The Concrete Blonde (1994)

by Michael Connelly

  “Right.”

  Edgar nodded and said, “He still could’ve been taken down by somebody who thought he was a gangbanger.”

  Wish walked over to them then but said nothing.

  “You know this isn’t a gang thing, Jed,” Bosch said.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, you do. If it was, there wouldn’t be a full can of paint in there. No gangbanger’s going to leave something like that behind. Also, whoever painted the wall in there didn’t have the touch. The paint ran. Whoever did it, didn’t know about spraying a wall.”

  “Come here a sec,” Edgar said.

  Bosch looked at Eleanor and nodded that it was okay. He and Edgar walked away a few steps and stood near the crime scene tape.

  “What did this kid tell you, and how come he was running around loose if he’s part of the case?” he asked.

  Bosch told him the basics of the story, that they didn’t know if Sharkey was important to the case. But somebody apparently did or couldn’t risk waiting to find out. As Bosch spoke he looked up over the hills and saw the first light of dawn outlining the tall palms at the top. Edgar took a step away and tilted his head up that way, too. But he wasn’t looking at the sky. His eyes were closed. He eventually turned back to Bosch.

  “Harry, you know what this weekend is?” he said. “It’s Memorial Day weekend. It’s the biggest three-day showing weekend of the year. Start of the summer season. Last year I sold four houses on this weekend, made almost as much as I made all year as a cop.”

  Bosch was confused by the sudden departure in the conversation. “What are you talking about?”

  “What I’m talking about is . . . I’m not going to be busting my ass on this case. It isn’t going to fuck up my weekend like the last one. So, what I’m saying is if you want it, I’ll go to Pounds and tell him you and the FBI want to take it ’cause it goes with the one you are already working. Otherwise, I’m going to work it strictly as a nine-to-five.”

  “You tell Pounds whatever you want, Jed. It’s not my call.”

  Bosch started back toward Eleanor, and Edgar said, “Just one thing. Who knew you had found the kid?”

  Bosch stopped and looked at Eleanor. Without turning around, he said, “We took him off the street. We interviewed him over on Wilcox. The reports went to the bureau. What do you want me to say, Jed?”

  “Nothing,” Edgar said. “But, Harry, maybe you and the FBI there should have looked out for your witness a little better. Maybe saved me some time and that boy some life.”

  Bosch and Wish walked silently back to the car. Once inside Bosch said, “Who knew?”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “What he asked back there, who knew about Sharkey?”

  She thought for a moment. Then said, “On my end, Rourke gets the daily summary reports, and he got the memo on hypnosis. The summaries go to records and are copied to the senior special agent. The tape from the interview that you gave me is locked in my desk. Nobody’s heard that. It hasn’t been transcribed. So, I guess anyone could have seen the summaries. But don’t even think about that, Harry. Nobody . . . It can’t be.”

  “Well, they knew we found the kid and he might be important. What’s that tell you? They’ve got to have somebody on the inside.”

  “Harry, that’s speculation. It could have been a lot of things. Like you told him, we picked him up on the street. Anybody could have been watching. His own friends, that girl, anybody could have put out the word that we were looking for Sharkey.”

  Bosch thought about Lewis and Clarke. They must have seen them pick up Sharkey. What part were they playing? Nothing made sense.

  “Sharkey was a tough little bastard,” he said. “You think he just went walking with somebody into that tunnel? I think he didn’t have a choice. And to do that, it maybe took somebody with a badge.”

  “Or maybe somebody with money. You know he’d go with somebody if there was money in it.”

  She didn’t start the car and they sat in it thinking. Bosch finally said, “Sharkey was a message.”

  “What?”

  “A message to us. See? They leave my card with him. They call it in on a no-trace line. And they do him in a tunnel. They want us to know they did it. They want us to know they’ve got somebody inside. They’re laughing at us.”

  She started the car. “Where to?”

  “The bureau.”

  “Harry, be careful with that stuff about an inside man. If you go trying to sell that and it’s not true, you could give your enemies all they need to bury you.”

  Enemies, Bosch thought. Who are my enemies this time?

  “I got that kid killed,” he said. “The least I am going to do is find who did it.”

  Bosch looked through the cotton curtains in the waiting room, down at the veterans cemetery, while Eleanor Wish unlocked the door to the bureau offices. The ground fog had not burned off the field of stones yet, and from above it looked like a thousand ghosts rising from their boxes at once. Bosch could see the dark gash dug into the crest of the hill at the north side of the cemetery but still could not make out what it was. It looked almost like a mass grave, a long gouge into the hill, a huge wound. The exposed soil was covered with black plastic sheets.

  “You want coffee?” Wish said from behind him.

  “Of course,” he said. He pulled himself away from the curtains and followed her in. The bureau was empty. They went into the office kitchen and he watched as she dumped a packet of ground coffee into a filter basket and turned the machine on. They stood there silently, watching the coffee slowly drip into a round glass pot on the heating pad. Bosch lit a cigarette and tried only to think about the coffee that was coming. She waved the smoke away with a hand but didn’t tell him to put it out.

  When the coffee was ready, Bosch took it black and it hit his system like a shot. He filled up a second cup and carried both into the squad room. He lit a cigarette off the butt of the first when he got to his temporary desk.

  “My last one,” he promised when he saw her looking.

  Eleanor poured herself a cup of water from a bottle she took from her file drawer.

  “You ever run out of that stuff?” he asked.

  She ignored the question. “Harry, we can’t blame ourselves for Sharkey. If we’re to blame, then we might as well offer every person we talk to protection. Should we go up and grab his mother and put her in witness protection? What about the girl in the motel room that knew him? See, it gets crazy. Sharkey was Sharkey. You live by the street, you die by the street.”

  Bosch didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “Let me see the names.”

  Wish pulled out the files on the WestLand case. She rifled through them and pulled out a computer printout several pages long and folded accordion-style. She tossed it on the desk in front of him.

  “That’s the master there,” she said. “Everybody who had a box. There are notes written after some of the names, but they probably are not germane. Most of that was if we thought they were scamming insurance or not.”

  Bosch started unfolding the printout and realized it was one long list and five shorter lists marked A through E. He asked what they were, and she came around the desk and looked over his shoulder. He smelled the apple in her hair.

  “Okay, the long list is like I said, everybody who had a box. It’s an all-inclusive list. Then we did five breakouts, A through E. The first—that’s A—is a breakout on boxes rented within the three months prior to the burglary. Then B, we did a breakout on boxholders who reported no loss at all in the burglary. Then C is the list of dead ends; boxholders who were actually dead or we couldn’t find because of changes in addresses or they had given phony information to rent them.

  “Then the fourth and fifth breakouts are matching lists from the first three. D is anybody who rented a box in the previous three months and also reported no loss. E is anybody on the dead-end list who was also on the three-month list. Understand?”

  He
did. The FBI’s thinking had been that the vault had to have been cased by the thieves before the break-in and that was most likely accomplished by simply going into the bank and renting a box. That way they had legitimate access; the guy who rented the box could go inside the vault anytime he wanted during business hours and have a look around. So the list including anybody who rented a box within three months of the robbery stood a good chance of also including the scout.

  Second, it was likely that this scout would not want to draw attention to himself after the robbery, so he might report nothing stolen from his box. So that would put him on the D list. But if he made no report at all or had given untraceable information on his box rental card, then his name would be on the E list.

  There were only seven names on the D list and five on the E list. One of the E names was circled. Frederic B. Isley of Park La Brea, the name of the man who had bought three Honda ATVs in Tustin. The other names had check marks next to them.

  “Remember?” Eleanor said. “I said that name would come up again.”

  Harry nodded.

  “Isley,” she said. “We think he was the scout. Rented the box nine weeks before the burglary. The bank records show he made a total of four visits to the vault during the next seven weeks. But after the break-in, he never came back, whoever he was. Never filed a report. And when we tried to contact him we found the address was phony.”

  “Get a description?”

  “Not one that would do us any good. Small, dark and maybe handsome was about as good as the vault clerks could do. We thought this guy was the scout even before we found out about the ATVs. When a boxholder wants to see his box, the clerk takes him in, unlocks the little door and then escorts him to one of the viewing rooms. When he’s done, they both take the box back and the customer initials his box card. Kind of like at a library. So, when we looked at this guy’s card we saw the initials—FBI. You’re a man who doesn’t like coincidences. Neither did we. We think somebody was having fun with us. Later, it was confirmed when we tracked the ATVs to Tustin.”

  Harry sipped his coffee.

  “Not much good it did us,” she said. “Never found him. In the debris of the vault after the burglary we were able to find his box. We printed it and the door. Nothing. We showed the vault clerks some mugs—Meadows was in there—and they couldn’t make anybody.”

  “We could go back to them now with Franklin and Delgado, see if one of them was this Isley.”

  “Yeah. We will. I’ll be right back.”

  She got up and left and Bosch went back to drinking coffee and studying the list. He read every name and address on the list, but nothing jogged his memory aside from the handful of names of celebrities, politicians and the like that had safe-deposit boxes. Bosch was going over the list a second time when Eleanor came back. She was carrying a piece of paper, which she slid onto his desk.

  “I checked Rourke’s office. He already sent most of the paperwork I turned in over to records. But the hypnosis memo was still in his in box, so he must not have seen it yet. I took it back. It’s useless now and it might be better if he didn’t see it.”

  Harry glanced at the memo and then folded the page and put it in his pocket.

  “Frankly,” she said, “I don’t think any of the paper was out in the open long enough . . . I mean, I just don’t see it. And Rourke . . . he’s a technocrat, not a killer. Like they said about you at behavioral sciences, he wouldn’t cross the line for money.”

  Bosch looked at her and found himself wanting to say something to please her, to get her back on his side. He could think of nothing and could not understand this new coldness in her manner.

  “Forget it,” he said, and then, looking down at the lists, he added, “How far did you people check out these people who reported no losses?”

  She looked down at the printouts where Bosch had circled list B. There were nineteen names on the list.

  “We ran each name for criminal records,” she began. “We did a telephone interview and later a face-to-face. If an agent got weird vibes or somebody’s story didn’t play well, then another agent would come by unannounced to do a follow-up interview. Kind of get another opinion. I was not part of that. We had a second crew who handled most of the field interviews. If there is a particular name there that you are interested in, I could pull the interview summaries.”

  “What about the Vietnamese names on the lists? I count thirty-four boxholders with Vietnamese names, four are on the no-loss list, one on the dead-end list.”

  “What about the Vietnamese? There is also probably a breakout, if you look for it, on Chinese, Korean, whites, blacks and Latinos. These were equal opportunity bandits.”

  “Yeah, but you came up with a connection to Vietnam in Meadows. Now we have Franklin and Delgado, possibly involved. All three were MPs in Vietnam. We’ve got Charlie Company, which may or may not have a part in this. So, after Meadows became a suspect and you started pulling military records of tunnel rats, did you do any further checking with the Vietnamese on this list?”

  “No—well, yes. On the foreign nationals we ran their names through INS to see how long they’d been here, whether they were legal. But that was about it.” She was quiet a moment. “I can see what you are getting at. It’s a flaw in the way we handled it. See, we didn’t develop Meadows as a possible suspect until a few weeks after the robbery. By then most of these people had already been interviewed. After we started looking at Meadows, I don’t think we went back to see if any of the names on the list fit in with him. You think one of the Vietnamese could have somehow been part of this?”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking. Just looking for connections. Coincidences that aren’t coincidences.”

  Bosch took a notebook out of his coat pocket and started making a list of the names, DOBs and addresses of the Vietnamese boxholders. He put the four who reported no loss and the name from the dead-end list at the top of his own list. He had just finished the list and closed the notebook when Rourke walked into the squad room, his hair still wet from his morning shower. He was carrying a coffee mug that said Boss on the side of it. He saw Bosch and Wish and then looked at his watch.

  “Getting an early start?”

  “Our witness, he turned up dead,” Wish said, no expression on her face.

  “Jesus. Where? They get somebody?”

  Wish shook her head and looked at Bosch with a face that warned him not to start anything. Rourke looked at him also.

  “Does it relate to this?” he said. “Any evidence of that?”

  “We think so,” Bosch said.

  “Jesus!”

  “You said that,” Bosch said.

  “Should we take the case from LAPD, add it to the Meadows investigation?” He said this looking directly at Wish. Bosch was not part of the decision-making team here. She didn’t answer, so Rourke added, “Should we have offered him protection?”

  Bosch couldn’t resist. “From who?”

  A strand of wet hair dropped out of place and across Rourke’s forehead. His face flushed deeply red.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “How’d you know LAPD had the case?”

  “What?”

  “You just asked if we should take the case from LAPD. How’d you know they had it? We didn’t say.”

  “I just assumed. Bosch, I resent what that implies and I resent the hell out of you. Are you implying that I or someone—If you are saying there is a law enforcement leak on this case, then I will request an internal review today. But I’ll tell you right now that if there was a leak it wasn’t from the bureau.”

  “Then where the hell else could it have been? What happened to the reports we filed with you? Who saw them?”

  Rourke shook his head.

  “Harry, don’t be ridiculous. I understand your feelings, but let’s calm down and think for a minute. The witness was snatched off the street and interviewed at Hollywood Station, then dropped off at a public youth shelter
.

  “And, lastly, you’re being followed around by your own department, Detective. I’m sorry, but even your own people apparently don’t trust you.”

  Bosch’s face grew dark. He felt betrayed in a sense. Rourke could only have known about the tail through Wish. She had made Lewis and Clarke. Why hadn’t she said anything to him instead of Rourke? Bosch looked over at her but she was looking down at her desk. He looked back at Rourke, who was nodding his head as if it were on a spring.

  “Yes, she made the tail on you the first day.” Rourke looked around the empty squad room, obviously wishing he had a larger audience. He was moving his weight from one foot to the other now, like a boxer in his corner impatiently waiting for the next round to begin so he could deliver the knockout punch on a fading opponent. Wish continued to sit silently at her desk. And in that moment it seemed to Bosch to be a million years ago that they had held each other in her bed. Rourke said, “Maybe you should look at yourself and your own department before running around making reckless accusations.”