Dirty Laundry

by Rhys Ford

  “How did James get along with her?”

  “James?” Sun looked confused. “Fine. He liked her. She was good with men. Even her brother… she was nice to him.” Sun went back to twisting her rings. “They grew up thinking they were cousins. They were never close, but when she came over to live here, he was good to her. A true brother. He’s a good son.”

  “He defended you today.” Holding her wrist to stop her nervous wringing, I stroked her papery skin to calm her. “That’s the sign of a good son… a good man. You should be proud of who you raised. Do you know how Vivian met Hong Chul? Maybe at a bar? Someplace where he hangs out? It might be a good place to start looking for him.”

  “Oh no, she met him here.” Her mouth twisted into a sour wrinkle. “He brought his grandfather for a reading. I told you about him. He was Bhak Bong Chol, the man who died in his office… from a heart attack.”

  Shit, the Gordian knot just retangled itself. Park Hong Chul would have motive to kill Vivian Na if he was upset over their breakup, and there definitely could have been family dynamics to lead to his grandfather’s death, but everything was too nebulous. Plus, there was nothing to indicate his grandfather’s death had been anything but natural.

  I also had nothing to connect Choi and Lee. Since Choi and Gyong-Si shared the same last name, there could have been something there, and my instincts told me Lee wasn’t carrying her husband’s bundle of joy. She’d probably fallen for Gyong-Si’s manipulations and found herself enceinte.

  I was stuck with two suspects, Gyong-Si and Hong Chul, and with only the slimmest of motives when I had them. Now wasn’t the time to press Madame Sun on Gyong-Si. I’d have to wait until she’d had time to deal with her daughter’s murder.

  “That man… the one James hit… he was going to kill me. I know it. James stopped him.” She met my gaze, her eyes drowning in her tears. “Do you think it’s over? The deaths? Was Vivian the last one? Do you think?”

  “I don’t know that either,” I confessed. “If the man who attacked you today is connected to Vivian’s, the cops will find that out.”

  “The police… they don’t agree this is all together… all connected. How can they not see this?” The tears began again, turning the pancake chasms on her face to rivers. “You have to find out who killed her, Cole-sshi. Someone killed her. How could they just… take her from me? Before I had a chance to make… it all better? I didn’t have a chance to get her to love me. Isn’t that what all mothers want? For their children to love them?”

  I left Madame Sun in her son’s hands. James had nothing to add. Finding out Vivian was his sister had been a surprise, but he’d accepted her into his life because it made his mother happy. A good son, his mother’d said. The perfect Korean son.

  It made me wonder what secrets he was hiding.

  I SPENT the rest of the next day chasing down dead-end leads and paying bills. Wong wasn’t answering any of my calls about the case, and I was hitting a dead end on Gyong-Si. There was nothing on the Internet about why he left Korea, or if there was, it wasn’t in any language I could read. By midafternoon, Martin’s kids hit the office for a couple of hours, bringing with them a blueberry pie their grandmother, Claudia, baked for me. I thanked them profusely, and I got a patented Claudia smirk in return.

  “Are you kidding? It’s all Nana’s doing,” Sissy snorted at me. “If she doesn’t go back to work soon, we’re all going to be rolling around like Violet Beauregarde.”

  “That was my favorite book as a kid….” I trailed off when I caught the looks of confusion the teens threw me.

  “There’s a book?” Mo cocked his head. “I liked the first movie. The remake was kind of weird, but hey, a river full of chocolate. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yeah, um… okay.” I waved them off, feeling old. “I’m going to take my pie and go home now.”

  People were starting to flow back into the neighborhood, coming home from their day jobs or from carting their children to soccer. The granola chick coffee shop across the street from my office was having a brisk business, the early tide of bearded hipsters and their fuzzy-armpitted girlfriends taking up most of the café’s outdoor seating. A particularly enterprising beanpole of a man had set up his guitar in the hopes of filling his case with tips. From the screeching twang coming from his instrument, he’d be there a long time before he made enough to get a single cup of joe.

  Juggling the pie, I hopscotched over my front lawn, taking note of where the newly laid sod wasn’t catching. One of the bushes blown to ribbons by Grace Kim seemed to be thriving, sending out green shoots from its stubby branches. I patted it as I went by. The landscapers wanted to yank it up by its roots, but I’d wanted to give it a chance. We were both survivors, although from the looks of things, the bush was doing better than I was. My side ached a bit from sitting in traffic, and I promised my tense back and legs a run once I fed the cat and put away my pie.

  That all went to shit when a car door slammed behind me and I turned my shoulders to see who it was, still tuned up to violence so soon after the shooting that took Claudia down. The sedan parked by my curb had the look of a rental car, a nondescript beige two-door chunk of metal no one with any personality would buy for themselves.

  The car quickly faded from my attention. No, what held me firmly to the ground, clutching a plastic-film-wrapped pie as if it were my long-lost teddy bear, was the young man coming around the trunk side of the vehicle. The face he wore was a bit like mine but, more importantly, nearly an exact echo of Mike’s.

  Lankier than Mike, he probably stood a few inches taller as well. Dressed in Doc Martens, jet-black jeans, and a gray T-shirt with the words L’Arc-en-Ciel on it, he would have blended in with the hipsters across the street, except that his jaw-length red-streaked ebony hair was clean and his chin was bare of any scruff. I couldn’t see a patch of his milky skinned arms through the tattoos running up from his wrists and disappearing under his short sleeves. They were bright, blending seamlessly from one image to the next, and in some cases, they shimmered together until I couldn’t tell what exactly I was looking at.

  He drew closer, close enough to see we had the same mouth, and I fought the urge to throw the pie in his face. It was a good pie. No one could bake like Claudia, but right in that moment, it would have been worth it. I wasn’t ready for him. Not after the week I’d just had… the evening I’d had the night before and the day I’d spent wading through blood and other people’s dirty laundry.

  “Hello, Kenjiro.” He slowed his approach, drawing up in front of me. It was impossible to read his face, but a hint of friendliness ghosted through his eyes. “I’m—”

  “Yeah, I know who you are. I just wasn’t… expecting you.” That was the understatement of the year, but as Bobby would say, time to pull up my big-boy panties and man up. Jerking my head toward the front door of my house, I said, “Well, since you’re here, Ichiro, might as well come in for some pie, and you can tell me why you came over.”

  Chapter 13

  HE WASN’T what I expected. Actually, he was nothing like I expected. The tattoos, the silver rings on his fingers, and the bad boy cut of his scarlet-sooty hair was… odd and so not a part of the image I’d had in my mind for my mother’s youngest son. I wasn’t sure what to say as he watched me cut into the pie Claudia baked for me, pursing his mouth at its bright blue color. It was too odd to see parts of me and Mike on someone else.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had fresh blueberries before.” His English was nearly flawless but with an odd cant to it, different than Jae’s. It wasn’t hard to understand him. Just different. I wondered if our mother sounded like him. If I would have grown up listening to the peculiar cadence and somehow mimicked it in my own speech. “Not in a pie. It smells good.”

  “Claudia, my… she’s kind of like an aunt… made it,” I replied. The whole scene was too domestic to be real. I plated a couple of slices, put them on one of the dining trays Jae liked to use, and pulled two cups o
f coffee from the brewing pot. I tossed a handful of the sugar packets and creamer cups I’d stolen from the front office onto the tray and jerked my head toward the living room. “Head over that way.”

  Neko decided to join us. I’d say it was my stellar company, but the truth was, she liked sucking up creamer from the cups. I opened one for her, set it on the chest, and stroked her fur while Ichiro mixed up his coffee. He chucked her under the chin when she went over to investigate his coffee and smiled when the damned cat declined his advances, returning to her own creamer.

  I flipped on the sound system, keeping the volume low. I skipped over the playlists until I found one of Jae’s and felt the tension slip down my shoulders and away from my back at the now-familiar burble of Korean playing through the house. Letting G-Dragon howl about getting his cray on, I settled back down, moving Neko’s tail out of my pie.

  “I like that you named her Neko.” He leaned back, cradling his cup and studying the pie.

  “She came that way.” I probably sounded like an asshole, and I still wasn’t sure where the whole come on in and let me give you pie courtesy came from. I blamed Jae. God knows, I’ve never been the crinoline skirts and pearls type. ’Course I’d never say that about him… out loud. “We’re working on our relationship. I expect her to be a pet. She expects me to be her slave. We’re trying to find a common ground.”

  “I wish you luck with that, brother.” Ichiro saluted me with his coffee cup.

  “Yeah, about that brother thing—” The pie didn’t hold my interest, which was a shame because I had a weakness for blueberries. Okay, a weakness for pie in general, but blueberries were up there. “How long are we supposed to have polite conversation before you tell me why you showed up here?”

  “Depends.” He pursed his mouth, thinking a moment. “Are we going by American or Japanese standards?”

  “How long would this shit take Japanese style?”

  “We’d probably be here until one of us is a grandfather if we do this Japanese style. I say let’s go American… how long is that?” Ichiro grinned, and damned if he didn’t look like me right at that moment.

  “Pretty much you thank me for the pie and then we get on with it.”

  “Thank you, oniisan, for the pie. It is delicious.” He saluted me with a forkful of blueberries. Chewing around the mouthful, he continued, “So where do we start?”

  “You know I don’t want you here… didn’t want you here.” I exhaled, confused and unable to unravel the emotions inside of me. Pushing my plate away, I leaned back and rubbed my face. I went for blunt honesty. It pissed me off that he was a nice guy. I wanted him to be an uptight fucking asshole, but the whole genial tattooed guy thing was throwing me off. I wanted to be pissed off. “I don’t know what to… do with you. I’m sorry. I’m just not ready for this. For you.”

  “Mikio told me you were direct. Actually, he said you were a blunt ass.” He cocked his head, catching my rueful smirk. “Ah, you probably don’t even think of him by that name. Mike, then. It’s hard to think of him with that name. I don’t think of you as Cole. All my life, you’ve been Kenjiro.”

  “So you… knew about us, then?”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about our mother talking us up to someone else, much less to a brother she’d had with another man. She couldn’t have known anything about me. As far as I knew, she and my father had no contact. She’d literally packed her shit up and walked out of the door without looking back. The last time she saw me, I’d probably been spitting up formula and couldn’t see anything but blurry shapes.

  “I knew.” Ichiro nodded. “She talked about you sometimes. Even if she had to leave you behind, she thought about you. So, I thought about you.”

  “I’m… sorry she passed.” That was a truth. No matter who Ryoko McGinnis-Tokugawa was to me, she’d been his mother.

  “It was hard,” Ichiro admitted softly. “She was never really strong. And when the cancer came, I think she just gave in to it. In a lot of ways, she was more a child to me than I was to her. Delicate—that’s the word for her. My father is very traditional. I think that made life easier for her. I, on the other hand, am the opposite. He’s probably trying to figure out where I came from and how the hell he can return me there.”

  A woman like that wouldn’t have survived my father. My stepmother, Barbara, could at least hold her own with the dick. She even matched him punch for punch in the asshole department. Ryoko wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  “Is that why she left us? Left my father? It was too hard over here?” It was the most pounding question in my head. I couldn’t fathom a woman abandoning her sons. It was what I’d struggled with ever since I’d answered Ichiro’s phone call a few weeks ago. The why of it bothered me, nestled into my brain, and grew burrs to hook into my thoughts.

  “Living wasn’t easy for her.” He reached for his cup and cradled it, looking more like he needed to do something with his hands rather than needing a drink. “When a couple divorces… where I am from… one parent assumes custody of the children. Usually, the other parent doesn’t have contact with the children again. Or rarely. You are… registered… with a family’s lineage. The absent parent doesn’t have any say over you anymore.”

  “They just walk out of their kids’ lives?”

  “Yes, because they no longer are connected… bound to the children. It’s very ritualistic in ways. Mother would have followed that.” Ichiro picked a blueberry from his dish and chewed on it, sipping his coffee afterward. “Even if she didn’t want to, she would have left you to your father because that’s what we do. She was very Japanese. That’s all I can guess.”

  “Did my father do something? Or did she just fall out of love with him?”

  “I don’t know. She never spoke about your father or why she left him. But knowing my mother—our mother—she wouldn’t be able to survive outside of her own place.” Ichiro shook his head. “She wasn’t strong, Kenjiro… Cole. Physically. Emotionally. She always needed someone. In many ways, she was like a little girl. Your father’s career would have been hard on her. I can’t imagine her surviving here, but she carried you with her. So much so that I knew you.”

  He slicked back the sleeve of his T-shirt, exposing more of his right arm for me to see. The pale of his skin was banished beneath vivid colors and deep, shadowy blacks. Covered from shoulder to wrist, his arm was a collage of three animals and natural elements.

  An Asian stylized rat sat on his upper arm, its fur dotted with bright pink cherry blossom petals. Farther down, a battle-armored horse ran strong past his elbow, its tail flowing down to tangle around the ends of a brilliant-hued rooster. Interspersed between the animals were more flowers, strange, wide-frilled petals of blues and yellows.

  “This is our mother’s birth year. I had this done for her. My art, but my teacher did the ink.” Pointing to the rat, he smiled again, softer and more wistful than before. “She was very young when she went away with your father. Not quite eighteen and, really, not very ratlike. Most Rat Year people adapt easily to new environments. Our mother… didn’t. She couldn’t stand to be away from her home. I think it’s why she finally left.”

  He spoke of a woman I never knew existed. As far as I knew, Ryoko McGinnis died on my birth day or soon after that. To my knowledge, she’d never held me… never spoke my name out loud. Now here was a man with my mouth and Mike’s eyes telling me she thought of me… thought of my brother… even after abandoning us to our father.

  “The horse—that is Mikio. From what I can tell, he’s truly a Horse. Very energetic. Very cunning. I like him. He seems strong.”

  “You haven’t met him?” More than a bit confused, I looked at a brother I’d never imagined having. “I thought you were staying with him.”

  “I came a day early,” Ichiro admitted softly. “I wanted to see you. To talk with my brother who seems to hurt inside. Just the two of us. Without Mikio stepping between us to shove us together. He seems to like maneuvering things
. Very much the Horse, no?”

  “I don’t know. Neither Mike or I are very Japanese. Hell, up until I met my… Jae, ramen and takeout sushi was the most Asian thing I was around.” I picked at the pie again, spearing a berry from its guts. “Jae… a friend of mine said something about birth animals once, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.”

  Mostly because I’d been stripping his jeans off of him at the time and sucking at the dip in his belly.

  Ichiro touched at the spot where the horse’s long tail curved into the rooster’s bright red tail feathers. “This is you, Kenjiro. The rooster. Of the two of you, she was more worried about you. That your father would move too much. Roosters are social creatures. They need people around them, long-time friends. She worried you would only have Mikio for company.”

  “He’s not bad company,” I confessed. “Once you can get him to stop bossing you around.”

  Ichiro grinned at me. “I’ve had him pushing at me. He’s hard to resist.”

  “A swift kick in the nuts worked when we were kids. Can’t do that now. He’s got a wife. Too much damage there and they won’t be able to have kids.” Staring at the art covering his arm, I was at a loss about what to say first. “Why did you ink that on you?”

  “Your birth signs?” Ichiro pursed his mouth when I grunted a yes. “Because I didn’t know you… didn’t have you. I needed you with me… needed umma… our mother with me. It was how I kept you close to me. You are my brothers. My family. Even if I didn’t know you, I carried you with me. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Yeah, it makes sense.”

  My shame soured the sweetness of the blueberries in my mouth. The colors of his ink blurred, and swallowing didn’t seem to get the chunk of emotion clear from my throat. I had to look away, focusing on a loose button on one of the pillows. Neko slammed her head into my arm, nudging me from my thoughts, and I looked up to find Ichiro staring at me, his face a calm mask. His hand was still on his tattoo, stroking at the images he’d laid down under his skin. Lacking our faces, he’d given himself as much of us as he could reach, mythical creatures drawn from our births and our places in his life.