The Black Ice (1993)

by Michael Connelly

  In the photos after that, the other boy never appeared again. These were color shots taken in Los Angeles. Bosch recognized City Hall shooting up in the background of one of them and the fountain in Echo Park in another. Moore and his mother had come to the United States. Whoever the other boy was, he had been left behind.

  Toward the end of the stack, the mother dropped out of the photos as well. Harry wondered if that meant she was dead. The final two pictures were of Moore as an adult. The first was his graduation from the police academy. There was a shot of a class of newly sworn officers gathered on the grass outside what was later renamed the Daryl F. Gates Auditorium. They were throwing their hats into the air. Bosch picked Moore out of the crowd. He had his arm around the shoulder of another probee and there was genuine joy in his face.

  And the last photo was of Moore in dress uniform pulling a young Sylvia close in a smiling cheek-to-cheek embrace. Her skin was smoother then, her eyes brighter and her hair longer and fuller. But she was still very much the same as now, still a beautiful woman.

  He pushed the photographs back into the bag and put it on the couch next to him. He looked at the bag and was curious why the photos had never been mounted in an album or put on display. They were just glimpses of a lifetime kept in a bag and ready to go.

  But he knew the reason. At his home he had stacks of his own pictures that he would never mount in a book, that he felt the need to hold when he looked at them. They were more than pictures of another time. They were parts of a life, a life that could not go forward without knowing and understanding what was behind.

  Bosch reached up to the lamp and turned it off. He smoked another cigarette, the glow of its tip floating in the dark. He thought about Mexico and Calexico Moore.

  “You fucked up,” he whispered again.

  He had told himself he had to come here to get a feel for Moore. That was how he had sold it to himself. But sitting there in the dark he knew there was more to it. He knew he had come because he wanted to understand a life’s course that could not be explained. The only one with all the answers to all of the questions was Cal Moore. And he was gone.

  He looked at the white neon glow on the curtains across the room and they looked like ghosts to him. It made him think of the worn photo of the father and son, fading to white. He thought of his own father, a man he never knew and did not meet until he was on his death bed. By then it had been too late for Bosch to change his own life’s course.

  He heard a key hit the dead bolt on the other side of the front door. He was up, with his gun out, moving quickly across the room to the hallway. He went into the bedroom first but then went back into the hall and into the bathroom because it afforded a better view of the living room. He dropped his cigarette into the toilet and heard it hiss as it died.

  He heard the front door open and then a few seconds of silence. Then a light went on in the living room and he stepped back into the dark recesses of his hiding spot. In the medicine cabinet mirror he saw Sylvia Moore standing in the middle of the living room looking around as if it was her first time in the apartment. Her eyes fell on the white bag on the couch and she picked it up. Bosch watched her as she looked through the photographs. She lingered over the last one. It was the one of her. She held her hand to her cheek as if charting the changes of time.

  When she was done, she put the photographs back in the bag and placed it back on the couch. She then started for the hallway and Bosch moved further back, silently stepping into the bathtub. Now a light came from the bedroom and he heard the closet door open. Hangers scraping on the bar. Bosch holstered his gun and then stepped out of the tub and the bathroom and into the hallway.

  “Mrs. Moore? Sylvia?” he called from the hall, unsure how to get her attention without scaring her.

  “Who’s that?” came the high-pitched, frightened reply.

  “It’s me, Detective Bosch. It’s okay.”

  She came out of the bedroom closet then, the fright wide in her eyes. She carried the hanger with her dead husband’s dress uniform on it.

  “Jesus, you scared me. What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  She held the uniform up in front of her as if Bosch had walked in on her while she was undressed. She took one step back toward the bedroom door.

  “You followed me?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “No, I didn’t follow you. I was already here.”

  “In the dark?”

  “Yes. I was thinking. When I heard somebody opening the door I went into the bathroom. Then when I saw it was you, I didn’t know how to come out without scaring you. Sorry. You scared me. I scared you.”

  She nodded once, seeming to accept his explanation. She was wearing a light blue denim shirt and unbleached blue jeans. Her hair was tied behind her head and she wore earrings made of a pinkish crystal. Her left ear had a second earring. It was a silver crescent moon with a star hooked on its bottom point. She put on a polite smile. Bosch became aware that he had not shaved in a day.

  “Did you think it was the killer?” she said when he said nothing else. “Kind of like coming back to the scene of the crime?”

  “Maybe. Something like that. . . Actually, no, I don’t know what I thought. This isn’t the scene of the crime, anyway.”

  He nodded toward the uniform she carried.

  “I have to take this by McEvoy Brothers tomorrow.”

  She must have read the frown on his face.

  “It’s a closed-casket service. Obviously. But I think he would’ve liked it this way, wearing the dress blues. Mr. McEvoy asked me if I had it.”

  Harry nodded. They were still in the hallway. He backed out into the living room and she followed.

  “What do you hear from the department? How are they going to handle it? The funeral, I mean.”

  “Who knows? But as of now, they are saying he went down in the line of duty.”

  “So he’s going to get the show.”

  “I think so.”

  A hero’s farewell, Bosch thought. The department wasn’t into self-flagellation. It wasn’t going to announce to the world that a bad cop was put down by the bad people he had done bad things for. Not unless it had to. And not when it could throw a hero’s funeral at the media and then sit back and watch sympathetic stories on seven different channels that night. The department needed all the sympathy it could get.

  He also realized that a line-of-duty death meant the widow would get full pension rights. If Sylvia Moore wore a black dress, dabbed at her eyes with a tissue at appropriate times and kept her mouth shut, she’d get her husband’s paycheck for the rest of her life. Not a bad deal. Either way. If Sylvia was the one who tipped IAD, she now stood to lose the pension if she pressed it or went public. The department could claim Cal had been killed because of his extracurricular activities. No pension. Bosch was sure this didn’t have to be explained to her.

  “So when’s the funeral?” he asked.

  “It’s Monday at one. At the San Fernando Mission Chapel. The burial is at Oakwood, up in Chatsworth.”

  Well, Bosch thought, if they are going to put on the show, that’s the place to do it. A couple hundred motor cops coming in in procession on curving Valley Circle Boulevard always made a good front-page photo.

  “Mrs. Moore, why did you come here at”—he looked at his watch; it was 10:45—“so late to get your husband’s dress blues?”

  “Call me Sylvia.”

  “Sure.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know why now. I haven’t been sleeping—I mean at all—since it . . . since he was found. I don’t know. I just felt like taking a drive. I just got the key to the place today, anyway.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “Assistant Chief Irving. He came by, said they were through with the apartment and if there was anything I wanted I could take it. Trouble is, there isn’t. I had hoped I’d never see this place. Then the man at the funeral home calle
d and said he needed the dress uniform if I had it. Here I am.”

  Bosch picked the bag of photographs up off the couch and held it out to her.

  “What about these? Do you want them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ever see them before?”

  “I think some of them. At least, some of them seemed familiar. Some of them I know I never saw.”

  “Why do you think that is? A man keeps photographs his whole life and never shows some of them to his wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Strange.” He opened the bag and while he was looking through the photos said, “What happened to his mother, do you know?”

  “She died. Before I knew him. Had a tumor in her head. He was about twenty, he said.”

  “What about his father?”

  “He told me he was dead. But I told you, I don’t know if that was true. Because he never said how or when. When I asked, he said he didn’t want to talk about it. We never did.”

  Bosch held up the photo of the two boys on the picnic table.

  “Who’s this?”

  She stepped close to him and looked at the photo. He studied her face. He saw flecks of green in her brown eyes. There was a light scent of perfume.

  “I don’t know who it is. A friend, I guess.”

  “He didn’t have a brother?”

  “Not one he ever told me about. He told me when we got married, he said I was his only family. He said . . . said he was alone except for me.”

  Now Bosch looked at the photo.

  “Kinda looks like him to me.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What about the tattoo?”

  “What about it?”

  “He ever tell you where he got it, what it means?”

  “He told me he got it in the village he grew up in. He was a boy. Actually, it was a barrio. I guess. They called it Saints and Sinners. That’s what the tattoo means. Saints and Sinners. He said that was because the people that lived there didn’t know which they were, which they would be.”

  He thought of the note found in Cal Moore’s back pocket. I found out who I was. He wondered if she realized the significance of this in terms of the place he grew up. Where each young boy had to find out who he was. A saint or a sinner.

  Sylvia interrupted his thoughts.

  “You know, you didn’t really say why you were already here. Sitting in the dark thinking. You had to come here to do that?”

  “I came to look around, I guess. I was trying to shake something loose, get a feel for your husband. That sound stupid?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Good.”

  “And did you? Did you shake something loose?”

  “I don’t know yet. Sometimes it takes a little while.”

  “You know, I asked Irving about you. He said you weren’t on the case. He said you only came out the other night because the other detectives had their hands full with the reporters and . . . and the body.”

  Like a schoolboy, Bosch felt a tingling of excitement. She had asked about him. It didn’t matter that now she knew he was freelancing on the case, she had made inquiries about him.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s true, to a degree. Technically, I am not on the case. But I have other cases that are believed to be tied in with the death of your husband.”

  Her eyes never left his. He could see she wanted to ask what cases but she was a cop’s wife. She knew the rules. In that moment he was sure she did not deserve what she had been handed. None of it.

  He said, “It really wasn’t you, was it? The tip to IAD. The letter.”

  She shook her head no.

  “But they won’t believe you. They think you started the whole thing.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What did Irving say? When he gave you the key to this place.”

  “Told me that if I wanted the money, the pension, I should let it go. Not get any ideas. As if I did. As if I cared anymore. I don’t. I knew that Cal went wrong. I don’t know what he did, I just knew he did it. A wife knows without being told. And that as much as anything else ended it between us. But I didn’t send any letter like that. I was a cop’s wife to the end. I told Irving and the guy who came before him that they had it wrong. But they didn’t care. They just wanted Cal.”

  “You told me before it was Chastain who came?”

  “It was him.”

  “What exactly did he want? You said something about he wanted to look inside the house.”

  “He held up the letter and said he knew I wrote it. He said I might as well tell him everything. Well, I told him I didn’t write it and I told him to get out. But at first he wouldn’t leave.”

  “What did he say he wanted, specifically?”

  “He—I don’t really remember it all. He wanted bank account statements and he wanted to know what properties we had. He thought I was sitting there waiting for him to come so I could give him my husband. He said he wanted the typewriter and I told him we didn’t even have one. I pushed him out and closed the door.”

  He nodded and tried to compute these facts into those he already had. It was too much of a whirlwind.

  “You don’t remember anything about what the letter said?”

  “I didn’t really get the chance to read it. He didn’t show it to me to read because he thought—and he and the others still believe—that it came from me. So I only read a little before he put it back in his briefcase. It said something about Cal being a front for a Mexican. It said he was giving protection. It said something along the lines that he had made a Faustian pact. You know what this is, right? A deal with the devil.”

  Bosch nodded. He was reminded that she was a teacher. He also realized that they had been standing in the living room for at least ten minutes. But he made no move to sit down. He feared that any sudden movement would break the spell, send her out the door and away from him.

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have gotten so allegorical if I had written it, but essentially that letter was correct. I mean, I didn’t know what he had done but I knew something happened. I could see it was killing him inside.

  “Once—this was before he left—I finally asked him what was happening and he just said he had made a mistake and he would try to correct it himself. He wouldn’t talk about it with me. He shut me out.”

  She sat down on the edge of an upholstered chair, holding the dress blues on her lap. The chair was an awful green color and there were cigarette burns on its right arm. Bosch sat down on the couch next to the bag of photos.

  She said, “Irving and Chastain. They don’t believe me. They just nod their heads when I tell them. They say the letter had too many intimate details. It had to be me. Meanwhile, I guess somebody is happy out there. Their little letter brought him down.”

  Bosch thought of Kapps and wondered if he could have known enough details about Moore to have written the letter. He had set up Dance. Maybe he had tried to set up Moore first. It seemed unlikely. Maybe the letter had come from Dance because he wanted to move up the ladder and Moore was in the way.

  Harry thought of the coffee can he had seen in the kitchen cabinet and wondered if he should ask her if she wanted some. He didn’t want the time with her to end. He wanted to smoke but didn’t want to risk having her ask him not to.

  “Do you want any coffee? There is some in the kitchen I could make.”

  She looked toward the kitchen as if its location or cleanliness had a role in her answer. Then she said no, she wasn’t planning to stay that long.

  “I am going to Mexico tomorrow,” Bosch said.

  “Mexicali?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the other cases?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he told her about them. About black ice and Jimmy Kapps and Juan Doe #67. And he told her of the ties to both her husband and Mexicali. It was there he hoped to unravel the whirlwind.

  He finished the story by saying, �
��As you can tell, people like Irving, they want this to go by. They don’t really care who killed Cal because he had crossed. They write him off like a bad debt. They are not going to pursue it because they don’t want it to blow up in their faces. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I was a cop’s wife, remember?”

  “Right. So you know. The thing about this is I care. Your husband was putting a file together for me. A file on black ice. It makes me think like maybe he was trying to do something good. He might have been trying to do the impossible. To cross back. It might’ve been what got him killed. And if it is, then I’m not letting it go by.”