The Concrete Blonde (1994)

by Michael Connelly

  “You’re not a suspect, Bosch, okay? So drop it.”

  “I know I’m not a suspect.” He gave a short, forced burst of laughter. “I was serving a suspension down in Mexico and can prove it. But you already know that. So for me, fine, I’ll drop it. But I need what you have on Meadows. You pulled his files back in September. You must have done a workup on him. Surveillance, known associates, background. Maybe . . . I bet you even pulled him in and talked to him. I need it all now—today, not in three, four weeks when some liaison puts a stamp on it.”

  The waitress came back with the coffee and water. Wish pulled her glass close but didn’t drink.

  “Detective Bosch, you are off the case. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. But you’re off. You go back to your office and you’ll find out. We made a call after you left.”

  He was holding his coffee with two hands, elbows on the table. He carefully put the cup down on the saucer, in case his hands began to shake.

  “What did you do?” Bosch asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Eleanor Wish said. “After you left, Rourke—the guy you shoved the picture in front of?—he called the number on your card and talked to a Lieutenant Pounds. He told him about your visit today and suggested there was a conflict, you investigating a friend’s death. He said some other things and—”

  “What other things?”

  “Look, Bosch, I know about you. I’ll admit we pulled your files, we checked you out. Hell, but to do that, all we had to do was read the newspapers back then. You and that Dollmaker thing. So I know what you have been through with the internal people, and this isn’t going to help, but it was Rourke’s decision. He—”

  “What other things did he tell?”

  “He told the truth. He said both your name and Meadows’s had come up in our investigation. He said you both knew each other. He asked that you be taken off the case. So all of this doesn’t matter.”

  Bosch looked off, out of the booth.

  “I want to hear you answer,” he said. “Am I a suspect?”

  “No. At least you weren’t until you walked in this morning. Now, I don’t know. I’m trying to be honest. I mean, you have to look at this from our standpoint. One guy we looked at last year comes in and says he is investigating the murder of another guy we looked very hard at. This first guy says, ‘Let me see your files.’”

  She didn’t have to tell him as much as she had. He knew this and knew she was probably going out on a limb saying anything at all. For all the shit he had just stepped in or been put in, Harry Bosch was beginning to like cold, hard Eleanor Wish.

  “If you won’t tell me about Meadows, tell me one thing about myself. You said I was looked at and then dropped. How’d you clear me? You go to Mexico?”

  “That and other things.” She looked at him a moment before going on. “You were cleared early on. At first we got excited. I mean, we look through the files of people with tunnel experience in Vietnam and there sitting on the top was the famous Harry Bosch, detective superstar, a couple books written about his cases. TV movie, a spinoff series. And the guy the newspapers just happened to have been filled with, the guy whose star crashed with a one-month suspension and transfer from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division to . . .” She hesitated.

  “The sewer.” He finished it for her.

  She looked down into her glass and continued.

  “So, right away Rourke started figuring that maybe that’s how you spent your time, digging this tunnel into the bank. From hero to heel, this was your way to get back at society, something crazy like that. But when we backgrounded you and asked around quietly, we heard you went to Mexico for the month. We sent someone down to Ensenada and checked it out. You were clear. Around then we also had gotten your medical files from the VA up at Sepulveda—oh, that’s it, that’s who you checked with this morning, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. She continued.

  “Anyway, in the medical there were the psychiatrist’s reports . . . I’m sorry. This seems like such an invasion.”

  “I want to know.”

  “The therapy for PTS. I mean, you are completely functional. But you have infrequent manifestation of post-traumatic stress in forms of insomnia and other things, claustrophobia. A doctor even wrote once that you wouldn’t go into a tunnel like that, never again. Anyway, we put a profile of you through our behavioral sciences lab in Quantico. They discounted you as a suspect, said it was unlikely that you would cross the line for something like financial gain.”

  She let all of that sink in for a few moments.

  “Those VA files are old,” Bosch said. “The whole story is old. I’m not going to sit here and present a case for why I should be a suspect. But that VA stuff is old. I haven’t seen a shrink, VA or otherwise, in five years. And as far as that phobia shit goes, I went into a tunnel to look at Meadows yesterday. What do you think your shrinks in Quantico would write about that?”

  He could feel his face turn red with embarrassment. He had said too much. But the more he tried to control and hide it, the more blood rushed into his face. The wide-hipped waitress chose that moment to come back and freshen his coffee.

  “Ready to order?” she said.

  “No,” Wish said without taking her eyes off Bosch. “Not yet.”

  “Hon, we have a big lunch crowd come in here, and we’re going to need the table for people what want to eat. I make my living off the hungry ones. Not the ones too angry to eat.”

  She walked away with Bosch thinking that waitresses were probably better observers of human behavior than most cops. Wish said, “I am sorry about all of this. You should have let me get up when I first wanted to.”

  The embarrassment was gone but the anger was still there. He wasn’t looking out of the booth anymore. He was looking right at her.

  “You think you know me from some papers in a file? You don’t know me. Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know you. I know about you,” she said. She stopped a moment to gather her thoughts. “You are an institutional man, Detective Bosch. Your whole life. Youth shelters, foster homes, the army, then the police. Never leave the system. One flawed societal institution after another.”

  She sipped some water and seemed to be deciding whether to go on. She did. “Hieronymus Bosch. . . . The only thing your mother gave you was the name of a painter dead five hundred years. But I imagine the stuff you’ve seen would make the bizarre stuff of dreams he painted look like Disneyland. Your mother was alone. She had to give you up. You grew up in foster homes, youth halls. You survived that and you survived Vietnam and you survived the police department. So far, at least. But you are an outsider in an insider’s job. You made it to RHD and worked the headline cases, but you were an outsider all along. You did things your way and eventually they busted you out for it.”

  She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn’t.

  “It only took one mistake,” she said. “You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn’t matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn’t enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer.”

  Her voice trailed off. She was finished. Bosch didn’t say anything, and there was a long period of silence. The waitress cruised by the booth but knew better than to speak to them.

  “When you get back to the office,” he finally began, “you tell Rourke to make one more call. He got me off the case, he can get me back on.”

  “I can’t do it. He won’t do it.”

  “Yes, he’ll do it, and tell him he has until tomorrow morning to do it.”

  “Or what? What can you do? I mean, let�
�s be honest. With your record, you’ll probably be suspended by tomorrow. As soon as Pounds got off the phone with Rourke he probably called IAD, if Rourke didn’t do it himself.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning I hear something, or tell Rourke he’ll be reading a story in the Times about how an FBI suspect in a major bank heist, a subject of FBI surveillance no less, was murdered right under the bureau’s nose, taking with him the answers to the celebrated WestLand tunnel caper. All the facts might not be right or in the correct order, but it will be close enough. More important than that, it will be a good read. And it’ll make waves all the way to D.C. It’ll be embarrassing and it’ll also be a warning to whoever did Meadows. You’ll never get them then. And Rourke will always be known as the guy who let them get away.”

  She looked at him, shaking her head as if she were above this whole mess. “It’s not my call. I’ll have to go back to him and let him decide what to do. But if it was me, I’d call your bluff. And I will tell you straight out that’s what I’ll tell him to do.”

  “It’s no bluff. You’ve checked me out, you know I’ll go to the media and the media will listen to me and like it. Be smart. You tell him it’s no bluff. I’ll have nothing to lose by doing it. He’ll have nothing to lose by bringing me in.”

  He began to slide out of the booth. He stopped and threw a couple of dollar bills on the table.

  “You’ve got my file. You know where you can reach me.”

  “Yes, we do,” she said, and then, “Hey, Bosch?”

  He stopped and looked back at her.

  “The street whore, was she telling the truth? About the pillow?”

  “Don’t they all?”

  Bosch parked in the lot behind the station on Wilcox and smoked right up until he reached the rear door. He killed the butt on the ground and went in, leaving behind the odor of vomit that wafted from the mesh windows at the rear of the station holding tank. Jerry Edgar was pacing in the back hall waiting for him.

  “Harry, we’ve got a forthwith from Ninety-eight.”

  “Yeah, what about?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s been coming out of the glass box every ten minutes looking for you. You got your beeper and the Motorola turned off. And I saw a couple of the IAD silks up from downtown go in there with him a while ago.”

  Bosch nodded without saying anything comforting to his partner.

  “What’s going on?” Edgar blurted. “If we’ve got a story, let’s get it straight before we go in there. You’ve had experience with this shit, not me.”

  “I’m not sure what’s going on. I think they’re kicking us off the case. Me, at least.” He was very nonchalant about the whole thing.

  “Harry, they don’t bring IAD in to do that. Something’s on, and, man, I hope whatever you did, you didn’t fuck me up, too.”

  Edgar immediately looked embarrassed.

  “Sorry, Harry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Relax. Let’s go see what the man wants.”

  Bosch headed toward the detective squad room. Edgar said he’d cut through the watch office and then come in from the front hall so it wouldn’t look like they had collaborated on a story. When Bosch got to his desk, the first thing he noticed was that the blue murder book on the Meadows case was gone. But he also noticed that whoever had taken it had missed the cassette tape with the 911 call on it. Bosch picked up the cassette and put it in his coat pocket just as Ninety-eight’s voice boomed out of the glass office at the head of the squad room. He yelled just one word: “Bosch!” The other detectives in the squad room looked around. Bosch got up and slowly walked toward the glass box, as the office of Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds was called. Through the windows he could see the backs of two suits sitting in there with Pounds. Bosch recognized them as the two IAD detectives who had handled the Dollmaker case. Lewis and Clarke.

  Edgar came into the squad through the front hallway just as Bosch passed and they walked into the glass box together. Pounds sat dull-eyed behind his desk. The men from Internal Affairs did not move.

  “First thing, no smoking, Bosch, you got that?” Pounds said. “In fact, the whole squad stunk like an ashtray this morning. I’m not even going to ask if it was you.”

  Department and city policy outlawed smoking in all community-shared offices such as squad rooms. It was okay to smoke in a private office if it was your office or if the office’s occupant allowed visitors to smoke. Pounds was a reformed smoker and militant about it. Most of the thirty-two detectives he commanded smoked like junkies. When Ninety-eight wasn’t around, many of them would go into his office for a quick fix, rather than have to go out to the parking lot, where they’d miss phone calls and where the smell of piss and puke migrated from the rear windows of the drunk tank. Pounds had taken to locking his office door, even on quick trips up the hall to the station commander’s office, but anybody with a letter opener could pop the door in three seconds. The lieutenant was constantly returning and finding his office space fouled by smoke. He had two fans in the ten-by-ten room and a can of Glade on the desk. Since the frequency of the fouling had increased with the reassignment of Bosch from Parker Center to Hollywood detectives, Ninety-eight Pounds was convinced Bosch was the major offender. And he was right, but he had never caught Bosch in the act.

  “Is that what this is about?” Bosch asked. “Smoking in the office?”

  “Just sit down,” Pounds snapped.

  Bosch held his hands up to show there were no cigarettes between his fingers. Then he turned to the two men from Internal Affairs.

  “Well, Jed, it looks like we might be off on a Lewis and Clarke expedition here. I haven’t seen the great explorers on the move since they sent me on a no-expense-paid vacation to Mexico. Did some of their finest work on that one. Headlines, sound bites, the whole thing. The stars of Internal Affairs.”

  The two IAD cops’ faces immediately reddened with anger.

  “This time, you might do yourself a favor and keep your smart mouth shut,” Clarke said. “You’re in serious trouble, Bosch. You get it?”

  “Yeah, I get it. Thanks for the tip. I got one for you, too. Go back to the leisure suit you used to wear before you became Irving’s bendover. You know, the yellow thing that matched your teeth. The polyester does more for you than the silk. In fact, one of the guys out there in the bullpen mentioned that the ass end of that suit is getting shiny, all the work you do riding a desk.”

  “All right, all right,” Pounds cut in. “Bosch, Edgar, sit down and shut up for a minute. This—”

  “Lieutenant, I didn’t say one thing,” Edgar began. “I—”

  “Shut up! Everybody! Shut up a minute,” Pounds barked. “Jesus Christ! Edgar, for the record, these two are from Internal Affairs, if you didn’t already know, Detectives Lewis and Clarke. What this is—”

  “I want a lawyer,” Bosch said.

  “Me too, I guess,” added Edgar.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Pounds said. “We are going to talk about this and get some things straight, and we aren’t bringing any Police Protective League bullshit into it. If you want a lawyer, you get one later. Right now you are going to sit here, the both of you, and answer some questions. If not, Edgar, you are going to be bounced out of that eight-hundred-dollar suit and back into uniform, and Bosch, shit, Bosch, you’ll probably go down for the count this time.”

  For a few moments there was silence in the small room, even though the tension among the five men threatened to shatter the windows. Pounds looked out at the squad room and saw about a dozen detectives acting as if they were working but who were actually trying to pick up whatever they could through the glass. Some had been attempting to read the lieutenant’s lips. He got up and lowered a set of venetian blinds over the windows. He rarely did this. It was a signal to the squad that this was big. Even Edgar showed his concern, audibly exhaling. Pounds sat back down. He tapped a long fingernail on the blue plastic binder that lay closed on his desk.

 
“Okay, now let’s get down to it,” he began. “You two guys are off the Meadows case. That’s number one. No questions, you’re done. Now, from the top, you are going to tell us anything and everything.”

  At that, Lewis snapped open a briefcase and pulled out a cassette tape recorder. He turned it on and put it on Pounds’s spotless desk.

  Bosch had been partnered with Edgar only eight months. He didn’t know him well enough to know how he would take this kind of bullying, or how far he could hold out against these bastards. But he did know him well enough to know he liked him and didn’t want him to get jammed up. His only sin in this whole thing was that he had wanted Sunday afternoon off to sell houses.

  “This is bullshit,” Bosch said, pointing to the recorder.

  “Turn that off,” Pounds said to Lewis, pointing to the recorder, which was actually closer to him than to Lewis. The Internal Affairs detective stood up and picked up the recorder. He turned it off, hit the rewind button and replaced it on the desk.