but I can’t guarantee that I’m going to come back to you with answers. They tend to be very close-mouthed about personal things.”

  “So then why did Jae-Min tell me he was gay?” Grabbing a throw pillow, I shoved it behind my head, leaning back on the couch arm. “Is that a lie he’s telling so people think that Hyun-Shik was there because of him? Or maybe to excuse what he did in that club?”

  He smirked at me. “Maybe he likes you and wanted a date.”

  “I’m going to beat you until you cry,” I growled under my breath. “He’s the one I’m pissed off about. He stood right in front of me and didn’t say a damned thing to me about Hyun-Shik. He said he knew about the club but not that he’d worked there.”

  “Cole, if you used to be a whore, would you tell an investigator which street corner you worked? He didn’t know you knew Scarlet, so he probably figured you’d get a few short answers from the club’s management and that would be the end of it.” Mike raised his head, meeting my eyes. “Why are you picking so hard at this? Is there something really here to look into, or are you mad because this Kim kid couldn’t take being in the closet and killed himself?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped. Why was I pissed off? Hyun-Shik’s death was stupid, but more stupid was the web of lies that surrounded his suicide. If Scarlet was telling me the truth, then there were a lot of people who might have wanted Hyun-Shik dead, maybe even his cousin, Jae-Min. So a stupid death, to me, was beginning to look like murder.

  “Stay with me for a bit, Mike.” I took a breath, spinning out my thoughts. “Hyun-Shik was a closeted gay man. He marries a woman and has a son. By his family’s thinking, he’s done his duty, right? So does he go back to his old ways, or is his death in Dorthi Ki Seu hiding something else?”

  “Okay, suppose someone killed him,” Mike said. “Who killed him? And how?”

  “Several people.” I looked over the remains of Mike’s dinner, picking out larger pieces of meat and shoving a few in my mouth. Chewing, I refused the napkin he held out for me with a shake of my head. “This Jin-Sang guy might have found him with someone else.”

  “So he gave Hyun-Shik something in his alcohol?” Mike pursed his lips, thinking. “Maybe he didn’t mean to kill him. Just give him something to scare him or make him sick?”

  “Still would take some planning, though.” I mulled it over. “Unless Jin-Sang is a regular user and had the pills there at the club.”

  “Jealousy? Didn’t want to share his lover?” Mike tossed in. “But you’re assuming that Jin-Sang and Hyun-Shik had more than a money thing going.”

  “Once again, we’re back to what Scarlet said: the hired sex toy and Hyun-Shik Kim had an understanding.”

  “How credible is Scarlet?”

  “Credible enough that she’s the only person in this mess besides you whose word I can trust.” I returned to the burrito corpse, picking at its flesh. “How fucked-up is that? The only truth I can depend on comes from a man who lives lying about what he looks like.”

  “What about the cousin? You said Hyun-Shik started him working there?” Mike shoved my foot off his leg. “Maybe it finally got to him and he wanted revenge.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

  “No, why would he wait this long? Unless Jae-Min was being pressured into something.” The overhead lights cast shadows over my brother’s face, his black hair a glossy sheen beneath the glow. “There’s only so much a guy would do for money.”

  “Wait, you said Jae-Min stayed with them only a short time.” I thought back to what he’d said to me in the Kims’ kitchen. “He came down here for high school. How old was he when he started working for Dorthi Ki Seu?”

  “I dunno. I just found out he was a whore.” Mike drained the rest of his beer.

  “Don’t call him that.” I was surprised at how much heat was in my voice. “Just don’t.”

  “If you’re going to fall for someone after Rick, don’t go for a Korean boy-whore, Cole.” My brother’s tone was flat, nearly as flat as his nose was going to be, once I was done with it.

  “Don’t start on me, Mike. Not about Rick and not about this.” I warned him off. “Jae-Min’s….”

  “You’re the one who brought up the whoring,” he pointed out. “Either he’s someone you’re spitting on or someone you’re defending. Which one is it?”

  “I don’t know, Mike.” I finished off my beer and gathered up the mess of our dinner. After dropping the paper plates into the kitchen trash, I wandered back into the living room. My brother watched me closely as I entered, his face inscrutable. Never good at reading Mike, I slouched back into the couch’s soft cushions, irritated that I couldn’t guess at what was going on in my brother’s mind. “What do you want from me, huh?”

  “I think this Jae-Min guy is clouding your brain.” He poked at my stomach, leaving behind a bruise I was probably going to find in the morning.

  “So what? You think I should just fuck him and get him out of my system?”

  “It’s bad enough that you have sex with guys. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to imagine you doing it.” Mike made a face. “And I really don’t want to get details.”

  It hurt. Hearing those words from Mike hurt. There was only so much support I was going to get from my brother about how I lived my life. Even if I wasn’t planning on hopping into bed with Jae-Min, or anyone else for that matter, I missed being able to talk about everything with my brother. But then again, I thought, I’d never really had that level of trust with my family. If I had, it wouldn’t have taken so long for me to come to grips with who I was or who I wanted.

  I did what I always did, ignored it.

  “Look, I’ve got to go home. Maddy’s probably hoping I’ll actually come home in the same day I left.” He stood, straightening the legs of his pants. He made a futile attempt to brush the wrinkles out of his shirt, stuffing his tie into his pocket and grabbing his keys from the table.

  “You’re already too late for that.” I walked him to the door, opening it for him to leave.

  He stopped, half-turned so I could only see the darkness of his profile. “Cole….”

  “It’s okay, Mike.” The last thing I wanted to hear was my brother sounding like my father. I needed him in my life too much. He was one tie I didn’t want to sever over pride.

  “No, it’s not okay.” We’d never spoken about things like relationships. Both of us grew up too Catholic, or maybe too Irish for that. I’d strayed a bit, searching around for where I fit in. Mike had never ha
d that problem, and for him, his little brother’s quirks were sometimes too much to deal with. “I keep telling you to get back out there, but then I shut you down when you start talking about it. I’m sorry I can’t be there for you with that, Cole.”

  I stared at him, wondering where he was going to go with the conversation.

  “You’re my brother, and I love you,” he said softly. “But there’s a small bit of me that hates what you are. I can’t get over that, but I still love you. A lot.”

  I wanted to tell him I loved him, but the words stuck, choking my windpipe until my chest hurt. He faded when he stepped off the side porch, plunging into the pitch dark until he reappeared in the pool of light from the streetlamp. He gave me a casual wave before getting into his car, as if that was going to make everything all right between us.

  “Love you too, Mike,” I whispered, too late for my brother to hear, but still, it helped wash away some of the pain. I closed the door, locking it behind me.

  BY LATE afternoon, I’d done enough research on Jin-Sang Yi to make my head hurt. Claudia stopped in for an hour or so, begging boredom, but I knew her curiosity had gotten the best of her, and she listened while I spoke about what I’d found out. She’d given me some respite from my research, plopping a pastrami sandwich on sourdough onto my desk with a baleful glare. I was going to object about the lettuce on it, but her lifted eyebrow gave me pause, and I shut my mouth with a bite of the sandwich.

  “You going to go see him?” Typing slowly on the keyboard, she leaned forward, staring at the screen. “What are you going to say when you get there?”

  “Well, I probably won’t ask if he’s killed his ex-lover,” I replied. “But I have two options right now: talking to Yi or to Hyun-Shik’s wife.”

  “You’ve got a third one.” Claudia hit print and turned her chair to wait for the paper to be spat out. “You can go back and talk to that boy you spoke to yesterday.”

  “Scarlet? I think I bugged her enough for a month.”

  “No, not that one.” Rolling her eyes, she gathered up her report. “The other Kim boy. The one from the kitchen.”

  I’d only mentioned Jae-Min in brief passing, so now I was beginning to doubt my poker face. Playing it smooth, I asked, “Why talk to him?”

  “Because he seems like the one that knows something.” For an amateur, Claudia was pretty good at picking out lies. Probably because she’d raised eight sons. “I’m all for not getting into someone’s business, but if this were one of my sons, I’d be banging down every door I could find to get some answers.”

  Claudia left a few minutes before I was ready to go, cheerfully bullying her youngest son to stop at the store before they went home. He waved at me through the open door, then followed her down the stairs, agreeing with whatever his mother said as she headed toward their car.

  Los Angeles’s freeways fought me all down the coast, throwing up traffic snarls indiscriminately where I didn’t need them. The sun played hide-and-seek with me all the way down, peering out from between buildings to burn its light into my eyes. Rolling the window down, I let the freeway breeze hit me, its unique perfume of rubber and overcooked cement. Billboards kept me company until I turned off toward the coast, hitting the off-ramp at a respectable speed and barely making the light. The Rover’s engine hiccupped a bit as I gunned past the white stop line, the yellow light ghosting over to red as I made the turn.

  Jin-Sang Yi lived in one of the many cardboard-box-looking condo complexes that had popped up all over Southern California in the ’90s. I had to circle the block to find off-street parking, the single guest spot taken up by a gardening truck. I ran a gauntlet of leaf blowers, nearly falling into the low-grade bushes that served as landscaping. Considering what Jin-Sang supposedly made a week, he certainly wasn’t spending it on his accommodations. The fake adobe walls were painted a shit brown, a half-assed attempt to provide some sort of California style to the squat condos.

  Children shouted obscenities at each other as they played around the complex’s swimming pool. A few women sat nearby in the shade of an overgrown tree. No one gave me a second look, and I wasn’t expecting one. Living in each other’s armpits went a long way toward ignoring people as they walked through what was basically their backyard.

  Somewhere inside an apartment, a small dog yapped continuously, the sound bouncing off the maze of buildings. Nearby, a man screamed in Spanish for someone to shut up. I wasn’t sure if it was the dog he was talking to or someone else only he could see.

  Jin-Sang lived in an upstairs apartment, located as far from the pool and where I parked as possible while still remaining in the same complex. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back, and even though night was close by, the oppressive heat of the day refused to give up its grip on the city. The whine of an air conditioner echoed from the apartment beneath Jin-Sang’s, its rattle sounding its furious charge as it battled the afternoon sun.

  A car parked in the space marked for Jin-Sang’s apartment stopped me dead in my tracks. It was an older white Explorer, the same one I’d seen parked in front of the Kims’ house. The interior of the SUV was nearly spotless, just a few pieces of paper on the front passenger seat, nothing to tell me who owned it.

  Still, I had a good idea about who owned the Explorer.

  I tried to be as quiet as I could, climbing up the cement steps to the apartment. With any luck, I would be able to overhear them through the door. Places like these didn’t invest in heavy sound-blocking doors. Tenants were usually lucky if there was a peephole to look through.

  There was a sliver of a shadow along the seam of the door. It was open a crack, nearly wide enough to stick a few fingers through. The space wasn’t wide enough to allow any airflow through the apartment, and I could hear the air conditioner set into the wall straining to cool the open space. Stepping onto the landing between the two top-floor apartments, I glanced down the stairs to see if anyone was watching and slowly pushed the door open.

  I smelled the blood before I saw anything. Nothing smells quite like cooking human blood on a sunny afternoon. Taking a deep breath, I stepped carefully into the apartment, and my stomach churned into a knot.

  Splatter covered the wall by the front door, streaking the off-white paint with red. A couple of bullet holes punctured the drywall, exposing the framework underneath. I revised my opinion of the apartment’s construction. Whatever the shooter had used to kill his victim had left a huge mess, but the damage didn’t go through to the other side, or I would have spotted it when I walked up the stairs.

  In my mind, the wall became brick, bleached from years of sun. It was night in a blink, a soft evening where my belly was full and I was looking forward to the taste of Rick’s mouth on mine. In an instant, it was gone, taken from me in a spray of blood and bone.

  Closing my thoughts against the memory didn’t help. All it did was remind me of other things, the taste of Rick’s brain on my tongue and lips, then suddenly pain grinding through me as other shots deafened the air. I’d fallen, holding him… crying for him. Then the world folded in on me.

  That night echoed around me, hidden in the blood and the afternoon light.

  Two bodies lay on the living room floor, sprawled where they’d been shot. I didn’t recognize the one on his back, the remains of his face broken by a gunshot. Whatever hit him had taken out most of the right side of his skull, a flap of skin holding what looked like his ear sprawled on the carpet next to his body. I was careful to step around him. Pieces of bone were on the tile entryway, bits of his brain caught under the door, smeared when I’d opened it to go in.

  I checked the one nearest the door. The carpet was matted with blood under his body. Whatever happened here hadn’t occurred too long ago. The bodily fluids were still liquid, and the telltale stink of his body releasing its remaining refuse had just started to smell the place up. Swallowing the bile at the back of my throat, I turned to the other man.

  My fear choked me as I looked at the man lying facedown
on the carpet. He was closer to the kitchen alcove, nearly hidden behind a thick-legged table. His features were hidden from me, but a pool of blood had leaked out of a wound I couldn’t see, spreading over the stained beige carpet. I didn’t want to touch the body, but my brain screamed to know if that was Jae-Min lying motionless and dead.

  The black hair I’d wanted to run my hands through only yesterday clung to his neck, weighted down with blood. He’d fallen like a broken doll, legs cocked as if in mid-turn when some god had decided it was done with its toy and cut his strings. Crouching, I forced my heart to keep beating as I reached down to brush away the hair that had fallen forward and covered his face.

  And I had to stop myself from sobbing like a girl when I saw Jae-Min’s beauty under the veil of black I’d pulled back.

  My hands were sticky, the lines on my palms clotted with Jae’s drying blood. There was so much of it, leaking out of someplace that I couldn’t see. I was afraid to turn him over, afraid to touch him in case he fell apart when I held him. I wasn’t going to let him die, cold and untouched.

  He was warm to the touch, too warm it seemed, even taking into account the sweltering heat of the apartment. A flush colored his pale skin, a blush of pink across his high cheekbone, and then his mouth moved, giving me a start. Jae-Min moaned softly, and his breath skittered over my fingers. My chest began to thump again as my blood moved through my veins again.

  “Don’t move,” I said, reaching for my cell phone. “Stay where you are, Jae. I’ve got to call the paramedics.”

  He either couldn’t hear me or was too stubborn to listen to common sense, because the first thing Jae did was shift his body and try to get up. Pushing himself onto his hands, Jae’s eyes were unfocused as he blinked, unable to see me or his surroundings. Gagging, he choked on the thread of vomit that dribbled from his mouth, retching violently.

  “Cole?” It was too much to be elated that he knew who I was, but I took what I could get. It was followed by some Korean that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t rational. I’d just met him, but hearing him croak my name and maybe even swear at me was a relief.