She sipped some water and seemed to be deciding whether to go on. She did. “Hieronymus Bosch…. The only thing your mother gave you was the name of a painter dead five hundred years. But I imagine the stuff you’ve seen would make the bizarre stuff of dreams he painted look like Disneyland. Your mother was alone. She had to give you up. You grew up in foster homes, youth halls. You survived that and you survived Vietnam and you survived the police department. So far, at least. But you are an outsider in an insider’s job. You made it to RHD and worked the headline cases, but you were an outsider all along. You did things your way and eventually they busted you out for it.”
She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn’t.
“It only took one mistake,” she said. “You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn’t matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn’t enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer.”
Her voice trailed off. She was finished. Bosch didn’t say anything, and there was a long period of silence. The waitress cruised by the booth but knew better than to speak to them.
“When you get back to the office,” he finally began, “you tell Rourke to make one more call. He got me off the case, he can get me back on.”
“I can’t do it. He won’t do it.”
“Yes, he’ll do it, and tell him he has until tomorrow morning to do it.”
“Or what? What can you do? I mean, let’s be honest. With your record, you’ll probably be suspended by tomorrow. As soon as Pounds got off the phone with Rourke he probably called IAD, if Rourke didn’t do it himself.”
“Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning I hear something, or tell Rourke he’ll be reading a story in the Times about how an FBI suspect in a major bank heist, a subject of FBI surveillance no less, was murdered right under the bureau’s nose, taking with him the answers to the celebrated WestLand tunnel caper. All the facts might not be right or in the correct order, but it will be close enough. More important than that, it will be a good read. And it’ll make waves all the way to D.C. It’ll be embarrassing and it’ll also be a warning to whoever did Meadows. You’ll never get them then. And Rourke will always be known as the guy who let them get away.”
She looked at him, shaking her head as if she were above this whole mess. “It’s not my call. I’ll have to go back to him and let him decide what to do. But if it was me, I’d call your bluff. And I will tell you straight out that’s what I’ll tell him to do.”
“It’s no bluff. You’ve checked me out, you know I’ll go to the media and the media will listen to me and like it. Be smart. You tell him it’s no bluff. I’ll have nothing to lose by doing it. He’ll have nothing to lose by bringing me in.”
He began to slide out of the booth. He stopped and threw a couple of dollar bills on the table.
“You’ve got my file. You know where you can reach me.”
“Yes, we do,” she said, and then, “Hey, Bosch?”
He stopped and looked back at her.
“The street whore, was she telling the truth? About the pillow?”
“Don’t they all?”
• • •
Bosch parked in the lot behind the station on Wilcox and smoked right up until he reached the rear door. He killed the butt on the ground and went in, leaving behind the odor of vomit that wafted from the mesh windows at the rear of the station holding tank. Jerry Edgar was pacing in the back hall waiting for him.
“Harry, we’ve got a forthwith from Ninety-eight.”
“Yeah, what about?”
“I don’t know, but he’s been coming out of the glass box every ten minutes looking for you. You got your beeper and the Motorola turned off. And I saw a couple of the IAD silks up from downtown go in there with him a while ago.”
Bosch nodded without saying anything comforting to his partner.
“What’s going on?” Edgar blurted. “If we’ve got a story, let’s get it straight before we go in there. You’ve had experience with this shit, not me.”
“I’m not sure what’s going on. I think they’re kicking us off the case. Me, at least.” He was very nonchalant about the whole thing.
“Harry, they don’t bring IAD in to do that. Something’s on, and, man, I hope whatever you did, you didn’t fuck me up, too.”
Edgar immediately looked embarrassed.
“Sorry, Harry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Relax. Let’s go see what the man wants.”
Bosch headed toward the detective squad room. Edgar said he’d cut through the watch office and then come in from the front hall so it wouldn’t look like they had collaborated on a story. When Bosch got to his desk, the first thing he noticed was that the blue murder book on the Meadows case was gone. But he also noticed that whoever had taken it had missed the cassette tape with the 911 call on it. Bosch picked up the cassette and put it in his coat pocket just as Ninety-eight’s voice boomed out of the glass office at the head of the squad room. He yelled just one word: “Bosch!” The other detectives in the squad room looked around. Bosch got up and slowly walked toward the glass box, as the office of Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds was called. Through the windows he could see the backs of two suits sitting in there with Pounds. Bosch recognized them as the two IAD detectives who had handled the Dollmaker case. Lewis and Clarke.
Edgar came into the squad through the front hallway just as Bosch passed and they walked into the glass box together. Pounds sat dull-eyed behind his desk. The men from Internal Affairs did not move.
“First thing, no smoking, Bosch, you got that?” Pounds said. “In fact, the whole squad stunk like an ashtray this morning. I’m not even going to ask if it was you.”
Department and city policy outlawed smoking in all community-shared offices such as squad rooms. It was okay to smoke in a private office if it was your office or if the office’s occupant allowed visitors to smoke. Pounds was a reformed smoker and militant about it. Most of the thirty-two detectives he commanded smoked like junkies. When Ninety-eight wasn’t around, many of them would go into his office for a quick fix, rather than have to go out to the parking lot, where they’d miss phone calls and where the smell of piss and puke migrated from the rear windows of the drunk tank. Pounds had taken to locking his office door, even on quick trips up the hall to the station commander’s office, but anybody with a letter opener could pop the door in three seconds. The lieutenant was constantly returning and finding his office space fouled by smoke. He had two fans in the ten-by-ten room and a can of Glade on the desk. Since the frequency of the fouling had increased with the reassignment of Bosch from Parker Center to Hollywood detectives, Ninety-eight Pounds was convinced Bosch was the major offender. And he was right, but he had never caught Bosch in the act.
“Is that what this is about?” Bosch asked. “Smoking in the office?”
“Just sit down,” Pounds snapped.
Bosch held his hands up to show there were no cigarettes between his fingers. Then he turned to the two men from Internal Affairs.
“Well, Jed, it looks like we might be off on a Lewis and Clarke expedition here. I haven’t seen the great explorers on the move since they sent me on a no-expense-paid vacation to Mexico. Did some of their finest work on that one. Headlines, sound bites, the whole thing. The stars of Internal Affairs.”
The two IAD cops’ faces immediately reddened with anger.
“This time, you might do yourself a favor and keep your smart mouth shut,” Clarke said. “You’re in serious trouble, Bosch. You get it?”
“Yeah, I get it. Thanks for the tip. I got one for you, too. Go back to the leis
ure suit you used to wear before you became Irving’s bendover. You know, the yellow thing that matched your teeth. The polyester does more for you than the silk. In fact, one of the guys out there in the bullpen mentioned that the ass end of that suit is getting shiny, all the work you do riding a desk.”
“All right, all right,” Pounds cut in. “Bosch, Edgar, sit down and shut up for a minute. This —”
“Lieutenant, I didn’t say one thing,” Edgar began. “I —”
“Shut up! Everybody! Shut up a minute,” Pounds barked. “Jesus Christ! Edgar, for the record, these two are from Internal Affairs, if you didn’t already know, Detectives Lewis and Clarke. What this is —”
“I want a lawyer,” Bosch said.
“Me too, I guess,” added Edgar.
“Oh, bullshit,” Pounds said. “We are going to talk about this and get some things straight, and we aren’t bringing any Police Protective League bullshit into it. If you want a lawyer, you get one later. Right now you are going to sit here, the both of you, and answer some questions. If not, Edgar, you are going to be bounced out of that eight-hundred-dollar suit and back into uniform, and Bosch, shit, Bosch, you’ll probably go down for the count this time.”
For a few moments there was silence in the small room, even though the tension among the five men threatened to shatter the windows. Pounds looked out at the squad room and saw about a dozen detectives acting as if they were working but who were actually trying to pick up whatever they could through the glass. Some had been attempting to read the lieutenant’s lips. He got up and lowered a set of venetian blinds over the windows. He rarely did this. It was a signal to the squad that this was big. Even Edgar showed his concern, audibly exhaling. Pounds sat back down. He tapped a long fingernail on the blue plastic binder that lay closed on his desk.
“Okay, now let’s get down to it,” he began. “You two guys are off the Meadows case. That’s number one. No questions, you’re done. Now, from the top, you are going to tell us anything and everything.”
At that, Lewis snapped open a briefcase and pulled out a cassette tape recorder. He turned it on and put it on Pounds’s spotless desk.
Bosch had been partnered with Edgar only eight months. He didn’t know him well enough to know how he would take this kind of bullying, or how far he could hold out against these bastards. But he did know him well enough to know he liked him and didn’t want him to get jammed up. His only sin in this whole thing was that he had wanted Sunday afternoon off to sell houses.
“This is bullshit,” Bosch said, pointing to the recorder.
“Turn that off,” Pounds said to Lewis, pointing to the recorder, which was actually closer to him than to Lewis. The Internal Affairs detective stood up and picked up the recorder. He turned it off, hit the rewind button and replaced it on the desk.
After Lewis sat back down Pounds said, “Jesus Christ, Bosch, the FBI calls me today and tells me they’ve got you as a possible suspect in a goddam bank heist. They say this Meadows was a suspect in the same job, and by virtue of that you should now be considered a suspect in the Meadows kill. You think we aren’t going to ask questions about that?”
Edgar was exhaling louder now. He was hearing this for the first time.
“Keep the tape off and we’ll talk,” Bosch said. Pounds contemplated that for a moment and said, “For now, no tape. Tell us.”
“First off, Edgar doesn’t know shit about this. We made a deal yesterday. I take the Meadows case and he goes home. He does the wrap-up on Spivey, the TV stabbed the night before. This FBI stuff, the bank job, he doesn’t know for shit. Let him go.”
Pounds seemed to make a point of not looking at Lewis or Clarke or Edgar. He’d make this decision on his own. It produced a slight glimmer of respect in Bosch, like a candle set out in the eye of a hurricane of incompetence. Pounds opened his desk drawer and pulled out an old wooden ruler. He fiddled with it with both hands. He finally looked at Edgar.
“That right, what Bosch says?”
Edgar nodded.
“You know it makes him look bad, like he was trying to keep the case for himself, conceal the connections from you?”
“He told me he knew Meadows. He was up front all the way. It was a Sunday. We weren’t going to get anybody to come out and take it off us on account of him knowing the guy twenty years ago. Besides, most of the people who end up dead in Hollywood the police have known one way or the other. This stuff about the bank and all, he must’ve found out after I left. I’m finding it all out sitting here.”
“Okay,” Pounds said. “You got any of the paper on this one?” Edgar shook his head.
“Okay, finish up what you’ve got on the — what did you call it? — Spivey, yeah, the Spivey case. I’m assigning you a new partner. I don’t know who, but I’ll let you know. Okay, go on, that’s all.”
Edgar let out one more audible breath and stood up.
• • •
Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds let things settle in the room for a few moments after Edgar left. Bosch wanted a cigarette badly, even to just hold one unlit in his mouth. But he wouldn’t show them such a weakness.
“Okay, Bosch,” Pounds said. “Anything you want to tell us about all this?”
“Yeah. It’s bullshit.”
Clarke smirked. Bosch paid no mind. But Pounds gave the IAD detective a withering look that further increased his stock of respect with Bosch.
“The FBI told me today I was no suspect,” Bosch said. “They looked at me nine months ago because they looked at anybody around here who’d worked the tunnels in Vietnam. They found some connection to the tunnels back there. Simple as that. It was good work, they had to check out everybody. So they looked at me and went on. Hell, I was in Mexico — thanks to these two goons — when the bank thing went down. The FBI just —”
“Supposedly,” Clarke said.
“Shove it, Clarke. You’re just angling for a way to take your own vacation down there, at taxpayers’ expense, checking it out. You can check with the bureau and save the money.”
Bosch then turned back to Pounds and adjusted his chair so his back was to the IAD detectives. He spoke in a low voice to make it clear he was talking to Pounds, not them. “The bureau wants me off it because, one, I threw a curve at ’em when I showed up there today to ask about the bank caper. I mean, I was a name from the past, and they panicked and called you. And two, they want me off the case because they probably fucked it up when they let Meadows skate last year. They blew their one chance at him and don’t want an outside department to come in and see that or to break the thing they couldn’t break for nine months.”
“No, Bosch, that’s what’s bullshit,” Pounds said. “This morning I received a formal request from the assistant special agent in charge who runs their bank squad, a guy named —”
“Rourke.”
“You know him. Well, he asked that —”
“I be removed from the Meadows case forthwith. He says I knew Meadows, who just happened to be the prime suspect in the bank job. He ends up dead and I’m on the case. Coincidence? Rourke thinks not. I’m not sure myself.”
“That’s what he said. So that’s where we start. Tell us about Meadows, how you knew him, when you knew him, don’t leave one thing out.”
Bosch spent the next hour telling Pounds about Meadows, the tunnels, the time Meadows called after almost twenty years and how Bosch got him into VA Outreach in Sepulveda without ever seeing him. Just phone calls. At no time did Bosch address the IAD detectives or acknowledge that they were even in the room.
“I didn’t make it a secret that I knew him,” he said at the end. “I told Edgar. I walked right in and told the FBI. You think I would have done that if I was the one who did Meadows? Not even Lewis and Clarke are that dumb.”
“Well, then, Jesus Christ, Bosch, why didn’t you tell me?” Pounds boomed. “Why isn’t it in the reports in this book? Why do I have to hear it from the FBI? Why does Internal Affairs have to hear it fr
om the FBI?”
So Pounds hadn’t made the call to IAD. Rourke had. Bosch wondered if Eleanor Wish had known that and had lied, or if Rourke called out the goons on his own. He hardly knew the woman — he didn’t know the woman — but he found himself hoping she hadn’t lied to him.
“I only started the reports this morning,” Bosch said. “I was going to bring them up to date after seeing the FBI. Obviously, I didn’t get the chance.”
“Well, I’m saving you the time,” Pounds said. “It’s been turned over to the FBI.”
“What has? The FBI has no jurisdiction over this. This is a murder case.”
“Rourke said they believe the slaying is directly related to their ongoing investigation of the bank job. They will include this in their investigation. We will assign our own case officer through an interdepartmental liaison. If and when the time comes to charge someone with the murder, the appointed officer will take it to the DA for state charges.”
“Christ, Pounds, there is something going on. Don’t you see that?”
Pounds put the ruler back in the drawer and closed it.
“Yes, something is going on. But I don’t see it your way,” he said. “That’s it, Bosch. That’s an order. You are off. These two men want to talk to you and you are on a desk till Internal Affairs is finished with its investigation.”
He was quiet a moment before beginning again in a solemn tone. A man unhappy with what he had to say.
“You know, you were sent out here to me last year and I could have put you anywhere. I could have put you on the goddam burglary table, handling fifty reports a week, just buried you in paper. But I didn’t. I recognized your skills and put you on homicide, what I thought you wanted. They told me last year that you’re good but you don’t stay in the lines. Now I see they were right. How this will hurt me, I don’t know. But I’m not worrying about what’s best for you anymore. Now, you can either talk to these guys or not. I don’t really care. But that’s it. We’re done, you and me. If somehow you ride this one out, you better see about getting a transfer, because you won’t be on my homicide table anymore.”