With his legs still feeling the pain of his run up the slope two nights before, Bosch didn’t want to walk up three flights of stairs. He found a freight elevator with a pull-down door and rode to the fourth floor at a turtle’s pace. The elevator was the size of his living room and he felt self-conscious about riding up alone and wasting what must have been an enormous amount of energy to move the platform. It was obviously a design element left over from the building’s early incarnation as a cardboard factory.
The top floor was quartered into four live-work lofts accessible off an industrial gray lobby. The lower half of the door to 4-D was plastered with cartoon stickers obviously placed haphazardly by a small person—Vibiana’s son, Harry assumed. Above this was a card with posted hours when Vibiana Veracruz would receive patrons and viewers of her art. On Wednesdays those hours were from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and that put Bosch fifteen minutes early. He considered just knocking on the door, since he was not there with the purpose of seeing her art. But he was also hopeful that he could somehow take a measure of the woman before he decided how to tell her she might be heir to a fortune with more zeroes attached to it than she could imagine.
While he was deciding what to do he heard someone coming up the stairs next to the elevator shaft. A woman soon appeared, carrying a frozen coffee drink in one hand and a key in the other. She wore overalls and had a breathing mask down around her neck. She looked surprised to see a man waiting at her door.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Bosch said.
“Can I help you?”
“Uh, are you Vibiana Veracruz?”
He knew it was her. There was a clear resemblance to Gabriela in the Coronado Beach photos. But he pointed at the door to 4-D as if he had to back up his presence with the posted hours.
“I am,” she said.
“Well, I’m early,” he said. “I didn’t know your hours. I was hoping to look at some of your work.”
“That’s okay. You’re close enough. I can show you around. What’s your name?”
“Harry Bosch.”
She looked like she recognized the name and Bosch wondered if her mother had found a way to contact her after promising she wouldn’t attempt to.
“That’s a famous artist’s name,” she said. “Hieronymus Bosch.”
Bosch suddenly realized his mistake.
“I know,” he said. “Fifteenth century. It’s actually my full name.” She used a key to unlock her door. She looked back at him over her shoulder.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“You had some strange parents.”
She opened the door.
“Come on in,” she said. “I only have a few pieces here at the moment. There’s a gallery over on Violet that has a couple more and then there are a couple out at Bergamot Station. How did you hear about me?”
Bosch hadn’t prepared a story, but he knew Bergamot Station was a conglomeration of galleries housed in an old rail station in Santa Monica. He had never been there but quickly adopted it as a cover.
“Uh, I saw your pieces at Bergamot,” he said. “I had some business downtown this morning and thought I would see what else you have.”
“Cool,” Veracruz said. “Well, I’m Vib.”
She reached out a hand and they shook. Her hand was rough and callused.
The loft was quiet as they entered and Bosch assumed her son was in school. There was a sharp smell of chemicals that reminded Bosch of the fingerprint lab, where they used cyanoacrylate to fume objects and raise prints.
She gestured to her right and behind Bosch. He turned and saw that the front space of the loft was used as her studio and gallery. Her sculptures were large and Bosch could see how the freight elevator and the twenty-foot ceilings here gave her freedom to go big. Three finished pieces sat on wheeled pallets so they could easily be moved. Movie night on Friday would probably be in this space after the sculptures were moved out of the way.
There was also a work area with two benches and racks of tools. A large block of what looked like foam rubber was on a pallet and it appeared that an image of a man was emerging from a sculpting process.
The finished pieces were multi-figure dioramas made of pure white acrylic. All were variations on the nuclear family: mother, father, and daughter. The interaction of the three was different in each sculpture but in each the daughter was looking away from her parents and had no clearly defined face. There were nose and brow ridges but no eyes or mouth.
One of the dioramas showed the father as a soldier with several equipment packs but no weapon. His eyes were closed. Bosch could see a resemblance to the photos he had seen of Dominick Santanello.
Bosch pointed to the diorama with the father as soldier figure.
“What is this one about?” he asked.
“What is it about?” Veracruz repeated. “It’s about war and the destruction of families. But I don’t really think my work needs explanation. You absorb it and you feel something or you don’t. Art shouldn’t be explained.”
Bosch just nodded. He felt he had blundered with his question.
“You probably notice that this one is the companion piece to the two you saw at Bergamot,” Veracruz said.
Bosch nodded again but in a more vigorous manner as if to communicate that he knew what she was talking about. Her saying so, however, made him want to go to Bergamot and see the other two.
He kept his eyes on the sculptures and walked further into the room to see them from different angles. Bosch could tell that it was the same girl in all three pieces, but her ages were different.
“What are the ages of the girl?” he asked.
“Eleven, thirteen, and fifteen,” Veracruz said. “Very observant.”
He guessed that the incomplete face on each had to do with abandonment, not knowing one’s origin, being one of the faceless and nameless. He knew what that was like.
“Very beautiful,” he said.
He meant it sincerely.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I didn’t know my father,” he said.
It startled him when it came out. It wasn’t part of his cover. The power of the sculptures made him say it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I only met him one time,” he said. “I was twenty-one and I had just come back from Vietnam.”
He gestured toward the war sculpture.
“I tracked him down,” he said. “Knocked on his door. I was glad I did it. He died soon after.”
“I supposedly met my father one time when I was a baby. I don’t remember it. He died soon after, too. He was lost in the same war.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m happy. I have a child and I have my art. If I can keep this place from falling into greedy hands, then all will be perfect.”
“You mean the building? It’s for sale?”
“It’s sold, pending the city’s approval to change it into residential. The buyer wants to cut every loft into two, get rid of the artists, and, get this, call it the River Arts Residences.”
Bosch thought for a long moment before responding. She had given him the opening.
“What if I told you there was a way to do that?” he asked. “Keep things perfect.”
When she didn’t answer, he turned and looked at her. Then she did speak.
“Who are you?” she asked.
37
Vibiana Veracruz was stunned to silence when Bosch told her who he was and what he was doing. He showed her his credentials as a state-licensed private investigator. He didn’t mention Whitney Vance by name but told her that he had tracked her through her father’s lineage and believed she and her son were the only two heirs by blood to an industrial fortune. It was she who brought up Vance, having seen media stories in the past few days about the passing of the billionaire industrialist.
“Is that who we’re talking about here?” she asked. “Whitney Vance?”
“What I want to do is confirm the link genetically before we get into names,” Bosch said. “If you are open to it I would take a sample of your DNA through a saliva swab and turn it in to the lab. It should only take a few days, and if we get confirmation, you would have the opportunity to use the attorney I have working with me on this or to seek your own representation. That would be your choice.”
She shook her head as if still not comprehending and sat down on a stool she had pulled away from one of the workbenches.