Murder on Bamboo Lane Read online

  “No,” I tell my aunt. “Actually, Detective Williams was informed that the department won’t be aggressively pursuing this case.” I frown. “But we can’t just give up now. We’re close, Aunt Cheryl. I can feel it.” You owe me.

  In the end, I get what I want. Forty-eight more hours to investigate Jenny’s murder.

  • • •

  The next morning, I call Valerie Ahmed at the Census to give her the address of Jenny’s relatives in Vietnam.

  “I appreciate this so much. We’ve collected some money and plan to send over a special gift,” she says.

  “Ah, Ms. Ahmed, I also wanted to ask you . . . Remember you mentioned that you wrote a recommendation letter for Jenny? Did you ever find it?”

  “No, I haven’t come across it yet. I’m sorry.”

  “Does the name Blue Flag Swimwear—or Garrett Mancuso—sound familiar to you?”

  “Mancuso. Mancuso. That might be it. I believe that she had met him at a Redistricting Commission meeting. She wanted a job with his company. That’s right. I thought that she would want to work for a councilman instead, based on her work for the Census. But she was after something altogether different.”

  • • •

  Sometimes a uniform is all it takes. A doctor’s white coat to make you think that you are in good medical hands. A polo shirt with a big box store’s logo to give customers the impression that you actually know what items are on sale. A police uniform, even one with shorts, also does the trick, at least with the receptionist at Blue Flag Swimwear. She allows me to barge into her boss’s office, located on the ground level of the five-story brick warehouse building.

  I recognize the man at the desk immediately. His receding hairline is more noticeable in person.

  Garrett Mancuso looks up from the document that he is reading. “Are you here for the ad shoot?”

  What? I think. Isn’t the word POLICE emblazoned on the back of my shirt a big enough clue?

  “No, I’m Officer Rush. I work for the Central Division.”

  Mancuso puts down his paper and checks me out over his reading glasses. “Sorry. You’re too good looking to be a cop.”

  I’m surprised by this middle-aged man’s comment. Who put this sleazy guy on the Redistricting Commission?

  “You do look familiar to me,” he says, perhaps remembering me from the Metro Club or the station.

  “I’m actually here to discuss a case with you. A homicide case.”

  “Don’t they have detectives for that?” He glances at his watch and gets up from his chair. “I have a shoot to go to. Follow me.”

  Apparently, Mancuso is used to getting women to follow him, and I’m annoyed to discover that I’m no different. We walk through a long hallway covered with photos of celebrities posed with a more lustrously coiffed Garrett Mancuso; the covers of some Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues; and memorabilia of international travel, including a group shot of what looks to be the Vietnamese trade delegation, based on our smiling mayor kneeling in the front row.

  At the back of the hallway we enter a rickety elevator with old-fashioned folding doors. I feel like I’m in the middle of 1930s New York City not modern-day Los Angeles. I keep one hand on my club.

  The elevator reaches the fourth floor, and Mancuso pulls back the accordion metal gate and pushes open the door. We enter a large room illuminated by professional lighting equipment. In the center stands a young woman about my age in a bright yellow swimsuit. She is holding a half-eaten banana.

  “Is she our next one?” asks a bespectacled photographer. Next to him is another man, scrawny with a long neck, who holds a clipboard.

  Mancuso raises his eyebrows toward me as if to say, See? “No, she’s an actual cop. Here about a murder.”

  “Wow. Sounds sexy,” says the long-necked man.

  I don’t have time for this. “Did you know this woman?” I ask Mancuso, holding up the MISSING flyer, which is folded to reveal just Jenny’s face.

  “Oh, that one.” Mancuso sits down on a stool and rubs his eyes, as if he has just heard a good joke. “She applied for a job as my assistant. Doesn’t get a call back and then comes here, accusing me of having an affair with her mother in Vietnam. C’mon, do I look like I’d touch anything that old on the vine? I don’t care how good her mother looks.”

  I take out my phone and show him a photo of the box of panties. “Do you make this line of lingerie?”

  “Yeah, it’s custom-made for a boutique in Beverly Hills. So?”

  “This particular box was found in Jenny Nguyen’s car. It was likely given to Jenny’s mother during your trade mission to Vietnam.”

  Mancuso shrugs. “So? I didn’t bring those to Asia.”

  “Well, then, why did Jenny’s mother have it in her possession?”

  “How should I know? Maybe she ordered them online. Maybe she was making knockoffs. Hell, Beachum brought over a ton of samples of products made in Los Angeles. Maybe he was the one who gave it to her.”

  • • •

  “I thought you weren’t talking to us anymore,” Rickie says over the phone. I’m actually surprised he even bothered to pick up—maybe plain curiosity?

  “It’s only Benjamin I’m not talking to. Anyway, I was just in a bad mood that day.” I walk over to the bicycle rack where I locked my wheels. “What do you know about Councilman Wade Beachum?”

  “A dinosaur. I mean, how many years has he been on the council? He doesn’t even trim his ear hair.”

  “He just turned sixty, Rickie.” Rickie thinks anyone past fifty is a relic.

  “Well, the commission is messing with his district, so he’ll be out sooner or later. But I heard he may run for mayor. If he wins, we are so screwed.”

  “Do you know anything about his personal life?”

  “Well, he’s married, but barely acts like it. He has serious yellow fever. Whenever his wife isn’t around, he’s always flirting with Asian babes.”

  “Did you know his aide, Teena Dang? Do you think they’re having a thing?”

  “Ew. I don’t think someone as fine as Teena Dang would do the nasty with Mr. T-Rex.”

  “But you know, power can be an aphrodisiac.”

  “Maybe, but she’s the one calling the shots.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Okay, so when Benjamin and I went to the city council meeting to lobby for more funding for our after-school tutoring program, Teena kept going to the councilman’s side to tell him how to vote. She was pulling the strings, dude. It was like the councilman was her puppet.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “She went to PPW.”

  “She did?”

  “A little before our time. But she majored in Asian studies.”

  “What is she anyway? Chinese?” I ask.

  “No, Vietnamese American. She’s actually super fluent in Vietnamese. I think she even did her senior thesis on the Vietnamese apparel trade. Spent some time there doing research. That girl is going places.”

  • • •

  “Hey, you can’t just go in there,” the girl receptionist peeps like a newborn bird. It’s obvious that she got new instructions from her boss: Beware of bicycle cop.

  I ignore her and keep walking toward the narrow hallway leading to the elevator in Blue Flag’s headquarters. I stop at the photo of the trade delegation in Vietnam. I scan the faces. The mayor, conspicuously in the front, of course. Councilman Beachum, at least six feet tall, standing in the back. There are quite a few Asian faces in the group, too, but there, on the far right side is who I am looking for: Teena Dang.

  “What the hell are you doing here again?” Mancuso has come out of his cave, baring his blinding white veneers. “Why do I even have a receptionist?”

  The long-necked man with the clipboard follows along. “Eye candy,” he replies.

  “Oh yeah. So what do you want now?” Mancuso asks me. “This can be considered harassment.”

  I dispense with all niceties. �
�This photo is of the trade delegation leaving Vietnam?”

  “Yeah, at the Tan Son Nhat Airport. What of it?”

  “I see Teena Dang was there. She claimed that she didn’t go on the trip.”

  “Great-looking legs,” he says dreamily.

  I feel like snapping my fingers in front of his eyes to wake him from his reverie.

  He continues. “She showed up at the tail end of our trip. Councilman Beachum needed her to handle something special.”

  “Involving what?”

  “Hell if I know. She’s like a beautiful genie in a bottle. Rub and she appears like magic.”

  My radio then starts squawking. I silently translate the codes. Dead body found. Coroner dispatched. The streets mentioned place it a couple of blocks north of Staples Center near the 110 on-ramp entrance.

  “I need to go,” I excuse myself. Mancuso and his assistant are only too happy to see me leave.

  • • •

  When I arrive at Central Division, the police station is abuzz. Johnny and Armine, who were first on the crime scene, have returned from answering the initial call. One of these recycling scavengers who collect aluminum cans, plastic bottles and cardboard boxes had been tugging at a tarp placed deep inside a dirt crevice near a side street. And—surprise!—what appeared was a dead body, there for at least a couple of days.

  “It was awful,” says Armine, who, like me, hasn’t seen that many corpses. “A Hispanic male in his teens.”

  Oh no, I think. Not Ramon?

  “I’d say older, mid-twenties,” Johnny reports. “It looked like he had been shot a few times in his stomach. He had a huge scar on his face.” Johnny places a curved finger on his chin. “I—I think that I’ve seen him before. At the projects. I think his name is Smiley Parker.”

  TWENTY

  SILVER LAKE BOULEVARD

  Could the victim be the same angry, scarred young man I’d seen at the projects? I wonder. Once they run his prints, a quick ID can be made. But it’ll be a few days before it’s official. The guy on the couch at the projects looked like a gangbanger; they usually didn’t last that long on the streets before being sent to prison or the morgue. Was all of this just coincidence?

  Nevertheless, Mancuso’s story about Teena and the Vietnamese mission makes it even more important for me to find the person who knew Jenny the best: Susana Perez, the BFF. Jenny must have mentioned something to her about her mother’s death. Something that Susana herself doesn’t realize could be a clue to solving Jenny’s murder. One huge obstacle: I don’t know where Susana lives anymore. Second huge obstacle: I’m the last person she wants to talk to.

  “Have you seen Susana Perez on campus recently?” I ask Nay. Shippo’s short legs are keeping up with us as we walk around the Silver Lake Reservoir that evening. Nay wants to “commune more with nature.” (Never mind that the reservoir is totally manmade, with a concrete bottom.) Turns out the cute guy from the gym lives in Silver Lake and Nay wants to increase the chances of running into him.

  “No, but I think that she’s a science major, anyway, so she’d be on the other side of campus.” Nay is out of breath after going one hundred yards. She is wearing something called a skort—a combination shorts and a skirt, like tennis players wear—and brand-new sneakers.

  “Maybe she’s not going to school anymore,” I say, tightening my grip on Shippo’s leash as I spy another small dog coming our way.

  “Oh no, she’s still in school, I can guarantee that.”

  I give Nay a sideways look. How can she be so sure?

  Nay stops and gulps in big breaths while placing her hands on her thighs. “I know her peer counselor. Remember I told you not to ask about Susana’s status? Well, she’s undocumented. She just found out when she started applying to college.”

  “I figured, but what do you mean she just found out? How could she not know?”

  Nay shrugs. “She was just a little kid when her family came over from Peru on tourist visas and just never went back. It’s not like they had the money to be taking international trips anyway, so it was only when Susana started filling out college applications that her parents dropped the bomb about how she wasn’t here legally. She spent months going through this special state program to be eligible for scholarships and all. She had to collect tons of paperwork to be eligible. Susana’s not going to throw all that away, no matter how scared she is.”

  Nay reveals this with such conviction, I can’t help but believe her.

  After taking a couple more deep breaths, she says, “Oh, guess who e-mailed me today?”

  I have no idea.

  “The jerk, Ken Gogoshian! He sent me a receipt for his new Android. He wants me to pay for it!”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I sent him my own bill. Five hundred dollars for an afternoon I’ll never get back in my life. I say that we are even.”

  • • •

  On the ride back home, I remember the textbook that Susana had at the coffee shop in South Gate. It was butt-ugly, a putrid green-brown color and the staple of every engineering student at PPW. I get back on my molasses-slow computer and locate the textbook on PPW’s bookstore’s buy-back website. There it is—Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering: An Integrated Approach. Wow, it costs over a hundred dollars—and that’s for a used edition.

  I find the class that the textbook is linked to. It’s one of those gigantic classes that meets every day from seven to nine at night. I look at the clock on my computer. If I leave now, I may just make it as class is ending.

  A crowd of students spill out of the doors of the auditorium. When Susana sees me and Shippo waiting for her, she starts biting her nails. “What are you doing here?”

  She’s cut her hair short, which makes it even wavier than before, with tendrils over her forehead and one curl behind her ear. She comes close to looking cute, if she wasn’t so doom and gloom.

  “I need to ask you a few more questions.”

  “No, no,” she says. “I can’t help you.” She walks briskly, clutching her backpack in front of her like a piece of protective armor. We follow her toward the parking lot, Shippo’s feet padding against the asphalt.

  “My boyfriend’s coming to pick me up. And he won’t be happy to see you,” she warns me. “I thought you weren’t going to tell the police about what I told you.”

  So, Cortez had followed up on my lead on Alfie’s Towing.

  “We had to move, too, after what happened to me.” Susana’s hands are trembling.

  “I am so, so sorry.” My eyes become moist. “If I could have done anything to prevent it, I would have.”

  “Why did those people who threatened me mention your name?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. Did you recognize anything about them?”

  “They pushed me to the ground right away and covered my eyes. I think there were two of them. Only one of them talked. His voice sounded young, but I had never heard it before.”

  “I know this is hard. I’m not going to pretend that it’s not hard. But you have to file a police report. For Jenny’s sake.”

  “I can’t. I can’t. You don’t understand.”

  “I know about your immigration status. The LAPD won’t hand you over to the feds. It’s not like you’ve committed a crime.”

  “Can you promise me that? Put it in writing?”

  I swallow. That’s beyond my purview. I can offer my word, but I know that’s not worth much.

  “Jenny was on the edge of something very big,” I say.

  “Did it have to do with her mother?”

  I’m surprised that Susana has mentioned Cam Hanh without my prompting.

  “That’s what the guy asked me,” she says. “What did I know about what happened to Jenny’s mother in Vietnam? I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I told them so. He asked me about Jenny’s cell phone, computer. I don’t know where they are! I assumed they were stolen when she got shot. Where was her car? Did she hav
e a diary? They threatened to kill my boyfriend if I didn’t tell them the truth. I didn’t know where the car was, so I told them about the scrapbook that Jenny was keeping. But I never even looked at it, so I wasn’t sure what was inside.”

  Susana’s face is pinched. She pulls on one of her curls and pushes it back behind her ear.

  “I met her mother once, before she went home to Vietnam. She was so beautiful. She looked like an actress. Jenny was so, so proud of how her mom had gone back to her homeland to start her own business.” Susana’s eyes filled with tears. “Her mother’s death really hit her hard. Jenny used to have such a great sense of humor. What do you call it? Deadpan humor. I mean, she was so funny. I don’t know if you remember.”

  Of course I don’t. I barely exchanged a whole sentence with Jenny. But I nod anyway to keep Susana talking.

  “No matter how tight a spot we got ourselves into, Jenny was always able to crack a joke. But when she came back from Vietnam after her mom died, no more. She wasn’t the same after that. Fought with Tuan a lot. She said he actually pushed her once and she hurt her wrist, but I think she wanted a reason to break up. She started partying. Drinking. Sleeping around with random guys.”

  Shippo sniffs the cuffs of Susana’s jeans, and his attention seems to calm her down. Cracking a faint smile, she bends down and pets Shippo’s head softly. She then looks up at me. “Jenny never would do that before, sleep around. She hardly trusted anyone. She never used to go out by herself, and then she started hanging out at that bar on Hill.”

  “You mean the place that has those reggae bands?”

  Susana nods.

  My mind starts to go wild, but I stop myself. I need to focus. Think about Jenny, the victim. “Susana, do you remember anything else out of the ordinary the last time that you saw her?”

  Susana places a hand on her chin, and I notice that most of her nails have been bitten to the quick. “Yeah, I do remember one thing that was kind of weird. It was a week before my birthday. She asked to meet me at the library. She wanted to borrow my library card; since she was taking a break from school, hers had expired.”

  I listen carefully, curiously. Why in the world would Jenny have needed access to a PPW library card? “What did she do with it?” I ask stupidly.