Grave on Grand Avenue Page 3

  I quickly separate the men, instructing Mr. Xu and the translator to stand on the south side of the stairs with the cello, and the younger gardener to stand on the north side. Xu seems to have left, but then I notice him standing in the concert hall’s side building entryway with a leggy redhead, her hair swept back in a ponytail. Someone in a higher pay grade will have to deal with him.

  I address the translator. “Sir, you and Mr. Xu will have to wait here until our detectives arrive. And we’ll have to hang on to the cello.”

  Again, Mr. Xu’s comprehension of English seems fine as he explodes in a fireball of Chinese. The translator attempts to calm him down.

  The tall redhead with the ponytail that I saw earlier with Xu has now come out of the side elevator. At least she had the sense not to take the stairs and disturb a crime scene.

  “I’m Kendra Prescott. I represent all of the hall’s visiting guest artists.” She grips her cell phone as she introduces herself. “Is there a problem here?”

  Uh, yeah. A man is semiconscious after being allegedly pushed down the stairs by the father of your guest artist. “I was just informing Mr. Xu that he needs to speak to detectives,” I explain to the PR rep. “Also, the cello needs to be turned in as evidence.”

  “Ah—that’s not going to happen. Xu has his concert tonight. Do you know how much this instrument is worth? Five million dollars,” Kendra reports, causing Mr. Xu to shake his head as if that information should not have been revealed.

  I try to prevent my mouth from falling open upon hearing the value of the instrument. Johnny is obviously listening, too, and he doesn’t do as well hiding his shock. His eyes bug out and he starts to cough.

  “Well, the investigators will be telling you what to do,” I manage to say. “Just don’t go anywhere.”

  I then go across to the younger gardener. Up close, I reassess him as probably in his late twenties. The guy doesn’t seem more than five years or so older than me.

  “What’s your name and phone number?”

  “Raul. Raul Jesus Santiago. Most people call me RJ.” He then gives me two phone numbers—cell and landline, the latter also serving as his primary work number.

  I ask for his uncle’s name. Eduardo Fuentes. His mother’s older brother. They’re obviously close, because RJ is really agitated. Even though he has a tough exterior, I sense that he could start crying at any minute.

  “Why did he do that? Why?” RJ keeps repeating.

  Sirens announce the arrival of the ambulance. I turn and see that Cortez has also arrived on the scene, along with another guy I assume is probably his partner. I’ve never met the partner before. He’s pretty short with some ugly-ass growth on his face that’s neither a goatee nor a beard. He has some gray hair mixed in with some black, and I have no idea what ethnicity he could possibly be.

  Cortez is looking good, wearing a crisp white shirt with a yellow tie that only a man like him can pull off. “Best dressed in the LAPD” definitely goes to him. “Garibaldi, Rush. Rush, Garibaldi,” is the extent of his introductions.

  “Ellie Rush.” Garibaldi takes his time looking me over, multiple times. Somehow I feel like I have to take a shower now. “Oh, so you’re the one.”

  What the hell is that supposed to mean?

  “You called this in, Mayhew?” Cortez says to Johnny, who nods.

  “Xu’s in that building.” I gesture toward the artists’ entrance. “And the cello case, that should be dusted for fingerprints.”

  “We got this, Ellie,” Cortez says. In other words, Shut up.

  Paramedics have strapped Eduardo onto a gurney and begin carrying him to the back of the open ambulance.

  RJ tries to accompany his uncle, but I have to stop him.

  “I want to go with him,” he says. “Where you taking him?”

  “Mr. Santiago, we can’t let you do that.” Even though RJ says he’s a relative, I have no real proof of that. Plus, this is turning into a possible crime scene and we can’t have the two men having a private conversation before we question them individually.

  “We’ll handle this,” Cortez Williams tells me. “Maybe you can help us with crowd control.”

  In other words, Get lost, little bicycle cop.

  “I did speak to the vic,” I add, but by then, no one’s really listening to me. Cortez is now getting a full report from Johnny. I notice that he isn’t telling him to do crowd control.

  * * *

  I spend the rest of the afternoon on the corner of Grand and First. I sneak some glances at my personal phone, searching for any mention about Xu or the incident that just happened at Disney Hall. Besides information about the concert that’s scheduled for tomorrow, there’s nothing. Either people are too busy to post anything or aren’t sure what they witnessed. Johnny eventually joins me on the corner and I can sense that he’s feeling pretty good about himself. He assisted an injured man and got to interact with detectives. I’m happy for him, but I have to admit that I’m a bit envious, too. I don’t want to stay a bike cop forever. Benjamin used to tell me that I need to slow down, not always obsess about my next step. But a part of me feels like I’m on one of those moving airport walkways, only it’s traveling in the opposite direction. I need to be always moving forward just to stay in the same place.

  Both Johnny and I have had enough excitement for the day, so we don our sunglasses and station ourselves on different corners on First Street. Nobody even attempts to jaywalk. The only nasty thing that happens is a Jack Russell taking a wiz on my back tire.

  It’s dark by the time I get home, via the Gold Line. My Glock is safely zipped up in my very unfashionable fanny pack and soon will be resting in the bottom drawer of my bedroom dresser, next to my laptop. As I approach my house, the motion detector activates the light above my porch. I see the lonely puddle of oil from the Green Mile glistening in the light, still mocking me.

  I notice then that it’s a full moon. Weird stuff happens when it’s a full moon, especially in the Central Division. Homeless people come to the station, claiming that they’ve been pursued by either zombies or alligators from the sewer. Sad thing is that bargain shoppers from Beverly Hills in the Garment District would claim that the homeless men and women are the zombies.

  Shippo greets me by jumping up and licking my bare knees.

  “So, what kind of a watchdog are you, anyway?” I say to him, cupping his face in my hands. It’s no use. He knows that I can’t really be mad at him.

  That night in bed I keep my Glock next to me underneath my extra pillow instead of in the dresser drawer. There’s just way too much weird stuff going on right now. Grandma Toma always talks about bad things happening in threes. The stolen Green Mile, and now this incident on Grand Avenue, were one and two—and I’m in no hurry to find out what the third bad thing will be.

  TWO

  When I get to work the next day, my commanding officer, Sergeant Tim Cherniss, stops me before I head into roll call. “Captain wants us to go to County General,” he says.

  My heart immediately begins to pound. Don’t get me wrong—I love Captain Randle, but I’m also totally scared of him. He’s the boss man. My future is entirely in his hands. Second of all, Cherniss says us. Which means I’ll be sitting in the same vehicle as my CO.

  Again, it’s not that I don’t like Cherniss. It’s more that we don’t have much in common. He’s in his late thirties, a family man, a guy who doesn’t swear much, and who goes to church regularly. I know this because he’s told me about how he goes over to Tijuana with his church to visit an orphanage in Mexico on his days off. You’d think, considering all we deal with here in the Central Division, that he’s already received his gold star in heaven right now and could just be kickin’ back with some cold ones in his favorite sports bar during his days off. But that’s not my CO.

  Cherniss is definitely on the straight and narrow. Nay may cla
im that I’m Ms. Goodie Goodie, but he makes me look like Lindsay Lohan. He knows that I’m the niece of the LAPD assistant chief, and based on things that I’ve already managed to do during my first year as a P2, I can tell that he doesn’t completely trust me. Heck, I don’t entirely trust myself sometimes.

  I’m not quite sure what to say to him as we walk over to a patrol car parked in the back parking lot. “What’s going on at County?” I finally ask, trying to make my voice sound light and unconcerned.

  He checks his phone and says, “Eduardo Fuentes, the vic from yesterday at the concert hall? His family’s requested to talk to you.”

  “To me? Why? I didn’t even see what happened. They should be talking to Johnny.”

  “They already have.”

  Latino gardeners aren’t usually high on anyone’s priority response list, so it’s a little weird that Eduardo’s family can pull the captain’s strings. But I’m pretty sure I know what Cherniss and I are doing with this visit at County General: containing a possible explosion. The LAPD Bomb Squad has this thing that explosives are placed in—a containment vessel. That’s us. We can’t let Eduardo Fuentes’s family feel disrespected enough to kick up a fuss that ends up on the six o’clock news. Especially a fuss involving Chinese musical superstar Xu. The mayor wouldn’t like that.

  Cherniss doesn’t need to tell me any of this. I’ve been around my aunt Cheryl often enough to absorb the kind of politics she’s had to survive over the years. It’s not like she talked about it, but whenever she was on edge during family get-togethers—and we have them all the time—I’d check the Internet for clues and always found some kind of dustup within the force. Aunt Cheryl says you have to like living in a pressure cooker to be in the LAPD. Fortunately, I do; I’ll take stressful over boring any day.

  And today is going to be one of those days. As we walk inside and bypass the metal detector in the front of the hospital, I feel the palpable distrust from everyone in line. I hear someone murmur, “I smell bacon.” Whatever. I keep my eyes straight ahead of me. I’ve been called worse. As soon as we enter the hospital’s conference room, a heavyset woman rises from a chair. “We want that Chinito to be charged with attempted murder,” she declares.

  I try not to cringe. Most strangers have no idea that I’m half-Asian, which sometimes places me in uncomfortable situations. Like hearing the Spanish slang word for Chinese used as a slur.

  Cherniss has his game face on, but then, he almost always does. “I’m Sergeant Tim Cherniss and this is Officer Ellie Rush,” he says, extending his hand to the woman, who introduces herself as Eduardo’s daughter, Marta Delgado. Also seated at the table is Eduardo’s nephew, RJ.

  “Is she the one?” Marta asks RJ, glancing at me.

  He nods, but I get the distinct impression that summoning me was his cousin’s idea, not RJ’s.

  “I heard that you spoke to my father. What did he say to you?” Marta demands.

  I look at Cherniss and he nods.

  “Well, he did say something,” I tell her. “But I couldn’t quite make it out.”

  “What was it? Maybe it will mean something to us.”

  “It sounded like ‘ba-ra-baaa.’” I suddenly have a flash of an idea. “Is there someone named Barbara in his life?”

  “My mother’s name was Cristina and she just died last year. Are you trying to say that he was having an affair?”

  Cherniss’s jaw tightens. I should have kept my ideas to myself.

  “No, no. I just heard ‘ba-ra-baaa.’”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, I did talk to him earlier. When he was working in the garden. But we just talked about plants,” I say. It sounds so lame. Lamer than lame.

  Marta’s eyes mist over. “He loves plants. And he loves his job, especially this one at the concert hall. He was a day laborer for years before RJ got him in his crew.” She blows her nose in a well-used tissue. “Why in heaven’s name would he want to jeopardize all that to steal an instrument in broad daylight?”

  She has a point.

  “That’s why we would like to talk to your father,” Cherniss tells her. “Eventually, when he’s able.”

  “Those detectives were here at the hospital. Like vultures, they are. Waiting to pick Papá’s bones before he’s dead.”

  From what I’ve seen of the guy, that might be true of Garibaldi, but I’m surprised to hear Marta characterize Cortez in this way. Besides being hot, Cortez is smooth. His voice is like dripping honey. During his interviews, people often start to like their medicine enough that they practically beg for more.

  “They were ready to accuse him, not defend him.” Marta points her finger our way.

  Cherniss shifts in his seat, making his leather holster crackle. I know what he’s thinking. I’ve got nothing to do with the Robbery-Homicide Division. I’m just in charge of Ellie Rush, this P2 here.

  Marta keeps going. “We were in the waiting room, flipping the channels, and on some Chinese news program, they’re showing Papá’s face. It’s from twenty years ago. I don’t even know where they got it. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I could figure it out. They were saying he’s a criminal. But Xu’s father is the one who hurt him!”

  Marta blows her nose again, even more furiously. I notice a box of Kleenex on a table against the wall. I get up and leave it on the table beside her. She whispers, “Thank you.”

  RJ finally starts to talk. “You saw him right before,” he says to me. “Working hard, not bothering nobody. Did he look like he going to steal something?”

  No, in fact, no, he didn’t, I think. But I can’t say that for fear of being called in as a witness in a possible civil lawsuit.

  Cherniss can tell that I’m wavering and he swoops in. “We will be conducting a full investigation in this matter. You can depend on that.”

  Before Marta can respond, there’s a knock on the conference room door.

  A young man who looks barely twenty enters. “Mom,” he calls out to Marta. “You better come.”

  Marta is immediately on her feet. She follows her son without saying good-bye.

  RJ remains for a moment. “My uncle didn’t do what that Chinese man say. He wouldn’t do nothing wrong. He a good man.” And with that, he, too, is out the door.

  Cherniss and I get up, too, and my CO thanks a woman in one of the private offices for the use of the conference room. “Let’s get back to the station,” he tells me. Thank God. I can tell that the family of Eduardo Fuentes is in crisis. No sense in having “bacon” stink up his hospital room.

  Back in the black-and-white, we both strap on our seat belts. “Well, that was fun,” Cherniss says. He doesn’t mention whether I messed up or not. I guess I didn’t, because he doesn’t say anything more during our drive back to Sixth Street.

  * * *

  I spend the rest of the day catching up on paperwork, specifically writing up what happened on Grand Avenue. Although report writing is my forte, I’m starting to hate not being out in the field. At first I was resistant to join the bicycle unit, and it was my aunt who encouraged me to do so after my first probationary year. “It’s the trend now. Community policing. Being on a bike is one of the best ways to do it. And you get to follow up on cases that you wouldn’t be able to if you were in a police car. You’ll have more latitude than those patrol officers,” she had told me. And while I resent being dissed by people like Rickie, I have to admit that being with the Bicycle Coordination Unit has been kind of growing on me.

  Later, as I’m proofreading my report, I see that my personal phone is vibrating on my desk. I quickly take a look, see “Text received from Nay Pram—CALL ME.” Well, that’s not going to happen right now. I have to be careful with Nay. After hanging out with me on a previous homicide case, Nay changed her major from sociology to communications. She thinks she has a knack for investigative reporting, which maybe
she does, but she’s taking it way too seriously. Now she’s a reporter for the Citrus Squeeze, Pan Pacific West’s student paper, with access to wire services. She’s been keeping tabs on any crime within a five-mile vicinity of PPW, which unfortunately for me includes the same area that the Central Division covers.

  “Hey, Rush, who is this Nay Pram? She says that she knows you,” Jay Steinlight says to me right now in the squad room. He’s always fielding questions from the press, and apparently Nay has made an impression. Oh great. Nay must have called him directly.

  “Uh, yeah, she’s a friend.” Like my BFF, practically the sister that I never had. But Steinlight doesn’t need to know how close we really are.

  “She’s persistent,” says Steinlight. I can read between the lines. She’s a crazy nightmare, and I should use my influence—discreetly, of course—to get her to lay off. But Nay’s a challenge. Push too softly and she won’t feel a thing. Push too hard and it will make her even more curious.

  During my break I go outside and stand beside some dying palm trees next to our building. It’s times like these I kind of wish I smoked. To hold something in between my fingers, some excuse to let my mind wander miles away from here.

  Instead, I hold my phone to my ear and keep my back toward the door. “Hey, Nay, what’s up?”

  “What’s with that guy Steinlight? Wouldn’t give me a thing.”

  “What do you mean?” I am an awful liar, because Nay quickly says, “You know exactly what I mean. Xu. The fight that his father had with that gardener. It was right at Walt Disney Hall. Weren’t you saying that you had patrol duty there?”

  “Nay, I can’t talk about it.”

  “So you were there! Did you see what happened?”

  “I didn’t see what happened,” I say definitively. That isn’t a lie. “And all of this is off the record.”

  “Of course, of course.” I want to believe Nay, but I can’t. Even her writing that “some unnamed cop said that she didn’t see anything” could possibly get me in trouble.