The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. by Gina B. Nahai

Author:Gina B. Nahai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2014-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

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The apartment was small, and smelled like laundry detergent and fabric softener. An ugly brown leather couch doubled as Eddy’s bed. A round glass table, the kind sold in the small Korean-owned stores up and down Venice and Robertson Boulevards, functioned as dining table and desk. There was an ancient TV perched atop the arms of a dining chair, and a three-drawer plywood dresser, painted a faint pink with white plastic knobs, that leaned against the part of the wall closest to the kitchen area. The dresser looked like it had been salvaged from a little girl’s room and purchased in a yard sale. The kitchen consisted of a two-burner portable stove, a narrow refrigerator, and a washer and dryer all crammed into an alcove with a sink. The stove and a carving board sat on top of the washer and dryer; the top of the dresser served as storage space for cooking utensils and condiments. Eddy himself looked like he had had one Turkish coffee too many that day.

“So what’s going on?” Leon said as he searched around for a place to sit. “Where’re you hiding him?”

Eddy was not amused. “I already talked to the American cop.”

“Who? O’Donnell?”

“Whatever his name is. And some Armenian woman called too, but I told her to fuck off.”

“But you don’t mind if we talk,” Leon said, apparently without irony. That showed what a lousy detective he was: you had only to see the way Eddy cringed at the very sight of Leon to realize just how much he did mind.

In the bedroom behind Eddy, a woman moaned pitifully every few seconds.

“Go ahead,” Leon nodded toward the door. “I’ll wait.”

Instead, Eddy headed to the “kitchen.”

“So is he dead or not?” he asked with obviously feigned indifference.

The lab had determined that there was only one person’s blood in the car, and that it was Raphael’s Son’s. The coroner had decided there was too much of it for Raphael’s Son to have survived without an immediate and extensive transfusion. The forensic team had yet to find a single trace of the man anywhere outside the car.

“What do you think?” Leon tested.

There was the moan again. Eddy sighed and rubbed his left eye with his fist.

“What the fuck do I know?”

“If he’s dead, and you were the last to see him, I’d say you may know a great deal.”

Eddy’s face flared with rage. “I hope he burns in hell, is what I know.”

The rawness of the statement sent a shiver up Leon’s spine. He tried hard not to look away from Eddy.

Eddy started to mash a cooked apple with the flat side of a fork. Cautiously, because it appeared too old and unstable to support his weight, Leon sat down on the arm of Eddy’s sofa bed.

“So you do believe he’s dead.”

Eddy opened a twelve-section, seven-layer pill container and took out a capsule, opened it, and poured the contents over the mashed apple.

“This thing tastes like poison,” he said, mixing the powder much too forcefully and making sure he looked only at the plate.

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