Carolina Crimes. Karen Pullen
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feeling so charitable all of a sudden.”
I thought about it. The real reason was I felt like if I hadn’t slipped up, Minnie wouldn’t be dead. I would have seen whoever attacked her. Maybe I could have helped. She’d seemed like a nice enough person, and she’d made one of the best margaritas I’d ever had. If my notes and pictures from the week I’d spent hunting Minnie down could help the police, they were welcome to them. But I couldn’t blame Shouft for being suspicious that I had an ulterior motive. I’m not above seeing if I can get the police department to do my work for me, and he knows it.
“Call it good citizenship. Can I go?”
Shouft grunted and scratched his nose. He read my statement again. Finally he said, “We’ll call if we have more questions.”
I sighed and stood with extreme care. “Try not to make me regret my generous impulses.” I managed to get out without knocking over the files stacked behind the door.
I spent the next few days working on other cases. I never sent Mrs. Kim a bill, figuring that the loss of her only child before the reconciliation she wanted was a high enough price. Especially since I’d lost sight of Minnie long enough for her to get killed.
A week after Min-jun’s death, Shouft called. “Can you come down to the station?” Shouft never bothers with extra words like “Hi” or “How are you?”
“You know, these amazing inventions called telephones allow for conversations without costing me four dollars in city parking fees and thirty minutes of my time.”
“Just get your ass down here, Parks.” He hung up.
When I got to the station, I was directed down to the hall outside the viewing rooms. I found Shouft coming out of one.
“Come look at this guy. Tell me if you’ve ever seen him,” he said tersely.
I looked through the one-way glass into the room where a scrawny young man slumped, tracing a shaky fingernail on the metal table. He looked like Shaggy from the Scooby Doo cartoons, if Shaggy had been Korean and wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt. He had a mop-like haircut and a scraggly beard. His clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes had crow’s-feet in the corners—a tell-tale sign of the heavy weed smoker in someone under thirty.
“Familiar maybe, but I’m not sure where. I might have seen him at a bar or somewhere in passing. You understand I don’t know every Korean in town, right?”
Shouft pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Says his name is Jun-seo Lee. He signed in as John Lee.”
“That’s nicely Americanized. Still not ringing a bell.”
Shouft made a growly noise in his throat. “He says he killed Min-jun. Says he was in love with her.”
I gave Jun-seo a long look, before saying, “I didn’t see anyone stalking Min-jun but me. And Min-jun’s boyfriend is a white boy. Gerald something.”
“We know. The best part is that Lee’s got an alibi for the time of the murder and doesn’t even know it.”
“So he’s crazy. I’m not a psychologist.”
“Not crazy enough. He says he shot the vic, before beating her to a pulp with a tree branch.”
“Again, so?”
“So we never advertised the vic was shot. That was our little secret. You saw the news. Would you have known cause of death was gunshot?”
I frowned. “No.” My first thought had been that Minnie’s parents had been abusing the love-stick. Traditional Korean culture is heavy on corrective beatings to properly raise children. I was fourteen before I discovered other kids didn’t get welts for B’s in Pre-Algebra.
“He even got the bullet caliber and proximate location of the bullet wound right. And the tree branch is bang on too.”
“The alibi is that good?”
“He was dead in the back of an ambulance. Heroin newbie overdose. The medics got him back, but docs kept him on ice in a medical coma for twenty-four hours. Standard procedure. He checked out seven hours after Kim was killed. No way he did it.”
“So he knows who did and talked to them?”
“Wow, Parks. Come up with that theory all by yourself?”
“Don’t be a dick. You want to know if I’d ever seen anyone with this guy.”
“That’s right. And think fast. Our boy in there called the news before he turned himself in. We’ve got a roomful of reporters upstairs demanding to know if he’s been arrested while they’re writing the story on their phones.”
“Have you told him he has an alibi?”
Shouft nodded. “That’s the hinky part. He insists we’re mistaken, he killed Minnie. It’s the only time he got mad, because we called him a liar.”
“But you’re keeping him on ice so he doesn’t end up on the news blabbing details about the murder, or dead in a ditch from a ‘remorseful suicide.’” I made air-quotes with my fingers.
Shouft made that growly noise again.
“No lawyer?” I asked.
“One showed up, but he refused to see her.”
“Determined to be guilty, huh?”
“Yep. I’ll walk you back upstairs.” Shouft already had a cigarette between his lips, and his lighter in one hand. The new no-smoking-in-official-buildings policy was killing him.
I made Shouft validate my parking before letting him go light up. I sat in my car for a few minutes. It wasn’t my business anymore, but I found myself heading out to the cheap student housing near NC State where Min-jun and her boyfriend Gerald Beaumont lived.
Gerald had been lucky so far. No news vans clogged the parking lot of the apartment complex. I sat on the front stoop for two hours until I saw Gerald trudging up the street from the bus stop. He had curly brown hair over a face and frame built out of angles. He wasn’t handsome, but his face could be interesting with its lantern jaw and upturned nose. Every day I’d been watching, Minnie had met him at the bus stop and walked back to the apartment with him. He walked like he’d forgotten how to walk home alone so I went to meet him halfway up the driveway.
“Hey, Gerald,” I said. He stopped and stared at me through swollen, red eyes, as if unable to summon enough energy to care about a stranger approaching him.
“Hi…uh… Do I know you?” he asked.
“We haven’t met, if that’s what you mean. I knew Minnie. I’m so sorry for your loss.” He flinched and started walking again. I fell into step next to him.
“She didn’t come home, but I thought maybe she had to close,” he muttered. “I fell asleep. I woke up freaking out because she wasn’t home. You know how I knew she wasn’t home? First thing she does when she comes home after working, is she sets up the coffeemaker. She says I can’t make coffee—Said. Said it was like mud, so she would set it up, and I always woke up to the smell of coffee. There wasn’t any coffee smell when I woke up.”
“I understand,” I said. “My mother died when I was eighteen. She’d had a massive heart attack in the middle of the night. She always watched the seven a.m. news, so silence in the morning woke me up.” It was an old memory and didn’t hurt too much anymore, but I will never forget that lead-weight panic and disorientation while my subconscious screamed at me to wake up because something was terribly wrong.
Gerald shook his head. “I don’t understand how anyone could hurt Minnie. She was nice to everyone. Said you couldn’t judge people because you didn’t know how much crap they were trying to rise above. She was seriously Confucian.”
“It’s a Korean thing.” I said. “I suppose you knew—”
“I