Homicide hotshots, Bradley Kyle and his pal Moose among the pack. Cole, red-faced and bug-eyed with anger, a drastic contrast in mood to his corny trademark fifties vintage bowling shirt; the Robbery-Homicide boys stone- faced in sharp suits and ties, mirrored shades hiding their eyes. Everyone costumed and playing their parts to the hilt.
“Why were Kyle and the Hulk there tonight?” Diane asked.
Parker shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him. “I don’t know. I didn’t invite them.”
“You think the dead guy was connected to something big and juicy?”
“The Lenny Lowells of the world are the Lenny Lowells of the world because they can’t hook on to something big and juicy even if they trip and fall in it.”
“He tripped and fell in something. And it killed him. Something smelly enough for the Parker Center boys to come sniffing.”
“It’s my case until my captain tells me it’s not,” Parker said. “Then I’ll walk away.”
Diane laughed, a throaty, sexy sound that moved her shoulders on its way out. “You liar. You wanted to run Bradley out of there like a tiger protecting its kill.”
“Well, I
“You’re entitled. He’s a prick. I hate the guy too. Everybody hates the guy. I’ll bet his mother hated him in utero,” she said. “But that’s all beside the point. I just don’t get what RHD would want with the murder of a bottom-feeder like that lawyer.”
“I don’t know,” Parker said as the
8
The Chinatown of LA is not the Chinatown of San Francisco. There are no pretty cable cars. Shops selling cheap souvenirs and knockoff designer handbags are fewer, and far from being the largest part of the economy.
The Chinatown of LA was the first modern American Chinatown owned and planned by the Chinese themselves, home now to more than fifteen thousand people of Asian heritage. In recent years it has begun to attract artists and young professionals of all races, and has become a hip place to live.
The Chinatown of LA is about the thriving avant-garde mix of people who make it their home, who live and work there. The streets are lined with meat markets with duck carcasses hanging in the front window, fish markets where the fishmongers wield razor-sharp knives, and places to buy herbs and medicinal cures that the Chinese have been using for thousands of years. Signs in windows are written in Chinese. The primary language spoken is Chinese in a multitude of dialects. But alongside the traditional Chinese shops are contemporary art galleries, and boutiques, and yoga schools.
Jace had moved himself and Tyler to Chinatown after their mother died. They had dumped their meager possessions in a couple of laundry bags pilfered from the back of a delivery truck parked behind a restaurant, and jumped on a bus. Every evening when he returned to Chinatown, Jace recalled the day he had led his brother by the hand beneath the Gate of Filial Piety and to a place no one would ever come looking for them.
Alicia Damon had died as a Jane Doe in Good Samaritan Hospital. Jace knew this because he had taken her to the emergency room himself, “borrowing” the car of a junkie neighbor who was too wasted to notice the scrawny kid next door taking his keys.
His mother had not given the admissions clerk her name or address. She had not allowed Jace to appear to be with her, or to attract attention to himself in any way, or to give anyone his name or tell anyone where they lived.
Alicia had trusted no one in any position of authority, her greatest fear being the Children and Family Services people, who had the power to take her sons away from her. What little mail they got came to a rented box, never to whatever crappy apartment they were living in at the time. They had no phone. Jace had been registered in public school under the name John Charles Jameson. They lived on what money Alicia could make at menial jobs that paid cash, and on a Social Security check that came monthly, made out to Allison Jennings.
They had no family friends. Jace had never brought any school friends home with him. He had never met his father, or even seen a photograph of him. When he was younger, he had asked why, but he had stopped asking by the time he was six, because it upset his mother so much that she would go into another room and cry.
He had an idea who Tyler’s dad might be—a bartender from a dive his mother had worked at briefly. He had seen the guy a couple of times because he had secretly followed his mother to work, afraid to stay alone in the room they were renting at the time. Twice he had seen them through a window, kissing after everyone else had gone from the bar. Then suddenly the Damons picked up and moved to another part of the city. Some months later, Tyler was born. Jace had never seen the bartender again.
Whenever Jace had asked for an explanation about the way they lived, Alicia would only reply: “You can’t be too careful.”
Jace had taken her at her word. After her death, he had made no claim on his mother’s body, because people would ask questions, and questions were never a good thing. He had been just thirteen at the time, and knew without having to be told that Children and Family Services would swoop in like hawks and he and Tyler would be put into foster care, probably not even together.
There was no money for a funeral anyway. And besides, the mother he and Tyler had known was gone. The dead body had nothing really to do with who she had been and would never be again. And so the body had been shipped off to the LA County Coroner’s building to be stored in the morgue with the other three hundred or so Jane and John Does that came in every year, waiting in vain for someone to remember them and care enough to come looking for them.
With stubby candles in cobalt blue votives from the Catholic church three blocks from their apartment, and wilted, unsalable flowers from the Korean market down the street, Jace and Tyler had made their own memorial to their mother. They had set up a little altar of sorts in the living room. Their centerpiece: a photograph of Alicia, taken long ago, in better times.
Tyler had dug the picture out of a cloth-covered box their mother had had as long as Jace could remember. He had looked through it many times when his mother had been out, but not with her there. She hadn’t offered to share it. A box of memories with no stories, no explanations. Photographs of people Jace had never known, taken in places he had never been. Secrets that would forever remain secrets.
Jace had given a short eulogy, then he and Tyler had each named the qualities about their mother they had loved most, and would miss most. They had said their good-byes and put out the candles. Then Jace had held his little brother tight, and both of them had cried, Jace as silently as he could because he was all they had now, and he had to be strong.
Alicia had told Jace never to worry if something ever happened to her, that in the event of tragedy, he should call a phone number she made him memorize, and ask for Alli. Only, when Jace called the number from a pay phone, he was told it was no longer in service. And so there was no Alli, and there was plenty to worry about.
The next day Jace had gone looking for another place for them to live. He had set his sights on Chinatown for a number of reasons. One, because he wanted Tyler to grow up in a place where he didn’t have to worry some junkie would beat his head in for a nickel or take him and sell him to a pedophile to get money for his next fix. Two, because the community was so eclectic, no one would think them out of place there. And three, because he figured if he could actually get them in among the Chinese, he wouldn’t have to worry someone would rat them out to Children and Family Services. The Chinese ran their community their own way, discouraging intrusion from the outside world. Family was more than just a word defined by the County of Los Angeles. The difficulty would be in getting accepted.
Jace had gone up and down the streets, looking for a menial job, being turned down again and again. Nobody wanted him, nobody trusted him, and most of them conveyed the sentiment without speaking a word of English.
At the end of the third fruitless day, when Jace had been almost ready to give up, Tyler had dragged him into a fish market to look at the live catfish in the tank in the front window.
Typical Tyler, he had gone right up to the person who looked most likely to have answers, and proceeded to
