Dirty Kiss (5 page)

He looked up at me, measuring me with a long stare. A keen intelligence gleamed in his golden-brown eyes, but something wilder lurked there as well. With that look, I realized what he reminded me of.

Growing up as a Marine Corp brat, I moved around a lot until my father retired when I was thirteen. One of the places we lived was a small town in Hawai’i where a feral cat colony lived next to the base. The cats and people seemed to come to a détente of sorts: the cats kept the rat population down, and every once in a while, the people would poach a particularly cute kitten from the roaming prides that scattered when a human approached. I’d spent a month coaxing a young cat out, hoping to convince my parents into letting me keep it if I could tame it. The cat would come close enough to get his ears scratched and take the food I offered, but any move to go past his shoulders sent him back into the tall grasses.

Jae-Min reminded me of that cat.

There was a feral quality to him. Someone had coaxed him into the house and fed him, but he probably would flee or scratch if held too tightly. He seemed out of place with the tightly wound perfection of the home we were in, but he definitely knew where everything was and was even willing to help make tea for a woman who seemed to hate him.

Life had all sorts of surprises for me. This one was something I wanted to figure out.

He must have decided it was okay to talk to me, because he gave me a half nod. The sugar cubes also were extremely interesting, because he took his time stacking them after turning the stove off, letting the boiling water settle.

“Uncle, Hyun-Shik’s father, arranged for me to go to high school down here.” I stayed silent, waiting for more. “My family lives in Sacramento. My mother thought it would be better if I was here. Hyun-Shik is… was four years older than me.”

“So he was like a brother?”

His expression barely changed, but the mask cracked, a bit of irony seeping out. “No, I never thought of hyung as my brother.”

How many nicknames did this guy have? I was trying to play catch-up on my notes when Grace scurried into the kitchen, her bare feet nearly sliding out from under her as she hit the slick wood floor. Shit. Looking down, I winced, finding my shoes were still firmly on my own feet.

“Good.” She grabbed at the sugar bowl, placing it on the tray. “There’s some sliced lemon in the fridge. Jae, grab some for me and put it on that dish. Umma has other guests coming. Are you staying?”

“If you need me to,” he replied. The coldness was back, placid as a glacier moving through still waters.

“Yes.” Grace stopped arranging dainty teacups on the tray, taking the plate of lemons from his hand. “Just stay out of sight. I’ll come in here when I need something. Can you see if we have something to serve people? Maybe nine or so?”

“I’ll look around.” Jae-Min stood as she bustled around him. She left the kitchen in a whirl of skirt and chatter, a wave of fragrant tea marking her exit. He caught the look on my face, quirking his mouth at me. “What?”

“I’m guessing that what Mrs. Kim said to you wasn’t all that pleasant, but you’re offering to make tea and finger sandwiches for her and her friends. Why?”

“Is this a part of your investigation in Hyun-Shik’s death?”

“It’ll help give me some idea of how this family works. Let’s just say that some things aren’t adding up for me. I’m being paid a lot of money to poke around, so I’m going to poke.”

“My family owes a lot to Uncle’s family. I’m here because….” He bit his lower lip with his teeth. It was obviously a habit he had when thinking. As habits go, it was better than my brother’s hedgehog hair brushing. “It’s an obligation. It would be… wrong to leave when Uncle’s family needed help.”

“A family thing,” I said, stepping in to take vegetables from his hands as he unloaded the refrigerator.

“Yes, a family thing. A Korean thing.” He risked another look at me, looking more than ever like the feral cat I’d tried to get to come home with me. “You don’t need to help. I can do this.”

“The most help I can give you is chopping things up and putting on water to boil. After that, you’re on your own. And I can probably open a can or two. It’ll give me something to do while we talk.”

“There’s not much to talk about. Hyun-ah lived with his wife. I didn’t socialize with him unless it was for a holiday or a funeral.”

“His wife, Victoria.” I had to look in my papers to find her name. “How does she get along with the family?”

“She’s hyung’s wife.” He said it like those three words explained everything. A small shrug when he turned, but other than that, nothing more.

“Was she supportive of him? Did he have problems with her?” Trying another angle, I dug a little deeper. “Was he unhappy with his marriage, or was he cheating on her with someone else?”

“Hyun-ah wasn’t seeing anyone else.”

“You say that like you know, but you said the two of you didn’t socialize.”

“We talked, sometimes.” There was a tiny verbal step toward me, just enough to reach for something else. Jae placed a large pot in the sink, filling it halfway with water before putting it on the stove. The gas ignited under it, and he began to chop up stalky green vegetables that I couldn’t identify if my life depended on it. “There was only Victoria and their son, Will.”

“Will?” That seemed out of place with the rest of the family’s traditions, despite Grace’s dismissal of her given name. “Odd choice.”

“He has a Korean middle name. Chang-shik.” He had to brush past me to get to a cabinet, and my body sang from the casual, warm contact. If I stayed around Jae-Min much longer, I was going to have to take a very cold shower when I got home. Or pray for a thunderstorm to hit me when I got outside. My notes were lying open, and he stopped, looking at my block lettering. Taking the pen from my hand, he crossed out something I’d written, correcting it underneath. “It’s Jae-Min Kim, or just Jae. With an E. Not a Y.”

“I promise I would have clarified spelling before I wrote my report.”

“You’re writing a report?” He frowned, returning to nibble on his lip. “Who for? Vicki?”

“No, Mr. Kim. Technically I’m working for my brother, Mike, but it’s at your uncle’s request. I file a report for every case. Sometimes even two or three, depending on how extensive of an investigation it is.”

“This should be short then, right?” The greens waited while he added some brown flakes to the water and a fishy aroma filled the kitchen. It wasn’t unpleasant, a whiff of sea and meat around the stove. “How much more is there to find out?”

“I don’t know.” Leaning my elbows against the counter, I watched his face, wondering why his eyes were dull and shut down as he stirred the broth. “What did Mrs. Kim say to you?” It was bold to ask, and I knew it. “What did she say that hurt you?”

“She said that I should be the one who died in that place. That Hyun-Shik should be here instead of me.” The flatness in his voice never wavered. It was as if he were discussing something mildly unpleasant, like someone crossing the street against the light or finding a dead bug on his windshield. “Auntie thinks that I deserved that kind of death, not her son.”

“Why would she say something like that?” I wanted to reach out to touch his stiff shoulders, but I’d been scratched before, by more feral things than a pretty-faced, young Korean man. “Yeah, Hyun-Shik made a choice, however fucked-up it might be. You had nothing to do with it. Did you?”

“No.” His black hair gleamed under the soft lights in the kitchen, and he turned to grab handfuls of the chopped leaves, adding them slowly to the simmering liquid. “I had nothing to do with Hyun-Shik’s death.”

“Then why say something that hateful? Or is that a Korean thing too?”

“No, she’ll either apologize or we’ll pretend as if nothing was said. That’s how we deal with uncomfortable things that happen.” More vegetables were pulled from paper bags, and an onion lay in line for execution under his sharp knife. “She said that because Hyun-Shik shouldn’t have died in a gay club. It’s one thing to kill himself, but to shame the family that way is too much.”

“And she thinks it would be okay for you to die there?” My opinion of Mrs. Kim was falling lower and lower as Jae minced a clove of garlic on the chopping board.

“Yes, because in her mind, my family has little to lose.” The bits of garlic joined the vegetables in the pot. “She’s one of the few family members that knows I like men. If someone in the family had to die there, it would have been better if it were me and not Hyun-Shik.”

I’d never
been smooth with men. This wasn’t any exception. I struggled with the possibilities of what to say. Eventually, my brain kicked out something brilliant.

“Wow. Um, okay.” Not my best, but after the closed-mouth atmosphere in the household, I was struck speechless.

“Are you going to put that in your report?” Jae stopped fiddling with the soup and turned to face me. There was more than suspicion there. With his chin tilted up, there was a definite challenge in his stance. I might have outweighed him by forty pounds, but he wasn’t going to go down without some kind of fight.

I was left to wonder: who was he fighting?

“No,” I replied. “How long has your aunt known?”

The tautness was back around his eyes. Steam rose from the soup pot, a light, fragrant mist that made my stomach rumble. It’d been a long time since I’d had that piece of Claudia’s pie, and my body was letting me know it. While the soup smelled good, I wasn’t certain I wanted to eat anything in that house. The Kim family seemed like the type that regularly poisoned one another just for kicks.

“I don’t know,” Jae said, frowning slightly. “She blames me for what happened to Hyun-Shik.”

“Why?” I stole a bit of a chopped vegetable and was about to put it in my mouth when Jae’s long fingers closed over my wrist. “What? You can’t eat this raw?”

“It’s bitter melon. You won’t like it.” He went into the fridge and came out with something that looked halfway familiar. “Here, leftover bao. There’s char siu inside.”

“The red pork stuff? Yeah, I like that. I thought it was Chinese.”

“It is. We also eat hamburgers and spaghetti.”

“Cute. I was joking.” I smiled as I bit into the cold, white-bread dumpling. Cold food and I have always had a loving relationship. “So, before you distracted me with food, why does your aunt blame you for Hyun-Shik’s death?”

“She thinks I’ve been a bad influence on him.” More guilt surfaced as he struggled again with the changing of tense. “Hyun-Shik made up his own mind on what he wanted to do or not do. He didn’t need me to influence him to do anything.”

I let that sink in. My picture of Hyun-Shik wasn’t a clear one, far from it. On one hand, he’d taken a handful of pills and died in a gay escort club, hardly the picture of self-esteem. Jae-Min saw him differently, and it was at odds with the personality I’d formed in my head. Sure, people often didn’t show their true selves to people around them, but the Kims were an opaque mess. I didn’t know which Hyun-Shik to buy as the real one.