The Wrong Side of Goodbye

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch purposely looked at Poydras when he next spoke.

  “He hired me,” Bosch said. “He paid me ten grand to find someone for him.”

  “Who?” Franks asked.

  “You know I can keep that confidential,” Bosch said. “Even with Vance dead.”

  “And we can throw your ass in jail for withholding information in a homicide investigation,” Franks said. “You know you’ll beat it, but how long will that take? A day or two in the clink? That what you want?”

  Bosch looked from Franks to Poydras.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I only want to talk to you, Poydras. Tell your partner to go sit in the car. You do that and I’ll talk to you, answer any question. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Franks said.

  “Then you’re not getting what you came here to get,” Bosch said.

  “Danny,” Poydras said.

  His head tilted toward the door.

  “You’re shitting me,” Franks said.

  “Just go have a smoke,” Poydras said. “Cool off.”

  Franks got up with a huff. He made a show of flipping closed his notebook, then grabbed the binder.

  “You better leave that,” Bosch said. “In case I can point out things at the crime scene.”

  Franks looked at Poydras, who gave a slight nod. Franks dropped the binder on the table like it was radioactive. He then left through the front door and made sure to slam it behind him.

  Bosch turned his head from the door to Poydras. “If that was all a good-cop-bad-cop act, you guys are the best I’ve ever seen,” Bosch said.

  “I wish,” Poydras said. “But no act. He’s just a hothead.”

  “With a six handicap, right?”

  “Eighteen, actually. Which is one reason he’s pissed off all the time. But let’s stay on subject now that it’s just us two talking here. Who did Vance hire you to look for?”

  Bosch paused. He knew he was on the proverbial slippery slope. Anything he told the police could get out into the world before he wanted it to. But Vance’s murder changed the landscape of things and he decided it was time to give in order to get—with limitations on the give.

  “He wanted to know if he had an heir,” he finally said. “He told me he got a girl pregnant at USC back in 1950. Under family pressure he more or less abandoned her. He felt guilty all his life about it and now wanted to know if she had the baby and whether he had an heir. He told me it was time to balance the books. If it turned out that he was a father, then he said he wanted to set things right before he died.”

  “And did you find an heir?”

  “This is where we trade. You ask a question, I ask a question.”

  He waited and Poydras did the smart thing. “Ask your question.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “It doesn’t leave this room.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “We think he was smothered with a pillow off his office couch. He was found slumped at his desk and it looked like a natural. Old man collapses at his desk. Seen it a hundred times before. Only Kapoor at the Coroner’s Office takes the opportunity to grandstand for the media and says there will be an autopsy. He does the cut himself and finds petechial hemorrhaging. Very slight, nothing on the face. Just conjunctival petechiae.”

  Poydras pointed to the corner of his left eye to illustrate. Bosch had seen it in many cases. Cutting off oxygen explodes the capillaries. The level of the struggle and the health of the victim were variables that helped define the extent of the hemorrhaging.

  “How’d you keep Kapoor from holding a press conference?” Bosch asked. “He needs every bit of positive spin he can get. Discovering a murder written off as a natural is a nice story for him. Makes him look good.”

  “We made a deal,” Poydras said. “He keeps it quiet and lets us work and we cut him in on the press conference when we break it open. We make him look like the hero.”

  Bosch nodded approvingly. He would have done the same thing.

  “So the case gets kicked over to me and Franks,” Poydras said. “Believe it or not, we’re the A team. We go back out to the house. We don’t say anything about it being a homicide. Just that we’re quality control, doing a follow-up investigation, crossing all the t’s and dotting the i’s. We take a few pictures and make a few measurements to make it look good, and we check the pillows on the couch and find what looks like dried saliva on a pillow. We sample it, get a DNA match to Vance, and now we have the means of murder. Somebody took the pillow, came around behind him in his chair at the desk, and held it over his face.”

  “An old guy like that, not much of a struggle,” Bosch said.

  “Which explains the lack of obvious hemorrhaging. Poor guy went out like a kitten.”

  Bosch almost smiled at Poydras calling Vance poor.

  “Still,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like something planned in advance, does it?”

  Poydras didn’t answer.

  “It’s my turn,” he said instead. “Did you find an heir?”

  “I did,” Bosch said. “The girl at USC had the baby—a boy— then gave him up for adoption. I traced the adoption and identified the kid. Only thing is, he went down in a helicopter in Vietnam a month before he turned twenty years old.”

  “Shit. Did you tell Vance that?”

  “Never got the chance. Who had access to his office on Sunday?”

  “Security people mostly, a chef and a butler type. A nurse came in to give him a course of prescriptions. We’re checking them all out. He called his secretary in to write some letters for him. She’s the one who found him when she got there. Who else knew what you were hired to do?”

  Bosch understood what Poydras was thinking. Vance was looking for an heir. Somebody who stood to benefit from his death if there was no apparent heir might have stepped in to hasten things along. On the other hand, an heir might also be motivated to hasten the inheritance. Lucky for Vibiana Veracruz, she was not identified as a likely inheritor until after Vance was dead. That was a pretty solid alibi in Bosch’s book.

  “According to Vance, no one,” Bosch said. “We met alone and he said no one was to know what I was doing. A day after I started the job, his security guy came to my house to try to see what I was up to. He acted as though he had been sent by Vance. I shined him on.”

  “David Sloan?” Poydras asked.

  “I never got the first name but, yeah, Sloan. He’s with Trident.”

  “No, he’s not with Trident. He was with Vance for years. When they brought in Trident he stayed on as the guy in charge of Vance’s personal security and to liaison with Trident. He personally came to your house?”

  “Yeah, knocked on the door, said Vance sent him to check on my progress. But Vance told me to talk to no one except the old man himself. So I didn’t.”

  Bosch next showed Poydras the card with the phone number Vance had given him. He told the detective that he had called a couple times and left messages. And how Sloan had answered when Bosch called the number after Vance was dead. Poydras just nodded, taking the information in, and fitting it with other case facts. He gave no indication if they had the secret phone and its call records. Without asking if he could keep the card, Poydras put it in his shirt pocket.

  Bosch too was fitting things Poydras had given up with the facts he knew. So far Bosch felt he had gotten more than he had given. And something bothered him about the new information when it was filtered through the sieve of his existing case knowledge. Something rubbed. He could not quite place what it was but it was there and it was worrisome.

  “You looking at the corporate side of this?” he asked, just to keep the conversation going while he was grinding on the rub.

  “I told you, we’re looking at everybody,” Poydras said. “Some people on the board had been questioning Vance’s competence and trying to oust him for years. But he always managed to carry the votes. So there was no love lost with some of them.
That group was led by a guy named Joshua Butler, who will probably become chairman now. It’s always a question of who gains and who gains the most. We’re talking to him.”

  Meaning they were looking at him as a possible suspect. Not that Butler would have done anything personally, but whether he was the kind of guy who could get it done.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time boardroom animosity leads to murder,” Bosch said.

  “Nope,” Poydras said.

  “What about the will? I heard they opened probate today.” Bosch hoped he had slid the question in casually, as a natural extension of the question regarding corporate motivation.

  “They opened probate with a will filed with the corporate attorney back in ’92,” Poydras said. “It was the latest will on record. Vance apparently had his first bout with cancer then, so he had the corporate lawyer create a last will and testament to make the transition of power clear. Everything goes into the corporation. There was an amendment—I think codicil is the word—filed a year later that covers the possibility of an heir. But with no heir, it all goes to the corporation and is controlled by the board. That includes setting compensation and bonus payouts. There are now eighteen people remaining on the board and they’re going to control about six billion bucks. You know what that means, Bosch?”

  “Eighteen suspects,” Bosch said.

  “Correct. And all eighteen of them are well heeled and insulated. They can hide behind lawyers, behind walls, you name it.”

  Bosch wanted to know exactly what the codicil regarding an heir said but thought that if he got more targeted with his questioning, Poydras would start to suspect that his search for an heir didn’t end in Vietnam. He thought Haller would at some point be able to procure a copy of the 1992 will and get the same information.

  “Was Ida Forsythe at San Rafael when you went there to visit Vance?” Poydras asked.

  It was a turn in direction away from the idea of corporate murder. Bosch understood that a good interviewer never follows a straight line.

  “Yes,” he said. “She wasn’t in the room when we talked but she led me back to the office.”

  “Interesting woman,” Poydras said. “She’d been with him longer than Sloan.”

  Bosch just nodded.

  “So have you talked to her since that day at San Rafael?” Poydras asked.

  Bosch paused as he considered the question. Every good interviewer sets up a trapdoor. He thought of Ida Forsythe saying she was being watched and about Poydras and Franks showing up on the day he visited her at her home.

  “You know the answer to that,” he said. “Either you or your people saw me at her house today.”

  Poydras nodded and hid a smile. Bosch had passed the trapdoor test.

  “Yeah, we saw you,” he said. “And we were wondering what that was about.”

  Bosch shrugged to buy time. He knew that they might have knocked on Forsythe’s door ten minutes after he left and that she could have told them what he had said about the will. But he guessed that if that were the case, Poydras would be coming at the interview from a different angle.

  “It was just about me thinking she was a nice old lady,” he said. “She lost her longtime boss and I wanted to pay my respects. I also wanted to know what she knew about what happened.”

  Poydras paused as he decided whether Bosch was lying.

  “You sure that’s all it was?” he pressed. “When you were standing at the door she didn’t look too happy to see you.”

  “Because she thought she was being watched,” Bosch said. “And she was right.”

  “Like I said, everybody’s a suspect until they’re not. She found the victim. That puts her on the list. Even though the only thing she gets out of it is being unemployed.”

  Bosch nodded. He knew at that moment that he was withholding a big piece of information from Poydras—the will he had received in the mail. But things were coming together in Bosch’s mind and he wanted time to think before giving up the big reveal. He changed the subject.

  “Did you read the letters?” Bosch said.

  “What letters?” Poydras asked.

  “You said Ida Forsythe was called in to write letters for Vance on Sunday.”

  “They never actually got written. She came in and found him dead at the desk. But apparently every Sunday afternoon, when Vance was feeling up to it, she came in and wrote letters for him.”

  “What kind of letters? Business? Personal?”

  “I got the idea it was personal stuff. He was old-fashioned, liked to send letters instead of e-mails. Kind of nice actually. He had the stationery out on the desk, ready to go.”

  “So these were handwritten letters she was coming in to write for him?”

  “I didn’t ask specifically. But the stationery and his fancy pen were there and ready to go. I think that was the plan. Where are you going with this, Bosch?”

  “You said a fancy pen?”

  Poydras looked at him for a long moment.

  “Yeah, you didn’t see it? Solid gold pen in a holder on his desk.”

  Bosch reached over and tapped a finger on the black binder.

  “You got a photo in there?” he asked.

  “I might,” Poydras said. “What’s so special about the pen?”

  “I want to see if it’s the one he showed me. He told me it was made of gold that his great-grandfather prospected.”

  Poydras opened the binder and flipped through to a section of clear plastic sleeves containing 8 x 10 color photos of the Vance death scene. He kept flipping pages until he found a shot he deemed appropriate and then turned the book around to show Bosch. In the photo Whitney Vance’s body was on the floor next to his desk and his wheelchair. His shirt was open, his ivory chest exposed, and it was clear the photo was taken after unsuccessful efforts had been made to revive him.

  “Right here,” Poydras said.

  He tapped the top left side of the photo where the desk was in the background. On the desk was a sheaf of pale yellow stationery that matched the stationery Bosch had received in the package from Vance. And there was a gold pen in a holder that looked like the pen that had also been in the package.

  Bosch leaned back and away from the binder. The pen being in the photo did not make sense because it had been sent to him before the photo was taken.

  “What is it, Bosch?” Poydras asked.

  Bosch tried to cover.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just seeing the old guy dead like that…and the empty chair.”

  Poydras turned the binder to look at the photo himself.

  “They had a house medical officer,” he said. “I use that term loosely. On Sundays it was a security guard with EMT training. He conducted CPR but got no response.”

  Bosch nodded and tried to act composed.

  “You said you went back after the autopsy and took more photos and measurements as cover,” he said. “Where are those photos? You put them in the book?”

  Bosch reached toward the murder book but Poydras pulled it back.

  “Hold your horses,” he said. “They’re in the back. Everything’s chronological.”

  He flipped further into the binder and came to a new set of photos of the office, at almost the same angle, but with no body of Whitney Vance on the floor. Bosch told Poydras to hold on the second photo he turned to. It showed the full top of the desk. The pen holder was there but not the pen.

  Bosch pointed it out.

  “The pen’s gone,” he said.

  Poydras turned the binder so he could see it better. Then he flipped back to the first photo to make sure.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “Where’d it go?” Bosch asked.

  “Who knows? We didn’t take it. We didn’t seal the office, either, after the body was removed. Maybe your pal Ida knows what happened to the pen.”

  Bosch didn’t say how close he thought Poydras was to the truth with that suggestion. He reached over and pulled the binder across the table so he coul
d look at the photo of the death scene again.

  The appearance and disappearance of the pen was the anomaly, but it was the empty wheelchair that held Bosch’s eyes and told him what he had been missing all along.

  41

  The next morning Bosch was sitting in his car on Arroyo Drive by nine thirty. He had already called and talked at length to Mickey Haller. He had already been to the evidence lockup at the San Fernando Police Department. And he had already been to Starbucks, where he happened to notice that Beatriz Sahagun was back at work behind the brewer as a barista.

  He now sat and watched Ida Townes Forsythe’s home and waited. He saw no activity at the house and no indication as to whether she was home. The garage was closed and the place was still, and Bosch wondered if she would be there when they knocked. He kept his eyes on the mirrors and saw no indications of police surveillance in the neighborhood either.

  At nine forty-five Bosch saw Mickey Haller’s Town Car enter his rearview mirror. He was behind the wheel. He had told Bosch earlier that he had parted ways with Boyd and no longer had a driver.

  This time Haller got out of his car and came up to sit in Bosch’s. He carried his own cup of coffee with him.

  “That was quick,” Bosch said. “You just breezed into the courthouse and they let you look at the probate file?”

  “Actually, I breezed in on the Internet,” Haller said. “All case filings are updated online within twenty-four hours. The wonder of technology. Not sure my office needs to be in a car anymore. They’ve closed half the courthouses in L.A. County because of budget cutbacks, and most of the time the Internet gets me where I need to go.”

  “So, the codicil?”

  “Your Pasadena Police friends were on the mark. The will filed in ’92 was amended the following year. The amendment establishes standing for a blood heir should one come forth at the time of Vance’s death.”

  “And no other will has surfaced?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So Vibiana is covered.”

  “She’s covered, but with an asterisk.”

  “Which is?”

  “The amendment grants a blood heir standing as a recipient of a share of the estate. It doesn’t specify what or how much that share is. Obviously when he added this, he and his lawyer both thought that a blood heir was a long shot. They added the codicil just in case.”