A man was sitting at a desk in the small, windowless office with his feet up on one of the open drawers. He looked up at Bosch and Edgar and said, “Yes, Officers, what can I do for you?”
Bosch smiled at the man’s deduction. He knew he had to be part businessman, part parole officer. If the polishers were ex-cons, it was the only job they could get. That meant the manager had seen his share of cops and knew how to pick them out. Either that or he saw them pull up in the slickback.
“We’re working a case,” Bosch began. “The Howard Elias case.”
The manager whistled.
“A few weeks ago he subpoenaed some of your records. Receipts with license plate numbers on them. You know anything about that?”
The manager thought about it for a few moments.
“All I know is that I was the one who had to go through everything and get it copied for his guy.”
“His guy?” Edgar asked.
“Yeah, what do you think, a guy like Elias comes get the stuff himself? He sent somebody. I got his card here.”
He lowered his feet to the floor and opened the desk’s pencil drawer. There was a stack of business cards with a rubber band around it. He took it off and looked through the cards and chose one. He showed it to Bosch.
“Pelfry?” Edgar asked.
Bosch nodded.
“Did his guy say exactly what they were looking for in all that stuff?” he asked.
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. Or, I mean, ask Pelfry.”
“Did Pelfry come back with the stuff yet?”
“No. It was copies, anyway. I mean, he came back but not to bring back the receipts.”
“Then why’d he come back?” Edgar asked.
“He wanted to see one of Michael Harris’s old time cards. From when he worked here.”
“Which one?” Edgar asked, a tone of urgency in his voice.
“I don’t remember, man. I gave him a copy. You go talk to him and maybe he —”
“Did he have a subpoena for the time card?” Bosch asked.
“No, he just asked for it, you know. I said sure and got it for him. But he gave me the date and you didn’t. I don’t remember it. Anyway, look, if you want to ask more about this then maybe you better call our lawyer. I’m not going to get involved in talking about stuff I don’t —”
“Never mind that stuff,” Bosch said. “Tell me about Michael Harris.”
“What’s to tell? I never had a problem with the guy. He was okay, then they came in and said he killed that little girl. And did things to her. It didn’t seem like the guy I knew. But he hadn’t been working here that long. Maybe five months.”
“Know where he was before that?” Edgar asked.
“Yeah. Up at Corcoran.”
Corcoran was a state prison near Bakersfield. Bosch thanked the manager and they left. He took a few sips of his coffee but dumped it in a trash can before getting back to the car.
While Bosch waited at the passenger door for it to be unlocked, Edgar went around to his side. He stopped before opening the door.
“Goddammit.”
“What?”
“They wrote shit on the door.”
Bosch came around and looked. Someone had used light blue chalk—the chalk used to write washing instructions on the windshields of clients’ cars—to cross out the words To protect and serve on the driver’s side front fender. Then written in large letters were the words To murder and maim. Bosch nodded his approval.
“That’s pretty original.”
“Harry, let’s go kick some ass.”
“No, Jerry, let it go. You don’t want to start something. It might take three days to end it. Like last time. Like Florence and Normandie.”
Edgar sullenly unlocked the car and then opened Bosch’s door.
“We’re right by the station,” Bosch said after he got in. “We can go back and spray it off. Or we can use my car.”
“I’d like to use one of those assholes’ faces to clean it off.”
After they had the car cleaned up there was still time for them to drive by the lot where Stacey Kincaid’s body had been found. It was off Western and was on the way downtown, where they would go to meet Pelfry.
Edgar was silent the whole way there. He had taken the vandalism of the patrol car personally. Bosch didn’t mind the silence, though. He used the time to think about Eleanor. He felt guilty because deep down and despite his love for her, he knew that he was feeling a growing relief that their relationship was coming to a head, one way or the other.
“This is it,” Edgar said.
He pulled the car to the curb and they scanned the lot. It was about an acre and bordered on both sides by apartment buildings with banners announcing move-in bonuses and financing. They didn’t look like places where people would want to live unless they had no choice. The whole neighborhood had a run-down and desperate feel.
Bosch noticed two old black men sitting on crates in the corner of the lot, under a sprawling and shade-giving eucalyptus tree. He opened the file he’d brought with him and studied the map that charted the location of the body. He estimated that it was less than fifty feet from where the two men were now sitting. He turned pages in the file until he found the incident report which named the two witnesses who reported finding the body.
“I’m getting out,” he said. “I’m going to go talk to those guys.”
He got out and Edgar did, too. They crossed the lot nonchalantly and approached the two men. As they got closer, Bosch saw sleeping bags and an old Coleman camp stove. Parked against the trunk of the eucalyptus were two supermarket carts filled with clothing, bags of aluminum cans and assorted junk.
“Are you men Rufus Gundy and Andy Mercer?”
“Depends on who’s doin’ the askin’.”
Bosch showed his badge.
“I wanted to ask a few questions about the body you guys found here last year.”
“Yeah, what took you so long?”
“Are you Mr. Gundy or Mr. Mercer?”
“I’m Mercer.”
Bosch nodded.
“Why do you say we took so long? Weren’t you interviewed by detectives when you found the body?”
“We was interviewed, but not by no detectives. Some wet-eared patrol boy akst us what we knew.”
Bosch nodded. He pointed to the sleeping bags and the camp stove.
“You guys live here?”
“We runnin’ a piece of bad luck. We just stayin’ till we on our feet again.”
Bosch knew there was nothing in the incident report about the two men living on the lot. The report said they were passing through the lot, looking for cans, when they came across her body. He thought about this and realized what had happened.
“You were living here then, weren’t you?”
Neither of them answered.
“You didn’t tell the cops that because you thought you might get run off.”
Still no reply.
“So you hid your sleeping bags and your stove and called it in. You told that patrol officer that you were just passing through.”
Finally, Mercer spoke.
“If’n you’re so smart, how come you ain’t chief yet?”
Bosch laughed.
“Because they’re smart enough not to make me chief. So, tell me something, Mr. Mercer and Mr. Gundy. If you two were sleeping here during nights back then, you probably would’ve found that body a lot sooner if it had been here the whole time she was missing, right?”
“Most likely,” Gundy said.
“So somebody probably dumped that body the night before you found it.”
“Could be,” Gundy said.
“Yeah, I’d say that was so,” Mercer added.
“With you two sleeping, what, forty, fifty feet away?”
This time they didn’t verbally agree. Bosch stepped over and dropped into a catcher’s squat so he was on their eye level.
“Tell me what you men saw that night.”
/>
“We didn’t see nothin’,” Gundy said adamantly.
“But we heard things,” Mercer said. “Heard things.”
“What things?”
“A car pull up,” Mercer said. “A door open, then a trunk. We heard somethin’ heavy hit the ground. Then the trunk closed and the door, then the car drive off.”
“You didn’t even look?” Edgar asked quickly. He had stepped over and was leaning down, hands on his knees. “A body gets dumped there fifty feet away and you don’t look?”
“No, we don’t look,” Mercer retorted. “People be dumpin’ their garbage and whatnot in the field most every night. We never look. We keep our heads down. In the morning we look. We get some nice items time to time from what people throw away. We always wait till mornin’ to check out what they throw.”
Bosch nodded that he understood and hoped Edgar would leave the men alone.
“And you never told all of this to the cops?”
“Nope,” Mercer and Gundy said in unison.
“What about anybody else? You ever told it to somebody who could verify this has been the true story all along?”
The men thought about it. Mercer was shaking his head no when Gundy nodded yes.
“The only one we told was Mr. Elias’s man.”
Bosch glanced at Edgar and then back at Gundy.
“Who’s that?”
“His man. The investigator. We told him what we told you. He said Mr. Elias was gonna use us in court one day. He said Mr. Elias would be takin’ care of us.”
“Pelfry?” Edgar asked. “Was that his name?”
“Could be,” Gundy said. “I don’t know.”
Mercer didn’t say anything.
“You guys read the paper today?” Bosch asked. “See any TV news?”
“On what TV?” Mercer asked.
Bosch just nodded and stood up. They didn’t even know Elias was dead.
“How long ago was that when Mr. Elias’s man talked to you?”
“Be about a month,” Mercer said. “Somewhere around that.”
Bosch looked at Edgar and nodded that he was done. Edgar nodded back.
“Thanks for your help,” Bosch said. “Can I buy you guys some dinner?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his money. He gave each man a ten. They thanked him politely and he walked away.
As they sped north on Western to Wilshire, Bosch started riffing on what the information from the two homeless men meant.
“Harris is clear,” he said excitedly. “That’s how Elias knew. Because the body was moved. It was dumped there three days after she was dead. And Harris was in custody when it was moved. The best alibi in the world. Elias was going to bring those two old guys into court and put the lie to the LAPD.”
“Yeah, but hold on, Harry,” Edgar said. “It doesn’t clear Harris completely. It could just mean he had an accomplice. You know, who moved the body while he was in lockup.”
“Yeah, then why dump it so close to his apartment and further implicate him? I don’t think there’s an accomplice. I think it was the real killer. He read in the paper or saw on TV that they had Harris as a suspect and he moved the body to his neighborhood, to be another nail in Harris’s coffin.”
“What about the fingerprints? How did Harris’s prints get into that nice mansion in Brentwood? Are you goin’ along with them being planted by your buddy Sheehan and his team?”
“No, I’m not. There’s an explanation. We just don’t know it yet. It’s what we ask Pel —”
There was a loud explosion as the rear window shattered and glass blasted through the car. Edgar momentarily lost control and the car swerved into the oncoming lanes. There was a chorus of angry horns as Bosch reached over and yanked the wheel right, bringing the car back across the yellow lines.
“What the fuck?” Edgar cried as he finally got the car under control and put on the brakes.
“No!” Bosch yelled. “Keep going, keep going!”
Bosch grabbed the radio out of the recharge slot on the floor and depressed the transmit button.
“Shots fired, shots fired! Western and Olympic.”
He held the button down as he looked over the backseat and out over the trunk. His eyes scanned the rooftops and windows of the apartment buildings two blocks back. He saw nothing.
“Suspect unknown. Sniper fire on a marked investigative services unit. Request immediate backup. Request air surveillance of rooftops east and west sides of Western. Extreme caution is advised.”
He clicked off the transmit button. While the dispatch operator repeated most of what he had just said to other units, he told Edgar that they had gone far enough and that he could stop.
“I think it came from the east side,” Bosch said to Edgar. “Those apartments with the flat roof. I think I heard it in my right ear first.”
Edgar exhaled loudly. His hands were gripped so tight on the steering wheel now that the knuckles were as white as Bosch’s.
“You know what?” he said. “I think I’m never going to drive one of these fucking targets again.”
24
“You guys are late. I was thinkin’ about goin’ home, already.”
Jenkins Pelfry was a big man, with a barrel chest and a complexion so dark it was hard to make out the lines of his face. He sat on the top of a small secretary’s desk in the anteroom of his office suite in the Union Law Center. There was a small television on a credenza to his left. It was tuned to a news channel. The view on the screen was from a helicopter circling a scene somewhere in the city.
Bosch and Edgar had arrived forty minutes late for their noon appointment.
“Sorry, Mr. Pelfry,” Bosch said. “We ran into a little problem on the way over. Appreciate you staying.”
“Lucky for you I lost track of the time. I was watching the tube here. Things are not looking too good at the moment. It’s looking a little testy out there.”
He indicated the television with one of his huge hands. Bosch looked again and realized the scene that the helicopter was circling was the scene he and Edgar had just left—the search for the sniper who had taken the shot at their car. On the tube Bosch could see the sidewalks on Western were now crowded with people watching the cops moving from building to building. More officers were arriving on the scene and these new officers were wearing riot helmets.
“These guys oughta just get out of there. They’re baitin’ the crowd. This isn’t good. Just back the hell out, man. Live to fight another day.”
“Tried that last time,” Edgar said. “Didn’t work.”
The three of them watched for a few more moments in silence, then Pelfry reached over and turned off the tube. He looked at his visitors.
“What can I do for you?”
Bosch introduced himself and his partner.
“I suppose you know why we’re here. We’re working the Howard Elias case. And we know you were doing some work for him on the Black Warrior thing. We could use your help, Mr. Pelfry. If we find who did this, we maybe have a shot at cooling this place off.”
Bosch nodded at the blank tube of the television to underline his point.
“You want my help,” Pelfry said. “Yeah, I worked for Eli—I always called him Eli. But I don’t know what I can do for you.”
Bosch looked at Edgar and his partner made a subtle nod of his head.
“Mr. Pelfry, our conversation here has to be kept confidential. My partner and I are following an investigative trail that indicates that whoever killed Stacey Kincaid may have also killed your employer. We think Elias got too close to the truth. If you know what he knew, then you could be in danger yourself.”
Pelfry laughed at him—a short, loud snort. Bosch looked at Edgar and then back at Pelfry.
“No offense but that’s about the worst pickup line I ever heard,” Pelfry said.
“What are you talking about?”
He pointed at the television once more. Bosch noticed how white the underside of his han
d was.
“I told you I been watchin’ the news. Channel Four says you guys are already measuring a cell for somebody. One of your own.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re sweatin’ a suspect over at Parker right now.”
“Did they have a name?”
“They didn’t say a name but they knew it. They said it was one of the Black Warrior cops. The lead detective, in fact.”
Bosch was dumbfounded. The lead detective was Frankie Sheehan.
“That’s impos—can I use your phone?”
“Help yourself. By the way, do you know you have glass in your hair?”
Bosch brushed his hand through his hair while he stepped to the desk and picked up the phone. While he punched in the number of Irving’s conference room Pelfry watched. The phone was answered immediately.
“Let me talk to Lindell.”
“This is Lindell.”
“It’s Bosch. What’s this on Channel Four about a suspect?”
“I know. I’m checking into it. Somebody leaked. All I can say is that I updated Irving and the next thing I know it’s on TV. I think he’s your leak, not Chas —”
“I don’t care about that. What are you saying, it’s Sheehan? That’s im —”
“I’m not saying that. That’s the leak talking and I think the leak is the goddamned deputy chief.”
“Have you brought Sheehan in?”
“Yeah, we got him in here and we’re talking to him. Strictly voluntary at this point. He thinks he can talk his way out of the box. We got all day and then some. We’ll see if he can.”
“Why Sheehan? Why’d you bring him in?”
“I thought you knew. He was on top of Chastain’s list this morning. Elias sued him once before. Five years ago. He shot some asshole while trying to make an arrest on a murder. Put five holes in him. The widow sued and eventually won a hundred grand—even though to me it looked like a righteous shoot. In fact your buddy Chastain was the one who investigated the shoot and cleared him.”
“I remember the case. It was a righteous shoot. But that didn’t matter to the jury. It was just a little while after Rodney King.”