Murder on Bamboo Lane Page 13

  The Gogoshian brothers finally arrive about twenty minutes later in a shiny new Lexus. Ken is dressed pretty much like Nay, except for the bandana, but Goggy—he’s in a full camouflage outfit.

  “I didn’t know that we were on a mission to Afghanistan,” I murmur to Nay, and she kicks me in the shin.

  “Ow,” I grimace. The soles of her Merrells are still stiff and hard.

  “Be nice. For my sake.”

  “That’s your car?” Ken asks, pressing down on his car alarm remote. Beep-beep.

  “Yup,” I simply respond. I’m the first to admit the Green Mile’s failings but I’m not going to let a stranger diss my grandfather’s car.

  We have at least three hours until sunset, plenty of time to cover the four-mile round-trip trek. Ken rubs me the wrong way, so I take the lead, Goggy close on my heels.

  “So how’s it like working for the LAPD? I read about you on the PPW alumni website.”

  “Okay.” I can’t believe Goggy had paid attention to a one-line sentence on me entering the police academy more than a year and a half ago.

  “I want to work for the FBI after I graduate,” he reveals.

  I roll my eyes behind my sunglasses. Great, a wannabe Jason Bourne.

  Being outdoors does invigorate me, helps me to forget about work politics, about Jenny’s murder, about Benjamin. Before I know it, I’m jumping on rocks as I crisscross the creek, enjoying the sound of the water and the smell of oak trees. The terrain changes every six to seven years, and the rocks that were there at one time have disappeared and been replaced with new ones. I then notice that I’ve pulled away from the other three and wait as Goggy catches up. About ten feet away are Ken and Nay.

  What I first think is a hawk flies above the canyon.

  “Wow, that’s a peregrine falcon,” says Goggy, standing next to me.

  I do a double take. This man knows his birds.

  Goggy’s cheeks are already pink from the sun, but they become a shade darker with embarrassment. “Yeah, I’m one of those bird-watching nerds. My grandfather was into it.”

  Actually I think that it’s cool and tell him so. “Oh, by the way, sorry that I went way on ahead. It wasn’t like I was trying to ditch you guys.”

  “You’re in good shape. Must be all that police training,” he says.

  We finally make it to the end of the trail, the pièce de résistance, the Falls. It’s an enclosed area of black concave stone, a beautiful shower of water over a shallow pool.

  We are surrounded by families with their toddlers and dogs, a Girl Scout troop with some mom-types, a few retirees and some young couples. So much for the great wild.

  We don’t say much as we listen to the sound of water under the chatter and screams of the girls, who are cautiously dipping their bare toes in the pool. Apparently it’s ice cold. After about five minutes, Ken appears from the trail.

  He is upset. His face is red and sweat is running down the sides of his face. “Thanks for waiting for us, guys,” he says in between breaths.

  “Sorry—” I start to say.

  “I dropped my new phone in the damn water.”

  Nay appears behind him. “I told you not to text while hiking.”

  “Does it still work?” Goggy asks, genuinely concerned.

  Ken clutches the dripping phone like it’s his lifeline, desperately punching at the screen, which looks to be cracked. Must have hit some rocks on its way down. He literally lets out a roar of an expletive, shocking the Girl Scouts. The mothers, wanting to protect their cubs, begin to descend upon us. This is not good.

  “Watch your language. There are young girls present,” one of the mothers, her knuckles on her hip, says to Ken.

  “I’m sure they’ve all heard and said worse. And if they haven’t, well, welcome to the real world.”

  “That’s unacceptable.” The woman stands her ground. I’m impressed, but I also want her to go away. Breaking up a fight between a Gogoshian and a helicopter mom is the last thing I need.

  Ken lowers his phone and stares into the woman’s face. He repeats the expletive, ending it with a long “yooooouuuu.”

  “Marlene, let’s call the police.” Her friend, another mom type, tugs at her arm.

  “No need.” Ken has a smug expression on his face as he points me out. “She’s a cop. Report it to her.”

  “You’re a police officer?” Both women look incredulously at me, amazed that I’m part of Ken’s circle.

  “Ah—” I really don’t want to get involved. I’m in hot water as it is, and I don’t need a couple of irate Girl Scout leaders to further tarnish my reputation.

  Nay, who’s been pretty quiet during this exchange, finally steps up to Ken. “Listen, just shut up, okay? You’re making a fool out of yourself. Not that it’s too hard.”

  “Chubby, I didn’t even want to go out with you. It was all my brother’s doing. He’s into ball crushers like your friend.”

  Nay takes a few steps closer to him. “What did you say?”

  “Your friend. She wants to be a man. She’s a ball crusher.”

  “I thought that’s what you said.” Nay raises her hiking stick and pushes it into the older Gogoshian’s belly like a harpoon, causing him to lose his balance and fall into the pool of water amidst some shrieking and scattering Girl Scouts.

  TWELVE

  AVENUE 26

  “Sorry about the Gogoshian brothers. I had no idea that they were going to be such jerks,” Nay says when the two of us arrive, a bit damp, back to my place. Nay’s staying over for a couple of nights to get a break from Mama Pram.

  “Actually, that Goggy wasn’t too bad. I mean, other than his fashion sense.”

  Nay is surprised. “You mean that you’d see him again?”

  “No way. I mean, I couldn’t date someone with a brother like that.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t hold that completely against him. I’m convinced that it’s nurture, not nature.”

  I realize that Nay is definitely speaking from personal experience with her own brother.

  “That Ken has a definite misogyny problem. You should have heard him on the way up. Girl cops just want to be like men. That most of them are ugly. That they are on power trips.” Nay then lets loose some of her own expletives. I don’t even bother to pinch her. It’s one of those days.

  • • •

  We go inside, and Shippo leaps on Nay’s bare knees. “Well, hello, sweetiekins. Long time no see.” She presses into Shippo’s neck and soon he’s on his back, exposing his bare belly for more love. “You man-whore,” Nay exclaims.

  I place my backpack on a chair. “Actually, you know the stuff he was saying, I’ve seen it before on the Internet.” I turn on my laptop and show Nay different police-related bulletin boards where guys spout the same things Ken did, only worse.

  “What haters!” Nay exclaims. When I first told her I was entering the police academy, she, like Benjamin and Rickie, was less than supportive. But over the past couple of months, Nay has been slowly changing her mind. Doesn’t hurt that I’m now making double of all of their part-time salaries combined.

  “Dibs on the shower okay?” Nay grabs her duffel bag and goes to the bathroom while I feed Shippo.

  The water in the bathroom stops running and after a few minutes Nay emerges with a towel wrapped around her head. She’s wearing a silk negligee that barely covers her private parts.

  “Nay, really!” I throw a sweatshirt at her. “Why can’t you just wear sweats and a T-shirt to bed like the rest of us?”

  “Well, somebody’s wound kind of tight.” She puts my high school volleyball sweatshirt on over her nightie. “You must be missing your Mr. Yum.”

  “No, no.” I bonk Nay on the head. “We’re not going there. He’s a dad, you know. We work together. He’s not my supervisor or anything, so at least it’s not a total no-no, but it’s just not smart.”

  Nay dries her hair with the towel. “No, I know what’s holding you back. Senor Choi.”r />
  “No, it’s not Benjamin. I’m over him.” Or at least, he’s over me.

  “Mm-hm. Sure. Well, he’s not at that level with what’s-her-name yet either.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  I scrunch up my nose.

  “Seriously, we had breakfast at Millie’s this morning, and they came separately.”

  “That’s your proof that they aren’t sleeping together?” I’m a little hurt that I wasn’t invited to Millie’s, too, and I pretend that’s all that’s bothering me. “It’s just a matter of time. You know that and I know that.”

  “But Ellie, you have this African god in front of you. And he’s older. More experienced. He’ll probably take you to places you have never been before.”

  “And what if I don’t want to go there?”

  “Then move out the way, girl!”

  Nay jabs me in the stomach, and we both dissolve into giggles. We end up talking for another two hours, all silliness and nonsense that has nothing to do with Jenny Nguyen or the LAPD.

  • • •

  I could sleep in the whole day, but I wake up when it’s still technically morning. I try to go back to sleep, but the sun is too much. I put on my glasses and look past the foot of my bed into the living room. Nay is drooling on one of my seat cushions, and on my volleyball sweatshirt. My tossing and turning has made Shippo even more hyper, so I go get cleaned up and put in my contacts.

  When I get out of the bathroom, Shippo, who is leashed, and Nay, now wearing jeans, are both waiting for me.

  “Breakfast?” Nay sleepily suggests, but I know I’m probably buying.

  I drive both of them in the Green Mile to pick up a couple of giant red velvet cupcakes from Auntie Em’s. Shippo is just happy to have his head hanging out of the open window. His eyes narrow slightly as the wind blows into his face. I love that look on him—he gives off a professorial aura, as if he is deep in thought.

  Back home, we polish off the cupcakes with some Diet Coke. Breakfast of champions.

  “Oh,” Nay says, sucking the cream cheese frosting off her fingers. “I wanted to show you some photos of this guy that I met in the gym.”

  “When did you start going to the gym?”

  “They have a Jacuzzi and sauna there.” Of course, no exercise involved.

  She begins to flip through the photos on her phone, an older model that causes her all sorts of consternation. I think a woman who now relies on buses as her main mode of transportation shouldn’t be worried about the features of her cell phone, but hey, that’s just me.

  I look over her shoulder as she goes through her photo archives. “Wait, stop,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Go back a couple. Yeah, yeah. The cover of Jenny’s census notebook.”

  “You mean her Botan Rice Candy stickers? Cute, huh?”

  “They look familiar.” I squint to try to make out the images of the stickers, then ask Nay to send the photo to my e-mail address while I turn on my laptop. Nay doesn’t ask me any questions. She just watches, waiting.

  I print out the photo and can now clearly see the drawings on the stickers. A monkey driving a fire truck. A dancing cucumber with eyes and a mouth. A couple of happy peppers, one red, the other green. A cow steering a speedboat.

  Then I get out the printouts of the last pages of Jenny’s notebook.

  Nay studies Jenny’s doodles, pointing to drawings on the page dated back in November and December. The days that she visited the projects. “These pictures are from the stickers,” she says. Exactly. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but something about the doodles look intentional. I remember the abacus we found in the car trunk, and after waiting for my interminably slow wireless Internet connection, I finally Google “Abacus,” and pull up a Wikipedia entry. Nay compares the image of the abacus, the rows and columns of beads, with the stickers on the census notebook. “Damn, Jenny created her own type of abacus, Botan Rice Candy style.”

  I nod. Nay and I watch a YouTube video on how to add using the abacus. Like Japanese and Chinese writing, you work right to left. The row of beads at the very top represent increments of five. Each column below has five individual beads. As you add, you move the beads down and then left. Easy.

  I can see Jenny there, outside the projects, with her little abacus. It probably looked like she was playing a video game, her fingers flying over those beads. But she wasn’t playing a game; she was counting. Counting how many people lived in there.

  Based on the key that she had made on the cover of her notebook, the numbers in November and December translate to 8,982, 9,148 and 9,251.

  “How many units do you think those projects have?”

  “I have no idea,” Nay says.

  Neither do I.

  To the uninitiated, the Adams Corridor Project may look like any kind of housing development. Pink two-story units sprinkled around grass and even a few palm trees to make it look like LA. But there’s been a long history of violence there involving gangs and drugs, enough so that every PPW frat brother and sorority sister stays the heck away from the projects.

  I look up the number of units on a website page. Six hundred. Taking the first number, dividing it by six hundred, rounding it to the closest whole number: fifteen.

  Nay swears and I frankly don’t care enough to pinch her. “That’s a hell of a lot of people to squeeze into one small apartment.”

  I nod. Odds are that only some of the units are over-occupied, but that still means there could be fifty to even a hundred people in a single unit. I have heard of these kinds of things happening—undocumented workers paying two hundred dollars for a temporary space the size of a mattress.

  “Why was Jenny using this elaborate method to count the people in there?” I wonder out loud. “Doodles, an abacus—it’s a lot of work.”

  “To be cute?”

  “I don’t think that Jenny was like that, Nay.” That sounds so strange now. Nay had initially remembered Jenny better than I had, but now I’m the one talking about her as if she had been a close friend. The more I’ve looked into her life, the closer I’ve felt to her.

  “She was hiding the numbers,” I say.

  “Yeah.” Nay takes a swig of her Diet Coke. “But why?”

  “Packing that many people in one unit is obviously illegal. Maybe she was being threatened to keep quiet.”

  “Why don’t you ask her boss?”

  “No, they won’t tell us anything about her work. Cortez already tried it. He was shut down. They claimed that their work is protected under the Constitution.”

  “Sheesh.” Nay pulls at my sweatshirt, which she’s still wearing.

  All this thinking gets me hungry again. I go into the kitchen and rummage through the cupboards. Score. Crackers from when I was sick a couple of months ago and two cans of tuna. As I mix the tuna with some pickles and mayonnaise, I think about Jenny and the projects.

  Could she have been killed over this? Clearly it was something she was worried enough about to disguise, but it still didn’t seem like anything worth killing a person over. . . . And what about Benjamin? His tutoring center is right on the premises. He must have noticed all these hundreds of people going back and forth. Didn’t he think something was fishy?

  I return to the living room with our brain food.

  “This is way weird,” Nay says, referring to Jenny’s census notebook.

  I agree. Most definitely.

  “This chick was into some heavy stuff,” she declares.

  Was this the reason that Jenny was trying to get a City Hall job? Tuan claimed that she rejected politics, but then why did she seem interested in redistricting? Didn’t one of those e-mails Rickie got say that Jenny was seen at a redistricting meeting on the day of her death?

  My head starts to hurt, and Nay gets restless.

  A break is in order. After Nay takes a shower and changes out of my sweatshirt and into her own clothes, we walk over to the local discou
nt movie theater, which shows films on their last legs before they get released on Netflix and cable. It’s the kind of place where most of the torn seats have been repaired with duct tape, and your shoes stick to the floor. Since admission before six is four dollars each, we will definitely get what we pay for.

  Our choices are an animated film for kids, an action film way past its spoiler date, and a cheesy horror flick. We go for the cheese.

  The horror movie is stupid but scary, and does the trick. For an hour and a half, I don’t think about Jenny or Cortez.

  We are walking home on the cracked concrete sidewalk when Nay gets a text. “It’s Rickie. He wants to hang out.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “What should I tell him?” From Nay’s tone of voice, I know that she wants to include him. She’s a “the more, the merrier” type person.

  I shrug my shoulders. “If he wants to come over, he can.”

  Rickie lives in the Westlake area, a couple of blocks from MacArthur Park and the best pastrami joint in the city of Los Angeles. Living in Westlake is harsh. It’s wall-to-wall people in the streets, many of them now Central American immigrants. Rickie lives with three guys in a small apartment and tries to spend more time out of those tight quarters than in. From a distance, the park is pretty, with paddleboats and a fountain jetting out from the lake like a geyser, but it also has a long history of criminal activity and shoot-outs. My father told me that when they drained the lake to clean it back when he was in high school, the Parks and Rec workers found a small arsenal of weapons on the concrete bottom.

  Rickie arrives about forty-five minutes after his call, a small white box with grease stains in his hands.

  Nay greedily takes the box and opens it.

  “Empanadas!” Nay celebrates. “Cool.”

  There’s a haphazard pile of small turnovers. I’m hoping that my favorite, chicken, is inside some of them.