“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the name on there,” Kim said, still blocking the way.
“Hieronymus Bosch. But people call me Harry.”
“You’re named for the painter.”
“Sometimes I feel old enough that I think he was named for me. Tonight’s one of those nights. Can I come in? This shouldn’t take long.”
Kim led him into the living room with a confused look on his face. It was a decent-sized and neat room with a couch and two chairs and a gas fireplace next to the TV. Kim took one of the chairs and Bosch sat on the end of the couch. He noticed a white poodle sleeping on the carpet next to Kim’s chair. Kim was an overweight man with a wide, florid face. He wore glasses that pinched his temples and what was left of his hair was dyed brown. He wore a red cardigan sweater over a white shirt and old khakis. Bosch guessed Kim wasn’t quite sixty. He had been expecting an older man.
“I guess this is where I ask, ‘What’s this all about?’”
“Yeah, and I guess this is where I tell you. Problem is I’m not sure how to begin. I’m investigating a couple of homicides. You can probably help. But I wonder if you’d indulge me and let me ask you some questions going a while back? Then, when we’re done, I’ll explain why.”
“Seems unusual but . . .”
Kim raised his hands and waved off any problems. He made a movement in his chair as if to get more comfortable. He checked the dog and then squinted his eyes as if that might better help him understand and answer the questions. Bosch could see a film of sweat developing in the defoliated landscape that had once been his scalp.
“You were a reporter for the Times. How long did that last?”
“Oh, boy, that was just a few years in the early sixties. How do you know that?”
“Mr. Kim, let me ask these questions first. What kind of reporting did you do?”
“Back then they called us cub reporters. I was on the crime beat.”
“What do you do now?”
“Currently, I work out of my home. I’m in public relations. I have an office upstairs in the second bedroom. I had an office in Reseda but the building was condemned. You could see daylight through the cracks.”
He was like most people in L.A. He didn’t have to preface his remarks by saying he was talking about earthquake damage. It was understood.
“I have several small accounts,” he continued. “I was a local spokesman for the GM plant in Van Nuys until they closed it down. Then I went out on my own.”
“What made you quit the Times back in the sixties?”
“I got— Am I a suspect in something?”
“Not at all, Mr. Kim. I’m just trying to get to know you. Indulge me. I’ll get to the point. You were saying why you quit the Times.”
“Yes, well, I got a better job. I was offered the position of press spokesman for the district attorney at the time, Arno Conklin. I took it. Better pay, more interesting than the cop beat and a brighter future.”
“What do you mean, brighter future?”
“Well, actually I was wrong about that. When I took the job I thought the sky would be the limit with Arno. He was a good man. I figured I’d eventually— you know, if I stayed with him— ride with him to the governor’s mansion, maybe the Senate in Washington. But things didn’t turn out. I ended up with an office in Reseda with a crack in the wall I could feel the wind come through. I don’t see why the police would be interested in all—”
“What happened with Conklin? Why didn’t things turn out?”
“Well, I’m not the expert on this. All I know is that in ’sixty-eight he was planning on running for attorney general and the office was practically his for the taking. Then he just . . . dropped out. He quit politics and went back to practice law. And it wasn’t to harvest the big corporate bucks that sit out there when these guys go into private practice. He opened a one-man law firm. I admired him. As far as I heard, sixty percent or better of his practice was pro bono. He was working for free most of the time.”
“Like he was serving a penance or something?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“Why’d he drop out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Weren’t you part of the inner circle?”
“No. He didn’t have a circle. He had one man.”
“Gordon Mittel.”
“Right. You want to know why he didn’t run, ask Gordon.” Then it clicked in Kim’s brain that Bosch had introduced the name Gordon Mittel to the conversation. “Is this about Gordon Mittel?”
“Let me ask the questions first. Why do you think Conklin didn’t run? You must have some idea.”
“He wasn’t officially in the race in the first place, so he didn’t have to make any public statement about dropping out. He just didn’t run. There were a lot of rumors, though.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, lots of stuff. Like he was gay. There were others. Financial trouble. Supposedly there was a threat from the mob that if he won, they’d kill him. Just stuff like that. None of it was ever more than backroom talk amongst the town politicos.”
“He was never married?”
“Not as far as I know. But as far as him being gay, I never saw anything like that.”
Bosch noted that the top of Kim’s head was slick now with sweat. It was already warm in the room but he kept the cardigan on. Bosch made a quick change of tracks.
“Okay, tell me about the death of Johnny Fox.”
Bosch saw the quick glimmer of recognition pass behind the glasses but then it disappeared. But it was enough.
“Johnny Fox, who’s that?”
“C’mon, Monte, it’s old news. Nobody cares what you did. I just need to know the story behind the story. That’s why I’m here.”
“You’re talking about when I was a reporter? I wrote a lot of stories. That was thirty-five years ago. I was a kid. I can’t remember everything.”
“But you remember Johnny Fox. He was your ticket to that brighter future. The one that didn’t happen.”
“Look, what are you doing here? You’re not a cop. Did Gordon send you? After all these years, you people think I . . .”
He stopped.
“I am a cop, Monte. And you’re lucky I got here before Gordon did. Something’s coming undone. The ghosts are coming back. You read in the paper today about that cop found in his trunk in Griffith Park?”
“I saw it on the news. He was a lieutenant.”
“Yeah. He was my lieutenant. He was looking into a couple old cases. Johnny Fox was one of them. Then he ended up in his trunk. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little nervous and pushy, but I need to know about Johnny Fox. And you wrote the story. You wrote the story after he got killed that made him out to be an angel. Then you end up on Conklin’s team. I don’t care what you did, I just want to know what you did.”
“Am I in danger?”
Bosch hiked his shoulders in his best who-knows-and-who-cares gesture.
“If you are, then we can protect you. You don’t help us, we can’t help you. You know how it goes.”
“Oh my God! I knew this— What other cases?”
“One of Johnny’s girls who got killed about a year before him. Her name was Marjorie Lowe.”
Kim shook his head. He didn’t recognize the name. He ran his hand over his scalp, using it like a squeegee to move the sweat into the thicker hair. Bosch could tell he had perfectly primed the fat man to answer the questions.
“So what about Fox?” Bosch asked. “I don’t have all night.”
“Look, I don’t know anything. All I did was a favor for a favor.”
“Tell me about it.”
He composed himself for a long moment before speaking.
“Look, you know who Jack Ruby was?”
“In Dallas?”
“Yeah, the guy who killed Oswald. Well, Johnny Fox was the Jack Ruby of L.A., okay? Same era, same kind of guy. Fox ran women, was a gambler, knew which cops could be greased and
greased them when he needed to. It kept him out of jail. He was a classic Hollywood bottom feeder. When he ended up dead on the Hollywood Division blotter, I saw it but was going to pass. He was trash and we didn’t write about trash. Then a source I had in the cop shop told me Johnny had been on Conklin’s payroll.”
“That made it a story.”
“Yeah. So I called up Mittel, Conklin’s campaign manager, and ran it by him. I wanted a response. I don’t know how much you know about that time, but Conklin had this squeaky-clean image. He was the guy attacking every vice in the city and here he had a vice hoodlum on the payroll. It was a great story. Though Fox didn’t have a record, I don’t think, there were intel files on him and I had access to them. The story was going to do damage and Mittel knew it.”
He stopped there at the edge of the story. He knew the rest but to speak of it out loud he had to be pushed over the edge.
“Mittel knew it,” Bosch said. “So he offered you a deal. He’d make you Conklin’s flak if you cleaned up the story.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what? What was the deal?”
“I’m sure any kind of statute has passed . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. Just tell me and only me, you and your dog will ever know it.”
Kim took a deep breath and continued.
“This was mid-campaign so Conklin already had a spokesman. Mittel offered me a job as deputy spokesman after the election. I’d work out of the office in the Van Nuys Courthouse, handle the Valley stuff.”
“If Conklin won.”
“Yeah, but that was a given. Unless this Fox story caused a problem. But I held out, used some leverage. I told Mittel I wanted to be the main spokesman after Arno’s election or forget it. He got back to me later and agreed.”
“After he talked to Conklin.”
“I guess. Anyway, I wrote a story that left out the details of Fox’s past.”
“I read it.”
“That’s all I did. I got the job. It was never mentioned again.”
Bosch sized Kim up for a moment. He was weak. He didn’t see that being a reporter was a calling just the same as being a cop. You took an oath to yourself. Kim had seemingly had no difficulty breaking it. Bosch could not imagine someone like Keisha Russell acting the same way under the same circumstances. He tried to cover his distaste and move on.
“Think back now. This is important. When you first called up Mittel and told him about Fox’s background, did you get the impression that he already knew the background?”
“Yes, he knew. I don’t know if the cops had told him that day or he had known all along. But he knew Fox was dead and he knew who he was. I think he was a little surprised that I knew and he became eager to make a deal to keep it out of the paper . . . It was the first time I ever did anything like that. I wish I hadn’t done it.”
Kim looked down at the dog and then to the beige rug and Bosch knew it was a screen on which he saw how his life diverged sharply the moment he took the deal. It went from where it was going to where it eventually was.
“Your story didn’t name any cops,” Bosch said. “Do you remember who handled it?”
“Not really. It was so long ago. It would have been a couple guys from the Hollywood homicide table. Back then, they handled fatal accidents. Now there’s a division for that.”
“Claude Eno?”
“Eno? I remember him. It might’ve been. I think I remember that it . . . Yes, it was. Now I remember. He was on it alone. His partner had transferred or retired or something and he was working alone, waiting for his next partner to transfer in. So they gave him the traffic cases. They were usually pretty light, as far as any investigation went.”
“How do you remember so much of this?”
Kim pursed his lips and struggled for an answer.
“I guess . . . Like I said, I wish I never did what I did. So, I guess, I think about it a lot. I remember it.”
Bosch nodded. He had no more questions and was already thinking of the implications of how Kim’s information fit with his own. Eno had worked both cases, Lowe and Fox, and later retired, leaving behind a mail-drop corporation with Conklin’s and Mittel’s name on it that collected a thousand dollars a month for twenty-five years. He realized that compared to Eno, Kim had settled for too little. He was about to get up when he thought of something.
“You said that Mittel never mentioned the deal you made or Fox again.”
“That’s right.”
“Did Conklin ever say anything about either one?”
“No, he never mentioned a thing, either.”
“What was your relationship like? Didn’t he treat you as a chiseler?”
“No, because I wasn’t a chiseler,” Kim protested but the indignation in his voice was hollow. “I did a job for him and I did it well. He was always very nice to me.”
“He was in your story on Fox. I don’t have it here but in it he said he had never met Fox.”
“Yeah, that was a lie. I made that up.”
Bosch was confused.
“What do you mean? You mean, you made up the lie?”
“In case they went back on the deal. I put Conklin in the story saying he didn’t know the guy because I had evidence he did. They knew I had it. That way, if after the election they reneged on the deal, I could dredge up the story again and show Conklin said he didn’t know Fox but he did. I could then make the inference that he also knew Fox’s background when he hired him. It wouldn’t have done much good because he’d have already been elected, but it would do some PR damage. It was my little insurance policy. Understand?”
Bosch nodded.
“What was the evidence you had that Conklin knew Fox?”
“I had photos.”
“What photos?”
“They were taken by the society photographer for the Times at the Hollywood Masonic Lodge’s St. Patrick’s Day dance a couple of years before the election. There’s two of them. Conklin and Fox are at a table. They were scratches but one day I was—”
“What do you mean, scratches?”
“Photos never published. Outtakes. But, see, I used to look at the society stuff in the photo lab, so I could learn who the big shots in the city were and who they were out with and so on. It was useful information. One day I saw these photos of Conklin and some guy that I recognized but wasn’t sure from where. It was because of the social background. This wasn’t Fox’s turf so at the time I didn’t recognize him. Then, when Fox got killed and I was told he worked for Conklin, I remembered the photos and who the other man was. Fox. I went back to the scratch files and pulled them out.”
“They were just sitting there together at this dance?”
“In the photos? Yeah. And they were smiling. You could tell they knew each other. These weren’t posed shots. In fact, that’s why each was a scratch. They weren’t good photos, not for the society page.”
“Anybody else with them?”
“A couple women, that was it.”
“Go get the photos.”
“Oh, I don’t have them anymore. I tossed them after I didn’t need them anymore.”
“Kim, don’t bullshit me, okay? There was never a time you didn’t need them. Those photos are probably why you are alive today. Now go get them or I’ll take you downtown for withholding evidence, then I’ll come back with a warrant and tear this place apart.”
“All right! Jesus! Wait here. I have one of them.”
He got up and went up the stairs. Bosch just stared at the dog. It was wearing a sweater that matched Kim’s. He heard a closet door being moved on rollers, then a heavy thud. He guessed a box had been taken off the shelf and dropped to the floor. In a few more moments, Kim’s heavy steps were coming down the stairs. As he passed the couch, he handed Bosch a black-and-white eight-by-ten that was yellowed around the edges. Bosch stared at it for a long time.
“I have the other in a safe deposit box,” Kim said. “It’s a clearer shot of the two of them
. You can tell it’s Fox.”
Bosch didn’t say anything. He was still looking at the photo. It was a flashbulb shot. Everybody’s face was lit up white as snow. Conklin sat across a table from the man Bosch assumed was Fox. There were a half dozen drink glasses on the table. Conklin was smiling and heavy-lidded— that was probably why the photo was a scratch— and Fox was turned slightly away from the camera, his features indistinguishable. Bosch guessed you would have had to know him to recognize him. Neither of them seemed aware of the photographer’s presence. Flashbulbs were probably going off all over the place.
But more so than the men, Bosch studied the two women in the photo. Standing next to Fox and bending over to whisper in his ear was a woman in a dark one-piece dress that was tight around the middle. Her hair was swirled on top of her head. It was Meredith Roman. And sitting across the table and next to Conklin, mostly obscured by him, was Marjorie Lowe. Bosch guessed that if you didn’t already know her, she wouldn’t have been recognizable. Conklin was smoking and had his hand up to his face. His arm blocked off half of Bosch’s mother’s face. It almost looked as if she was peeking around a corner at the camera.
Bosch turned the photo over and there was a stamp on the back that said TIMES PHOTO BY BORIS LUGAVERE. It was dated March 17, 1961, seven months before his mother’s death.
“Did you ever show this to Conklin or Mittel?” Bosch finally asked.
“Yeah. When I made my case for head spokesman. I gave Gordon a copy. He saw that it was proof the candidate knew Fox.”
Mittel must also have seen that it was proof that the candidate knew a murder victim, Bosch realized. Kim didn’t know what he had. But no wonder he got the head spokesman’s job. You’re lucky you’re alive, he thought but didn’t say.
“Did Mittel know it was only a copy?”
“Oh yeah, I made that clear. I wasn’t stupid.”
“Did Conklin ever mention it to you?”