The Last Coyote

by Michael Connelly

  She nodded as if he had scored some point in a game he wasn’t sure how to play.

  “There used to be one that lived in the canyon below my house. I’d see him down there and—”

  “How do you know it was a he? And I think you called the one you saw last night a he. How are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I don’t even know. It’s just a guess.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Um, he—it—lived down there below my house and I used to see him from time to time. After the earthquake it was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. Then I saw this one last night. Something about the mist and the light out there…it looked like its coat was blue. He looked hungry. There is something…they’re kind of sad and threatening at the same time. You know?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Anyway, I thought about him when I got in bed after I got home. That was when I burned my hand. I fell asleep with the cigarette. But before I woke up I had this dream. I mean, I think it was a dream. Maybe like a daydream, like I was still kind of awake. And in it, whatever it was, the coyote was there again. But it was with me. And we were in the canyon or on a hill or something and I wasn’t really sure.”

  He held up his hand.

  “And then I felt the fire.”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  “Well, interpretation of dreams is not something I do often. Frankly, I’m not sure of its value. The real value I think I see in what you just told me was the willingness to tell me. It shows me a one-eighty-degree turn in your approach to these sessions. For what it’s worth, I think it’s clear you identify with the coyote. Perhaps, there are not many policemen like you left and you feel the same threat to your existence or your mission. I don’t really know. But look at your own words. You called them sad and threatening at the same time. Could that be you also?”

  He drank from his cup before answering.

  “I’ve been sad before. But I’ve found comfort in it.”

  They sat in silence for a while, digesting what had been said. She looked at her watch.

  “We still have some time. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Maybe something related to this story?”

  He contemplated the question for a while and took out a cigarette.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “As long as you want. Don’t worry about the time. I want to do this.”

  “You’ve talked about my mission. You told me to think about my mission. And you said the word again just a minute ago.”

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated.

  “What I say here is protected, right?”

  She furrowed her brow.

  “I’m not talking about anything illegal. What I mean is, whatever I tell you in here, you’re not going to tell people, right? It won’t get back to Irving.”

  “No. What you tell me stays right here. That’s an absolute. I told you, I make a single, narrowly focused recommendation for or against return to duty that I give to Assistant Chief Irving. That’s it.”

  He nodded, hesitated again and then made his decision. He would tell her.

  “Well, you were talking about my mission and your mission and so on and, well, I think I’ve had a mission for a long time. Only I didn’t know it, or I mean…I didn’t accept it. I didn’t acknowledge it. I don’t know how to explain it right. Maybe I was afraid or something. I put it off. For a lot of years. Anyway, what I’m telling you is that I’ve accepted it now.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you. Harry, you have to come out and tell me what you’re talking about.”

  He looked down at the gray rug in front of him. He spoke to it because he didn’t know how to say it to her face.

  “I’m an orphan…I never knew my father and my mother was murdered in Hollywood when I was a kid. Nobody…there never was any arrest made.”

  “You’re looking for her killer, aren’t you?”

  He looked up at her and nodded.

  “That’s my mission right now.”

  She showed no shock on her face, which in turn surprised him. It was as if she expected him to say what he had just said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  BOSCH SAT AT his dining room table with his notebook out and the newspaper clips that Keisha Russell had had a Times intern gather for him sitting in front of him in two separate stacks. One stack for Conklin stories and one for Mittel stories. There was a bottle of Henry’s on the table and through the evening he had been nursing it like cough syrup. The one beer was all he would allow himself. The ashtray, however, was loaded and there was a pall of blue smoke around the table. He had placed no limit on cigarettes. Hinojos had said nothing about smoking.

  She’d had plenty to say about his mission, though. She’d flatly counseled him to stop until he was better emotionally prepared to face what he might find. He told her that he was too far down the road to stop. Then she said something that he kept thinking about as he drove home and it intruded even now.

  “You better think about this and make sure it’s what you want,” she said. “Subconsciously or not, you may have been working toward this all your life. It could be the reason you are who you are. A policeman, a homicide investigator. Resolving your mother’s death could also resolve your need to be a policeman. It could take your drive, your mission, away from you. You have to be prepared for that or you should turn back.”

  Bosch considered what she had said to be true. He knew that all his life it had been there. What had happened to his mother had helped define everything he did after. And it was always there in the dark recesses of his mind. A promise to find out. A promise to avenge. It was never anything that had been spoken aloud or even thought about with much focus. For to have done that was to plan and this was no part of a grand agenda. Still, he was crowded with the feeling that what he was doing was inevitable, something scheduled by an unseen hand a long time ago.

  His mind put Hinojos aside and focused on a memory. He was under the surface of the water, eyes open and looking up toward the light above the pool. Then, the light was eclipsed by a figure standing above, the image murky, a dark angel hovering above. Bosch kicked off the bottom and moved toward the figure.

  Bosch picked up the bottle of beer and finished it in one pull. He tried to concentrate again on the newspaper clips in front of him.

  He had initially been surprised at how many stories there were about Arno Conklin prior to his ascendance to the throne of the district attorney’s office. But as he started to read through them he saw most of the stories were mundane dispatches from trials in which Conklin was the prosecuting attorney. Still, Bosch got somewhat of a feel for the man through the cases he tried and his style as a prosecutor. It was clear that his star rose both in the office and the public’s eyes with a series of highly publicized cases.

  The stories were in chronological order and the first dealt with the successful prosecution in 1953 of a woman who poisoned both her parents and then stored their bodies in trunks in the garage until neighbors complained about the smell to the police a month later. Conklin was quoted at length in several articles on the case. One time he was described as the “dashing deputy district attorney.” The case was one of the early forerunners of the insanity defense. The woman claimed diminished capacity. But judging by the number of articles, there was a public furor over the case and the jury only took a half hour to convict. The defendant received the death penalty and Conklin’s place in the public arena as a champion of public safety, a seeker of justice, was secured. There was a photo of him talking to the reporters after the verdict. The paper’s earlier description of him had him down perfectly. He was a dashing man. He wore a dark three-piece suit, had short blond hair and was clean-shaven. He was lean and tall and had the ruddy, All-American look that actors pay surgeons thousands for. Arno was a star in his own right.

  There wer
e more stories about more murder cases in the clips after that first one. Conklin won every one of them. And he always asked for—and got—the death penalty. Bosch noticed that in the stories from the later fifties, he had been elevated in title to senior deputy district attorney and then by the end of the decade to assistant, one of the top jobs in the office. It was a meteoric rise to have taken place in only a decade.

  There was one report on a press conference in which DA John Charles Stock announced he was placing Conklin in charge of the Special Investigations Unit and charging him with cleaning up the myriad vice problems that threatened the social fabric of Los Angeles County.

  “I’ve always gone to Arno Conklin with the toughest jobs,” the DA said. “And I go to him again. The people of the Los Angeles community want a clean community and, by God, we will have it. To those who know we are coming for you, my advice is, move out. San Francisco will have you. San Diego will have you. But the City of Angels won’t have you!”

  Following that there were several stories spread over a couple of years with splashy headlines about crackdowns on gambling parlors, pipe dens, whorehouses and the street prostitution trade. Conklin worked with a task force of forty cops comprised of loaners from all departments in the county. Hollywood was the main target of “Conklin’s Commandos,” as the Times dubbed the squad, but the scourge of the law came down on wrongdoers all over the county. From Long Beach to the desert, all those who labored for the wages of sin were running scared—at least according to the newspaper articles. Bosch had no doubt that the vice lords Conklin’s Commandos were targeting operated business as usual and that it was only the bottom feeders, the replaceable employees, that were getting the hook.

  The last Conklin story in the stack was on his February 1, 1962, announcement that he would run for the top spot in the district attorney’s office on a campaign of renewed emphasis on ridding the county of the vices that threatened any great society. Bosch noted that part of the stately speech he delivered on the steps of the old downtown courthouse was a well-known police philosophy that Conklin, or his speechwriter, had apparently appropriated as original thought.

  People sometimes say to me, “What’s the big deal, Arno? These are victimless crimes. If a man wants to place a bet or sleep with a woman for money, what’s wrong with that? Where’s the victim?” Well, my friends, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that and who the victim is. We’re the victim. All of us. When we allow this kind of activity to occur, when we simply look the other way, then it weakens us all. Every one of us.

  I look at it this way. These so-called little crimes are each like a broken window in an abandoned house. Doesn’t seem like a big problem, right? Wrong. If nobody fixes that window, pretty soon kids come along and think nobody cares. So they throw a few rocks and break a few more windows. Next, the burglar drives down the street and sees the house and thinks nobody around there cares. So he sets up shop and starts breaking into houses while the owners are at work.

  Next thing you know, another miscreant comes along and steals cars right off the street. And so on and so on. The residents start to see their own neighborhood with different eyes then. They think, Nobody cares anymore, so why should I? They wait an extra month before cutting the grass. They don’t tell the boys hanging on the corner to put the cigarettes out and go back to school. It’s gradual decay, my friends. It happens all across this great country of ours. It sneaks in like weeds in our yard. Well, when I’m district attorney the weeds are coming out by the roots.

  The story ended by reporting that Conklin had chosen a young “firebrand” from his office to manage his campaign. He said that Gordon Mittel would resign from the DA’s office and begin work immediately. Bosch reread the story and immediately became transfixed by something that hadn’t registered during his first read. It was in the second paragraph.

  For the well-known and not-press-shy Conklin, it will be his first run for public office. The 35-year-old bachelor and Hancock Park resident said he has planned the run for a long time and has the backing of retiring DA John Charles Stock, who also appeared at the press conference.

  Bosch turned the pages of his notebook back to the list of names he had written before and wrote “Hancock Park” after Conklin’s name. It wasn’t much but it was a little piece of verification of Katherine Register’s story. And it was enough to get Bosch’s juices going. It made him feel that at least he had a line in the water.

  “Fucking hypocrite,” he whispered to himself.

  He drew a circle around Conklin’s name in the notebook. He absentmindedly kept circling it as he tried to decide what he should do next.

  Marjorie Lowe’s last known destination was a party in Hancock Park. According to Katherine Register, she was more specifically going to meet Conklin. After she was dead, Conklin had called the detectives on the case to make an appointment but any record of the interview, if any occurred, was missing. Bosch knew it was all a general correlation of facts but it served to deepen and solidify the suspicion he had felt from the night he had first looked through the murder book. Something was not right about the case. Something didn’t fit. And the more he thought about it, the more he believed Conklin was the wrong piece.

  He reached into his jacket, which was on the chairback behind him, and took out his small phone book. He took it into the kitchen, where he dialed the home line of Deputy District Attorney Roger Goff.

  Goff was a friend who shared Bosch’s affection for the tenor saxophone. They’d spent many days in court sitting side by side during trials and many nights in jazz bars side by side on stools. Goff was an old-line prosecutor who had been with the office nearly thirty years. He had no political aspirations inside or outside of the office. He just liked his job. He was a rarity because he never tired of it. A thousand deputies had come in, burned out, and gone on to corporate America during Goff’s watch, but he stayed. He now labored in the criminal courts building with prosecutors and public defenders twenty years his junior. But he was still good at it and, more important, still had the fire in his voice when he stood before a jury and called down the outrage of God and society against those in the defendant’s chair. His mixture of tenacity and plain fairness had made him a legend in downtown legal and law enforcement circles. And he was one of the few prosecutors Bosch had unconditional respect for.

  “Roger, Harry Bosch.”

  “Hey, goddamnit, how you doing?”

  “I’m fine. What are you up to?”

  “Watching the tube like everybody else. What’re you doing?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking, you remember Gloria Jeffries?”

  “Glo—shit, of course I do. Let’s see. She’s…yeah, she’s the one with the husband got quaded in the motorcycle accident, right?”

  Recalling the case, it sounded as if he were reading it off one of his yellow tablets.

  “She got tired of caring for him. So one morning he’s in bed and she sits on his face until she smothers him. It was about to go by as a natural but a suspicious detective named Harry Bosch wouldn’t let it go. He came up with a witness who Gloria had told everything to. The clincher, the thing that got the jury, was that she told the wit that when she smothered him, it was the first orgasm the poor devil had ever been able to give her. How is that for a memory?”

  “Damn, you’re good.”

  “So what about her?”

  “She’s raising up at Frontera. Getting ready to. I was wondering if you’d have time to write a letter.”

  “Fuck, already? What was that, three, four years ago?”

  “Almost five. I hear she’s got the book now and goes to the board next month. I’ll write a letter but it’d be good if there was one from the prosecutor, too.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I got a standard in my computer. All I do is change the name and the crime, throw in a few of the gruesome details. The basic line is that the crime was too heinous for parole to be considered at this time. It’s a good letter. I’ll send it out tomo
rrow. It usually works charms.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  “You know, they gotta stop giving the book to those women. They all get religion when they’re coming up. You ever go to one of those hearings?”

  “A couple.”

  “Yeah, sit through a half a day of them if you have the time and aren’t feeling particularly suicidal sometime. They sent me out to Frontera once when one of the Manson girls was up. See, with the big ones like that they send a body out instead of a letter. So, I went out and I sat through about ten of these things waiting for my girl to come up. And let me tell you, everybody’s quoting Corinthians, they’re quoting Revelations, Matthew, Paul, John three-sixteen, John this, John that. And it works! It goddamn works. These old guys on the board eat that shit up. Plus I guess they’re all sitting up there getting thick in their pants having all these women groveling in front of them. Anyway, you got me started, Harry. It’s your fault, not mine.”