Murder on Bamboo Lane Read online

  She offers me a seat on the other side of her desk, which is stacked with paper. Promotional posters featuring multigenerational, multiethnic families are pinned to her walls.

  “So you were close to Jenny?” Valerie asks.

  “Ah, we had a class together.” I am tired of telling so many white lies, so I just go for the truth. “But I’m in touch with a lot of her friends.”

  “I already spoke to a detective.”

  And gave him nothing, I think to myself. “I know that you can’t talk about Jenny’s work, about where she went, who she spoke to, but maybe you can tell me something about her. You know, like her personality.”

  “I thought you knew her.”

  “I mean, her work personality. A lot of times people are different at work than at home or school.”

  That seems to satisfy Jenny’s supervisor.

  “She was ambitious. So ambitious.”

  See? Already I’m surprised.

  “She seemed to have political aspirations,” Valerie says. “She always wanted to be at any event. Especially anything involving redistricting. She was a great representative. She always put herself together well for someone so young.”

  She rummages around in her desk and pulls out a photo, apparently taken at a special event at City Hall. She points to Jenny, wearing a dress with pumps and pearls. I do a double take to make sure it’s her.

  “She really wanted a job at City Hall.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes, I wrote her a recommendation letter. A very effusive one, in fact. But she was turned down. I think a couple of times.”

  “Do you remember what office she applied to?”

  Valerie folds her arms in thought. She is wearing a hound’s-tooth suit that fits her perfectly. “I can’t remember. A senior moment, perhaps. I’ve been getting more and more of them these days.”

  “If you happen to find a copy of that recommendation letter, can you call me? I’ll be very interested to see where she was trying to work.” I write my phone number and name on a piece of notebook paper along with “Re: Jenny Nguyen.”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  “Just trying to put the pieces together for her family,” I tell Valerie.

  Her eyes cloud over with tears. “We’ve been talking about sending a card or some sort of flowers to her family back in Vietnam. She didn’t talk much about them, but I’m sure they were so proud of her. Can you provide us with their contact information?”

  Note to self: Contact Tuan to get family’s address. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

  Valerie glances at her watch, and I take it as a sign not to overstay my welcome. I stand up and thank her, then leave my temporary ID badge with the receptionist and walk out of the Census office.

  Was this the same Jenny whom I’d always seen dressed in a PPW T-shirt like the rest of us? The Jenny who lived out of a borrowed car?

  I remember the bin in her trunk labeled CH CLOTHING. Perhaps the CH stood for City Hall? Now I regret not opening the bin to look at the contents.

  My own trunk is full of dirty laundry. Since I don’t have to go to work today, I plan to stop at my parents’ house for dinner and use their washer and dryer. I leave Shippo at home so not to aggravate Mom, physically or emotionally.

  Ironically, it turns out that neither Mom nor Dad is home tonight anyway. Dad has an evening work meeting, and Mom, who has left dinner for Grandma Toma, Noah and me, is off jogging the Rose Bowl with her running group in preparation for her next half marathon.

  “How’s Benjamin doing?” Grandma asks as we sit around the dining room table.

  I take a deep breath. “Actually, we broke up. Three months ago.”

  Grandma Toma looks constipated.

  Noah doesn’t say a word.

  “Can you two do me a favor? Don’t tell Mom and Dad about me and Benjamin yet. I’d like to break the news myself. I mean, we’re still friends. We all get together at that ramen house in Little Tokyo a few times a week.”

  Grandma wrinkles her forehead. “You still see him every week?” She murmurs something about not understanding young people, and we pass the rest of the meal in relative silence. When we finish, she heads toward her bedroom, while Noah and I clear the table and start loading the dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

  “I gotta agree with Grandma,” Noah comments.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re still seeing Benjamin even though you’ve broken up? That sounds pretty dysfunctional.”

  When did my brother turn into Dr. Phil?

  The doorbell rings, and I hear Grandma’s slippers shuffling against the hardwood floor to get the door. A few moments later, Simon Lee enters the kitchen. He wears oversized black-framed glasses and a short-sleeve plaid cotton shirt. He has better hair than I do; it’s long and goes past his shoulders.

  “Hey,” he says to Noah.

  “You remember my sister.” Noah shrugs in my direction.

  “Hey.” Simon doesn’t bother to take the earbuds out of his ears.

  I give him a once-over. So this is the drug lord of Madison Heights in Pasadena? God help us.

  I go back into the laundry room, feeling like I’ve disappointed both Grandma Toma and Noah. What did they expect, that I was going to marry Benjamin? We were together two and a half years, but still.

  Before the drying cycle has completely finished, I stuff my clothes into laundry bags. I say good-bye to Grandma and the cartel boys, but all three of them are too busy to notice my departure.

  I park the Green Mile in my narrow driveway; there’s no room for it in my tiny garage. I open the trunk and pull out the bags of clean laundry.

  Shippo greets me by dancing on my feet as I carry my laundry into the house. I know that I’ve neglected him this past week or so and give him extra doggie treats, then rub the folds of his neck for a good ten minutes.

  “Okay, Shippo,” I tell him, “let’s walk.”

  Highland Park is a funny neighborhood. Most people my parents’ age think of it as a drive-by place, in multiple senses. My neighborhood has a bad rap for its flashes of gang warfare, and the winding three-lane Pasadena Freeway, the oldest operating freeway, cuts through, leaving the homes on the west side and the Arroyo Seco Park on the other. North Figueroa and York are the main drags; York is becoming increasingly hipster with coffee shops, vinyl stores and bars, while Figueroa hangs on to its Latino postwar past. As more young families have moved in, the image has started to change, but Highland Park is probably still populated with more have-nots than haves. Maybe that’s why the Gold Line track is right in the middle of Figueroa, right next to homes and car lanes. Still, anchoring the area are its museums and historic spots, like the museum with the nation’s best collections of Native American artifacts, or the row of multicolored Victorian houses smack beside the freeway on the Arroyo side. My favorite tourist location is the Lummis House, a homemade structure built with stone and glass photographs taken by the owner, a journalist from the Midwest who literally walked over to Highland Park from Ohio in the 1880s. In a way, Highland Park is still filled with pioneers and daredevils. Maybe I’m one of them.

  As I walk Shippo down a street with a neat row of small bungalows, my cell phone rings.

  “I cannot believe her!” Nay yells on the other side. I know she’s talking about her mother.

  “What happened?”

  “My mother just gave our car to my brother—he’s a grown-ass man with a wife and kid. He should be buying his own car!”

  “Well, isn’t the pink slip in your mother’s name? Legally, she had a right—”

  “Look, don’t get all Law & Order on me, okay? I made payments on that car when I was working. I contributed. Hard cash. Part of that car is mine. How am I going to get to school?”

  “Bus?” I offer, and Nay ignores me.

  “This is it! I need to leave Mommie Dearest, and now is not soon enough. I have to move out.”

  “But Nay, you
quit your job. How can you afford to move out?”

  “Maybe I’ll move in with you.”

  I gulp and Shippo looks up at me with concern. “You have the key; if you ever need a break, you can come over and crash for a night or two. But in terms of being roommates . . .”

  “I know, I know,” Nay says, saving me. “Besides, you have no closet space.”

  I finally exhale.

  “Sorry, I’ve just been going on and on. How’s your man?”

  “He’s not my man, Nay.” Not yet, anyway.

  “Boy toy?”

  “It hasn’t come to that.”

  “Well, let’s speed it up.”

  Cortez and I are supposed to meet in Chinatown tomorrow, but I don’t consider a forty-minute lunch anything romantic.

  “By the way,” I say, remembering my conversation with Valerie Ahmed, “I stopped by Jenny’s work today. Did you notice her ever looking dressed up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like in dresses and high heels?”

  “Are you kidding me? She always looked like the typical PPW student. T-shirt. Sweats. Hair down or in a ponytail.”

  “I talked to her Census supervisor. According to her, Jenny was always dressed to the nines.”

  “What? That doesn’t sound like Jenny. Are you sure you were talking about the same Jenny Nguyen? You know it’s like Paul Kim or Grace Park—there’s a million of them around.”

  “No, it’s the same person.”

  We both then become quiet. Who was the real Jenny Nguyen after all?

  TEN

  NORTH HILL STREET

  “I’ve only got forty-five minutes—tops,” I tell Cortez. I’m locking my bike to a post downstairs from a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown.

  It’s a little past noon, and a crowd presses into the second-floor entrance. Occasionally, a Chinese woman wearing a blood-red shirt, black skirt and comfortable shoes steps out into the waiting area calling out numbers. This doesn’t look good for a quick meal.

  Cortez notices my irritation. “Don’t worry. I just met the owner last month at a community meeting. He’ll put us at the front of the line.”

  We squeeze through the waiting office workers and families, and Cortez flags down a man, his hair combed out with grease, who nods and leads us through an obstacle of food carts on wheels and round tables. We are seated by a wall of windows. I have a great view of a homeless man taking a whiz on the base of a palm tree.

  I quickly survey the carts in motion. I locate the oblong metal tins holding my favorite, chow fun, fat rice noodles wrapped around shrimp (the best) and also beef. Farther away are the round tins, most likely pork shumai and maybe shrimp har gow, another favorite. Anything with shrimp is going to appear on my top five list.

  I don’t wait to see what Cortez wants. I’m hungry, and I don’t have much time.

  “Don’t tell me,” he says, watching me make my orders. “You’ve been here before.”

  “After Empress Pavilion closed, this is now my parents’ favorite.” I personally prefer the dim sum eatery on Broadway near where I first met Cortez. I tell him that we’ll have to meet there next time. The mention of “next time” puts a smile on Cortez’s face.

  “How’s today been so far?” I ask him.

  “Good, real good. I’ve been here all morning, in fact. We’ve been getting a lot of information from people in the neighborhood. From the Alpine Recreation Center, too.”

  I stop chewing when I hear Alpine, which hosts pickup basketball games in its gym. Jenny didn’t have anything to do with Alpine, as far as I know, but Tuan Le does.

  Thinking of Tuan Le reminds me that, as I was walking my bike through the shopping center on my way here, I noticed a simple flyer advertising a talk, “Free Speech or Historic Amnesia?” at Goldfinger Gallery in conjunction with Tuan Le’s art exhibition. I mention it to Cortez.

  “Yeah, we already went to the exhibition opening. Pretty standard stuff. Rich people from Pasadena, San Marino and the Westside. Nothing really that could help the case.”

  “The talk tonight may attract some of Tuan’s critics,” I tell Cortez. “You know that his work is controversial in the Vietnamese community? Some people consider it communist propaganda.”

  “Well, politics sells paintings and whatever you call it—installations. Anyway, I have a date tonight.”

  I lift my head up from my har gow.

  “A date with my son. We Skype once a week.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Are you okay? You seem distracted.”

  My first reaction is denial, but Cortez is right. I just haven’t realized it until now. I’m feeling guilty, while trying to convince myself that I’m not doing anything wrong, just asking a few questions about Jenny during my time off. Because we all want the same thing, right? To catch her killer.

  “There’s a lot going on right now,” I say.

  Cortez touches my hand briefly. “Seeing your first murder victim. It changes you. It really does.”

  I feel tears come to my eyes, and I blink them back. Is it really that? Has seeing Jenny in that alley changed me?

  “I remember my first,” Cortez says. “I’d actually been working for the department for a couple of years. It was in the middle of the night in the Crenshaw area. A teenager gunned down with an AK-47 at Taco Bell. I’ll never forget it. His body was mangled; his face almost nonexistent. Sometimes that body appears in my dreams.”

  I flinch.

  “Most cops would say to compartmentalize your feelings. It’s work. They’re vics,” Cortez tells me. “But I can’t be that way. Maybe you’re like me, too.”

  When Cortez says this to me, I study his face. His smooth complexion. His beautiful thick lips. I want to kiss him right there in the middle of that large banquet hall clanging with noise and voices. Instead, I wipe the corner of my mouth. I am starting to have feelings for Cortez, feelings that I once thought were reserved only for Benjamin.

  “I need to go,” I remind Cortez, and he flags the owner for our check. He leaves way too much tip, which, as a good friend to many waitresses, makes me happy.

  By the time we make it to the front, the line has reduced considerably. After going down to the first floor, I head for my bicycle, but Cortez pulls me behind some outdoor vendors selling fake jade bracelets for two dollars and bonsai adorned with plastic mini-Asians doing kung-fu.

  He draws me close to him and gives me a quick kiss. His lips taste salty. I’m sure mine do, too. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve just been thinking of doing that all throughout lunch.”

  Cortez gets no resistance from me, since I’ve been having similar thoughts. We are taking a risk—even though Cortez is not my supervisor, the department frowns upon in-house “personal relationships.”

  It’s all pretty great, actually. And then: disaster.

  “Ellie, is that you?” I hear. A voice I’ve heard since I was born.

  Oh no, I think. I turn from Cortez and see my mother in a fuchsia running jacket and my father in his trademark baby blue Windbreaker. Great. Both of them. Even better.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I say.

  “Going to our favorite dim sum restaurant. How about you?” Dad says. He works just across the street, so it’s not unusual for Mom to sometimes meet him for lunch.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?” My mother says friend as icily as possible. This isn’t going to be pretty.

  “Ah, Detective Cortez Williams, these are my parents, Gary and Caroline Rush.”

  “Good to meet you.” Cortez shakes hands with both of them. Cortez is a good, firm hand-shaker, but that’s not going to be enough to appease these two.

  “Uh, and how do you know Ellie?” Dad asks.

  “We work together, kind of,” Cortez begins and then glances at his phone. “I’m sorry. I have to take this call.” After excusing himself, he walks to a less crowded place within the mini-mall, the phone at his ear.

  I
brace myself for the parental inquisition.

  “What is going on? How old is that man?” my mother asks.

  “He’s not that much older,” I answer. What’s seven years?

  “What about Benjamin?”

  “The thing is, we broke up a while ago.”

  My father actually looks halfway relieved that at least he doesn’t have a cheater for a daughter. Mom, on the other hand, as expected, seems crushed.

  “When? When did this happen?”

  “Around Thanksgiving.”

  “So that was why he didn’t come over for Christmas. I still have his Christmas present, you know.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “So that was an excuse, that he was visiting his family in São Paulo?”

  “No, that was actually the truth.”

  “What happened?” my father finally interjects. He is a fan of Benjamin, too, but I don’t think that he ever pictured us walking down the aisle together.

  “Benjamin just had a hard time with me joining the force.”

  “See, see, I told you that this would ruin your life. You’ll be like your aunt and never have enough time for relationships,” Mom said.

  “Ah, Caroline, it seems like our daughter is not having any problems in that department.”

  “Well, any relationships with good men.”

  I keep my eye on Cortez. He’s still on the phone. “What are you trying to say about Cortez? You just met him.”

  “That’s not what I am saying—”

  At this point, Cortez rejoins us. “I’m so sorry, but I need to go. Such a pleasure meeting you,” he says, pumping their hands again.

  “Yes,” my mother replies. She smiles widely, her fake Joker grin. Whenever I see that face, I know Mom is either super pissed, super uncomfortable or super annoyed. Right now she must be at least two of those emotions. “Can’t wait to meet you again.”

  “I’ll call you,” he says to me.

  I nod. After he leaves, I tell my parents that I’m late for my next assignment—which is both true and the best excuse to escape their prying questions. School and work always take precedence. That’s why Noah can be a dope-dealer-in-training as long as he hides under his cloak of straight A’s. And even though Mom doesn’t approve of my chosen profession and Dad doesn’t quite understand it, they are certainly not going to be obstacles to my success. If there isn’t such a thing as Overachievers Anonymous, there should be. And we all should be charter members.