Murder on Bamboo Lane (19 page)

“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.”

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 have 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.

“She went to borrow something in Reserved Reading. That’s all. And then she returned the card to me on the spot.”

“But you said she had taken that quarter off, right? So why would she have to borrow something from the library?”

“I’m not sure.” Susana is as puzzled as I am. “Right afterward, she hugged me. Really hard. And she wasn’t a huggy type of person. She told me that she’d never forget what a great friend I had been to her.”

Susana tugs on her backpack, which is slipping off her shoulder. “We were supposed to go to Vegas the next weekend for my birthday. But you know what? Now I don’t think that she ever intended to go. I think she knew that might be the last time we’d see each other. She was actually saying good-bye.”

• • •

After speaking with Susana, I feel sick to my stomach. So sick that I can barely walk. I literally throw up in some bushes near the parking lot, and Shippo looks up at me with concern. He knows that something is not right with his master. Luckily, I have a half-filled water bottle in my car. Since the weather has been cold, the water is cool but tastes old and metallic.

I manage to get my phone out of my backpack. My hands are shaking as I press a number. “Are you home?” I say once I’ve made a connection. “Well, stay there. I’m coming right over.”

• • •

“When did it happen?” I push against Benjamin’s front door as soon as he unlocks it from the inside. I carry Shippo under my arm like a football while holding on to the old water bottle.

“What are you talking about?” He stands there, barefoot, in a T-shirt and ripped jeans. He glances down at the dog and then back at me.

“You know. The thing that you’ve been feeling so guilty about.” We barge into his apartment, and I release Shippo onto Benjamin’s hardwood floor. “I just spoke to Susana, Jenny’s best friend. She told me,” I lie.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, closing the door behind us.

“You mean you didn’t sleep with Jenny while we were still together?”

There’s a long silence, too long for my taste. “Define
together
, Ellie.”

“No!” I throw the old water bottle against his wall, and it knocks down one of his Brazilian masks. The noise of the mask clattering onto the floor scares Shippo into Benjamin’s bedroom. The lid of the bottle has popped off, splashing water on the wood floor. I’m shocked by my anger. I thought that I had moved on.

Benjamin, on the other hand, doesn’t respond with the same passion. Defeated and pressed down, he wipes up the spilled water with an old T-shirt before addressing me. “I’m so, so sorry, El. I never meant for you to find out like this. I wanted to tell you. But you and I were already falling apart.” I feel like the walls of Benjamin’s apartment are caving in. I cannot breathe.

“So when did this happen?” I repeat. Probably when I had just started working at Central Division, I figure.

“You were just so busy, obsessed with work.”

Oh no, he is not going down that road. “Don’t blame this on me.” I deserve better than that. “And I suppose Jenny gave you her sob story about her big bad boyfriend.”

“He hurt her, you know. During some argument.”

“And that gave you the right to cheat on me?”

Benjamin’s face has lost all its color. It’s pasty white and his eyes seem to be sunken in. “I didn’t mean for it to happen, you know. We were just hanging out in the bar, and . . .”

“Is that why you came over after Jenny got killed? You wanted to make sure that I didn’t find out, so you cast suspicion on Tuan and these protesters who were supposedly after him?”

“No,” Benjamin bunches up the wet T-shirt. “I was honestly concerned about you. I don’t trust Tuan.”

Oh yeah, manly macho Benjamin. He was so worried for me that he sacrificed himself and slept with another woman.

I realize Benjamin is right about one thing. “I knew that things weren’t working out,” I finally admit. “But I never thought that you were the type of guy to take the easy way out.”

• • •

The 101 is wall-to-wall traffic. If I had been thinking straight, I would have taken the streets.

I sandwich my phone in between the car visor and the top of the windshield and put it in speaker mode. I press a number, and my call automatically goes to voice mail.

I want to yell into the phone, “You’re right, Cortez. There’s nothing to this case. It’s a freakin’ nightmare.” Instead, I hang up without leaving a message. Shippo scurries up the side of the closed door to look out the window. Even he doesn’t want to be around me right now.

I can’t put into words how I really feel at this moment. It’s awful. Unacceptable for a policewoman, as well as for a human being. A part of me is so, so happy that Jenny Nguyen is gone from this world. Yes, right now I am relieved that she is dead.