Choiseokhyun of Korea University Law School, Class of ’08
Korea University Law School, class of ’08—Choi Seok-hyun.
He was the guy who had picked a fight with Seon Ryeowon’s boyfriend in the law school cafeteria. I still remembered what he had barked at the time: "When did Ryeowon ever turn me down because I gave her a confession letter?! Doesn’t a boyfriend even keep track of his girlfriend?!" The prep students in the cafeteria, along with every classmate around them, had stopped with their spoons halfway to their mouths and, instead of taking sides, offered silent prayers of their own: That bastard’s gone insane from studying for the bar exam, and another couple has just sent a poor soul straight to the Lord.
As for me, I only wanted to finish my meal quickly and get back to reviewing my lectures.
“Cha Do-hyuk, you saw it from next to me. I put the confession letter in Ryeowon’s locker, didn’t I?”
“…”
“I was trying to put it in another locker, but I got nervous and put it in the wrong one!”
If it were me now, I would probably have covered his embarrassment, but back then I couldn’t do that. A law student with a knife-edged tongue told only the truth.
“Choi Seok-hyun, was it really a mistake?”
“Of course it was!”
“But all the lockers around Seon Ryeowon’s are men’s lockers.”
“…!”
The student council had just announced that the gender ratio was finally 6:4 and, in the process of showing off, had put the female students’ lockers right in the center of each row of lockers. Looking back, it had probably been the student council president’s way of buttering up the last class of female law students in the 2008 cohort.
Anyway, Choi Seok-hyun dragged a fact-checking moot court out over whether he had launched a confession attack or simply exposed his own sexual preferences, and after being handed a guilty verdict as a bizarrely innovative confession assaulter, he came at me like he wanted to kill me every time he saw me. Ten years had passed, and he was still the same.
“How is it my fault that you got caught lying? Give me a break.”
Honestly, if Choi Seok-hyun hadn’t done the whole "Boyfriend, come out here! Boo-boo." routine in the cafeteria, I might never have known any of this in the first place.
In any case, I put the man I would never need to see again out of my mind, got off at Bongeunsa Station on Line 9, and walked down the alley toward the restaurant.
My smartphone, which I had been holding as I searched for the place, buzzed in my hand.
I’ve already smoothed things over. Since the police were there just a few days ago, there shouldn’t be much trouble copying the CCTV footage.
Thanks.
Knock knock.
Lawyer uncle?
Hello?
: (
Ah! You saw it!
Uncle, I have a question.
What is it?
You don’t need to request extra tests. If you push it too far, they might call it overtreatment.
Aha!
So just do whatever the doctor says, lol?
Yes.
By piecing together the words, I figured she was asking whether, since she was scheduled to undergo a few tests at the hospital that day, it might be worth requesting additional ones. If there was some problem, she probably wanted to pin it on Oh Yoon-bok.
No need for that. If you’re careless, they might accuse you of unnecessary treatment.
Then there was something else I should ask.
Oh Ye-ji. Could you ask your aunt if she has any photos of Oh Yoon-sik and his brothers?
Oh, okay!
Mom says she has them.
She didn’t even ask what I needed them for—she just sent them over. She was far too quick on the uptake.
Maybe it was because she had been working in entertainment since she was young, but she had the kind of maturity that made her feel like she’d grown up early.
By then, the black building I had seen must have been around here somewhere.
“Is this it?”
The alley restaurant by Bongeunsa Station was a pork barbecue place with barely any reviews. It was a large restaurant, even with seating set aside for group customers.
If it was this big, they might be too busy running the place to remember Oh Yoon-sik’s brother. That might make things a little awkward.
“Welcome. Dining alone?”
A man in a black T-shirt and a name tag that read Owner came over. The badge was the sort you didn’t often see at an ordinary barbecue joint, which told me he probably had a strong ego tied up in that title. In that case, if I fed that ego properly, he’d likely start spilling clues without realizing it. It was time to become Cha Do-hyuk, the friendly lawyer.
“Yes. But, sir, did you get a call from the police station?”
The owner’s face, which had been wearing a business smile, stiffened.
“Ah, so you’re the one here to copy the CCTV. I called the officer back and told him to bring a warrant. Did he come with it?”
He said that with such confidence, as though a warrant were something that could be produced in one minute flat. I could understand why. It was almost lunchtime, but the place was emptier than it had any right to be.
If the first customer of the day was the police, he’d probably already written the day off.
Like a certain profession that hates it when the first customer wears glasses.
No helping it.
I was up against someone who raised his guard before rapport could even be formed, so I had to move first.
“As you know, warrants don’t just get handed out that easily.”
“Then why are you here?”
He looked at me with a sulky glare, clearly annoyed, but I ignored it and went to sit at the table where I had seen Oh Yoon-sik sitting in the Psychometry vision.
“I was planning to eat first and go in afterward. You know that.”
“…”
“I’ll pay at the table kiosk, so please get me two orders of pork belly.”
The owner barked toward the kitchen, “Hey, two orders of pork belly over here!” in a voice that was anything but cheerful, then sat down across from me.
“Do you really not need the CCTV copy? People usually insist on getting it.”
“A quick scolding is enough. If that doesn’t work, I can just come back with the warrant. That only leaves you annoyed, not me.”
“...I’m the one who’s annoyed?”
He gave a dry, incredulous laugh. I looked away from him and set the spoons in place.
“If a warrant comes out, there’s a good chance you’ll be called as a witness, so of course it’s annoying.”
“What?”
“But if the alley restaurant owner says he wants to testify, it’s not like we can tell him not to, is it?”
“…”
“You’d only have to come to court for a few days.”
Not one or two days—several days. And that could stretch out over months.
The moment the owner swallowed hard, the part-timer came over with the side dishes and meat.
“Um, do I really have to appear if a warrant comes out?”
“Since you were at the scene, there’s a high chance you’ll have to.”
“Would it be different if I copied it for you right now?”
“Hmm. No, not really.”
“Haah!”
“Originally.”
In Korean, you always had to hear the end of the sentence.
“I’ll speak well of you. People should help each other out. The world’s hard enough already.”
“Exactly!”
I took a USB drive out of my pants pocket.
“Then shall we go check the CCTV right away?”
“No, no, the customer should eat first. Even if our meat is delicious, cold meat tastes terrible! Haha!”
“Then?”
“I’ll copy the whole day for you.”
The owner snatched the USB out of my hand in a flash.
“Eat your lunch. I’ll copy it over in a hurry.”
He hurried off into the staff-only area.
“Sorry if he seems a little chaotic. Our owner is the type who acts first when he gets an idea.”
“It’s fine. All I need is the CCTV footage.”
“In that case.”
The part-timer shrugged, then took a plastic bag out of the apron and held it out to me.
“Put your coat in this and keep it in there. It’ll help keep the meat smell off.”
“Thank you.”
I took off my coat and put it into the plastic bag, then watched the part-timer’s dazzling hands as she sliced the meat.
A restaurant where the part-timer grills the meat herself. In that case, wasn’t there a chance she’d been the one serving Oh Yoon-sik?
Or I could just ask one of the other part-timers.
For now, I pulled out my phone and zoomed in on the photo of Oh Yoon-sik and his brothers that Ye-ji had sent me.
“Sorry to bother you while you’re working, but have you seen these men before? They’re older than they look in the photo.”
The part-timer set down the tongs she had been holding and stared at the phone.
“Hmm, let me think.”
“Some of them may have been a little stockier when they came here. And that day, they would have signed on a thick sheet of paper.”
Since Oh Yoon-sik had said he was too drunk that day to even make it to a karaoke bar or a café and had gone straight home, he must have signed it here.
“...Signed? Oh!”
“Do you remember now?”
“They’re the jerks who sat here.”
Jerks?
The part-timer looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“Huh? Weren’t you here about the assault case?”
So that was the case Min Ho-jun had mentioned. I’d have to play along for now.
“That’s right. It was connected to the paperwork they signed, so I was asking to get a preliminary statement.”
“That explains it. I thought it was strange.”
If even a part-timer who was busy working thought something was strange, then something pretty unusual must have happened.
“I went over when the bell rang, and an old lady asked whether the shop had a pen. I said there was only one, and she told me to just lend her that one, so I did.”
“Yes.”
“I was too busy working to think much about it, but when our youngest part-timer went over to ask for the pen, she said she had never borrowed one and acted like she didn’t know anything. It was ridiculous.”
The youngest part-timer must have assumed she’d had too much to drink and simply forgotten.
“But from what I saw, she didn’t seem drunk at all.”
“What made you think that?”
“Come on, does it make sense for seven people to come in and only one of them drink? It would be different if it were the other way around.”
At a drinking table, most people drink and only a few don’t.
“There was soju left in the bottle, but they kept ordering more. From the owner’s point of view, as long as it sold, that was what mattered, so he just acted like he didn’t notice. But it was weird. All of that costs money, you know.”
“Did you tell the police who came that day?”
That was the kind of thing a police officer would have found strange. It might even have been noted in the case file.
“It’s not because I’m a law and police studies major or anything.”
The part-timer set the scissors down on the table with a slightly awkward smile.
“The officers all looked so tired that I couldn’t bring myself to say it. They were already busy trying to quiet the disturbance.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
I’m a law student, sure, but I probably look tired too.
“Because you seem interesting.”
She pointed at my jacket with the tongs.
More precisely, she pointed at the lawyer badge.
“...Lawyers work on paper, right? But I thought someone who goes to the police, asks them to copy CCTV footage, and then asks the part-timers questions on the side might actually be useful.”
Was there any better deed than that? This was the deed itself.
“You’ve been a huge help.”
“Then I’m glad.”
While we were talking, the pork belly had cooked beautifully.
“Enjoy.”
The part-timer went back into the kitchen, and I was the only customer left in the dining room.
This was my chance to hear the voices of that day through the CCTV footage, and I’d already burned through it.
Setting aside the fact that, before I left home, I had used my Psychometry ability once more just so I could look at my mother’s face again, I probably should have taken the written statement the old lady had given me and worked through it slowly.
But...
“That’s odd.”
I turned my head toward the counter, which had already become useless now that the table kiosk was in place.
A flower blooming out of season in the cold.
It was definitely that eerie soap-flower bouquet I had seen beside Oh Yoon-sik in the psychometry vision.
“Why is it over there?”
Did Oh Yoon-sik leave it behind?