“You think I should just go around the house so I don’t intrude on the owner?” he asked.
“Oh, he left,” Mitchell said. “When I told him we weren’t finished, he said he was going to run up the street to get something at Gelson’s.”
She came up next to Bosch and opened the slider. He stepped in and walked through the house to the front door. He then thanked Mitchell again and left.
As Bosch passed through the archway cut into the hedge and walked out to the sidewalk he saw a man leaning against the front of his Cherokee across the street. It was Harrick and he was waiting for Bosch, his arms folded across his chest.
Bosch crossed the street toward his car, unsure how he was going to handle what might be about to turn ugly.
“It’s Bosch, right?” Harrick said.
“That’s right,” Bosch said. “Sorry we took so long in—”
“Save your bullshit.”
Bosch stopped in front of him. There wasn’t much sense in continuing the play since Harrick wasn’t buying it. Bosch held his hands out as if to signal you got me.
“I thought you were a fucking reporter,” Harrick said. “Piece-of-shit car like this, you can’t afford a house like that. So I run your plate and it’s got an LAPD block on it. I make a couple calls and I get the story. Retired cop. Retired homicide cop. So tell me, Detective Bosch, what the fuck are you doing in my house?”
Bosch knew that the situation could quickly go sideways. He was acting as an extension of Haller’s defense of Da’Quan Foster. A complaint that brought the ethics of his scam with Taylor Mitchell before a judge could cause blowback for Haller. He had to salvage this somehow.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’ve been asked to look into the case privately by someone who has reason to believe Da’Quan Foster was set up and that he didn’t kill your wife.”
Harrick’s eyes disappeared in the creases of his squint. His ruddy complexion turned a darker shade.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said. “Who has reason to believe that?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Bosch said. “It’s a matter of client confidentiality. I agreed to look into the case and I wanted to see the crime scene. I apologize. I didn’t expect you to be here and to be confronted by this. It was a mistake.”
Before Harrick could respond, Mitchell called from across the street while on her walk back to her house.
“Do you need me for anything, gentlemen?”
Both Bosch and Harrick turned to her.
“We’re fine, Taylor,” Harrick called back. “Thank you.”
He added a wave to keep her going. She was one house from the corner. As soon as she got there she turned left and disappeared from sight.
“Put your hands on the hood,” Harrick said.
“Excuse me?” Bosch asked.
“On the hood. Assume the position.”
“No, I’m not going to do that.”
“You want to go to jail, Bosch?”
“You can take me to jail but I don’t think I’ll be staying there long. I haven’t committed any crime.”
“You’ve got a choice here. Put your hands on the hood so I can check for weapons. Or go to jail.”
He took a phone out of his pocket and got ready to make a call.
“I’m unarmed,” Bosch said and he stepped forward, put his hands on the front hood, and spread his feet.
Harrick quickly frisked him and found no weapons. Bosch didn’t like the way this was heading. He had to change the course.
“What happened to her watch?” he asked.
Harrick’s hands froze for a moment as he was patting down Bosch’s front pants pockets. He then stood straight up, put a hand on Bosch’s arm, and turned him away from the hood of the car.
“What did you say?” Harrick asked.
“Her watch,” Bosch said calmly. “The one you gave her. The Audemars Piguet—if I am saying that right. It wasn’t on her wrist and it wasn’t on any property report from the crime scene. It didn’t turn up in the search of Da’Quan Foster’s house, studio, or van. It’s not in its box either. So, what happened to it?”
Harrick took a half step back as he considered what Bosch had just said. Bosch recognized it as a move to create space between them and a potential prelude to a punch. He braced himself to block but Harrick managed to control his rage and the swing never came.
“Just go,” Harrick said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of here.”
Bosch reached in his pocket for his keys and stepped around the front of the car. When he got to the driver’s-side door, he looked back at Harrick, who had not moved.
“It doesn’t matter who I’m working for if I’m trying to find the truth,” he said. “If Foster didn’t do it, somebody else did. And he’s still out there. Think about that.”
Harrick shook his head.
“Who are you, fucking Batman?” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. The watch was broken. It was being fixed. It’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“Then, where is it? Did you get it back?”
Harrick opened his mouth to say something, then paused and shook his head.
“I’m not talking to you.”
He turned, checked for traffic, and then crossed the street toward his house.
Bosch watched him disappear through the archway, then got in the Cherokee and drove off. He angrily banged his palm on the steering wheel. He knew that his anonymity on the case had just come to an end. Harrick didn’t know who Bosch worked for but he would soon enough find out. A complaint might follow. Whether it did or it didn’t, Bosch needed to get ready for the onslaught of anger that would come his way.
18
The Haven House was an aging two-story motel with neon promises of free HBO and Wi-Fi. It was the kind of place that probably looked shabby on the day it opened in the 1940s and had only gone downhill from there. The kind that served as a last-stop shelter before the car became primary domicile. Bosch pulled into the parking lot off Santa Monica and cruised slowly. The motel was situated on what was known as a flag lot. A narrow fronting on Santa Monica led into a bigger, wider piece of property in the rear that ran behind other businesses. This afforded the rear parking lot and motel rooms significant privacy. It was no wonder that it had become a place favored by people engaged in illicit sexual transactions.
He saw a door with a 6 painted on it and parked in the spot in front of it. He realized it was the same sort of move he would make when he worked cold cases. Visit the scene of the crime long after the crime had been committed. He called it looking for ghosts. He believed every murder left a trace on the environment, no matter how old.
In this case only a few months had passed but that still made it a cold case.
Bosch got out and looked around. There were a few cars parked in the lot and it was surrounded by the windowless rear side of the businesses fronting Santa Monica on one side and an L-shaped apartment building on two others. There was a row of tall and mature cypress trees buffering the line between the parking lot and the apartment building. The fourth side was lined by wood fencing that ran along the backyard of a private residence.
Bosch thought about Lucia Soto’s report on the James Allen case. The supposition was that Allen had been murdered in room 6 and then his body was removed and dumped in the alley off El Centro. Putting aside the question of why the body was moved, Bosch now saw that it could have been accomplished without great risk. In the middle of the night the parking lot would have been deserted and unseen from the outside. He looked around for any cameras and saw none. It wasn’t the kind of place where customers wanted to be photographed.
Bosch walked back around the corner to the office at the front of the building. The office was not open to the public. The door had a shelf below a sliding window. There was a push-button bell there and Bosch used his palm to ring it three quick times. He waited and was about to hit it again whe
n an Asian man slid the glass window open and looked at Bosch through watery eyes.
“I need a room,” Bosch said. “I want number six.”
“Check-in at three,” the man said.
That would be in four hours. Bosch looked back at the parking lot and saw a total of six cars including his own. He looked back at the man.
“I need it now. How much?”
“Check-in three, check-out twelve noon. Rules.”
“How about I check in yesterday at three, check out today at noon?”
The man studied him. Bosch didn’t look like his usual clientele.
“You cop?”
Bosch shook his head.
“No, no cop. I just want to look at room six. How much? I’ll be out by twelve. Less than an hour.”
“Forty dollar.”
“Deal.”
Bosch pulled out his cash.
“Sixty,” the man said.
Bosch looked up from his money at him and silently communicated the message that the man was fucking with the wrong guy.
“Okay, forty,” the man said.
Bosch put two twenties down on the window’s counter. The man slid out a 3 x 5 registration card but didn’t ask for any formal identification confirming the information Bosch quickly wrote on it.
The man then slid out a key attached to a diamond-shaped piece of plastic with the number 6 on it.
“One hour,” he said.
Bosch nodded and took the key.
“You betcha,” he said.
He walked back around the corner of the building and used the key to open room 6. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. He stood there, taking the whole room in. The first thing he noticed was the rectangular discoloration on the wall where the picture of Marilyn Monroe had obviously hung. It was gone now, most likely taken as evidence.
He turned his head and slowly swept the room, looking for anything unusual about it but committing its well-worn furnishings and drab curtains to memory. Anything that had belonged to James Allen was long gone. It was just a threadbare room with its aging furnishings. It was depressing to think someone had lived here. Even more so to think someone may have died here.
His phone buzzed and he saw that it was Haller.
“Yeah.”
“Where are we?”
“We? We are in a shabby-as-shit room in a hot-sheet motel in Hollywood. The place Da’Quan claims he was at when Lexi Parks was murdered.”
“And?”
“And nothing. A big fat nothing. Mighta helped if he’d scratched his initials into the bed table or put some gang graffiti on the shower curtain. You know, to show he was here.”
“I meant, ‘and what are you doing there?’”
“My job. Covering all the bases. Absorbing, thinking. Looking for ghosts.”
Bosch’s words were clipped. He didn’t like the interruption. He was in the middle of an established process. He was also annoyed with himself for what he had to say next.
“Look, I may have messed up.”
“How so?”
“I posed as a real-estate buyer and got inside the victim’s house. I wanted to look around.”
“And look for ghosts? What happened?”
“Her husband, the deputy sheriff, came by and ran my plate because he thought I was a reporter or something. Instead, he found out I was a retired cop and I was working on the case.”
“That’s not a mess-up. That’s a full-fledged fuckup. You know if the guy makes a complaint, it goes on me with the judge, right?”
“I know. I messed up—I fucked up. I just wanted to see—”
“You sure did. But nothing we can do about it now. What’s next? Why are you at the motel?”
“Same reason.”
“Ghosts. Really?”
“When I investigate a murder, I want to be where that murder took place, or where it may have taken place.”
There was a pause before Haller responded.
“Then I guess I’ll leave you to it,” he said.
“Talk to you later,” Bosch said.
Bosch clicked off the call and continued to stare at the room until he finally stepped toward the bed.
Thirty minutes later he left the room with no more than he had when he entered. If anything had remained to prove Da’Quan Foster was there the night of the Lexi Parks murder, it had been swept up by the LAPD forensics team. As he walked to his car he wondered if something more than forensics had been left behind that could help Foster. James Allen was a prostitute, after all. And many prostitutes kept records. In these digital times a prostitute’s little black book would more likely be his little black cell phone. After her conversation with Ali Karim, Soto had mentioned nothing about the recovery of a cell phone either from the body or from room six.
Bosch diverted and walked back to the office window. He rang the bell again and the same man slid the window open. Bosch put the room key down on the counter.
“I’m out,” he said. “You don’t even have to make the bed.”
“Okay, very fine, thank you,” the man said.
He started to slide the window closed but Bosch blocked it with his hand.
“Hold on a second,” he said. “The man who had that room back in March got murdered, you remember that?”
“Nobody get murder here.”
“Not here. Or maybe not here. His body was found down the street in an alley. But he had room six here, and the police came to investigate. James Allen. You remember now?”
“No, not here.”
“Yes, here. Look, I’m just trying to figure out what happened to all his belongings. His property. The police took things, I know that. Did they take everything?”
“No, his friends come. They take clothes and things.”
“Friends? Did you get any names?”
“No, no names here.”
“Do they do what he did? Do they stay here?”
“Sometimes they stay.”
“Any of them here now?”
“No, not now. Nobody here.”
Bosch pulled out his notebook and wrote his name and number down. He tore the page out and handed it through the window.
“If any of his friends come back, you call me and I’ll pay you.”
“How much you pay?”
“Fifty bucks.”
“You pay now.”
“No, I’ll pay when you tell me they’re here.”
Bosch rapped his knuckles on the shelf under the window and turned back toward the parking lot. He walked around the corner of the building and got in his car. Before starting the engine, he called Haller, who answered right away.
“We need to talk.”
“That’s funny, because I called you about a half hour ago and it was pretty clear you didn’t want to talk to me.”
“That was then. We need to talk about next moves. This is your show and I don’t want to do something that hurts things down the line in court.”
“You mean like get caught sneaking into the victim’s house?”
“I told you that was a mistake. It won’t happen again. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Did you find something?”
“No, nothing. I still need to check the street, but so far nothing. I’m talking about other things. The next move—whether you make it in court or I make it out here.”
“Sounds mysterious. Where are you? I can come now.”
“On Santa Monica near Gower. I need to work the street here a little bit.”
“I’ll head that way. You in the Cherokee? The one you claim is a classic?”
“I am, and it is.”
Bosch disconnected and started the car. He drove to the motel’s parking lot exit on Santa Monica and paused there while he looked right and then left at the small businesses that lined the four-lane boulevard. They were a mixture of industrial and commercial businesses. Several of the big studios were nearby—he could see Paramount’s water tower rising behind the shops fronting Santa Monica
. This meant that there were also all manner of feeder companies in the neighborhood that lived off the scraps of the behemoths—prop houses, costume shops, camera equipment renters—interspersed with a routine variety of fast-food dreck. There was a do-it-yourself car wash and across the street and down a half block was the entrance to Hollywood Forever—the onetime cemetery to the stars.
Bosch nodded. The cemetery was his best lead. He knew Rudolph Valentino was buried there as well as many other long-ago Hollywood greats and pioneers, like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cecil B. DeMille, and John Huston. Many years back Bosch had worked a suicide at Hollywood Forever. The victim was a woman who had laid herself out on top of Tyrone Power’s crypt and then cut her wrists. Before she died she managed to write her name in blood beneath his name on the memorial stone. Bosch did the math on the dead woman and determined she was not even born until five years after Power died. The case seemed to underline what many in homicide work knew; you can’t explain crazy.
Bosch knew that in any town in the country the local cemetery was a draw for a certain class of odd people. In Hollywood, that draw was amped exponentially because there were graves with famous names carved on them. That meant there would be security. And that meant cameras. The woman who killed herself on Tyrone Power’s crypt had done it under a camera. The problem was, no one was watching, and she bled out.
When the traffic momentarily cleared, Bosch turned left out of the parking lot and drove down to Hollywood Forever. The cemetery was surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall interrupted only by entrance and exit lanes. As Bosch pulled in he readily saw cameras affixed to the walls and focused on the auto lanes. Bosch couldn’t tell by his cursory glance whether they were in position to also record activities a half block down Santa Monica Boulevard. But he recognized that the cameras were placed in obviously public positions, thereby acting as a deterrent as well as a recording device. He was interested in them but he was also interested in the cameras nobody could see.
Once past the wall, he saw a parking area and a complex that included the cemetery office as well as a chapel and a casket-and-stone showroom. It was a full-service operation. Beyond this, the cemetery lay spread out and was sectioned by various driving lanes and other, smaller parking areas. Rising above the back wall Bosch could see the giant stages of Paramount Studios and the water tower. He saw cameras on the tower.