Mom Among the Liars Page 6

  “Yes, I gather the young prime minister was down here this morning, looking for clues.”

  “The Quiz Kid from Harvard, you mean? I didn’t see him myself, but I heard he dropped in and took the Grand Tour. Fortunately, the forensic boys had done their duty before he arrived—dusted for fingerprints, tested for bloodstains, vacuumed for dust and hair, photographed everything, and so forth—so there was no way he could foul up the investigation. Talking about which, I’ll show you around myself if you’d like.”

  He let me into the house and stayed with me as I looked the place over.

  Inside the front door was a small anteroom with two corridors branching off from it. The only decoration was a picture on the wall, which looked at first like one of those typical Chinese or Japanese paintings of mountains with a few trees and a waterfall nestling beneath them. Until you looked more closely and saw that those rolling hills were really the curves of a woman’s shoulders and breasts, the trees were her legs, and the waterfall was what you generally found in between. Very clever optical illusion. I wondered if there was a factory somewhere that supplied them to Asian-owned massage parlors all over the country.

  Delaney gave an ironic grin when he saw me looking at the picture. Then he jerked his thumb toward the corridors. “This is how you get to the rooms. The massage rooms, like. There are two of them off each hallway.”

  “She had four girls working for her?”

  “Right. No big operation, but a nice steady profit, I’d bet. The girls weren’t working last night though. We talked to them this morning, and they all had the same story: Their boss came down with the virus or something, so she gave them last night off, they went away around seven.”

  “They don’t live here in the house? Prossies generally do.”

  “Not these. Pulaski’s operation didn’t go in for on-campus dorm living. More like a commuter college, you might say.”

  “Any of the commuters around for me to talk to now?”

  “It’s Sunday, they didn’t come in today. It’s only the God-fearing respectable elements in town that sell their merchandise on the Lord’s day. I’ll give you the names and phone numbers if you want, so you can talk to those girls personally.”

  We went up the stairs that began in the middle of the first-floor anteroom. On the landing at the top there was only one door, and a uniformed cop was standing in front of it. Delaney led me through it, into the late Pulaski’s private apartment. It was very dim; heavy black drapes were shut across both windows.

  “We’ve left it exactly the way we found it when we got here at seven this morning,” Delaney said. “Except for the body. You want to see that, you’ll have to go down to the coroner’s lab.”

  My eyes were beginning to get adjusted to the dim light. I was in a combination living room–bedroom, which looked pretty much as Harry Stubbins had described it: flimsy lamps with Oriental shades, a couple of chairs, pictures of birds and flowers on the walls, a small statue of Buddha next to the ornate clock on the mantelpiece.

  But also, mixed in with the Asian stuff, were items that came as a shock. For instance, on one wall, in a gold frame, was a reproduction of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover: a freckled-face redheaded little boy with his mouth grinning around a slice of watermelon. And on another wall was a montage of publicity stills of Elizabeth Taylor, a very young Elizabeth Taylor, in her costumes for four different roles.

  What I noticed above all, though, was the bed. A big bed, with dragons carved on the headboard, and bedclothes strewn all over the place. You could still see the indentations in the sheets where the body had been lying. I was struck by the tininess of the shape. It could have been a little child’s body.

  “Pulaski wasn’t very big, was she?” I said.

  “When I saw her lying there this morning,” Delaney said, “the first thing I thought to myself was ‘God damn it, another kid murder!’ Then I saw she was a grown-up woman, only less than five feet tall. In her thirties, maybe older, it’s hard to tell with these Oriental women. Like those face cream ads on TV. Anyway, it was a relief. I don’t like kid murders.”

  “Was Harry Stubbins still around when you got here?”

  “He was downstairs, they had him in a squad car. The two officers nabbed him just as he was trying to run for it out the front door.”

  “What got them there?”

  “A phone call to the station house. The old lady—the dead woman’s mother—found the body and ran out to the street screaming for help. She can’t talk any English, so one of the neighbors made the call. The squad car was here in five minutes.”

  I looked around the room. A pair of sliding doors on one wall pulled aside to reveal Pulaski’s closet, a long shallow space packed with clothes on hangers. Next to this was a window. I pulled aside those thick black drapes and lifted the yellow shade behind them. I found myself looking out on the motel next door, with its dead neon sign lined with Chinese letters.

  The only other door led to the kitchen, so I walked through it. The kitchen was small, with only one tiny window, looking out to a back alley of dirt and concrete. Most of the space in this kitchen was taken up by a table, a sink, a refrigerator, and a stove. On the stove was a coffeepot, and below it was a cabinet full of pots and pans. Above the stove was another cabinet, which had cans and boxes of food in it. Among them I noticed four different kinds of coffee: Maxwell House regular and decaf, Italian espresso, fancy Viennese.

  “She was a big coffee drinker, wasn’t she?” I said.

  “I guess you have to be,” Delaney said, “when you work late hours.”

  Remembering one of the questions Mom had wanted me to ask, I realized that I hadn’t come across any liquor in the apartment. Not even a bottle of wine.

  I looked at the sink, which was shiny and clean. No dishwasher, but next to the sink bowl was a drainboard and a wire dishholder. No dishes were in it.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to look for in Pulaski’s apartment, and it was beginning to depress me. These were the wages of sin? It didn’t seem to pay as well as it was supposed to. So I had Delaney take me down to the street again.

  * * *

  The crowd in front was as thick as before, though the TV cameras had disappeared. They had to process their film, I guessed, in time for the evening news. I asked Delaney if he saw anybody there who lived in the neighborhood, close to Pulaski’s house.

  “You won’t find out anything we didn’t find out already,” Delaney said. “None of the neighbors heard anything during the night. And if they did, and if it involved one of the people that lives down here, they wouldn’t let us in on it anyway.”

  Just the same, there were some questions I had to ask, so Delaney picked out a thick-waisted Asian woman, with a gray housedress that matched her hair, and an Asian boy, about fifteen or sixteen, who was peering over a cop’s shoulder from behind thick glasses. I introduced myself and said I’d like to talk to them about the victim.

  “Oh, very sad,” said the woman. “She very nice person, Mrs. Pulaski. Terrible what happened to her.”

  “You were a friend of hers?”

  “Friend? Oh no. She prostitute. You think I have friends who are prostitutes? But we see her every day, my husband and me, in our grocery store. We have small store a block away, we sell vegetables, seasonings, meat, noodles, all kinds of Korea specialties. We do nice business, Chinese and Korea restaurants in town buy from us.”

  “Mrs. Pulaski was one of your customers too?”

  “Oh yes. She buy Korea specialties from us only. She very loyal to neighborhood. She always say, ‘I live here, I make my money here, I give my money back to the people here.’”

  “Was she generally well liked in the neighborhood?”

  “My mom and pop are down on her,” said the teenage boy. “They’re always saying she’s a disgrace to her people. But most of us around here liked her a lot.”

  “How much contact did you have with her?”

  �
��I made a lot of deliveries to her from the liquor store.”

  “She did a lot of drinking?” I came out with this a little sharply, remembering how there hadn’t been any liquor, not even empty bottles, anywhere in her apartment.

  “Naw, she never touched the stuff. What I brought her was only Cokes and ginger ale and 7-Up, like that.”

  “And she was a big tipper, was she?”

  “About average.”

  “Then why did you like her so much?”

  “She was nice, that’s all. She always had a joke or some funny story to tell me. ‘Here’s a new one I just heard, Tommy,’ she’d say. And when I was leaving and told her thank you for the tip, she—she’d always—” The boy’s cheeks suddenly turned red, so don’t ever tell me that Asians can’t blush. “She’d give me a kiss. I don’t mean a real kiss, like on the mouth or anything. She’d just give me a kind of a quick peck on my cheek, and she’d say something like ‘Come back in a couple of years, kid, and we can improve on that one.’”

  The boy broke off suddenly and darted a nervous look at the woman who was standing next to him. “Mrs. Sung—you’re not going to tell my folks about that, are you?”

  Mrs. Sung humphed a little. “I mind my business, other people do same.” She turned back to me. “One good thing you say about Mrs. Pulaski. She do bad maybe, but drinking and drugs never. Anybody do drinking and drugs on her premises, she kick them right out. Any girl who work for her she catch her with drinks or drugs, she fire quick. She don’t—What she did with a customer, she don’t do it if she smell liquor on breath.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “No secret. She tell everybody how she feel about these things. She say she want to advertise it so nobody come to her who won’t obey her rules.”

  “So she was kind of a fastidious type, was she?”

  The lady shook her head. “Don’t know that word.”

  The teenage boy spoke up. “It means very neat and tidy, very careful about things.”

  Mrs. Sung gave a highpitched laugh. “Neat and tidy—she? She one big mess. She drop something on floor, she never bother pick it up, just leave it lay. And if you ask how I know, her mother tell me. Her mother don’t live with her, she live in house of her own two three block from here, Edna bought it for her. ‘Edna is one big mess,’ her mother always say. ‘She live like pig if I don’t clean up after her.’”

  I decided my next step was to talk to Edna Pulaski’s mother, so I asked Mrs. Sung how to get to her house. She pointed the way for me—it was a few blocks east, off South Arizona—but shook her head gloomily. “She feel very bad now, very much crying. Maybe she won’t talk to you. She don’t talk English.”

  “Would you come along with me and translate?”

  Mrs. Sung looked tempted for a moment, but respectability won out over curiosity. “So sorry. Can’t go into house of prostitute mother. Poor woman, not her fault. But I can’t go into house that prostitute bought.”

  I turned to the boy and asked him if he’d translate for me. He laughed. “Hello and good-bye—that’s all the Korean I know. My folks are always on my case about it. But to tell you the truth, they’re forgetting what they know too.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Kim’s house, off South Arizona Avenue, was even smaller than her daughter’s. It was on a block lined with small clean houses, neatly trimmed lawns, but not much in the way of decorations. Nobody in this neighborhood had iron elves or giant plastic frogs on their lawns.

  I heard voices coming from inside as I climbed the wooden steps to Mrs. Kim’s door. I knocked, but nobody answered. Then I saw that the door wasn’t locked; evidently visitors were supposed to simply walk in.

  I found myself in a corridor that had half a dozen people in it, which made it feel crowded. All of them seemed to be Asians—Koreans, I supposed, though I couldn’t really tell. They were wearing sober dark clothes and talking to one another in soft voices but with great earnestness. I had the only white face in the crowd, and also I was taller than anybody else; I could see them looking at me curiously and suspiciously, but nobody did it for more than a split second, nobody was rude enough to stare.

  I made my way as politely as possible into the parlor, which had twice as many people in it. Most of them were in their fifties or older, many a lot older, and only a few of them were men. Across the room I got a glimpse of a very tiny wrinkled old lady in a black housedress. I figured she was the dead woman’s mother, because she was sitting in the biggest, most comfortable chair, with a circle of women gathered around her. Even at a distance I could see that her eyes were red with crying.

  I didn’t think it would do me any good to pull my punches, so I walked straight up to Mrs. Kim and told her I was working for the public defender’s office, and I had to find out some things from her in order to prepare Harry Stubbins’s defense.

  She blinked up at me, as bewildered as if I’d been a visitor from another planet. Which, in a way, I was. But one of the women in the circle stood up and pushed herself between Mrs. Kim and me. “She can’t understand English! Why don’t you go away!”

  This woman was the only one in that circle who didn’t seem to be sixty or more. I would have put her in her early twenties, and she was taller than the others, better dressed, wearing lipstick and eye shadow, and talking American English without a trace of an accent.

  “I’ve got a job to do,” I said, “I’ll go away after I do it. You might explain to Mrs. Kim that the public defender’s office is a bona fide law enforcement agency. She has as much of a legal obligation to answer my questions as she did to answer the police’s.”

  I have to make this speech many times during an investigation. People assume, maybe from looking at too much television, that the lawyers who defend crooks are automatically crooks themselves.

  “Why do you have to bug her?” said the woman. “Can’t you see what she’s going through?”

  I had no answer to this. Sure I saw what she was going through. But in my job you can’t give too much consideration to human feelings. Sometimes there’s only one way to find out what you need to know for your client: barge in early and hammer away while people are still too grief-stricken to have their guards up.

  So I said to the woman, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Madeleine Kim. I’m Mrs. Kim’s great-niece.”

  “Do you speak Korean?” I said. She said her Korean was rusty but she could handle it, and I went on, “Okay, will you translate for us?” And when she opened her mouth to say something hostile: “Look, believe it or not, I’m not enjoying this any more than you are. Let’s get it over with as fast as we can.”

  She tightened her lips but gave a nod. Then she turned to Mrs. Kim and said something that caused the old lady to focus on me with a long hard look, no mistaking the anger in it.

  “Mrs. Kim, I’m sorry about your daughter,” I said, looking straight into the old lady’s face as I talked. I wasn’t going to address myself to the interpreter even though I knew the old lady couldn’t make anything out of my words. I wanted her to feel that she was conducting this conversation with me, with the law, not with some nice sympathetic intermediary. “But I’m sure you want us to find the person who killed her and punish that person for the crime.”

  The niece translated, and the old lady said a sentence in a low cracked voice.

  “She says the murderer has been found. She says you’re trying to save him from his punishment.”

  “That isn’t so, Mrs. Kim. All the evidence isn’t in yet, things may not be as obvious as they seem. Suppose Harry Stubbins didn’t do it. You wouldn’t want the real murderer to get away, would you?”

  Another translation, and the old lady’s eyes were as full of anger as before. But a few brief words came out of her, and I knew she was telling me to go ahead and ask my questions.

  First I took her through the obvious things that I pretty much knew already. How she came to her daughter’s apartment nearly every morning at seven o
’clock. How she cleaned up the place as quietly as she could, because her daughter was never awake that early. How her daughter wouldn’t do this for herself after she woke up, so there was no other way to keep her from living in mess and filth. How she came yesterday morning, Saturday, as usual, and everything seemed fine, and that was the last time she saw her daughter alive.

  She then described how she had arrived this morning, and when she opened the door she saw her daughter lying on the bed. And she saw the man lying on the floor. “The little man with the dirty clothes and the hole in his teeth” was what she called him, according to her niece. And then she ran from the room, frightened that the little man who had killed her daughter would kill her too. She ran down the stairs and out to the street, crying out to people what had happened. The policemen came, and they talked to her, and then she went back to her house.

  “And she’s been here ever since,” said the niece, no longer interpreting, putting in her own two cents instead, “with her relatives and neighbors trying to comfort her. And you don’t happen to be helping much!”

  I ignored the crack and turned to Mrs. Kim again. “Why did you have to clean up your daughter’s place every morning? Why didn’t she hire a cleaning woman?”

  Mrs. Kim spoke for a while, and the niece said, “Edna wanted to hire somebody, but her mother wouldn’t let her. She didn’t trust any strange cleaning woman. She could do a better job herself.” A sharp laugh came out of the young woman. “Anyway, my great-aunt is a cleaning woman. She works for half a dozen people in town; cleaning is what she does for a living.”

  “Was Edna Pulaski’s business doing badly?” I said. “Why did she let her mother do work like that?”

  “Business was terrific, from what I heard. My mother told me, she’s Edna’s first cousin. She doesn’t approve, of course. These old Koreans think what you do reflects honor or dishonor on your ancestors. They’re big on family honor, that type of thing. But my own opinion is, since prostitutes are victims of a male-dominated society, how can you blame them for—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “But could you ask her my question?”