“You didn’t open it?”
“Didn’t have time. But I wouldn’t have done it anyway. I worked tunnels in Vietnam. Every trapdoor was just that, a trap. The people that came after I got out of there came by car, not through the tunnel. That tells you right there that there might be a rig in the tunnel.”
He then told Ramos that his application for a search warrant or approval or whatever they called them in Mexico should include requests to seize all tools and debris from trash cans.
“Why?”
“Because the stuff you will find will help me make one of the murder cases I came down here for. There is also evidence of a conspiracy to murder a law enforcement officer — me.”
Ramos nodded and didn’t ask for further explanation. He wasn’t interested. He got up and went to a file cabinet and pulled out two large black binders.
Bosch sat down at an empty desk and Ramos put the binders down in front of him.
“These are KOs — known operatives — associated with Humberto Zorrillo. We have some bio info on some of them. Others, it’s just surveillance stuff. We might not even have a name.”
Bosch opened the first binder and looked at the picture on top. It was a fuzzy eight-by-ten blow-up of a surveillance shot. Ramos said it was Zorrillo and Bosch had guessed as much. Dark hair, beard, intense stare through dark eyes. Bosch had seen the face before. Younger, no beard, a smile instead of the long, empty gaze. It was the grown-up face of the boy who had been in the pictures with Calexico Moore.
“What do you know about him?” Bosch asked Ramos. “You know anything about his family?”
“None that we know of. Not that we looked real hard. We don’t give a shit where he came from, just what he’s doing now and where he’s going.”
Bosch turned the plastic page and began looking at the mugs and surveillance shots. Ramos went back to his desk, rolled a piece of paper into a typewriter and began typing.
“I’m working up a CI statement here. I’ll get it by somehow.”
About two-thirds through the first book Bosch found the man with three tears. There were several photos of him — mugs and surveillance — from all angles and over several years. Bosch saw his face change as the tears were added from a smiling wiseass to a hardened con. The brief biographical data said his name was Osvaldo Arpis Rafaelillo and that he was born in 1952. They said his three stays in the penitenciaro were for murder as a juvenile, murder as an adult and drug possession. He had spent half his life in prisons. The data described him as a lifelong associate of Zorrillo’s.
“Here, I got him,” Bosch said.
Ramos came over. He recognized the man also.
“You’re saying he was up in L.A. whacking out cops?”
“Yeah. At least one. I think he might have done the job on the first one, too. I think he also took down a courier for the competition. A Hawaiian named Jimmy Kapps. He and one of the cops were strangled the same way.”
“Mexican necktie, right?”
“Right.”
“And the laborer? The one you think got it at the bug house?”
“He could’ve done them all. I don’t know.”
“This guy goes way back. Arpis. Yeah, he just got out of the penta a year or so ago. He’s a stone-cold killer, Bosch. One of the pope’s main men. An enforcer. In fact, people ‘round here call him ‘Alvin Karpis,’ you know, after that killer with the machine gun in the thirties? The Ma Barker gang? Arpis was put away for a couple hits but they say that doesn’t do him service. He’s really down for more than you can count.”
Bosch stared at the photos and said, “That’s all you got on him? This stuff here?”
“There’s more around someplace but that’s all you have to know. Most of it is just he said/she said informant stuff. The main story about Al Karpis is that when Zorrillo first made his move to the top, this guy was a one-man front line doing the heavy stuff. Every time Zorrillo had a piece of work to do, he’d turn to his buddy Arpis from the barrio. He’d get the job done. And like I said, they only bagged him a couple times. He probably paid his way out of the rest.”
Bosch began writing some of the information from the bio in a notebook. Ramos kept talking.
“Those two, they came from a barrio south of here. Some —”
“Saints and Sinners.”
“Yeah, Saints and Sinners. Some of the local cops, the ones I trust about as far as I can throw ’em, said Arpis had a real taste for killing. In the barrio they had a saying. Quien eres? Means who are you? It was a challenge. It means what side are you on, you know? Are you with us or against us? Saint or Sinner? And when Zorrillo rose to power, he had Arpis taking out the people that were against them. The locals said that after they whacked somebody, they’d spread the word around the barrio. El descubrio quien era. Means —”
“He found out who he was.”
“Right. It was good PR, made the natives fall in behind him. Supposedly they really got into it. Got to the point they were leaving messages with the body. You know? They’d kill a guy and write out ‘He found out who he was,’ or whatever and leave it pinned to his shirt.”
Bosch said nothing and wrote nothing. Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place.
“Sometimes you still see it on graffiti around the barrio,” Ramos said. “It’s part of the folklore surrounding Zorrillo. It’s part of what makes him the pope.”
Harry finally closed his notebook and stood up.
“I got what I need.”
“All right. Be careful out there, Bosch. Nothing that says they won’t try again, especially if Arpis is on the job. You just want to hang out here today? It’s safe.”
“Nah, I’ll be okay.” He nodded and took a step toward the door. He touched the pager on his belt. “I will get a call?”
“Yeah, you’re in. Corvo’s coming down for the show so I gotta make sure you’re there. Where you gonna be later today?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m going to make like a tourist. Go to the historical society, take in a bullfight.”
“Just be cool. You’ll get a call.”
“I better.”
He walked out to the Caprice thinking only about the note that had been found in Cal Moore’s back pocket.
I found out who I was.
26
It took Bosch thirty minutes to get across the border. The line of cars extended nearly half a mile back from the drab brown Border Patrol port of entry. While waiting and measuring his progress in one or two car-length movements, he ran out of change and one-dollar bills as an army of peasants came to his window holding up their palms or selling cheap bric-abrac and food. Many of them washed the windshield unbidden with their dirty rags and held up their hands for coins. Each progressive washing smeared the glass more until Bosch had to put on the wipers and use the car’s own spray. When he finally made it to the checkpoint, the BP inspector in mirrored shades just waved him through after seeing his badge. He said, “Hose up there on the right if you want to wash the shit off your windshield.”
A few minutes later he pulled into one of the parking spaces in front of the Calexico Town Hall. Bosch parked and looked out across the park while smoking a cigarette. There were no troubadours today. The park was almost empty. He got out and headed toward the door marked Calexico Historical Society, not sure what he was looking for. He had the afternoon to spend and all he knew was that he believed there was a deeper line running through Cal Moore’s death — from his decision to cross to the note in his back pocket to the photo of him with Zorrillo so many years ago. Bosch wanted to find out what happened to the house he had called a castle and the man he had posed with, the one with the hair white as a sheet.
The glass door was locked and Bosch saw that the society didn’t open until one on Sundays. He looked at his watch and saw he still had fifteen minutes to wait. He cupped his hands to the glass and looked in and saw no one inside the tiny space that included two desks, a wall of books and a couple of glass displa
y cases.
He stepped away from the door and thought about using the time to get something to eat. He decided it was too early. Instead, he walked down to the police station and got a Coke from the machine in the minilobby. He nodded at the officer behind the glass window. It wasn’t Gruber today.
While he stood leaning against the front wall, drinking the soda and watching the park, Harry saw an old man with a latticework of thin white hair on the sides of his head unlock the door to the historical society. He was a few minutes early, but Bosch headed down the walk and followed him in.
“Open?” he said.
“Might as well be,” the old man said. “I’m here. Anything in particular I can help you with?”
Bosch walked into the center of the room and explained he was unsure what he wanted.
“I’m sort of tracing the background of a friend and I believe his father was a historical figure. In Calexico, I mean. I want to find their house if it’s still standing, find out what I can about the old man.”
“What’s this fellow’s name?”
“I don’t know. Actually, I just know his last name was Moore.”
“Hell, boy, that name don’t much narrow it down. Moore’s one of the big names around here. Big family. Brothers, cousins all over the place. Tell you what, let me —”
“You have pictures? You know, books with photos of the Moores? I’ve seen pictures of the father. I could pick —”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, let me set you up here with a couple things. We’ll find your Moore. I’m kinda curious now myself. What’re you doing this for your friend for, anyway?”
“Trying to trace the family tree. Put it all together for him.”
A few minutes later the old man had him sitting at the other desk with three books in front of him. They were leather-bound and smelled of dust. They were the size of yearbooks and they wove photographic and written history together on every page. Randomly opening one of the books, he looked at a black-and-white photo of the De Anza Hotel under construction.
Then he started them in order. The first was called Calexico and Mexicali: Seventy-five Years on the Border and as he scanned the words and photos on the pages, Bosch picked up a brief history of the two towns and the men who built them. The story was the same one Aguila had told him, but from the white man’s perspective. The volume he read described the horrible poverty in Tapai, China, and told how the men facing it gladly came to Baja California to seek their fortunes. It didn’t say anything about cheap labor.
In the 1920s and 1930s Calexico was a boomtown, a company town, with the Colorado River Land Company’s managers the lords of all they surveyed. The book said many of these men built opulent homes and estates on bluffs rising on the outskirts of town. As Bosch read he repeatedly saw the names of three Moore brothers: Anderson, Cecil and Morgan. There were other Moores listed as well, but the brothers were always described in terms of importance and had high-level titles in the company.
While leafing through a chapter called “A Dirt Road Town Paves Its Streets in Gold,” Bosch saw the man he was interested in. He was Cecil Moore. There, amidst the description of the riches the cotton brought to Calexico, was a photograph of a man with prematurely white hair standing in front of a Mediterranean-style home the size of a school. It was the man in the photo Moore had kept in the crumpled white bag. And rising like a steeple on the left-hand side of the home was a tower with two arched windows side by side at its uppermost point. The tower gave the house the appearance of a Spanish castle. It was Cal Moore’s childhood home.
“This is the man and this is the place,” Bosch said, taking the book over to the old man.
“Cecil Moore,” the man said.
“Is he still around?”
“No, none of those brothers are. He was the last to go, though. Last year about this time, went in his sleep, Cecil did. I think you’re mistaken though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cecil had no children.”
Bosch nodded.
“Maybe you’re right. What about this place. That gone, too?”
“You’re not working on any family tree, are you now?”
“No. I’m a cop. I came from L.A. I’m tracing down a story somebody told me about this man. Will you help me?”
The old man looked at him and Bosch regretted not being truthful with him in the first place.
“I don’t know what it’s got to do with Los Angeles but go ahead, what else you want to know?”
“Is this place with the tower still there?”
“Yes, Castillo de los Ojos is still there. Castle of the Eyes. Gets its name from those two windows up in the tower. When they were lit at night, it was said that they were eyes that looked out on all of Calexico.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s on a road called Coyote Trail west of town. You take 98 out there past Pinto Wash to an area called Crucifixion Thorn. Turn onto Anza Road — like the hotel here in town. That’ll take you to Coyote Trail. The castle’s at the end of the road. You can’t miss it.”
“Who lives there now?”
“I don’t think anyone does. He left it to the city, you know. But the city couldn’t handle the upkeep on a place like that. They sold it — I believe the man came down from Los Angeles, matter of fact. But as far as I know he never moved in. It’s a pity. I was hoping to have maybe made a museum out of it.”
Bosch thanked him and left to head out to Crucifixion Thorn. He had no idea whether Castillo de los Ojos was anything more than a dead rich man’s estate with no bearing on his case. But he had nothing else going and his impulse was to keep moving forward.
State road 98 was a two-lane blacktop that stretched west from Calexico-town proper, running alongside the border, into farmland delineated into a huge grid by irrigation ditches. As he drove, he smelled green pepper and cilantro. And he realized after running alongside a field planted in cotton that this wide expanse was all once the Company’s huge acreage.
Ahead, the land rose into hills and he could see Calexico Moore’s boyhood home long before he was near. Castillo de los Ojos. The two arched windows were dark and hollow eyes against the peach-colored stone face of the tower rising from a promontory on the horizon.
Bosch crossed a bridge over a dry bed that he assumed was Pinto Wash, though there was no sign on the road. Glancing down into the dusty bed as he passed, Harry saw a lime-green Chevy Blazer parked below. He caught just a glimpse of a man behind the wheel with binoculars held to his eyes. Border Patrol. The driver was using the bed’s low spot as a blind from which he could watch the border for crossers.
The wash marked the end of the farmland. Almost immediately the earth began to rise into brown-brush hills. There was a turnout in the road by a stand of eucalyptus and oak trees that were still in the windless morning. This time there was a sign marking the location:
CRUCIFIXION THORN NATURAL AREA
Danger Abandoned Mines
Bosch remembered seeing a reference in the books at the historical society to the turn-of-the-century gold mines that pockmarked the border zone. Fortunes had been found and lost by speculators. The hills had been heavy with bandits. Then the Company came and brought order.
He lit a cigarette and studied the tower, which was much closer now and rose from behind a walled compound. The stillness of the scene and the tower windows, like soulless eyes, somehow seemed morbid. The tower was not alone on the hill, though. He could see the barrel-tile roofs of other homes. But something about the tower rising singularly above them with its empty glass eyes seemed lonely. Dead.
Anza Road came up in another half mile. He turned north and the single-lane road curved and bumped and rose along the circumference of the hill. To his right he could look down on the farmland basin extending below. He turned left onto a road marked Coyote Trail and was soon passing large haciendas on sprawlng estates. He could see only the second floors of most of them because of the walls that surrounded almost ever
y property.
Coyote Trail ended in a circle that went around an ancient oak tree with branches that would shade the turnaround in the summer. Castillo de los Ojos was here at the end of the road.
From the street, an eight-foot-high stone wall eclipsed all but the tower. Only through a black wrought-iron gate was there a fuller view. Bosch pulled onto the driveway and up to the gate. Heavy steel chain and lock kept it closed. He got out, looked through the bars and saw that the parking circle in front of the house was empty. The curtains inside every front window were pulled closed.
On the wall next to the gate were a mailbox and an intercom. He pushed the ringer but got no response. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if someone had answered. He opened the mailbox and found that empty too.
Bosch left his car where it was and walked back down Coyote Trail to the nearest house. This was one of the few without a wall. But there was a white picket fence and an intercom at the gate. And this time when he rang the buzzer, he got a response.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yes, ma’am, police. I was wondering if I can ask a few questions about your neighbor’s house.”
“Which neighbor?”
The voice was very old.
“The castle.”
“Nobody lives there. Mr. Moore died some time ago.”
“I know that, ma’am. I was wondering if I could come in and talk to you a moment. I have identification.”
There was a delay before he heard a curt “Very well” over the speaker and the gate lock buzzed.
The woman insisted that he hold his ID up to a small window set in the door. He saw her in there, white-haired and decrepit, straining to see it from a wheelchair. She finally opened up.
“Why do they send a Los Angeles police officer?”
“Ma’am, I’m working on a Los Angeles case. It involves a man who used to live in the castle. As a boy, long ago.”
She looked up at him through squinting eyes, as if she was trying to see past a memory.