Murder on Bamboo Lane (16 page)

“His Vietnamese is good,” Nay whispers to me.

“It is? Can you tell what he’s saying?”

“No idea. But it sounds authentic.”

He finally says good-bye in Vietnamese—
tam biet
, which even I can recognize—and returns my phone to me.

Both Nay and I sit breathless, waiting.

He delicately presses the tips of his fingers together. “The mother was found dead four months ago in Ho Chi Minh City,” he finally says. “They believe her death was at the hands of an American from Los Angeles.”

NORTH FIGUEROA

Neither Nay nor I say anything as Father Kwame tells us what he has heard from Jenny’s family. Nay keeps bringing her cup to her lips, even though it’s obvious that she’s all out of tea. I, on the other hand, have retrieved my notebook from my backpack and am furiously writing down everything Father Kwame is reporting.

“I spoke to Jenny’s aunt, her mother’s sister. She told me that Jenny’s mother, Kam Hanh, was found dead in her bedroom last October. She had obviously been with someone. A white man, she says.”

Shiiit
, I think.
The mother, Kam Hanh, was possibly killed
, I write.

“This was at the same time a trade mission from Los Angeles was in Ho Chi Minh City. Kam Hanh had been excited because she used to live in Los Angeles, and thought she could make some good connections. She had started a clothing manufacturing business a few years ago upon returning to her homeland.”

Father Kwame adjusts his glasses to read the notes that he himself had taken during the call. “She had volunteered to be part of the welcoming committee. Apparently, things were going well. She told her sister that she had made an important contact that would lead to very big things. Then the morning after a social event, she was found dead by her sister.”

“What happened?” I ask.

Father Kwame hesitates before he tells us. “She was strangled.”

“Damn,” Nay says.

“Did they find who killed her?”

Father Kwame shook his head. “Not even a witness.”

“How about DNA?” Nay asks eagerly, educated on forensic television programs.

I turn on my phone and connect to the web so that I can do some quick and dirty research on DNA facilities in Vietnam. Just like at my place, though, the wireless connection here is super slow.

Meanwhile, Father Kwame takes the time to ask Nay some questions about her and her family.

“I was born in Long Beach,” she tells him. “We moved to Lakewood when I was in elementary school.”

Nay spends an inordinate amount of time listing her older brother’s bad habits and expressing how relieved she is that he and his family have finally moved out.

“It’s just you and your mother now?”

“Yeah, Pops took off when I was born. Guess he thought that I might be too much to handle.” Nay, as always, tries to make a joke of it, but I know that being abandoned by her father is a sensitive subject.

I let their conversation continue for a while before I finally jump in.

“It looks like Ho Chi Minh City just got a DNA testing center a couple of years ago. It’s probably just in its infancy.”

“But they do have one,” Nay says. “So there could be a chance . . . ?”

“Well, you would also need the DNA of the suspect to make a match,” adds Father Kwame.

Good point. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the police over there glossed over the whole thing,” I say. “I mean, here’s a delegation of politicians and businesspeople who want to invest in your city and country. There’s not much incentive to accuse one of them of killing a local woman.” I’m sure the mayor’s trade mission didn’t force any of its members to donate any bodily fluids or tissues to aid a foreign police investigation. They may not even have bothered asking.

Nay is deep in thought. This is a new look for her. “How many people were on the trip?” she asks.

I go back to my phone and look it up. “A lot. Thirty-five,” I say. Nay and Father Kwame’s faces fall in unison. “But only twenty were men.”

I scan the list. It includes the mayor, and other political leaders and businesspeople. Could one of them have really left Kam Hanh for dead and come back to the States as if nothing had happened?

Nay excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Actually, she announces, “Have to pee.”

I blush, but Father Kwame smiles and points a finger down the hallway.

After Nay is gone, he says, “Well, it seems that your friend problem has largely resolved itself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your last visit. You said that some of your friends were holding you back.”

“Oh yeah. Well, it was actually my ex-boyfriend. Not Nay.”

“It’s good to have friends who can hold you lightly.”

“What do you mean,
lightly
?”

“Hold you light enough so you can change, grow. Give you enough room to evolve.”

Does Nay hold me lightly? I’ve never really analyzed our relationship. She doesn’t judge me, that’s for sure. But she also tells me if I’m doing wrong. I don’t really think about how good of a friend I’m being to her. I mean, I offer my couch to her, buy her the occasional lunch or snack. But emotionally? Not sure.

When we leave, Father Kwame extends his hand to Nay. “Good to meet you,” he says.

“You’re the coolest celibate man I’ve ever met.”

Father Kwame doesn’t know what to do with Nay’s compliment. I just cover my eyes.

• • •

I can’t wait to call Cortez with this information, but Nay and I decide to hang out afterward to debrief. She has her mother’s car back—I guess her brother couldn’t handle Nay’s bellyaching. I think that she was also practically stalking her brother, calling and leaving messages every fifteen minutes: “Give me back my car, you stealer!” When she wasn’t calling, she was texting:
SCUMBAGSCUMBAGSCUMBAG
. In that way, Nay and my Aunt Cheryl are similar. They usually get what they want by any means necessary.

I buy Nay a mocha at Café de Leche. While she slurps, I take out my notebook and study some of its pages.

She glances at my notes. “That’s not how you write it.”

“What?”

“Jenny’s mom’s name. It’s Cam with a
C
, not a
K
.”

“Thanks,” I say. Nay’s definitely more savvy about Southeast Asian languages than I am.

“I just don’t get it,” I say.

“Get what?”

“Who Jenny really was. I mean, at first I was thinking that she was some activist like Benjamin, you know? Looking out for the little people at the projects. But the people there seem to think that Jenny was nothing like that. The project’s tenant organizer even claimed that Jenny was pretty much only looking out for herself.”

“Well, she was all alone here. She needed the money. The girl was living out of a car, and not even a car she owned. She needed to look out for herself.”

That was true.

“Tuan insists that she wasn’t seeing anyone else, but then she has these expensive panties in her trunk.”

Nay purses her lips.

“Let me see those again.”

I turn on my phone and locate the photos of the box of French underwear. Nay brings the screen close to her face to study the images.

“You know, I didn’t notice this before, but this is last season’s packaging.”

“So?” I’m amazed she can even tell this stuff.

“So these panties are from last season. Not this season. And you know what else? These aren’t Jenny’s.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Don’t you remember how tiny that girl was? She was a size two, if that. These are a size six.”

Nay flips through a few photos before the picture of the panty box. I rest my chin on her shoulder as I also look on.

She stops at the
Vietnamese
dress.

“That was in the same box as the panties,” I say.

“I love
áo dài
,” she comments. It looks a lot like those tight Chinese traditional dresses, only this one has long sleeves.

“Yeah, so pretty, huh?”

She squints. “The dress wasn’t Jenny’s, either.”

“How do you know?”

“It looks old school. And this dragon-and-phoenix motif? That’s usually for weddings.”

I think back to the label on the box.
CH Clothing
, it had said. I thought
CH
was short for
City Hall
, but maybe it stood for something else. Like
Cam Hanh
.

Jenny had a special box for her dead mother’s clothes. In a way, it makes sense. Jenny had no family here, so it figured that she’d want to hang on to some personal keepsakes. But panties from a high-end lingerie shop? It seems a little pervy.

“Maybe she was thinking of selling them? They still look brand new,” Nay says.

“Why didn’t she, then? She obviously needed the money.”

A server brings by a toasted cheese bagel with a side of jalapeno cream cheese spread. We split the bagel, and it suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t had any food in my stomach all day.

“You know, you’ve really inspired me, Ellie,” Nay says as she crunches on her half of the bagel.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I’ve decided to change majors. From sociology to communications. I want to be a journalist.”

A bit of jalapeno hits my tongue in the wrong place and I grimace.

Nay continues, “I like all of this. This asking questions stuff. But you’re right, I don’t want to look like you everyday—I mean in terms of the uniform—and I probably couldn’t pass the physical. But the rest of it, the rest of it is really . . . stimulating.”

The skeptic side of me starts to kick in. Newspapers are closing down. Hardly anyone our age watches broadcast news, unless it’s over the Internet. Bloggers basically work their butts off for free. But more than that, Nay’s a fifth-year senior. Changing majors now may mean that she’ll be way old, maybe even twenty-five, by the time she graduates.

Then I think about Father Kwame’s advice to hold on to my friends lightly so they can grow. If Nay feels like this is the best direction for her, I have to support her.

“Nay, you’d be a great journalist. I can totally see you on TV.” I say this with great confidence. And as I’m saying it, I realize I really mean it.

My compliment makes an impact, and fuels Nay to further play Nancy Drew.

“You know, if you want to check out the store where they sell those panties, I can take you there on Saturday.”

Sure, I agree. What else do I have going on?

• • •

As soon as I’m by myself, I give Cortez a call. He doesn’t pick up his phone, and I immediately think,
Maybe he’s on a date
.

I decide not to leave a message. It can wait until tomorrow.

When I get home, I try to do some cleaning. The house is a disaster area. I’ve lived there seven months now, and I don’t think that I’ve mopped the floor more than three times.

Unlike the expansive loft Tuan is living in, my house is teeny-tiny. In fact, the whole building could literally be plopped into his living room. It’s five hundred square feet, if even that, including all the strange cubbyholes and shallow closets.

I begin by tackling my refrigerator and quickly fill a couple of garbage bags with takeout containers of old leftovers.

Once I’ve cleaned the inside of the refrigerator, I start on the outside. Underneath a Thai restaurant’s takeout menu, I find a photo of Benjamin and me from our trip to Hawaii. Wearing snorkeling masks, we both look like dorks: Benjamin with his wet hair spiked up like a cockatiel’s crown and me looking like a wet, smiling seal. I throw the photo in the trash and then quickly retrieve it. Even though we’re over as a couple, the vacation did happen. It’s not like a computer hard drive. It cannot be erased.

Instead, I toss the photo into a box in the corner, along with other Benjamin-related paraphernalia. While I continue my cleaning and purging, I get a phone call on my landline.

I pick up, not even bothering to say hello because I’m expecting to be greeted by a robocall. But it’s a human being: Dad, sounding a little desperate: “You better come over to the house.” He doesn’t explain exactly what’s going on, but for my dad, aka “Mr. Sunshine,” to call me like this means it’s serious. I waste no time in driving to Eagle Rock, which takes me seventeen minutes.

When I arrive, it looks like my parents are having a yard sale. There are piles of clothes, a laptop computer. Then I notice that it’s all Noah’s stuff.

I park the Green Mile and go up to Noah, who’s sitting on the curb as if he’s a criminal. He’s pulled his long-sleeved shirt over his hands.

“What the heck is going on?” I ask.

Noah doesn’t bother to answer and just looks at me. He’s not crying, but his eyes are bloodshot.

“Oh no,” I say. He’s obviously been found out. He
is
a criminal.

Dad, meanwhile, is also outside, pacing back and forth on the driveway.

“Are the police involved?” I ask.

Dad shakes his head. “No, just your mother.”

But we both know that she can be the scariest enforcer of them all.

I go into the house and check Grandma Toma’s room. She’s holed up in there watching a UCLA basketball game. “It’s Looney Tunes in this house,” she warns me.

Next I go upstairs. Mom has single-handedly dismantled Noah’s room. There’s only a bare mattress on his floor. His bed frame has been taken apart and shoved in the back of the hallway.

“Did you know about this?” She shakes a plastic bag of weed in front of my face.

I can’t lie, so I don’t respond.

Mom lets out a “Hmph,” and adds, “And you’re a so-called police officer.” As it turns out, Mom’s the real professional.

“Noah, come in here right now!” she yells out the open upstairs window. She then plows down the stairs to meet him at the front door and gestures for him to go into the kitchen. Dad, meanwhile, re-enters the house with Noah’s laptop and garbage bags full of clothes.

Mom has obviously watched one too many episodes of cable TV shows like
Scared Straight!
or
Intervention
. She forces Noah to sit at the kitchen table while she circles around it.

“So, who’s your dealer? Who’s been giving you this stuff?” She grips the bag of weed for emphasis.

Noah crosses his arms. He’s not going to crack.

“You’re going to stay at that table until you tell me.”

This is too painful to watch. I’m having flashbacks to the times Noah refused to eat his green vegetables. The impasses went on for days.

I intervene. “Mom, he doesn’t have a dealer. He’s been growing weed with Simon Lee and his older brother.”

Noah looks wounded. “Snitch,” he says under his breath.

“Simon Lee? The same Simon Lee whose parents always tell me is bound for MIT? The same Simon Lee who got almost a perfect score on his PSATs? I’m going to give them a piece of my mind.” She takes out her cell phone from her purse and places her reading glasses on her nose. She calls the Lee household and apparently gets ahold of a parent.