Murder on Bamboo Lane (2 page)

“I can’t just forget about him,” I say. “I’m sick of getting porta-potty patrol.”

“Pee-pee patrol, I like that,” Nay laughs. I am not amused, and she tries to cheer me up by saying, “What’s his name? Mac? Oh, oh—I can make a macaroni voodoo doll, and we can boil him. Feed him to Shippo.”

“What? Poison my dog?”

“Okay, well, maybe to Rickie, then.” Our friend Rickie Plata has a notoriously indiscriminate appetite. “Or better yet, we could throw it in a porta-potty.” Nay excuses herself to the restroom, and of course that’s the moment our food arrives. The bowls of ramen are way too hot to eat right away anyway, so I don’t mind waiting for her to return.

Before Nay makes it back to her seat, Rickie himself appears in the doorway of the ramen house. He’s so tall that his Mohawk brushes the fabric doorway hanger.

“Oh, so Officer Rush is gracing us with her presence tonight,” he says when he sees me. He slips in the seat across from me and immediately starts slurping down Nay’s ramen.

“Hey, back off,” Nay calls from behind and sits next to Rickie. She reclaims her bowl but decides it’s still a little too hot.

“Sorry.”

“Actually, I was hoping that you’d be here, Rickie,” I say, quickly feeling that I’m really not.

“Need your Rickie fix. I’m addicting.”

I ignore him, and take the missing-person flyer out from my backpack. “I think that you know about this.”

Rickie lifts an eyebrow, apparently impressed with my investigating skills.

Silently, I point to the bottom, where it reads:
Anyone with information, please contact . . .
and Rickie’s e-mail address.

“I know this girl,” Nay says, taking a break from her straw. “Remember, Ellie? She was in our comparative religion class. She’d be a senior now.” A fourth year, not a fifth year like Nay and Rickie.

I nod. I thought I’d recognized her from an Asian Pacific Student Union event, but Nay’s right, the three of us had had a class together. I remember her as a girl who rarely smiled, but, who knows—maybe lightness would have won out if given a chance.

“So what’s going on with her?” I ask Rickie after he places his ramen order.

“I know her best friend, Susana. She was all distraught yesterday, saying that she thinks something bad’s happened to Jenny.” He sighs. “I was actually thinking of asking Jenny out sometime.”

Nay and I exchange glances. She claims that Rickie has not fully come to terms with his sexuality, but I tell her that it’s none of our business. Because it isn’t.

Even if I pretty much agree with her.

My miso ramen’s finally cool enough, so I start eating while Rickie continues. “It was Susana’s twenty-first birthday a couple of days ago. They were apparently planning to go to Vegas, but Jenny didn’t show up.”

“What? She was stood up?” Nay is appalled. When she turned twenty-one, she expected a full-on flash mob show on campus. I was in my third month of training at the academy, learning how to infiltrate a drug house. I had no time to coordinate a hundred-person dance number to Usher’s “OMG.” She still hasn’t forgiven me for that.

“Yep. Jenny’s been totally incommunicado. Doesn’t answer calls, texts, Facebook, Twitter.”

“Didn’t show up to class?”

“She was taking the quarter off. Ran out of money.”

Nay’s concentrating on her Osaka ramen special, leaving me to concentrate on Jenny.

“Does she live at home?” I ask Rickie.

“No. I don’t think she’s from around here.”

“No roommates?”

“No. I think she lived by herself. Actually, Susana was kind of hazy about that.”

Strange, I thought. Why would this so-called best friend be vague about such an important detail? “If this Susana is so concerned, why isn’t
her
information on the flyer?”

“I don’t know. She just kept telling me that it’s all complicated and she can’t get too involved, but she knows that something bad has happened to Jenny. So I told her I’d do what I could to help her out.”

“She needs to file a missing-person report.”

“Oh, we did. I mean, not Susana, but Benjamin and I did.”

I feel myself inadvertently blush at the mention of my ex, and hope that the alcohol flush already on my face masks my feelings.

“We called up the police, gave them what info we had—kind of spotty and all—and it was all ‘Don’t call us again, we’ll call you.’ Something about being missing is not a crime.” Exactly what Tim had told me.

“You should have called me,” I say. “I may be able to help. Maybe my aunt can do something.”

Rickie then rests his hand over mine beside the steaming bowls of ramen. “Ellie, my dear, you’re among friends. Let’s be honest. You can’t help. You’re just a bicycle cop.”

• • •

I go home that night in a foul mood. Since I live in Highland Park, just over the hill from Dodger Stadium, I take the Gold Line light rail. My father has spent his whole life doing engineering for the Metro Rail system, so my brother and I are anomalies among most of our friends in LA—we actually know how to work mass transit.

Of course, this being LA, I do also own a car. And what a car it is: a 1969 Buick Skylark. It’s bright green and the size of a small cargo ship.

The car is a gift from Lita, short for
abuelita
, or
grandma
in Spanish. She’s my grandmother on my father’s side. She’s white but was a high school Spanish teacher for forty years. Instead of Dr. Seuss, she read the poems of Pablo Neruda to me as a baby. She’s the one who passed on to me a love for the Spanish language, much to the disappointment of my mother. (“Spanish? Why not Japanese? What are you going to do with a Spanish major? Teach high school Spanish like Lita?” I don’t mention anything to Mom about how
she
never really learned Japanese, and hasn’t had a day job for more than twenty years for that matter, because I don’t want to be disowned.)

The Skylark was actually my grandfather’s, my dad’s dad, whom I’ve never met. In fact, I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. Lita just refers to him as her
indisgression
. Dad, who’s curious about most things, says that he doesn’t care to know anything about his bio dad. Lita filled the shoes of both parents, he claims, and there wasn’t room for anyone else. Knowing how Lita is, I believe him.

It doesn’t make any logical sense to keep the Skylark. It gets about thirteen miles to the gallon and that’s freeway driving. I keep having to get multiple smog checks and pay for multiple adjustments to pass those multiple smog checks.

And even though its body is like a plate of armor, there are no protective air bags. Benjamin calls it “the Green Mile” because riding in it may be the last mile of any passenger’s life. I feel that riding my bike and taking public transportation most of the time allows me this tangible connection to my grandfather, my own indiscretion.

Anyway, tonight I get off at the Highland Park station and walk down a couple of blocks, one hand in the pocket of my special fanny pack for my Glock when I’m off duty. According to Nay, it’s a fashion disaster, but I need to make sure that I can easily get to my gun when I need it. Right now it’s already dark and my neighborhood isn’t the safest.

I’m a few yards away from my small rental house when I see that the bedroom light is on. Not only that, the window is open. My heart begins to race. The first thing I think about is my dog. I can’t help but worry that something’s happened to Shippo; there’s no way he’d be quiet if an intruder had come into my house.

I hug the outside wall with my back and edge over to the window. The curtains obscure my view inside, but I can see the shadow of a head. I sniff. Definitely pot.
Piece of trash druggie robber
. I tear the curtain down. “Police!” I shout as I squarely aim at the person in front of me.

It’s my teenage brother, Noah, his hands in the air and a joint falling out of his mouth.

AVENUE 26

“Man, I almost lost it there. You were pretty scary,” Noah says with what sounds like renewed respect. Guess I should pull a gun on him more often. “I thought maybe you might be at a stakeout or staying over at Benjamin’s.”

“Noah, I’m on the bicycle unit, remember?” Although we do come across drug deals, it’s more by chance than anything planned out. I don’t mention anything about Benjamin. My family adores him—sometimes, I feel, more than they adore me. I know we’re over for good this time, but I can’t say it out loud to my family yet.

“I didn’t give you a key to my place so that you could randomly come over and smoke weed. It was only for emergencies. To take care of you, huh, Shippo?” I look down at the only male creature in the house whom I can presently stand. Shippo wags his crazy corkscrew tail. “Call or even text me next time. And keep your pot out of my house. How much of this do you smoke on a regular basis anyhow?” I pick up the half-burned joint from the hardwood floor and aim it toward my toilet.

“Hey, hey!” Noah calls out. “That’s domestically grown. All organic.”

I miss the bowl, and Shippo makes a dive for the joint.

“No, Shippo, no!” I grab the joint in time to properly flush it down the toilet.

“You could really get me in trouble,” I scold Noah.

“I’m sure there are plenty of cops who smoke weed.”

I ignore Noah’s comment. “Where did you get it?”

Noah leans back on my retro beanbag chair. His eyes are completely bloodshot. “Simon Lee. His brother grows it right there in his mom’s greenhouse. She has no idea what it is. She thinks it’s a varietal of the Chinese money tree.”

“You know what marijuana will do to your brain.”

“I know, I know. Cause paranoid schizophrenia. A gateway drug to ecstasy. You’re almost worse than Mom and Dad.”

“I suppose you have them all fooled with your straight A’s,” I say.

“I just give them what they want. It’s a fair trade.”

I stare at Noah in disbelief. I don’t understand how he got so worldly, but Catholic boys’ school probably has something to do with it. I remember how adorable he was when he was five or six. Strangers always thought that he was Latino—“cute little Mexican boy.” Then they would see him with Mom and get totally confused.

“I don’t think Mom and Dad know what you’re getting away with in this deal.” I take my fanny pack off and return the Glock to its special firearm compartment. “How did you get here, anyway?”

“The 180, and then I walked and caught the 81.”

“Not too smart.” Bus riding in the city of Los Angeles after dark can be treacherous for a teenage boy who looks like he has money but doesn’t.

I pull the car keys out of my pocket and gesture for him to get up.

“What?”

“I’m going to drive you home.”

“No, no. I’m sorry, okay? I just need a break from Mom. She’s driving me crazy. Let me sleep over tonight. She already thinks I’m over at Simon’s anyway.”

“Nu-ah.”

“You’re partially to blame, you know. Since you went blue collar with the LAPD, all this pressure is on me to make it academically. Mom keeps saying that she didn’t send you to private school to ride a bike at work.”

“What else does she say?”

“That it’s all Aunt Cheryl’s fault.”

That argument again?
It’s getting old, Mom
, I say to myself
.
But Noah certainly knows what he is doing, because I relent. “Okay, but I have to get up early to go work the Chinatown parade. When I leave, you leave,” I tell him.

• • •

When I wake up at 4:30 a.m., the living room couch is empty. There’s only a note, scribbled on the back of a cigarette rolling paper in felt tip pen:
WENT HOME
.

I feel a little bad not being more hospitable to my younger brother, but then again, not that bad. My father says that, based on neurological studies, the brain of a teenage boy is not fully developed, and my brother is a perfect example of that. Half human, half swamp creature. I don’t know if he understands that I was one finger pull from blowing his head off.

I go to replenish Shippo’s dog food bowl, but it’s already full. So is his water bowl. I find another note on cigarette rolling paper on the counter:
WALKED THE DOG & FIXED YOUR CURTAIN
. Just when I’m ready to give up on my brother, he completely surprises me.

I put on my contacts and quickly change into a clean uniform—a black shirt that clearly reads
POLICE
in the back, and shorts, because even though it’s cold for LA, about fifty degrees, the cycling will soon warm my legs. I slather moisturizer on my freshly shaven calves. My skin tends to be on the dry side, especially during the winter months. Shippo watches me this whole time. He knows the routine. Luckily, I have a small backyard and doggy door, so at least he has squirrels to bark at when I’m not around.

I drive to work this time. The best time to drive in Los Angeles is early morning on the weekends around five a.m. It’s late enough that even the drunken partiers have gone home and early enough that most people—from suburbanites to gangbangers—are still in bed. Right now I’m working a compressed schedule, four ten-hour days, but being a P2, I realize that things can change for me at any time.

I collect my bike at Central Division and ten of us set off in groups for Chinatown. Blocked-off streets are no problem for us, and we’ve been trained to navigate bikes in tight quarters. I purposely stay away from Mac, and he stays away from me.

The city has already set out orange cones and wooden street barriers to control traffic, but only a few Chinese grandmas, their hands behind their backs, walk the cleaned-up streets this early. I’ve never actually watched the Chinatown parade, though I’ve participated in some of the Chinese New Year weekend events. My dad and I have run the Firecracker 5K Run a few times and have the faded T-shirts to prove it.

I circle North Broadway, pedaling past Chinese churches, and Vietnamese sandwich shops. There’s also an Italian American museum hidden away, along with an aging Italian church that feeds hungry Chinese immigrants every Thanksgiving.

Of course, these days Chinatown doesn’t come close to containing all of the recent Chinese immigrants. New Chinatowns have emerged east of Downtown Los Angeles in the hilly suburbs of Monterey Park, Rowland Heights and Diamond Bar. As Chinese from Hong Kong and mainland China leave downtown, Chinese from Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia have moved in—not to mention young artists and hipsters of all colors who have opened up galleries and bars down here. I ride around the perimeter of the Los Angeles Historic State Park, about thirty acres of empty space hardly anyone seems to know about. Across the street from the park are Nick’s Coffee Shop, a hangout for the city’s head honchos, and a recycling center that used to be something that looked like a steel manufacturing plant. Don’t ask me what the plant is doing there, although I bet it was there before Nick’s.

Here, in a patch of concrete across from a trading company and hole-in-the-wall restaurant I happen to know serves the best dim sum in Chinatown, are the twenty-five porta-potties. Ever since a flasher exposed himself to a dozen women in one of those during Fiesta Broadway, we’ve (or should I say,
I’ve
) been charged with carefully monitoring the plastic temporary structures. I see some homeless men making good use of them right now.

I settle in for a long, stinky day. As each hour passes and the sun battles through the clouds, the streets become more and more alive with people, cars, sounds and smells. A steady stream of families travels down the concrete stairs of the Gold Line station, and I see a lot of non-Asians walking around in coolie hats. The vendors that sell those hats should be cited with perpetuation of a bad stereotype. But I guess they, like most people these days, just need to make a few bucks.

I try to concentrate on the porta-potties, keeping in mind the description of the flasher—five eight, 160 pounds, possibly Hispanic. Incredibly generic. I try to be as visible as possible to serve at least as a deterrent.

At around noon, the radio on my belt squawks with noise. The reception isn’t great, but I can make out that a dead body has been discovered on Bamboo Lane, only three blocks away. Asian female. Approximately twenty years of age. About a hundred and ten pounds. Gunshot wound to the head.

How many twenty-year-old Asian women are there in LA? Maybe a quarter of a million, at least. But I can’t help but think of the missing one in my circle: Jenny Nguyen.

I know I ought to remain at my assigned station, and I manage to do so for about fifteen minutes. But after hearing police sirens nearby, I decide to make my way through the crowd.

Yellow crime tape has already been stretched across the narrow street by the time I arrive. My colleagues, on bikes and in black and whites, are already there. Curious onlookers loiter before they are told to move on. In the middle of the alley, a couple of detectives are blocking the view of something on the ground, presumably the body.

As I attempt to duck under the tape with my bike, I see Mac on the other side. He stops me, his arms crossed.

“Rush, you can’t go in there. You’ll compromise the crime scene.”

“Is it her?”

“Who?”

“You know, the missing girl in the flyer that I had. The one who was at Pan Pacific West at the same time as me. Did she have any ID on her?”

Mac swallows, and I know that he is also swallowing my leads. He tells me to get back to North Broadway, but I’m not moving.

I recognize one of the detectives on the scene. He’s black with a shaven head and a light mustache. Detective Cortez Williams. I’m not quite sure how old he is, but he looks around thirty. I’ve heard good things about his work; plus, as one of the hotter-looking guys at the station, he’s kind of hard to miss.

Mac approaches Cortez and says something to him. They’re about a hundred yards away, and I can’t hear their conversation.

Cortez writes something in his notebook, then says something to Mac and Mac just shakes his head. Cortez pats Mac’s back, and I can see him mouthing, “Good work.” Cortez walks off in the opposite direction, and Mac, meanwhile, pretends that I don’t exist.

Anger rises to my head.
What the hell?
This is beyond office politics now. The dead girl may be Jenny, but for some reason, Mac wants to shut me out.

There’s another surge of people, and Mac returns to the yellow tape to disperse the lookie-loos. He still won’t look me in the eye.

“Why didn’t you tell Detective Williams that I may have some pertinent information about the victim?” I demand.

“Because you don’t know if you
do
have pertinent information.”

“I told you that I went to Pan Pacific West with a missing girl who fits the description of the victim.”

“He has been informed.”

“Yeah, because you informed him.”

“They’ll check with the school and Missing Persons. I’m sure any information you have, they have.”

Mac is such an SOB, I can’t believe it.

“What is your problem?” I can’t keep it inside anymore. I don’t know if I can get in trouble for speaking like this to a fellow officer who has five years on me, but at the moment, I don’t care.

“What did you say to me?”

I take a deep breath. “I’m just saying that I may be able to help this investigation and you’re preventing me from doing so.”

“Look, Rush, we have this covered, so go patrol North Broadway again. Or do you need to hear it directly from Cherniss?”

I glare at him but stalk away, and as I pedal back to Broadway, all I can think is “S-O-B, S-O-B.” I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to risk interfering with an active investigation. Should I call Rickie?

The news about the discovery of a dead body hasn’t reached North Broadway yet, or if it has, the visitors don’t care. I brace myself for questions in various native tongues once the word gets around to the actual residents of Chinatown, however. It’s strange—in times like this, people claim me as their own. With death literally on their doorstep, it’s like they suddenly intuit my Asian heritage, while at other times, they view me as a complete outsider.

I stand by the porta-potties for at least another half hour and then circle the park again and return to the front of the dim sum eatery.

I hear the bang and twang of approaching drums. The lion dancers are on their way to the restaurant. Behind one of the drummers is a woman carrying a head of lettuce hanging from a long pole.

“What’s the lettuce for?” A deep and syrupy voice says next to me. It’s Detective Williams, apparently taking a late-morning break to eat a pork bao from one of the street vendors.

“Good luck,” I respond. “The lion is supposed to reach up and swallow it.”

“Cortez Williams.” He reaches out a hand to introduce himself, though of course I know who he is.

“Ellie Rush. I’m part of Central Division’s Bicycle Coordination Unit.”

“I can see that,” he says. I’m so glad my legs aren’t chafed today.

“Captain Ardiss Randle’s a good man,” he says of my boss.

I know that I won’t get this opportunity again, so I dive in. “Detective Williams, actually, I wanted to talk to you. About the victim in the alley. I want to make sure that it’s not a girl who’s missing from my old school. Jenny Nguyen.”

Cortez’s head jerks up and he carefully wipes the corners of his mouth with a napkin. He looks at me carefully. He is listening. “How well do you know her?”

“Well, we had a class together a couple of years ago.”

“Could you ID her?”

My head feels light; I am slightly dizzy. Now I regret saying anything. The last thing I want to do is see Jenny Nguyen’s dead body, or any young woman’s dead body, for that matter.

“I thought that it had to be next of kin.”

“I mean, just for our purposes.”

“I’ve been assigned to patrol this area.”

“I’ll tell your captain. Come with me.”

• • •

I’ve never seen the dead body of anyone whom I knew alive. My whole extended family has been ridiculously healthy, except for my Grandpa Toma, who died from prostate cancer when I was five; he was immediately cremated. That isn’t to say I haven’t seen cadavers—we saw them in the county morgue during our academy training, but they just seemed like preserved and pickled meats, nothing left of their humanity.