“It’s okay,” Bosch said. “I enjoyed checking out the photos.”
“A lot of history there.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Vance is looking forward to seeing you.”
“Great. I’ve never met a billionaire before.”
His graceless remark ended the conversation. It was as though his mention of money was entirely crass and uncouth in a mansion built as a monument to money.
Finally they arrived at a set of double doors and Ida ushered Bosch into Whitney Vance’s home office.
The man Bosch had come to see was sitting behind a desk, his back to an empty fireplace big enough to take shelter in during a tornado. With a thin hand so white it looked like he was wearing a Latex glove, he motioned for Bosch to come forward.
Bosch stepped up to the desk, and Vance pointed to the lone leather chair in front of it. He made no offer to shake Bosch’s hand. As he sat, Bosch noticed that Vance was in a wheelchair with electric controls extending from the left armrest. He saw the desk was clear of work product except for a single white piece of paper that was either blank or had its contents facedown on the polished dark wood.
“Mr. Vance,” Bosch said. “How are you?”
“I’m old—that’s how I am,” Vance said. “I have fought like hell to defeat time but some things can’t be beat. It is hard for a man in my position to accept, but I am resigned, Mr. Bosch.”
He gestured with that bony white hand again, taking in all of the room with a sweep.
“All of this will soon be meaningless,” he said.
Bosch glanced around in case there was something Vance wanted him to see. There was a sitting area to the right with a long white couch and matching chairs. There was an office bar that a host could slip behind if necessary. There were paintings on two walls that were merely splashes of color.
Bosch looked back at Vance, and the old man offered the lopsided smile Bosch had seen in the photos in the waiting room, the upward curve on only the left side. Vance couldn’t complete a full smile. According to the photos Bosch had seen, he never could.
Bosch didn’t quite know how to respond to the old man’s words about death and meaninglessness. Instead, he just pressed on with an introduction he had thought about repeatedly since meeting with Creighton.
“Well, Mr. Vance, I was told you wanted to see me, and you have paid me quite a bit of money to be here. It may not be a lot to you, but it is to me. What can I do for you, sir?”
Vance cut the smile and nodded.
“A man who gets right to the point,” he said. “I like that.”
He reached to his chair’s controls and moved closer to the desk.
“I read about you in the newspaper,” he said. “Last year, I believe. The case with that doctor and the shoot-out. You seemed to me like a man who stands his ground, Mr. Bosch. They put a lot of pressure on you but you stood up to it. I like that. I need that. There’s not a lot of it around anymore.”
“What do you want me to do?” Bosch asked again.
“I want you to find someone for me,” Vance said. “Someone who might never have existed.”
3
After intriguing Bosch with his request Vance used a shaky left hand to flip over the piece of paper on his desk and told Bosch he would have to sign it before they discussed anything further.
“It is a nondisclosure form,” he explained. “My lawyer said it is ironclad. Your signature guarantees that you will not reveal the contents of our discussion or your subsequent investigation to anyone but me. Not even an employee of mine, not even someone who says they have come to you on my behalf. Only me, Mr. Bosch. If you sign this document, you answer only to me. You report any findings of your investigation only to me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” Bosch said. “I have no problem signing it.”
“Very good, then. I have a pen here.”
Vance pushed the document across the desk, then drew a pen from an ornate gold holder on his desk. It was a fountain pen that felt heavy in Bosch’s hand because it was thick and made of what he presumed was real gold. It reminded Bosch of the pen Vance used in the photo to sign the book for Larry King.
He quickly scanned the document and then signed it. He put the pen down on top of it and pushed both back across the desk to Vance. The old man placed the document in the desk drawer and closed it. He held the pen up for Bosch to study.
“This pen was made with gold my great-grandfather prospected in the Sierra Nevada goldfields in 1852,” he said. “That was before the competition up there forced him to head south. Before he realized that there was more to be made from iron than from gold.”
He turned the pen in his hand.
“It was passed on from generation to generation,” he said. “I’ve had it since I left home for college.”
Vance studied the pen as if seeing it for the first time. Bosch said nothing. He wondered if Vance suffered from any sort of diminished mental capacity and if the old man’s desire to have him find somebody who may never have existed was some sort of indication of a failing mind.
“Mr. Vance?” he asked.
Vance put the pen back into its holder and looked at Bosch.
“I have no one to give it to,” he said. “No one to give any of this to.”
It was true. The biographical data Bosch had looked up said Vance was never married and childless. Several of the summaries he had read suggested obliquely that he was homosexual but there was never confirmation of this. Other biographical extracts suggested that he was simply too driven by his work to keep up a steady relationship, let alone establish a family. There were a few brief romances reported, primarily with Hollywood starlets of the moment—possibly dates for the cameras to put off speculation about homosexuality. But for the past forty years or more, Bosch could find nothing.
“Do you have children, Mr. Bosch?” Vance asked.
“A daughter,” Bosch answered.
“Where?”
“In school. Chapman University, down in Orange County.”
“Good school. Is she a film student?”
“Psychology.”
Vance leaned back in his chair and looked off into the past.
“I wanted to study film when I was a young man,” he said. “The dreams of youth…”
He didn’t finish his thought. Bosch realized he would have to give the money back. This was all some kind of derangement, and there was no job. He could not take payment from this man even if it was only an infinitesimal drop from Vance’s bucket. Bosch didn’t take money from damaged people, no matter how rich they were.
Vance broke away from his stare into the abyss of memory and looked at Bosch. He nodded, seeming to know Harry’s thoughts, then gripped the armrest of his chair with his left hand and leaned forward.
“I guess I need to tell you what this is about,” he said.
Bosch nodded.
“That would be good, yes.”
Vance nodded back and offered the lopsided smile again. He looked down for a moment and then back up at Bosch, his eyes deeply set and shiny behind rimless glasses.
“A long time ago I made a mistake,” he said. “I never corrected it, I never looked back. I now want to find out if I had a child. A child I could give my gold pen to.”
Bosch stared at him for a long moment, hoping he might continue. But when he did he seemed to have picked up another string of memory.
“When I was eighteen years old I wanted nothing to do with my father’s business,” Vance said. “I was more interested in being the next Orson Welles. I wanted to make films, not airplane parts. I was full of myself, as young men often are at that age.”
Bosch thought of himself at eighteen. His desire to blaze his own path had led him into the tunnels of Vietnam.
“I insisted on film school,” Vance said. “I enrolled at USC in 1949.”