Murder on Bamboo Lane

by Naomi Hirahara

  “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.

  TWENTY-ONE

  AVENUE 26

  I can usually sleep anywhere—in cars, trains, airplanes—but not tonight. I toss and turn and even Shippo notices. He sits upright in my open bedroom doorway, his head cocked to the side as if prepared to go after whatever ails me. But these demons don’t take the form of an intruder. I’m fighting with a masked woman whom I thought I knew: me.

  By the time my alarm sounds, I’ve probably only gotten a couple hours of rest. I take a hot shower to wake me up and don’t even bother with the hair dryer or moisturizer. It’s not one of those days.

  My hair still wet, I walk to the train station. The first car is practically empty. Taking a bench seat, I rest my head against the glass, feeling the train car sway with each stop it makes.

  I arrive at the police station fifteen minutes early and head into the squad room, where Mac is inputting a report into a computer. Mac is a man of routine, so he is easily found.

  “Listen, do you have a minute?” I ask.

  Mac looks to his side, making sure not to make eye contact with me. Ever since I called him out before our morning briefing, he has completely avoided me. Good for him and good for me.

  “Please, Mac. I’d really appreciate it.”

  At that he gets up, probably recognizing that me saying Mac and appreciate at one time means something is up.

  I gesture for him to go into one of the downstairs holding rooms. He’s reluctant, but complies.

  “What?” he asks when the door is closed.

  It’s hard for me to speak with him, and my voice trembles a little. I hope that he doesn’t notice. “I know that you’ve never cared for me, ever since I first came to the unit.”

  Mac doesn’t contest my observation.

  “I was wondering, does this have anything to do with my aunt?” I put it out there, the secret that I’ve been hiding from most of my colleagues.

  Mac finally looks straight at me and places a hand on the interrogation table. “So you’ve stopped pretending, huh?”

  You’re the one who’s been pretending, not to mention being a complete passive-aggressive asshole, I think. “I just didn’t want people to think that I’ve received favoritism because of my aunt.”

  “But you already have. This so-called special assignment.”

  “It’s a bullshit assignment,” I spout out.

  He then smiles, apparently enjoying my discontent. “You’re getting a firsthand taste of the bitter pill that is Assistant Chief Cheryl Toma.”

  I pull back my damp hair. I don’t want to hear what Mac is going to tell me, but I need to.

  “I was her lapdog, too, until last year,” he says. “Before her promotion. Worked under her command in the Central Bureau. I was an FTO in the Hollenbeck area, and things were going good.” As a field training officer, Mac was actually the boss of at least a few P1 officers. “She brings me in to have coffee, tells me that she wants me to be her source in the station. Didn’t take her long to pull the rug out from underneath me.”

  I try to keep my face as expressionless as possible. But inside,
I’m dying.

  “I don’t know if you remember the immigration-protest melee over at Roosevelt High School?”

  Oh yeah. Benjamin had been up in arms over it, and he and Rickie had even joined a sit-in around the LAPD headquarters afterward. It wasn’t a good time for us.

  “We were there doing crowd control. A couple of young people—I don’t think they were even protesters—started to taunt some officers, pouring soda on them and poking them with sticks. The officers had to take action.

  “Then one girl pulls pepper spray out of her pocket and starts to spray the officers. She’s tackled and subdued. She’s a little thing, maybe five foot one at the most. Three ribs broken and a busted chin. It’s the cut to the chin that does it. She has blood everywhere. And, of course, all the high school kids, even the poor ones, have video cameras on their cell phones. That night every television channel aired the footage of this girl soaked in blood.”

  Mac winces as he relays the scene. “The officers involved were immediately put on leave. But the protesters weren’t satisfied. They wanted someone higher up to take responsibility. So who does Commander Toma select? Me, their FTO. I’m the sacrificial lamb. I’m demoted and sent to bicycle hell.”

  I can’t say anything for a moment.

  “That wasn’t right,” I say when I find my voice. “But I’m not my aunt.”

  “I heard about you from your aunt, actually, when I was still on good terms with her. She said that she had a niece who was considering entering law enforcement. She said that you were just like her when she was your age. And now, seeing you in action, I think that she’s right.”

  • • •

  At my morning briefing, I am sent with Armine to patrol Pershing Square’s Farmers’ Market, which occurs once a week. I’m relieved, because the market is an easy assignment, even pleasant. It’s away from the street, just a line of umbrellas, produce stands and food carts next to the grass, where about a half dozen barefoot homeless men catch their daytime z’s.

  Armine has a friendship with the man who runs the kabob stand and spends most of her time there, chatting with him and the rest of his customers. I watch businessmen and women cross the street at the light to check out what fresh food they can buy during their lunch break, and stand back with my bike, my head still in a daze. Is Mac right? Am I like Aunt Cheryl? Do I just use people for my own purposes?

  Eventually, Armine comes to my side, a takeout box filled to the brim with hummus, rice, tabouleh, chicken and lamb.

  “Hungry?” she asks with a smile. I shake my head, and she senses something is wrong. “Man problems?”

  “Excuse me?” Armine and I have never had a conversation about my personal life.

  “I’m sorry. But you’re so pretty, and I haven’t heard you mention any boyfriend or anything.”

  “I’m not seeing anybody right now. It’s too much of a hassle.”

  “No, no.” Armine lifts up her plastic fork and finishes swallowing some tabouleh. “When you’re young and pretty, you should be out there meeting men. You have to make time for relationships. If your life is just about this job, it’s going to kill you. Really. Police officers don’t live that long; did you know that? Take my word for it. This is the time for you to blossom.”

  Blossom? I say to myself. If I’m some sort of flower, I’m a dead, wilted one right now.

  • • •

  At the end of the day, I stumble onto the Metro and slump into an available seat. I made it through the day. I’m still in my uniform, and people give me plenty of room. After a few minutes, however, a little boy comes up to me, his index finger extended like the barrel of a gun. He aims his pretend weapon at me. “Bang,” he says.

  His mother quickly pulls him back to her side of the train. I understand what she is saying in Spanish. “No, little one, no. You must be careful. The police can do very bad things to you.”

  When I get off at my station, I call Nay on my cell phone.

  “It’s all over.” I tell her that I’m no longer going to track down Jenny’s murderer. They definitively identified Smiley as the shooting victim near the 110 on-ramp, so I’m going to just let the department’s gang unit take the ball and run with it.

  “You’re giving up? I’ve never seen you give up on anything.”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

  “Ellie, you are the strongest person that I know.”

  “I’m not sure about that.” I stop on the sidewalk, holding on to an old oak tree for support. “Nay, Nay.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Benjamin cheated on me. While we were supposedly still together.”

  “No. No. Not with Kari?”

  “With Jenny.”

  “Jenny who? Jenny Kobayashi?”

  “Jenny Nguyen.”

  Nay is completely silent.

  “You know, the dead Jenny Nguyen.”

  “That’s why he was trying to find her when she was missing?”

  “Yeah.” I watch a squirrel wander to the base of the tree, steal an acorn in the grass and scamper away.

  “I still can’t believe it.”

  “He admitted it to me, Nay. He said it to my face. And that’s not all.” I tell Nay about Aunt Cheryl setting me up.

  “That sucks,” she says. “Did she at least say that she was sorry?”

  I attempt to recall our conversation, made hazy by the Benjamin-cheating situation. “As a matter of fact, she did.”

  “And how about Benjamin? Did he say that he was sorry?”

  “Nay, an apology is not going to make everything go away.”

  “When did he hook up with Jenny?”

  “Back when I’d just started working.”

  “You were pretty out of it back then. You didn’t return any phone calls or texts for a stretch. You were pretty incommunicado, as I remember.”

  “So I deserved to be cheated on?” I feel like hanging up the phone on my best friend.

  “No. No. That’s not what I’m saying. Girl, you know me. There’s no excuse for being unfaithful in my book. None. But you and Benjamin were already having problems then, remember? Anyway, didn’t you tell me after you two finally split up that you were kind of relieved?”

  No, I wasn’t relieved. That was just a cover. But I was able, slowly, to piece my life together. On New Year’s Day, I was at my parents’ house, and Grandma Toma was overseeing the Oshogatsu meal. I was in charge of assembling the gelatinous gray strips of root cake—make a cut in the middle with a knife and then thread one side into the hole. Don’t ask me why we do it. It doesn’t even taste that good.

  But I had that job, and I’m not quite sure what Noah was doing, but he was there, too. Even Lita was over, learning how to make sweet Japanese black beans. The kitchen was crowded, and we were all laughing. For the first time in a long while, I completely forgot about Benjamin and the ache of our broken relationship.

  “Now you’re dropping Jenny,” Nay says while I’m lost in my thoughts.

  “I’m not dropping her. I’m just a bicycle cop. I’m not a detective. I wasn’t even supposed to be involved.”

  “But you are involved. Totally involved. Maybe Jenny orchestrated this whole thing from the grave for you to solve the mystery.”

  I roll my eyes, and I’m glad that Nay can’t see me.

  “Somebody killed her mother and got away with it. And now someone killed her and is getting away with it. This isn’t right, and you know it, Eleanor Rush.”

  I can’t speak for a moment. Nay allows our conversation to go dead silent, which is a big deal for her. I finally swallow and say, “What are you doing right now?”

  • • •

  I go home and pick up the Green Mile, then drive to PPW and park in a lot, feeding ten bucks on my debit card to an automated kiosk. At least this ensures that the Parking Nazis won’t be towing away my car. That’s the last thing that I need this week.

  As a former library employee, Nay has some frien
ds who still work in the building. One of them, Julie Chop, is working tonight. Julie’s a chubby Chinese American girl who likes to wear her hair in pigtails.

  I walk into the library and see Julie looking dubiously at Nay. “You won’t get in trouble,” Nay’s telling her. “Susana Perez.”

  “I don’t know. We had to go through privacy training, and this one girl got fired when she started looking up info on this guy she had a crush on.”

  “This is nothing like that. I’m telling you, it’ll take you only a few seconds. You can just have her record on the screen, go away and then come back.”

  Julie shifts her gaze from left to right. “O-kay,” she finally agrees. Noticing me standing to the side, Nay grins and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

  Julie taps the keyboard, pulls on one of her pigtails and then walks away. Nay sneaks behind the counter and gestures for me to approach. “Got a pen?” she asks me.

  Squinting at the screen, Nay quickly writes down the name of the resource Jenny had borrowed from the library a week before she was killed. “Weird,” she says to me. “It’s reserved reading for Professor Utley’s class, Women in Cities, but she had an aneurysm in January and they had to cancel the class. Why would Jenny need to see material for that?”

  “Check it out,” I tell her. My hands are shaking. “Check it out quick, Nay.”

  Julie is back behind the counter, and Nay gives her a check-out slip along with her student ID. What comes back is a manila accordion file containing some papers.

  Nay comes to my side, and we both dump out the contents. First, a bound collection of articles on the status of women around the world, and then, as if it were an afterthought, a neon green journal.

  • • •

  I tell Nay that I need to be alone with the journal and, surprisingly, she complies. She can tell that this is serious and tells me to call her tomorrow—first thing in the morning, but not too early.

  I ask Julie for a pair of the white gloves librarians have available for patrons to look through archival material in special collections.

  Jenny has created her own murder book. I’ve never actually seen a real one, but it’s obvious what she was doing. The first pages feature photos of her mother when she was alive. Susana wasn’t kidding: Cam Hanh was a beautiful woman. Creamy white skin and luminous hair tied back in a ponytail.