“Right. Homicide one-oh-one.”
They got out and walked under the portico that led to the double-wide front door. It was opened before they got to it by a woman in a black-and-white maid’s uniform. In a thick Spanish accent the woman told them that Mrs. Waters was waiting in the living room.
The living room was the size and had the feel of a small cathedral, with a twenty-five-foot ceiling with exposed roof beams. High on the wall facing the east were three large stained-glass windows, a triptych depicting a sunrise, a garden and a moonrise. The opposite wall had six side-by-side sliding doors with a view of a golf course putting green. The room had two distinct groupings of furniture, as if to accommodate two separate gatherings at the same time.
Sitting in the middle of a cream-colored couch in the first grouping was a woman with blonde hair and a tight face. Her pale blue eyes followed the men as they entered and took in the size of the room.
“Mrs. Waters?” Bosch said. “I am Detective Bosch and this is Detective Edgar. We’re from the Los Angeles Police Department.”
He held out his hand and she took it but didn’t shake it. She just held it for a moment and then moved on to Edgar’s outstretched hand. Bosch knew from the birth certificate that she was fifty-six years old. But she looked close to a decade younger, her smooth tan face a testament to the wonders of modern medical science.
“Please have a seat,” she said. “I can’t tell you how embarrassed I am to have that car sitting in front of my house. I guess discretion is not the better part of valor when it comes to the LAPD.”
Bosch smiled.
“Well, Mrs. Waters, we’re kind of embarrassed about it, too, but that’s what the bosses tell us to drive. So that’s what we drive.”
“What is this about? The guard at the gate said you have a court order. May I see it?”
Bosch sat down on a couch directly opposite her and across a black coffee table with gold designs inlaid on it.
“Uh, he must have misunderstood me,” he said. “I told him we could get a court order, if you refused to see us.”
“I’m sure he did,” she replied, the tone of her voice letting them know she didn’t believe Bosch at all. “What do you want to see me about?”
“We need to ask you about your husband.”
“My husband has been dead for five years. Besides that, he rarely went to Los Angeles. What could he possibly—”
“Your first husband, Mrs. Waters. Samuel Delacroix. We need to talk to you about your children as well.”
Bosch saw a wariness immediately enter her eyes.
“I . . . I haven’t seen or spoken to them in years. Almost thirty years.”
“You mean since you went out for medicine for the boy and forgot to come back home?” Edgar asked.
The woman looked at him as though he had slapped her. Bosch had hoped Edgar was going to use a little more finesse when he acted indignant with her.
“Who told you that?”
“Mrs. Waters,” Bosch said. “I want to ask questions first and then we can get to yours.”
“I don’t understand this. How did you find me? What are you doing? Why are you here?”
Her voice rose with emotion from question to question. A life she had put aside thirty years before was suddenly intruding into the carefully ordered life she now had.
“We are homicide investigators, ma’am. We are working on a case that may involve your husband. We—”
“He’s not my husband. I divorced him twenty-five years ago, at least. This is crazy, you coming here to ask about a man I don’t even know anymore, that I didn’t even know was still alive. I think you should leave. I want you to leave.”
She stood up and extended her hand in the direction they had come in.
Bosch glanced at Edgar and then back at the woman. Her anger had turned the tan on her sculptured face uneven. There were blotches beginning to form, the tell of plastic surgery.
“Mrs. Waters, sit down,” Bosch said sternly. “Please try to relax.”
“Relax? Do you know who I am? My husband built this place. The houses, the golf course, everything. You can’t just come in here like this. I could pick up the phone and have the chief of police on the line in two—”
“Your son is dead, lady,” Edgar snapped. “The one you left behind thirty years ago. So sit down and let us ask you our questions.”
She dropped back onto the couch as if her feet had been kicked out from beneath her. Her mouth opened and then closed. Her eyes were no longer on them, they were on some distant memory.
“Arthur . . .”
“That’s right,” Edgar said. “Arthur. Glad you at least remember it.”
They watched her in silence for a few moments. All the years and all the distance wasn’t enough. She was hurt by the news. Hurt bad. Bosch had seen it before. The past had a way of coming back up out of the ground. Always right below your feet.
Bosch took his notebook out of his pocket and opened it to a blank page. He wrote “Cool it” on it and handed the notebook to Edgar.
“Jerry, why don’t you take some notes? I think Mrs. Waters wants to cooperate with us.”
His speaking drew Christine Waters out of her blue reverie. She looked at Bosch.
“What happened? Was it Sam?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’re here. Arthur has been dead a long time. His remains were found just last week.”
She slowly brought one of her hands to her mouth in a fist. She lightly started bumping it against her lips.
“How long?”
“He had been buried for twenty years. It was a call from your daughter that helped us identify him.”
“Sheila.”
It was as if she had not spoken the name in so long she had to try it out to see if it still worked.
“Mrs. Waters, Arthur disappeared in nineteen eighty. Did you know about that?”
She shook her head.
“I was gone. I left almost ten years before that.”
“And you had no contact with your family at all?”
“I thought . . .”
She didn’t finish. Bosch waited.
“Mrs. Waters?”
“I couldn’t take them with me. I was young and couldn’t handle . . . the responsibility. I ran away. I admit that. I ran away. I thought that it would be best for them to not hear from me, to not even know about me.”
Bosch nodded in a way he hoped conveyed that he understood and agreed with her thinking at the time. It didn’t matter that he did not. It didn’t matter that his own mother had faced the same hardship of having a child too soon and under difficult circumstances but had clung to and protected him with a fierceness that inspired his life.
“You wrote them letters before you left? Your children, I mean.”
“How did you know that?”
“Sheila told us. What did you say in the letter to Arthur?”
“I just . . . I just told him I loved him and I’d always think about him, but I couldn’t be with him. I can’t really remember everything I said. Is it important?”
Bosch shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know. Your son had a letter with him. It might have been the one from you. It’s deteriorated. We probably won’t ever know. In the divorce petition you filed a few years after leaving home, you cited physical abuse as a cause of action. I need you to tell us about that. What was the physical abuse?”
She shook her head again, this time in a dismissive way, as if the question was annoying or stupid.
“What do you think? Sam liked to bat me around. He’d get drunk and it was like walking on eggshells. Anything could set him off, the baby crying, Sheila talking too loud. And I was always the target.”
“He would hit you?”
“Yes, he would hit me. He’d become a monster. It was one of the reasons I had to leave.”
“But you left the kids with the monster,” Edgar said.
This time she didn’t react as if st
ruck. She fixed her pale eyes on Edgar with a deathly look that made Edgar turn his indignant eyes away. She spoke very calmly to him.
“Who are you to judge anyone? I had to survive and I could not take them with me. If I had tried none of us would have survived.”
“I’m sure they understood that,” Edgar said.
The woman stood up again.
“I don’t think I am going to talk to you anymore. I’m sure you can find your way out.”
She headed toward the arched doorway at the far end of the room.
“Mrs. Waters,” Bosch said. “If you don’t talk to us now, we will go get that court order.”
“Fine,” she said without looking back. “Do it. I’ll have one of my attorneys handle it.”
“And it will become public record at the courthouse in town.”
It was a gamble but Bosch thought it might stop her. He guessed that her life in Palm Springs was built squarely atop her secrets. And that she wouldn’t want anybody going down into the basement. The social gossips might, like Edgar, have a hard time viewing her actions and motives the way she did. Deep inside, she had a hard time herself, even after so many years.
She stopped under the archway, composed herself and came back to the couch. Looking at Bosch, she said, “I will only talk to you. I want him to leave.”
Bosch shook his head.
“He’s my partner. It’s our case. He stays, Mrs. Waters.”
“I will still answer questions from you only.”
“Fine. Please sit down.”
She did so, this time sitting on the side of the couch farthest from Edgar and closest to Bosch.
“I know you want to help us find your son’s killer. We’ll try to be as fast as we can here.”
She nodded once.
“Just tell us about your ex-husband.”
“The whole sordid story?” she asked rhetorically. “I’ll give you the short version. I met him in an acting class. I was eighteen. He was seven years older, had already done some film work and to top it off was very, very handsome. You could say I quickly fell under his spell. And I was pregnant before I was nineteen.”
Bosch checked Edgar to see if he was writing any of this down. Edgar caught the look and started writing.
“We got married and Sheila was born. I didn’t pursue a career. I have to admit I wasn’t that dedicated. Acting just seemed like something to do at the time. I had the looks but soon I found out every girl in Hollywood had the looks. I was happy to stay at home.”
“How did your husband do at it?”
“At first, very well. He got a recurring role on First Infantry. Did you ever watch it?”
Bosch nodded. It was a World War II television drama that ran in the mid to late sixties, until public sentiment over the Vietnam War and war in general led to declining ratings and it was cancelled. The show followed an army platoon as it moved behind German lines each week. Bosch had liked the show as a kid and always tried to watch it, whether he was in a foster home or the youth hall.
“Sam was one of the Germans. His blond hair and Aryan looks. He was on it the last two years. Right up until I got pregnant with Arthur.”
She let some silence punctuate that.
“Then the show got cancelled because of that stupid war in Vietnam. It got cancelled and Sam had trouble finding work. He was typecast as this German. He really started drinking then. And hitting me. He’d spend his days going to casting calls and getting nothing. He’d then spend his nights drinking and being angry at me.”
“Why you?”
“Because I was the one who had gotten pregnant. First with Sheila and then with Arthur. Neither was planned and it all added up to too much pressure on him. He took it out on whoever was close.”
“He assaulted you.”
“Assaulted? It sounds so clinical. But yes, he assaulted me. Many times.”
“Did you ever see him strike the children?”
It was the key question they had come to ask. Everything else was window dressing.
“Not specifically,” she said. “When I was carrying Arthur he hit me once. In the stomach. It broke my water. I went into labor about six weeks before my due date. Arthur didn’t even weigh five pounds when he was born.”
Bosch waited. She was talking in a way that hinted she would say more as long as he gave her the space. He looked out through the sliding door behind her at the golf course. There was a deep sand trap guarding a putting green. A man in a red shirt and plaid pants was in the trap, flailing with a club at an unseen ball. Sprays of sand were flying up out of the trap onto the green. But no ball.
In the distance three other golfers were getting out of two carts parked on the other side of the green. The lip of the sand trap shielded them from view of the man in the red shirt. As Bosch watched, the man checked up and down the fairway for witnesses, then reached down and grabbed his ball. He threw it up onto the green, giving it the nice arc of a perfectly hit shot. He then climbed out of the trap, holding his club with both hands still locked in their grip, a posture that suggested he had just hit the ball.
Finally, Christine Waters began to talk again and Bosch looked back at her.
“Arthur only weighed five pounds when he was born. He was small right up through that first year and very sickly. We never talked about it but I think we both knew that what Sam had done had hurt that boy. He just wasn’t right.”
“Aside from that incident when he struck you, you never saw him strike Arthur or Sheila?”
“He might have spanked Sheila. I don’t really remember. He never hit the children. I mean, he had me there to hit.”
Bosch nodded, the unspoken conclusion being that once she was gone, who knows who became the target? Bosch thought of the bones laid out on the autopsy table and all the injuries Dr. Golliher had catalogued.
“Is my hus—is Sam under arrest?”
Bosch looked at her.
“No. We’re in the fact-finding stage here. The indication from your son’s remains is that there is a history of chronic physical abuse. We’re just trying to figure things out.”
“And Sheila? Was she . . . ?”
“We haven’t specifically asked her. We will. Mrs. Waters, when you were struck by your husband, was it always with his hand?”
“Sometimes he would hit me with things. A shoe once, I remember. He held me on the floor and hit me with it. And once he threw his briefcase at me. It hit me in the side.”
She shook her head.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just that briefcase. He carried it with him to all his auditions. Like he was so important and had so much going on. And all he ever had in it were a few head shots and a flask.”
Bitterness burned in her voice, even after so many years.
“Did you ever go to a hospital or an emergency room? Is there any physical record of the abuse?”
She shook her head.
“He never hurt me enough that I had to go. Except when I had Arthur, and then I lied. I said I fell and my water broke. You see, Detective, it wasn’t something I wanted the world to know about.”
Bosch nodded.
“When you left, was that planned? Or did you just go?”
She didn’t answer for a long moment as she watched the memory first on her inside screen.
“I wrote the letters to my children long before I left. I carried them in my purse and waited for the right time. On the night I left, I put them under their pillows and left with my purse and only the clothes I was wearing. And my car that my father had given us when we got married. That was it. I’d had enough. I told him we needed medicine for Arthur. He had been drinking. He told me to go out and get it.”
“And you never went back.”
“Never. About a year later, before I came out to the Springs, I drove by the house at night. Saw the lights on. I didn’t stop.”
Bosch nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else to ask. While the woman’s memory of that early time in he
r life was good, what she was remembering wasn’t going to help make a case against her ex-husband for a murder committed ten years after she had last seen him. Maybe Bosch had known that all along—that she wouldn’t be a vital part of the case. Maybe he had just wanted to take the measure of a woman who had abandoned her children, leaving them with a man she believed was a monster.