Dirty Laundry

by Rhys Ford

  “Pfah, the police do nothing. Just like when that crazy man down the street blew up all the garbage cans.” Ms. Yi made a face. “She was nice, and her husband … Dong-Ju Lee…worked hard for her. It is very sad.”

  “Her husband’s last name is Lee?” I checked my notes. Eun Joon was in her early forties, but I had no information on her spouse. I was guessing they were similar in age or he was older. “Same last name, then?”

  “They were cousins but no children. That’s a shame. Now, he is alone.” A calculating look briefly flitted over her smiling face. “Did he hire you?”

  “Someone was concerned about the incident. Were you close to Mrs. Lee?”

  “Eun Joon was—not to say anything bad—”

  I nodded so both of us could silently agree that, while Eun Joon Lee was a saint, her ignoble death necessitated at least a modicum of gossip to be shared.

  “Her family has money, more than her husband’s, and she never complained about where they were living….”

  “But?” I seeded the conversation. There was always a but to gossip. It’s what made talking behind a neighbor’s back so delicious.

  “Always high class, you know?” Ms. Yi sniffed the air, her neck wattle flapping back and forth under her chin. “She lived here like us, but she was very picky. Everything had to be just so, very Korean. Hardly anything from here. Even the music she listened to, very old. I was older than her, but her music was too old for me, more like my mother’s.”

  I took it as an avenue to slide the conversation to where I needed it to go. “So she did a lot of things here that she’d do in Korea? Like a fortune-teller?”

  “Omo, she wasted so much money on those people she went to. Not just one but two!” Ms. Yi made a disgusted face that rivaled anything Neko gave me when I put chilled cat food in front of her. “Let’s see, she saw Madame Sun and Gangjun Gyong-Si. I don’t go to either one of them. Too rich for me. What is wrong with Madame Hae-jung? Nothing! So she is younger! We were all younger before.”

  “She went to two fortune-tellers?” I frowned. “Did they know about Mrs. Lee seeing both of them?”

  “Hah!” Ms. Yi wrinkled her nose and slapped my arm. It stung, but nothing like being shot. I was thankful for that small favor. “You don’t tell something like that. Especially to those two. Sun and Gyong-Si butt heads all the time. If they see each other on the street, you watch them, because one might start screaming at the other. Madame Sun is a better fortune-teller, but some of the women, they like going to Gyong-Si. He says he likes men so women like talking to him, but I don’t know. I don’t believe that. I know better.”

  “They’re rivals?” I frowned, trying to make sense of what she was saying, and she scowled back, not understanding me. “Sun and Gyong-Si? How come?”

  “Madame Sun and Gyong-Si always fight for people. One says something bad will happen to you and the other says something good. You go to the one that is right most of the time until you get an answer you do not like. Then some people switch.” She shrugged, her shoulders a wave of purple and pink hibiscus flowers.

  “Do they tell fortunes a different way?” I had no idea what qualifications made a good fortune-teller or even how to go about choosing one. It wasn’t anything I’d ever thought about, but I had a feeling I was going to get a crash course in it soon.

  “No, the same way… Sun and Gyong-Si came from the same teacher, a very famous fortune-teller in Seoul, Kung Choong-Hoon. Gyong-Si was here first. Then Madame Sun moved to LA with her son. Stole a lot of his clients.” Ms. Yi scowled, obviously disgusted by their behavior. “Gyong-Si wasn’t happy when she came. Everyone knows they fight, digging into each other like centipedes. Why would you go to someone like that to tell you how to live your life?”

  Madame Sun having a rival changed things. I couldn’t imagine anyone killing a couple of women to warn clients off of another fortune-teller, but people have done crazier things. “Do you know if they gave her conflicting information? Maybe she was going to choose one over the other?”

  “If they were so good, why didn’t either one of them tell her not to get murdered?” The woman flattened her lips further into a thin line. “No, she needed to see both of them, in case one had information the other one didn’t. I don’t know if they knew she was seeing the other. Probably, no? If they knew, they would have made her choose. Neither one shares. They refuse.”

  “Do you know where I can find Gyong-Si?” I pressed lightly. “Maybe he spoke to Eun Joon before she died? I know she had an appointment with Madame Sun that morning.”

  “He is easy to find, easier than Madame Sun, but I don’t know his address. She says she only takes people who know one of her clients, but that is a lie. She takes everyone. She is just trying to hide that her place is in a bad area. Gyong-Si sees people in his home. He has a front room he uses to greet people. You can find him there.”

  I extracted myself as quickly as I could. Walking around the building, I cased the place as if I were a burglar. Situated on the second floor, the Lees’ home wouldn’t have been my first choice if I was looking for quick cash.

  “The cops thought they saw no sign of forced entry at the front door.” I recalled what Wong told me but I wanted to check things out for myself. “Only other way in and out would be to go over the balcony.”

  A pass-through walkway connected the central area to the parking lot behind the building, and its cool darkness was a balm after the muggy dampness of the courtyard. The Lees’ balcony was in reality more of a high-walled burp of a cement outcropping, a typical feature in California’s mid-80s apartment architecture. Since the apartment overlooked the parking lot, anyone climbing up onto the second floor would have been spotted in the daylight hours by anyone coming or going. Covered in thin stucco and painted a light sand, the walls were chipped and white where stones probably flew up from a lawnmower and struck the coating.

  Pressing my sneaker against the wall, I tested its grip on the stucco. The sprayed-on faux mud crumbled under my weight, streaking the paint white where my shoe dug in too deep. Crouching, I examined the wear of another mark in the coating. From the sharp angle, it appeared to have been made by something hard rather than spongy like the sole of a shoe, but its edges were weathered, softer than the scrapes I’d gouged into the stucco surface.

  The walls around and near the Lees’ balcony showed no sign of being scraped or gouged. The stucco coating above me was the same weathered hue as the rest of the building, and I couldn’t see any sign of powdery debris beneath the balcony. From the appearance of other abrasions, it didn’t look like the building’s maintenance man would have rushed to repair the damage.

  “Whoever the cops sent out here was a fricking idiot. No one climbed up there. It had to be the front door.” I climbed out of the agapanthus planted around the edge of the building, shaking a stray purple bloom off my T-shirt. “So either they picked the lock or they had a key, because no way in hell they got in this way. Wong’s going to be pissed.”

  I’d have to check out Gangjun Gyong-Si and whether or not May Choi was as much of a double dipper into the fortune well as Eun Joon Lee. I double-checked my notes. The psychic’s name was familiar. Other than sounding like a district in Seoul, I’d heard that name before. Recently, if the whispering in my mind could be believed.

  “Son of a bitch, Gangjun was May Choi’s maiden name.” I jotted down the connection, drawing a dotted line between Choi and Gyong-Si.

  It could be a coincidence since there were only about two hundred and fifty Korean surnames, and while not Park, Kim, or Lee, the three used by nearly half of all Koreans, Gangjun could be one of the more commonly used. If Gyong-Si was related to Choi, then there was my connection to Mrs. Lee.

  I pulled my phone out and found there were a hell of a lot of fortune-tellers in Koreatown. It seemed like everyone’s nutty Aunt Esmeralda dried a bunch of newt eyes and hung up her shingle to peer into a cup of tea leaves. I found Gyong-Si by accident, using a phonetic
spelling of Gangjun and praying for the best. I was memorizing his address when I noticed a missed text from Jae. Frowning, I scrolled through the message, wishing Jae’d called so I could have heard his voice.

  Busy. I’ll try to call you later. In the middle of something big, he’d sent. Might not be home. Please feed the cat.

  “Hah, cat’s been fed, and if I know you, you haven’t been.” I gave myself a fist pump. Looking at the time, I figured I’d give him a couple of hours before I descended on him with some food. I messaged back that I’d bring him kalbi and rice then slid my phone back into my pocket before he replied with an argument. With the phone out of sight, I could plead ignorance. “I’ll drop by once I’m done talking to Gyong-Si the Magnificent.”

  TRYING to get anywhere in Koreatown is solely dependent on parking. Street spots are an urban legend. Usually, tantalizing openings turn out to be driveways or painted red by the evil SoCal parking gnome for no reason other than to thwart people looking for a place to put their car for a few hours. After circling the block for five minutes, I gave in to the inevitable and pulled into a garage structure. The last time I’d left the Rover in such a structure, I’d been shot at by a client’s deranged ex-lover and forced to use an old metal hubcap as a Frisbee to bring him down.

  With that in mind, I paid a valet extra to park the Rover and told him I’d be back in an hour or so.

  Gyong-Si’s place was a rarity in the district, a stand-alone bungalow tucked into the back of a stack of quad-plexes. The one-story, flat-roofed structure appeared to have once served as the rental office before being converted to a residence. More of that thin stucco covered the outer walls, this time painted that curious shade of salmon pink some idiot decided looked Southern Californian. It was a color used by many large housing developments, saturating the landscape with its bromide and vomit hue until common sense prevailed and construction companies went back to a more reasonable sandy brown.

  At some point, an enterprising owner stretched a wide covered porch across the front of the place, painting it a sharp white. It did little to mute the pink. If anything, it made the bungalow look like a bonus stop in a game of Candy Land. A few metal wind chimes hung from the porch’s supporting beam. The dull singing coins were alternated by wind socks made of rainbow threads and a couple of spinning-wing flamingoes, the afternoon’s light breeze turning them about in a slow waltz.

  A large sign above the steps announced to any visitor that they were in the presence of the famed Gangjun Gyong-Si, blessed fortune-teller and purveyor of futures. I assumed the Korean below extolled Gyong-Si’s virtues. This assumption continued when I was further inundated with a magazine rack full of leaflets, all printed in a now familiar circle and hash mark writing Jae used to mark his projects.

  An OPEN placard hung behind one of the glass-paned windows framing the front door. A bell clanged when I stepped in, bringing my arrival to the attention of an overly pretty young man sitting behind the receptionist’s desk. Gyong-Si’s reception area ran the entire front length of the bungalow, with only a single doorway covered with a beaded curtain leading off to the shadowy cool in the back. Painted a muted bamboo green, the front room was decorated in modern California Zen, with the prerequisite water fountain sitting on a side table and motivational, artsy posters urging readers to release their inner child and embrace their peace.

  Judging by the receptionist’s youthful appearance, Gyong-Si also liked to embrace hot, sexy twinks.

  Dressed in blood-red skinny jeans and an overlarge T-shirt artfully draped off of one golden shoulder, he slinked around to greet me. He was cute, a perfectly packaged sip of Korean beauty. Poems could have been written about limpid pools or windswept mahogany locks, all with him in mind, and he certainly was confident in his sexuality, especially when his thigh brushed across the front of my jeans.

  Surprisingly, nothing in me tingled, not even when he slid his hand up my upper arm and squeezed. My cock seemed to be off doing sudoku, and the only growling response my body had was my stomach not so politely informing me that my sole meal that day had been coffee and two purloined Choco Pies. If there was any question, it’d been answered. Apparently, I was so deeply in love with Jae, the young man with his soulful brown eyes and plump mouth did absolutely nothing for me.

  “Uh, hi.” I was a master of conversation, mostly with myself, but still a master. “I’m looking for Gangjun Gyong-Si. I’m an investigator. I was hoping I could ask him a few questions.”

  “Oh, I was hoping you were a new client. It would be nice to see someone in here besides dried up ajumma.” Mr. Fluttering Eyes’ smile waned. “Do you have an appointment with sunbae?”

  “No, I was hoping he could fit me in.” I ignored his snigger. “Does Mr. Gangjun have an opening?”

  It was an entrance any drag queen would have been proud of. The beads were flung back for effect, their clatter a soft drumroll to herald his arrival. I don’t know what I was expecting. Perhaps someone as coolly elegant as Scarlet or even maybe a warm grandfather dressed in a cardigan and singing about neighbors. Instead, I got a plump Korean man dressed in an orange silk shirt, tan jodhpurs, and a red beret set at a jaunty tilt on his balding head. I’d always wondered exactly what angle jaunty was set at, and now I knew.

  He gave me a once-over that had me wondering if I was about to board a flight or was suspected of smuggling heroin balloons up my ass. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he snapped on a pair of pink rubber gloves and told me to bend over.

  Gangjun Gyong-Si was the true-to-life, breathing embodiment of every gay stereotype I’d ever heard of, so it certainly was no surprise to me when he dipped into his magic bag of double entendres and purred, “Oh, dear boy, for someone as beautiful as you, any opening I have is all yours.”

  Chapter 5

  “DOES that line ever work for you?” Being sarcastic to a fortune-teller didn’t earn me a lightning bolt from the heavens, so the man definitely didn’t deal out instant karma. I smirked, giving Gyong-Si a once-over.

  He smirked back and winked. Up close, he looked both older and smoother than I expected. I thought he used makeup to achieve his youthful appearance, a suspicion verified by the thin dusting of foundation and powder on the collar of his shirt.

  “No, it never does.” He threw his head back and laughed, exposing his very white teeth. “But I keep hoping someday it will. Come, come. Let me take you some place more comfortable, Detective. Terry, make us some coffee, please.” Gyong-Si gave me a sly look from under his lashes. “Unless you’d like something… sweeter?”

  “Actually, nothing. I’m good.” I thanked Terry and followed a pouting Gyong-Si through the beads.

  A small, dim hallway led to the back of the bungalow. Gyong-Si turned right at the first door, but I could see the hall continued down a few steps to open up into his private quarters. I couldn’t see much beyond the half-door fabric curtain, but from what I could make out, the man really liked eye-bleaching colors. If I thought the outside of the bungalow was spasm-inducing, the yellow-green walls peeking out from between the slit in the fabric were sharp enough to cut.

  The mediation area, or whatever it was the room was called, mimicked the front room, with a cool wash of soothing sea grass walls and enormous chairs. They were cut low, and while comfortable, when I sat down, my knees struck the edge of the teak coffee table the man probably used for his readings. Gyong-Si smiled apologetically as he sat across from me, reaching over to pat my arm when I grabbed at a pair of candles before they fell over.

  “I am so sorry,” he murmured, stroking at the back of my hand. “Most of my customers are shorter. Their legs… they are not so long. Maybe you would like to go into my living room instead?”

  “No, no. I’m good.” The last thing I wanted to do at the moment was cross that fabric barrier, even if it meant I could get a better look at the man’s living space. I wasn’t sure what I was more scared of, being put into a compromising position on the man’s couch or my eyes bu
rsting from the flood of color leaking off the walls. “I only have a few questions. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

  “Anything for the police.” Gyong-Si inclined his head.

  Again, I didn’t correct him. People often told the cops more than they’d share with a private investigator, Ms. Yi aside, and I’d take any advantage I had in getting Gyong-Si to talk. I used to wear a badge. I kept telling my conscience that, but it snickered back at me.

  “I’m here about Eun Joon Lee.” As I spoke, his face turned tragic, a mask of sorrow so deeply carved into his skin, I was afraid it would stick that way. “I imagine that you’ve heard of her passing.”

  “I did hear. Bad news always travels fast.” He made a steeple with his fingers. If it was supposed to make him look wise, I wasn’t seeing it. “Terry, my assistant, lives near to Eun Joon. He informed me of the troubles visited upon her family. I sent her husband my regrets. I am sorry to say that I saw nothing in her fortune that told me of her death. I divined the I Ching for answers, but so far, nothing has been revealed to me. I’m not sure what I can tell you.”

  It was easier to just lay my metaphorical cards on the table, especially since my knees seemed to hone in on the one in front of them. “Mostly, I was wondering if you knew Mrs. Lee was also seeing Madame Sun? Did she share that with you?”

  There was the barest flicker of his eyelid, so faint I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking for it. Nothing else in the man’s face changed, not even the beatific smile he’d plastered on his face. The light in his eyes dimmed and his nostrils twitched before he tightened his grin further and shook his head.

  “No, I did not know that,” Gyong-Si murmured. His hand shook when he withdrew it from my arm. “She must have been troubled far more than I thought.”

  “How often did she see you? Can you share with me what was she troubled about?”

  “Normally, I would say no, because anything a client says to me is in confidence, but she is… no longer with us. I will do anything to help.” He wiped the spare beads of sweat forming on his forehead, nearly knocking his beret off. “I would see her once or twice a month, but we spoke of so many things.”