“Well, how will you confirm it?” she said, waving a hand helplessly. “Nicky’s been dead since 1970.”
Bosch sensed an opening.
“There are ways. This is the house where he grew up, isn’t it?”
“How do you know that?”
“The same address is on his birth certificate. The one that was filed after he was adopted. There might be something here I can use. Was his bedroom left intact?”
“What? No, that’s weird. Besides I raised three kids in this house after I moved back. We didn’t have room to turn his bedroom into a museum. Nicky’s stuff, what’s left of it, is up in the attic.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Oh, I don’t know. His war stuff. The things he sent back and then what they sent back after he got killed. My parents kept it all and after I moved in here I shoved it all up there. I wasn’t interested in it but my mother made me promise not to throw it away.”
Bosch nodded. He had to find a way to get up into the attic.
“Are your parents alive?” he asked.
“My father died twenty-five years ago. My mother’s alive but she doesn’t know what day it is or who she is anymore. She’s at a facility where they take good care of her. It’s just me here now. Divorced, kids grown and out on their own.”
Bosch had gotten her talking without her coming back to her demand to know who his employer was. He knew he had to keep that going and drive the conversation back around to the attic and what was up there.
“So you said on the phone that your brother knew he was adopted.”
“Yes, he did,” she said. “We both did.”
“Were you also born at St. Helen’s?”
She nodded.
“I came first,” she said. “My adoptive parents were white and I obviously was brown. It was very white out here back then and they thought it would be good for me to have a sibling who was the same. So they went back to St. Helen’s and got Dominick.”
“You said your brother knew his birth mother’s name. Vibiana. How did he know that? That was usually kept from everybody— at least back then.”
“You’re right, it was. I never knew my mother’s name or what the story was there. When Nicky was born he was already set to go to my parents. They were waiting for him. But he was sick and the doctors wanted him to stay with his mother for a while and have her milk. It was something like that.”
“And so your parents met her.”
“Exactly. For a few days they visited and spent some time with her, I guess. Later on, when we were growing up, it was pretty obvious we didn’t look like our two Italian-American parents, so we asked questions. They told us we were adopted and the only thing they knew was that Nicky’s mother was named Vibiana, because they met her before she gave him up.”
It didn’t appear that Dominick and Olivia were told the full story about what had happened to Vibiana, whether their adoptive parents knew it or not.
“Do you know if your brother ever tried to find his mother and father when he was growing up?”
“Not that I know of. We knew what that place was, St. Helen’s. It’s where babies were born that were unwanted. I never tried to find my naturals. I didn’t care. I don’t think Nicky did either.”
Bosch noted a slight tone of bitterness in her voice. More than sixty years later she clearly harbored an animosity toward the parents who gave her up. He knew it would not serve him here to tell her he didn’t agree that all the babies were unwanted at St. Helen’s. Some mothers, maybe all of them back then, had no choice in the matter.
He decided to move the conversation in a new direction. He took a drink of iced tea, complimented her on it, and then nodded at the envelope on the table.
“Are those photos?” he asked.
“I thought you might want to see him,” she said. “There’s also a story about him from the paper.”
She opened the envelope and passed Bosch a stack of photos and a folded newspaper clipping. They had all faded and yellowed over time.
He looked at the clipping first, carefully unfolding it so it wouldn’t split along the crease. It was impossible to determine what newspaper it had come from but the contents of the story made it seem very local. The headline read, “Oxnard Athlete Killed in Vietnam” and the story confirmed much of what Bosch had already deduced. Santanello was killed when he and four Marines were returning from a mission in the Tay Ninh Province. The helicopter they were in was hit by sniper fire and crashed in a rice paddy. The story said Santanello was an all-around athlete who had played varsity football, basketball, and baseball at Oxnard High. The story quoted Santanello’s mother as saying her son had been very proud to serve his country despite the antiwar sentiment back home at the time.
Bosch refolded the clipping and handed it back to Olivia. He then took up the photos. They appeared to be in chronological order, showing Dominick as a boy growing into a teenager. There were shots of him at the beach, playing basketball, riding a bike. There was a photo of him in a baseball uniform and another of him and a girl in formal wear. A family shot included him with his sister and adoptive parents. He studied Olivia as a young girl. She was pretty and she and Dominick looked like real siblings. Their complexions, eyes, and hair color were a full match.
The last photo in the stack showed Dominick in his Navy dungarees, Dixie Cup sailor’s cap tilted back, his hair high and tight with sidewalls. He was standing with hands on hips, with a manicured green field behind him. It didn’t look like Vietnam to Bosch and the smile was the kind of careless, naive expression worn by someone who had not yet gotten his first taste of war. Bosch guessed it was from basic training.
“I love that photo,” Olivia said. “It’s so Nick.”
“Where did he go for basic?” Bosch asked.
“San Diego area. Hospital corps school at Balboa, then combat training and the field medical school at Pendleton.”
“Did you ever go down there and see him?”
“Only one time, when we went down for his graduation from hospital school. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
Bosch glanced down at the photo. He noticed something and looked closer. The shirt Santanello wore was very wrinkled from being hand-washed and wrung out, so it was difficult to read, but the name stenciled on the shirt over the pocket looked like it said Lewis, not Santanello.
“The name on the shirt is—”
“Lewis. Yeah, that’s why he’s smiling like that. He switched shirts with a friend of his named Lewis who couldn’t pass a swim test. They all wore the same thing, they all had the same haircut. The only way to tell them apart was the names stenciled on the shirts, and that’s all the training people checked off when they did testing. So Lewis didn’t know how to swim and Nicky went over to the pool wearing his shirt. He got checked in under his name and took the test for him.”
She laughed. Bosch nodded and smiled. A typical military service story, right down to the guy in the Navy who didn’t know how to swim.
“So what made Dominick enlist?” he asked. “And why the Navy? Why did he want to be a corpsman?”
The smile left on her face from the Lewis story disappeared.
“Oh my god, he made such a mistake,” Olivia said. “He was young and dumb and he paid for it with his life.”
She explained that her brother turned eighteen in January of his senior year of high school. That made him old compared with his classmates. As was required then during the war, he presented himself to Selective Services for his pre-draft physical. Five months later when he graduated high school, he got his draft card and saw that he had been classified as 1A, meaning he was draft eligible and likely to go to Southeast Asia.
“This was before the draft lottery,” she said. “The way it worked was the older guys went first and he was one of the older guys coming out of high school. He knew he was going to get drafted— it was just a matter of time—so he joined up so he would have a choice and he went into the Navy. He’d ha
d a summer job over by the base at Hueneme and always liked the Navy guys who came in. He thought they were cool.”
“He wasn’t going to go to college?” he asked. “It would have been a deferment and the war was winding down by ’69. Nixon was cutting back troops.”
Olivia shook her head.
“No, no college. He was very smart but he just didn’t like school. Had no patience for it. He liked movies and sports and photography. I think he also wanted to figure things out a little bit. Our father sold refrigerators. There was no money for college.”
Those last words—no money—echoed in Bosch’s mind. If Whitney Vance had owned up to his responsibility and raised and paid for his child, then there would have been money and his son wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Vietnam. He tried to break away from such thoughts and concentrate on the interview.
“He wanted to be a corpsman—a medic?” he asked.
“That’s another story,” Olivia said. “When he enlisted he got to choose which way he wanted to go. He was torn. There was something about him; he wanted to get close but not that close, you know? There was a list of the different things you could do and he told them he wanted to be a journalist/photographer or a combat medic because he thought it would get him to, you know, where the action was but he wouldn’t have to be killing people right and left.”
Bosch had known many of the same type over there. Guys who wanted to be in battle without having to be in battle. Most of the grunts were only nineteen or twenty years old. It was a time to prove who you were, what you could do.
“So they made him a corpsman and trained him for battle,” Olivia said. “His first assignment overseas was on the hospital ship, but that was just to get his feet wet. He was there for, like, three or four months and then they put him with the Marines and he was in combat…And of course, he got shot down.”
She finished the story in a matter-of-fact tone. It was almost fifty years old and she had probably told it and thought about it ten thousand times. It was family history now and the emotion had gone out of it.
“So sad,” she said then. “He only had a couple weeks left over there. He sent a letter saying he would be home by Christmas. But he didn’t make it.”
Her tone had turned somber and Bosch thought maybe he had too quickly come to the conclusion that there was no longer an emotional burden on her. He took another drink of iced tea before asking the next question.
“You mentioned that some of his stuff from over there was sent back. It’s all up in the attic?”
She nodded.
“A couple boxes. Nicky sent stuff home because he was about to get out. He was a short-timer and then the Navy sent back his footlocker too. My parents kept it all and I put it up there. I didn’t like looking at it, to tell you the truth. It was just a bad reminder.”
Despite her feelings about her brother’s war things, Bosch grew nervous with the excitement of possibility.
“Olivia,” he said. “Can I go up to the attic and look at his things?”
She made a face like he had crossed some line with the question.
“Why?”
Bosch leaned forward across the table. He knew he needed to be sincere. He needed to get up into that attic.
“Because it might help me. I’m looking for something that might connect him to the man who hired me.”
“You mean like DNA in stuff that old?”
“It’s possible. And it’s because I was over there when I was your brother’s age. As I said on the memorial site, I was even on the same hospital ship, maybe even at the same time he was. It will just help me to look at his things. Not just for the case. For me too.”
She thought a moment before answering.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m not going up in that attic. The ladder’s way too rickety and I’d be scared I’d fall off. If you want to go up, you can, but it will be by yourself.”
“That’s okay,” Bosch said. “Thank you, Olivia.”
He finished his iced tea and stood up.
15
Olivia had been right about the ladder. It was a fold-down job attached to the pull-down attic door in the ceiling of the second-floor landing. Bosch was by no means a heavy man. Wiry was the description that favored him his entire life. But as he climbed the wooden ladder, it creaked under his weight and he worried the hinges on the fold would give way and he would fall. Olivia stood by below and nervously watched him. Four steps up he was able to reach and grab on to the framing in the ceiling and safely redistribute some of his weight.
“There should be a pull string for the light up there,” she said.
Bosch made it to the top without the ladder collapsing and swung his hand around in the dark until he captured the pull string. Once the light was on he looked around to get his bearings. Olivia called up from below.
“I haven’t been up there in years, but I think his stuff was in the back right corner.”
Bosch turned that way. It was still dark in the recesses of the attic. Out of his back pocket he pulled the flashlight Olivia had armed him with. He pointed the light into the back right corner, where the roof sloped sharply down, and immediately saw the familiar shape of a military footlocker. He had to crouch to get to it and he banged his head on one of the rafters. At that point he lowered himself to a crawl until he reached the locker.
There was a cardboard box on top of the locker. Bosch put the light on it and saw that it was the box Olivia had mentioned her brother sent home from Da Nang. Dominick Santanello was both the sender and addressee. The return address was 1st Medical Battalion, Da Nang. The tape was yellowed and peeling but Bosch could tell the box had been opened and then later closed before being stored. He lifted it off the footlocker and put it to the side.
The footlocker was a basic plywood box painted grayish green and now faded to the point that the grain of the wood was readily visible. There was faded black stenciling across the top panel.
DOMINICK SANTANELLO HM3
Bosch easily interpreted the coding. Only in the military would HM3 stand for hospital corpsman 3rd class. This meant Santanello’s actual rank was petty officer, 3rd class.
He pulled latex gloves from his pocket and put them on before handling either box. There was a single unlocked hasp on the footlocker. Bosch opened it and shone the light onto its contents. An earthy smell immediately caught in Bosch’s nose and he had a momentary flash of the tunnels he had been in over there. The wooden box smelled like Vietnam.
“Did you find it?” Olivia called from below.
Bosch collected himself for a moment before answering.
“Yeah,” he called out. “It’s all here. I might be up here awhile.”
“Okay,” she called back. “Let me know if you need anything. I’m going downstairs to the laundry for a minute.”
The footlocker was neatly packed with folded clothes on top. Bosch carefully lifted each piece out, examined it, and put it on top of the cardboard box he had set to the side. Bosch had served in the Army but he knew that across the board of military services, when the belongings of a KIA were shipped home to a grieving family, they were sanitized first, in order not to embarrass or add to the grief. All magazines and books featuring nudity were removed as well as any photos of Vietnamese or Filipino girls, any sort of drugs and paraphernalia, and any sort of personal journal that might have details of troop movements, mission tactics, or even war crimes.
What was left to return were the clothes and some of the creature comforts. Bosch removed several sets of fatigues—both camo and green—as well as underwear and socks. At the bottom of the box were a stack of paperback novels popular in the late 1960s, including a book that Bosch remembered had been in his own footlocker, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. There was a full carton of Lucky Strikes along with a Zippo lighter with a chevron on it from the Subic Bay naval base in Olongapo, Philippines.
There was a stack of letters with a rubber band that broke the moment Bos
ch tried to remove it. He looked through the envelopes. All the senders were family members and the return address was the same, the home Bosch was in at that moment. Most of the letters were from Olivia.
Bosch did not feel the need to intrude on these private communications. He assumed they were letters of encouragement, with his loved ones telling Dominick they were praying for his safe return from war.
There was a zippered leather toiletry kit in the box and Bosch carefully lifted it out. More than anything else, this was what he had come for. He unzipped it and spread it open, then put the light beam into it. The bag contained all the usual toiletries: razor, shaving powder, toothbrush, toothpaste, nail clippers, and a brush and comb.
Bosch took nothing out of the bag because he wanted to leave that to the DNA lab to do. The contents were so old he feared he might lose a hair follicle or some microscopic piece of skin or blood by moving it.
By holding the light at an angle, he could see hair in the bristles of the brush. Each was longer than an inch and he guessed that once Santanello had gotten out into the boonies, he had let his hair grow out like a lot of guys did.
He next put the light on an old-fashioned double-edged razor which was held in the kit by a leather strap. It looked clean but Bosch could only see one of its edges. He knew the DNA gold mine would be if there was blood on it. One slight nick with the razor could have left a microdot of blood, which would be all he’d need.
Bosch had no idea whether after almost fifty years DNA could be extracted from hair or saliva dried on a toothbrush or even whiskers in a double-edged razor, but he knew that blood would work. In the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit he had worked cases where dried blood almost as old as this had given up a solid DNA code. Maybe he’d get lucky with what he had in the kit. He would deliver it undisturbed to one of the labs suggested by Mickey Haller. As long as he could persuade Olivia to let him borrow it.