“Yeah, the bakery was going to throw these out because it was the end of the day.”
“Waitaminute,” I put a brake on my appetite. “These weren’t actually in the Dumpster, were they?”
He frowns. “I only get my furniture from the trash, not my food,” he says emphatically. I decide to believe him and am happy to discover that all the empanadas are chicken with potatoes and raisins.
Rickie takes a seat, his knees almost touching the bottom of my living room table. He takes a sip out of an open Diet Coke can. “So, Charlie’s Angel, what’s up? Are you any closer to finding Jenny’s killer?”
I don’t appreciate how flip Rickie is being about Jenny’s death. I know that his MO is to always act cool and detached, but he’s carrying out his fake hipsterhood too far.
“We’ve been breaking codes all day,” Nay cheerily says.
“Sounds very Mission: Impossible. Or James Bond.”
“Ours are made of Japanese candy stickers.” Nay waves the color printout of Jenny’s census notebook cover.
“Wow. Next step, CIA.”
“It’s not a joke, Rickie,” I scold him, but I know that he doesn’t care. “But now that you’re here, I have some questions for you.”
Rickie pushes himself away from the table and crosses his legs. He surveys the room. “Where’s the interrogation lamp?”
“Stop being stupid.” In spite of his attitude, I get out my notebook. “I have questions about redistricting.”
Rickie feigns being asleep and lets out fake snores.
“Rickie.”
He quickly straightens up and looks around like a half madman. “What? What?”
“Redistricting.”
“Just that word puts people asleep. Certainly put most of us asleep in Poly Sci 101.”
Well, I don’t blame them, but I still want to know this stuff. I glance over at Nay and see that she’s starting to doze over a half-eaten empanada.
“Okay, fine,” Rickie says. “So we have this decennial census, this population count, every ten years, right? That’s the thing I worked on with Jenny way back when.”
“Right.” I remember Mom having some issues filling ours out. When it comes to race, it gets a little complicated in our house, with all the boxes that applied to our household: Asian, Japanese, white. Grandma Toma wanted Okinawan written in, too, but Mom nixed it, saying that it was overkill.
“On the basis of that population count, political districts for Congress, the state assembly, and even the city council are all redrawn. It’s a big deal. The city council is fighting about it right now. I think Koreatown is going to get screwed.”
“What do you mean, screwed?”
“It’s going to be divided. Their voting bloc and influence may be diluted. They want to be included with Thai Town and Filipinotown.”
“Oh, so it’s an Asian bloc thing.”
“Yeah, but it’s complicated. I mean, you have race, you have geography, you have history. They are saying that Little Tokyo will be with East LA instead of downtown.”
Personally, I don’t have a problem with that. But I can imagine a lot of folks in Little Tokyo don’t feel the same way I do.
“Did you know that Jenny was going to these redistricting meetings?”
Rickie wrinkles his nose. “She was? That’s weird. She wasn’t into hardcore politics as far as I could tell.”
“I’m not sure.”
“You think she got killed over redistricting?” he says incredulously. “That’s crazy. The police don’t have any suspects yet?”
I hesitate. It’s not like it’s a big secret. “An ex-boyfriend.”
“Oh, Tuan Le. I’ve met him. Tatted out. Ripped.”
Nay suddenly wakes up. “Oh, he’s your type, huh?”
Rickie crosses his arms. “Excuse me?”
“Nothing, Rickie. Don’t listen to her.” I don’t want him to get sidetracked. I’m eager to hear what he thinks of the LAPD’s main suspect. “Benjamin seemed to think that Tuan was dangerous. I guess he has a temper.”
“Well, Benjamin would be the one to know. He’s the one who always talked to Jenny.”
“What?” I don’t believe Rickie. Benjamin said Jenny was quiet, private.
“Yeah, sometimes at the projects. She was working there for a month or two, right?”
But Benjamin had said that he only saw her once at the projects. What’s going on?
“Yeah, aside from Susana, he was the one who was most worried about her.”
• • •
I don’t get much sleep that night, and it’s not because Nay sings and laughs in her sleep. I’m on edge. It’s this information about Jenny and the projects. What the hell were you doing? I ask the dead Jenny. What were you trying to prove?
And how is Benjamin involved in all this?
I feel like something heavy is wrapped around my waist and that I’ve been thrown in the ocean. I’m struggling for air, and each time I get up to the surface, something pulls me back down again.
• • •
“Rush, you got a present,” Sergeant Tim Cherniss announces when I come in on Monday morning. It’s a couple of evidence packages in the Jenny Nguyen case, courtesy of the office of Detective Cortez Williams.
“Cortez Williams, huh?” Mac looks over my shoulder. “You two seem pretty chummy these days.”
Damn, I think. The streets have eyes.
Cherniss tells me that I should view the contents of the packages in one of our holding rooms. Boyd is at the station and squints as I walk by with the packages and a pair of gloves. A few of the rookies are curious about what I’m up to.
The LAPD’s Property Division is located in the basement of the new Metropolitan Detention Center, which is basically our jail. As part of our training, I took a tour of evidence rooms, which are packed from top to bottom with packages of varying shapes and sizes. There are bloodstained chairs, computers, machetes and even samurai swords. Stacks and stacks of manila folders full of documents. A freezer filled with DNA evidence. And, of course, rooms permeated with the smell of pot, collected from drug busts.
Cortez obviously couldn’t book all of Jenny’s clothes as evidence, so he’d chosen a few items. In one of the packages is a long, flowing dress, which I recognize as a traditional Vietnamese costume. I check the tag. In box labeled CH Clothing, it states.
In the other package is a pink-and-brown square container the size of a shoe box. It has a French name engraved on the lid, and when I undo the satin ribbon and open the box, I see seven pairs of black underwear.
I check my personal phone to see if I get any reception in the room. Thank God I do, because I’m going to need Nay’s help on this one.
I call to give her the 411. “What are you doing?”
“Shippo and I are just kickin’ it in the park,” she says. Her first class today isn’t until two o’clock. What a life.
I can’t pronounce the name on the box, so I take a quick picture and send it to Nay. It only takes her a few minutes before she calls me back.
“Ohmygod, that’s one of my dream stores,” she exclaims.
“What is it?”
“It’s a luxury lingerie shop in Beverly Hills. That box will put you back five hundred dollars.”
“Five hundred dollars?” I quickly make the calculations on my fingers. “That’s about seventy bucks a panty. Crazy,” I exclaim. “Why would Jenny be buying such expensive underwear?”
“My guess is that she didn’t buy it; someone bought it for her as a gift.”
I look at the police tag. In box labeled CH Clothing, it says. A Vietnamese dress and fancy underwear, still unworn, as far as I can tell. What does this all mean?
I return the two packages to my sergeant, my brain still attempting to connect the dots. I’m thinking so hard that I almost don’t notice my phone vibrating in my pocket. I recognize the area code and the first three numbers. It’s from LAPD headquarters downtown.
“Hello. Officer
Ellie Rush,” I answer. Who at headquarters would be calling my personal cell phone?
“Ellie, it’s Tuan.”
I’m confused. Tuan?
“They found my gun in the gallery. I don’t know how it got there. I swear. Jenny had it, and the police searched the gallery before.” His low voice sounds strangely breathy. “You gotta help me.”
“Have you been arrested?”
“No, I’m just here for questioning. But I think it’s only a matter of time.”
A person of interest, I think. Tuan’s right. It’s just a matter of time.
“You have to get yourself a lawyer.”
“I don’t know any lawyers. And I don’t have any money to pay for a good one.”
Without a private lawyer, Tuan’s case will be assigned to the public defender’s office. The lawyers within the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office are good, but with recent budget cuts, their resources have been slashed to bare bones. I do know one criminal attorney, but to involve her would make my already complicated life even more, well, dysfunctional.
“I didn’t do it,” he maintains.
“Okay, let me see what I can do.” I then click off.
Stay out of it, I try to tell myself. Tuan can take care of himself.
I touch a name on my phone’s address book and then cancel the call. I press my finger to my lips. “Dammit,” I mutter.
She’s a true believer herself. A believer that the LAPD makes mistakes and needs a watchdog, namely attorneys like herself.
“Ellie,” Benjamin’s sister, Sally Choi, says. “I’ve missed seeing you. How are you?”
In spite of our differences of opinion on law enforcement, I’ve always liked Sally. She’s upfront and says whatever’s on her mind.
I explained the situation with Tuan Le.
“I know it’s strange that I’m calling you now that I work for the department. And now that Benjamin and I aren’t together anymore.”
“Listen, we are healthy adversaries. How else is the system going to function? And I’m so sorry that it didn’t work out with you and my brother, but you can still call me. Anytime.” She goes on to say that Benjamin is an idiot to have let me go. Her words sting at first, but then I feel better. I want her to continue, but she quickly segues to Tuan Le’s case. “By the way, who is the investigating detective?” she asked.
“Cortez Williams. I think that he’s going to be pretty upset if he finds out that I was the one who called you on behalf of Tuan.”
“Listen, he doesn’t need to know a thing. This shall never be spoken. Besides, I know Cortez Williams. He’s one of the good ones; you can trust him,” she said.
Yeah, I think, but he sure as hell isn’t going to trust me anymore. After all, I’ve just found a lawyer for Tuan at one of the best criminal law firms in the city.
I press another name on my phone and watch as the phone tries to make a connection. Finally, a voice on the other line, “Hello.”
“Aunt Cheryl,” I say, “I think we may have the wrong guy.”
THIRTEEN
WEST FIRST STREET
When I went to that mother-daughter event with Aunt Cheryl, it was back when she wore her black uniform daily and worked out of the old LAPD headquarters, Parker Center, on Los Angeles Street. Parker Center seemed like any other boxy building constructed in the mid-1950s; it didn’t feel relaxing or comfortable, but it seemed to hold secrets, like if you opened the wrong door, a mass murderer would appear, hoisting a giant knife. Another door, a robber with a rope. It was like a criminal The Price Is Right game show: choose the wrong door, and your life might be in danger. Don’t ask me why, but even as a kid that possibility excited me, the thought that crime could be contained in such a generic and nondescript wrapper.
Then Parker Center was replaced with a new location and a new building on First Street, a couple of blocks west of Little Tokyo and across from City Hall. The structure is awe-inspiring, an elegant ocean liner anchored in a sea of concrete. It doesn’t seem like anything bad or evil could occur in the new police headquarters. Which is misleading, of course. But that’s where I am this morning, to hear what kind of hot water I’m in.
I wait outside Aunt Cheryl’s office, across from her assistant’s desk. I sit with my legs crossed at the ankles underneath my chair. It’s sunny today, and light streams through the clear glass windows. It’s the total opposite inside my head.
Wearing a cordless phone headset, the assistant stops typing and speaks into the thin microphone positioned at her mouth. “Okay,” she says and then looks at me. “She’s ready for you now. Go on in.”
I expect Aunt Cheryl to be alone. But there’s a man in a suit seated in a chair facing her, so I can’t see his face, and standing beside a line of flags—American, Californian, LAPD—is Cortez. He obviously wasn’t expecting me, because his eyes go as big as saucers when he sees me enter. I immediately lower my head like Shippo does when he’s done something bad.
“You’re probably familiar with my niece, Officer Ellie Rush,” Aunt Cheryl says to Cortez. “You were at the crime scene together.”
I can see the thought bubble above his head. What the—?
Yup, Cortez, you heard it right. I’m the assistant chief’s niece. And it’s not like there are a lot of nieces. In fact, only me. I’m like the daughter that she never had.
“This is District Attorney Mitch Tocher. So, Ellie, tell these two gentlemen what you told me yesterday.”
The DA gives me a sideways look. His legs are crossed and his body faces away from me. I can tell he’s not going to put much credence in what I have to say.
“I spoke to Tuan Le two times in person after Jenny Nguyen’s murder.”
“Two times?” Cortez interjects.
I steady my voice as much as possible. “He came to my house once, and I spoke to him at his gallery at an event. I was off duty both times,” I add, trying to document that I have not overstepped my professional boundaries.
“What kind of relationship were you having with Le?” the DA asks. I can feel Cortez’s stare.
“It wasn’t anything like that, personal. In fact, I had never met him until after the discovery of Jenny Nguyen’s body.”
“My niece was classmates with the victim,” Aunt Cheryl chimes in.
“I asked him if he had a firearm, and he told me about the Smith and Wesson. According to him, he lent it to Jenny. Later, he feared that she had been shot with it.”
I hear a noise coming from Cortez’s side of the room.
“How about the ex-roommate?” Aunt Cheryl eggs me on.
“Oh, yes, I also met with Jenny’s best friend, Susana. Later, I found out that she was then held at gunpoint in her and her boyfriend’s apartment by two people who were apparently searching for something of Jenny’s. She was told not to cooperate with the police, especially me.”
The DA sits up and then shifts his body in the chair so that he faces me. “What?”
Cortez uncrosses his arms. “When did this happen?”
“Apparently the same evening I met with Susana. It was the first Wednesday after that Chinese New Year weekend. They didn’t report the incident. They were scared.”
Cortez is completely dumbfounded.
“I just want to be on the record that I failed to say anything to Detective Williams about this. That was my mistake.” I mean to somehow protect Cortez, but my statement just sounds weak, lame.
The DA addresses Cortez. “Did you talk with this girl, this Susana—?”
“Perez,” I say.
Cortez clears his throat. “Yes, when we discovered that the victim had been living in Perez’s brother’s car. I saw her at Pan Pacific West. But she refused to cooperate. I think that she may be undocumented.”
Aunt Cheryl sits behind her desk, studying my face. This is making me very nervous. “Didn’t you say something else about her work?”
“You know that Jenny worked for the Census, right?” My voice trembles. “Well, I
think that she discovered some kind of irregularities. Like too many people living in units operated by the city.”
“And so someone killed her for that?” The DA is practically snarling. I know that he thinks I’m ridiculous. Why is Aunt Cheryl subjecting me to this?
The DA shifts his body away from me again. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Detective. But let’s get this together. I’m getting calls from the Asian community, the arts community. Chinatown leaders. Let’s not”—and he stops himself for a moment, turning toward me—“screw this up. I don’t want to arrest Le and then have to release him later.”
I start thinking about the Koreatown fiasco involving the wrongfully arrested shopkeeper. The DA is probably here to prevent another PR disaster.
“We have the firearm, found in the gallery where the ex-boyfriend was exhibiting his work. Ballistics matched the bullet that killed the victim to the gun. The two of them had a contentious relationship. She was known for sleeping with other men. End of story.” Cortez wants this investigation over.
“But no fingerprints on the gun,” Aunt Cheryl says. “And anyone had access to the gallery, even Tuan’s detractors.”
“What do you need? A digital recording?” Cortez shoots back.
“That would help.”
“Okay, okay. Ceasefire.” The DA holds up his hands. “This new information about the roommate getting assaulted in connection with Nguyen’s murder. And by two people. I don’t like it. Maybe Le did it, but he wasn’t alone. He might have been working together with someone else.”
“Don’t arrest him yet,” Aunt Cheryl says to Cortez. “But continue to hold him.” She then turns to me. “And you give Detective Williams all your leads. And the friend’s name and number.”
“But—”
“All of them.” So much for cultivating confidential informants.
The DA rises from his seat. “Reinterview the best friend, this Susana Perez,” he tells Cortez.
“Take Ellie along if that will help,” my aunt adds.
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Cortez says.
• • •
“I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t even look at you.” Cortez says, as I’m practically jogging to keep up with him down the carpeted hall. “Just e-mail or text the names and phone numbers to my work cell. That’s all I will need from you in the future.”
Murder on Bamboo Lane Page 14