Grave on Grand Avenue Read online

  I brace myself for talk of burning bushes, or anything paranormal, but it’s pretty much like other Protestant services I’ve been to. Unlike Catholic mass, there are no robes, incense, or wafers—which is fine with me.

  The minister is about my dad’s age, with a mustache and thinning hair. He’s taken off his jacket and wears a striped tie with his shirt. Even though he’s not close enough for me to know, I feel sure he’d smell musky clean, no flowery cologne, but something straightforward. And safe.

  The religious stuff doesn’t interest me as much as what the minister says about Eduardo Fuentes’s personal history. He was from a small town in the middle of Mexico and came here when he was thirty, then became a naturalized citizen in the 1990s. That was when he was able to call over his nephew Raul Jesus, his sister’s son, to the United States. Eduardo and his late wife, Cristina, had only one child, their daughter, Marta, and three grandsons. When Marta’s name is mentioned, a sob breaks out from the front row. No doubt from Marta herself.

  Eduardo was one of the founding members of this church, the minister says. An elder. I figure that’s why people keep pressing into the church, filling every space in the pews and even the folding chairs that have been placed in the back. Father Kwame and I are sandwiched between women who bring out fans to cool themselves. They obviously knew there’s no air-conditioning in the small building. I wish I’d known, too.

  The guitarists then get up onstage again, and a line is formed to view the body in the open casket. I gulp. I am less than thrilled.

  The last row goes first, and the cranky old Asian man pulls on his suit jacket, as if that will make him more presentable as he stands in line. He’s short, only about five two if even that. He ducks his head toward the body, and when he turns around, his eyes look kind of moist. His face is weathered and dark. He looks like a man who has spent time in the sun, like Fuentes. Maybe they were in the same line of work.

  The row of family members—I recognize RJ and Marta from the hospital—rise and give the old man hugs. He seems a little taken aback.

  We’re up next and I take a deep breath. I take a few steps forward and look down in the casket. It’s lined with white, puffy material, which makes Mr. Fuentes seem like he’s lying on a cloud. He’s wearing a suit and his face looks stiff and waxy, not wrinkly and smiley like he was when we talked about the Gracias sage, the purplish flower that he’d been in the middle of planting at the concert hall garden. I expected to feel sad, but I actually feel nothing. This is not the man whose hand I held on to while he tried to mouth his last word.

  I turn to the relatives sitting in the front row of the church. Eduardo’s daughter, tears pooling down her face, studies me for a moment. “At the hospital,” she murmurs. “Police.” She then takes a deep breath; I fear that she’s going to let out a scream of grief. Instead, she leans forward. Is she going to be sick? I wonder. No, it’s not vomit—she intentionally spits on my shoes. They are not fancy shoes; I got them for barely forty bucks at Nordstrom Rack for events. But still.

  “My father was not trying to steal that cello. How dare the police close his case!” she says to me in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. The words, police and policía, can be heard throughout the crowd.

  I’m stunned, and even Father Kwame, who’s rarely taken aback, looks disturbed. RJ, the nephew, quickly stands up. “You better leave,” he says.

  Father Kwame carefully guides me through the crowd of mourners, who all give me dirty looks as I pass by. Once we’re outside, Father Kwame asks me if I’m okay.

  “I’m all right,” I tell him. “I’ve been spit on before.” Now that my initial surprise has passed, I’m feeling nonchalant about it. Like I’m some sort of LAPD veterana, even though I’m barely out of probation.

  “Where did you park? I will walk you to your car.”

  I don’t need Father Kwame to protect me, but I accept his fatherly care. I feel a stab of self-pity over not having my father around as my personal cheerleader. It wasn’t like I’d intentionally invited Puddy Fernandes into my life—he’d barreled in, and took my car with him. If I’d a say in the matter, yeah, I wouldn’t have engaged in any kind of conversation with him. But that’s not how it went down. My dad needs to understand that.

  I hope he does soon.

  When we’re about a block away from my car, I hear someone call out, “Officer!”

  I turn around. It’s Wendy Tomlinson, the gardener who witnessed Mr. Xu push Fuentes down the stairs. Instead of khaki pants, she’s wearing a dress. And of all people, she’s with Oliver Bikel, the contrabassoonist. The two blondes in the crowd.

  “Hello,” I say, wondering whether they saw my little incident with Fuentes’s daughter.

  “I wanted to see if it was true,” she says. We stand underneath a streetlamp and everyone’s face looks a bit ghostly. “Are the police really not going to charge Fang Xu with anything?”

  I want to say, No and it totally sucks. Something’s off, but I’m not sure what it is. But instead I just shove my hands in the pockets of my dress. “Yeah, I guess they’ve determined that Mr. Xu was defending himself against a potential robber.”

  “That’s bullshit.” Bikel’s voice is much higher than I expected. I guess I’d just assumed it would sound deep, like a contrabassoon. “I told the police that there’s no way Eduardo would do such a thing.”

  Another person walks toward us on the sidewalk. The short, cranky Asian man who was in front of us in the receiving line.

  “Mr. Arai, you’ve worked with Eduardo before,” Wendy says to him. “Don’t you think it’s crazy that the police think he was trying to steal that cello?”

  The old man moistens his lips. He obviously doesn’t want to stand around and talk about Eduardo Fuentes outside his funeral.

  “He’zu not kind of guy to make trouble,” he finally offers. His accent is heavy. He sounds like some of Grandma Toma’s relatives who have lived some years in Japan.

  “See,” Wendy says. “This man has worked with Eduardo for, what—”

  “Thirty yearsu.”

  “He should know,” adds Oliver.

  “Really,” I say.

  “Yeah, straight as knife.” The man then slices the air like he’s simulating a karate chop. I think that the expression is straight as an arrow, but I get the general gist.

  He excuses himself and we make way for him to pass by.

  “I think that you guys got this all wrong,” Wendy says as Father Kwame and I also keep proceeding to my car. “This is no way to ruin the reputation of an honest man.”

  Standing in front of Kermit, Father Kwame clears his throat, as if he is struggling to find something encouraging to say. But no words can lighten this situation. In these people’s eyes, the police are scum and there’s no convincing them otherwise.

  SEVEN

  On Sunday, despite my arguments, Mom and Dad decide to go through with their separate Mother’s Day excursion with the Good Mother, Grandma Toma, leaving Noah, Shippo and me to celebrate with Lita on our own. This is going to be awkward.

  We haven’t made any reservations and none of our favorite eating spots has any openings. “How about McDonald’s? They have a senior special or something. Old people are always hanging out at the McDonald’s in South Pasadena,” Noah suggests as the two of us brainstorm last-minute ideas at my dining room table while we wait for Lita to arrive at my house.

  “We are not taking Lita to McDonald’s for Mother’s Day.”

  “Then what?”

  “I suppose I can whip something up in the kitchen,” I say.

  “Since when did you start whipping things up?” my brother asks doubtfully.

  I go into my tiny kitchen and try to summon my inner Rachael Ray. Can I make a three-course meal in thirty minutes, all with a smile on my face? Yeah, right. At least Lita’s low-maintenance. My usual coffee cake and
fresh-squeezed orange juice should be okay. I’ll just fry up some bacon to go along with it, and it’ll be fine. Everything is better with bacon.

  Soon my house is smelling entirely of bacon. Noah’s on a mission to “harvest” my neighbor’s oranges for some juice. Anything that hangs over the wall is mine, I tell Noah. That’s the law.

  “If you say so,” he replies, taking a Trader Joe’s bag with him outside. Shippo, his tail wagging, is only too happy to act as his accomplice.

  We are still prepping when Lita walks in without even knocking or ringing the doorbell.

  “Happy Mother’s Day, Lita!” I call out when I notice her. She seems subdued. She’s probably bummed that her only son isn’t celebrating the day with her.

  “Oh, that looks deliciosa.” She compliments the coffee cake that I’ve just taken out of the oven, but her eyes have lost their usual sparkle.

  “Dad will come around,” I say to her, putting my arm around her and squeezing her shoulder.

  “I don’t know. This is the first time he’s ever stopped talking to me. I sent him a letter, apologizing and revealing everything I know. I even came clean on the Skylark, that Puddy was the one who stole it.”

  We sit around the table and squeeze the orange halves. I’ve held off from buying an expensive electric blender. Instead, I have one plastic juicer, which we let Noah use, while Lita and I just use our hands to extract a few drops of juice from each half. Luckily, my brother has managed to fill the Trader Joe’s bag with oranges, so we have a pretty big stash.

  There’s a knock on the door. I frown. I’m not expecting anyone. Shippo barks ferociously, the way he gets when he doesn’t like the person on the other side of the door. I look through the peephole. Oh my God, no.

  “What are you doing here?” I open the door just enough to talk to Puddy Fernandes.

  “I’m here to talk to the mother of my child. I know she’s here. She won’t open the door to me at her place. She almost ran me over with her car the other day.”

  “This is not a good time.”

  “Who is it, Ellie?” Lita asks from the kitchen, her hands dripping with juice.

  “Uh—” Turning for one minute, I lose control of the door. It swings open, revealing Puddy Fernandes, who’s wearing the exact same clothes as he was on Thursday. Based on how he smells, he’s been sleeping in them, too.

  “Estel, my girl.” His arms are outstretched, revealing underarm sweat marks on his shirt. Following him is his torpedo of a dog, Bacall.

  “Don’t you ‘my girl’ me, you son of a bitch.” And then Lita pulls back her right arm to unleash the most amazing punch I have ever seen in person.

  Fernandes’s head snaps back and he immediately clutches the bridge of his nose. Shippo starts barking like crazy again, setting off high-pitched yaps from Bacall. I position myself to intervene, but Fernandes lets out a crazy laugh that sounds like Shippo coughing up grass. “You haven’t lost it, have you?” he says, his voice sounding a bit nasal from the pressure he’s placing on his injured nose. He then lets go and smells his fingers. “Mmmm, oranges.” A line of blood streams from his left nostril.

  Noah’s eyes are as big as saucers while I push Fernandes into a chair and try to administer some first aid. I get a washcloth from my linen closet and toss it to Noah. “Get some ice cubes,” I tell him. “And soak this in cold water.”

  I push Fernandes’s head back—not as gently as I probably should—and wipe blood from his upper lip with a tissue. Up close, he smells even worse. Noah hands me the damp washcloth with a couple of ice cubes, which I press against his nose.

  “Is it broken?” Lita asks. I’m not sure whether she’s concerned or hopeful.

  The nose doesn’t look crooked, but it’s definitely swelling up.

  “Can’t let anything happen to these good looks here.” Fernandes smiles widely, exposing all his brown teeth. Lita grimaces.

  “You’ll have to go to a doctor tomorrow after the swelling has gone down,” I tell him. “The bleeding has stopped, so that’s a good sign, at least.”

  Noah pours Fernandes some fresh orange juice, which he accepts gratefully. “Haven’t had a drink so delicious in decades,” Fernandes says, after taking a small sip. “On a container ship, everything is usually freeze-dried or frozen.”

  “Are we supposed to feel sorry for you because you haven’t had a chance to drink fresh orange juice?” Lita asks.

  “Why all the hate? Is this what I get after all these years?”

  “Puddy, I don’t see hide nor hair of you in fifty years and now you show up out of the blue and I’m supposed to be happy about it?”

  “Well, if I had known that I was a father and a grandfather, I would’ve tracked you down. I had to hear that from this boy.” Fernandes nods his head toward Noah.

  Lita turns to glare at Noah.

  “All I said was the Skylark used to be our grandfather’s,” Noah says weakly.

  Usually my brother acts all chill, but this family stress has brought out his younger self. I realize he’s the one who must’ve given Fernandes my address in the first place.

  “No, Noah, I take responsibility for all of this mess,” says Lita. It’s clear that by mess, she’s referring to Fernandes.

  “Listen, I’m just here as a Good Samaritan. A good soul.” Leaving his rough-and-tumble sailor speech behind for a moment, Fernandes talks as if he were reciting a page out of Don Quixote. His nose is now all red.

  Lita looks unconvinced. For that matter, so am I.

  “Ronnie killed someone. An innocent person. I’ve maybe done wrong, but I’ve never hurt anyone. I just want him stopped.”

  “How do you know that he’s behind the Old Lady Bandit?” Lita asks. My question exactly.

  “Can you get me a photo of the Bandit from your computer thingermajigger?” Fernandes asks.

  I go into the bedroom and get my laptop from inside my dresser. My Glock is nestled right beside it. I think twice about getting my gun out, too, but since Noah’s here, I decide against it.

  I bring out my laptop and go online to find news clips showing security camera footage of the Old Lady Bandit. There are some other criminals with the same nickname, but ours in LA is the easiest to find. I click on some links that include video still images.

  The Old Lady Bandit looks like she could easily play an evil witch in a production of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. She’s hunched over, with a scarf around her head. Deep wrinkles on her forehead, drooping cheeks and bags under her eyes.

  Upon seeing the photographs, Fernandes gets super-excited. “See, there, that makeup technique? That’s Ronnie’s technique. I’d know it anywhere.”

  I zoom the images to full screen to get a better idea of what he’s talking about.

  “It’s collodion. Cellulose nitrate, real flammable stuff. Nowadays, it’s all latex, but that’s what they used back in the sixties. Look at the forehead and the way the cheeks fall down, like rotting fruit. That’s Ronnie’s handiwork. I’m sure of it.”

  Both Noah and I squint at the screen, while Lita sits back with her arms folded.

  “I’m telling you, that’s his signature.”

  “From fifty years ago?” Lita says.

  “Listen, I’ve been waiting for this moment for that weasel to emerge from his miserable hole. He ruined my life. After being in the slammer, I couldn’t get a regular job. Had to go out to sea.”

  “You ruined your own life. You didn’t have to chase him like a dog going after a bone in the first place. You were a grown man.”

  Fernandes’s swollen nose makes him look comical, like a sad clown. “I had a future. I could have made it in the industry. And I could have made it as a father.” He starts to sniffle. “May I use your bathroom?”

  “It’s through the bedroom,” I tell him, a little embarrassed. Even though my new place is
bigger, I don’t care for the awkward layout, like how the only way to reach the bathroom is by going through my bedroom.

  After Fernandes goes into the bathroom, I ask Lita, “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s lying. There’s something he’s not telling us.”

  I think Lita is right, but I have to admit that Fernandes’s vulnerability does have its charms. I can feel myself softening toward him.

  Shippo starts barking again at the front door.

  Now what? I think. I open the door without checking the peephole. My parents are standing on the welcome mat.

  “Mom, Dad,” I say, more as an announcement than a greeting. They both pile into the house. Grandma Toma is immediately behind them, and so is Aunt Cheryl. Oh crap, I think.

  “Hola, queridos,” Lita murmurs, but doesn’t get up from her seat.

  Noah covers his face with his hands.

  “So this is your new place,” Aunt Cheryl says, doing a quick survey of my humble abode.

  “It’s bigger than her other place, if you can believe it.” Mom is the master of insulting me while complimenting me at the same time.

  Grandma Toma immediately plops herself down in my new red chair (which Rickie was right about; it really adds a nice something to the room), and starts spinning around in it.

  “That’s a nice vintage piece.” Aunt Cheryl zeroes in on the chair. “I think it’s designer. Where did you find it?” She’s a fan of all those home-renovation cable shows.

  Before I can answer, the toilet flushes and I see Mom silently counting the people in my living room.

  I close my eyes.

  “These low-flow toilets don’t really do their job, do they?” Fernandes walks out, rubbing his hands on the sides of his pants. “Oh, hey, when did the parade arrive?”

  Fernandes and my father lock eyes and the resemblance is unmistakable, even with Puddy’s swollen nose. Dad could be Fernandes in twenty years if he stopped brushing his teeth and hair right now.

  Dad doesn’t need anyone to connect the dots for him. “This. Is. Unacceptable,” he declares to no one in particular. Maybe the entire universe.