Grave on Grand Avenue (28 page)

Then in the bedroom, I notice that my dresser drawer is open, just a crack. No. No friggin’ way.

But it’s true. I pull open the drawer and my laptop is still there. But next to it, where my Glock should be, is an empty space. I swear, long and repeatedly. I sit on the edge of my couch and cover my face. Who else knew where I stored my gun? Who else would take my Glock but not my computer? Shippo comes over to me and jumps on my knees. He senses that I’m upset.

“It’s not your fault, Shippo.” I pet his head. I took him to the groomer on my day off and he still smells sweet from the oatmeal shampoo. There’s something caught in his collar—a piece of black string? No, it’s a long curly hair. Hair from a poodle.

I curse again. Proof that my effing long-lost grandfather has stolen my gun.

It doesn’t matter if I report it missing; if someone does anything illegal while using my gun, I’ll be sunk. The media will be unforgiving. If my gun, an LAPD officer’s gun, gets used in the commission of a crime, the public won’t care about the illegal circumstances in which it was obtained. They will just stamp the department as BAD and the officer who owned the gun as the WORST.

I can’t even tell Aunt Cheryl that my gun has been stolen. If she tries to cover it up in some way, she’ll get in trouble. Then again, if she doesn’t know about it, she’ll be in trouble, too.

I rub my eyelids with my fingers. I’m all sweaty and filthy. Definitely apropos.
Get a grip, Ellie. Think.
I’m so scattered and freaked-out, I can’t even find my cell phone for a moment, and then I realize that it’s in the pocket of my shorts.

“Lita, it’s me, Ellie.”

“
Querida
, so nice—”

“I don’t have time for all that.” I’m being super rude, but I can’t help it. “I need to figure out where Fernandes might be. Or maybe that other guy, Ron Sullivan.”

“But why?”

“Lita, please.”

“I have no idea. You were the one who told me that Puddy lived in San Bernardino.”

“What if he needed to hang out somewhere close by? Aunt Cheryl says the taxi dropped him off in North Hollywood on Mother’s Day.”

“Well, he used to hang out in this bar in North Hollywood. That’s where we met. But that was sixty years ago,
querida
. Many lifetimes ago. Although . . .”

“Yes, Lita?”

“Although I heard that it was going to reopen. Some younger relatives of the original owner.”

It’s a long shot. An extreme long shot. But I’m desperate. I tell her, “I’m in trouble, Lita. I think that Fernandes might have stolen my gun.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she says.

“Wait, what?”

“You stay put. We’ll handle this together.”

*   *   *

Lita actually makes it in thirteen minutes and quickly agrees with my initial attribution of the theft to Fernandes’s handiwork. “Who else could it be? He probably snooped around and saw it there the other day when he went through your room to the bathroom. He knew exactly where to find it.”

We drive in Lita’s yellow Cadillac. I’m thankful that she is literally taking over the wheel. My hands are wet with
nervous sweat and starting to shake. How could this guy—the man who claims to be my flesh and blood, my grandfather—do this to me? I wish I’d never met him. I wish that he’d never come back into Lita’s life. We were all better off without him.

The other reason I’m glad Lita is driving is that she knows exactly where we’re going. She doesn’t need a GPS or Google Maps to tell her where to go. She has an internal compass that pulls both of us through the freeways and streets of Los Angeles and now North Hollywood.

We finally park on Lankershim, one of the main boulevards in the city, in front of a construction site. The facade of an older building in the back is still visible; it’s a dome, shaped like a German beer stein. Dirt is everywhere. A blue Porta-Potty is off to one side.

A man about my father’s age with a graying beard seems to be the person in charge.

“Hel-lo!” Lita says to him. It’s amazing to see my seventysomething grandmother turn on the charm with someone who could be her son.

“Hi.” He brushes his hands on his dirty jeans and walks over to us.

“I’m an old-time customer here. So excited to see it reopen.”

“Me, too. We’ve been working seven days a week to make it happen. It was my father’s place. I actually grew up here. I want to make it what it was back then. Like
Cheers
, right?”

“You’re Saunders’s son?”

The bearded man nods. “He died a couple of years ago. I came back home to help my mother take care of her affairs. That actually gave me the idea to do something with this property again. Would you like to take a look?”

We walk past an outdoor deck where most of the renovations are taking place. When we go inside the building, Lita immediately comments on the sunroof. “I like all the light. It used to be so dark in here,” she says.

The bar owner nods. “We are definitely going to be mixing the new with the old.” An old door, a makeshift table on two sawhorses, is in the middle of the room. On top of it are all sorts of old furnishings that do look fifty years old: doorknobs, switch and light socket plates, and grills.

I’m getting a bit impatient about their leisurely pace of conversation. This is not a nostalgia tour. “We’re actually in search of an old customer,” I interrupt.

“A lot of them have actually been coming around. Excited about the eventual opening, I guess.”

“Pascoal Fernandes. He could also be going by Puddy.”

“Puddy Fernandes? No, I’m afraid that that name doesn’t ring a bell. And I’d remember that one.”

Lita and I exchange looks. Is this just a complete dead end? I take a second look at the beat-up doorknobs and remember the rusty screws littering the backseat of the Green Mile. I quickly scroll through some photos on my phone while Lita and the bar owner engage in more small talk. I hate to do this to Dad, but I don’t have that many options. “How about someone who kind of looks like this? He’d be twenty years older with a mustache.”

The bar owner takes hold of my phone and stares at a photo of Dad that I took on New Year’s Day. He’s looking goofy and holding a big bowl of
ozoni
, a Japanese clear broth with fish and nuked mochi floating in it.

“Oh, that looks like Noah. A younger version.”

“Noah?”

“Yeah, Noah Rush.”

Fernandes stole my brother’s name? That’s low.

“Noah’s been helping me go to junkyards and picking up old furnishings for me. Or picking up purchases from craigslist. But then he lost his wheels. Said his old lady took away his car.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” I can see the steam rise from Lita’s head. I hold her elbow. We are too close to finding him to blow it.

“Do you know where he is? It’s very important. We have something valuable to give him.”

“Oh, yeah? He’s been talking about how he was waiting for something that was owed to him.”

I bet.

“He’s in that hotel down the street. You know, the Bavarian Inn?”

“The Bavarian Inn is still there?” Lita’s voice is thin.

“Yeah, new owners, of course. But still hanging around.”

We thank the bar owner and Lita promises to come to the grand opening in September. As we walk back to her car, she seems a bit distracted.

“Are you okay, Lita?” Perhaps all these old memories are too overwhelming.

“The Bavarian Inn,” she says weakly.

“You know it?”

“That’s . . . umm . . . That’s where your father was conceived.”

Definitely TMI for this granddaughter, though it certainly explains why Lita now resembles a limp rag.

“Lita, give me the keys.” I wait until she gets in the passenger side and then buckle myself into the driver’s seat. I speed up the street. The sun is just starting to go down. The
Bavarian Inn sign is in some kind of Germanic-style font. The office has a high-pitched roof with a rooster weather vane bent at a forty-five-degree angle. The rooms themselves are in a two-story building that has definitely seen better days.

“It didn’t used to look like this,” Lita says apologetically, as I park the car in the cracked parking lot. The paint for the parking lines has faded so that I’m not even sure if we’re in a legitimate spot. Since there are only five other cars here, I think we’re good.

We get out of the car, bringing with us the security club that Lita uses on her steering wheel. You never know when a club may come in handy.

Above the traffic noises, I hear something: the high-pitched sound of a dog barking, coming from the second floor. I quickly follow the barking, while Lita more slowly makes her way up the stairs behind me.

“Fernandes.” I rap on the door with the end of the steering wheel club. “Let me in! It’s me, Ellie.”

The barking gets louder, but it sounds like it’s coming from a back room. Bacall must be locked in the bathroom.

“Fernandes! I need my gun back.”

Lita has finally caught up with me, her chest heaving from the physical activity.

“I don’t care what you do with your life, Puddy,” she says once she’s caught her breath. “But you can’t do this to Ellie. Give my granddaughter her gun back.”

The door is unlocked and then opened a crack. I tell Lita to stay in the hallway as I slowly walk in, clutching the club in my right hand.

Bacall’s barking gets more furious, but I can’t see her. It’s dark in the room, other than light seeping through the open
door and sides of the window not covered by a dirty curtain. There are two men on the floor, their feet and hands secured by what looks like multiple rounds of Duct tape. Duct tape also covers their mouths. The two men are both alive and wriggle like worms. It’s amazing that Fernandes could do this on his own, without the assistance of a partner.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I spot Fernandes in the far corner. He holds my Glock, first aiming it toward his hostages on the floor and then at me. I hear Bacall’s paws scratch at the closed bathroom door.

“What have you done, Puddy?” I hear Lita behind me.

“Close the door,” he says, and Lita enters the room with me and shuts the door behind her.

Lita visibly reacts to the older Duct-taped man. It must be Ron Sullivan.

“Is this the best you can do? Claim something you lost fifty years ago?” Lita says.

“I did time for the first heist. Didn’t get my share for the second one. I deserve something for all that.”

“And you want to benefit from the evil they have done? They killed a man, Puddy. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not a killer.”

“I haven’t killed anyone. Yet.”

“And you’re not going to kill anyone else, either. At least not with my granddaughter’s gun.” Lita takes a few steps forward so that she’s standing next to me. She stretches out her hand. “Give it to me.”

Fernandes continues to hold my gun toward us. “It’s not fair. My mother died while I was in the joint. She deserved better. I deserved better.”

I grip Lita’s club. “One thing that my parents always
taught me was never to assume that I deserved anything. To think about other people instead. How I can help them.”

Fernandes stares at me. In the dim light his eyes look like black holes. It’s obvious that he hasn’t slept.

“See, Puddy, you’ve actually received more than you have ever deserved. Than I have deserved,” Lita adds. I know that she’s talking about Dad and Noah and me.

First Fernandes’s shoulders begin to shake. Then his arms. And then his hands and, as a result, the Glock. He’s making a weird choking noise. Is he crying? I fear that he will inadvertently shoot off the gun.

“Mr. Fernandes, I need you to give me the gun.” My voice sounds calm and collected, like it’s not coming out of my mouth.

Fernandes steadies himself. He wipes tears from his face with a brush of his forearm. He turns the gun in his hands—for a second I fear that he’s going to shoot himself—and then presents it to me, grip out.

Dropping the club, I claim my gun. I hold it in my right hand and aim it safely toward the floor.

“What’s going to happen now?” Lita asks after picking up the club.

“I’m going to have to call this in,” I tell her. “Assuming they’re the bank robbers, then these two here killed a man.”

“I know,
querida
. You’re the one person in the family who does everything by the book.”

*   *   *

I don’t know how I’m going to explain everything.

The reception in the room is awful, so I step outside onto the balcony to make my call.

He finally answers.

“Cortez—” I begin.

“Listen, Ellie, I have to call you back later. We got a lead in the Old Lady Bandit case.”

I hear sirens in the distance closing in on the Bavarian Inn.

“What’s happening?” Lita is at my side as I quickly end my conversation with Cortez.

“Let’s get out of here,” I tell her.

I know I should stay, give a full report about what happened—Fernandes stealing my gun, following a hunch to the bar and then the Bavarian Inn, discovering the two men taped up, my own biological grandfather aiming a gun—my gun—at me. But it’s easier to do what we are doing, sitting in Lita’s Cadillac from across the street and watching the black-and-whites as well as Cortez’s car drive into the parking lot.

“He must have called it in himself,” I say, referring to Puddy Fernandes. He and Bacall are long gone.

“But when?”

“Probably even before we arrived.”

“You mean he really was trying to help the police catch the Old Lady Bandit?”

“I don’t know,” I say. The car is silent for a few moments. I listen for the yapping of a dog somewhere outside, but there’s only the hum of cars driving past a dilapidated motel, a motel with literally cockeyed direction, the place where my family
began.

EIGHTEEN

On Sunday night, I’m looking on my laptop at stories regarding the apprehension of suspects in the Old Lady Bandit robberies. Ronald Sullivan and his nephew, Andrew Sullivan. Due to a lead by an anonymous caller, the LAPD found both of them in a hotel room, their hands and feet taped together. Their vehicle was discovered in the parking lot, and contained residue from a bank dye pack, further linking them to at least one of the robberies.