“How dare you ask me that?”
“It’s my job. There’s been a murder. You’re involved.”
She turned away from him and looked to her right. She was staring through the window at the painting of Anthony Quinn. Again, the tears appeared to be barely holding back.
“Look, Inspector, can we try to remember one thing? Howard Elias is dead. And believe it or not, I want to get the person who did it. Okay?”
She nodded tentatively. He continued, talking slowly and calmly.
“In order to get this person, I’m going to need to know everything I can about Elias. Not just what I know from television and newspapers and other cops. Not just from what’s in his files. I’ve got to know —”
Out in the reception area someone tried the locked door and then knocked sharply on the glass. Entrenkin got up and went to the door. Bosch waited in Elias’s office. He listened as Entrenkin answered the door and spoke to Langwiser.
“Give us a few minutes, please.”
She closed the door without waiting for a response, locked it again and came back to Elias’s office, where she took the seat behind the desk. Bosch spoke to her in a voice low enough not to be heard outside of the office.
“I’ve got to know it all,” he said. “We both know you are in a position to help. So can’t we come to some sort of truce here?”
The first tear fell down Entrenkin’s cheek, soon followed by another on the other side. She leaned forward and began opening drawers in the desk.
“Bottom left,” Bosch said from memory of his inventory of the desk.
She opened the drawer and removed the box of tissues. She placed it on her lap, took one tissue and dabbed at her cheeks and eyes. She began to speak.
“It’s funny how things change so quickly . . .”
A long silence went by.
“I knew Howard superficially for a number of years. When I was practicing law. It was strictly professional, mostly ‘How are you’s in the hallways of the federal building. Then when I was appointed inspector general, I knew it was important that I knew the critics of the police department as well as I knew the department. I arranged to meet Howard. We met right here—him sitting right here . . . It went from there. Yes, I loved him . . .”
This confession brought more tears and she pulled out several tissues to take care of them.
“How long were you two . . . together?” Bosch asked.
“About six months. But he loved his wife. He wasn’t going to leave her.”
Her face was dry now. She returned the tissue box to its drawer and it seemed as though the clouds that had crossed her face moments before were gone. Bosch could see she had changed. She leaned forward and looked at him. She was all business.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Detective Bosch. But only with you. Despite everything . . . I think if you give me your word then I can trust you.”
“Thank you. What is your deal?”
“I will only talk to you. In return I want you to protect me. And by that I mean keep the source of your information confidential. You don’t have to worry, nothing I tell you would be admitted in court anyway. You can keep everything I tell you in background. It may help you, it may not.”
Bosch thought about this for a moment.
“I should be treating you as a suspect, not a source.”
“But you know in your gut that it wasn’t me.”
He nodded.
“It wasn’t a woman’s murder,” he said. “It’s got male written all over it.”
“It’s got cop written on it, too, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe. That’s what I’m going to find out—if I could just get to the case and not have to worry about the community and Parker Center politics and everything else.”
“Then do we have an agreement?”
“Before making any agreement like that I have to know something first. Elias had a source inside Parker. Somebody with high access. Somebody who could get him unsustained IAD files. I need —”
“It wasn’t me. Believe me, I may have crossed a line when I began a relationship with him. That was my heart, not my head. But I didn’t cross the line you are talking about. Never in a hundred years. Contrary to what most of your fellow officers think, my goal is to save and improve the department. Not destroy it.”
Bosch looked at her blankly. She took it as disbelief.
“How would I get him files? I am public enemy number one in that department. If I went in to get files, or even just made a request for them, the word would spread around that building and out into the ranks faster than an earthquake wave.”
Bosch studied her defiant face. He knew she was right. She wouldn’t make much of a deep-cover source. He nodded.
“Then we have an agreement?” she asked.
“Yes. With one asterisk.”
“And what is that?”
“If you lie one time to me and I find out about it, all bets are off.”
“That is more than acceptable to me. But we can’t talk now. I want to finish the files so that you and your people can pursue all leads. Now you know why I want this case solved not only for the sake of the city but for myself. What do you say we meet later? When the files are done.”
“Fine with me.”
As Bosch crossed Broadway fifteen minutes later he could see the garage doors of the Grand Central Market had been rolled up. It was years since he had been in the market, maybe decades. He decided to cut through it to Hill Street and the Angels Flight terminus.
The market was a huge conglomeration of food booths, produce stalls and butcher shops. Vendors sold cheap trinkets and candy from Mexico. And though the doors had just opened and there were more sellers readying for the day than buyers inside, the overwhelming smell of oil and fried food already hung heavy in the air. As he made his way through Bosch picked up pieces of conversations, delivered in staccato snippets of Spanish. He saw a butcher carefully placing the skinned heads of goats on ice in his refrigerated display case next to the neat rows of sliced oxtail. At the far end old men sat at picnic tables, nursing their cups of thick, dark coffee and eating Mexican pastries. Bosch remembered his promise to Edgar to bring doughnuts before they began the canvass. He looked around and found no doughnuts but bought a bag of churros, the crisp-fried dough sticks with cinnamon sugar that were the Mexican alternative.
As he came out on the Hill Street side of the market he glanced to his right and saw a man standing in the spot where Baker and Chastain had found the cigarette butts hours earlier. The man had a blood-stained apron wrapped around his waist. He wore a hair net. He snaked his hand in underneath the apron and came out with a pack of smokes.
“Got that right,” Bosch said out loud.
He crossed the street to the Angels Flight arch and waited behind two Asian tourists. The train cars were passing each other at the midpoint on the tracks. He checked the names painted above the doors of each car. Sinai was going up and Olivet was coming down.
A minute later, Bosch followed the tourists as they stepped onto Olivet. He watched as they unknowingly sat on the same bench where Catalina Perez had died about ten hours earlier. The blood had been cleaned away, the wood too dark and old to reveal any stain. He didn’t bother telling them the recent history of their spot. He doubted they understood his language anyway.
Bosch took the spot where he had sat before. He yawned again the moment the weight was off his feet. The car jerked and started its ascent. The Asians started taking photos. Eventually they got around to using sign language to ask Bosch to take one of their cameras and take photos of them. He obliged, doing his part for the tourist trade. They then quickly took the camera back and moved to the other end of the car.
He wondered if they had sensed something about him. A danger or maybe a sickness in him. He knew that some people had that power, that they could tell these things. With him, it would not be difficult. It was twenty-four hours since he had slept. He rubbed a hand across his face and it f
elt like damp stucco. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and felt the old pain that he had hoped would never be in his life again. It had been a long time since he had felt so alone, since he had felt like such an outsider in his own city. There was a tightness in his throat and chest now, a feeling of claustrophobia like a shroud about him, even in the open air.
Once more he got the phone out. He checked the battery display and found it almost dead. Enough juice for one more call if he was lucky. He punched in the number for home and waited.
There was one new message. Fearing the battery wouldn’t hold, he quickly punched in the playback code and held the phone back up to his ear. But the voice he heard was not Eleanor’s. It was the sound of a voice distorted by cellophane wrapped around the receiver and then perforated with a fork.
“Let this one go, Bosch,” the voice said. “Any man who stands against cops is nothing but a dog and deserves to die like a dog. You do the right thing. You let it go, Bosch. You let it go.”
13
Bosch got to Parker Center twenty-five minutes before he was to meet with Deputy Chief Irving to update him on the investigation. He was alone, having left the other six members of the Elias team to conclude the canvass of the apartment building next to Angels Flight and then to pursue their next assignments. Stopping at the front counter he showed his badge to the uniformed officer and told the man that he was expecting some information to be called in anonymously to the front desk within the next half hour. He asked the officer to relay the information to him immediately in Chief Irving’s private conference room.
Bosch then took an elevator up to the third floor rather than the sixth, where Irving’s office was located. He went down the hall to the Robbery-Homicide Division squad room and found it empty except for four detectives he had called earlier. They were Bates, O’Toole, Engersol and Rooker—the four detectives who had originally handled the call out to the Angels Flight murder scene. They looked suitably bleary-eyed, having been up half the night before the case was turned over to Bosch and his squad. Bosch had rousted them from sleep at nine and given them a half hour to meet him at Parker Center. It had been easy enough to get them in so quickly. Bosch had told them their careers depended on it.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Bosch began as he walked down the main aisle between the rows of desks, locking eyes with the four. Three of the detectives were standing around Rooker, who was seated at his desk. This was a clear giveaway. Whatever decisions had been made out at the scene, when it was only the four of them, Bosch was sure were made by Rooker. He was leader of the pack.
Bosch stayed standing, stopping just outside the informal grouping of the other four. He started telling the story, using his hands in an informal manner, almost like a television news reporter, as if to underline that it was simply a story he was telling, not the threat that he was actually delivering.
“The four of you get the call out,” he said. “You get out there, push the uniforms back and make a perimeter. Somebody checks the stiffs and lo and behold the DL says one of them is Howard Elias. You then put —”
“There was no driver’s license, Bosch,” Rooker said, interrupting. “Didn’t the cap tell you that?”
“Yeah, he told me. But now I’m telling the story. So listen up, Rooker, and shut up. I’m trying to save your ass here and I don’t have a lot of time to do it.”
He waited to see if anybody wanted to say anything more.
“So like I said,” he began again, looking directly at Rooker, “the DL identifies one of the stiffs as Elias. So you four bright guys put your heads together and figure there’s a good chance that it was a cop who did this. You figure Elias got what he had coming and more power to the badge who had the guts to put him down. That’s when you got stupid. You decided to help out this shooter, this murderer, by staging the robbery. You took off —”
“Bosch, you are full —”
“I said shut up, Rooker! I don’t have the time to hear a bunch of bullshit when you know it went down just like I said. You took off the guy’s watch and his wallet. Only you fucked up, Rooker. You scratched the guy’s wrist with the watch. Postmortem wound. It’s going to come up on the autopsy and that means you four are going to go down the toilet unless it gets contained.”
He paused, waiting to see if Rooker had anything to say now. He didn’t.
“Okay, sounds like I have your attention. Anybody want to tell me where the watch and wallet are?”
Another pause while Bosch looked at his watch. It was a quarter to ten. The four RHD men said nothing.
“I didn’t think so,” Bosch said, looking from face to face. “So this is what we’re going to do. I meet with Irving in fifteen minutes to give him the overview. He then holds the press conference. If the front desk downstairs doesn’t get a call with information as to the location of the gutter or trash can or whatever place this stuff was stashed, then I tell Irving the robbery was staged by people at the crime scene and it goes from there. Good luck to you guys then.”
He scanned their faces again. They showed nothing but anger and defiance. Bosch expected nothing less.
“Personally, I wouldn’t mind it going that way, seeing you people get what you got coming. But it will fuck the case—put hair on the cake, taint it beyond repair. So I’m being selfish about it and giving you a chance it makes me sick to give.”
Bosch looked at his watch.
“You’ve got fourteen minutes now.”
With that he turned and started heading back out through the squad room. Rooker called after him.
“Who are you to judge, Bosch? The guy was a dog. He deserved to die like a dog and who gives a shit? You should do the right thing, Bosch. Let it go.”
As if it was his intention all along, Bosch casually turned behind an empty desk and came back up a smaller aisle toward the foursome. He had recognized the phrasing of the words Rooker had used. His demeanor disguised his growing rage. When he got back to the group, he broke their informal circle and leaned over Rooker’s desk, his palms down flat on it.
“Listen to me, Rooker. You call my home again—whether it’s to warn me off or to just tell me the weather—and I’ll come looking for you. You won’t want that.”
Rooker blinked but then raised his hands in surrender.
“Hey, man, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talk —”
“Save it for somebody you can convince. At least you could’ve been a man and skipped the cellophane. That’s coward shit, boy.”
Bosch had hoped that when he got to Irving’s conference room there would be at least a few minutes for him to look at his notes and put his thoughts together. But Irving was already seated at the round table, his elbows on the polished surface and the fingertips of both hands touching and forming a steeple in front of his chin.
“Detective, have a seat,” he said as Bosch opened the door. “Where are the others?”
“Uh,” Bosch said, putting his briefcase down flat on the table. “They’re still in the field. Chief, I was just going to drop my case off and then run down to get a cup of coffee. Can I get you something?”
“No, and you do not have time for coffee. The media calls are starting. They know it was Elias. Somebody leaked. Probably in the coroner’s office. So it’s about to get crazy. I want to hear what is happening, starting right now. I have to brief the police chief, who will lead a press conference that has been scheduled for eleven. Sit down.”
Bosch took a seat opposite Irving. He had worked a case out of the conference room once before. That seemed like a long time ago but he remembered it as the time he had earned Irving’s respect and probably as much trust as the deputy chief was willing to give to anyone else who carried a badge. His eyes moved across the surface of the table and he saw the old cigarette scar that he had left during the investigation of the Concrete Blonde case. That had been a difficult case but it seemed almost routine beside the investigation he was involved in now.
“When are
they coming in?” Irving asked.
He still had his fingers together like a steeple. Bosch had read in an interrogation manual that such body language denoted a feeling of superiority.
“Who?”
“The members of your team, Detective. I told you I wanted them here for the briefing and then the press conference.”
“Well, they’re not. Coming in. They are continuing the investigation. I thought that it didn’t make sense that all seven of us should just drop things to come in here when one of us could easily tell you the status of things.”
Bosch watched angry flares of red explode high on Irving’s cheeks.
“Once again we seem to have either a communication problem or the chain of command remains unclear to you. I specifically told you to have your people here.”
“I must’ve misunderstood, Chief,” Bosch lied. “I thought the important thing was the investigation. I remembered that you wanted to be brought up to date, not that you wanted everybody here. In fact, I doubt there is enough room in here for everybody. I —”
“The point is I wanted them here. Do your partners have phones?”
“Edgar and Rider?”
“Who else?”
“They have phones but they’re dead. We’ve been running all night. Mine’s dead.”
“Then page them. Get them in here.”
Bosch slowly got up and headed to the phone which was on top of the storage cabinet that ran along one wall of the room. He called Rider and Edgar’s pagers, but when he punched in the return number he added an extra seven at the end. This was a long-standing code they used. The extra seven—as in code seven, the radio call for out of service—meant they should take their time in returning the pages, if they returned them at all.
“Okay, Chief,” Bosch said. “Hopefully, they’ll call in. What about Chastain and his people?”
“Never mind them. I want your team back here by eleven for the press conference.”
Bosch moved back to his seat.
“How come?” he asked, though he knew exactly why. “I thought you said the police chief was going —”