Murder on Bamboo Lane

by Naomi Hirahara

The one I’m most disappointed to see ditching school is Ramon, a good kid I know from my ex-boyfriend Benjamin’s tutoring program. He’s had a tough life—his father is dead and his mother is in jail. Even so, it’s only now, under his aunt’s care, that he’s been living in the same place for more than one year.

  Ramon and I are both dog lovers, maybe the only thing we have in common. I have Shippo, the fattest white Chihuahua mix in the world, and when Ramon’s not in school, he’s usually out walking with his beautiful pit bull, Romeo. When I asked him about Romeo today, though, his face fell. Something’s happened to Romeo that Ramon didn’t want to talk about. No Romeo equals no conversation.

  The meeting finally ends, and we all get out of our seats. All of us, that is, except me. Someone is blocking my way.

  “So, Rush.” Mac, who holds a clipboard, is working with our assistant watch commander on assignments for special-events patrols. Tomorrow begins the Chinese New Year parade festivities, and I prepare myself for the lousy assignment I’m going to be given.

  “Yes?” My back stiffens. For the past three festivals, I’ve had to circle porta-potties, and I know that a line of twenty-five porta-potties has been installed on North Broadway on the edge of Chinatown.

  “For the parade, I have you just east of North Broadway, by the park.”

  I let out a small sigh of annoyance, then think, Oh my God, did I really just do that?

  “What, you have a problem?”

  “No,” I say. I have no idea why Mac’s assigned to the bicycle unit. I had heard from Harrington that Mac was on the fast track for a promotion until something went wrong. He doesn’t like it here, that’s for sure. But why does he have to take it out on me?

  Sergeant Tim Cherniss, who is my supervisor, comes around, saving me from Mac. He asks how my day went, and I show him the flyer with Jenny’s face. “I know her,” I tell him. “I’d see her on campus when I was going to PPW.” I’m aware that Mac is still standing next to me. Doesn’t he have more assignments to give out to other people? “That contact e-mail address? It’s my friend’s.”

  “Well, see if a missing-person report was filed. That’s about the most you can do,” Tim says. “A lot of times they’re on the run from their families, boyfriends, creditors. Sometimes they just want a fresh start. As you know, being missing is not a crime.”

  I nod my head. “Yes, I’m sure she’ll turn up,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound sure at all.

  • • •

  “Mac’s really messing with my head.” I take another swig of my Sapporo. The bottle’s lip feels cool against mine and, for a minute, I miss my ex-boyfriend. I guess it’s been too long.

  “Fu—forget about him,” my best friend, Nay Pram, says. Her mom, with whom she lives, has been on her case for using four-letter words too much, so Nay’s been trying to clean up her vocab. She claims that her mother does her share of swearing in Khmer, and that it’s a lousy double standard. Then I remind Nay who’s paying the rent, and she tells me to pinch her every time she swears. But whenever I pinch her, she swears, so then I have to pinch her again.

  Nay and I have been best friends since we were in the same American studies class freshman year. She came in late and stumbled into the first available seat, which happened to be next to me. She, of course, didn’t have a pen handy—yes, I had an extra—needed notes of what had happened—yes, I’d e-mail her mine—and last of all, wanted to take me out for coffee—oops, forgot her wallet. That pretty much sums up our relationship for the past five years, except that I know she’d pretty much kill anyone to save my life.

  We sit at our usual place, Osaka’s, the ramen house on First Street in Little Tokyo. Nay’s drinking a Diet Coke, also as usual. Not because she’s trying to lose weight (well, to be honest, she could lose a few pounds), but because she actually likes the taste.

  “I can’t just forget about him,” I say. “I’m sick of getting porta-potty patrol.”

  “Pee-pee patrol, I like that,” Nay laughs. I am not amused, and she tries to cheer me up by saying, “What’s his name? Mac? Oh, oh—I can make a macaroni voodoo doll, and we can boil him. Feed him to Shippo.”

  “What? Poison my dog?”

  “Okay, well, maybe to Rickie, then.” Our friend Rickie Plata has a notoriously indiscriminate appetite. “Or better yet, we could throw it in a porta-potty.” Nay excuses herself to the restroom, and of course that’s the moment our food arrives. The bowls of ramen are way too hot to eat right away anyway, so I don’t mind waiting for her to return.

  Before Nay makes it back to her seat, Rickie himself appears in the doorway of the ramen house. He’s so tall that his Mohawk brushes the fabric doorway hanger.

  “Oh, so Officer Rush is gracing us with her presence tonight,” he says when he sees me. He slips in the seat across from me and immediately starts slurping down Nay’s ramen.

  “Hey, back off,” Nay calls from behind and sits next to Rickie. She reclaims her bowl but decides it’s still a little too hot.

  “Sorry.”

  “Actually, I was hoping that you’d be here, Rickie,” I say, quickly feeling that I’m really not.

  “Need your Rickie fix. I’m addicting.”

  I ignore him, and take the missing-person flyer out from my backpack. “I think that you know about this.”

  Rickie lifts an eyebrow, apparently impressed with my investigating skills.

  Silently, I point to the bottom, where it reads: Anyone with information, please contact . . . and Rickie’s e-mail address.

  “I know this girl,” Nay says, taking a break from her straw. “Remember, Ellie? She was in our comparative religion class. She’d be a senior now.” A fourth year, not a fifth year like Nay and Rickie.

  I nod. I thought I’d recognized her from an Asian Pacific Student Union event, but Nay’s right, the three of us had had a class together. I remember her as a girl who rarely smiled, but, who knows—maybe lightness would have won out if given a chance.

  “So what’s going on with her?” I ask Rickie after he places his ramen order.

  “I know her best friend, Susana. She was all distraught yesterday, saying that she thinks something bad’s happened to Jenny.” He sighs. “I was actually thinking of asking Jenny out sometime.”

  Nay and I exchange glances. She claims that Rickie has not fully come to terms with his sexuality, but I tell her that it’s none of our business. Because it isn’t.

  Even if I pretty much agree with her.

  My miso ramen’s finally cool enough, so I start eating while Rickie continues. “It was Susana’s twenty-first birthday a couple of days ago. They were apparently planning to go to Vegas, but Jenny didn’t show up.”

  “What? She was stood up?” Nay is appalled. When she turned twenty-one, she expected a full-on flash mob show on campus. I was in my third month of training at the academy, learning how to infiltrate a drug house. I had no time to coordinate a hundred-person dance number to Usher’s “OMG.” She still hasn’t forgiven me for that.

  “Yep. Jenny’s been totally incommunicado. Doesn’t answer calls, texts, Facebook, Twitter.”

  “Didn’t show up to class?”

  “She was taking the quarter off. Ran out of money.”

  Nay’s concentrating on her Osaka ramen special, leaving me to concentrate on Jenny.

  “Does she live at home?” I ask Rickie.

  “No. I don’t think she’s from around here.”

  “No roommates?”

  “No. I think she lived by herself. Actually, Susana was kind of hazy about that.”

  Strange, I thought. Why would this so-called best friend be vague about such an important detail? “If this Susana is so concerned, why isn’t her information on the flyer?”

  “I don’t know. She just kept telling me that it’s all complicated and she can’t get too involved, but she knows that something bad has happened to Jenny. So I told her I’d do what I could to help her out.”

  “She needs to file a
missing-person report.”

  “Oh, we did. I mean, not Susana, but Benjamin and I did.”

  I feel myself inadvertently blush at the mention of my ex, and hope that the alcohol flush already on my face masks my feelings.

  “We called up the police, gave them what info we had—kind of spotty and all—and it was all ‘Don’t call us again, we’ll call you.’ Something about being missing is not a crime.” Exactly what Tim had told me.

  “You should have called me,” I say. “I may be able to help. Maybe my aunt can do something.”

  Rickie then rests his hand over mine beside the steaming bowls of ramen. “Ellie, my dear, you’re among friends. Let’s be honest. You can’t help. You’re just a bicycle cop.”

  • • •

  I go home that night in a foul mood. Since I live in Highland Park, just over the hill from Dodger Stadium, I take the Gold Line light rail. My father has spent his whole life doing engineering for the Metro Rail system, so my brother and I are anomalies among most of our friends in LA—we actually know how to work mass transit.

  Of course, this being LA, I do also own a car. And what a car it is: a 1969 Buick Skylark. It’s bright green and the size of a small cargo ship.

  The car is a gift from Lita, short for abuelita, or grandma in Spanish. She’s my grandmother on my father’s side. She’s white but was a high school Spanish teacher for forty years. Instead of Dr. Seuss, she read the poems of Pablo Neruda to me as a baby. She’s the one who passed on to me a love for the Spanish language, much to the disappointment of my mother. (“Spanish? Why not Japanese? What are you going to do with a Spanish major? Teach high school Spanish like Lita?” I don’t mention anything to Mom about how she never really learned Japanese, and hasn’t had a day job for more than twenty years for that matter, because I don’t want to be disowned.)

  The Skylark was actually my grandfather’s, my dad’s dad, whom I’ve never met. In fact, I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. Lita just refers to him as her indisgression. Dad, who’s curious about most things, says that he doesn’t care to know anything about his bio dad. Lita filled the shoes of both parents, he claims, and there wasn’t room for anyone else. Knowing how Lita is, I believe him.

  It doesn’t make any logical sense to keep the Skylark. It gets about thirteen miles to the gallon and that’s freeway driving. I keep having to get multiple smog checks and pay for multiple adjustments to pass those multiple smog checks.

  And even though its body is like a plate of armor, there are no protective air bags. Benjamin calls it “the Green Mile” because riding in it may be the last mile of any passenger’s life. I feel that riding my bike and taking public transportation most of the time allows me this tangible connection to my grandfather, my own indiscretion.

  Anyway, tonight I get off at the Highland Park station and walk down a couple of blocks, one hand in the pocket of my special fanny pack for my Glock when I’m off duty. According to Nay, it’s a fashion disaster, but I need to make sure that I can easily get to my gun when I need it. Right now it’s already dark and my neighborhood isn’t the safest.

  I’m a few yards away from my small rental house when I see that the bedroom light is on. Not only that, the window is open. My heart begins to race. The first thing I think about is my dog. I can’t help but worry that something’s happened to Shippo; there’s no way he’d be quiet if an intruder had come into my house.

  I hug the outside wall with my back and edge over to the window. The curtains obscure my view inside, but I can see the shadow of a head. I sniff. Definitely pot. Piece of trash druggie robber. I tear the curtain down. “Police!” I shout as I squarely aim at the person in front of me.

  It’s my teenage brother, Noah, his hands in the air and a joint falling out of his mouth.

  TWO

  AVENUE 26

  “Man, I almost lost it there. You were pretty scary,” Noah says with what sounds like renewed respect. Guess I should pull a gun on him more often. “I thought maybe you might be at a stakeout or staying over at Benjamin’s.”

  “Noah, I’m on the bicycle unit, remember?” Although we do come across drug deals, it’s more by chance than anything planned out. I don’t mention anything about Benjamin. My family adores him—sometimes, I feel, more than they adore me. I know we’re over for good this time, but I can’t say it out loud to my family yet.

  “I didn’t give you a key to my place so that you could randomly come over and smoke weed. It was only for emergencies. To take care of you, huh, Shippo?” I look down at the only male creature in the house whom I can presently stand. Shippo wags his crazy corkscrew tail. “Call or even text me next time. And keep your pot out of my house. How much of this do you smoke on a regular basis anyhow?” I pick up the half-burned joint from the hardwood floor and aim it toward my toilet.

  “Hey, hey!” Noah calls out. “That’s domestically grown. All organic.”

  I miss the bowl, and Shippo makes a dive for the joint.

  “No, Shippo, no!” I grab the joint in time to properly flush it down the toilet.

  “You could really get me in trouble,” I scold Noah.

  “I’m sure there are plenty of cops who smoke weed.”

  I ignore Noah’s comment. “Where did you get it?”

  Noah leans back on my retro beanbag chair. His eyes are completely bloodshot. “Simon Lee. His brother grows it right there in his mom’s greenhouse. She has no idea what it is. She thinks it’s a varietal of the Chinese money tree.”

  “You know what marijuana will do to your brain.”

  “I know, I know. Cause paranoid schizophrenia. A gateway drug to ecstasy. You’re almost worse than Mom and Dad.”

  “I suppose you have them all fooled with your straight A’s,” I say.

  “I just give them what they want. It’s a fair trade.”

  I stare at Noah in disbelief. I don’t understand how he got so worldly, but Catholic boys’ school probably has something to do with it. I remember how adorable he was when he was five or six. Strangers always thought that he was Latino—“cute little Mexican boy.” Then they would see him with Mom and get totally confused.

  “I don’t think Mom and Dad know what you’re getting away with in this deal.” I take my fanny pack off and return the Glock to its special firearm compartment. “How did you get here, anyway?”

  “The 180, and then I walked and caught the 81.”

  “Not too smart.” Bus riding in the city of Los Angeles after dark can be treacherous for a teenage boy who looks like he has money but doesn’t.

  I pull the car keys out of my pocket and gesture for him to get up.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to drive you home.”

  “No, no. I’m sorry, okay? I just need a break from Mom. She’s driving me crazy. Let me sleep over tonight. She already thinks I’m over at Simon’s anyway.”

  “Nu-ah.”

  “You’re partially to blame, you know. Since you went blue collar with the LAPD, all this pressure is on me to make it academically. Mom keeps saying that she didn’t send you to private school to ride a bike at work.”

  “What else does she say?”

  “That it’s all Aunt Cheryl’s fault.”

  That argument again? It’s getting old, Mom, I say to myself. But Noah certainly knows what he is doing, because I relent. “Okay, but I have to get up early to go work the Chinatown parade. When I leave, you leave,” I tell him.

  • • •

  When I wake up at 4:30 a.m., the living room couch is empty. There’s only a note, scribbled on the back of a cigarette rolling paper in felt tip pen: WENT HOME.

  I feel a little bad not being more hospitable to my younger brother, but then again, not that bad. My father says that, based on neurological studies, the brain of a teenage boy is not fully developed, and my brother is a perfect example of that. Half human, half swamp creature. I don’t know if he understands that I was one finger pull from blowing his head off.
>
  I go to replenish Shippo’s dog food bowl, but it’s already full. So is his water bowl. I find another note on cigarette rolling paper on the counter: WALKED THE DOG & FIXED YOUR CURTAIN. Just when I’m ready to give up on my brother, he completely surprises me.

  I put on my contacts and quickly change into a clean uniform—a black shirt that clearly reads POLICE in the back, and shorts, because even though it’s cold for LA, about fifty degrees, the cycling will soon warm my legs. I slather moisturizer on my freshly shaven calves. My skin tends to be on the dry side, especially during the winter months. Shippo watches me this whole time. He knows the routine. Luckily, I have a small backyard and doggy door, so at least he has squirrels to bark at when I’m not around.

  I drive to work this time. The best time to drive in Los Angeles is early morning on the weekends around five a.m. It’s late enough that even the drunken partiers have gone home and early enough that most people—from suburbanites to gangbangers—are still in bed. Right now I’m working a compressed schedule, four ten-hour days, but being a P2, I realize that things can change for me at any time.

  I collect my bike at Central Division and ten of us set off in groups for Chinatown. Blocked-off streets are no problem for us, and we’ve been trained to navigate bikes in tight quarters. I purposely stay away from Mac, and he stays away from me.

  The city has already set out orange cones and wooden street barriers to control traffic, but only a few Chinese grandmas, their hands behind their backs, walk the cleaned-up streets this early. I’ve never actually watched the Chinatown parade, though I’ve participated in some of the Chinese New Year weekend events. My dad and I have run the Firecracker 5K Run a few times and have the faded T-shirts to prove it.

  I circle North Broadway, pedaling past Chinese churches, and Vietnamese sandwich shops. There’s also an Italian American museum hidden away, along with an aging Italian church that feeds hungry Chinese immigrants every Thanksgiving.

  Of course, these days Chinatown doesn’t come close to containing all of the recent Chinese immigrants. New Chinatowns have emerged east of Downtown Los Angeles in the hilly suburbs of Monterey Park, Rowland Heights and Diamond Bar. As Chinese from Hong Kong and mainland China leave downtown, Chinese from Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia have moved in—not to mention young artists and hipsters of all colors who have opened up galleries and bars down here. I ride around the perimeter of the Los Angeles Historic State Park, about thirty acres of empty space hardly anyone seems to know about. Across the street from the park are Nick’s Coffee Shop, a hangout for the city’s head honchos, and a recycling center that used to be something that looked like a steel manufacturing plant. Don’t ask me what the plant is doing there, although I bet it was there before Nick’s.