Chapter Seventeen
CARMEN HINOJOS was in her waiting room when Bosch got there a few minutes late. She ushered him in and waved off his apology for lateness as if it was unnecessary. She wore a dark blue suit and as he passed her in the doorway he smelled a light soapy fragrance. He took the seat on the right side of the desk near the window again.
Hinojos smiled and Bosch wondered why. There were two chairs on the other side of the desk from her. So far, in three meetings, he had taken the same one each time. The one closest to the window. He wondered if she had taken note of this and what, if anything, it meant.
“Are you tired?” she asked. “You don’t look like you got much sleep last night.”
“I guess I didn’t. But I’m fine.”
“Have you changed your mind about anything we discussed yesterday?”
“No, not really.”
“You are continuing this private investigation?”
“For now.”
She nodded in a way that told him she expected his reply.
“I want to talk about your mother today.”
“Why? It’s got nothing to do with why I’m here, why I’m on leave.”
“I think it’s important. I think it will help us get to what is happening with you, what has made you take on this private investigation of yours. It might explain a lot about your recent actions.”
“I doubt it. What do you want to know?”
“When you spoke yesterday, you made several references to her lifestyle, but you never really came out and said what she did, what she was. Thinking about it after the session, I was wondering if you have trouble accepting what she was. To the point of not being able to say she—”
“Was a prostitute? There, I said it. She was a prostitute. I’m a grown man, Doctor. I accept the truth. I accept the truth in anything as long as it’s the truth. I think you’re going far afield here.”
“Perhaps. What do you feel about her now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anger? Hatred? Love?”
“I don’t think about it. Certainly not hate. I loved her at the time. After she was gone that didn’t change.”
“What about abandonment?”
“I’m too old for that.”
“What about back then? Back when it happened.”
Bosch thought a moment.
“I’m sure there was some of that. Her lifestyle, her line of work, got her killed. And I was left behind the fence. I guess I was mad about that and felt abandoned. I was also hurt. The hurt was the worst part. She loved me.”
“What do you mean, left behind the fence?”
“I told you yesterday. I was in McClaren, the youth hall.”
“Right. So her death prevented you from leaving there, correct?”
“For a while.”
“How long?”
“I was there on and off until I was sixteen. I lived a few months two different times with some fosters but I always got sent back. Then, when I was sixteen, another couple took me. I was with them until I was seventeen. I found out later that they kept getting the DPSS checks for a year after I’d split.”
“DPSS?”
“Department of Public Social Services. Now they call it the Division of Youth Services. Anyway, when you took a kid into your home as foster parents, you got a monthly support payment. A lot of people took kids in just for those checks. I’m not saying these people did, but they never told DPSS I wasn’t in their home anymore after I left.”
“I understand. Where were you?”
“Vietnam.”
“Wait a minute, let’s go back. You said that two different times before this you lived with foster parents but were then sent back. What happened? Why were you sent back?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t like me. They said it wasn’t working out. I went back into the dorms behind the fence and waited. I think getting rid of a teenage boy was about as easy as selling a car with no wheels. The fosters always wanted the younger ones.”
“Did you ever run away from the hall?”
“A couple times. I always got caught in Hollywood.”
“If placing teenagers was so difficult, how did it happen to you the third time, when you were even older, sixteen?”
Bosch laughed falsely and shook his head.
“You’ll get a kick out of this. I was chosen by this guy and his wife because I was left-handed.”
“Left-handed? I don’t follow.”
“I was a lefty and I could throw a pretty good fastball.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, Jesus, it was—see, Sandy Koufax was with the Dodgers then. He was a lefty and I guess they were paying him about a zillion bucks a year to pitch. This guy, the foster, his name was Earl Morse, he had played semipro baseball or something and never really made it. So, he wanted to create a left-handed major league prospect. Good left-handers were pretty rare back then, I guess. Or he thought that. Anyway, they were the hot commodity. Earl thought he’d grab some kid with some potential, slap him into shape and then be his manager or agent or something when it came to contract time. He saw it as his way back into the game. It was crazy. But I guess he’d seen his own big league dream crash and burn. So he came out to McClaren and took a bunch of us into the field for a catch. We had a team, we played other halls, sometimes the schools in the Valley let us play them. Anyway, Earl took us out to throw the ball around and it was a tryout but none of us knew it at the time. It didn’t even enter my mind what was going on until later. Anyway, he glommed on to me when he saw I was a lefty and could throw. He forgot the others like they were last season’s program.”
Bosch shook his head again at the memory.
“What happened? You went with him?”
“Yeah. I went with him. There was a wife, too. She never said much to me or him. He used to make me throw a hundred balls a day at a tire hanging in the back yard. Then every night he’d have these coaching sessions. I put up with it for about a year and then I split.”
“You ran away?”
“Sort of. I joined the Army. I had to get Earl to sign for me, though. At first he wouldn’t do it. He had major league plans for me. But then I told him I was never going to pick up another baseball as long as I lived. He signed. Then he and the wife kept cashing those DPSS checks while I was overseas. I guess the extra money helped make up for losing the prospect.”
She was quiet for a long time. It looked to Bosch like she was reading her notes but he had not seen her write anything during this session.
“You know,” he said into the silence, “about ten years later, when I was still in patrol, I pulled over a drunk driver coming off the Hollywood Freeway onto Sunset. He was all over the place. When I finally got him over and got up there to the window, I bent over to look in and it was Earl. It was a Sunday. He was coming home from the Dodgers. I saw the program on the seat.”
She looked at him but didn’t say anything. He was looking at the memory still.
“I guess he’d never found that lefty he was looking for…Anyway, he was so drunk he didn’t recognize me.”
“What did you do?”
“Took his keys and called his wife…I guess it was the only break I ever gave the guy.”
She looked back down at the pad while asking her next question.
“What about your real father?”
“What about him?”
“Did you ever know who he was? Did you have any relationship at all?”
“I met him once. I was never curious about it until I came back from overseas. Then I traced it down. Turned out he was my mother’s lawyer. He had a family and all of that. He was dying when I met him, looked like a skeleton…So I never really knew him.”
“His name was Bosch?”
“No. My name was just something she came up with. The painter, you know. She thought L.A. was a lot like his paintings. All the paranoia, the fear. Once she gave me a book that had his paintings in it.”
More silence followed as she thought about this one, too.
“These stories, Harry,” she finally said, “these stories that you tell are heartbreaking in their own way. It makes me see the boy who became the man. It makes me see the depth of the hole left by your mother’s death. You know, you would have a lot to blame her for and no one would blame you for doing it.”
He looked at her pointedly while composing a response.
“I don’t blame her for anything. I blame the man who took her from me. See, these are stories about me. Not her. You can’t get the feel for her. You can’t know her like I did. All I know is that she did all she could to get me out of there. She never stopped telling me that. She never stopped trying. She just ran out of time.”
She nodded, accepting his answer. A few moments passed.
“Did there come a time when she told you what she did…for a living?”
“Not really.”
“How did you know?”
“I can’t remember. I think I really didn’t know for sure what she did until she was gone and I was older. I was ten when they took me away. I didn’t really know why.”
“Did she have men stay with her while you were together?”
“No, that never happened.”
“But you must have had some idea about this life she was leading, that you both were leading.”
“She told me she was a waitress. She worked nights. She used to leave me with a lady who had a room at the hotel. Mrs. DeTorre. She watched four or five kids whose mothers were doing the same thing. None of us knew.”
He finished there but she didn’t say anything and he knew he was expected to continue.
“One night I snuck out when the old lady fell asleep and I walked down to the Boulevard to the coffee shop where she said she worked. She wasn’t in there. I asked and they didn’t know what I was talking about…”
“Did you ask your mother about it?”
“No…The next night I followed her. She left in her waitress uniform and I followed her. She went to her best friend’s place upstairs. Meredith Roman. When they came out, they were both wearing dresses, makeup, the whole thing. Then they both left in a cab and I couldn’t follow them.”
“But you knew.”
“I knew something. But I was like nine or something. How much could I know?”
“What about the charade she followed, dressing every night like a waitress, did that anger you?”
“No. The opposite. I thought that was…I don’t know, there was something noble about her doing that for me. She was protecting me, in a way.”
Hinojos nodded that she saw his point.
“Close your eyes.”
“Close my eyes?”
“Yes, I want you to close your eyes and think back to when you were a boy. Go ahead.”
“What is this?”
“Indulge me. Please.”
Bosch shook his head as if annoyed but did as she asked. He felt stupid.
“Okay.”
“Okay, I want you to tell me a story about your mother. Whatever image or episode with her that you have the clearest in your mind, I want you to tell it to me.”
He thought hard. Images of her passed through and disappeared. Finally, he came to one that stayed.
“Okay.”
“Okay, tell it.”
“It was at McClaren. She had come to visit and we were out at the fence at the ballfield.”
“Why do you remember this story?”
“I don’t know. Because she was there and that always made me feel good, even though we always ended up crying. You should have seen that place on visiting day. Everybody crying…And I remember it, too, because it was near the end. It wasn’t too long after that she was gone. Maybe a few months.”
“Do you remember what you talked about?”
“A lot of stuff. Baseball, she was a Dodgers fan. I remember one of the older kids had taken my new sneakers that she had given me for my birthday. She noticed I didn’t have ’em on and she got pretty mad about it.”
“Why did the older boy take your sneakers?”
“She asked the same thing.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her the kid took my shoes because he could. You see, they could call that place whatever they wanted but basically it was a prison for kids and it had the same societies as a prison has. Your dominant cliques, your submissives, everything.”
“What were you?”
“I don’t know. I pretty much kept to myself. But when some older, bigger kid took my shoes, I was a submissive. It was a way of surviving.”
“Your mother was unhappy about this?”
“Well, yeah, but she didn’t know the score. She wanted to go complain or something. She didn’t know that if she did that it would only make it worse for me there. Then she suddenly did realize what the deal was. She started crying.”
Bosch was silent, picturing the scene perfectly in his mind. He remembered the dampness in the air and the smell of the orange blossoms from the nearby groves.
Hinojos cleared her throat before breaking into his memory.
“What did you do when she started crying?”
“I probably started crying, too. I usually did. I didn’t want her to feel bad but there was a comfort in knowing she knew what was happening to me. Only mothers can do that, you know? Make you feel good when you’re sad…”
Bosch still had his eyes closed and was seeing only the memory.
“What did she tell you?”
“She…she just told me she was going to get me out. She said that her lawyer was going to go to court soon to appeal the custody ruling and the unfit mother finding. She said there were other things she could do, too. The point was, she was getting me out.”
“That lawyer was your father?”
“Yes, but I didn’t know it…Anyway, what I’m saying is that the courts were wrong about her. That’s the thing that bothers me. She was good to me and they didn’t see that…anyway, I remember she promised me that she would do what she had to do, but she would get me out.”
“But she never did.”
“No. Like I said, she ran out of time.”
“I’m sorry.”
Bosch opened his eyes and looked at her.
“So am I.”
Chapter Eighteen
BOSCH HAD PARKED in a public lot off Hill Street. It cost him twelve dollars for his car. He then got onto the 101 and headed north toward the hills. As he drove, he occasionally looked over at the blue box on the seat next to him. But he didn’t open it. He knew that he had to but he would wait for home.
He turned the radio on and listened as the DJ introduced a song by Abbey Lincoln. Bosch had never heard it before but he immediately liked the words and the woman’s smoky voice.
Bird alone, flying high
Flying through a clouded sky
Sending mournful, soulful sounds
Soaring over troubled grounds
After he got to Woodrow Wilson and followed his usual routine of parking a half block away from his home, Bosch brought the box inside and placed it on the dining room table. He lit a cigarette and paced the room, looking down occasionally at the box. He knew what was in it. He had the evidence list from the murder book. But he couldn’t overcome a feeling that by opening the box he was invading some secret privacy, committing a sin that he didn’t understand.
Finally, he took his keys out. There was a small pen knife on the ring and he used it to slice through the red tape that sealed the box. He put the knife down and without thinking about it any further lifted the top off the box.
The victim’s clothes and other belongings were wrapped individually in plastic bags, which Bosch took out of the box one by one and placed on the table. The clear plastic was yellowed but he could see through it. He did not remove anything from the bags but instead just held each piece of evidence up and studied it in its sterile covering.
He opened the murder book to the
evidence list and made sure nothing was missing. It was all there. He held the small bag containing the gold earrings up to the light. They were like frozen tear drops. He put the bag back down and at the bottom of the box he saw the blouse, folded neatly in plastic, the spot of blood exactly where the evidence sheet said it was, on the left breast, about two inches from the center button.
The Last Coyote Page 14