The Concrete Blonde (1994)

by Michael Connelly

  Irving was smiling at the memory when Officer Mary Grosso knocked and then walked into the office with a one-inch-thick file in her hand. She placed it on Irving’s glass-topped desk. There was nothing else on its gleaming surface, not even a phone.

  “You were right, Chief. It was still in the actives files.”

  The deputy chief in charge of the Internal Affairs Division leaned forward and said, “Yes, I believe I did not have it transferred to archives because I had a feeling we had not seen the last of Detective Bosch. Let me see, that would be Lewis and Clarke, I believe.”

  He opened the file and read the notations on the inside of the jacket.

  “Yes. Mary, will you have Lewis and Clarke come in, please.”

  “Chief, I saw them in the squad. They were getting ready for a BOR. I’m not sure which case.”

  “Well, Mary, they will have to cancel the Board of Rights—and please do not talk to me in abbreviations. I am a slow-moving, careful policeman. I do not like shortcuts. I do not like abbreviations. You will learn that. Now, tell Lewis and Clarke I want them to delay the hearing and report to me forthwith.”

  He flexed his jaw muscles and held them, hard as tennis balls, at their full width. Grosso scurried from the office. Irving relaxed and paged through the file, reacquainting himself with Harry Bosch. He noted Bosch’s military record and his fast advance through the department. From patrol to detectives to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division in eight years. Then the fall: administrative transfer last year from Robbery-Homicide to Hollywood homicide. Should have been fired, Irving lamented as he studied the entries on Bosch’s career chronology.

  Next, Irving scanned the evaluation report on a psychological given Bosch the year before to determine if he should be allowed to return to duty after killing an unarmed man. The department psychologist wrote:

  Through his war and police experiences, most notably including the aforementioned shooting resulting in fatality, the subject has to a high degree become desensitized to violence. He speaks in terms of violence or the aspect of violence being an accepted part of his day-to-day life, for all of his life. Therefore, it is unlikely that what transpired previously will act as a psychological deterrent should he again be placed in circumstances where he must act with deadly force in order to protect himself or others. I believe he will be able to act without delay. He will be able to pull the trigger. In fact, his conversation reveals no ill effects at all from the shooting, unless his sense of satisfaction with the outcome of the incident—the suspect’s death—should be deemed inappropriate.

  Irving closed the file and tapped it with a manicured nail. He then picked a strand of long brown hair—Officer Mary Grosso’s, he presumed—off the glass desk top and dropped it into a wastebasket next to the desk. Harry Bosch was a problem, he thought. A good cop, a good detective—actually, Irving grudgingly admired his homicide work, particularly his affinity for serial slayers. But in the long run, the deputy chief believed, outsiders did not work well inside the system. Harry Bosch was an outsider, always would be. Not part of the LAPD Family. And now the worst had come to Irving’s attention. Bosch had not only left the family but appeared to be engaged in activities that would hurt the family, embarrass the family. Irving decided that he would have to move swiftly and surely. He swiveled in his chair and looked out the window at City Hall across Los Angeles Street

  . Then his gaze dropped, as it always did, to the marble fountain in front of Parker Center, the memorial to officers killed in the line of duty. There was family, he thought. There was honor. He clenched his teeth powerfully, triumphantly. Just then the door opened.

  Detectives Pierce Lewis and Don Clarke strode into the office and presented themselves. Neither spoke. They could have been brothers. They shared close-cropped brown hair, the arms-splayed build of weight lifters, conservative gray silk suits. Lewis’s had a thin charcoal stripe, Clarke’s maroon. Each man was built wide and low to the ground for better handling. Each had a slightly forward tilt to his body, as if he were wading out to sea, crashing through breakers with his face.

  “Gentlemen,” said Irving, “we have a problem—a priority problem—with an officer who has come across our threshold before. An officer you two worked with some degree of success before.”

  Lewis and Clarke glanced at each other and Clarke allowed himself a small, quick smile. He couldn’t guess who it could be, but he liked going after repeaters. They were so desperate.

  “Harry Bosch,” Irving said. He waited a moment to let the name sink in, then said, “You need to take a little ride up to Hollywood Division. I want to open a one point eighty-one on him right away. Complainant will be the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “FBI?” Lewis said. “What did he do with them?”

  Irving corrected him for using the abbreviation for the bureau and told them to sit down in the two chairs in front of his desk. He spent the next ten minutes recounting the telephone call he had received minutes earlier from the bureau.

  “The bureau says it is too coincidental,” he concluded. “I concur. He may be dirty in this, and the bureau wants him off the Meadows case. At the very least, it appears he intervened to help this suspect, his former military comrade, avoid a jail term last year, possibly so he could accomplish this bank burglary. Whether Bosch knew this, or if there was further involvement in the crime, I do not know. But we are going to find out what Detective Bosch is up to.”

  Irving delayed here to drive home his point with a full jaw flex. Lewis and Clarke knew better than to interrupt. Irving then said, “This opportunity opens the door for the department to do what it was unable to accomplish before with Bosch. Eliminate him. You will report directly to me. Oh, and I want Bosch’s supervisor, a Lieutenant Pounds, copied with your daily reports. On the quiet. But you will do more than copy me. I want telephonic reports twice daily, morning and evening.”

  “We’re on our way,” Lewis said as he stood up.

  “Aim high, gentlemen, but be careful,” Irving counseled them. “Detective Harry Bosch is no longer the celebrity he once was. But, nevertheless, do not let him slip away.”

  Bosch’s embarrassment at being unceremoniously dismissed by Agent Wish had turned to anger and frustration as he rode down the elevator. It was like a physical presence in his chest that jumped into his throat as the stainless steel cell descended. He was alone, and when the pager on his belt started to chirp, he let it go on for its allotted fifteen seconds rather than turn it off. He swallowed his anger and embarrassment and formed it into resolve. As he stepped out of the elevator car, he looked down at the phone number on the pager’s digital display. An 818 area code—the Valley, but he didn’t recognize the number. He stepped to a pod of pay phones in the courtyard in front of the Federal Building and dialed the number. Ninety cents, an electronic voice said. Luckily he had the loose change. He dumped it in and the call was picked up on a half ring by Jerry Edgar.

  “Harry,” he began without a hello, “I’m still up here at the VA and I’m getting the runaround, man. They don’t have any files on Meadows. They say I have to go through D.C. or I gotta get a warrant. I tell them I know there is a file, you know, on account of what you told me. I say, ‘Look, if I was to get a search warrant, can you look and make sure you know where this file is?’ And so they’re lookin’ for a while and what they finally come out saying is, yes, they had a file but it’s gone. Guess who came and got it with a court order last year?”

  “The FBI.”

  “You know something I don’t know?”

  “I haven’t exactly been sitting on my ass. They say when the bureau took it or why?”

  “They weren’t told why. FBI agent just came in with the warrant and took it. Checked it out last September and hasn’t brought it back since. Didn’t give a reason. The Fucking-B-I doesn’t have to.”

  Bosch was quiet while he thought about this. They knew all along. Wish knew about Meadows and the tunnels and everything else he had just tol
d her. It had all been a show.

  “Harry, you there?”

  “Yeah, listen, did they show you a copy of the paperwork or know the name of the agent?”

  “No, they couldn’t find the subpoena receipt and nobody remembered the agent’s name, except that she was a woman.”

  “Take this number where I’m at. Go back to them in records and ask for another file, just see if it’s there. My file.”

  He gave Edgar the pay phone number, his date of birth, social security number and his full name, spelling out his real first name.

  “Jesus, that’s your first name?” Edgar said. “Harry for short. How’d your momma come up with that one?”

  “She had a thing about fifteenth-century painters. It goes with the last name. Go check on the file, then call me back. I’ll wait here.”

  “I can’t even pronounce it, man.”

  “Rhymes with ‘anonymous.’”

  “Okay, I’ll try that. Where you at, anyway?”

  “A pay phone. Outside the FBI.”

  Bosch hung up before his partner could ask any questions. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the phone booth while watching a small group of people walking in a circle on the long green lawn in front of the building. They were holding up homemade signs and placards that protested a proposal to open new oil leases in Santa Monica Bay. He saw signs that said Just Say No to Oil and Isn’t the Bay Polluted Enough? and United States of Exxon and so on.

  He noticed a couple of TV news crews on the lawn filming the protest. That was the key, he thought. Exposure. As long as the media showed up and put it on the six o’clock news, the protest was a success. A sound-bite success. Bosch noticed that the group’s apparent spokesman was being interviewed on camera by a woman he recognized from Channel 4. He also recognized the spokesman but he wasn’t sure from where. After a few moments of watching the man’s ease during the interview in front of the camera, Bosch placed him. The guy was a TV actor who used to play a drunk on a popular situation comedy that Bosch had seen once or twice. Though the guy still looked like a drunk, the show wasn’t on anymore.

  Bosch was on his second cigarette, leaning on the phone booth and beginning to feel the heat of the day, when he looked up at the glass doors of the building and saw Agent Eleanor Wish walking through. She was looking down and digging a hand through her purse and hadn’t noticed him. Quickly and without analyzing why, he ducked behind the phones and, using them as a shield, moved around them as she walked by. It was sunglasses she had been looking for in the purse. Now she had them on as she walked past the protestors without even a glance in their direction. She headed up Veteran Avenue

  to Wilshire Boulevard

  . Bosch knew the federal garage was under the building. Wish was walking in the opposite direction. She was going somewhere nearby. The phone rang.

  “Harry, they have your file, too. The FBI. What’s going on?”

  Edgar’s voice was urgent and confused. He didn’t like waves. He didn’t like mysteries. He was a straight nine-to-five man.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, they wouldn’t tell me,” Bosch replied. “You head into the office. We’ll talk there. If you get there before me, I want you to make a call over to the subway project. Personnel. See if they had Meadows working there. Try under the name Fields, too. Then just do the paper on the TV stabbing. Like we said. Keep your end of our deal. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Harry, you told me you knew this guy, Meadows. Maybe we should tell Ninety-eight it’s a conflict, that we ought to turn the case over to RHD or somebody else on the table.”

  “We’ll talk about it in a little while, Jed. Don’t do anything or talk to anybody about it till I get there.”

  Bosch hung up the phone and walked off toward Wilshire. He could see Wish already had turned east toward Westwood Village. He closed the distance between them, crossed to the other side of the street and followed behind. He was careful not to get too close, so that his reflection would not be in the shop windows she was looking in as she walked. When she reached Westwood Boulevard

  she turned north and crossed Wilshire, coming to Bosch’s side of the street. He ducked into a bank lobby. After a few moments he went back out on the sidewalk and she was gone. He looked both ways and then trotted up to the corner. He saw her a half block up Westwood, going into the village.

  Wish slowed in front of some shop windows and came to a stop in front of a sporting goods store. Bosch could see female manikins in the window, dressed in lime-green running shorts and shirts. Last year’s fad on sale today. Wish looked at the outfits for a few moments and then headed off, not stopping until she was in the theater district. She turned into Stratton’s Bar & Grill.

  Bosch, on the other side of the street, passed the restaurant without looking and went up to the next corner. He stood in front of the Bruin, below the old theater’s marquee, and looked back. She hadn’t come out. He wondered if there was a rear door. He looked at his watch. It was a little early for lunch but maybe she liked to beat the crowd. Maybe she liked to eat alone. He crossed the street to the other corner and stood below the canopy of the Fox Theater. He could see through the front window of Stratton’s but didn’t see her. He walked through the parking lot next to the restaurant and into the rear alley. He saw a public access door at the back. Had she seen him and used the restaurant to slip away? It had been a long while since he had been on a one-man tail, but he didn’t think she had made him. He headed down the alley and went in the back door.

  Eleanor Wish was sitting alone in the row of wooden booths along the restaurant’s right wall. Like any careful cop she sat facing the front door, so she didn’t see Bosch until he slid onto the bench across from her and picked up the menu she had already scanned and dropped on the table.

  He said, “Never been here, anything good?”

  “What is this?” she said, surprise clearly showing on her face.

  “I don’t know, I thought you might want some company.”

  “Did you follow me? You followed me.”

  “At least I’m being up front about it. You know, you made a mistake back at the office. You played it too cool. I walk in with the only lead you’ve had in nine months and you want to talk about liaisons and bullshit. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t figure out what. Now I know.”

  “What are you talking about? Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  She made a move to slide out of the booth, but Bosch reached across the table and firmly put his hand on her wrist. Her skin was warm and moist from the walk over. She stopped and turned and smoked him with brown eyes so angry and hot they could have burned his name on a tombstone.

  “Let go,” she said, her voice tightly controlled but carrying enough of an edge to suggest she could lose it. He let go.

  “Don’t leave. Please.” She lingered a moment and he worked quickly. He said, “It’s all right. I understand the reasons for the whole thing, the cold reception back there, everything. I have to say it actually was good work, what you did. I can’t hold it against you.”

  “Bosch, listen to me, I don’t know what you are talking about. I think—”

  “I know you already knew about Meadows, the tunnels, the whole thing. You pulled his military files, you pulled mine, you probably pulled files on every rat that made it out of that place alive. There had to have been something in the WestLand job that connected to the tunnels back there.”

  She looked at him for a long moment and was about to speak, when a waitress approached with a pad and pencil.

  “For now, just one coffee, black, and an Evian. Thank you,” Bosch said before Wish or the waitress could speak. The waitress walked away, writing on the pad.

  “I thought you were a cream-and-sugar cop,” Wish said.

  “Only when people try to guess what I am.”

  Her eyes seemed to soften then, but only a bit.

  “Detective Bosch, look, I don’t know how you know what you think you know, but I am not
going to discuss the WestLand case. It is exactly as I said at the bureau. I can’t do it. I am sorry. I really am.”

  Bosch said, “I guess maybe I should resent it, but I don’t. It was a logical step in the investigation. I would’ve done the same. You take anybody who fit the profile—tunnel rat—and sift them through the evidence.”