“About us?” She kissed his chin.
“I guess.”
“And?”
He brought his hand around to her face and traced the outline of her jaw with his fingers.
“I was wondering how you got this little scar here.”
“Oh …that is from when I was a girl. My brother and I, we were riding on a bike and I was on the handlebars. And we went down this hill, it was called Highland Avenue — this was when we lived in Pennsylvania — and he lost control. The bike started weaving and I was so scared because I knew we were going to crash. And just as he really lost it and we were going down, he yelled, ‘Ellie, you’ll be all right!’ Just like that. And because he had yelled that, he was right. I cut my chin but I didn’t even cry. I always thought that was something, that he would try to yell something to me rather than worry about himself at a moment like that. But that was my brother.”
Bosch dropped his hands from her face. He said, “I was also thinking that what happened between us was nice.”
“I think so, too, Harry. Nice for a couple of nighthawks. Come back to bed now.”
They went back in. Bosch first went into the bathroom and used his finger as a toothbrush and then crawled back under the sheet with her. The blue glow of a digital clock on the bedtable said 2:26 and Bosch closed his eyes.
When he opened them again the clock said 3:46 and there was an obnoxious chirping sound coming from somewhere in the room. He realized he was not in his own room. Then he remembered he was in Eleanor Wish’s room. As he finally got oriented he saw her shadowy figure stooped next to the bed, her hands going through the pile of his clothes.
“Where is it?” she said. “I can’t find it.”
Bosch reached for his pants, traced his hands along the belt until he found the pager and turned it off without having to fumble with it. He had done it many times in the dark before.
“Jesus,” she said. “That was rude.”
Bosch swung his legs over the side of the bed, gathered the sheet around his waist and sat up. He yawned and then warned her that he was going to turn on the light. She said go ahead, and when the light came on it hit him like a diamond burst between his eyes. When his vision cleared, she was standing in front of him naked, looking down at the digital readout of the pager in his hand. Bosch finally looked down at the number but didn’t recognize it. He wiped a hand across his face and rustled his hair. There was a telephone on the bedtable and he pulled it onto his lap. He dialed the number and then fumbled with his hands in his clothes for a cigarette, which he put in his mouth but didn’t light.
Eleanor noticed her nakedness and walked over to a lounge chair to get her robe. After it was on she went into the bathroom and closed the door. Bosch heard water running. The other end of the line was picked up halfway through the first ring. Jerry Edgar didn’t answer with a hello, just “Harry, where you at?”
“I’m not home. What is it?”
“This kid you were looking for, the one on the nine one one call, you found him, right?”
“Yeah, but we’re looking for him again.”
“Who’s ‘we’ — you and the feebee woman?”
Eleanor came out of the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bed next to him.
“Jerry, what are you calling me for?” Bosch asked. He was beginning to get a sinking feeling in his chest.
“What’s the kid’s name?”
Bosch was in a daze. It had been months since he had fallen so deeply asleep, only to be rousted out of it. He couldn’t remember Sharkey’s real name and he didn’t want to ask Eleanor because Edgar might hear and then know they were together. Harry looked at Eleanor and when she began to speak, he touched his finger to her lips and shook his head.
“Is it Edward Niese?” Edgar spoke into the silence. “That the kid’s name?”
The sinking feeling was gone. Bosch felt an invisible fist pressing up under his ribs and into the folds of his guts and heart.
“Right,” he said. “That’s the name.”
“You gave him one of your business cards?”
“Right.”
“Harry, you aren’t looking for him anymore.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Come on out and see for yourself. I’m over at the bowl. Sharkey’s in the pedestrian tunnel under Cahuenga. Park on the east side. You’ll see the cars.”
• • •
The Hollywood Bowl’s east parking lot was supposed to be empty at 4:30 A.M. But as Bosch and Wish drove up Highland to the mouth of the Cahuenga Pass they saw that the north end of the lot was crowded with the usual grouping of official cars and vans that signal the violent, or at least unexpected, end of a life. There was yellow plastic crime scene tape strung in a square, boxing the entrance to the stairwell that went down to the pedestrian underpass. Bosch flashed his badge and gave his name to a uniform cop who was keeping the officers-on-the-scene list on a clipboard. He and Wish ducked under the tape and were met by the loud sound of an engine echoing from the mouth of the tunnel. Bosch knew by the sound that it was a generator making the juice for the crime scene lights. At the top step, before they began their descent, he turned to Eleanor and said, “You want to wait here? We don’t both have to go.”
“I’m a cop, for godsake,” she said. “I’ve seen bodies before. You going to get protective of me now, Bosch? Tell you what. Want me to go down and you stay up here?”
Startled by her abrupt change in mood, Bosch didn’t answer. He looked at her a moment longer, confused. He started down a few steps in front of her but stopped when he saw Edgar’s large body come out of the tunnel and start up the steps. Edgar saw Bosch, and then Bosch saw his eyes go over his shoulder and take Eleanor Wish in.
“Hey, Harry,” he said. “This your new partner? You must be getting along real fine already.”
Bosch just stared at him. Eleanor was still three steps behind and probably hadn’t heard the remark.
“Sorry, Harry,” Edgar said just loud enough to be heard over the roar from the tunnel. “Out of line. Been a bad night. You should see who I got for a new partner, the useless fuck Ninety-eight Pounds stuck me with.”
“I thought you were going to get —” “Nope. Get this: Pounds put me with Porter from autos. The guy’s a burned-out lush.”
“I know. How’d you even get him out of bed for this?”
“He wasn’t in bed. I had to track him down at the Parrot up in North Hollywood. It’s one of them private bottle clubs. Porter gives me the number when we’re first introduced as partners and tells me that’s where he’ll be most nights. Tells me he works a security detail there. But I called the off-duty assignments office at Parker Center to check it out and they got no record. I know the only thing he does there is booze. He must’ve been practically passed out when I called. The bartender said the pager on his belt went off but he didn’t even hear it. Harry, I think the guy could blow a point two right now if we put a Breathalyzer on him.”
Bosch nodded and frowned the required three seconds and then put Jerry Edgar’s troubles aside. He felt Eleanor step down beside him and he introduced her to Edgar. They shook hands and smiled and Bosch said, “So, what have we got?”
“Well, we got these on the body,” Edgar said, and he held up a clear plastic bag. There was a short stack of Polaroids in it. More nude shots of Sharkey. He hadn’t wasted any time resupplying. Edgar turned the bag and there was Bosch’s business card.
“It looks like the kid was a hustler down in Boytown,” Edgar said, “but if you already pulled him in once you already know that. Anyway, I saw the card and figured he might be the kid from the nine one one call. If you want to come down and take a look, be my guest. We already processed the scene, so touch whatever you want. You can’t hear yourself think in there, though. Sombody went through and knocked out every light in the tunnel. Haven’t figured out whether that was the perp or the lights were knocked out before.
“Anyway, we had to set up our own.
And our cables weren’t long enough to put the generator up here. It’s in there screaming like a five-horsepower baby.”
He turned to head back into the tunnel but Bosch reached out and touched his shoulder.
“Jed, how’d you get the call on this?”
“Anonymous. It wasn’t a nine one one line, so there’s no tape or trace. Came in right to the Hollywood desk. Caller was a male, that’s all the dip-shit, one of those fat Explorer kids who took it, could tell us.”
Edgar turned back into the subway. Bosch and Wish followed. It was a long hallway that curved to the right. The floor was dirty concrete, its walls were white stucco with a heavy overlay of graffiti. Nothing like a dose of urban reality as you are leaving the symphony at the bowl, Bosch thought. The tunnel was dark except for the bright splash of light that bathed the crime scene about halfway in. There Bosch could see a human form sprawled on its back. Sharkey. He could see men standing and working in the light. Bosch walked with the fingers of his right hand trailing along the stuccoed wall. It steadied him. There was an old, damp smell in the tunnel that was mixed with the new odor of gasoline and exhaust from the generator. Bosch felt beads of sweat start to form on his scalp and under his shirt. His breathing was fast and shallow. They passed the generator thirty feet in and in another thirty feet or so Sharkey was lying on the tunnel floor under the brutal light of the strobes.
The boy’s head was propped against the tunnel wall at an unnatural angle. He seemed smaller and younger than Bosch remembered him. His eyes were half open and had the familiar glaze of the unseeing on them. He wore a black T-shirt that said Guns N Roses on it, and it was matted with his blood. The pockets of his faded jeans were pulled out and empty. At his side stood a can of spray paint in a plastic evidence bag. On the wall above his head a painted inscription read RIP Sharkey. The paint had been applied with an inexperienced hand and too much had been used. Black paint had run down the wall in thin lines, some of them into Sharkey’s hair.
When Edgar yelled, “You want to see it?” above the din of the generator Bosch knew that he meant the wound. Because Sharkey’s head was angled forward, the throat wound was not visible. Only the blood. Bosch shook his head no.
Bosch noticed the blood splatter on the wall and floor about three feet from the body. Porter the lush was comparing the shapes of the drops with those on splatter cards on a steel ring. A crime scene tech named Roberge was also photographing the spots. The blood on the floor was in round spots. The wall splatter drops were elliptical. You didn’t need splatter cards to know the kid had been killed right here in the tunnel.
“The way it’s looking,” Porter said loudly to no one in particular, “somebody comes up behind him here, cuts him and pushes him down against the wall there.”
“You only got it half right, Porter,” Edgar said. “How’s somebody come up behind somebody in a tunnel like this? He was with somebody and they did him. It was no sneak job, Porter.”
Porter put the splatter cards in his pocket and said, “Sorry, partner.”
He didn’t say anything else. He was fat and broken down the way many cops get when they stay on longer than they should. Porter could still wear a size 34 belt, but above it a tremendous gut bloomed outward like an awning. He wore a tweed sport coat with a frayed elbow. His face was gaunt and as pallid as a flour tortilla, behind a drinker’s nose that was large, misshapen and painfully red.
Bosch lit a cigarette and put the burnt match in his pocket. He crouched down like a baseball catcher next to the body and lifted the bag containing the paint can and hefted it. It was almost full, and that confirmed what he already knew, already feared. It was he who had killed Sharkey. In a way, at least. Bosch had tracked him down and made him valuable, or potentially valuable, to the case. Someone could not allow this. Bosch squatted there, elbows on knees, holding cigarette to mouth, smoking and studying the body, making sure he would not forget it.
Meadows had been part of this thing — the circle of connected events that had gotten him killed. But not Sharkey. He was street trash and his death here probably saved someone else’s life down the line. But he did not deserve this. In this circle he was an innocent. And that meant things were out of control and there were new rules — for both sides. Bosch signaled with his hand to Sharkey’s neck and a coroner’s investigator pulled the body away from the wall. Bosch put one hand down on the ground to balance himself and stared for a long time at the ravaged neck and throat. He did not want to forget a single detail. Sharkey’s head lolled back, exposing the gaping neck wound. Bosch’s eyes never wavered.
• • •
When Bosch finally looked up from the body, he noticed that Eleanor was no longer in the tunnel. He stood up and signaled Edgar to come outside to talk. Harry didn’t want to have to shout over the sound of the generator. When they got out of the tunnel, he saw that Eleanor was sitting alone on the top step. They walked up past her, and Harry put his hand on her shoulder as he went by. He felt it go rigid at his touch.
When he and his old partner were reasonably away from the noise, Harry said, “So what do the techs have?”
“Not a damned thing,” Edgar said. “If it was a gang thing, it’s one of the cleanest I’ve ever seen. Not a single print or partial. The spray can is clean. No weapon. No wits.”
“Sharkey had a crew, used to stay at a motel near the Boulevard until today, but he wasn’t into gangs,” Bosch said. “It’s in the files. He was a scammer. You know, with the Polaroids, rolling homosexuals, stuff like that.”
“You’re saying he’s in the gang files but he isn’t in a gang?”
“Right.”
Edgar nodded and said, “He still could’ve been taken down by somebody who thought he was a gangbanger.”
Wish walked over to them then but said nothing.
“You know this isn’t a gang thing, Jed,” Bosch said.
“I do?”
“Yeah, you do. If it was, there wouldn’t be a full can of paint in there. No gangbanger’s going to leave something like that behind. Also, whoever painted the wall in there didn’t have the touch. The paint ran. Whoever did it, didn’t know about spraying a wall.”
“Come here a sec,” Edgar said.
Bosch looked at Eleanor and nodded that it was okay. He and Edgar walked away a few steps and stood near the crime scene tape.
“What did this kid tell you, and how come he was running around loose if he’s part of the case?” he asked.
Bosch told him the basics of the story, that they didn’t know if Sharkey was important to the case. But somebody apparently did or couldn’t risk waiting to find out. As Bosch spoke he looked up over the hills and saw the first light of dawn outlining the tall palms at the top. Edgar took a step away and tilted his head up that way, too. But he wasn’t looking at the sky. His eyes were closed. He eventually turned back to Bosch.
“Harry, you know what this weekend is?” he said. “It’s Memorial Day weekend. It’s the biggest three-day showing weekend of the year. Start of the summer season. Last year I sold four houses on this weekend, made almost as much as I made all year as a cop.”
Bosch was confused by the sudden departure in the conversation. “What are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is … I’m not going to be busting my ass on this case. It isn’t going to fuck up my weekend like the last one. So, what I’m saying is if you want it, I’ll go to Pounds and tell him you and the FBI want to take it ’cause it goes with the one you are already working. Otherwise, I’m going to work it strictly as a nine-to-five.”
“You tell Pounds whatever you want, Jed. It’s not my call.”
Bosch started back toward Eleanor, and Edgar said, “Just one thing. Who knew you had found the kid?”
Bosch stopped and looked at Eleanor. Without turning around, he said, “We took him off the street. We interviewed him over on Wilcox. The reports went to the bureau. What do you want me to say, Jed?”
“Nothing,” Edg
ar said. “But, Harry, maybe you and the FBI there should have looked out for your witness a little better. Maybe saved me some time and that boy some life.”
Bosch and Wish walked silently back to the car. Once inside Bosch said, “Who knew?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“What he asked back there, who knew about Sharkey?”
She thought for a moment. Then said, “On my end, Rourke gets the daily summary reports, and he got the memo on hypnosis. The summaries go to records and are copied to the senior special agent. The tape from the interview that you gave me is locked in my desk. Nobody’s heard that. It hasn’t been transcribed. So, I guess anyone could have seen the summaries. But don’t even think about that, Harry. Nobody …It can’t be.”
“Well, they knew we found the kid and he might be important. What’s that tell you? They’ve got to have somebody on the inside.”
“Harry, that’s speculation. It could have been a lot of things. Like you told him, we picked him up on the street. Anybody could have been watching. His own friends, that girl, anybody could have put out the word that we were looking for Sharkey.”
Bosch thought about Lewis and Clarke. They must have seen them pick up Sharkey. What part were they playing? Nothing made sense.
“Sharkey was a tough little bastard,” he said. “You think he just went walking with somebody into that tunnel? I think he didn’t have a choice. And to do that, it maybe took somebody with a badge.”
“Or maybe somebody with money. You know he’d go with somebody if there was money in it.”
She didn’t start the car and they sat in it thinking. Bosch finally said, “Sharkey was a message.”
“What?”
“A message to us. See? They leave my card with him. They call it in on a no-trace line. And they do him in a tunnel. They want us to know they did it. They want us to know they’ve got somebody inside. They’re laughing at us.”
The Harry Bosch Novels Page 23