The Wrong Side of Goodbye

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch was not surprised.

  “Why?” he asked anyway.

  “Because you’ve got no case,” Valdez said. “You had an argument. That’s all Lopez heard. You say you were threatened. He can turn around and say you threatened him. It’s a pissing match. You’ve got no corroborating witness and no one at the D.A.’s Office will go anywhere near this.”

  Bosch assumed Lopez was the desk officer. It was good to know that Valdez had at least investigated the complaint Bosch had written before he released Creighton.

  “When did you kick him loose?” he asked.

  “He just walked out the door,” Valdez said. “And he wasn’t happy. Where the hell are you and why’d you leave?”

  “I’m working a case, Chief, and it doesn’t involve San Fernando. I had to keep moving.”

  “It involves us now. Cretin says he going to sue you and us.”

  It was good to hear Valdez use the name the rank and file had christened Creighton with. It told Bosch that the chief was ultimately in his corner. Bosch thought of Mitchell Maron, the mailman, who was threatening a lawsuit as well.

  “Yeah, well, tell him to get in line,” he said. “Chief, I gotta go.”

  “I don’t know what you are doing, but watch yourself out there,” Valdez said. “Guys like Cretin, they’re no good.”

  “I hear you,” Bosch said.

  The freeway opened wide when he finally crossed into San Diego County. By 2:30 he had parked underneath the section of the 5 that was elevated over Logan Barrio and was standing in Chicano Park.

  The Internet photos didn’t do the murals justice. In person the colors were vibrant and the images startling. The sheer number of them was staggering. Pillar after pillar, wall after wall of paintings greeted the eye from every angle. It took him fifteen minutes of wandering through to find the mural that listed the names of the original artists. The wreath of zinnias was now hiding even more of the lower mural—and the names of the artists. Bosch squatted down and used his hands to part the flowers and read the names.

  While many of the murals in the park looked like they had been repainted over the years to keep the colors and messages vibrant, the names behind the flowers had faded and were almost unreadable. Bosch took out his notebook. He was thinking that he might need to write down the names he could read and then hope those artists could be contacted and lead him to Gabriela. But then he saw the tops of letters from names that were below the soil line. He put down the notebook, reached in and started pulling back the dirt and uprooting the zinnias.

  The first name he uncovered was Lukas Ortiz. He moved right and continued his trenching, his hands getting dirty with the dark, moist soil. Soon he uncovered the name Gabriela. He excitedly picked up the pace and was just clearing the dirt from the last name Lida when a booming voice struck him from behind.

  “Cabrón!”

  Bosch startled, then turned and looked over his shoulder to see a man behind him with his arms stretched wide in the universal stance that says, What the fuck are you doing! He was wearing a green work uniform.

  Bosch jumped up.

  “Hey, sorry,” he said. “Lo siento.”

  He started wiping the dirt off his hands but both were caked with wet soil and it wasn’t going anywhere. The man in front of him was midfifties with graying hair and a thick, wide mustache to go with a thick, wide body. An oval patch over the pocket of his shirt said Javier. He wore sunglasses but they didn’t hide his angry stare at Bosch.

  “I wanted to see…” Bosch began.

  He turned and pointed down toward the bottom of the pillar.

  “Uh, los nombres?” he said. “Under—uh, debajo la tierra?”

  “I can speak English, fool. You’re fucking up my garden. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Sorry, I was looking for a name. An artist who was one of the originals here.”

  “There was a lot of them.”

  Javier walked past Bosch and squatted down where Bosch had been. He started using his own hands to carefully put the uprooted flowers back into place, handling each one far more gently than Bosch had.

  “Lukas Ortiz?” he asked.

  “No, the other,” Bosch said. “Gabriela Lida. Is she still around?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m a private invest—”

  “No, who wants to know?”

  Bosch understood.

  “If you can help me, I’d like to pay for the damage I did there.”

  “How much you pay?”

  It was time for Bosch to reach into his pocket for his money but his hands were dirty. He looked around and saw a tiled fountain that was part of the centerpiece of the park.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  He walked over and dipped his hands into the fountain’s pool and rubbed the dirt off. He then shook them and reached into his pocket. He checked his money fold and chose three of the four twenties he had. He went back to Javier. He hoped he wasn’t about to spend sixty bucks to be told Gabriela Lida was dead and in the ground like her name on the pillar.

  Javier shook his head when Bosch got back to him.

  “Now you fucked up my fountain,” he said. “The dirt gets in the filter and I gotta clean it.”

  “I’ve got sixty bucks,” Bosch said. “It covers everything. Where can I find Gabriela Lida?”

  He held the money out and Javier took it with a dirty hand.

  “She use to work here and was in charge of the collective,” he said. “But now she’s retired. Last I heard, she still lived in the Mercado.”

  “She lives in a market?” Bosch asked.

  “No, cabrón, the Mercado. It’s a housing complex, man. Over there on Newton.”

  “Her last name is still Lida?”

  “That’s right.”

  That’s all Bosch needed. He headed back to his car. Ten minutes later he parked in front of the main entrance of a sprawling complex of nicely kept low-income apartments in a neo-adobe style. He checked a residents’ listing in the entryway and soon afterward knocked on a freshly painted green door.

  Bosch was holding the cardboard folder from Flashpoint Graphix down by his side. He raised his other hand to knock again just as the door was pulled open by a statuesque woman who, by Bosch’s calculations, had to be at least seventy but looked younger. She had sharply defined cheekbones and startling dark eyes set against still-smooth brown skin. Her hair was long and silver. Polished turquoise hung from her ears.

  Bosch slowly lowered his hand. He had no doubt that this was the woman from the photo, all these years later.

  “Yes?” she said. “Are you lost?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bosch said. “Are you Gabriela Lida?”

  “Yes, I am. What is it you want?”

  Haller had told Bosch it would be his call to make when the moment arose. That moment was now and Bosch felt there was no need and no time to run a game with this woman.

  “My name’s Harry Bosch,” he said. “I’m an investigator down from L.A. and I’m looking for Dominick Santanello’s daughter.”

  The mention of the name seemed to sharpen her eyes. Bosch saw equal parts curiosity and concern.

  “My daughter doesn’t live here. How do you know she is Dominick’s daughter?”

  “Because I started with him and it brought me to you. Let me show you something.”

  He brought up the folder, took the elastic band off it, and opened it in front of her, holding it like a music stand so she could see the photos and page through them. He heard her breath catch in her throat as she reached forward and lifted the 8 x 10 of her holding the baby. Bosch saw tears start to show in her eyes.

  “Nick took these,” she whispered. “I never saw them.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “They were in his camera in an attic for many years,” he said. “What is your daughter’s name?”

  “We called her Vibiana,” Gabriela said. “It was the name he wanted.”

  “After his mother.
”

  Her eyes came up off the photo to his.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “If I could come in, there is a lot I need to tell you,” Bosch said.

  She hesitated for a moment, then stepped back and allowed him in.

  Bosch initially explained his presence by telling Gabriela that he had been hired by someone in Dominick Santanello’s family to see if he had fathered a child before he passed. She accepted that, and over the course of the next hour they sat in her small living room and Bosch heard the story of the short-lived love affair between Gabriela and Dominick.

  It was a different angle on the story that Halley Lewis from Tallahassee had told Bosch. Gabriela had met Dominick in a bar in Oceanside with the express purpose of awakening him to his cultural roots and pride. But those motives soon took a backseat to the passion that bloomed between them and they became a couple.

  “We made plans for after he came back and was discharged,” Gabriela said. “He wanted to be a photographer. We were going to do a project together, on the border. He was going to shoot it; I was going to paint it.”

  She said that she found out she was pregnant when he was near the end of his training at Pendleton and was waiting to receive orders to Vietnam. It was a heart-wrenching time and he repeatedly offered to desert the Navy to stay with her. Each time she talked him out of it, an effort that later brought a crushing guilt down on her after she learned he was killed overseas.

  She confirmed that Dominick had snuck back into the country twice while on leaves from Vietnam. The first time he attended the dedication of Chicano Park and the second time it was to see his newborn daughter. The family spent the only four days they’d ever have together at the del Coronado. She said the photograph that Bosch showed her was taken after an impromptu “marriage” on the beach officiated by an artist friend who was ordained in a cult-like Mexican religion called brujeria.

  “It was in fun,” she said. “We thought we would get the chance to get married for real when he came back at the end of the year.”

  Bosch asked why Gabriela never reached out to Dominick’s family after his death and she explained that she had feared his parents might try to take the baby from her.

  “I lived in a barrio,” she said. “I had no money. I was worried that they could win in court and take Vibiana from me. That would have killed me.”

  Bosch did not mention how closely Gabriela’s feelings mirrored the plight of her daughter’s grandmother and namesake. But her answer served as a segue to questions about Vibiana and where she was. Gabriela revealed that she lived in Los Angeles and was an artist as well. She was a sculptress living and working in the Arts District downtown. She had been married once but now was not. The kicker was that she was raising a nine-year-old boy from that marriage. His name was Gilberto Veracruz.

  Bosch realized he had found another heir. Whitney Vance had a great-grandson he never knew about.

  27

  The San Diego County Bureau of Vital Records and Statistics was open until 5 p.m. Bosch walked hurriedly through the door at 4:35 and luckily found no one in line at the window marked Birth Certificates, Death Certificates, Changes of Name. He had only a single document to request and getting it now would save him from having to stay in San Diego overnight.

  Bosch left the Mercado Apartments convinced that Vibiana and Gilberto Veracruz were direct descendants of Whitney Vance. If that could be proved, they were in line to inherit the Vance fortune. Genetic analysis would of course be the key but Bosch also wanted to gather legal documentation that would go hand in hand with the science and be part of a judge-convincing package. Gabriela had told him that she put Dominick’s name down on her daughter’s birth certificate. Details like that would make the package complete.

  At the window Bosch provided the name Vibiana Santanello and the date she was born, and requested a certified copy of her birth certificate. While he waited for the clerk to find and print it, he considered some of the other revelations and confirmations that came out of his conversation with Gabriela.

  Bosch had asked her how she had learned of Santanello’s death in Vietnam and she said she knew in her heart that he had been killed when a week went by and she did not receive a letter from him. He had never gone that long without writing her. Her intuition was sadly confirmed when later she saw a story in the newspaper about how the shooting down of a single helicopter in Vietnam had hit Southern California particularly hard. All the Marines on the chopper had California hometowns and had previously been stationed at El Toro Marine Air Base in Orange County. The lone corpsman who was killed had trained at Camp Pendleton in San Diego after being raised in Oxnard.

  Gabriela also told Bosch that Dominick’s face was on one of the murals at the park. She had put it there many years before. It was on the mural called the Face of Heroes—several depictions of men and women forming one face. Bosch remembered seeing the mural as he had walked through the park earlier that day.

  “Here you are, sir,” the clerk said to Bosch. “You pay at the window to your left.”

  Bosch took the document from the clerk and proceeded to the cash window. He studied it as he walked and saw the name Dominick Santanello listed as father. He realized how close he was to finishing the journey Whitney Vance had sent him on. He was disappointed that the old man would not be on hand at the finish line.

  He was soon back on the 5 and heading north. He had told Gabriela that it was in her best interests to reveal nothing about her conversation with Bosch to anyone else. They had not immediately reached out to Vibiana because Gabriela said her daughter led a life devoid of the trappings of digital technology. She had no cell phone and rarely answered the phone in the studio-loft where she lived and worked.

  Bosch planned to be at Vibiana’s studio the next morning. Meanwhile, on the brutal rush-hour drive back up to L.A. he spoke at length on his cell to Mickey Haller, who said he had made some subtle inquiries of his own.

  “Pasadena did sign off on it as a natural but there will be an autopsy,” he said. “I think Kapoor wants the headlines so he’s going to milk cause of death for all it’s worth.”

  Bhavin Kapoor was the embattled chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. In recent months he had come under fire for mismanagement and delays in processing autopsies at the office that handled more than eight thousand of them a year. Law enforcement agencies and loved ones of murder and accident victims complained that some autopsies were taking months to complete, delaying investigations, funerals, and closure. The media piled on further when it was revealed that some bodies got mixed up in the Big Crypt, a giant refrigerated storage center that held over a hundred cadavers. Toe tags blown off by the giant turbine fans that kept things cold had been reattached to the wrong toes.

  Looking for headlines that didn’t involve scandal, Kapoor had evidently decided to proceed with an autopsy on Whitney Vance’s body so that he could hold a press conference that was about something other than his handling of his duties and department.

  “You watch, though,” Haller said. “Some smart reporter will turn this against him by pointing out that the billionaire didn’t have to wait in line for an autopsy while every other body does. Even in death the rich get treated special—that’ll be the headline.”

  Bosch knew the observation was dead-on accurate and was surprised that Kapoor’s advisers, if he had any, had not warned him.

  Haller asked what Bosch had found in San Diego and Harry reported that there might be two blood descendants in play. He recounted his conversation with Gabriela and told Haller that it might soon be time for DNA analysis. He outlined what he had: A sealed sample from Vance, though he did not witness the old man being swabbed. Several items that belonged to Dominick Santanello, including a razor that might have his blood on it. A swab sample he had taken from Gabriela Lida in case it was needed. And he planned to swab Vibiana when he met her the following day. For the moment he planned to leave Vibiana’s son—Vance’s presumed
great-grandson—out of it.

  “The only thing that’s going to matter is Vibiana’s DNA,” Haller said. “We will need to show the hereditary chain, which I think you have in hand. But it’s going to come down to her DNA and whether they match it to Vance’s as direct descendant.”

  “We need to do it as a blind, right?” Bosch said. “Not tell them the swab is from Vance. Just give them the swab from Vibiana. Then see what they say.”

  “Agreed. Last thing we want is for them to know whose DNA they have. I will work on that and set something up in one of the labs I gave you. Whichever one will do it the fastest. Then when you get the blood from Vibiana, we go in.”

  “I’m hoping that will be tomorrow.”

  “That’ll be good. What did you do with the swab from Vance?”

  “My refrigerator.”

  “Not sure that’s the safest place. And I don’t think refrigeration is required.”

  “It’s not. I just hid it in there.”

  “I like the idea of keeping it separate from the will and the pen. Don’t want everything in the same place. I’m just concerned with it being in your house. It’s probably the first place they’ll look.”

  “There you go with that ‘they’ thing again.”

  “I know. But it is what it is. Maybe you should think of another place.”

  Bosch told Haller about his run-in with Creighton and Harry’s suspicion that there might be camera surveillance on his house.

  “I’ll check it out tomorrow morning first thing,” he said. “It will be dark by the time I get there tonight. The point is, there was nobody out there this morning when I left. I checked my car for a GPS tag and yet somehow Creighton’s following me up Laurel Canyon Boulevard.”

  “Maybe it was a fucking drone,” Haller said. “They’re being used all over the place now.”

  “I’ll have to remember to start looking up. You too. Creighton said they knew you were on the case, too.”

  “Not a surprise.”

  Bosch could see the lights of downtown now through the wind-shield. He was finally getting close to home and he could feel the exhaustion from the day on the road settling on his body. He was bone tired and wanted to rest. He decided that he would skip dinner in favor of extra sleep time.