by Rhys Ford
The Boulevard was a sparkling testimony to Pasadena’s mildly eclectic, semi-granola culture, a mingle of coffee shops, high-end department stores, and posh restaurants. Hints of old money and conservatism reared up in the flocks of smartly dressed men and women lounging about with nothing to do but sip tea and gossip. A life of leisure was something to aspire to, and Pasadena was more than willing to offer it to those who could afford it.
Hardly anything remained of the tragic face the city wore during years of encroaching gang violence. Hardly anyone now spoke of the Halloween Massacre, but the heavy police presence along the main strip told everyone Pasadena didn’t forget, and would gladly rise up again to smack down anyone who threatened its idyllic existence.
Much like its crotch-grabbing and raspberries at its bigger, grumpier sister-city, Pasadena had no tolerance for anything eating its way out from the inside. I liked that in a city. The weather still was too hot in the summer and sucked frozen donkey balls in the winter, but it was a nice place as cities went, and not without its attractions.
I spied the Cloak and Dagger bookstore before we hit our next turn. Bobby followed my gaze and murmured, “Ever go in there?”
“Yeah, it’s a nice place. Mostly mysteries, I think,” I said, remembering the last time I’d made it out to Pasadena. “Guy who runs it is fucking hot.”
“That makes me almost want to take up reading as a hobby.” He laughed, and the traffic in front of us thinned enough for us to make a right turn. Checking the directions on his GPS, Bobby turned left again, and found a spot to park on a wide, tree-lined residential stretch.
The houses ran to large Craftsman-style bungalows with dark-green lawns. Colorful flowerbeds edged the walks and wound up toward side-yard gates like rainbows after a storm. One house had a toddler’s three-wheeler next to the front door, but that was the only sign of a kid on the block. Bobby’s mud-splattered truck seemed slightly out of place in a neighborhood of BMWs, but it was tough and held up its massive head as best it could.
We walked up to a tidy-looking triple-peaked house with a covered porch that ran along the entire front of the building. The door opened at the first knock, and a veritable god stood in front of us.
He was older than Bobby by a few years, but from the muscles moving under his fitted T, there was no evidence he was slowing down. If anything, William Grey looked like he could still go out and kick ass if ever there was a zombie invasion in his neighborhood. Movie-star handsome, his silver hair was thick and cut into a boyish tousle that fell over his forehead. His bright blue eyes lit up when he saw us, and he stepped back, his bare feet squeaking slightly on the polished wood floor.
“You must be Bobby Dawson,” he said, holding his hand out for Bobby to shake. I introduced myself, and his hand covered mine in a firm grip “Come in.”
The interior of the house matched the outside, soft furnishings that whispered of a soft, comfortable life. Something familiar filled the air, and I sniffed, catching a whiff of the spicy red sauce Jae liked to cook with. William motioned for us to sit down, and offered a round of iced tea or coffee.
“Tea would be great. Thanks,” I replied. Bobby murmured his agreement and sat down. I wandered.
A baby grand piano took up one side of the long room, and I drifted over, examining the photos set up on its glossy black top. They seemed fairly recent, showing William with an Asian man near his age, smiling and hugging at various locations. Sometimes other people joined them, but predominantly, they depicted either William or the Asian man.
“I don’t add sugar, so I brought some so you can add your own,” William said, coming back into the room with a tray. He spotted me by the piano, and for a brief second, his smile softened wistfully. He nodded his chin toward the large black and white photograph I held in my hand. It was a sweet picture of him and the other man kissing in the rain. “That’s one of my favorites. Charles hates it. He said all he could think about was he was going to drown from the water running up his nose.”
“Get your ass over here, Cole, so we can let Grey get back to what he was doing,” Bobby growled at me.
“It’s okay. It’s a slow day for me. Charles is at work. I’m just cooking dinner, and it’s in a crock pot.” He shrugged and sprawled back into a wide chair. “If anything, I was curious about what you were doing. When Mark called and asked if I would talk to you, I was surprised to hear someone was looking for Park Dae-Hoon.”
“You knew Dae-Hoon?” I picked up a tumbler of tea and sipped at it before adding some brown sugar. I tried not to get excited about the prospect of another person who might help us track down what happened. That pipe dream was quickly shattered when William shook his head.
“I knew of him,” William said carefully. “I’d forgotten about him until yesterday. He went missing at a club, or something. The shields were floating a theory that he’d been killed, but no one turned up anything at the time.”
“The trail must have gone cold quick,” Bobby said. “Especially since he wasn’t American.”
“We had other things to worry about then,” the man admitted. “LA was a shit hole to work in. I transferred out here to Pasadena. At least the city out here was doing something about the crime rate. And honestly, it was easier on me and Charles. People out here tend to mind their own business. I did the rest of my time and got out. Charles found a teaching spot at CIT, so life’s pretty good.”
He told us everything he remembered about that night, which wasn’t much. The most notable thing he remembered was the arrival of several long black cars. “It was like the Secret Service arrived.”
“Were you inside?” I knew what Bobby was saying. So did William.
“You’re asking if I went in and cracked heads like the rest of them? No, not that night,” he admitted. “But, I had before. I’m not proud of it but… what was I supposed to do? You couldn’t run the risk of someone finding out you were gay back then. I know some guys who got it much worse than some panties in their locker. There were a lot of cases of blue on blue back then that the brass ignored, because as far as they were concerned, some faggot got what he deserved. The thing with me and Charles was new. I wasn’t going to fuck it up.”
“Yeah, we know about that kind of shit.” Bobby shot me a glance.
I shrugged. Hell, if Ben shot me because I was gay that would at least have made some sense, but he’d known since we’d first met. Why wait years to put holes in me? Killing Rick was as stupid. They’d spent hours together watching some game on the tube and drinking my beer. As conspiracy theories went, it was weak to think Ben was luring us into a false sense of security only to ventilate us in front of a restaurant.
“Charles is from LA too?” I asked.
“No, he’s from some place in South Korea. Um, Gangnam-gu in Seoul.” William took a lemon slice and squeezed it into his tea, rattling the ice around with a spoon. “He came over after his family found out he was gay. His brother… um, Dae-Su… pretty much smuggled him out before they could do anything drastic to him. It’s not… good to be a homosexual in Korea. He hasn’t been back since.”
“He’s Korean?” I glanced back at the pictures. “He didn’t like his Korean name?”
“No, nothing like that.” He smiled. “He just wanted to put it all behind him. He thought it would be easier to do that if he took a more American sounding name, so he chose Charles. After a few years, he got his citizenship papers and changed his name officially to Grey. Well, now he’s Doctor Grey, so he’s slumming it by sticking with me.”
Curious, I asked, “What was his name before?”
“Bhak Chi-Soo.” William laughed at Bobby’s grimace. “Yeah, I like Charles too. Do you know a lot about Koreans?”
“His boyfriend’s Korean,” Bobby replied. “With a better name, though. How about if we focus on what we came here for, kid?”
“Sorry,” I apologized. “It was a long day yesterday. My brain’s not all here.”
I took notes as William talked
, but my mind kept wandering off. After scribbling down the names of other cops that were there that night, I looked up. “Did you see Dae-Hoon at all? Or just the cars?”
“I might have seen him.” He looked slightly surprised to come back to that point. “I did see several young men getting in the cars. Um, one was alone. There were men in suits around that car. It was gone before we started taking down details.”
“There weren’t any records of Dae-Hoon’s arrest?” I asked, flipping through the notebook. “The report said there were what, twenty men taken in that night. Seven went to the hospital for injuries sustained during their arrest. Dae-Hoon doesn’t appear on either list. We know he was there that night. We have a witness placing him there, but no one saw him get out. Could someone else have snuck him out without the cops knowing?”
“I don’t know,” William said. “It was pretty crazy, and I was outside. He could have gotten away in the confusion.”
“The problem we’re having with that is he never surfaced again,” I said. “No note. Nothing. Either someone killed him, or he walked away.”
“It was easier to disappear back then,” Bobby pointed out. “Not a lot of the people-tracking we have in place now.”
“He wasn’t a citizen. He was like Charles, coming over from Korea on a visa. He’d need help to drop off the face of the Earth.” I frowned at my notes. Everything we chased seemed to come to a dead end. Even the money trail left us nowhere. Dae-Hoon took nothing from his accounts, leaving a small fortune to his sons. “He left a lot of money behind, and didn’t make arrangements for it to get to his family. Why would he stockpile the account and not make sure his kids got it?”
William frowned. “Dae-Hoon left money behind? Wouldn’t his bank have contacted his wife?”
“She was gone from the country almost right after he went missing,” I said. “The bank didn’t even know he was missing. They kept rolling over his accounts until recently. I guess if I were a bank guy, and I had a multimillion dollar account no one touched, I’d keep my mouth shut too. Looks good on the books to have that in the assets column.”
“Bobby said he had kids… sons,” William said, leaning forward. “They must be pretty old by now.”
“Yeah, one of them was going to get married this past Saturday,” Bobby murmured. “Some fucking asshole shot up the dinner. His fiancée died.”
“Damn.” William inhaled sharply. “I read about that. Fuck, it was one of his kids’ girlfriend?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “A day later, the older brother was shot outside a gay bar. He’s pulling through, but kind of going through the same shit Dae-Hoon did. The family doesn’t want his gayness touching them. Those kids have some fucked up life right now.”
“Are they doing okay? The sons?” He placed his tea down, missing the coaster he’d pulled out to protect the coffee table from moisture.
“As well as can be expected.” I explained the situation about their mother and stepfather boycotting the wedding, but coming to Shin-Cho’s side following the shooting. It hurt more than I’d imagined, talking about it. I kept thinking back to the days I’d spent lying flat on my ass in the hospital hoping the next person who opened the door to my room would be my father or Barbara. “He’ll have some scars, but he’s doing good. His brother’s strong. David’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’ll take care of his older brother.”
We talked briefly about anything else William remembered, but my notes were lean of anything worthwhile. He saw us out with a promise to Bobby to hook up for some fishing at some later point. Bobby unlocked the truck, and I climbed in, sliding the seat belt over my chest.
“That was a waste of time,” I grumbled. “Unless there’s something he’s not telling us.”
“I think Dae-Hoon had help getting out of there,” Bobby remarked. Turning the truck around, we headed back to Colorado. “There’s no way he’d have been missed by the cops that night. From everything I’ve read, it sounded like they were shooting fish in a barrel.”
“So someone there that night knows what happened to Dae-Hoon.” I mulled it over. “Another cop?”
“Or maybe even someone he was blackmailing,” he said. “Dae-Hoon might have thought he was safe because they knew each other, but the guy might have had other plans. Think about it. The guy shaking you down is there, and cops are bashing people’s heads in. How hard would it be to convince some scared young man that he was safe?”
“Just follow me, and we can get out of here?” It sounded plausible. “You know what we haven’t done? Run the list of Dae-Hoon’s victims against who was arrested that night. Betcha there’d be someone there who might have seen something. He’d know Dae-Hoon. Shit, I’d want to keep an eye on the bastard blackmailing me. He’d be the first person I noticed when I walked into the room.”
“That’s what I love about you, Princess.” Bobby grinned. “You’ve got some brains to go with that pretty face. Not a lot, but enough to make me not want to drown you. Let’s head back, and find out who was there and dancing to Dae-Hoon’s tune.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE worst part about being a private investigator is holding your pee while waiting for a guy to crawl out of some other guy’s wife’s bed. The suckiest thing after that is digging through mounds of paperwork for the one tiny item that will prove you’ve got something to chase down. With arrest reports of nearly thirty men, Jae’s notes from Dae-Hoon’s journals, and the names of men off the bank statements, we were definitely in a previously unknown second circle of Hell.
“Can I be racist?” Bobby asked wearily. I didn’t know how he’d gotten the arrest records, but I wasn’t going to argue about privacy laws or any other nonsense. I needed to find out what happened to Dae-Hoon. Screw anything else.
“Sure, go ahead.” I stretched, rocking back in my chair.
“So long as you don’t cut up any of my good sheets to put over your head, I don’t care,” Claudia interjected, staring at him over the rims of her cats-eye glasses.
Bobby grunted at her in agreement and waved the report he’d been going over in the air. “Why the fuck don’t these people have more than seven last names? And all the first names are the same, just jumbled around. It’s like trying to figure out who’s who at a fucking twins’ picnic.”
“I don’t know if that counts as racist,” I replied. “I think it was kind of set up that way. I’ll ask Jae, but I think some emperor did it. Or I might be confusing that with the writing system. I don’t remember.”
It seemed like hours before we hit the last pile, but it was worth the effort. In the end, we had five names that matched either the journal or the bank statement to an arrest report. We’d gone through five pots of coffee and a few orders of Thai spring rolls, but those five names were like finding gold.
“Okay, I’ve got a date.” Bobby stood and stretched. His spine crackled when he twisted from side to side, and I teased him about getting old. “Still got enough in me to see you in the ring tomorrow.”
“Nope,” Claudia announced. “He’s not going to get beat on until the doctor says he can. I’m not spending my days in here smelling that ointment he uses when he’s hurt.”
“Nice, now you’ve got a woman protecting you, Princess,” Bobby teased, dancing out of Claudia’s reach when she leaned over to slap his legs. “Hey now, watch the goods. I’ve got plans for that later.”
“I’ll watch your goods,” she grumbled at him. “Go wash your cup out. I’m not your maid. I didn’t pick up after any of my boys. Don’t think I’m going to wipe your ass.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Bobby saluted her.
I gathered up the trash to take out to the dumpster while Bobby washed up. I turned off the lights and held the door open for Claudia to go ahead of me. She stopped to grab her purse and was nearly on the front porch when I heard someone coming up the steps.
“McGinnis!” I knew the skinny guy now standing on my porch. I would probably never get the memory of Trey’s masticated
dick out of my head, but it was better than ever having it in my mouth, even before the glass bottle chewed through it. If anything, he looked rougher and more strung out than he did when I’d left him in Urgent Care. He waddled a bit, bouncing around on the balls of his sneakers. A sour smell rolled off him, and his pupils were large, swallowing up his irises.
“Go home, Trey,” Bobby said, pushing lightly at the kid’s shoulder. “You’re tweaking.”
“I want to talk to Cole here about my dick,” Trey slurred, spitting as he spoke. A speck got on Claudia’s bare arm, and she looked down at the drop in disgust. “What are you looking at, bit—”
My hand was around his throat before he could finish what he was saying. Squeezing until he choked on his own tongue, I leaned in until we were nose to nose. “You ever talk to her like that around me, I’ll tear off what’s left of that fucking dick of yours and feed it to the cat. Got it, bitch?”
Trey gurgled, and I shook him, waiting for his face to turn beet red before I pushed him away. Putting his fingers to his throat, he bent over, gasping for air. If he could, he’d have boiled me alive with his eyes. “What are you going to do about my dick?”
“Probably nothing,” I drawled. “I didn’t put your dick in that bottle. You did. Shit, you weren’t even paying me to be there. If anything, I should sue you for mental trauma, but any judge who met you would tell me I should have known better.”
It was late afternoon, and people were coming back from work. The occasional car drove by, some slowing down to park at one of the restaurants to grab dinner or coffee before heading home. It was something Claudia and I didn’t pay attention to. It was a natural part of the day, kind of like the morning screaming of I love yous from the couple across the street as they drove off to work.
I didn’t notice the small two-door coupe slowing down in front of my building. My focus was more on Trey, and dislodging his barnacle ass from my front porch. If push came to shove, hopefully one of Claudia’s mountainous boys would be by soon, and the three of us could hold him until the cops came. My first choice for his jailer was Bobby, since he’d gotten me into this mess to begin with.
