The Concrete Blonde (1994)

by Michael Connelly

  “Harry, come on, you are not going to suggest that was a reason, that these guys tunneled for weeks and then blasted into a bank vault to steal a collection of kiddie porn?”

  “Of course not. But that’s why it raises the question. Why’d they take the stuff?”

  “Well, maybe they wanted it. Maybe one was a pedophile and he liked it. Who knows?”

  “Or maybe it was all part of a cover. Take everything from every box they drilled to hide the fact that what they were really after was one box. You know, sort of blur the picture by hitting dozens of boxes. But all along the target was something in only one of the boxes. Same principle with the pawnshop break-in: take a lot of jewelry to cover they only wanted the bracelet.

  “But with the vault, they wanted something that wouldn’t be reported stolen afterward. Something that couldn’t be reported stolen because it would get the owner into some kind of jam. Like with the pedophile. When his stuff got stolen what could he say? That’s the sort of thing the tunnelers were after, but something more valuable. Something that would make hitting the safe-deposit vault more attractive than hitting the main vault.

  “Something that would make killing Meadows a necessity when he endangered the whole caper by pawning the bracelet.”

  She was quiet. Bosch looked over at her, but behind her sunglasses she was unreadable.

  “Sounds to me like you are talking about drugs again,” she said after a while. “And the dog said no drugs. The DEA found no connections on our list of customers.”

  “Maybe drugs, maybe not. But that’s why we should look at the boxholders again. I want to look at the list for myself. Want to see if anything rings a bell with it. The people who reported no losses, they are the ones that I want to start with.”

  “I’ll get the list. We’ve got nothing else going anyway.”

  “Well, we’ve got these names from Scales to run down,” Bosch said. “I was thinking that we’d pull mugs and take ’em to Sharkey.”

  “Worth a try, I guess. More like just going through the motions.”

  “I don’t know. I think the kid is holding something. I think he maybe saw a face that night.”

  “I left a memo with Rourke about the hypnosis. He’ll probably get back to us on that today or tomorrow.”

  They took the Pacific Coast Highway

  around the bay. The smog had been blown inland and it was clear enough to see Catalina Island out past the whitecaps. They stopped at Alice’s Restaurant for lunch, and since it was late there was an open table by a window. Wish ordered an ice tea and Bosch had a beer.

  “I used to come out to this pier when I was a kid,” Bosch told her. “They’d take a busload of us out. Back then, they had a bait shop out on the end. I’d fish for yellowtail.”

  “Kids from DYS?”

  “Yeah. Er, no. Back then it was called DPS. Department of Public Services. Few years back they finally realized they needed a whole department for the kids, so they came up with DYS.”

  She looked out the restaurant window and down along the pier. She smiled at his memories and he asked where hers were.

  “All over,” she said. “My father was in the military. Most I ever spent in one place was a couple years. So my memories aren’t really of places. They’re people.”

  “You and your brother were close?” Bosch said.

  “Yes, with my father gone a lot. He was always there. Until he enlisted and went away for good.”

  Salads were put down on the table and they ate a little bit and small-talked a little bit and then sometime between when the waitress picked up the salad plates and put down the lunch plates she told her brother’s story.

  “Every week he’d write me from over there and every week he said he was scared, wanted to come home,” she said. “It wasn’t something he could say to our father or mother. But Michael wasn’t the type. He should never have gone. He went because of our father. He couldn’t let him down. He wasn’t brave enough to say no to him, but he was brave enough to go over there. It doesn’t make sense. Have you ever heard anything so dumb?”

  Bosch didn’t answer because he had heard similar stories, his own included. And she seemed to stop there. She either didn’t know what had happened to her brother over there or didn’t want to recount the details.

  After a while she said, “Why’d you go?”

  He knew the question was coming but in his whole life he had never been able to truthfully answer it, even to himself.

  “I don’t know. No choice, I guess. The institutional life, like you said before. I wasn’t going to college. Never really thought about Canada. I think it would have been harder to go there than to just get drafted and go to Vietnam. Then in sixty-eight I sort of won the draft lottery. My number came up so low I knew I was going to go. So I thought I’d outsmart ’em by joining, thought I’d write my own ticket.”

  “And so?”

  Bosch laughed a little in the same phony way she had laughed before. “I got in, went through basic and all the bullshit and when it came time to choose something, I picked the infantry. I still have never figured out why. They get you at that age, you know? You’re invincible. Once I got over there I volunteered for a tunnel squad. It was kind of like that letter Meadows wrote to Scales. You want to see what you’ve got. You do things you’ll never understand. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so,” she said. “What about Meadows? He had chances to leave and he never did, not till the very end. Why would anybody want to stay if they didn’t have to?”

  “There were a lot like that,” Bosch said. “I guess it wasn’t usual or unusual. Some just didn’t want to leave that place. Meadows was one of them. It might have been a business decision, too.”

  “You mean drugs?”

  “Well, I know he was using heroin while he was there. We know he was using and selling afterward when he got back here. So maybe when he was over there he got involved in moving it and he didn’t want to leave a good thing. There is a lot that points to it. He was moved to Saigon after they took him out of the tunnels. Saigon would have been the place to be, especially with embassy clearance like he had as an MP. Saigon was sin city. Whores, hash, heroin, it was a free market. A lot of people jumped into it. Heroin would have made him some nice money, especially if he had a plan, a way to move some of the stuff back here.”

  She pushed pieces of red snapper she wasn’t going to eat around on her plate with a fork.

  “It’s unfair,” she said. “He didn’t want to come back. Some boys wanted to come home but never got the chance.”

  “Yes. There was nothing fair about that place.”

  Bosch turned and looked out the window at the ocean. There were four surfers in bright wet suits riding on the swells.

  “And after the war you joined the cops.”

  “Well, I kicked around a little and then joined the department. It seemed most of the vets I knew, like what Scales said today, were going into the police departments or the penitentiaries.”

  “I don’t know, Harry. You seem like the loner type. A private eye, not a man who has to take orders from men he doesn’t respect.”

  “There are no more private operators. Everybody takes orders. . . . But all this stuff about me is in the file. You know it all.”

  “Not everything about somebody can be put down on paper. Isn’t that what you said?”

  He smiled as a waitress cleared the table. He said, “What about you? What’s your story with the bureau?”

  “Pretty simple, really. Criminal justice major, accounting minor, recruited out of Penn State. Good pay, good benefits, women highly sought and valued. Nothing original.”

  “Why the bank detail? I thought the fast track was antiterrorism, white-collar stuff, maybe even drugs. But not the heavy squad.”

  “I did the white-collar stuff for five years. I was in D.C., too, the right place to be. The thing is, the emperor had no clothes. It was all deadly, deadly boring stuff.” She smiled and shook h
er head. “I realized I just wanted to be a cop. So, that’s what I became. I transferred to the first good street unit that had an opening. L.A. is the bank robbery capital of the country. When an opening came up here, I called in my markers and got the transfer. Call me a dinosaur, if you want.”

  “You are too beautiful for that.”

  Despite her dark tan, Bosch could tell the remark embarrassed her. It embarrassed him, too, just sort of slipping out like that.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No. No, that was nice. Thank you.”

  “So, are you married, Eleanor?” he said and then he turned red, immediately regretting his lack of subtlety. She smiled at his embarrassment.

  “I was. But it was a long time ago.”

  Bosch nodded. “You don’t have anything . . . what about Rourke? You two seemed . . .”

  “What? Are you kidding?”

  “Sorry.”

  They laughed together then, and followed it with smiles and a long, comfortable silence.

  After lunch they walked out on the pier to the spot where Bosch had once stood with rod and reel. There was no one fishing. Several of the buildings at the end of the pier were abandoned. There was a rainbow sheen on top of the water near one of the pylons. Bosch also noticed the surfers were gone. Maybe all the kids are in school, Bosch thought. Or maybe they don’t fish here anymore. Maybe no fish make it this far into the poisoned bay.

  “I haven’t been here in a long time,” he said to Eleanor. He leaned on the pier railing, his elbows on wood scarred by a thousand bait knives. “Things change.”

  It was midafternoon by the time they got back to the Federal Building. Wish ran the names and prisoner identification numbers Scales had given them through the NCIC and state department of justice computers and ordered mug shots photo-faxed from various prisons in the state. Bosch took the list of names and called U.S. military archives in St. Louis and asked for Jessie St. John, the same clerk he had dealt with on Monday. She said the file on William Meadows that Bosch had asked for was already on the way. Bosch didn’t tell her he already had seen the FBI’s copy of it. Instead, he talked her into calling up the new names he had on her computer and giving him the basic service biography of each man. He kept her past the end of shift at five o’clock in St. Louis, but she said she wanted to help.

  By five o’clock L.A. time Bosch and Wish had twenty-four mug shots and brief criminal and military service sketches of the men to go with them. Nothing jumped off Wish’s desk and hit either of them over the head. Fifteen of the men had served in Vietnam at some point during the period Meadows was there. Eleven of these were U.S. Army. None were tunnel rats, though four were First Infantry along with Meadows on his first tour. There were two others who were MPOs in Saigon.

  They focused on the NCIC records of the six soldiers who were First Infantry or military police. Only the MPOs had bank robbery records. Bosch shuffled through the mug shots and pulled those two out. He stared at the faces, half expecting to get confirmation from the hardened, disinterested looks they gave the camera. “I like these two,” he said.

  Their names were Art Franklin and Gene Delgado. They both had Los Angeles addresses. In Vietnam, they spent their tours in Saigon assigned to separate MP units. Not the embassy unit that Meadows was attached to. But, still, they were in the city. Both of them had been discharged in 1973. But as with Meadows, they stayed on in Vietnam as civilian military advisers. They were there until the end, April 1975. There was no question in Bosch’s mind. All three men—Meadows, Franklin and Delgado—knew each other before they met at Charlie Company in Ventura County.

  Stateside after 1975, Franklin got jammed up on a series of robberies in San Francisco and went away for five years. He went down on a federal rap of bank robbery in Oakland in 1984 and was at TI at the same time as Meadows. He was paroled to Charlie Company two months before Meadows left the program. Delgado was strictly a state offender; three pops for burglaries in L.A., for which he was able to get by on county lockup time, then an attempted bank robbery in Santa Ana in 1985. He was able to plead in state court under an agreement with federal prosecutors. He went up to Soledad, getting out in 1988 and arriving at Charlie Company three months ahead of Meadows. He left Charlie Company a day after Franklin arrived.

  “One day,” Wish said. “This means all three were together there at Charlie Company only one day.”

  Bosch looked at their photos and the accompanying descriptions. Franklin was the larger one. Six foot, 190, dark hair. Delgado was lean, five-six and 140. Dark hair, too. Bosch stared at the photos of the big man and the small man, and was thinking about the descriptions of the men in the Jeep that had dumped Meadows’s body.

  “Let’s go see Sharkey,” he said after a while.

  He called Home Street Home and was told what he knew they were going to tell him: Sharkey was gone. Bosch tried the Blue Chateau and a tired old voice told him that Sharkey’s crew had moved out at noon. His mother hung up on Bosch after she determined he was not a customer. It was near seven. Bosch told Wish they would have to go back to the street to find him. She said she’d drive. They spent the next two hours in West Hollywood, mostly in the Santa Monica Boulevard

  corridor. But there was no sign of Sharkey or his motorbike locked to a parking meter. They flagged down a few sheriff’s cruisers and told them who they were looking for, but not even the extra eyes helped. They parked at the curb by the Oki Dog, and Bosch was thinking that maybe the boy had gone back to his mother’s house and she had hung up the phone to protect him.

  “You want to take a ride up to Chatsworth?” he asked.

  “As much as I’d like to see this witch you told me Sharkey has for a mother, I was thinking more along the lines of calling it a day. We can find Sharkey tomorrow. How about that dinner we didn’t have last night?”

  Bosch wanted to get to Sharkey, but he also wanted to get to her. She was right, there was always tomorrow.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Where you feel like going?”

  “My place.”

  Eleanor Wish lived in a rent-controlled townhouse she subleased two blocks from the beach in Santa Monica. They parked at the curb in front, and as they went in she told Bosch that although she lived close by, if he wanted to actually see the ocean he had to walk out onto her bedroom balcony, lean over and look sharply to the right down Ocean Park Boulevard

  . A slice of the Pacific could then be seen between two condominium towers that guarded the shoreline. From that angle, she mentioned, he could also see into her next-door neighbor’s bedroom. The neighbor was a has-been television actor turned small-time dope dealer who had a never-ending procession of women through the bedroom. It kind of took away from the view, she said. She told Bosch to have a seat in the living room while she got dinner started. “If you like jazz, I have a CD over there I just bought but haven’t had time to listen to,” she said.

  He walked over to the stereo, which was stacked on shelves next to a set of bookcases, and picked up the new disk. It was Rollins’s Falling in Love with Jazz, and inside Harry smiled because he had it at home. It was a warm connection. He opened the case, put the music on and began to look around the living room. There were pastel throw rugs and light-colored coverings on the furniture. Architectural books and home magazines were spread on a glass-topped coffee table in front of a light-blue couch. The place was very neat. A framed cross-stitch canvas on the wall next to the front door said Welcome To This Home. Small letters stitched in its corner said EDS 1970, and Bosch wondered about the last letter.

  He made another one of those psychic connections with Eleanor Wish when he turned around and looked at the wall above the couch. Framed in black wood was a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Bosch didn’t have the print at home but he was familiar with the painting and from time to time even thought about it when he was deep on a case or on a surveillance. He had seen the original in Chicago once and had stood in front of it studying it for nearly an ho
ur. A quiet, shadowy man sits alone at the counter of a street-front diner. He looks across at another customer much like himself, but only the second man is with a woman. Somehow, Bosch identified with it, with that first man. I am the loner, he thought. I am the nighthawk. The print, with its stark dark hues and shadows, did not fit in this apartment, Bosch realized. Its darkness clashed with the pastels. Why did Eleanor have it? What did she see there?

  He looked around the rest of the room. There was no TV. There was just the music on the stereo and the magazines on the table and the books on the lawyer’s shelves against the wall across from the couch. He stepped over and looked through the glass panes and browsed the collection. The top two shelves were mostly high-brow book-of-the-month offerings descending into crime fiction by writers like Crumley and Willeford and others. He had read some of them. He opened the glass door and pulled out a book called The Locked Door. He’d heard of the book but had never seen it to buy. He opened the cover to see how old it was and he solved the mystery of the last letter on the needlework. On the first page, printed in ink, it said Eleanor D. Scarletti—1979. She must have kept her husband’s name after the divorce, Bosch thought. He put the book back and closed the case.