Angels Flight

by Michael Connelly

Normally, when Bosch told his partners he was going out back it meant he was going outside the building to have a smoke. As he walked toward the rear doorway, Rider called after him.

  ‘Harry, don’t do it.’

  He waved without turning back.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not.’

  Out in the lot Bosch stood and looked around. He knew he had done some of his best analytical thinking while standing outside smoking. He hoped he could put something together now, without the aid of a smoke. He looked into the sand jar that the station’s smokers used and saw a half-smoked cigarette protruding from the sand. There was lipstick on it. He decided he wasn’t that desperate yet.

  He thought about the mystery notes. He knew because of postmarks and the markings made on the notes by Elias that they had numbers two, three and four, but not the first note. The meaning of the fourth note—the warning Elias was carrying with him—was obvious. The third note they now had a line on, thanks to the subpoena return Edgar had come across. But the second note — Dot the i humbert humbert — still made no sense to Bosch.

  He looked at the cigarette protruding from the sand again but once more dismissed it. He remembered he carried no matches or lighter anyway.

  It suddenly occurred to him that the one other piece of the puzzle that seemed to stand out as making no sense, at least so far, was the Mistress Regina connection—whatever that was.

  Bosch turned and quickly headed back into the station. Edgar and Rider had their heads down and into the paperwork when he came to the table. Bosch immediately began looking through the stacks of files.

  ‘Who has the Mistress Regina file?’

  ‘Over here,’ Edgar said.

  He handed over the file and Bosch opened it and took out the photo printout of the dominatrix. He then put it down next to one of the mystery notes and tried to make a comparison between the printing on the note and the printing below the photo—the web page address. It was impossible for him to determine if the same hand had printed both lines. He was no expert and there were no obvious anomalies in the printing to make a comparison easy.

  When Bosch took his hand off the printout, its top and bottom edges rose an inch off the desk, telling him that at one time the page had been folded top and bottom, as if to be placed in an envelope.

  ‘I think this is the first note,’ he said.

  Bosch had often found that when he made a logic breakthrough it was like clearing a clog in a drain. The pipe was open and other breaks soon came. It happened now. He saw what he could have and maybe should have seen all along.

  ‘Jerry, call Elias’s secretary. Right now. Ask her if he had a color printer in the office. We should have seen this—I should have seen it.’

  ‘Seen what?’

  ‘Just make the call.’

  Edgar started looking through a notebook for a phone number. Rider got up from her spot and came around next to Bosch. She looked down at the printout. She was now riding on Bosch’s wave. She saw where he was going.

  ‘This was the first one,’ Bosch said. ‘Only he didn’t keep the envelope because he probably thought it was crank mail.’

  ‘But it probably was,’ Edgar said, the phone to his ear. ‘We were there, the woman didn’t know the man and didn’t know what the hell we — ’

  He stopped and listened when his line was picked up.

  ‘Mrs Quimby? It is Detective Edgar from yesterday?

  I have one quick question for you. Do you know if there was a color printer in the office? A printer that could print out stuff from one of the computers. In color.’

  He waited and listened, his eyes on Bosch and Rider.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Quimby.’

  He hung up.

  ‘No color printer.’

  Bosch nodded and looked down at the printout of Mistress Regina.

  ‘We should have picked up on this yesterday,’ Rider said.

  Bosch nodded and started to ask Edgar if he had contacted Pelfry, the private investigator, when his pager went off. He cut it off and pulled it off his belt. It was his home number. Eleanor.

  ‘Yeah, I talked to him,’ Edgar said. ‘He’ll meet us at noon at his office. I didn’t mention anything about receipts or this Regina. I just said we needed to talk.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Bosch picked up his phone and punched in his home number. Eleanor answered after three rings. She sounded either sleepy or sad.

  ‘Eleanor.’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  He slid back into his seat and Rider went back to hers.

  ‘I’m fine ... I just ...’

  ‘When did you get in?’

  ‘A little while ago.’

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘I didn’t really play. After you called me there last night ... I left.’

  Bosch leaned forward and put an elbow on the table, a hand against his forehead.

  ‘Well ... where’d you go?’

  ‘A hotel ... Harry, I just came back for some clothes and things. I ...’

  ‘Eleanor?’

  There was a long silence on the phone. Bosch heard Edgar say he was going to get some coffee in the watch office. Rider said she’d go along, even though Bosch knew she didn’t drink coffee. She had an assortment of herbal teas she kept in the drawer of her desk.

  ‘Harry, it’s not right,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘What are you talking about, Eleanor?’

  Another long moment of silence went by before she answered.

  ‘I was thinking about that movie we saw last year. About the Titanic.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And the girl in that. She fell in love with that boy, that she only met right there on the boat. And it was ... I mean, she loved him so much. So much that at the end she wouldn’t leave. She didn’t take the lifeboat so she would be with him.’

  ‘I remember, Eleanor.’

  He remembered her crying in the seat next to him and his smiling and not being able to understand how a film would affect her in such a way.

  ‘You cried.’

  ‘Yes. It’s because everybody wants that kind of love. And, Harry, you deserve that from me. I — ’

  ‘No, Eleanor, what you give me is more than — ’

  ‘She jumped from a lifeboat back onto the Titanic, Harry.’ She laughed a little bit. But it sounded sad to Bosch. ‘I guess nobody can ever top that.’

  ‘You’re right. Nobody can. That’s why it was a movie. Listen ... you are all I’ve ever wanted, Eleanor. You don’t have to do anything for me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I do ... I love you, Harry. But not enough. You deserve better.’

  ‘Eleanor, no ... please. I ...’

  ‘I’m going to go away for a while. Think about things.’

  ‘Will you wait there? I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. We can talk about — ’

  ‘No, no. That’s why I paged. I can’t do this in person.’

  He could tell she was crying.

  ‘Well, I’m coming up there.’

  ‘I won’t be here,’ she said urgently. ‘I packed the car before I paged you. I knew you’d try to come.’

  Bosch put his hand over his eyes. He wanted to be in darkness.

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Will you call?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll call.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m ... I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Eleanor, I love you. I know I never said that enough but I — ’

  She made a shushing sound in the phone and he stopped.

  ‘I love you, Harry, but I have to do this.’

  After a long moment, during which he felt a deep tearing inside, he said, ‘Okay, Eleanor.’

  The silence that followed was as dark as the inside of a coffin. His coffin.

  ‘Good-bye, Harry,’ she finally said. ‘I’ll see you.’

  She hung up. Bosch took his hand away from h
is face and the phone from his ear. In his mind he saw a swimming pool, its surface as smooth as a blanket on a bed. He remembered a time long before when he had been told his mother was dead and that he was alone in the world. He ran to that pool and dove beneath the calm surface, into its warm water. At the bottom, he screamed until his air was gone and his chest ached. Until he had to choose between staying there and dying, or going up and life.

  Bosch now longed for that pool and its warm water. He wanted to scream until his lungs burst inside him.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  He looked up. It was Rider and Edgar. Edgar carried a steaming cup of coffee. Rider had a look that said she was concerned or maybe even scared by the look she was seeing on Bosch’s face.

  ‘Everything’s cool,’ Bosch said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  23

  They had ninety minutes to kill before the meeting with Pelfry. Bosch told Edgar to drive over to Hollywood Wax and Shine, on Sunset not far from the station. Edgar pulled to the curb and they sat there watching. Business was slow. Most of the men in orange coveralls who dried and polished the cars for minimum wage and tips were sitting around, drying rags draped over their shoulders, waiting. Most of them stared balefully at the slickback as if the police were to blame.

  ‘I guess people aren’t that interested in having their cars washed when they might end up turned over or torched,’ Edgar said.

  Bosch didn’t answer.

  ‘Bet they all wish they were in Michael Harris’s shoes,’ Edgar continued, staring back at the workers. ‘Hell, I’d trade three days in an interview room and pencils in my ears to be a millionaire.’

  ‘So then you believe him,’ Bosch said.

  Bosch hadn’t told him about Frankie Sheehan’s barroom confession. Edgar was quiet a moment and then nodded.

  ‘Yeah, Harry, I guess I sort of do.’

  Bosch wondered how he had been so blind as to not even have considered that the torturing of a suspect could be true. He wondered what it was about Edgar that made him accepting of the suspect’s story over the cops’. Was it his experience as a cop or as a black man? Bosch assumed it had to be the latter and it depressed him because it gave Edgar an edge he could never have.

  ‘I’m gonna go in, talk to the manager,’ Bosch said. ‘Maybe you should stay with the car.’

  ‘Fuck that. They won’t touch it.’

  They got out and locked the car.

  As they walked toward the store Bosch thought about the orange coveralls and wondered if it was coincidence. He guessed that most of the men working at the car wash were ex-cons or fresh out of county lockup — institutions in which they also had to wear orange coveralls.

  Inside the store Bosch bought a cup of coffee and asked for the manager. The cashier pointed down a hallway to an open door. On the way down the hall, Edgar said, ‘I feel like a Coke but I don’t think I can drink a Coke after what I saw last night in that bitch’s closet.’

  A man was sitting at a desk in the small, windowless office with his feet up on one of the open drawers. He looked up at Bosch and Edgar and said, ‘Yes, Officers, what can I do for you?’

  Bosch smiled at the man’s deduction. He knew he had to be part businessman, part parole officer. Most of the polishers were ex-cons. It was the only job they could get. That meant the manager had seen his share of cops and knew how to pick them out. Either that or he saw them pull up in the slickback.

  ‘We’re working a case,’ Bosch began. ‘The Howard Elias case.’

  The manager whistled.

  ‘A few weeks ago he subpoenaed some of your records. Receipts with license plate numbers on them. You know anything about that?’

  The manager thought about it for a few moments.

  ‘All I know is that I was the one who had to go through everything and get it copied for his guy.’

  ‘His guy?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Yeah, what do you think, a guy like Elias comes get the stuff himself? He sent somebody. I got his card here.’

  He lowered his feet to the floor and opened the desk’s pencil drawer. There was a stack of business cards with a rubber band around it. He took it off and looked through the cards and chose one. He showed it to Bosch.

  ‘Pelfry?’ Edgar asked.

  Bosch nodded.

  ‘Did his guy say exactly what they were looking for in all that stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. Or, I mean, ask Pelfry.’

  ‘Did Pelfry come back with the stuff yet?’

  ‘No, it was copies, anyway. I mean, he came back but not to bring back the receipts.’

  ‘Then why’d he come back?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘He wanted to see one of Michael Harris’s old time cards. From when he worked here.’

  ‘Which one?’ Edgar asked, a tone of urgency in his voice.

  ‘I don’t remember, man. I gave him a copy. You go talk to him and maybe he — ’

  ‘Did he have a subpoena for the time card?’ Bosch asked.

  ‘No, he just asked for it, you know. I said sure and got it for him. But he gave me the date and you didn’t. I don’t remember it. Anyway, look, if you want to ask more about this then maybe you better call our lawyer. I’m not going to get involved in talking about stuff I don’t — ’

  ‘Never mind that stuff,’ Bosch said. ‘Tell me about Michael Harris.’

  ‘What’s to tell? I never had a problem with the guy. He was okay, then they came in and said he killed that little girl. And did things to her. It didn’t seem like the guy I knew. But he hadn’t been working here that long. Maybe five months.’

  ‘Know where he was before that?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Yeah. Up at Corcoran.’

  Corcoran was a state prison near Bakersfield. Bosch thanked the manager and they left. He took a few sips of his coffee but dumped it in a trash can before getting back to the car.

  While Bosch waited at the passenger door for it to be unlocked, Edgar went around to his side. He stopped before opening the door.

  ‘Goddammit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They wrote shit on the door.’

  Bosch came around and looked. Someone had used light blue chalk—the chalk used to write washing instructions on the windshields of clients’ cars—to cross out the words To protect and serve on the driver’s side front fender. Then written in large letters were the words To murder and maim. Bosch nodded his approval.

  ‘That’s pretty original.’

  ‘Harry, let’s go kick some ass.’

  ‘No, Jerry, let it go. You don’t want to start something. It might take three days to end it. Like last time. Like Florence and Normandie.’

  Edgar sullenly unlocked the car and then opened Bosch’s door.

  ‘We’re right by the station,’ Bosch said after he got in. ‘We can go back and spray it off. Or we can use my car.’

  ‘I’d like to use one of those assholes’ faces to clean it off.’

  After they had the car cleaned up there was still time for them to drive by the lot where Stacey Kincaid’s body had been found. It was off Western and was on the way downtown, where they would go to meet Pelfry.

  Edgar was silent the whole way there. He had taken the vandalism of the patrol car personally. Bosch didn’t mind the silence, though. He used the time to think about Eleanor. He felt guilty because deep down and despite his love for her, he knew that he was feeling a growing relief that their relationship was coming to a head, one way or the other.

  ‘This is it,’ Edgar said.

  He pulled the car to the curb and they scanned the lot. It was about an acre and bordered on both sides by apartment buildings with banners announcing move-in bonuses and financing. They didn’t look like places where people would want to live unless they had no choice. The whole neighborhood had a rundown and desperate feel.

  Bosch noticed two old black men sitting on crates in the corner of the lot, under a sprawling and shade-giving eucalyptus tre
e. He opened the file he’d brought with him and studied the map that charted the location of the body. He estimated that it was less than fifty feet from where the two men were now sitting. He turned pages in the file until he found the incident report which named the two witnesses who reported finding the body.

  ‘I’m getting out,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go talk to those guys.’

  He got out and Edgar did, too. They crossed the lot nonchalantly and approached the two men. As they got closer, Bosch saw sleeping bags and an old Coleman camp stove. Parked against the trunk of the eucalyptus were two supermarket carts filled with clothing, bags of aluminum cans and assorted junk.

  ‘Are you men Rufus Gundy and Andy Mercer?’

  ‘Depends on who’s doin’ the askin’.’

  Bosch showed his badge.

  ‘I wanted to ask a few questions about the body you guys found here last year.’

  ‘Yeah, what took you so long?’

  ‘Are you Mr Gundy or Mr Mercer?’

  ‘I’m Mercer.’

  Bosch nodded.

  ‘Why do you say we took so long? Weren’t you interviewed by detectives when you found the body?’

  ‘We was interviewed, but not by no detectives. Some wet-eared patrol boy akst us what we knew.’

  Bosch nodded. He pointed to the sleeping bags and the camp stove.

  ‘You guys live here?’

  ‘We runnin’ a piece of bad luck. We just stayin’ till we on our feet again.’

  Bosch knew there was nothing in the incident report about the two men living on the lot. The report said they were passing through the lot, looking for cans, when they came across her body. He thought about this and realized what had happened.

  ‘You were living here then, weren’t you?’

  Neither of them answered.

  ‘You didn’t tell the cops that because you thought you might get run off.’

  Still no reply.

  ‘So you hid your sleeping bags and your stove and called it in. You told that patrol officer that you were just passing through.’

  Finally, Mercer spoke.

  ‘Ifn you’re so smart, how come you ain’t chief yet?’

  Bosch laughed.

  ‘Because they’re smart enough not to make me chief. So, tell me something, Mr Mercer and Mr Gundy. If you two were sleepin’ here during nights back then, you probably would’ve found that body a lot sooner if it had been here the whole time she was missing, right?’