The Last Coyote

by Michael Connelly

  “Now it’s not. Now it’s a smoking car.”

  “Bosch, you’re really fucked, you know that?”

  “Write me up, kid. Add it to the association beef your boss is working on. I don’t care.”

  They were silent for a few moments and the car crept further away from Hollywood.

  “He’s bluffing you, Bosch. I thought you knew that.”

  “How so?”

  He was surprised that Toliver was turning.

  “He’s just bluffing, that’s all. He’s still hot about what you did with that table. But he knows it won’t stick. It’s an old case. Voluntary manslaughter. A domestic violence case. She walked on five years probation. All you have to do is say you didn’t know and it gets shitcanned.”

  Bosch could almost guess what the case was about. She had practically told him during true confessions. She stayed too long with someone. That was what she had said. He thought of the painting he had seen in her studio. The gray portrait with the highlights red like blood. He tried to pull his mind away from it.

  “Why’re you telling me this, Toliver? Why are you going against your own?”

  “Because they’re not my own. Because I want to know what you meant by what you said to me in the hallway.”

  Bosch couldn’t even remember what he said.

  “You told me it wasn’t too late. Too late for what?”

  “Too late to get out,” Bosch said, recalling the words he had thrown as a taunt. “You’re still a young guy. You better get yourself out of IAD before it’s too late. You stay too long and you’ll never get out. Is that what you want, spend your career busting cops for trading hookers dime bags?”

  “Look, I want to work out of Parker and I don’t want to wait ten years like everybody else. It’s the easiest and fastest way for a white guy to get in there.”

  “It’s not worth it, is what I’m telling you. Anybody stays in IAD more than two, three years, they’re there for life because nobody else wants ’em, nobody else trusts ’em. They’re lepers. You better think about it. Parker Center isn’t the only place in the world to work.”

  A few moments of silence passed as Toliver tried to muster a defense.

  “Somebody’s got to police the police. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that.”

  “That’s right. But in this department nobody polices the police who police the police. Think about that.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the sharp tone he recognized as his mobile phone. On the back seat of the car were the items the searchers had taken from his apartment. Irving had ordered it all returned. Among them was his briefcase and inside it he heard his phone. He reached back, flipped the briefcase open and grabbed the phone.

  “Yeah. It’s Bosch.”

  “Bosch, it’s Russell.”

  “Hey, I got nothing to tell you yet, Keisha. I’m still working on it.”

  “No, I have something to tell you. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the soup. The 101 coming up to Barham, my exit.”

  “Well, I have to talk to you, Bosch. I’m writing a story for tomorrow. You will want to comment, I think, if only in your defense.”

  “My defense?”

  A dull thud went through him and he felt like saying, What now? But he held himself in check.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you read my story today?”

  “No, I haven’t had the time. What—”

  “It’s about the death of Harvey Pounds. Today I have a follow…It concerns you, Bosch.”

  Jesus, he thought. But he tried to keep calm. He knew that if she detected any panic in his voice she would gain confidence in whatever it was she was about to write. He had to convince her she had bad information. He had to undermine that confidence. Then he realized Toliver was sitting next to him and would hear everything he said.

  “I have a problem talking now. When is your deadline?”

  “Now. We have to talk now.”

  Bosch looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes until six.

  “You can go to six, right?”

  He’d worked with reporters before and knew that was the deadline for the Times’s first edition.

  “No, I can’t go to six. If you want to say something, say it now.”

  “I can’t. Give me fifteen minutes and then call back. I can’t talk now.”

  There was a pause and then she said, “Bosch, I can’t push it far past then. You better be able to talk then.”

  They were at the Barham exit now and they’d be up to his house in ten minutes.

  “Don’t worry about it. In the meantime, you go warn your editor that you might be pulling the story.”

  “I will not.”

  “Look, Keisha, I know what you’re going to ask me about. It’s a plant and it’s wrong. You have to trust me. I’ll explain in fifteen minutes.”

  “How do you know it’s a plant?”

  “I know. It came from Angel Brockman.”

  He flipped the phone closed and looked over at Toliver.

  “See, Toliver? Is that what you want to do with your job? With your life?”

  Toliver said nothing.

  “When you get back, you can tell your boss that he can shove tomorrow’s Times up his ass. There isn’t going to be any story. See, even the reporters don’t trust IAD guys. All I had to do was mention Brockman. She’ll start backpedaling when I tell her I know what’s going on. Nobody trusts you guys, Jerry. Get out of it.”

  “Oh, and like everybody trusts you, Bosch.”

  “Not everybody. But I can sleep at night and I’ve been on the job twenty years. Think you’ll be able to? What have you got in, five, six years? I’ll give you ten, Jerry. That’s all for you. Ten and out. But you’ll look like one of these guys who puts in thirty.”

  His prediction was met with a stony silence from Toliver. Bosch didn’t know why he even cared. Toliver was part of the team trying to put him in the dirt. But something about the young cop’s fresh face gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  They made the last curve on Woodrow Wilson and Bosch could see his house. He could also see a white car with a yellow plate parked in front of it and a man wearing a yellow construction helmet standing in front holding a toolbox. It was the city building inspector. Gowdy.

  “Shit,” Bosch said. “This one of IAD’s tricks, too?”

  “I don’t—if it is, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Without a further word Toliver stopped in front of the house and Bosch got out with his returned property. Gowdy recognized him and immediately came over as Toliver pulled away from the curb.

  “Listen, you’re not living in this place, are ya?” Gowdy asked. “It’s been red-tagged. We gotta call said somebody bootlegged the electric.”

  “I gotta call, too. See anybody? I was just going to check it out.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Bosch. I can see you’ve made some repairs. You gotta know something, you can’t repair this place, you can’t even go in. You gotta demolition order and it’s overdue. I’m gonna put in a work order and have a city contractor do it. You’ll get the bill. No use waitin’ any longer. Now, you might as well get out of here because I’m going to pull the electric and padlock it.”

  He bent down to put the toolbox on the ground and proceeded to open it up and retrieve a set of stainless steel hinges and hasp locks he would apply to the doors.

  “Look, I’ve got a lawyer,” Bosch said. “He’s trying to work it out with you people.”

  “There’s nothing to work out. I’m sorry. Now if you go in there again, you’re subject to arrest. If I find these locks have been tampered with, you’re also subject to arrest. I’ll call North Hollywood Division. I’m not fooling with you anymore.”

  For the first time it occurred to Bosch that it might be a show, that the man might want money. He probably didn’t even know Bosch was a cop. Most cops couldn’t afford to live u
p here and wouldn’t want to if they could. The only reason Bosch could afford it was he had bought the property with a chunk of money he had made years earlier on a TV movie deal based on a case he had solved.

  “Look, Gowdy,” he said, “just spell it out, okay? I’m slow about these things. Tell me what you want and you’ve got it. I want to save the house. That’s all I care about.”

  Gowdy looked at him for a long moment and Bosch realized he had been wrong. He could see the indignation in Gowdy’s eyes.

  “You keep talking like that and you could go to jail, son. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to forget what you just said. I—”

  “Look, I’m sorry…” Bosch looked back at the house. “It’s just like, I don’t know, the house is the only thing I’ve got.”

  “You’ve got more than that. You just haven’t thought about it. Now, I’m going to cut you a break here. I’ll give you five minutes to go inside and get what you need. After that, I’m putting the locks on it. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is. If that house goes down the hill on the next one, maybe you’ll thank me.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Go on. Five minutes.”

  Bosch went inside and grabbed a suitcase from the top shelf of the hallway closet. First he put his second gun in it, then he dumped in as much of the clothing from the bedroom closet as he could. He walked the overstuffed suitcase out to the carport, then came back inside for another load. He opened the drawers of his bureau and dumped them on the bed, then wrapped everything in the bedclothes and carried that out as well.

  He went past the five-minute mark but Gowdy didn’t come in after him. Bosch could hear him working with a hammer on the front door.

  After ten minutes he had a large stack of belongings gathered in the carport. Included there was the box in which he kept his keepsakes and photos, a fireproof box containing his financial and personal records, a stack of unopened mail and unpaid bills, the stereo and two boxes containing his collection of jazz and blues LPs and CDs. Looking at the pile of belongings, he felt forlorn. It was a lot to fit into a Mustang, but he knew it wasn’t much to show for almost forty-five years on the planet.

  “That it?”

  Bosch turned around. It was Gowdy. He was holding a hammer in one hand and a steel latch in the other. Bosch saw a keyed lock was hooked through one of the belt loops on his pants.

  “Yeah,” Bosch said. “Do it.”

  He stepped back and let the inspector go to work. The hammering had just begun when his phone rang. He had forgotten about Keisha Russell.

  He had the phone in his jacket pocket instead of his briefcase now. He took it out and flipped it open.

  “Yeah, it’s Bosch.”

  “Detective, it’s Dr. Hinojos.”

  “Oh…Hi.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, uh, yeah, I was expecting somebody else. I’ve got to keep this line open for a few minutes. I’ve got a call coming in. Can I call you back?”

  Bosch looked at his watch. It was five minutes until six.

  “Yes,” Hinojos said. “I’ll be at the office until six-thirty. I want to talk to you about something, and to see how you fared on the sixth floor after I left.”

  “I’m fine, but I’ll call you back.”

  As soon as he flipped the phone closed, it rang again in his hand.

  “Bosch.”

  “Bosch, I’m up against it and don’t have time for bullshit.” It was Russell. She also didn’t have time to identify herself. “The story is that the investigation into the killing of Harvey Pounds has turned inward and detectives spent several hours with you today. They searched your home and they believe you are the prime suspect.”

  “Prime suspect? We don’t even use those words, Keisha. Now I know you’re talking to one of those squints in IAD. They wouldn’t know how to run a homicide investigation if the doer came up and bit them on their shiny ass.”

  “Don’t try to deflect what we’re talking about here. It’s really simple. Do you or don’t you have a comment on the story for tomorrow’s paper? If you want to say something, I have just enough time to get it in the first run.”

  “On the record, I have no comment.”

  “And off?”

  “Off the record, not for attribution or any use at all, I can tell you that you’re full of shit, Keisha. Your story is wrong. Flat-out wrong. If you run it as you have just summarized it for me, you will have to write another one tomorrow correcting it. It will say I am not a suspect at all. Then, after that, you’ll have to find another beat to cover.”

  “And why is that?” she asked haughtily.

  “Because this is a smear orchestrated by Internal Affairs. It’s a plant. And when it is read tomorrow by everybody else in the department they’ll know it is and they’ll know you fell for it. They won’t trust you. They’ll think you’re just a front for people like Brockman. No one that it is important for you to have a source relationship with will want to have that relationship with you. Including me. You’ll be left covering the police commission and rewriting the press releases out of media relations. And then, of course, whenever Brockman wants to cream somebody else, he’ll pick up the phone and call.”

  There was silence on the line. Bosch looked up at the sky and saw it turning pink with the start of sunset. He looked at his watch. It was one minute until her deadline.

  “You there, Keisha?”

  “Bosch, you’re scaring me.”

  “You should be scared. You got about a minute to make a big decision.”

  “Let me ask you this. Did you attack Pounds two weeks ago and throw him through a window?”

  “On or off the record?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just need an answer. Quick!”

  “Off the record, that’s more or less accurate.”

  “Well, that would seem to make you a suspect in his death. I don’t see—”

  “Keisha, I’ve been out of the state for three days. I got back today. Brockman brought me in and talked to me for less than an hour. My story checked and I was kicked free. I’m not a suspect. I’m talking to you from the front of my house. You hear that hammering? That’s my house. I’ve got a carpenter here. Are prime suspects allowed to go home at night?”

  “How can I confirm all of this?”

  “Today? You can’t. You’ve got to pick. Brockman or me. Tomorrow, you can call Assistant Chief Irving and he’ll confirm—if he is willing to talk to you.”

  “Shit! Bosch, I can’t believe this. If I go to my editor at deadline and tell him a story that they had budgeted for the front page since the three o’clock meeting is not a story…I might be looking for a new beat and a new paper to cover it for.”

  “There’s other news in the world, Keisha. They can find something for the front page. This will pay off for you in the long run, anyway. I’ll spread the word about you.”

  There was a brief silence while she made her decision.

  “I can’t talk. I have to get in there and grab him. Good-bye, Bosch. I hope I’m still working here the next time we talk.”

  She was gone before he could say good-bye.

  He walked up the street to the Mustang and drove it down to the house. Gowdy had finished with the latches and both doors now had locks on them. The inspector was out at his car using the front hood as a desk. He was writing on a clipboard and Bosch guessed he was moving slowly so as to make sure Bosch left the property. Bosch started loading his pile of belongings into the Mustang. He didn’t know where he was going to take himself.

  He put the thought of his homelessness aside and began thinking about Keisha Russell. He wondered if she would be able to stop the story so late in the game. It had probably taken on a life of its own. Like a monster in the newspaper’s computer. And she, its Dr. Frankenstein, would likely have little power over stopping it.

  When he had everything in the Mustang, he waved a salute to Gowdy, got in and drove down the hill. Down at Cahuenga he
didn’t know which way to turn because he still didn’t know where he should go. To the right was Hollywood. To the left was the Valley. Then he remembered the Mark Twain. In Hollywood, only a few blocks from the station on Wilcox, the Mark Twain was an old residence hotel with efficiencies that were generally clean and neat—a lot more so than the surrounding neighborhood. Bosch knew this because he had stashed witnesses there on occasion. He also knew that there were a couple of units that were two-room efficiencies with private baths. He decided he would go for one of them and turned right. The phone rang almost as soon as he had made the decision. It was Keisha Russell.