“Listen, you’re not living in this place, are ya?” Gowdy asked. “It’s been red-tagged. We got a call said somebody bootlegged the electric.”
“I got a call, too. See anybody? I was just going to check it out.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Bosch. I can see you’ve made some repairs. You gotta know something, you can’t repair this place, you can’t even go in. You got a demolition order and it’s overdue. I’m gonna put in a work order and have a city contractor do it. You’ll get the bill. No use waitin’ any longer. Now, you might as well get out of here because I’m going to pull the electric and padlock it.”
He bent down to put the toolbox on the ground and proceeded to open it up and retrieve a set of stainless steel hinges and hasp locks he would apply to the doors.
“Look, I’ve got a lawyer,” Bosch said. “He’s trying to work it out with you people.”
“There’s nothing to work out. I’m sorry. Now if you go in there again, you’re subject to arrest. If I find these locks have been tampered with, you’re also subject to arrest. I’ll call North Hollywood Division. I’m not fooling with you anymore.”
For the first time it occurred to Bosch that it might be a show, that the man might want money. He probably didn’t even know Bosch was a cop. Most cops couldn’t afford to live up here and wouldn’t want to if they could. The only reason Bosch could afford it was he had bought the property with a chunk of money he had made years earlier on a TV movie deal based on a case he had solved.
“Look, Gowdy,” he said, “just spell it out, okay? I’m slow about these things. Tell me what you want and you’ve got it. I want to save the house. That’s all I care about.”
Gowdy looked at him for a long moment and Bosch realized he had been wrong. He could see the indignation in Gowdy’s eyes.
“You keep talking like that and you could go to jail, son. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to forget what you just said. I—”
“Look, I’m sorry . . .” Bosch looked back at the house. “It’s just like, I don’t know, the house is the only thing I’ve got.”
“You’ve got more than that. You just haven’t thought about it. Now, I’m going to cut you a break here. I’ll give you five minutes to go inside and get what you need. After that, I’m putting the locks on it. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is. If that house goes down the hill on the next one, maybe you’ll thank me.”
Bosch nodded.
“Go on. Five minutes.”
Bosch went inside and grabbed a suitcase from the top shelf of the hallway closet. First he put his second gun in it, then he dumped in as much of the clothing from the bedroom closet as he could. He walked the overstuffed suitcase out to the carport, then came back inside for another load. He opened the drawers of his bureau and dumped them on the bed, then wrapped everything in the bedclothes and carried that out as well.
He went past the five-minute mark but Gowdy didn’t come in after him. Bosch could hear him working with a hammer on the front door.
After ten minutes he had a large stack of belongings gathered in the carport. Included there was the box in which he kept his keepsakes and photos, a fireproof box containing his financial and personal records, a stack of unopened mail and unpaid bills, the stereo and two boxes containing his collection of jazz and blues LPs and CDs. Looking at the pile of belongings, he felt forlorn. It was a lot to fit into a Mustang, but he knew it wasn’t much to show for almost forty-five years on the planet.
“That it?”
Bosch turned around. It was Gowdy. He was holding a hammer in one hand and a steel latch in the other. Bosch saw a keyed lock was hooked through one of the belt loops on his pants.
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Do it.”
He stepped back and let the inspector go to work. The hammering had just begun when his phone rang. He had forgotten about Keisha Russell.
He had the phone in his jacket pocket instead of his briefcase now. He took it out and flipped it open.
“Yeah, it’s Bosch.”
“Detective, it’s Dr. Hinojos.”
“Oh . . . Hi.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, uh, yeah, I was expecting somebody else. I’ve got to keep this line open for a few minutes. I’ve got a call coming in. Can I call you back?”
Bosch looked at his watch. It was five minutes until six.
“Yes,” Hinojos said. “I’ll be at the office until six-thirty. I want to talk to you about something, and to see how you fared on the sixth floor after I left.”
“I’m fine, but I’ll call you back.”
As soon as he flipped the phone closed, it rang again in his hand.
“Bosch.”
“Bosch, I’m up against it and don’t have time for bullshit.” It was Russell. She also didn’t have time to identify herself. “The story is that the investigation into the killing of Harvey Pounds has turned inward and detectives spent several hours with you today. They searched your home and they believe you are the prime suspect.”
“Prime suspect? We don’t even use those words, Keisha. Now I know you’re talking to one of those squints in IAD. They wouldn’t know how to run a homicide investigation if the doer came up and bit them on their shiny ass.”
“Don’t try to deflect what we’re talking about here. It’s really simple. Do you or don’t you have a comment on the story for tomorrow’s paper? If you want to say something, I have just enough time to get it in the first run.”
“On the record, I have no comment.”
“And off?”
“Off the record, not for attribution or any use at all, I can tell you that you’re full of shit, Keisha. Your story is wrong. Flat-out wrong. If you run it as you have just summarized it for me, you will have to write another one tomorrow correcting it. It will say I am not a suspect at all. Then, after that, you’ll have to find another beat to cover.”
“And why is that?” she asked haughtily.
“Because this is a smear orchestrated by Internal Affairs. It’s a plant. And when it is read tomorrow by everybody else in the department they’ll know it is and they’ll know you fell for it. They won’t trust you. They’ll think you’re just a front for people like Brockman. No one that it is important for you to have a source relationship with will want to have that relationship with you. Including me. You’ll be left covering the police commission and rewriting the press releases out of media relations. And then, of course, whenever Brockman wants to cream somebody else, he’ll pick up the phone and call.”
There was silence on the line. Bosch looked up at the sky and saw it turning pink with the start of sunset. He looked at his watch. It was one minute until her deadline.
“You there, Keisha?”
“Bosch, you’re scaring me.”
“You should be scared. You got about a minute to make a big decision.”
“Let me ask you this. Did you attack Pounds two weeks ago and throw him through a window?”
“On or off the record?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just need an answer. Quick!”
“Off the record, that’s more or less accurate.”
“Well, that would seem to make you a suspect in his death. I don’t see—”
“Keisha, I’ve been out of the state for three days. I got back today. Brockman brought me in and talked to me for less than an hour. My story checked and I was kicked free. I’m not a suspect. I’m talking to you from the front of my house. You hear that hammering? That’s my house. I’ve got a carpenter here. Are prime suspects allowed to go home at night?”
“How can I confirm all of this?”
“Today? You can’t. You’ve got to pick. Brockman or me. Tomorrow, you can call Assistant Chief Irving and he’ll confirm— if he is willing to talk to you.”
“Shit! Bosch, I can’t believe this. If I go to my editor at deadline and tell him a story that they had budgeted for the front page since the three o’clock meeting is not a story . . . I m
ight be looking for a new beat and a new paper to cover it for.”
“There’s other news in the world, Keisha. They can find something for the front page. This will pay off for you in the long run, anyway. I’ll spread the word about you.”
There was a brief silence while she made her decision.
“I can’t talk. I have to get in there and grab him. Good-bye, Bosch. I hope I’m still working here the next time we talk.”
She was gone before he could say good-bye.
He walked up the street to the Mustang and drove it down to the house. Gowdy had finished with the latches and both doors now had locks on them. The inspector was out at his car using the front hood as a desk. He was writing on a clipboard and Bosch guessed he was moving slowly so as to make sure Bosch left the property. Bosch started loading his pile of belongings into the Mustang. He didn’t know where he was going to take himself.
He put the thought of his homelessness aside and began thinking about Keisha Russell. He wondered if she would be able to stop the story so late in the game. It had probably taken on a life of its own. Like a monster in the newspaper’s computer. And she, its Dr. Frankenstein, would likely have little power over stopping it.
When he had everything in the Mustang, he waved a salute to Gowdy, got in and drove down the hill. Down at Cahuenga he didn’t know which way to turn because he still didn’t know where he should go. To the right was Hollywood. To the left was the Valley. Then he remembered the Mark Twain. In Hollywood, only a few blocks from the station on Wilcox, the Mark Twain was an old residence hotel with efficiencies that were generally clean and neat— a lot more so than the surrounding neighborhood. Bosch knew this because he had stashed witnesses there on occasion. He also knew that there were a couple of units that were two-room efficiencies with private baths. He decided he would go for one of them and turned right. The phone rang almost as soon as he had made the decision. It was Keisha Russell.
“You owe me big time, Bosch. I killed it.”
He felt relief and annoyance at the same time. It was typical thinking for a reporter.
“What are you talking about?” he countered. “You owe me big time for saving your ass.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. I’m still going to check this out tomorrow. If it falls the way you said, I’m going to Irving to complain about Brockman. I’ll burn him.”
“You just did.”
Realizing she had just confirmed Brockman as the source, she laughed uneasily.
“What did your editor say?”
“He thinks I’m an idiot. But I told him there’s other news in the world.”
“Good line.”
“Yeah, I’m going to keep that one in my computer. So what’s going on? And what’s happening with those clips I got you?”
“The clips are still percolating. I can’t really talk about anything yet.”
“Figures. I don’t know why I keep helping you, Bosch, but here goes. Remember you asked about Monte Kim, the guy who wrote that first clip I gave you?”
“Yeah. Monte Kim.”
“I asked about him around here and one of the old rewrite guys told me he’s still alive. Turns out that after he left the Times he worked for the DA’s office for a while. I don’t know what he’s doing now but I got his number and his address. He’s in the Valley.”
“Can you give it to me?”
“I guess so, since it was in the phonebook.”
“Damn, I never thought of that.”
“You might be a good detective, Bosch, but you wouldn’t make much of a reporter.”
She gave him the number and address, said she’d be in touch and hung up. Bosch put the phone down on the seat and thought about this latest piece of information as he drove into Hollywood. Monte Kim had worked for the district attorney. Bosch had a pretty good idea which one that would be.
Chapter 37
The man behind the front desk at the Mark Twain didn’t seem to recognize Bosch, though Harry was reasonably sure he was the same man he had dealt with before while renting rooms for witnesses. The counterman was tall and thin and had the hunched-over shoulders of someone carrying a heavy burden. He looked like he’d been behind the desk since Eisenhower.
“You remember me? From down the street?”
“Yeah, I remember. I didn’t say anything ’cause I didn’t know if this was an undercover job or not.”
“No. No undercover. I wanted to know if you have one of the big rooms in the back open. One with a phone.”
“You want one?”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
“Who you going to put in there this time? I don’t want no gangbangers again. Last time, they—”
“No, no gangbangers. Only me. I want the room.”
“You want the room?”
“That’s right. And I won’t paint on the walls. How much?”
The desk man seemed nonplussed by the fact that Bosch wanted to stay there himself. He finally recovered and told Bosch he had his choice: thirty dollars a day, two hundred a week or five hundred a month. All in advance. Bosch paid for a week with his credit card and waited anxiously while the man checked to make sure the charge would clear.
“Now, how much for the parking space in the loading zone out front?”
“You can’t rent that.”
“I want to park out front, make it harder for one of your other tenants to rip my car off.”
Bosch took out his money and slid fifty dollars across the counter.
“If parking enforcement comes by, tell them it’s cool.”
“Yeah.”
“You the manager?”
“And owner. Twenty-seven years.”
“Sorry.”
Bosch went out to get his things. It took him three trips to bring everything up to room 214. The room was in the back and its two windows looked across an alley to the back of a one-story building that housed two bars and an adult film and novelties store. But Bosch had known all along it would be no garden spot. It wasn’t the kind of place where he would find a terry cloth robe in the closet and mints on the pillow at night. It was just a couple of notches up from the places where you slid your money to the clerk through a slot in the bulletproof glass.
One room had a bureau and a bed, which had only two cigarette burns in the bedspread, and a television mounted in a steel frame that was bolted to the wall. There was no cable, no remote and no courtesy TV Guide. The other room had a worn green couch, a small table for two and a kitchenette that had a half refrigerator, a bolted-down microwave and a two-coil electric range. The bathroom was off the hallway that connected the two rooms and came complete with white tile that had yellowed like old men’s teeth.
Despite the drab circumstances and his hopes that his stay would be temporary, Bosch tried his best to transform the hotel room into a home. He hung some clothes in the closet, put his toothbrush and shaving kit in the bathroom and set the answering machine up on the phone, though nobody knew his number. He decided that in the morning he’d call the telephone company and have a forwarding tape put on his old line.
Next he set up the stereo on the bureau. For the time being he just placed the speakers on the floor on either side of the bureau. He then rummaged through his box of CDs and came across a Tom Waits recording called “Blue Valentine.” He hadn’t listened to it in years so he put it on.
He sat down on the bed near the phone and listened and thought for a few minutes about calling Jazz in Florida. But he wasn’t sure what he could say or ask. He decided it might be better to just let it go for now. He lit a cigarette and went to the window. There was nothing happening in the alley. Across the tops of the buildings he could see the ornate tower of the nearby Hollywood Athletic Club. It was a beautiful building. One of the last in Hollywood.
He closed the musty curtains, turned around and studied his new home. After a while he yanked the spread off the bed along with the other covers and then remade it with his own sheets and blanket. H
e knew it was a small gesture of continuity but it made him feel less lonely. It also made him feel a little bit as though he knew what he was doing with his life at that point and it made him forget for a few more moments about Harvey Pounds.
Bosch sat on the newly made bed and leaned back on the pillows propped against the headboard. He lit another cigarette. He studied the wounds on his two fingers and saw that the scabs had been replaced with hard pink skin. They were healing nicely. He hoped the rest of him would, too. But he doubted it. He knew he was responsible. And he knew he had to pay. Somehow.
He absentmindedly pulled the phone off the bed table and placed it on his chest. It was an old one with a rotary dial. Bosch lifted the receiver and looked at the dial. Who was he going to call? What was he going to say? He replaced the receiver and sat up. He decided he had to get out.
Chapter 38
Monte Kim lived on Willis Avenue in Sherman Oaks in the midst of a ghost town of apartment buildings red-tagged after the quake. Kim’s apartment building was a gray-and-white Cape Cod affair that sat between two empties. At least they were supposed to be empty. As Bosch pulled up he saw lights go out in one of the buildings. Squatters, he guessed. Like Bosch had been, always on alert for the building inspector.
Kim’s building looked as though it had been either completely spared by the quake or already completely repaired. Bosch doubted it was the latter. He believed the building was more a testament to the serendipitous violence of nature, and maybe a builder who didn’t cut corners. The Cape Cod had stood up while the buildings around it cracked and slid.
It was a common, rectangular building with apartment entrances running down each side of it. But to get to one of the doors, you had to be buzzed through a six-foot-tall electronic gate. The cops called them “feel good” gates because they made the dwellers inside feel safer, but they were worthless. All they did was put up a barrier for legitimate visitors to the building. Others could simply climb over, and they did, all over the city. Feel good gates were everywhere.
He said only that it was the police when Kim’s voice sounded on the intercom and he was buzzed in. He took the badge wallet out of his pocket as he walked down to apartment eight. When Kim opened up, Bosch shoved the open badge wallet through the door and about six inches from his face. He held it so his finger was across the badge and obscured the marking that said LIEUTENANT. He then pulled the wallet back quickly and put it away.
Harry Bosch Novels, The: Volume 2 Page 29