Murder on Bamboo Lane

by Naomi Hirahara

  Ramon slowly proceeds through the images. I feel like averting my eyes; I can’t watch. What if he identifies the wrong person? We’ll be back to square one, or maybe the case for sure will be considered cold.

  He slumps over the photos, his ankles crossed. Romeo pants, as if to give Ramon encouragement.

  His finger carefully moves through the numbers. He’s taking so long that I half expect him to say that he’s not sure. But then the finger stops at number four. “That’s him,” he says, his voice a little wobbly. Then stronger: “That’s definitely him.”

  • • •

  After contacting the DA’s office, we are off to Tuan’s loft. I ride my bike and meet Cortez and four uniformed officers, including Boyd and Azusa, about a block east of the loft. Customers going to a wild-game sausage-and-beer house take note of the two black-and-whites. They know that something will be going down soon. Cortez tells me to wait on the street with one of the patrol cars. I’m not happy about that, but it’s not the time to argue. I watch Cortez, Boyd and Azusa go through the doors with one of the loft tenants. I pedal west toward some eateries and stop there.

  My whole body feels jittery and feverish, as if I’m coming down with the flu. I carefully listen to my radio. No news about an arrest, no calls for assistance. About the time I see Cortez looking out the bay window, a man wearing a baseball cap walks out on the sidewalk and slips into a blue Cube car, the cheapo kind Noah calls toasters on wheels.

  Could it be Tuan’s wheels?

  “Suspect is not in his residence,” Cortez reports on the radio.

  As the driver turns on the engine, I pedal over to get a closer look at the Cube. I’d recognize those high cheekbones anywhere.

  “Suspect in vehicle, blue Cube, on Third Street.” I don’t have the radio lingo down yet, but do the best I can.

  The Cube backs out from its parking space, and Tuan finally sees me in his side mirror. He guns it toward the Metro rail yard, but the black-and-white has blocked off that exit. The officers, using the car as a shield, aim their guns at the Cube. “Stop, police!” one of them yells.

  Tuan then takes a sharp left into a narrow alley next to one of the buildings. I take the parallel pedestrian pathway on my bike. I’m not that far from him, and I hear two sirens now wailing in stereo—one from the east and the other from the west. Once we’ve reached the end of the alley on Second Street, I see that both sides of the streets are blocked by our patrol cars. A chain-link fence bars the alleyway in front of us, but, of course, that’s no deterrent for a desperate man. Tuan attempts to crash through the fence with his toaster car and manages to break open the lock.

  Getting out of the car, he runs, but I’m right behind him on foot. The other side of the fence is also locked, so I use it to slam his body against. His cap is long gone, revealing a cut on his freshly shaven head.

  As I hold him, I hear my fellow officers rushing toward us to give me assistance.

  “I almost had you, girl,” Tuan says, his chest heaving.

  Yeah, I think, but almost doesn’t count.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  BAMBOO LANE

  Cortez and I stand outside the gallery, just blocks from where we first met.

  “I still can’t believe that he made up his past,” I say.

  “It was all on Jenny’s computer. Photographs of relatives, interviews, e-mails. She was obviously thrown by it, too.”

  Tuan is a fraud. His grandparents weren’t from North Vietnam, and his grandfather had nothing to do with the Viet Cong. They were from the same South Vietnamese village where Cam Hanh was from. It was at Cam Hanh’s funeral where Jenny learned that Tuan had reinvented his past for artistic gain.

  “Before he started to take on political art, his career was stalled, going nowhere,” says Cortez. “But by claiming that his grandfather fought for North Vietnam, he was followed by controversy. Cha-ching. Instant hit.”

  Jenny was trying to convince Tuan to come clean, Cortez continues. If he didn’t do it by the time of his exhibition opening, she’d tell the truth.

  “She was sick of it all,” I say. “She’d had enough of the BS.”

  We stare at the gallery for a moment. “I just can’t believe that he stashed the gun back here.” Tuan was so cool and collected throughout the whole investigation; it was hard to believe that he would make such a mistake.

  “Lapse in judgment. Probably thought that we had searched it already, so it was a safe hiding place. He might have been more desperate than he let on.”

  I listen carefully. Cortez had been on the right track all along. If only I hadn’t interfered . . . I think—but I can’t go there. We wouldn’t have figured out the true motive without the computer. And, of course, we wouldn’t have even known about the mysterious circumstances of Jenny’s mother’s death.

  “He shot Smiley, too,” Cortez says this definitively. He has some evidence. “With his picture in the news, informants have come forward. Smiley was boasting that he was going to get money from blackmailing a Chinese artist who killed a girl.”

  Before Cortez can say more, a black-and-white patrol car stops at the curb. First out of the back seat is an Asian man in his mid-fifties with short-cropped hair. The interpreter, I think. Boyd gets out of the driver’s side and opens the other door. The second passenger hobbles out with crutches.

  “Hello, Mr. Phuong,” I say tentatively. I’m not quite sure if he blames me for his injury.

  Phuong stares at me, slightly madmanlike.

  “That’s his usual look,” I notify Cortez.

  I’m not sure if Phuong has been able to travel much since the accident. He seems relieved to be out in the open air, and he goes back and forth along the street with his crutches.

  “Does he know why he’s here?” I ask the interpreter.

  “To give his report again about that Thursday evening, the last week in January.”

  Both Cortez and I nod. “Can you ask him to show us exactly where he was standing?”

  The interpreter calls Phuong over to us and explains what we want him to do. He trudges to the sidewalk, next to the fire hydrant and immediately opposite the storefront. There’s indeed a clear view into the gallery. The gallery owner, whom Cortez had spoken to before I arrived, is clearly visible unwrapping a large square package.

  “He was standing here the whole time while Tuan was inside?” Cortez asks the interpreter to confirm with Phuong. They speak back and forth, and finally the interpreter reports, “Yes. But he says there were curtains. The curtains were closed.”

  My heart starts to race. “Curtains? I don’t remember seeing any curtains on the window.”

  Both Cortez and I rush into the gallery. We check the top and sides of the window frame. There’s nothing there. Completely bare.

  “You didn’t have any curtains for the windows, did you?” I ask the gallery owner.

  “Just the temporary ones we use when we are installing new exhibitions. We don’t want passersby to see the artwork before the official opening. Ruins the mystery of it all.”

  Cortez goes with the gallery owner to retrieve the temporary curtains from a back storage room. Phuong and the interpreter, meanwhile, join me in the main gallery space.

  “How have you been?” I ask Phuong. Other than his ankle, he actually looks healthier. He’s put on weight and his face is fuller.

  The interpreter recites what I’ve said in Vietnamese, but Phuong ignores us both. He is mesmerized by Tuan’s mixed-media installations. He spends a long time staring at one featuring Tuan’s grandmother.

  He murmurs something, and the interpreter explains to me, “She reminds him of his own mother.”

  Tears openly spill from his eyes, and he uses the back of his jacket sleeve to wipe them away.

  “She was killed in the war,” the interpreter reports to me, but he didn’t have to. That much I can figure out on my own.

  Cortez and the gallery owner return with a large wooden frame, which supports a curtain rod an
d opaque fabric. It’s almost see-through; light can definitely go through it. After the frame is placed in the window, Cortez and I walk outside and look in. We can distinctly see the silhouettes of the three people—the tall and almost gawky outline of the gallery owner, Phuong with his crutches, and the stouter figure of the interpreter.

  So how did Tuan do it? Did he have an accomplice who sat in the gallery in his place while he snuck out back to shoot Jenny?

  Wait a minute. I run into the gallery and ask the owner about what I had seen during the panel discussion. He goes into storage and returns with what I’m looking for: A life-size statue of the artist at work.

  “It’s just papier-mâché. Light as a feather,” he tells me as he easily moves it from place to place. I try my hand at it. He’s right. It probably only weighs about five pounds.

  With the curtains closed, I put the sculpture in front of the storefront window.

  After staging the scene, I poke my head outside, where Phuong and the interpreter now stand with Cortez.

  Phuong nods his head, while the interpreter speaks to Cortez.

  “That’s it, Ellie,” Cortez calls out to me. “That’s exactly what Mr. Phuong saw that night.”

  • • •

  Dressed in his street clothes, Tuan Le is brought into the courtroom and stands behind a panel of glass. He’s never been charged with a serious crime before, but he looks right at home with his wrists bound in handcuffs.

  Cortez sits with me, and after I bounce my leg up and down for a while, he gently pats my thigh once. I can rest now.

  So many people faked me out. Benjamin, first, and then Aunt Cheryl. Two of the people who had meant the most in my life. Maybe that’s excusable on my part. I wasn’t looking to be tricked, wasn’t expecting it. In a way, I’m glad that I wasn’t so jaded back then. That I could just open my arms wide and hold on to the people who loved me, or who I thought loved me.

  But Tuan. Tuan was different. He was the leading suspect in a murder, a murder of a college classmate. He was known to have a temper and had a line of detractors. I should have been more cautious. Why had I been so easy to fool? Tuan must have known about Benjamin and me, about Jenny and Benjamin. Maybe that’s even why he came to my place that first time. To mess with my head. Instead, he found something even more valuable in me: an advocate. Someone who was willing to vouch for him without even knowing him. What a stupid, stupid idiot I was.

  Maybe I projected my own desires onto Tuan—the loving, supportive boyfriend. The one who innately understood his girlfriend’s innermost thoughts.

  The bailiff calls out Tuan Le’s name and recites the charge against him.

  His attorney, the public defender, approaches the bench. After talking with Benjamin, Sally has told Tuan that she cannot continue representing him.

  The judge asks for Tuan’s plea.

  “Not guilty,” the PD says.

  There’s wrangling about the possibility of bail. The assistant DA argues that Tuan is a possible flight risk. Plus there is the severity of the crime. The PD argues that Tuan is a respected artist with no priors.

  The assistant DA is insistent. “We believe that this was a premeditated murder. The defendant elaborately orchestrated the shooting of his ex-girlfriend and the subsequent cover-up. This was not a crime of passion. It was a calculated homicide.” She doesn’t mention anything about Smiley’s murder. But those charges are coming soon, Cortez has assured me.

  In the end, the judge is convinced. Tuan is held without bail.

  Before Tuan is taken away, he sees me in the courtroom and raises his bound hands to flash me a “hang loose” sign. I pretend that I don’t notice and turn away.

  • • •

  As Cortez and I leave the courtroom, we both let out deep breaths of relief.

  “You did it, Ellie. You got Jenny’s killer,” Cortez says to me in the hallway.

  “We,” I correct him. And maybe in spite of me, I think, but I don’t verbalize it.

  There’s more news that Cortez is eager to share with me. “Teena’s admitted to assaulting Susana. She’s agreed to a deal with the DA.”

  I have heard that through the Central Division grapevine. “I can’t believe she admitted it.”

  “It helped when we told her that we had her accomplice, Smiley Parker, in the other room.”

  “She doesn’t know that Smiley is dead?”

  Cortez explains that Smiley’s death has been kept under wraps to buy more time to gather evidence. “She blamed most of it on Smiley. That he overpowered her. As if anyone, especially a two-bit gangster, could overpower Teena.”

  That’s true.

  “She’ll be doing some time. At least a few months.”

  “But if there’s a plea bargain—”

  “No trial.”

  “And Councilman Beachum gets away scot-free. No kind of knock on his reputation.”

  “The incident in Vietnam is out of our purview.” Cortez then tells me that Cam Hanh was going to announce a big venture with a garment manufacturer in LA. Her former partner in Vietnam, seeing that he wasn’t going to benefit from the deal, was going ballistic. He came up with some weak alibi during the time that Cam Hanh was killed, an alibi that Councilman Beachum could possibly break. But he hasn’t come forward. Neither has Teena. I can imagine he probably cut a deal with his star aide. If she keeps quiet, she will be rewarded immensely. How and with what, I can only imagine. And when she’s released, she won’t be that happy with me.

  • • •

  It’s already past three in the afternoon, and Captain Randle has already told me that I don’t have to return back to the station. I practically did an all-nighter to check over my contribution to Cortez’s police report on Tuan’s arrest. I almost felt like I was back at PPW, working on a paper, only this one’s importance goes way beyond a letter grade.

  I could go straight home, but I don’t. On my bike, under gray skies, I travel south on Alameda.

  “He’s arraigned,” I tell Benjamin in person at the tutoring center. “No bail.”

  “Thank God.”

  I unzip my backpack and take out a brown paper bag. “These are treats for Romeo. Do you think that you can get them to him?”

  I’m officially not supposed to give anything to a prospective witness, but I hope a gift for a dog isn’t going to get me into trouble.

  Benjamin holds the bag with both hands and looks down. “If I could redo that whole day, I would. I would have made some different choices.”

  I’ve come to resent that word choices. That’s what Benjamin always says to his students: “Make good choices.” Well, I’ve come to understand that bad choices just reflect what you feel inside. And it’s become clear that Benjamin did not want to be with me that day in November.

  “At least nothing happened to you,” he says. “If you got hurt, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  My cool facade begins to break. “What do you mean, nothing happened? Do you know how messed up I was after you broke it off? And now this? Something did happen, Benjamin. People got hurt.” I got hurt.

  “I told you that I was sorry. I didn’t want to end what we had that way.”

  Yeah, right, I think. I put on my helmet, a signal that I’m done.

  Benjamin lightly touches my sleeve as I turn toward the door. “Ellie. Please. I know that we’re over as a couple, but I want us to still be friends.”

  I let out a dry laugh. “Won’t your new girlfriend get mad at you?”

  Benjamin shakes his head. “That was nothing. She was trying to run my life. When I said no, she quit the internship. I shouldn’t have been hanging out with her in the first place. It was too soon. I should have waited to see what was going to happen with us.”

  Benjamin’s words are heavy, but they fail to go deep. Instead, they float at the surface. I want to bat them away from my line of vision, yet they hang around, bothering me.

  I leave the tutoring center feeling unsettled. I’m glad tha
t I’m on my bike, my legs pumping and my face wet with the faint drizzle. Benjamin wants to be friends. What does friendship look like after a two-year relationship? And even if Miss Boots is out of the picture now, there will be another woman, sooner or later. Wouldn’t it be better to shut the door forever and walk away?

  If I walk away, however, it wouldn’t just be from our dead relationship. It will be from the Fearsome Foursome, born in freshman year. For at least three years, Nay, Rickie, Benjamin and I have seen each other every day. We’re family, maybe even closer than family. Am I prepared to let all that go?

  I decide to change course and go west. The sun is going down and I know that I don’t have much time to ride. The streetlights are terrible in this neighborhood, and I’m not wearing reflective clothing. At the Central Division, we’ve seen our share of fatal accidents involving bicyclists who were unseen in the dark of night.

  But I need one loop, one free ride. The familiar ivy-covered sign, Pan Pacific West College, greets me as I enter the campus. Both students and professors are leaving classroom buildings for dinner. There’s a sense of peace on their faces. Another school day over and done. There may be more papers and tests for tomorrow, but for an hour before dinner, everybody can take a quick breather, let their minds wander.

  My tires press against wet, slippery fallen leaves on the main pathway. Soon, in spring, students will be sitting on the grass, some even throwing Frisbees. Soon, but not yet.

  As I pass the library, I wonder what Jenny hoped to become before she became consumed by her mother’s death. She was a sociology major. Maybe a social worker? Maybe she wanted to be a mom herself one day. I feel sad as I realize that her small nuclear family, the three of them, is all gone now. Where does their past suffering go? Is it just like smoke—does it elevate into the ether and get absorbed by the universe? Are we changed by their brief lives at all? Or is it like they never existed?

  I finally return my bike to the police station, the homeless all tucked in their cardboard boxes. Riding the train home, I am so exhausted that I fall asleep and miss my stop. Someone finally wakes me up at the end of the line.