“Cool your jets for a couple minutes. Over here in the car.”
He led Bosch to the second parking row, where there was a car with its engine running and its dark-tinted windows all the way up.
“Hop in the back,” Carbone said.
Bosch nonchalantly walked to the door, still showing no concern. He opened it and ducked in. Leon Fitzgerald was sitting in the back. He was a tall man—more than six and a half feet—and his knees were pressed hard against the back of the driver’s seat. He wore a beautiful suit of blue silk and held the stub of a cigar between his fingers. He was almost sixty and his hair was a jet-black dye job. His eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, were pale gray. His skin was pasty white. He was a night man.
“Chief,” Bosch said, nodding.
He had never met Fitzgerald before but had seen him often enough at cop funerals and on television news reports. He was the embodiment of the OCID. No one else from the secretive division ever went on camera.
“Detective Bosch,” Fitzgerald said. “I know of you. Know of your exploits. Over the years you have been suggested to me more than once as a candidate for our unit.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
Carbone had come around and gotten in the driver’s seat. He started moving the car slowly through the lot.
“Because like I said, I know of you,” Fitzgerald was saying. “And I know you would not leave homicide. Homicide is your calling. Am I correct?”
“Pretty much.”
“Which brings us to the current homicide case you are pursuing. Dom?”
With one hand, Carbone passed a shoebox over the seat. Fitzgerald took it and put it on Bosch’s lap. Bosch opened it and found it full of audiocassette tapes with dates written on tape stuck to the cases.
“From Aliso’s phone?” he asked.
“Obviously.”
“How long were you on it?”
“We’d only been listening for nine days. It hadn’t been productive, but the tapes are yours.”
“And what do you want in return, Chief?”
“What do I want?”
Fitzgerald looked out the window, down at the railroad switching yard in the valley below the parking lot.
“What do I want?” he asked again. “I want the killer, of course. But I also want you to be careful. The department’s been through a lot these past few years. No need to hang our dirty laundry in public once again.”
“You want me to bury Carbone’s extracurricular activities.”
Neither Fitzgerald nor Carbone said anything but they didn’t have to. Everybody in the car knew that Carbone did what he did on orders. Probably orders from Fitzgerald himself.
“Then you’ve got to answer some questions.”
“Of course.”
“Why was there a bug on Tony Aliso’s phone?”
“Same reason there’s a bug on anyone’s phone. We heard things about the man and set about finding out if they were true.”
“What did you hear?”
“That he was dirty, that he was a scumbag, that he was a launderer for the mob in three states. We opened a file. We had just begun when he was killed.”
“Then when I called, why did you pass on it?”
Fitzgerald took a long pull on his cigar and the car filled with its smell.
“There’s a complicated answer to that question, Detective. Suffice it to say that we thought it best if we remained uninvolved.”
“The tap was illegal, wasn’t it?”
“It is extremely difficult under state law to gather the required information needed for a wiretap. The feds, they can get it done on a whim. We can’t and we don’t want to work with the feds all the time.”
“It still doesn’t explain why you passed. You could’ve taken the case from us and then controlled it, buried it, done whatever you wanted with it. No one would have known about illegal wiretaps or anything else.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps it was a wrong choice.”
Bosch realized they had underestimated himself and his crew. Fitzgerald had believed the break-in would go unnoticed and therefore his unit’s involvement would not be discovered. Bosch understood the tremendous leverage he held over Fitzgerald. Word about the illegal wiretap would be all the police chief would need to rid himself of Fitzgerald.
“So what else do you have on Aliso?” he asked. “I want everything. If I hear at any point you held something back, then your little-black-bag job is going to get known. You know what I mean? It will get known.”
Fitzgerald turned from the window and looked at him.
“I know exactly what you mean. But you are making a mistake if you are going to smugly sit there and believe you have all the high cards in this game.”
“Then put whatever cards you have on the table.”
“Detective, I am about to fully cooperate with you, but know this. If you seek to hurt me or anyone in my division with the information you get here, I will hurt you more. For example, there’s this matter of your keeping company last night with a convicted felon.”
He let that hang in the air with his cigar smoke. Bosch was stunned and angry but managed to swallow down his urge to throttle Fitzgerald.
“There is a department prohibition against any officer knowingly associating with criminals. I’m sure you know that, Detective, and understand the need for such a safeguard. If this were to become known about you, then your job could be in jeopardy. Then where would you and your mission be?”
Bosch didn’t answer. He looked straight ahead, over the seat and out the front window. Fitzgerald leaned over so that he was almost whispering in his ear.
“This is what we know about you in just one hour,” he said. “What if we spend a day? A week? And it’s not just you, my friend. You can tell your lieutenant that there is a glass ceiling in the department for lesbians, especially if something like that should get out. Now her girlfriend, she could go further, her being black. But the lieutenant, she’d have to get used to Hollywood, you ask me.”
He leaned back to his spot and returned his voice to normal modulation.
“Do we have an understanding here, Detective Bosch?”
Bosch turned and finally looked at him.
“We have an understanding.”
After dropping the bullets retrieved from Tony Aliso’s head at the ballistics lab in Boyle Heights, Bosch made it back to the Hollywood Division just as the investigators were gathering in Billets’s office for the six o’clock meeting. Bosch was introduced to Russell and Kuhlken, the two fraud investigators, and everybody sat down. Also sitting in was a deputy district attorney. Matthew Gregson was from Special Prosecutions, a unit that handled organized crime cases as well as the prosecution of police officers and other delicate matters. Bosch had never met him.
Bosch gave his report first and concisely brought the others up to date on the occurrences in Las Vegas as well as the autopsy and his swing by the department’s gun shop. He said he’d been promised that the ballistics comparison would be done by ten the following morning. But Bosch made no mention of his meetings with Carbone and Fitzgerald. Not because of the threat Fitzgerald had made—or so Bosch told himself. But because the information he had gleaned from those meetings was best not discussed with such a large group in general and a prosecutor in particular. Apparently, feeling the same way, Billets asked him no questions in this regard.
When Bosch was finished, Rider went next. She said she had talked to the IRS auditor assigned to the TNA Productions case and gotten very little information.
“Basically, they have a whistle-blowing program,” she said. “You blow the whistle on a tax scofflaw and you get a share of whatever taxes the IRS finds it’s been cheated out of. That’s how this started. Only problem is, according to Hirschfield, he’s the IRS guy, this tip came in anonymously. Whoever blew the whistle didn’t want a share. He said they got a three-page letter outlining Tony Aliso’s money-washing scam. He would not show it to me because he claimed, anonymo
us or not, the guidelines of the program call for strict confidence and the specific language of the letter could lead to identification of the author. He —”
“That’s bullshit,” Gregson said.
“Probably,” Rider said. “But there was nothing I could do about it.”
“Afterwards, give me the guy’s name and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Sure. Anyway, they got this letter, did some preliminary looking at TNA’s corporate filings over the years and decided the letter had merit. They sent the audit letter to Tony on August 1 and were going to do him at the end of this month. That was it with him—oh, the one thing he would tell me about the letter was that it was mailed from Las Vegas. It was on the postmark.”
Bosch almost nodded involuntarily because that last bit of information fit with something Fitzgerald had told him.
“Okay, now for Tony Aliso’s associates. Jerry and I spent the better part of the day interviewing the core group of people he used when making this trash he called film. He basically raided the local film schools, low-rent acting schools and strip bars for the so-called artistic talent for these shoots, but there were five men that he repeatedly worked with to get them off the ground. We took them all one by one and it appears they were not privy to financing of the movies or the books Tony kept. We think they were in the dark. Jerry?”
“That’s right,” Edgar said. “I personally think Tony picked these guys because they were stupid and didn’t ask questions about that sort of stuff. He just sent them out, you know, over to USC or UCLA to grab some kid who’d want to direct or write one of these things. They’d go over to the Star Strip on La Cienega and talk girls into taking the bimbo parts. On and on, you know how it goes. Our conclusion is that this little money-washing scam was Tony’s. Only he and his customers knew.”
“Which leads us to you guys,” Billets said, looking at Russell and Kuhlken. “You got anything to tell us yet?”
Kuhlken said they were still waist-deep in the financial records but they had so far traced money from TNA Productions to dummy corporations in California, Nevada and Arizona. The money went into the corporation bank accounts and was then invested in other, seemingly legitimate, corporations. He said when the trail was fully documented they would be in a position to use the IRS and federal statutes to seize the money as the illegal funds of a racketeering enterprise. Unfortunately, Russell said, the documentation period was long and difficult. It would be another week before they could move.
“Keep at it and take the time you need,” Billets said, then she looked at Gregson. “So then, how are we doing? What should we be doing?”
Gregson thought a moment.
“I think we are doing fine. First thing tomorrow I’ll call Vegas and find out who’s handling the extradition hearing. I’m thinking that I possibly should go out there to babysit that. I’m not that comfortable at the moment with all of us here and Goshen over there with them. If we are lucky enough to pull a match out of ballistics, I think you and I, Harry, should go over there and not leave until we have Goshen with us.”
Bosch nodded his agreement.
“After hearing all of these reports, I really have just one question,” Gregson continued. “Why isn’t there someone from OCID sitting in this room right now?”
Billets looked at Bosch and almost imperceptibly nodded. The question was being passed to him.
“Initially,” Bosch said, “OCID was informed of the murder and the victim’s ID and they passed. They said they didn’t know Tony Aliso. As recently as two hours ago I had a conversation with Leon Fitzgerald and told him what it looked like we had. He offered whatever expertise his people had but felt we were too far along now to have fresh people come in. He wished us best of luck with it.”
Gregson stared at him a long moment and then nodded. The prosecutor was in his mid-forties with short-cropped hair already completely gray. Bosch had never worked with him but he’d heard the name. Gregson had been around—long enough to know there was more to what Bosch had said. But he had also been around long enough to let it go for the time being. Billets didn’t give him a lot of time to make something of it anyway.
“Okay, so why don’t we brainstorm a little bit before we call it a night?” she said. “What do we think happened to this man? We’re gathering a lot of information, a lot of evidence, but do we know what happened to him?”
She looked at the faces gathered in the room. Finally, Rider spoke up.
“My guess is that the IRS audit brought it all about,” she said. “He got the notice in the mail and he made a fatal mistake. He told this guy in Vegas, Joey Marks, that the government was going to look at his books and his cheap movies and the scam was likely going to come out. Joey Marks responded the way you expect these guys to respond. He whacked him. He had his man Goshen follow Tony back home from Vegas so it would happen far away from him and Goshen puts him in the trunk.”
The others nodded their heads in agreement. This included Bosch. The information he’d received from Fitzgerald fit with this scenario as well.
“It was a good plan,” Edgar said. “Only mistake was the fingerprints Artie Donovan got off the jacket. That was pure luck and if we didn’t have that, we probably wouldn’t have any of this. That was the only mistake.”
“Maybe not,” Bosch said. “The prints on the jacket just hurried things along, but Metro in Vegas was already working a tip from an informant who overheard Lucky Goshen talking about hitting somebody and putting them in a trunk. It would’ve gotten back to us. Eventually.”
“Well, I’d rather be already on it than waiting for eventually,” Billets said. “Any alternative theories we should also be chasing? Are we clear on the wife, the angry screenwriter, his other associates?”
“Nothing that sticks out,” Rider said. “There definitely was no love lost between the victim and the wife but she seems clean so far. I pulled the gatehouse log up there with a warrant and her car never left Hidden Highlands on Friday night. She seems clean.”
“What about the letter to the IRS?” Gregson asked. “Who sent it? Obviously, someone with pretty good knowledge of what this man was doing, but who would that be?”
“This could all be part of a power play within the Joey Marks group,” Bosch said. “Like I said before, something about the look on Goshen’s face when he saw that gun and his claims later that it was a plant . . . I don’t know, maybe somebody tipped the IRS knowing it would get Tony whacked and that they could then possibly lay it off on Goshen. With Goshen gone, this person moves up.”
“You’re saying Goshen didn’t do it?” Gregson asked, his eyebrows arched.
“No. I think Goshen is probably good for it. But I don’t think he was counting on that gun showing up behind the toilet. It doesn’t make sense, anyway, to keep it around. So say he whacks out Tony Aliso on orders from Joey Marks. He gives the gun to somebody in his crew to get rid of. Only that person goes and plants it at the house—this is the same person who sent the letter to the IRS in the first place to get the whole thing going. Now we come along and wrap Goshen up in a bow. The guy who stashed the gun and sent the letter, he’s in a position to move up.”
Bosch looked at their faces as they tried to follow the logic.
“Maybe Goshen isn’t the intended target,” Rider said.
Everyone looked at her.
“Maybe there’s one more play. Maybe it’s someone who wants Goshen and Joey Marks out of the way so he can move in.”
“How will they get Marks now?” Edgar asked.
“Through Goshen,” she said.
“If those ballistics come back a match,” Bosch said, “then you can stick a fork in Goshen because he’ll be done. He’ll be looking at the needle or life without possibility. Or a reduced sentence if he gives us something.”
“Joey Marks,” Gregson and Edgar said at the same time.
“So who is the letter writer?” Billets asked.
“Who knows?” Bosch answered. “I do
n’t know enough about the organization over there. But there’s a lawyer who was mentioned by the cops there. A guy who handles everything for Marks. He’d know about Aliso’s scam. He could pull this off. There’s probably a handful of people close to Marks capable of doing it.”
They all were silent for a long moment, each one thinking the story through and seeing that it could work. It was a natural conclusion to the meeting and Billets stood up to end it.
“Let’s keep up the good work,” she said. “Matthew, thanks for coming out. You’ll be the first one I call when we get the ballistics in the morning.”
Everyone else started standing up.
“Kiz and Jerry, flip a coin,” Billets said. “One of you will have to go to Vegas to work the extradition escort with Harry. It’s regulations. Oh, and Harry, could you wait a minute? There’s something I need to discuss with you about another case.”
After the others left, Billets told Bosch to close the door. He did so and then sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk.
“So what happened?” she asked. “Did you really talk to Fitzgerald?”
“Well, I guess it was more that he talked to me, but, yeah, I met with him and Carbone.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Basically, the deal is that they didn’t know Tony Aliso from a hole in the ground until they, too, got a letter, probably the same one that went to the IRS. I’ve got a copy of it. It has details. It was from somebody with knowledge, just like Kiz said. The letter OCID got also was postmarked in Las Vegas and it was addressed specifically to Fitzgerald.”
“So their response was to bug his office phone.”
“Right, illegal bug. They had just started—I have nine days’ worth of tapes to listen to—when I call up and say Tony got whacked. They panicked. You know his situation with the chief. If it came out that first of all they illegally put the bug on Tony and second of all might have somehow been the cause of his death because Joey Marks found out, then the chief would pretty much have all he’d need to move Fitzgerald out and reestablish controls on OCID.”
“So Fitzgerald sends Carbone in to get the bug and they play dumb about Tony.”
Harry Bosch Novels, The: Volume 2 Page 57