The black echo

Part IV
Wednesday, May 23
By 10 A.M. they were on the Ventura Freeway, which cuts across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and out of the city. Bosch was driving and they were going against the grain of traffic, heading northwest, toward Ventura County, and leaving behind the blanket of smog that filled the Valley like dirty cream in a bowl.
They were heading to Charlie Company. The FBI had only done a cursory check on Meadows and the prison outreach program the year before. Wish said she had thought its importance was minimal because Meadows's stay had ended nearly a year before the tunnel caper. She said the bureau had requested a copy of Meadows's file but had not checked the names of other convicts who were part of the program at the same time as Meadows. Bosch thought this was a mistake. Meadows's work record indicated the bank caper was part of a long-range plan, he told Wish. The bank burglary might have been hatched at Charlie Company.
Before leaving, Bosch had called Meadows's parole officer, Daryl Slater, and was given a rundown on Charlie Company. Slater said the place was a vegetable farm owned and operated by an army colonel who was retired and born again. He contracted with the state and federal prisons to take early release cases, the only requirement being that they be Vietnam combat veterans. That wasn't too difficult a bill to fill, Slater said. As in every other state in the country, the prisons in California had high populations of Vietnam vets. Gordon Scales, the former colonel, didn't care what crimes the vets had been convicted of, Slater said. He just wanted to set them right again. The place had a staff of three, including Scales, and held no more than twenty-four men at a time. The average stay was nine months. They worked the vegetable fields from six to three, stopping only for lunch at noon. After the workday there was an hour-long session called soul talk, then dinner and TV. Another hour of religion before lights-out. Slater said Scales used his connections in the community to place the vets in jobs when they were ready for the outside world. In six years, Charlie Company had a recidivist record of only 11 percent. A figure so enviable that Scales got a favorable mention in a speech by the president during his last campaign swing through the state.
"The man's a hero," Slater said. "And not 'cause of the war. For what he did after. When you get a place like that, moving maybe thirty, forty cons through it a year, and only one in ten gets his ass in a jam again, then you are talking about a major success. Scales, he has the ear of the federal and state parole boards and half the wardens in this state."
"Does that mean he gets to pick who goes to Charlie Company?" Bosch asked.
"Maybe not pick, but give final approval to, yes," the PO said. "But the word on this guy is out. His name is known in every and any cellblock where you got a vet doing time. These guys come to him. They send letters, send Bibles, make phone calls, have lawyers get in contact. All to get Scales to sponsor them."
"Is that how Meadows got there?"
"Far as I know. He was already heading there when he was assigned to me. You'd have to call Terminal Island and have them check their files. Or talk to Scales."
Bosch filled Wish in on the conversation while they were on the road. Otherwise, it was a long ride and there were long periods of silence. Bosch spent much of the time wondering about the night before. Her visit. Why had she come? After they crossed into Ventura County his mind came back to the case, and he asked her some of the questions he had come up with the night before while reviewing the files.
"Why didn't they hit the main vault? At WestLand there were two vaults. Safe-deposit and then the bank's main vault, for the cash and the tellers' boxes. The crime scene reports said the design of both vaults was the same. The safe-deposit vault was bigger but the armoring in the floor was the same. So it would seem that Meadows and his partners could just as easily have tunneled to the main vault, gotten in and taken whatever was there and gotten out. No need to risk spending a whole weekend inside. No need to pry open safe-deposit boxes either."
"Maybe they didn't know they were the same. Maybe they assumed the main vault would be tougher."
"But we are assuming they had some knowledge of the safe-deposit vault's structure before they started on this. Why didn't they have the same knowledge of the other vault?"
"They couldn't recon the main vault. It's not open to the public. But we think one of them rented a box in the safe-deposit vault and went in to check it out. Used a phony name, of course. But, see, they could check out one vault and not the other. Maybe that's why."
Bosch nodded and said, "How much was in the main vault?"
"Don't know offhand. It should have been in the reports I gave you. If not, it's in the other files back at the bureau."
"More, though. Right? There was more cash in the main vault than what, the two or three million in property they got from the boxes."
"I think that is probably right."
"See what I'm saying? If they had hit the main vault the stuff would have been laying around in stacks and bags. Right there for the taking. It would have been easier. There probably would have been more money for less trouble."
"But, Harry, we know that from hindsight. Who knows what they knew going in? Maybe they thought there was more in the boxes. They gambled and lost."
"Or maybe they won."
She looked over at him.
"Maybe there was something there in the boxes that we don't even know about. That nobody reported missing. Something that made the safe-deposit vault the better target. Made it worth more than the main vault."
"If you're thinking drugs, the answer is no. We thought of that. We had the DEA bring around one of their dogs and he went tbrough the broken boxes. Nothing. No trace of drugs. He then sniffed around the boxes the thieves hadn't gotten to and he got one hit. On one of the small ones."
She laughed for a moment and said, "So then we drilled this box the dog went nuts over and found five grams of coke in a bag. This poor guy who kept his coke stash at the bank got busted just because somebody happened to tunnel into the same vault."
Wish laughed again, but it seemed to be a little forced to Bosch. The story wasn't that funny. "Anyway," she said, "the case against the guy was kicked by an assistant U.S. attorney because he said it was a bad search. We violated the guy when we drilled his box without a warrant."
Bosch exited the freeway into the town of Ventura and headed north. "I still like the drug angle, despite the dog," he said after a quarter hour of silence. "They aren't infallible, those dogs. If the stuff was packed in there right and the thieves got it, there may not have been a trace. A couple of those boxes with coke in them and the caper starts being worth their while."
"Your next question will be about the customer lists, right?" she said.
"Right."
"Well, we did a lot of work on that. We checked everybody, right down to tracing purchases of things they said were in the boxes. We didn't find who did the job, but we probably saved the bank's insurance companies a couple million in paying for things that were reported stolen but never really existed."
He pulled into a gas station so he could take out a map book from under the seat and figure out the way to Charlie Company. She continued to defend the FBI investigation.
"The DEA looked at every name on the boxholder list and drew a blank. We ran the names through NCIC. We got a few hits but nothing serious, mostly old stuff." She gave another one of those short fake laughs. "One of the holders of one of the bigger boxes had a kiddy porn conviction from the seventies. Served a deuce at Soledad. Anyway, after the bank job he was contacted and he reported nothing was taken, said he had recently emptied his box.
But they say these pedophiles can never part with their stuff, their photos and films, even letters written about kids. And there was no record at the bank of him going into the box in the two months before the burglary. So we figured that the box was for his collection. But, anyway, that had nothing to do with the job. Nothing we turned up did."
Bosch found the way on the map and pulled out of the service station. Charlie Company was in grove country. He thought about her story about the pedophile. Something about it bothered him. He rolled it around in his head but couldn't get to it. He let it drift and went on to another question.
"Why was nothing ever recovered? All that jewelry and bonds and stocks, and nothing ever turns up except for a single bracelet. Not even any of the other worthless things that were taken."
"They are sitting on it until they think they are clear," Wish said. "That's why Meadows was smoked. He went out of line and pawned the bracelet before he should have, maybe before everyone agreed they were clear. They found out he'd sold it. He wouldn't say where, so they buzzed him until he told them. Then they killed him."
"And by coincidence, I get the call."
"It happens."
"There is something in that story that doesn't work," Bosch said. "We start out with Meadows getting juiced, tortured, right? He tells them what they want, they put the hot load in his arm and they go get the bracelet from the pawnshop, okay?"
"Okay."
"But, see, it doesn't work. I've got the pawn slip. It was hidden. So he didn't give it to them, and they had to go break in the shop and take the bracelet, covering the scam by also taking a lot of other junk. So if he didn't give them the pawn slip, how'd they know where the bracelet was?"
"He told them, I guess," Wish said.
"I don't think so. I don't see him giving up one and not the other. He had nothing to gain from holding back the slip. If they got the name of the shop out of him, they would've gotten the slip."
"So, you're saying he died before he told them anything. And they already knew where the bracelet was pawned."
"Right. They worked him to get the ticket, but he wouldn't give it up, wouldn't break. They killed him. Then they dump the body and roll his place. But they still don't find the pawn stub. So they hit the pawnshop like third-rate burglars. The question is, if Meadows didn't tell them where he had sold the bracelet and they didn't find the stub, how did they know where it was?"
"Harry, this is speculation on top of speculation."
"That's what cops do."
"Well, I don't know. Could have been a lot of things. They could have had a tail on Meadows 'cause they didn't trust him and could have seen him go into the pawnshop. Could've been a lot of things."
"Could've been they had somebody, say a cop, who saw the bracelet on the monthly pawn sheets and told them. The sheets go to every police department in the county."
"I think that kind of speculation is reckless."
They were there. Bosch braked the car at a gravel entranceway below a wooden sign with a green eagle painted on it and the words Charlie Company. The gate was open and they drove down a gravel road with muddy irrigation ditches running along both sides. The road split the farmland, with tomatoes on the right and what smelled like peppers on the left. Up ahead there was a large aluminum-sided barn and a sprawling ranch-style house. Behind these Bosch could see a grove of avocado trees. They drove into a circular parking area in front of the ranch house and Bosch cut the engine.
A man wearing a white apron that was as clean as his shaven head came to the screen at the front door.
"Mr. Scales here?" Bosch asked.
"Colonel Scales, you mean? No, he is not. It's almost time for chow, though. He'll be coming in from the fields then."
The man did not invite them to come in out of the sun, and so Bosch and Wish went back and sat in the car. A few minutes later a dusty white pickup truck drove up. It had an eagle inside a large letter C painted on the driver's door. Three men got out of the cab and six more piled out of the back. They moved quickly toward the ranch house. They ranged in age from late thirties to late forties. They wore military green pants and white T-shirts soaked with sweat. No one wore a bandanna or sunglasses or had his sleeves rolled up. No one's hair was longer than a quarter inch. The white men were burned brown like stained wood. The driver, wearing the same uniform but at least ten years older than the rest, slowed to a stop and let the others go inside. As he approached, Bosch put him on the early side of his sixties, but a guy who was almost as solid as he had been in his twenties. His hair, what could be seen of it against his gleaming skull, was white and his skin was like walnut. He was wearing work gloves.
"Help you?" he asked.
"Colonel Scales?" Bosch said.
"That's right. You police?"
Bosch nodded and made introductions. Scales didn't seem too impressed, even with the FBI being mentioned.
"You remember about seven, eight months ago the FBI asked you for some information on a William Meadows, who spent some time here?" Wish asked.
"Sure I do. I remember every time you people call up or come around asking about one of my boys. I resent it, so I remember it. You want more information on Billy? Is he in some trouble?"
"Not anymore," Bosch said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Scales said. "Sounds like you're saying he's dead."
"You didn't know?" Bosch said.
" 'Course I didn't. Tell me what happened to him."
Bosch thought he saw genuine surprise and then a flashing hint of sadness cross Scales's face. The news had hurt.
"He was found dead three days ago in L.A. A homicide. We think it is related to a crime he took part in last year, that you may have heard about from the FBI's previous contact."
"The tunnel thing? At that bank in L.A.?" he asked. "I know what I was told by the FBI. That's it."
"That's fine," Wish said. "What we need from you is more complete information about who was here when Meadows was. We went over this ground before, but we are rechecking, looking for anything that might help. Will you cooperate with us?"
"I always cooperate with you people. I don't like it because half the time I think you got your wires crossed. Most of my boys, when they leave here, they don't get mixed up again. We have a good record here. If Meadows did what you're saying he did, he is the rarity."
"We understand that," she said. "And this will be strictly confidential."
"O'right then, come into my office and you can ask your questions."
As they went through the front door Bosch saw two long tables in what was probably once the ranch house's living room. About twenty men sat before plates of what looked like chicken-fried steaks and mounds of vegetables. Not one looked at Eleanor Wish. That was because they were silently saying grace, their heads down, eyes closed and hands folded. Bosch could see tattoos on almost every arm. When they stopped their prayer a chorus of forks struck home on the plates. A few of the men took the time then to look at Eleanor approvingly. The man in the apron who had come to the screen door earlier now stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
"Colonel, are you eating with the men today, sir?" he called.
Scales nodded and said, "I'll be through in a few minutes."
They went down a hallway and through the first door into an office that was supposed to be a bedroom. It was crowded by a desk with a top the size of a door. Scales pointed to two chairs in front of it and Bosch and Wish sat down, while he took the upholstered job behind the desk.
"Now, I know exactly what I am required by law to give you and what I don't have to even speak to you about. But I am inclined to do more, if it will help and we have an understanding. Meadows—I sort of knew he would end up as you say he did. I prayed to the Good Lord to guide him, but I knew. I will help you. No one should take a life in a civilized world. No one at all."
"Colonel," Bosch began, "we appreciate your help. I want you to know, first off, that we know what kind of job you are doing bere. We know you have the respect and encouragement of both state and federal authorities. But our investigation of Meadows's death leads us to conclude he was involved in a conspiracy with other men who had the same skills as he and—"
"You are saying they are vets," Scales cut in. He was filling a pipe with tobacco from a canister on the desk.
"Possibly. We have not identified them yet, so we don't know it for a fact. But if that is the case, there would seem a possibility that the players in the conspiracy may have met here. I stress the word "may." Therefore, there are two things we want from you. A look at any records you still have on Meadows and a list of every man that was here during the ten months he was."
Scales was tamping his pipe and seemingly paying no attention to what had just been said. Then he said, "No problem on his records—he's dead. On the other, I suppose I should call my lawyer just to make sure I can do that. We run a good program here. And vegetables and money from the state and the feds don't cover it. I get out the soapbox and make the rounds. We rely on the tithings of the community, civic organizations, things like that. Bad publicity will dry that money up faster than a Santa Ana wind. I help you, I risk that. The other risk is the loss in the faith of the men who come here for a new start. See, most of those men that were here back when Meadows was, they've gone on to new lives. They aren't criminals anymore. If I'm handing out their names to every cop that comes around, then that doesn't look too good for my program, does it?"
"Colonel Scales, we don't have time for lawyers to look this over," Bosch said. "We are on a murder case, sir. We need this information. You know we can get it if we go to the state and federal correctional departments, but that might take longer than your lawyer. We can also get it with a subpoena, but we thought mutual cooperation would be best. We are much more inclined to tread lightly if we have your cooperation."
Scales didn't move and again didn't seem to be listening. A curl of blue smoke swirled like a ghost out of his pipe bowl.
"I see," he finally said. "Then I'll just get those files, won't I?" He stood up then and went to a row of beige file cabinets that lined the wall behind his desk. He went to one drawer and after a short search pulled out a thin manila file. He dropped it on his desk near Bosch. "That's the file on Meadows, there," he said. "Now let's see what else we can find here."
He went to the first drawer, which had no marking in the card slot on front. He looked through files without taking any out. Then he chose one and sat down with it.
"You are free to look through that file and I can copy anything you need from it," Scales said. "This one is my master flow chart of people through here. I can make you a list of any people Meadows could have met here. I assume you will need DOBs and PINs?"




"That would help, thank you," Wish said.
It took only fifteen minutes to look through Meadows's file. He had started a correspondence with Scales a year before his release from TI. He had the backing of a chaplain and an intake counselor who knew him because he had been assigned to maintenance at the prison's intake and placement office. In one of the letters Meadows had described the tunnels he had been into in Vietnam and how he had been drawn to their darkness.
"Most of the other guys were scared to go down there," he wrote. "I wanted to go. I didn't know why then, but I think now that I was testing my limits. But the fulfillment I received from it was false. I was as hollow as the ground we fought on. The fulfillment I now have is in Jesus Christ and knowing He is with me. If given the chance, and with His guidance, I can make the right choices this time and leave these bars forever behind. I want to go from hollow ground to hallowed ground."
"Tacky but sincere enough, I guess," Wish said.
Scales looked up from the desk, where he was writing names, birth dates and prison identification numbers on a sheet of yellow paper. "He was sincere," he said in a voice that suggested there was no other way about it. "When Billy Meadows left here, I thought, I believed, he was ready for the outside and that he had shed past alliances with drugs and crime. It becomes obvious that he fell back into that temptation. But I doubt you two will find what you are looking for here. I give you these names but they won't help you."
"We'll see," Bosch said. Scales went back to writing, and Bosch watched him. He was too consumed by his faith and loyalty to see he might have been used. Bosch believed Scales was a good man but one who might be too quick to see his beliefs and hopes in someone else, perhaps someone like Meadows.
"Colonel, what do you get out of all this?" Bosch asked.
This time he put his pen down, adjusted his pipe in his set jaw and folded his hands together on the desk. "It's not what I get. It's what the Lord gets." He picked up the pen again, but then another thought came to him. "You know, these boys were destroyed in many ways when they got back. I know, it's an old story and everybody's heard it, everybody's seen the movies. But these guys have had to live it. Thousands came back here and literally marched off to the prisons. One day I was reading about that and I wondered what if there hadn't been any war and these boys never went anywhere. They just stayed in Omaha and Los Angeles and Jacksonville and New Iberia and wherever. Would they still have ended up in prison? Would they be homeless, wandering mental cases? Drug addicts?
"For most of them, I doubt that. It was the war that did it to them, that sent them the wrong way." He took a long drag on the dead pipe. "So all I do, with the help of the earth and a few prayer books, is try to put back inside what the Vietnam experience took out. And I'm pretty good at it. So I'm giving you this list, letting you take a look at that file there. But don't hurt what we've got here. You two have a natural suspicion of what goes on here, and that's fine. It's healthy for people in your position. But be careful with what is good here. Detective Bosch, you look the right age, were you over there?"
Bosch nodded and Scales said, "Then you know." He went back to finishing the list. Without looking up he said, "You two join us for lunch? Freshest vegetables in the county on our table."
They declined and stood up to go after Scales handed Bosch the list with the twenty-four names he had come up with. As Bosch turned to the office door he hesitated and said, "Colonel, do you mind me asking what other vehicles you have on the farm? I saw the pickup."
"We don't mind you asking, because we have nothing to hide. We got two more pickups like that, two John Deeres and a four-wheel-drive vehicle."
"What kind of four-wheel-drive vehicle?"
"It's a Jeep."
"And what color?"
"It's white. What's going on?"
"Just trying to clear up something. But I guess the Jeep would have the Charlie Company seal on the side, like the pickup?"
"That's right. All our vehicles are marked. When we go into Ventura we're proud of what we've accomplished. We want people to know where the vegetables are coming from."
Bosch didn't look at the names on the list until he was in the car. He didn't recognize any, but he noticed that Scales had written the letters PH after eight of the twenty-four names.
"What's that mean?" Wish asked as she leaned over and looked at the list also.
"Purple Heart," Bosch said. "One more way to say be careful, I guess."
"What about the Jeep?" she said. "He said it was white. It has a seal on the side."
"You saw how dirty the pickup was. A dirty white Jeep, it could have looked beige. If it's the right Jeep."
"He just doesn't seem right. Scales. He seems legit."
"Maybe he is. Maybe it's the people he lends his Jeep to. I didn't want to press it with him until we know more."
He started the car and they headed down the gravel road to the gate. Bosch rolled his window down. The sky was the color of bleached jeans and the air was invisible and clean and smelled like fresh green peppers. But not for long, Bosch thought. We go back into the nastiness now.
On the way back to the city Bosch cut off the Ventura Freeway and headed south through Malibu Canyon to the Pacific. It would take longer to get back, but the clean air was addictive. He wanted it for as long as possible.
"I want to see the list of the victims," he said after they had made their way through the winding canyon and the hazy blue surface of the ocean could be seen ahead. "This pedophile you mentioned earlier. Something about that story bothered me. Why would they take the guy's collection of kiddie porno?"
"Harry, come on, you are not going to suggest that was a reason, that these guys tunneled for weeks and then blasted into a bank vault to steal a collection of kiddie porn?"
"Of course not. But that's why it raises the question. Why'd they take the stuff?"
"Well, maybe they wanted it. Maybe one was a pedophile and he liked it. Who knows?"
"Or maybe it was all part of a cover. Take everything from every box they drilled to hide the fact that what they were really after was one box. You know, sort of blur the picture by hitting dozens of boxes. But all along the target was something in only one of the boxes. Same principle with the pawnshop break-in: take a lot of jewelry to cover they only wanted the bracelet.
"But with the vault, they wanted something that wouldn't be reported stolen afterward. Something that couldn't be reported stolen because it would get the owner into some kind of jam. Like with the pedophile. When his stuff got stolen what could he say? That's the sort of thing the tunnelers were after, but something more valuable. Something that would make hitting the safe-deposit vault more attractive than hitting the main vault.
"Something that would make killing Meadows a necessity when he endangered the whole caper by pawning the bracelet."
She was quiet. Bosch looked over at her, but behind her sunglasses she was unreadable.
"Sounds to me like you are talking about drugs again," she said after a while. "And the dog said no drugs. The DEA found no connections on our list of customers."
"Maybe drugs, maybe not. But that's why we should look at the boxholders again. I want to look at the list for myself. Want to see if anything rings a bell with it. The people who reported no losses, they are the ones that I want to start with."
"I'll get the list. We've got nothing else going anyway."
"Well, we've got these names from Scales to run down," Bosch said. "I was thinking that we'd pull mugs and take 'em to Sharkey."
"Worth a try, I guess. More like just going through the motions."
"I don't know. I think the kid is holding something. I think he maybe saw a face that night."
"I left a memo with Rourke about the hypnosis. He'll probably get back to us on that today or tomorrow."
They took the Pacific Coast Highway around the bay. The smog had been blown inland and it was clear enough to see Catalina Island out past the whitecaps. They stopped at Alice's Restaurant for lunch, and since it was late there was an open table by a window. Wish ordered an iced tea and Bosch had a beer.
"I used to come out to this pier when I was a kid," Bosch told her. "They'd take a busload of us out. Back then, they had a bait shop out on the end. I'd fish for yellowtail."
"Kids from DYS?"
"Yeah. Er, no. Back then it was called DPS. Department of Public Services. Few years back they finally realized they needed a whole department for the kids, so they came up with DYS."
She looked out the restaurant window and down along the pier. She smiled at his memories and he asked where hers were.
"All over," she said. "My father was in the military. Most I ever spent in one place was a couple years. So my memories aren't really of places. They're people."
"You and your brother were close?" Bosch said.
"Yes, with my father gone a lot. He was always there. Until he enlisted and went away for good."
Salads were put down on the table and they ate a little bit and small-talked a little bit and then sometime between when the waitress picked up the salad plates and put down the lunch plates she told her brother's story.
"Every week he'd write me from over there and every week he said he was scared, wanted to come home," she said. "It wasn't something he could say to our father or mother. But Michael wasn't the type. He should never have gone. He went because of our father. He couldn't let him down. He wasn't brave enough to say no to him, but he was brave enough to go over there. It doesn't make sense. Have you ever heard anything so dumb?"
Bosch didn't answer because he had heard similar stories, his own included. And she seemed to stop there. She either didn't know what had happened to her brother over there or didn't want to recount the details.
After a while she said, "Why'd you go?"
He knew the question was coming but in his whole life he had never been able to truthfully answer it, even to himself.
"I don't know. No choice, I guess. The institutional life, like you said before. I wasn't going to college. Never really thought about Canada. I think it would have been harder to go there than to just get drafted and go to Vietnam. Then in sixty-eight I sort of won the draft lottery. My number came up so low I knew I was going to go. So I thought I'd outsmart 'em by joining, thought I'd write my own ticket."
"And so?"
Bosch laughed a little in the same phony way she had laughed before. "I got in, went through basic and all the bullshit and when it came time to choose something, I picked the infantry. I still have never figured out why. They get you at that age, you know? You're invincible. Once I got over there I volunteered for a tunnel squad. It was kind of like that letter Meadows wrote to Scales. You want to see what you've got. You do things you'll never understand. You know what I mean?"
"I think so," she said. "What about Meadows? He had chances to leave and he never did, not till the very end. Why would anybody want to stay if they didn't have to?"
"There were a lot like that," Bosch said. "I guess it wasn't usual or unusual. Some just didn't want to leave that place. Meadows was one of them. It might have been a business decision, too."
"You mean drugs?"
"Well, I know he was using heroin while he was there. We know he was using and selling afterward when he got back here. So maybe when he was over there he got involved in moving it and he didn't want to leave a good thing. There is a lot that points to it. He was moved to Saigon after they took him out of the tunnels. Saigon would have been the place to be, especially with embassy clearance like he had as an MP. Saigon was sin city. Whores, hash, heroin, it was a free market. A lot of people jumped into it. Heroin would have made him some nice money, especially if he had a plan, a way to move some of the stuff back here."
She pushed pieces of red snapper she wasn't going to eat around on her plate with a fork.
"It's unfair," she said. "He didn't want to come back. Some boys wanted to come home but never got the chance."
"Yes. There was nothing fair about that place."
Bosch turned and looked out the window at the ocean. There were four surfers in bright wet suits riding on the swells.
"And after the war you joined the cops."
"Well, I kicked around a little and then joined the department. It seemed most of the vets I knew, like what Scales said today, were going into the police departments or the penitentiaries."
"I don't know, Harry. You seem like the loner type. A private eye, not a man who has to take orders from men he doesn't respect."
"There are no more private operators. Everybody takes orders. . . . But all this stuff about me is in the file. You know it all."
"Not everything about somebody can be put down on paper. Isn't that what you said?"
He smiled as a waitress cleared the table. He said, "What about you? What's your story with the bureau?"
"Pretty simple, really. Criminal justice major, accounting minor, recruited out of Penn State. Good pay, good benefits, women highly sought and valued. Nothing original."
"Why the bank detail? I thought the fast track was antiterrorism, white-collar stuff, maybe even drugs. But not the heavy squad."
"I did the white-collar stuff for five years. I was in D.C., too, the right place to be. The thing is, the emperor had no clothes. It was all deadly, deadly boring stuff." She smiled and shook her head. "I realized I just wanted to be a cop. So, that's what I became. I transferred to the first good street unit that had an opening. L.A. is the bank robbery capital of the country. When an opening came up here, I called in my markers and got the transfer. Call me a dinosaur, if you want."
"You are too beautiful for that."
Despite her dark tan, Bosch could tell the remark embarrassed her. It embarrassed him, too, just sort of slipping out like that.
"Sorry," he said.
"No. No, that was nice. Thank you."
"So, are you married, Eleanor?" he said and then he turned red, immediately regretting his lack of subtlety. She smiled at his embarrassment.
"I was. But it was a long time ago."
Bosch nodded. "You don't have anything . . . what about Rourke? You two seemed . . ."
"What? Are you kidding?"
"Sorry."
They laughed together then, and followed it with smiles and a long, comfortable silence.
After lunch they walked out on the pier to the spot where Bosch had once stood with rod and reel. There was no one fishing. Several of the buildings at the end of the pier were abandoned. There was a rainbow sheen on top of the water near one of the pylons. Bosch also noticed the surfers were gone. Maybe all the kids are in school, Bosch thought. Or maybe they don't fish here anymore. Maybe no fish make it this far into the poisoned bay.
"I haven't been here in a long time," he said to Eleanor. He leaned on the pier railing, his elbows on wood scarred by a thousand bait knives. "Things change."
It was midafternoon by the time they got back to the Federal Building. Wish ran the names and prisoner identification numbers Scales had given them through the NCIC and state department of justice computers and ordered mug shots photo-faxed from various prisons in the state. Bosch took the list of names and called U.S. military archives in St. Louis and asked for Jessie St. John, the same clerk he had dealt with on Monday. She said the file on William Meadows that Bosch had asked for was already on the way. Bosch didn't tell her he already had seen the FBI's copy of it. Instead, he talked her into calling up the new names he had on her computer and giving him the basic service biography of each man. He kept her past the end of shift at five o'clock in St. Louis, but she said she wanted to help.
By five o'clock L.A. time Bosch and Wish had twenty-four mug shots and brief criminal and military service sketches of the men to go with them. Nothing jumped off Wish's desk and hit either of them over the head. Fifteen of the men had served in Vietnam at some point during the period Meadows was there. Eleven of these were U.S. Army. None were tunnel rats, though four were First Infantry along with Meadows on his first tour. There were two others who were MPOs in Saigon.
They focused on the NCIC records of the six soldiers who were First Infantry or military police. Only the MPOs had bank robbery records. Bosch shuffled through the mug shots and pulled those two out. He stared at the faces, half expecting to get confirmation from the hardened, disinterested looks they gave the camera. "I like these two," he said.
Their names were Art Franklin and Gene Delgado. They both had Los Angeles addresses. In Vietnam, they spent their tours in Saigon assigned to separate MP units. Not the embassy unit that Meadows was attached to. But, still, they were in the city. Both of them had been discharged in 1973. But as with Meadows, they stayed on in Vietnam as civilian military advisers. They were there until the end, April 1975. There was no question in Bosch's mind. All three men—Meadows, Franklin and Delgado—knew each other before they met at Charlie Company in Ventura County.
Stateside after 1975, Franklin got jammed up on a series of robberies in San Francisco and went away for five years. He went down on a federal rap of bank robbery in Oakland in 1984 and was at TI at the same time as Meadows. He was paroled to Charlie Company two months before Meadows left the program. Delgado was strictly a state offender; three pops for burglaries in L.A., for which he was able to get by on county lockup time, then an attempted bank robbery in Santa Ana in 1985. He was able to plead in state court under an agreement with federal prosecutors. He went up to Soledad, getting out in 1988 and arriving at Charlie Company three months ahead of Meadows. He left Charlie Company a day after Franklin arrived.
"One day," Wish said. "This means all three were together there at Charlie Company only one day."
Bosch looked at their photos and the accompanying descriptions. Franklin was the larger one. Six foot, 190, dark hair. Delgado was lean, five-six and 140. Dark hair, too. Bosch stared at the photos of the big man and the small man, and was thinking about the descriptions of the men in the Jeep that had dumped Meadows's body.
"Let's go see Sharkey," he said after a while.
He called Home Street Home and was told what he knew they were going to tell him: Sharkey was gone. Bosch tried the Blue Chateau and a tired old voice told him that Sharkey's crew had moved out at noon. His mother hung up on Bosch after she determined he was not a customer.
It was near seven. Bosch told Wish they would have to go back to the street to find him. She said she'd drive. They spent the next two hours in West Hollywood, mostly in the Santa Monica Boulevard corridor. But there was no sign of Sharkey or his motorbike locked to a parking meter. They flagged down a few sheriffs cruisers and told them who they were looking for, but not even the extra eyes helped. They parked at the curb by the Oki Dog, and Bosch was thinking that maybe the boy had gone back to his mother's house and she had hung up the phone to protect him.
"You want to take a ride up to Chatsworth?" he asked.
"As much as I'd like to see this witch you told me Sharkey has for a mother, I was thinking more along the lines of calling it a day. We can find Sharkey tomorrow. How about that dinner we didn't have last night?"
Bosch wanted to get to Sharkey, but he also wanted to get to her. She was right, there was always tomorrow.
"Sounds good to me," he said. "Where you feel like going?"
"My place."
Eleanor Wish lived in a rent-controlled townhouse she subleased two blocks from the beach in Santa Monica. They parked at the curb in front, and as they went in she told Bosch that although she lived close by, if he wanted to actually see the ocean he had to walk out onto her bedroom balcony, lean over and look sharply to the right down Ocean Park Boulevard. A slice of the Pacific could then be seen between two condominium towers that guarded the shoreline. From that angle, she mentioned, he could also see into her next-door neighbor's bedroom. The neighbor was a has-been television actor turned small-time dope dealer who had a never-ending procession of women through the bedroom. It kind of took away from the view, she said. She told Bosch to have a seat in the living room while she got dinner started. "If you like jazz, I have a CD over there I just bought but haven't had time to listen to," she said.
He walked over to the stereo, which was stacked on shelves next to a set of bookcases, and picked up the new disk. It was Rollins's Falling in Love with Jazz, and inside Harry smiled because he had it at home. It was a warm connection. He opened the case, put the music on and began to look around the living room. There were pastel throw rugs and light-colored coverings on the furniture. Architecture books and home magazines were spread on a glass-topped coffee table in front of a light-blue couch. The place was very neat. A framed cross-stitch canvas on the wall next to the front door said Welcome To This Home. Small letters stitched in its corner said EDS 1970, and Bosch wondered about the last letter.
He made another one of those psychic connections with Eleanor Wish when he turned around and looked at the wall above the couch. Framed in black wood was a print of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Bosch didn't have the print at home but he was familiar with the painting and from time to time even thought about it when he was deep on a case or on a surveillance. He had seen the original in Chicago once and had stood in front of it studying it for nearly an hour. A quiet, shadowy man sits alone at the counter of a street-front diner. He looks across at another customer much like himself, but only the second man is with a woman. Somehow, Bosch identified with it, with that first man. I am the loner, he thought. I am the nighthawk. The print, with its stark dark hues and shadows, did not fit in this apartment, Bosch realized. Its darkness clashed with the pastels. Why did Eleanor have it? What did she see there?
He looked around the rest of the room. There was no TV. There was just the music on the stereo and the magazines on the table and the books on the lawyer's shelves against the wall across from the couch. He stepped over and looked through the glass panes and browsed the collection. The top two shelves were mostly high-brow Book-of-the-Month offerings descending into crime fiction by writers like Crumley and Willeford and others. He had read some of them. He opened the glass door and pulled out a book called The Locked Door. He'd heard of the book but had never seen it to buy. He opened the cover to see how old it was and he solved the mystery of the last letter on the needlework. On the first page, printed in ink, it said Eleanor D. Scarletti—1979. She must have kept her husband's name after the divorce, Bosch thought. He put the book back and closed the case.
The books on the bottom two rows of the bookcase ranged from true crime to historical studies of the Vietnam War to FBI manuals. There was even an LAPD homicide investigation textbook. Many of these books Bosch had read. One of them he was even in. It was a book the Times reporter Bremmer had written about the so-called Beauty Shop Slasher. A guy named Harvard Kendal, the slasher killed seven women in one year in the San Fernando Valley. They were all beauty shop owners or employees. He cased the shops, followed the victims home and killed them by cutting their throats with a sharpened nail file. Bosch and his partner at the time connected Kendal through a license plate number the seventh victim had written on a pad in the salon the night before she was murdered. They never figured out why she had done it, but the detectives suspected she had seen Kendal watching the shop from his van. She wrote the tag number down as a precaution but then didn't take the precaution of not going home alone. Bosch and his partner traced the tag to Kendal and found out he had spent five years in Folsom for a series of beauty shop arsons near Oakland in the 1960s.
They later discovered his mother had worked as a manicurist in a beauty shop when he was a boy. She had practiced her craft on young Kendal's nails, and the shrinks figured he never got over it. Bremmer had gotten a best-seller out of it. And when Universal made a movie of the week out of it, the studio paid Bosch and his partner for the use of their names and technical assistance. The money doubled when a cop series spun off the movie. His partner quit the department and moved to Ensenada. Bosch stayed on, investing his stake in the stilt house on the hill that looked down on the studio that paid him the money. Bosch always found an unexplainable symbiosis in that.
"I read that book before your name ever came up in this. It wasn't part of the research."
Eleanor had come out of the kitchen with two glasses of red wine. Harry smiled.
"I wasn't going to accuse you of anything," he said. "Besides, it isn't about me. It's about Kendal. The whole thing was luck, anyway. But they still made a book and TV show about it. Whatever it is in there, it smells good."
"You like pasta?"
"I like spaghetti."
"That's what we're having. I made a big pot of sauce Sunday. I love to spend an entire day in the kitchen, not thinking about anything else. I find it's good therapy for stress. And it lasts and lasts. All I have to do is warm it up and boil some noodles."
Bosch sipped his wine and looked around some more. He still hadn't sat down but was feeling very comfortable with her. A smile played across his face. He gestured toward the Hopper print. "I like it. But why something so dark?"
She looked at the print and crinkled her brow as if this were the first time she had considered it.
"I don't know," she said. "I've always liked that painting. Something there grabs me. The woman is with a man. So that isn't me. So I guess if it's anyone, it would be the man sitting with his coffee. All alone, kind of watching the two that are together."
"I saw it in Chicago once," Bosch said. "The original. I was out there on an extradition and had about an hour to kill until I could pick up the body. So I went into the Art Institute and it was there. I spent the whole hour looking at it. There's something about it—like you said. I can't remember the case or who I was bringing back here. But I remember that painting."
They sat at the table talking for nearly an hour after the food was gone. She told him more about her brother and her difficulty getting over the anger and loss. Eighteen years later she was still working it out, she said. Bosch told her that he was still working things out, too. He still dreamed of the tunnels from time to time, but more often he battled insomnia instead. He told her how mixed up he was when he got back, how thin the line was, the choice, between what he had done afterward and what Meadows did. It could have been different, he said, and she nodded, seeming to know that was true.
Later, she asked about the Dollmaker case and his fall from Robbery-Homicide. It was more than curiosity. He sensed that something important rode on what he told her. She was making a decision about him.
"I guess you know the basics," he began. "Somebody was strangling women, mostly prostitutes, then painting over their faces with makeup. Pancake, red lipstick, heavy rouge on the cheeks, sharp black eyeliner. The same thing every time. The bodies were bathed, too. But we never said it looked like he was making them into dolls. Some a*shole—I think it was a guy named Sakai over at the coroner's—leaked that the makeup was the common denominator. Then this Dollmaker stuff started playing in the press. I think Channel 4 was the first to come up with that name. It took off from there. To me, it looked more like a mortician's work. But the truth is we weren't doing too good. We didn't have a handle on the guy until he was into double figures.
"Not much physical evidence. The victims were all dumped in random locations, all over the Westside. We knew from fiber evidence on a couple of the bodies that the guy probably wore a rug or some kind of hair disguise, fake beard or something. The women that were taken off the stroll, we were able to isolate times and places of their last trick. We went to the hourly motels and got nothing. So we figured the guy was picking them up in a car and then taking them somewhere else, maybe to his home or some kind of safe place he used as a killing pad. We started watching the Boulevard and other hot spots the pros work, and we must've busted up three hundred tricks before we got the break. This whore name of Dixie McQueen calls up the task force one morning, early, and says she just escaped from the Dollmaker and is there a reward if she gives him up. Well, we were getting calls like that every week. I mean, eleven murdered women and people are coming out of the woodwork with clues that aren't really clues. It's panic city."
"I remember," Wish said.
"But Dixie was different. I was working the late shift in the task force offices that day and I caught the call. I went and talked to her. She told me that this john she'd picked up on Hollywood near Spa Row, you know, near the Scientology mansion, took her to this garage apartment in Silver Lake. She said that while the guy was getting naked she wanted to use the toilet. So she goes in and while she's running the water she looks through the cabinet below the sink, probably to see if there is anything worth lifting. But she sees all these little bottles and compacts and all this women's stuff. She looks at it all and she just puts it all together. Just like that. Bingo; this has to be the guy. So she gets a case of total creeps and bails out. She comes out of the bathroom and the guy's in the bed. She just hauls ass through the front door.
"The thing is, we hadn't put out all the stuff about the makeup. Or, actually, the a*shole that was the media leak didn't put out everything. See, we knew that the guy was keeping the victims' stuff. They were found with their purses but there were no cosmetics—you know, lipstick, compacts, things like that. So when Dixie told me about what was in the bathroom cabinet she got my attention. I knew she was legit.
"And that is the point where I screwed up. It was three A.M. by the time I was done talking to Dixie. Everybody on the task force had gone home and I was left there thinking that this guy might realize Dixie made him and clear out. So I went there alone. I mean, Dixie went with me to show me the place, but then she never left the car. Once we were there, I saw a light on above the garage, which was behind this rundown house off of Hyperion. I called for patrol backup, and while I'm waiting I see the guy's shadow going back and forth across the window. Something tells me he is getting ready to bug out and take all the stuff from the cabinet with him. And we had no evidence from the eleven bodies. We needed the stuff that was in the bathroom cabinet. The other consideration was, what if he has someone up there? You know, a replacement for Dixie. So I went up. Alone. You know the rest."
Wish said, "You went in without a warrant and shot him when he was reaching under the pillow on the bed. You later told the shooting team that you believed it was an emergency situation. There had been enough time for him to go out and get another prostitute. You said that gave you the authority to come through the door without a warrant. You said you fired because you believed the suspect was reaching for a weapon. It was one shot, upper torso from fifteen or twenty feet, if I remember the report. But the Dollmaker was alone, and under the pillow was only his toupee."
"Only his rug," Bosch said. He shook his head like a Monday-morning quarterback. "The shooting team cleared me. We connected him to two of the bodies through the hair from the toupee, and the makeup in the bathroom was traced to eight of the victims. There was no doubt. It was him. I was clear, but then the shooflies started in on it. A Lewis and Clarke expedition. They ran down Dixie and got her to sign a statement saying she told me beforehand that he put his hair under the pillow. I don't know what they used against her, but I can imagine. IAD's always had a hard-on for me. They don't like anybody who's not a hundred percent part of the family. Anyway, the next thing I know they are bringing departmental charges against me. They wanted to fire me and take Dixie to a grand jury to get criminal charges. It was like there was blood in the water and two fat white sharks."
He stopped there but Eleanor continued. "The IAD detectives misjudged things, though, Harry. They didn't realize that public opinion would be with you. You were known in the newspapers as the cop who broke the Beauty Shop Slasher and Dollmaker cases. A character in a TV show. They couldn't take you down without a lot of public scrutiny and embarrassment for the department."
"Someone reached down from above them and put a stop to the grand jury move," Bosch said. "They had to settle for a suspension and my demotion to Hollywood homicide."
Bosch had his fingers on the stem of his empty wine glass and was absentmindedly turning the glass on the table.
"Some settlement," he said after a while. "And those two IAD sharks are still swimming around out there, waiting for the kill."
They sat silently for a while then. He was waiting for her to ask the question she had asked once before. Had the whore lied? She never asked it, and after a while she just looked at him and smiled. And he felt as if he had just passed the test. She started gathering the plates off the table. Bosch helped her in the kitchen and when the work was done, they stood close, drying their hands on the same dish towel, and lightly kissed. Then, as if following the same secret signals, they pressed themselves against each other and kissed with the kind of hunger lonely people have.
"I want to stay," Bosch said after momentarily breaking away.
"I want you to stay," she said.
Arson's stoned eyes were shiny and reflected the neon night. He sucked hard on the Kool and held the precious smoke in. The cigarette had been dipped in PCP. A smile cracked across his face as the jet streams of smoke escaped his nostrils. He said, "You're the only shark I ever heard of being used as bait. Get it?"
He laughed and took another deep drag before handing the cigarette to Sharkey, who waved it away because he'd had enough. Mojo took it then.
"Yeah, I'm getting tired of this shit," Sharkey said. "You take a turn for once."
"Chill out, man, you're the only one can get away with it, man. Mojo and me, man, we just don't play the part good as you. Besides, we got our part. You ain't big enough to pound these faggots."
"Well, whyn't we do the 7-Eleven again?" Sharkey said. "I don't like this not knowing who it is. I like it at the 7-Eleven. We pick our meat, they don't pick me."
"No way," Mojo spoke up then. "We go back there, we don't know if that last guy reported it to the sheriffs or not. We have to stay clear a there awhile. They're probly watching the place from the same parking lot we did."
Sharkey knew they were right. He just thought that being out on Santa Monica on the queer stroll was getting too close to the real thing. Next thing, he guessed, the two dopers will not feel like charging in. They'll want him to go through with it, get the money that way. That was when he would split these guys, he knew.
"Okay," he said, stepping off the curb. "Don't f*ck me up."
He started to cross the street. Arson yelled after him, "BMW or better!"
As if I need to be told, Sharkey thought. He walked a half block toward La Brea and then leaned against the door of a closed print shop. He was still a half block from Hot Rod's, an adult bookstore that offered twenty-five-cent all-male peeps. But he was close enough to catch the eye of somebody walking out. If the eye was looking. He looked back the other way and saw the glow of the joint in the darkness of the driveway where Arson and Mojo sat on their bikes.
Sharkey hadn't been standing there ten minutes when a car, a new Grand Am, pulled to the curb and the electric window glided down. Sharkey was going to blow this one off, remembering BMW or better, until he saw the glint of gold and stepped closer. His adrenaline kicked up a notch. The wrist the driver had draped over the steering wheel was adorned with a Rolex Presidential. If it was real, Arson knew where they could get $3,000 for it. A grand apiece, not to mention what else the meat might have at home or in his wallet. Sharkey looked the man over. The guy looked like a straight, a businessman. Dark hair, dark suit. Mid-forties, not too big. Sharkey might even be able to take him alone. The man smiled at Sharkey and said, "Hey, howya doin'?"
"Not bad. What's up?"
"Oh, I don't know. Just out for a ride. You want to take a ride?"
"Where to?"
"No place special. I know a place we can go. Be alone."
"You got a hundred dollars on you?"
"No, but I've got fifty dollars for night baseball."
"Pitching or catching?"
"I'm a pitcher. And I brought my own glove."
Sharkey hesitated and glanced toward the driveway where he had seen the glow from the Kool. It was gone now. They must be ready to move. He looked back at the watch.
"That's cool," he said, and got in the car.
The car headed west past the alley driveway. Sharkey held himself from looking, but he thought he heard the revving and popping sound of their bikes. They were following.
"Where we going?" he asked.
"Uh, I can't go home with you, my friend. But I know a place we can go. Nobody will bother us."
"Cool."
They stopped at the light at Flores, which made Sharkey think of the guy from the other night. They were near his place. Arson was hitting harder, it seemed. This would have to stop soon or they would kill someone. He hoped the man with the Rolex would give it up peaceably. There was no telling what those two would do. Stoked on PCP, they would be ready for battle and blood.
Suddenly the car lurched through the intersection. Sharkey noticed the light was still red.
"What's going on?" he said sharply.
"Nothing. I'm tired of waiting, is all."
Sharkey thought there would be nothing suspicious about looking back now. He turned and saw only cars waiting back at the intersection. No motorbikes. Those bastards, he thought. He felt a dampness beginning on his scalp and the first tremblings of fear. The car turned right after Barnie's Beanery and up the hill to Sunset. Then they went east to Highland and the man with the Rolex steered north again.
"Have we been together before?" the man asked. "You seem familiar. I don't know, maybe we've just seen each other around."
"No, I've never—I don't think so."
"Look at me."
"What?" Sharkey said, startled by the question and the man's sharp tone. "Why?"
"Look at me. You know me? Have you seen me before?"
"What is this, a credit card commercial? I said no, man."
The man turned the car off the street into the east parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl. It was deserted. He drove quickly and without saying another word to the darkened north end. Sharkey thought, If this is your quiet little spot, then that ain't no real Rolex you got on your wrist, pal.
"Hey, what are we doing, man?" Sharkey said. He was thinking of a way to bail out of this. He was pretty sure Arson and Mojo, stoned as they were, were lost. He was alone with this guy and he wanted to scratch it.
"The bowl is closed," Rolex said. "But I got a key to the dressing rooms, see? We just take the tunnel under Cahuenga and then near where it comes up, there is a little walkway we take back around. There won't be anyone around. I work there. I know."
For a moment, Sharkey considered trying to take the guy alone, then decided he couldn't do it. Unless there was a way of taking him by surprise. He would see. The man turned the car engine off and opened his door. Sharkey opened his own door, got out and looked across the dark expanse of the empty parking lot. He was looking for the two lights of the motorbikes, but there weren't any. I'll take this guy out on the other side, he decided. He would make his move. Either hit and run, or just run.
They headed toward the sign that said Pedestrian Expressway. There was a concrete outbuilding with an open doorway and then stairs. As they walked down the whitewashed steps, the man with the Rolex put his hand on Sharkey's shoulder and then clamped it on the back of his neck in a fatherly manner. Sharkey could feel the cold metal of the watch's wristband.
The man said, "You sure we don't know each other, Sharkey? Maybe seen each other?"
"No, man, I'm telling you, I haven't been with you."
They were about halfway through the tunnel when Sharkey realized he hadn't told the man his name.