“Thanks, Kiz,” Bosch said but his mind was flying.
“Well, look, I’m gonna go. I’ll see you. Knock ’em dead tomorrow, okay?”
“I’ll try.”
She hung up and Bosch slowly put the phone back in its cradle. The tightening in his gut got more intense. He started thinking about McCaleb’s visit and what he had asked and what Harry had said. Now Winston was asking questions about him.
He did not believe it was a coincidence. It was clear to Bosch that they had a bead on him. They were looking at him for the Edward Gunn killing. And he knew he had probably given McCaleb the right amount of psychological insight to believe he was on the right course.
Bosch drained the bottle of beer that was on the nightstand. The last swallow was room temperature and sour. He knew there were no more bottles in the refrigerator. He got up to get a cigarette instead.
22
Nat’s was a railroad car–sized bar that was like a lot of Hollywood haunts — favored during daylight hours by hard-core drinkers, during early evening hours by casual hookers and their clientele, and late at night by the black leather and tattoo crowd. It was the kind of place where a person would stand out as a target if he tried to pay for drinks with a gold credit card.
McCaleb had stopped at Musso’s for dinner — his body clock demanding nourishment before a complete shutdown occurred — and didn’t get to Nat’s until after ten. While eating his chicken pot pie he had wondered whether going to the bar to ask questions about Gunn was even worth the time. The tip had come from the suspect. Would the suspect knowingly point the investigator in the right direction? It seemed not, but McCaleb factored in Bosch’s drinking and his being unaware of McCaleb’s true mission during the visit to the house on the hill. The tip might very well be valid and he decided no part of the investigation should be overlooked.
As he walked in it took him a few seconds to adjust to the dim, reddish lighting. When the room became clear he saw it was half empty. It was the time between the early evening crowd and the late-night group. Two women — one black, one white — sitting at one end of the bar that ran along the left side of the room sized him up and McCaleb could see cop register in their eyes at the same moment hookers registered in his. It secretly pleased him that he still had the look. He walked by them and further into the lounge. The booths lining the right side of the room were mostly full. No one in these bothered to give him a glance.
He stepped up to the bar between two empty stools and signaled one of the bartenders.
An old Bob Seger song, “Night Moves,” was blaring from a jukebox in the back. The bartender leaned over the bar so she could get McCaleb’s order. She was wearing a buttoned black vest with no shirt underneath. She had long straight black hair and a thin gold hoop pierced her left eyebrow.
“What can I get you?”
“Some information.”
McCaleb slid a driver’s-license picture of Edward Gunn across the counter. It was a three-by-five blowup that had been in the files Winston gave him. The bartender looked at it for a moment and then back up at McCaleb.
“What about him? He’s dead.”
“How do you know that?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. Word just got around, I guess. You a cop?”
McCaleb nodded, lowered his voice so the music would cover it and said, “Something like that.”
The bartender leaned further over the bartop so she could hear him. This position opened the top of her vest, exposing most of her small but round breasts. There was a tattoo of a heart wrapped in barbed wire on the left side. It looked like a bruise on a pear, not very appetizing. McCaleb looked away.
“Edward Gunn,” he said. “He was a regular, right?”
“He came in a lot.”
McCaleb nodded. Her acknowledgment confirmed Bosch’s tip.
“You work New Year’s Eve?”
She nodded.
“You know if he came in that night?”
She shook her head.
“I can’t remember. A lot of people were in here New Year’s Eve. We had a party. I don’t know if he was here or not. It wouldn’t surprise me, though. People came and went.”
McCaleb nodded toward the other bartender. A Latino who also wore a black vest with no shirt beneath.
“What about him? Think he’d remember?”
“No, ’cause he only started last week. I’m breaking him in.”
A thin smile played on her face. McCaleb ignored it. “Twisting the Night Away” began playing. The Rod Stewart version.
“How well did you know Gunn?”
She let out a short burst of laughter.
“Honey, this is the kind of place where people don’t exactly like to let on who they are or what they are. How well did I know him? I knew him, okay? Like I said, he came in. But I didn’t even know his name until he was dead and people started talking about him. Somebody said Eddie Gunn got himself killed and I said, ‘Who the fuck is Eddie Gunn?’ They had to describe him. The whiskey rocks who always had the paint in his hair. Then I knew who Eddie Gunn was.”
McCaleb nodded. He reached inside his coat pocket and brought out a folded piece of newspaper. He slid it across the bartop. She leaned down to look, showing another view of her breasts. McCaleb thought it was intentional.
“This is that cop, the one from the trial, right?”
McCaleb didn’t answer the question. The newspaper had been folded to a photo of Harry Bosch that had run that morning in the Los Angeles Times as an advance on the testimony expected to begin in the Storey trial. It was a candid shot of Bosch standing outside the courtroom door. He probably didn’t even know it had been taken.
“You seen him in here?”
“Yeah, he comes in. Why are you asking about him?”
McCaleb felt a charge go up the back of his neck.
“When does he come in?”
“I don’t know, from time to time. I wouldn’t call him a regular. But he’d come in. And he wouldn’t stay long. A one-timer — one drink and out. He’s . . .”
She pointed a finger up and cocked her head to the side as she rifled through her interior files. She then slashed her finger down as if making a notch.
“Got it. Bottled beer. Asks for Anchor Steam every time because he always forgets we don’t carry it — too expensive, we’d never sell it. He then settles for the old thirty-three.”
McCaleb was about to ask what that was when she answered his unspoken question.
“Rolling Rock.”
He nodded.
“Was he in here New Year’s Eve?”
She shook her head.
“Same answer. I don’t remember. Too many people, too many drinks, too many days since then.”
McCaleb nodded and pulled the newspaper back across the bar and put it in his pocket.
“He in some kind of trouble, that cop?”
McCaleb shook his head. One of the women at the end of the bar tapped the corner of her empty glass on the bartop and called to the bartender.
“Hey, Miranda, you got payin’ customers over here.”
The bartender looked around for her partner. He was gone, apparently in the back room or the bathroom.
“Gotta go to work,” she said.
McCaleb watched her go to the end of the bar and make two fresh vodka rocks for the hookers. During a lull in the music, he overheard one of them tell her to stop talking to the cop so he would leave. As Miranda headed back toward McCaleb’s position one of the hookers called after her.
“And stop giving him the freebie or he’ll never leave.”
McCaleb acted like he didn’t hear it. Miranda exhaled like she was tired when she got to him.
“I don’t know where Javier went. I can’t be standing here talking to you all night.”
“Let me ask you one last thing,” he said. “You ever remember the cop being in here with Eddie Gunn at the same time — either together or apart?”
She thought a moment and leaned forward.
“Maybe, it could’ve happened. But I don’t remember.”
McCaleb nodded. He was pretty sure that was the best he could get out of her. He wondered if he should leave some money on the bar. He’d never been good at that sort of thing when he was an agent. He never knew when it would be appropriate and when it would be insulting.
“Can I ask you something now?” Miranda asked.
“What?”
“You like what you see?”
He felt his face immediately begin to color with embarrassment.
“I mean, you were looking enough. I just thought I’d ask.”
She glanced over at the hookers and shared a smile. They were all enjoying McCaleb’s embarrassment.
“They’re real nice,” he said as he stepped away from the bar, leaving a twenty-dollar bill for her. “I’m sure they keep people coming back. Probably kept Eddie Gunn comin’ in.”
He headed toward the door and she called after him, her words hitting him in the back all the way to the door.
“Then maybe you oughta come back and try ’em out some time, Officer!”
As he went through the door he heard the hookers whoop and slap hands in a high five.
• • •
McCaleb sat in the Cherokee in front of Nat’s and tried to shake off the embarrassment. He concentrated on the information he had gotten from the bartender. Gunn was a regular and might or might not have been in there on the last night of his life. Secondly, she was familiar with Bosch as a customer. He, too, might or might not have been in there on the last night of Gunn’s life. The fact that this information had indirectly come from Bosch was puzzling. Again, he wondered why Bosch — if he was Gunn’s killer — had given him a valid clue to follow. Was it arrogance, a belief that he would never be considered a suspect and therefore not be brought up during the questioning at the bar? Or could there be a deeper psychological motivation? McCaleb knew that many criminals make mistakes that ensure their apprehension because subconsciously they do not want to get away with their crimes. The big wheel theory, McCaleb thought. Maybe Bosch was subconsciously making sure the wheel turned for him as well.
He opened his cell phone and checked the signal. It was good. He called Jaye Winston’s home number. He checked his watch while the phone was ringing and thought that it was not too late to call. After five rings she finally picked up.
“It’s me. I’ve got some stuff.”
“So do I. But I’m still on the phone. Can I call you when I’m done?”
“Yeah, I’ll be here.”
He clicked off and sat in the car waiting and thinking about things. He watched through the windshield as the white hooker from the bar stepped through the door with a man in a baseball cap in tow. They both lit cigarettes and headed down the sidewalk toward a motel called the Skylark.
His phone chirped. It was Winston.
“It’s coming together, Terry. I’m a believer.”
“What did you get?”
“You first. You said you got some stuff.”
“No, you. What I got is minor. It sounds like you hooked something big.”
“Okay, listen to this. Harry Bosch’s mother was a prostitute. In Hollywood. She got murdered when he was a little kid. And whoever did it got away with it. How is that for psychological underpinnings, Mr. Profiler?”
McCaleb didn’t answer. The new information was stunning and provided many of the missing pieces in the working theory. He watched the hooker and her customer at the window of the motel office. The man passed cash through and received a key. They went in through a glass door.
“Gunn kills a prostitute and walks away,” Winston said when he didn’t respond. “Just like what happened with his mother.”
“How’d you find this out?” McCaleb finally asked.
“I made that call we talked about. To my friend, Kiz. I acted like I was interested in Bosch and asked her if she knew if he was, you know, over his divorce yet. She told me what she knew about him. The stuff about his mother apparently came out a few years ago in a civil trial when Bosch got sued for a wrongful death — the Dollmaker, you remember that one?”
“Yeah, the LAPD refused to call us in on that one. That was also a guy who killed prostitutes. Bosch killed him. He was unarmed.”
“There’s a psychology going on here. A goddamn pattern.”
“What happened to Bosch after his mother was killed?”
“Kiz didn’t really know. She called him an institutional man. It happened when he was ten or eleven. After that he grew up in youth halls and foster homes. He went into the service and then the department. The point is, this is the thing we were missing. The thing that turned a no-count case into something Bosch wouldn’t let go.”
McCaleb nodded to himself.
“And there’s more,” Winston said. “I went through all the accumulated files — extraneous things I didn’t put in the murder book. I looked at the autopsy on the woman Gunn killed six years ago. Her name was Frances Weldon, by the way. There was one thing in there that now seems significant in light of what we now know about Bosch. Examination of the uterus and hips showed that at some point she’d had a child.”
McCaleb shook his head.
“Bosch wouldn’t have known that. He pushed his lieutenant through a window and was on suspension by the time there was an autopsy.”
“True. But he could and probably did look at the case files after he came back. He would have known that Gunn did to some other kid what was done to him. You see, it is all fitting. Eight hours ago I thought you were grasping at straws. Now it looks to me like you’re dead on.”
It didn’t feel all that good to be dead on. But he understood Winston’s excitement. When cases fell together the excitement could sometimes obscure the reality of the crime.
“What happened to her kid?” he asked.
“No idea. She probably gave the child up after the birth. That doesn’t matter. What matters is what it meant to Bosch.”
She was right. But McCaleb didn’t like the loose end.
“Going back to your call to Bosch’s old partner. Is she going to call him and tell him you asked about him?”
“She already did.”
“This is tonight?”
“Yeah, this all just went down. That was that call, her getting back to me. He passed. He told her he was still holding out hope for his wife coming back.”
“Did she tell him it was you who was interested?”
“She wasn’t supposed to.”
“But she probably did. This might mean he knows we’re looking at him.”
“That’s impossible. How?”
“I was just up there tonight. I was in his house. Then the same night he gets this call about you. A guy like Harry Bosch, he doesn’t believe in coincidences, Jaye.”
“Well, when you were up there, how did you handle it?” Winston finally asked.
“Like we said. I wanted more info on Gunn but sidetracked into talking about Bosch. That’s why I was calling you. I got some interesting stuff. Nothing that compares to what you got but stuff that also fits. But if he got this call about you right after I was there . . . I don’t know.”
“Tell me about your stuff.”
“All little stuff. He’s got the photo of the estranged wife prominently displayed in the living room. I was there less than an hour and the guy downed three beers. So there’s the alcohol syndrome. Symptomatic of interior pressures. He also spoke of something he called ‘the big wheel.’ It’s part of his belief system. He doesn’t see the hand of God in things. He sees the Big Wheel. What goes around comes around. He said guys like Gunn don’t really get away. Something always catches up to them. The wheel. I used some specific phrases to see if I could draw a reaction or disagreement. I called the world outside his door the plague. He didn’t disagree. He said he could deal with the plague as long as he got his shots at the carriers. It’s all very subtle, Jaye, but
it’s all there. He’s got a Bosch print on the wall in the hallway. The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s got our owl in it.”
“So, he’s named after the guy. If my name was Picasso I’d have a Picasso print on the wall.”
“I acted like I’d never seen it before and asked him what it meant. All he said was that it was the big wheel turning. That’s what it meant to him.”
“Little pieces that fit.”
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