“I guess I shouldn’t have been so candid before, then.”
Rider said, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, the truth shouldn’t hurt you.”
Bosch knew from long experience never to say such a thing. He knew the words were false before they were out of her mouth. Judging by the small, thin smile on Veronica Aliso’s face, she knew it as well.
“Are you new at this, Detective Rider?” she asked while looking at Bosch with that smile.
“No, ma’am, I’ve been a detective for six years.”
“Oh. And I guess I don’t have to ask Detective Bosch.”
“Mrs. Aliso?” Bosch asked.
“Veronica.”
“There is one last thing you could clear up for us tonight. We do not know yet exactly when your husband was killed. But it would help us concentrate on other matters if we could quickly eliminate routine avenues of—”
“You want to know if I have an alibi, is that it?”
“We just want to know where you were the last few days and nights. It’s a routine question, nothing else.”
“Well, I hate to bore you with my life’s details, because I’m afraid that’s what they are, boring. But other than a trip to the mall and supermarket Saturday afternoon, I haven’t left the house since I had dinner with my husband Wednesday night.”
“You’ve been here alone?”
“Yes . . . but I think you can verify this with Captain Nash at the gate. They keep records of who comes in as well as out of Hidden Highlands. Even the residents. Also, on Friday our pool man was here in the afternoon. I gave him his check. I can get you his name and number.”
“That won’t be necessary right now. Thank you. And again, I’m sorry for your loss. Is there anything we can do for you right now?”
She seemed to be withdrawing into herself. He was not sure she had heard his question.
“I’m fine,” she finally said.
He picked up his briefcase and headed down the hallway with Rider. It ran behind the living room and took them directly to the front door. All the way along the hallway there were no photographs on the wall. It didn’t seem right to him, but he guessed nothing had been right in this house for a while. Bosch studied dead people’s rooms the way scholars studied dead people’s paintings at the Getty. He looked for the hidden meanings, the secrets of lives and deaths.
At the door Rider went out first. Bosch then stepped out and looked back down the hall. Veronica Aliso was framed at the other end in the light. He hesitated for a beat. He nodded and walked out.
They drove in silence, digesting the conversation, until they got to the gatehouse and Nash came out.
“How’d it go?”
“It went.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Mr. Aliso.”
“Yeah.”
Nash whistled quietly.
“Captain Nash, you keep records here of when cars come in and out?” Rider asked.
“Yes. But this is private property. You’d need a—”
“Search warrant,” Bosch said. “Yes, we know. But before we go to all that trouble, tell me something. Say I come back with a warrant, are your gate records going to tell me when exactly Mrs. Aliso came in and out of here the last few days?”
“Nope. It’ll only tell you when her car did.”
“Gotcha.”
Bosch dropped off Rider at her car and they drove separately down out of the hills to the Hollywood Division station on Wilcox. On the way Bosch thought about Veronica Aliso and the fury she seemed to hold in her eyes for her dead husband. He didn’t know how it fit or if it even fit at all. But he knew they would be coming back to her.
Rider and Bosch stopped briefly in the station to update Edgar and pick up cups of coffee. Bosch then called Archway and arranged for the security office to call in Chuckie Meachum from home. Bosch did not tell the duty officer who took the call what it was about or what office inside the studio they would be going to. He just told the officer to get Meachum there.
At midnight they went out the rear door of the station house, past the fenced windows of the drunk tank and to Bosch’s car.
“So what did you think of her?” Bosch finally asked as he pulled out of the station lot.
“The embittered widow? I think there wasn’t much to their marriage. At least at the end. Whether that makes her a killer or not, I don’t know.”
“No pictures.”
“On the walls? Yeah, I noticed that.”
Bosch lit a cigarette and Rider didn’t say anything about it, although it was a violation of department policy to smoke in the detective car.
“What do you think?” Rider asked.
“I’m not sure yet. There’s what you said. The bitterness you could almost put in a glass if you ever ran out of ice. Couple other things I’m still thinking about.”
“Like what?”
“Like all the makeup she had on and the way she took my badge out of my hand. Nobody’s ever done that before. It’s like . . . I don’t know, like maybe she was waiting for us.”
When they got to the entrance of Archway Pictures, Meachum was standing under the half-size replica of the Arc de Triomphe smoking a cigarette and waiting. He was wearing a sport coat over a golf shirt and had a bemused smile on his face when he recognized Bosch pulling up. Bosch had spent time with Meachum in the Robbery-Homicide Division ten years before. Never partnered, but they worked a few of the same task forces. Meachum had gotten out when the getting out was good. He pulled the pin a month after the Rodney King tape hit the news. He knew. He told everybody it was the beginning of the end. Archway hired him as the assistant director of security. Nice job, nice pay, plus he was pulling in the twenty-year pension of half pay. He was the one they talked about when they talked about smart moves. Now, with all the baggage the LAPD carried— the King beating, the riots, the Christopher Commission, O. J. Simpson and Mark Fuhrman— a retiring dick would be lucky if a place like Archway hired him to work the front gate.
“Harry Bosch,” Meachum said, leaning down to look in. “What it is, what it is?”
The first thing Bosch noticed was that Meachum had gotten his teeth capped since he’d last seen him.
“Chuckie. Long time. This is my partner, Kiz Rider.”
Rider nodded and Meachum nodded and studied her a moment. Black female detectives were a rarity in his day, even though he hadn’t been off the job more than five years.
“So what’s shaking, Detectives? Why’d you want to go and pull me out of the hot tub?”
He smiled, showing off the teeth. Bosch guessed he knew that they had been noticed.
“We got a case. We want to take a look at the vic’s office.”
“It’s here? Who’s the stiff?”
“Anthony N. Aliso. TNA Productions.”
Meachum crinkled his eyes. He had the deep tan of a golfer who never misses his Saturday morning start and usually gets away for at least nine once or twice during the week.
“Doesn’t do anything for me, Harry. You sure he—”
“Look it up, Chuck. He’s here. Was.”
“All right, tell you what, park the car over in the main lot and we’ll go back to my office, grab a cup and look this guy up.”
He pointed toward a lot directly through the gate and Bosch did as instructed. The lot was almost empty and was next to a huge soundstage with an outside wall painted powder blue with puffs of white clouds. It was used for shooting exteriors when the real sky was too brown with smog.
They followed Meachum on foot to the studio security offices. Entering the suite, they passed by a glass-walled office in which a man in a brown Archway Security outfit sat at a desk surrounded by banks of video monitors. He was reading the Times sports page, which he quickly dropped into a trash can next to the desk when he saw Meachum.
Bosch saw that Meachum didn’t seem to notice because he had been holding the door open for them. When he turned, he casually saluted the man in the glass office and led Bosch and Rider
back to his office.
Meachum slid in behind his desk and turned to his computer. The monitor screen depicted an intergalactic battle among assorted spaceships. Meachum hit one key and the screen saver disappeared. He asked Bosch to spell Aliso’s name and he punched it into the computer. He then tilted the monitor so Bosch and Rider couldn’t see the screen. Bosch was annoyed by this but he didn’t say anything. After a few moments, Meachum did.
“You’re right. He was here. Tyrone Power Building. Had one of the little cubbyholes they rent to nonplayers. Three-office suite. Three losers. They share a secretary who comes with the rent.”
“How long’s he been here? That say?”
“Yeah. Almost seven years.”
“What else you got there?”
Meachum looked at the screen.
“Not much. No record of problems. He complained once about somebody dinging his car in the parking lot. Says here he drove a Rolls-Royce. Probably the last guy in Hollywood who hadn’t traded in his Rolls on a Range Rover. That’s tacky, Bosch.”
“Let’s go take a look.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you and Detective Riley go out there and grab a cup of joe while I make a call about that. I’m not sure what our procedure is for this.”
“First of all, Chuck, it’s Rider, not Riley. And second, we’re running a homicide investigation here. Whatever your procedures are, we are expecting you to allow us access.”
“You’re on private property here, buddy. You’ve got to keep that in mind.”
“I will.” Bosch stood up. “And when you make your call, the thing you should keep in mind is that so far the media haven’t gotten wind of any of this. I didn’t think it would be good to pull Archway into this sort of thing, especially since we don’t know for sure what’s involved here. You can tell whoever you’re calling that I’ll try to keep it that way.”
Meachum smirked and shook his head.
“Still the same old Bosch. Your way or the highway.”
“Something like that.”
While waiting, Bosch had time to gulp down a cup of lukewarm coffee from a pot that had been on a warmer in the outer office for the better part of the night. It was bitter, but he knew the cup he’d had at the station would not take him through the night. Rider passed on the coffee, instead drinking water from a dispenser in the hallway.
After nearly ten minutes Meachum came out of his office.
“Okay, you got it. But I’ll tell you right now that me or one of my people gotta be in there the whole time as observers. That going to be a problem for you, Bosch?”
“No problem.”
“Okay, let’s go. We’ll take a cart.”
On the way out he opened the door to the glass room and stuck his head in.
“Peters, who’s roving?”
“Uh, Serrurier and Fogel.”
“Okay, get on the air and tell Serrurier to meet us at Tyrone Power. He’s got keys, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, do it.” Meachum made a motion to close the door but stopped. “And Peters? Leave the sports page in the trash can.”
They took a golf cart to the Tyrone Power Building because it was on the other side of the lot from the security offices. Along the way Meachum waved to a man dressed entirely in black who was coming out of one of the buildings they passed.
“We’ve got a shoot on New York Street tonight, otherwise I’d take you through there. You’d swear you were in Brooklyn.”
“Never been,” Bosch said.
“Me neither,” Rider added.
“Then it doesn’t matter, unless you wanted to see them shooting.”
“The Tyrone Power Building will be just fine.”
“Fine.”
When they got there, another uniformed man was waiting. Serrurier. At Meachum’s instructions he first unlocked a door to a reception area that served the three separate offices of the suite, then the door to the office Aliso had used. Meachum then told him to go back out on roving patrol of the studio.
Meachum’s calling it a closet was not too far off. Aliso’s office was barely large enough for Bosch, Rider and Meachum to stand in together without having to smell each other’s breath. It contained a desk with a chair behind it and two more close in front of it. Against the wall behind the desk was a four-drawer file cabinet. The left wall was hung with framed one-sheets advertising two classic films: Chinatown and The Godfather, both of which had been made down the street at Paramount. Aliso had countered these on the right wall with framed posters of his own efforts, The Art of the Cape and Casualty of Desire. There were also smaller frames of photos depicting Aliso with various celebrities, many of the shots taken in the same office with Aliso and the celebrity of the moment standing behind the desk smiling.
Bosch first studied the two posters. Each one carried the imprimatur along the top Anthony Aliso Presents. But it was the second poster, for Casualty of Desire, that caught his attention. The artwork beneath the title of the film showed a man in a white suit carrying a gun down at his side, a desperate look on his face. In larger scale, a woman with flowing dark hair that framed the image looked down on him with sultry eyes. The poster was a rip-off of the scene depicted in the Chinatown poster on the other wall. But there was something entrancing about it. The woman, of course, was Veronica Aliso, and Bosch knew that was one reason why.
“Nice-looking woman,” Meachum said from behind him.
“His wife.”
“I see that. Second billing. Only I never heard of her.”
Bosch nodded at the poster.
“I think this was her shot.”
“Well, like I said, nice-looking gal. I doubt she looks like that anymore.”
Bosch studied the eyes again and remembered the woman he had seen just an hour ago. The eyes were still as dark and gleaming, a little cross of light at the center of each.
Bosch looked away and began to study the framed photos. He immediately noticed that one of them was of Dan Lacey, the actor who had portrayed Bosch eight years earlier in a mini-series about the search for a serial killer. The studio that had produced it had paid Bosch and his then partner a lot of money to use their names and technical advice. His partner took the money and ran, retired to Mexico. Bosch bought a house in the hills. He couldn’t run. He knew the job was his life.
He turned and took in the rest of the small office. There were shelves against the wall near the door and these were piled with scripts and videotapes, no books save for a couple of directories of actors and directors.
“Okay,” Bosch said. “Chuckie, you stand back by the door and observe like you said. Kiz, why don’t you start with the desk and I’ll start with the files.”
The files were locked and it took Bosch ten minutes to open them with the picks he got out of his briefcase. It then took an hour just to make a cursory study of the files. The drawers were stocked with notes and financial records regarding the development of several films that Bosch had never heard of. This did not seem curious to him after what Veronica Aliso had said and because he knew little about the film business anyway. But it seemed from his understanding of the files he was quickly scanning that large sums of money had been paid to various film services companies during the production of the films. And what struck Bosch the most was that Aliso seemed to have financed a hell of a nice lifestyle from this little office.
After he was finished going through the fourth and bottom drawer, Bosch stood and straightened his back, his vertebrae popping like dominoes clicking together. He looked at Rider, who was still going through the drawers of the desk.
“Anything?”
“A few things of interest but no smoking gun, if that’s what you mean. Aliso’s got a flag here from the IRS. His corporation was going to be audited next month. Other than that, there is some correspondence between Tony Aliso and St. John, the flavor-of-the-month Mrs. Aliso mentioned. Heated words but nothing overtly threatening. I’ve still got one drawer to
go.”
“There’s a lot in the files. Financial stuff. We’re going to have to go through it all. I’d like you to be the one. You going to be up for it?”
“No problem. What I’m seeing so far is a lot of routine, if not sloppy, business records. It just happens to be the movie business here.”
“I’m going outside to catch a smoke. When you’re done there, why don’t we switch and you take the files, I’ll take the desk.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Before going out he ran his eyes along the shelves by the door and read the titles of the videotapes. He stopped when he came to the one he was looking for. Casualty of Desire. He reached up and took it down. The cover carried the same artwork as the movie poster.
He stepped back and put it on the desk so it would be gathered with things they would be taking. Rider asked what it was.
“It’s her movie,” he said. “I want to watch it.”
“Oh, me too.”
Outside, Bosch stood in the small courtyard by a bronze statue of a man he guessed was Tyrone Power and lit a cigarette. It was a cool night and the smoke in his chest warmed him. The studio grounds were very quiet now.
He walked over to a trash can next to a bench in the courtyard and used it to tip his ashes. He noticed a broken coffee mug at the bottom of the can. There were several pens and pencils scattered in the can as well. He recognized the Archway insignia, the Arc de Triomphe with the sun rising in the middle of the arch, on one of the fragments. He was about to reach into the trash can to pick out what looked like a gold Cross pen when he heard Meachum’s voice and turned around.
“She’s going places, isn’t she? I can tell.”
He was lighting his own cigarette.
“Yeah, that’s what I hear. It’s our first case together. I don’t really know her, and from what I hear I shouldn’t try. She’s going to the Glass House as soon as the time is right.”
Meachum nodded and flicked his ashes onto the pavement. Bosch watched him glance up toward the roofline above the second floor and give another one of his casual salutes. Bosch looked up and saw the camera moored to the underside of the roof eave.