Page 30 of For You, Sir

He took out a leather-bound jotter and a pen. “Mrs. Francene Olsen employed you as her butler. Is that correct?”

“Uhm, yes.” My heart clenched at the mention of poor Madam’s name. Images flashed through my mind of how I’d found her lying on her side that terrible morning, wide-eyed and slack-mouthed. Pressing her cold skin for a pulse and finding nothing.

“Would you mind stepping outside a moment? I’ve got a few questions for you.”

I obediently stepped over the threshold. After the darkness in Sir’s house, the desert sun lanced my eyes, and I shielded my brow with a cupped hand. “I already answered all the police’s questions,” I told him.

It hurt to recall the morning the body removal service came to take Madam away. The hollow rattle of the gurney, my silent indignation as uniformed strangers tromped all over Madam’s plush white carpet. I’d thought they would zip her into a black body bag like in the movies, but her frail body was wrapped ignobly in a white plastic sheet. I’d fetched her favorite fur-lined poncho from the closet and tried to cover her, but they wouldn’t let me.

“What the fuck is this?”

I jumped at the sound of Sir’s voice behind me. He had reached up and leaned a forearm against the door frame, which made him look big. His eyes were narrowed.

“I’m Investigator Marshall,” the man said, looking Sir up and down like something he’d scraped from under his shoe. “I’ve got some questions for Mr. Kim here. You can wait inside. It’ll just be a moment.”

“The fuck I will. This is my house. I’m staying right here.”

I squirmed in place—a mouse between two cats.

Marshall turned toward me again. “Mr. Kim, were you serving in Francene Olsen’s estate on the morning of April seventeenth?”

“Yes—”

“Don’t answer that, Jun,” Sir cut in. “He’s not even a cop.”

I looked at Marshall again, confused. Theinvestigatortitle had sounded official, but Sir was right. He could be writing an article about Madam’s death for a tabloid.

The man rolled his eyes and sighed. He drew a business card from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “I’m a private investigator,” he said. “Just trying to clear up a few details about Mrs. Olsen’s passing.”

“Uh-huh,” Sir said, snatching the business card away before I could look at it. “On behalf of who?”

Whom,I thought disjointedly.

“I was hired by the Olsen estate,” Marshall said.

“What?”Sir exclaimed.

“I can handle this, Sir.” I wanted him there, but not if he kept cutting in.

“What’s their concern?” I asked. Maybe the family was suing me for neglect. I’d tried to make Madam take her medicine, but I could have tried harder…

“Apparently, Mrs. Olsen left you a sizeable portion of her inheritance,” Marshall said.

“And?”It’s not like I asked for it or anything.

“You were her live-in butler? Got her groceries and such?”

“Yes.”

“Any chance you brought home the Oxy that she overdosed on?”

Rage sparked in my brain like a live wire. What a despicable accusation! “I did not buy Madam drugs!” I thought of Ho-Sung sneaking liquor into Mom’s hospital room, and my stomach boiled.

“But you oversaw Mrs. Olsen’s pills.”

“I assisted Mrs. Olsen with herprescribedmedications. OxyContin was never one of them.” One of Madam’s rowdy day-drunk friends must have brought the opioids into the house. Poor Madam. She’d been so desperately unhappy at the end. I had worried about the company she kept, but it wasn’t my place to question.

Marshall tapped the end of his pen on the jotter pad. “Is there any chance some extra pills might haveaccidentallyended up in the meds you gave her?”

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