They were at the light at Wilshire and Bosch was wondering what he was going to do. And once again she read him, she sensed his indecision.
“Are you going to take me in now, Harry? You might have a hard time proving your case. Everybody’s dead. It could look like you were part of it, too. You going to risk that?”
He didn’t say anything. The light changed and he drove down to the Federal Building, pulling to the curb near the garden of flags.
She said, “If it means anything to you at all, what happened between you and me, it wasn’t part of any plan. I know you won’t ever know if that’s the truth, but I wanted to say —”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say a thing about it.”
A few uneasy moments of silence passed between them.
“You’re just letting me go here?”
“I think it would be best for you, Eleanor, if you turned yourself in. Go get a lawyer and then come in. Tell them you didn’t have anything to do with the murders. Tell them the story about your brother. They are reasonable people and they’ll want to keep it low profile, avoid the scandal. The U.S. attorney will probably let you plead to something short of murder. The bureau will go along.”
“And what if I don’t turn myself in? You will tell them?”
“No. Like you said, I’m too much a part of it. They’d never go with what I’d tell them.”
He thought a long moment. He didn’t want to say what he was going to say next unless he was sure he meant it. And could, and would, do it.
“No, I won’t tell them…. But if I don’t hear in a few days that you went in, I will tell Binh. And I’ll tell Tran. I won’t need to prove it to them. I’ll just tell them the story with enough facts that they’ll know it is true. Then, you know what they’ll do? They’ll act like they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and they’ll tell me to get out. And then they’ll come after you, Eleanor, looking for the same kind of justice you got for your brother.”
“You would do that, Harry?”
“I said I would. I’ll give you two days to go in. Then I tell them the story.”
She looked at him, and the pained expression on her face asked why.
Harry said, “Somebody has to answer for Sharkey.”
She turned away, put her hand on the door handle and looked out the car window at the flags flapping in the Santa Ana breeze. She didn’t look back at him when she said, “So, I guess I was wrong about you.”
“If you mean the Dollmaker case, the answer is yes, you were wrong about me.”
She looked back at him with a wan smile as she opened the door. She quickly leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. She said, “Good-bye, Harry Bosch.”
Then she was out of the car, standing in the wind and looking in at him. She hesitated and then closed the door. As Harry drove away he glanced once in the mirror and saw her still at the curb. She stood there looking down like someone who had dropped something in the gutter. After that, he didn’t look back.
Epilogue
The morning after Memorial Day, Harry Bosch checked back into MLK, where he was severely chastised by his doctor, who seemed, to Harry at least, to take a perverse pleasure in ripping the home-applied bandages away from his shoulder and then using a stinging saline solution to rinse the wound. He spent two days resting and then was wheeled into the OR for surgery to reattach muscles that had been torn from bone by the bullet.
On the second day of his recovery from surgery, a nurse’s aide dropped off a day-old Los Angeles Times for him to while away a few hours with. Bremmer’s story was on the front page, and it accompanied a photograph of a priest standing before a lonely casket at a cemetery in Syracuse, New York. It was FBI Special Agent John Rourke’s casket. Bosch could tell from the photo that more mourners — albeit members of the media — had been at Mead-ows’s funeral. But Bosch tossed the front section aside after scanning the first few paragraphs of the story and realizing it wasn’t about Eleanor. He turned to the sports.
The next day, he had a visitor. Lieutenant Harvey Pounds told Bosch that when he was recovered, he would report back to Hollywood homicide. Pounds said that neither of them had any choice in the matter. The order came from the sixth floor at Parker Center. The lieutenant didn’t have much else to say, and didn’t mention the newspaper article at all. Harry took the news with a smile and a nod, not wanting to show a hint of what he felt or thought.
“Of course, this is all contingent on you being able to pass a departmental physical when you’re released by your physicians here,” Pounds added.
“Of course,” Bosch said.
“You know, Bosch, some officers would want the disability, retire at eighty percent pay. You could get a job in the private sector and do very nicely. You’d deserve it.”
Ah, Harry thought, there is the reason for the visit.
“Is that what the department wants me to do, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Are you the messenger?”
“Of course not. The department wants you to do what you want, Harry. I’m just looking at the advantages of the situation. You know, just something to think about. I understand private investigation is the growth market of the nineties. No trust anymore, you know? Nowadays people are secretly getting complete backgrounds — medical, financial, romantic — on the people they are going to marry.”
“That doesn’t sound like my kind of work.”
“You’ll take the homicide table, then?”
“Soon as I pass the physical.”
He had another visitor the next day. This one was expected. She was a prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office. Her name was Chavez and she wanted to know about the night Sharkey was killed. Eleanor Wish had come in, Bosch knew then.
He told the prosecutor that he had been with Eleanor, confirming her alibi. Chavez said she just had to check to be sure, before they started talking a deal. She asked a few other questions about the case, then got up from the visitor’s chair to go.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Bosch asked.
“I can’t discuss that, Detective.”
“Off the record?”
“Off the record, she’s obviously going to have to go away, but it probably won’t be long. The climate is right for this to be handled very quietly. She came forward, she brought competent counsel and it appears she was not directly responsible for the deaths involved. If you ask me, she’ll get out of this very lucky. She’ll plead and do maybe thirty months tops up at Tehachapi.”
Bosch nodded and Chavez was gone.
Harry, too, was gone the next day, sent home for six weeks’ recuperative leave before reporting back to the station on Wilcox. When he arrived at the house on Woodrow Wilson he found a yellow slip of paper in his mailbox. He took it to the post office and exchanged it for a wide, flat package in brown paper. He didn’t open it until he was home. It was from Eleanor Wish, though it did not say so: it was just something he knew. After tearing away the paper and bubbled plastic liner, he found a framed print of Hopper’s Nighthawks. It was the piece he had seen above her couch that first night he was with her.
Bosch hung the print in the hallway near his front door, and from time to time he would stop and study it when he came in, particularly from a weary day or night on the job. The painting never failed to fascinate him, or to evoke memories of Eleanor Wish. The darkness. The stark loneliness. The man sitting alone, his face turned to the shadows. I am that man, Harry Bosch would think each time he looked.
The
Black
Ice
This is for
Linda McCaleb Connelly
1
The smoke carried up from the Cahuenga Pass and flattened beneath a layer of cool crossing air. From where Harry Bosch watched, the smoke looked like a gray anvil rising up the pass. The late afternoon sun gave the gray a pinkish tint at its highest point, tapering down to deep black at its root, which was a brushfire moving up the hillside on the east side of the cut. He switched his s
canner to the Los Angeles County mutual aid frequency and listened as firefighter battalion chiefs reported to a command post that nine houses were already gone on one street and those on the next street were in the path. The fire was moving toward the open hillsides of Griffith Park, where it might make a run for hours before being controlled. Harry could hear the desperation in the voices of the men on the scanner.
Bosch watched the squadron of helicopters, like dragonflies from this distance, dodging in and out of the smoke, dropping their payloads of water and pink fire retardant on burning homes and trees. It reminded him of the dustoffs in Vietnam. The noise. The uncertain bobbing and weaving of the overburdened craft. He saw the water crushing through flaming roofs and steam immediately rising.
He looked away from the fire and down into the dried brush that carpeted the hillside and surrounded the pylons that held his own home to the hillside on the west side of the pass. He saw daisies and wildflowers in the chap-arral below. But not the coyote he had seen in recent weeks hunting in the arroyo below his house. He had thrown down pieces of chicken to the scavenger on occasion, but the animal never accepted the food while Bosch watched. Only after Bosch went back in off the porch would the animal creep out and take the offerings. Harry had christened the coyote Timido. Sometimes late at night he heard the coyote’s howl echoing up the pass.
He looked back out at the fire just as there was a loud explosion and a concentrated ball of black smoke rotated up within the gray anvil. There was excited chatter on the scanner and a battalion chief reported that a propane tank from a barbecue had ignited.
Harry watched the darker smoke dissipate in the larger cloud and then switched the scanner back to the LAPD tactical frequencies. He was on call. Christmas duty. He listened for a half minute but heard nothing other than routine radio traffic. It appeared to be a quiet Christmas in Hollywood.
He looked at his watch and took the scanner inside. He pulled the pan out of the oven and slid his Christmas dinner, a roasted breast of chicken, onto a plate. Next he took the lid off a pot of steamed rice and peas and dumped a large portion onto the plate. He took his meal out to the table in the dining room, where there was already a glass of red wine waiting, next to the three cards that had come in the mail earlier in the week but that he had left unopened. He had Coltrane’s arrangement of “Song of the Underground Railroad” on the CD player.
As he ate and drank he opened the cards, studied them briefly and thought of their senders. This was the ritual of a man who was alone, he knew, but it didn’t bother him. He’d spent many Christmases alone.
The first card was from a former partner who had retired on book and movie money and moved to Ensenada. It said what Anderson’s cards always said: “Harry, when you coming down?” The next one was also from Mexico, from the guide Harry had spent six weeks living and fishing and practicing Spanish with the previous summer in Bahia San Felipe. Bosch had been recovering from a bullet wound in the shoulder. The sun and sea air helped him mend. In his holiday greeting, written in Spanish, Jorge Barrera also invited Bosch’s return.
The last card Bosch opened slowly and carefully, also knowing who it was from before seeing the signature. It was postmarked Tehachapi. And so he knew. It was handprinted on off-white paper from the prison’s recycling mill and the Nativity scene was slightly smeared. It was from a woman he had spent one night with but thought about on more nights than he could remember. She, too, wanted him to visit. But they both knew he never would.
He sipped some wine and lit a cigarette. Coltrane was now into the live recording of “Spiritual” captured at the Village Vanguard in New York when Harry was just a kid. But then the radio scanner — still playing softly on a table next to the television — caught his attention. Police scanners had played for so long as the background music of his life that he could ignore the chatter, concentrate on the sound of a saxophone, and still pick up the words and codes that were unusual. What he heard was a voice saying, “One-K-Twelve, Staff Two needs your twenty.”
Bosch got up and walked over to the scanner, as if looking at it would make its broadcast more clear. He waited ten seconds for a reply to the request. Twenty seconds.
“Staff Two, location is the Hideaway, Western south of Franklin. Room seven. Uh, Staff Two should bring a mask.”
Bosch waited for more but that was it. The location given, Western and Franklin, was within Hollywood Division’s boundaries. One-K-Twelve was a radio designation for a homicide detective out of the downtown headquarters’ Parker Center. The Robbery-Homicide Division. And Staff Two was the designation for an assistant chief of police. There were only three ACs in the department and Bosch was unsure which one was Staff Two. But it didn’t matter. The question was, what would one of the highest-ranking men in the department be rolling out for on Christmas night?
The second question bothered Harry even more. If RHD was already on the call, why hadn’t he — the on-call detective in Hollywood Division — been notified first? He went to the kitchen, dumped his plate in the sink, dialed the station on Wilcox and asked for the watch commander. A lieutenant named Kleinman picked up. Bosch didn’t know him. He was new, a transfer out of Foothill Division.
“What’s going on?” Bosch asked. “I’m hearing on the scanner about a body at Western and Franklin and nobody’s told me a thing. And that’s funny ’cause I’m on call out today.”
“Don’t worry ’bout it,” Kleinman said. “The hats have got it all squared away.”
Kleinman must be an oldtimer, Bosch figured. He hadn’t heard that expression in years. Members of RHD wore straw bowlers in the 1940s. In the fifties it was gray fedoras. Hats went out of style after that — uniformed officers called RHD detectives “suits” now, not “hats” — but not homicide special cops. They still thought they were the tops, up there high like a cat’s ass. Bosch hated that arrogance even when he’d been one of them. One good thing about working Hollywood, the city’s sewer. Nobody had any airs. It was police work, plain and simple.
“What’s the call?” Bosch asked.
Kleinman hesitated a few seconds and then said, “We’ve got a body in a motel room on Franklin. It’s looking suicide. But RHD is going to take it — I mean, they’ve already taken it. We’re out of it. That’s from on high, Bosch.”
Bosch said nothing. He thought a moment. RHD coming out on a Christmas suicide. It didn’t make much — then it flashed to him.
Calexico Moore.
“How old is this thing?” he asked. “I heard them tell Staff Two to bring a mask.”
“It’s ripe. They said it’d be a real potato head. Problem is, there isn’t much head left. Looks like he smoked both barrels of a shotgun. At least, that’s what I’m picking up on the RHD freek.”
Bosch’s scanner did not pick up the RHD frequency. That was why he had not heard any of the early radio traffic on the call. The suits had apparently switched freeks only to notify Staff Two’s driver of the address. If not for that, Bosch would not have heard about the call until the following morning when he came into the station. This angered him but he kept his voice steady. He wanted to get what he could from Kleinman.
“It’s Moore, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it,” Kleinman said. “His shield is on the bureau there. Wallet. But like I said, nobody’s going to make a visual ID from the body. So nothing is for sure.”
“How did this all go down?”
“Look, Bosch, I’m busy here, you know what I mean? This doesn’t concern you. RHD has it.”
“No, you’re wrong, man. It does concern me. I should’ve gotten first call from you. I want to know how it went down so I understand why I didn’t.”
“Awright, Bosch, it went like this. We get a call out from the owner of the dump says he’s got a stiff in the bathroom of room seven. We send a unit out and they call back and say, yeah, we got the stiff. But they called back on a land line — no radio — ’cause they saw the badge and the wallet on the bureau and knew it was
Moore. Or, at least, thought it was him. We’ll see. Anyway, I called Captain Grupa at home and he called the AC. The hats were called in and you were not. That’s the way it goes. So if you have a beef, it’s with Grupa or maybe the AC, not me. I’m clean.”
Bosch didn’t say anything. He knew that sometimes when he was quiet, the person he needed information from would eventually fill the silence.
“It’s out of our hands now,” Kleinman said. “Shit, the TV and Times are out there. Daily News. They figure it’s Moore, like everybody else. It’s a big mess. You’d think the fire up on the hill would be enough to keep them occupied. No way. They’re out there lined up on Western. I gotta send another car over for media control. So, Bosch, you should be happy you aren’t involved. It’s Christmas, for Chrissake.”
But that wasn’t good enough. Bosch should have been called and then it should have been his decision when to call out RHD. Someone had taken him out of the process altogether and that still burned him. He said goodbye and lit another cigarette. He got his gun out of the cabinet above the sink and hooked it to the belt on his blue jeans. Then he put on a light-tan sport coat over the Army green sweater he was wearing.
It was dark outside now and through the sliding glass door he could see the fire line across the pass. It burned brightly on the black silhouette of the hill. It was a crooked devil’s grin moving to the crest.
From out in the darkness below his house he heard the coyote. Howling at the rising moon or the fire, or maybe just at himself for being alone and in the dark.
2
Bosch drove down out of the hills into Hollywood, traveling mostly on deserted streets until he reached the Boulevard. On the sidewalks there were the usual groupings of runaways and transients. There were strolling prostitutes — he saw one with a red Santa hat on. Business is business, even on Christmas night. There were elegantly made up women sitting on bus benches who were not really women and not really waiting for buses. The tinsel and Chistmas lights strung across the Boulevard at each intersection added a surreal touch to the neon glitz and grime. Like a whore with too much makeup, he thought — if there was such a thing.