The temple where Billy Lusk was eulogized was only a few miles from the address I’d copied from Jin Jai-Sik’s driver’s license.
I turned the Mustang east on Olympic Boulevard and put on the headlights against the dusk. The air was warm and still, “earthquake weather” in L.A. parlance, though the only things rumbling at the moment were the wheels of the Mustang, which needed aligning.
I cruised along an unrelieved stretch of commercial real estate that had been a corridor of flames during the last riots, until I reached the heart of Koreatown.
A tangle of neon signs, formed from the slash mark ideographs of hangul, the Korean word system, loomed brightly above the bustling business district.
The address I was looking for was in the residential section to the north, where most of the faces were Hispanic, but Korean families were part of the mix. I found the house on a broad, clean street of restored Victorians and Craftsmen, which managed to look hospitable despite the cast-iron burglar bars that covered almost every ground-level window.
I left the Mustang at the curb and followed a cleanly edged walkway across a gentle slope of lawn. Three steps led to a broad porch and massive front door of lacquered wood, with a heavy knocker of burnished brass.
Lights were on inside, but dense curtains guarded the interior from prying eyes.
A thin, graying Korean man, tidy and well groomed, answered the bell with a newspaper in his hand. He wore dark pleated slacks and a starched white dress shirt, and examined me dispassionately through wire-rimmed glasses.
I told him my name and that I was looking for Jin Jai-Sik.
“No English,” he said. “Sorry.”
I glanced at the copy of The Wall Street Journal in his hand.
“It’s very important that I talk with him.”
The man took a quick look back into the big house, where a little girl sat at a dining room table, bent over a book. It was difficult to tell if she was the same child whose photograph I’d seen in Jin Jai-Sik’s wallet, but the general resemblance was close.
The man stepped out and quietly shut the door.
“Jin no longer live here.”
“Are you his father?”
The pain in his eyes gave away the truth.
“Jin no longer live here,” he repeated more firmly.
“He has something that belongs to me. It’s important that he return it.”
I wrote my name and phone number in a small notebook, tore out the page, and handed it to him.
“If Jin does not return what belongs to me, I may have to inform the police. Please, Mr. Jai-Sik. Have him call me.”
“I try.”
He turned back into the house but paused at the door.
“If Jin take something not belong to him, I apologize for him and for his family.”
He went in, and I heard the door being locked and latched.
Along the porch, window curtains parted, and the little girl peeked out.
Before I could get a good look at her, someone whisked her away, and the heavy curtains fell closed again.