by Rhys Ford
I didn’t need to see the bowl of orange-dusted fruit strips sitting on the table next to the couch to know he’d been eating li hing mui mango. Jae’s kiss tasted of it. Its sweet licorice-sugar stung my tongue, reminiscent of tamarind with a punch of Jae behind it. I was dead tired, scraped up to hell, but my body responded as it always did, flaring to life whenever he was near. My desire for him became incendiary whenever we touched, and there were moments when I was convinced I would one day be found as a pile of ash at the side of our bed. I would be the happiest pile of ash ever.
He was almost my height, skimming six feet, but we were built so very differently. For all of my being half Japanese, very little of it settled in my bones and musculature. My face wore ghosts of my mother’s Asian blood, but my personality and body were purely descended from the McGinnis side of the family—a long line of Irish brawlers with a nose for trouble and a thirst for adventure. I kept fit by boxing and running, usually accompanied by Bobby Dawson, my best friend and a former LAPD detective, and lately I’d tried to keep up with Jae doing yoga, hoping it would help ease the scar tissue knotting up my body.
Jae was a sleek, beautiful Korean man with a pretty face it almost hurt to look at and a flexibility that almost guaranteed my destiny as that pile of ash. His black hair framed his sculpted face, falling almost down to his shoulders and long enough to pull back into a ponytail, something he did when he went all mad scientist in the kitchen. As much as I loved his mouth, I loved his eyes even more. They were a smoky honey-rye silken brown mixed with burnt gold, and I loved seeing the world through them when he told me about his day. He was graceful in a way I could never compete with and seemed to possess a fondness for spicy things that even amazed other Koreans. He’d come to me guarded and hating his attraction to other men, but to be fair, I’d come to him broken and hating myself.
Along the way, we kept each other company as we patched up our wounds even as life injured us further. But we’d still found each other, still climbed over rigid walls to admit our love, to embrace our connection and eventually exchange rings.
I regretted nothing of the pain we’d gone through to reach this point in our lives, but I would have to say I wished I had brought more smiles to Jae’s full lips. Since we were both in our thirties, we had a lot more years ahead of us, and I looked forward to teasing those smiles out of him for a long time.
“I’m glad you’re home, Cole-ah.” Even his voice held a hint of the chilis he loved, scorching a fusion of lust and desire down my spine and across my belly. The kiss ended way too soon, and I went in for seconds, but Jae pinched the end of my nose, stopping me in midswoop. “Hold on to that thought, because I planned on waking up when you came home, but something dragged me out of bed.”
“I’m guessing that something has to do with me,” I mumbled as if suffering a tremendous cold, unable to speak clearly with my nose held firmly between his fingers. “Could you let go? I sound as if I’m going to go take a job as a nanny for a man named Sheffield with three kids and a butler.”
He let go, leaving me with a kiss on my injured nose tip. Reaching across of me, he dislodged Neko, who’d settled against me on the other side, and snagged a piece of paper I’d not seen tucked in under the bowl of mango.
“I wasn’t asleep, because I was worried about you, even though you told me you were fine. I was still worried,” Jae admitted in a soft whisper. Neko, however, voiced her opinion at being ruffled with a loud strident meow at odds with her tiny body. Honey, probably sensing the cat’s impending rampage across the room, wisely picked herself up off of the floor and shuffled over to one of the dog beds where she would be safe.
“I was fine.” I could see he didn’t believe me, and since I’d left out the part about being shot at, Jae probably suspected I was lying. Actually it was probably more than suspicion, because he could always tell when I was lying. “It was a little hairy at times—and remind me to tell you about the sheep—but I was okay. What woke you up?”
“The phone.” Jae held up the piece of paper so I could see the numbers he’d written down. “A man named Arthur Brinkerhoff called about an hour ago. He’d like you to find out who killed his wife and why the cops are accusing her of stealing two million dollars in diamonds.”
Three
“WAIT. BRINKERHOFF.” Claudia hovered at the edge of my desk, holding my coffee cup hostage, just out of my reach. “We know that name, right? Wasn’t that the name of the spanking dominatrix grandma who nearly popped your head off with a shotgun a few years back?”
“I don’t know about dominatrix,” I grumbled, grabbing at my cup as it wove closer. “Okay, maybe.”
“She sure as hell beat your ass,” my alleged surrogate mother shot back as she set my coffee down with a firm thump. “And now she’s dead, and somehow it’s your problem?”
“Well, I did kind of find her.” The coffee was strong. At some point in Claudia’s past, someone taught her how to make paint thinner out of coffee beans, and she’s been perfecting her toxic brew ever since. I was surprised I still had nostril hairs, but I was grateful for the punch to my heart, since I’d gotten so little sleep the night before. “I feel like I owe this guy. I haven’t thought about them in years, but it’s the case I was working on when Mike dropped Hyun-Shik’s case into my lap.”
The look I got from Claudia was a stern reminder of how she raised eight sons to a steady, responsible adulthood where they all made a good living and treated their significant others with love and respect. We’d both come a long way since the day she walked into my office, resplendent in her Sunday-go-to-church best, and subsequently took over my life. She became the mother I never had, a strong, bighearted Southern woman who told me when to pull up my socks and when to shut my mouth. Unfortunately for Jae and me, Claudia was also now best friends with Jae’s adopted aunt, a Filipino kathoey lounge singer named Scarlet who spent most of her life as a woman and a voice of reason alongside of Claudia’s already brimming sea of knowledge. The two of them together kept us wrapped up tight, doted on and loved but also subjected to their extremely strong opinions about practically everything under the sun.
I got a lot of sympathy from Claudia’s sons and their children, but mostly I believed they were just happy to have someone else take the occasional hit.
Judging by the contemplative expression on Claudia’s face, I was about to take one helluva hit.
I just didn’t know when.
My neighborhood in Brentwood wasn’t filled with châteaus, castles, and McMansions, but rather with vintage Craftsman- and Victorian-style buildings. The homes here were large, some nearly big enough to serve as small hotels, except zoning regulations frowned on that kind of thing. I’d barely gotten permission from the city to run my business out of the bottom front of my restored Craftsman, but since a few people had already converted smaller carriage houses across the street from me to a coffee shop run by hippies and a couple of other storefronts, I’d been able to leverage my way in. There were other little cottage industries half a block down the street from us, including a pizza parlor with pies so delectable angels wept every time one was pulled out of the oven.
Sipping my coffee, I stared out of the large wooden-sash windows looking out onto the street and watched the odd foot traffic flow in and out of the tree-hugging, otter-scrubber coffee shop that had once been the bane of my existence. Its owners and I had come to an agreement. They would make sure their customers didn’t dump their trash onto my lawn or piss in the hedges along the side of my property, and I wouldn’t shoot the next person I found watering the stunted bush at the front of my house. It already suffered from almost being blown up and had become almost a pet of mine. I’d fought hard for it to survive and didn’t appreciate the golden showers it occasionally had to suffer through. I didn’t care if the coffee shop was pretty much an illegal pot dispensary or that they committed an act against all humanity by serving a rock-hard vegan carrot cake I could’ve used to build a brick wall, but dis
respecting my poor blast-victim bush had been my breaking point.
The coffee shop settled down into the neighborhood, its customers skewing as much soccer mom as Coachella attendees. Floridly painted Schwinn bicycles were now kept company by strollers large enough to transport a baby yak, and the outside patio usually sported a healthy canine population—one that was sometimes gifted with the angelic presence of Honey and her favorite caretaker, Jae. She’d been Rick’s dog and subsequently dumped by his family, but she did remember me when I came to get her. While she adored me, she fell in love with Jae, and I didn’t blame her one bit.
I was about to head across the street to grab some of the dog biscuits the coffee shop bakers whipped up for their canine customers when Claudia cleared her throat.
I sat my ass back in my chair before it rose more than two inches off its padded cushion. Judgment Day was coming, and I was going to have a front-row seat.
“Seems to me that getting involved in that woman’s death is only going to give you a headache. Probably the stupidest things you’ve ever considered doing, and boy, you don’t need me to tell you how many really stupid things you’ve already gotten into so far in your life.” Claudia’s rich voice was soft, but its steely point was made. “It’s been a long time since you ended up getting shot at, and I don’t know if my blood pressure can take sitting vigil for you at the hospital chapel again.”
“Actually I got shot at last night.” There were times when I swear to God, my mouth was installed by a pack of demons, because I never seem to be able to swallow words that would get me into trouble. If I thought the look Claudia gave me earlier was glaring, the one she gave me now was hot enough to cook my skin off my flesh.
“Best start talking, boy,” she murmured.
It was a gentle, sweet rejoinder, but I’m sure many a child riding her bus over the years pissed in their pants when they heard her say it. The only thing more terrifying would have been if she pulled the bus over to the side of the road, turned around in her seat, and said it. Since the office wasn’t moving and she was already facing me, I was probably experiencing a nightmare more than a few full-grown adults still dreamed about, even after leaving Claudia’s bus for the very last time.
She was a large woman, built to have large children, and with a personality big enough to rest the world’s weight on. I briefly thought about telling her it was nothing, but one did not lie to Claudia Dubois. So I gave her the whole story, not leaving out one thing, including the flappy man bits poking out of the sheep costume.
“Huh,” she finally said when my story ran down. “I’m not saying people don’t have the God-given right to do anything they want in their bedroom or with who they want, so long as no animal or child is hurt, but you’d think they’d have the common sense to not get caught flying their perversions out in the open.”
“That’s funny,” Bobby said as he came through the office’s wooden screen door. “People still say that about guys like me and Cole.”
“Tell Bobby about the sheep thing and see what he says then.” Claudia sniffed, patting a stray curl down. “I’ve got some billing to do. You figure out if you’re going to go meet that man about his dead wife, but mark my words, Cole, you take that case and this nice quiet life that you’ve had over the past couple of years is going to blow up into a mess of trouble like you haven’t seen in a long time.”
“SO YOU haven’t heard a damned whisper from this guy since… he and his wife came tucked tail into your office after she tried to blow your head off?” Bobby whistled a low, keening note. Then he chuckled when a woman being dragged by a trio of yappy long-haired Dachshunds walked past and gave him a filthy look. “Trust me, lady, as cute as your dogs are, I’m whistling at my friend here.”
The woman hurried past, ignoring my apologies for Bobby’s brashness.
“Swear to God, one day someone’s going to punch you in the nose for being an asshole,” I muttered, closing the Rover’s driver-side door. “Or maybe just punch you in general. Quit being a dick.”
“It’s kind of what I’m known for, Princess,” he jabbed back, giving me a wicked, disarming smile.
I didn’t know what my half brother, Ichi, saw in him. Despite being older than me by almost twenty years, Bobby was a fit, silvering, handsome rogue who’d treated monogamy like a disease before Ichi rolled into town. Then he fell hard, swore off all other men, and became a fiercely loyal husband. He was still a dick, though, and he often dragged me on long runs or hounded me into the gym and boxing ring so he could pound bruises into my delicate flesh, all in the name of keeping me healthy and fit.
Bobby could wipe the floor with me and often did. Still, he was a good guy to watch my back when I went out on my more dangerous jobs. And as a former LAPD detective who’d spent his years wearing a badge safely in the closet, he had a hell of a lot more connections with the boys in blue than I did. I’d spent my time on the force out and probably dealt out more than my share of attitude when clashing with the more old-school cops. Things were different now. I was different now. I’d come out of the other side of the shooting a different man, and Bobby had been sitting next to my hospital bed when I pulled out of my coma, sitting beside me because I was a brother in blue and ashamed he’d hidden in that closet instead of helping me batter down LAPD’s homophobic walls.
I loved him like a brother. It just took me a bit to accept he loved my brother like… well… I didn’t even want to think about what he and my baby brother got up to.
“Just try not to be a dick to Mister Brinkerhoff. He’s an old man, and he just lost his wife,” I reminded Bobby. “I don’t even know why he called me. This should be something he leaves up to the cops.”
“A lot of people don’t like to involve the cops, because it means opening up their lives to some intense scrutiny,” he shot back. “And if O’Byrne is doing her job right, she’s got to take a hard look at him, because the spouse is always the first person you suspect.”
“From what I remember of the old guy, he just didn’t strike me as a murderer.” I stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the two-story 1940s home set back from the street and shrouded by mature trees.
“Yeah. His wife also looked like the type of woman who baked cookies and gave you a quarter as a tip,” Bobby murmured, closing the distance between us with one stride. “But you found her dead, wearing one of Emma Peel’s hand-me-downs and holding on to enough ice to sink the Titanic.”
We were about three or four neighborhoods away from my home, but we’d gone through several economic strata to get there. Los Angeles was a curious city. Most people were surprised at how small Downtown was. With its glittering skyscrapers and beautiful old buildings, that part of the city sat in the center of a vast, knitted-together sprawl, boundary lines blurred in places with a mingle of languages on the signs, alphabets changing in the blink of an eye from Korean to Arabic. We were diverse in pockets. Taken together as a whole, Los Angeles covered the spectrum from pale to intensely dark, with every shade in between and practically a slice of every language there is, but walking its streets was a cruise through different cultures and shifting streams of ethnicities and foods. Los Angeles’s people were bound together by different threads, mostly living outside of the Industry, both feeding and shitting out movies, television shows, and literature to entertain the masses.
The neighborhood we were in sat up against the walls of a studio, its squatters’ rights entrenched by a convoluted agreement between powerful men who’d long since started their own dirt naps and the money stream it continued to dump into the city’s coffers. Open real estate was hard to come by in Los Angeles, and once the studio took an inch, it held on to it until the rocks turned to sand. Oil wells churned up product in different parts of the LA Basin, but none were ever set up inside of the studio compound.
The Brinkerhoffs’ home was much like every other one in the area—a throwback to a time when the entertainment executives lived close by and movie stars were tethered to a s
ingle studio. The houses were old, but their bones were firm, their lines echoing structures found mostly in the South, with squared-off columns and broad porches facing short lawns kept green by armies of gardeners and lots of water. There was an understated elegance to the neighborhood, with ghosts of large-finned Cadillacs and dinner parties where the menu featured Grandma’s meatloaf and a multicolored Jell-O-mold salad with canned pears and shredded carrots. The hint of money clung to the air, and as sedate as the street appeared, the homes themselves were worth several million and were passed through family lines rather than sold.
Climbing the few stone steps up to the porch, I shivered as I passed into the cool shade. Spring hadn’t quite made its appearance, and I was wearing my second-best leather jacket, since the Doberman ate the other one. The jacket wasn’t as warm as I’d have liked, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and since I’d been pretty much forbidden to buy my own clothes after coming home with a light-blush-and-faint-green camo jacket I’d have sworn on a pack of Bibles was actually shades of gray, I couldn’t just pop out to get a new one.
Compromise—the key to a good marriage and also, apparently, defined as agreeing to certain things a spouse insists upon in order to continue sleeping in the marital bed. Jae didn’t draw the line on a lot of things, but since I apparently couldn’t dress myself—something Claudia and Scarlet also agreed on—it curtailed replacing my jacket.
“You know, I’ve got you with me,” I said, suddenly coming to a stop on the porch.
“Dude, put your hazards on if you’re going to brake like that,” Bobby grumbled, taking a quick step to the right to avoid slamming into me as he came up the steps. “Yeah, you asked me to come with you.”
“No. I mean I need a new jacket. My old one got eaten.” A more thorough explanation was apparently needed, because Bobby gave me an odd look. “I just want a black leather jacket. Once we’re done here, I can swing by a shop, and you can verify it’s black when I buy it. That way Jae doesn’t give me the hairy eyeball when I come home with it.”
