The Black Ice hb-2

by Michael Connelly

  With his handkerchief-wrapped hand on the knob ready to open the door, he wondered again how prudent he was in coming here. If Irving or Pounds found out, he’d be back on the street in blue before the first of the year. He looked down the hall behind him once more and opened the door. He had to go in. Nobody else seemed to care what had happened to Cal Moore and that was fine. But Bosch did care for some reason. He thought maybe he would find that reason here.

  Once inside the apartment, he closed and relocked the door. He stood there, a couple of feet inside, letting his eyes adjust. The place smelled musty and was dark, except for the bluish-white glow of the Scientology light that leaked through the sheer curtains over the living room window. Bosch walked into the room and switched on the lamp on an end table next to an old misshapen sofa. The light revealed that the place had come furnished in the same decor it had maybe twenty years ago. The navy blue carpet was worn flat as Astroturf in pathways from the couch to the kitchen and to the hallway that went off to the right.

  He moved farther in and took quick glances in the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom. He was struck by the emptiness of the place. There was nothing personal here. No pictures on the walls, no notes on the refrigerator; no jacket hung over the back of a chair. There wasn’t even a dish in the sink. Moore had lived here but it was almost as if he hadn’t existed.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, so he started in the kitchen. He opened cabinets and drawers. He found a box of cereal, a can of coffee and a three-quarters-empty bottle of Early Times. In another cabinet he found an unopened bottle of sweet rum with a Mexican label. Inside the bottle was a stalk of sugar cane. There was some silverware and cooking tools in the drawers, several books of matches from Hollywood area bars like Ports and the Bullet.

  The freezer was empty, except for two trays of ice. On the top shelf in the refrigerator section below there was a jar of mustard, a half-finished package of now-rancid bologna and a lone can of Budweiser, its plastic six-pack collar still choking it. On the lower shelf on the door was a two-pound bag of Domino sugar.

  Harry studied the sugar. It was unopened. Then he thought, What the hell, I’ve come this far. He took it out and opened it and slowly poured it into the sink. It looked like sugar to him. It tasted like sugar to him. There was nothing else in the bag. He turned on the hot water and watched as the white mound was washed down the drain.

  He left the bag on the counter and went into the bathroom. There was a toothbrush in the holder, shaving equipment behind the mirror. Nothing else.

  In the bedroom Bosch first went into the walk-in closet. An assortment of clothes was on hangers and more filled a plastic laundry basket on the floor. On the shelf there was a green plaid suitcase and a white box with the word “Snakes” printed on it. Bosch first dumped the basket over and checked the pockets of the dirty shirts and pants. They were empty. He picked through the hanging clothes until he reached the back of the closet and found Moore’s dress uniform wrapped in plastic. Once you left patrol, there was really only one reason to save it. To be buried in. Bosch thought saving it was a bad omen, a lack of confidence. As required by the department, he kept one uniform, to be worn in time of civil crisis such as a major earthquake or riot. But he had dumped his dress blues ten years ago.

  He brought down the suitcase; it was empty and smelled musty. It had not been used for some time. He pulled down the boot box but could tell it was empty before he opened it. There was some tissue paper inside it.

  Bosch put it back up on the shelf, remembering how he had seen Moore’s one boot standing upright on the tile in the bathroom at the Hideaway. He wondered if Moore’s killer had had difficulty pulling it off to complete the suicide scene. Or had he ordered Moore to take it off first? Probably not. The blow to the back of the head that Teresa found meant Moore probably hadn’t known what hit him. Bosch envisioned the killer, his identity cloaked in shadow, coming up from behind and swinging the stock of the shotgun against the back of Moore’s head. Moore goes down. The killer pulls off the boot, drags him into his bathroom, props him against the tub and pulls both triggers. Wipe off the triggers, press the dead man’s thumb against the stock and rub his hands on the barrels to make convincing smears. Then set the boot upright on the tile. Add the splinter from the stock and the scene was set. Suicide.

  The queen-sized bed was unmade. On the night table was a couple of dollars in change and a small framed photograph of Moore and his wife. Bosch bent over and studied it without touching it. Sylvia was smiling and appeared to be sitting in a restaurant, or perhaps at a banquet table at a wedding. She was beautiful in the picture and her husband was looking at her as if he knew it.

  “You fucked up, Cal,” Harry said to no one.

  He moved to the bureau, which was so old and scarred by cigarettes and knife-cut initials that the Salvation Army might even reject it. In the top drawer were a comb and a cherrywood picture frame lying face down. Bosch picked up the frame and saw that it was empty. He considered this for a few moments. The frame had a floral design carved into it. It would have been expensive and obviously did not come with the apartment. Moore had brought it with him. Why was it empty? He would have liked to be able to ask Sheehan if he or anybody else had taken a photograph from the apartment as part of the investigation. But he couldn’t without revealing he had been here.

  The next drawer contained underwear and socks and a stack of folded T-shirts, nothing else. There were more clothes in the third drawer, all having been neatly folded at a laundry. Beneath a stack of shirts was a skin magazine which announced on the cover that nude photos of a leading Hollywood actress were provided inside. Bosch leafed through the magazine, more out of curiosity than belief there would be a clue inside. He was sure the magazine had been pawed over by every dick and blue suit who had been in the apartment during the investigation into Moore’s disappearance.

  He put the magazine back after seeing that the photos of the actress were dark, grainy shots in which it could just barely be determined that she was barebreasted. He assumed they were from an early movie, made before she had enough clout to control the exploitation of her body. He imagined the disappointment of the men who bought the magazine only to discover those shots were the payoff on the cover’s lurid promise. He imagined the actress’s anger and embarrassment. And he wondered what they did for Cal Moore. A vision of Sylvia Moore flashed in his head. He shoved the magazine under the shirts and closed the drawer.

  The last drawer of the bureau contained two things, a folded pair of faded blue jeans and a white paper bag that was crumpled and soft with age and contained a thick stack of photographs. It was what he had come for. Bosch instinctively knew this when he picked the bag up. He took it out of the bedroom, hitting the switch turning off the ceiling light as he went through the door.

  Sitting on the couch next to the light, he lit a cigarette and pulled the stack of photos from the bag. Immediately he recognized that most of them were faded and old. These photographs somehow seemed more private and invasive than even those in the skin mag. They were pictures that documented Cal Moore’s unhappy history.

  The photos seemed to be in some kind of chronological order. Bosch could tell this because they moved from faded black and white to color. Other benchmarks, like clothing and cars, also seemed to prove this.

  The first photo was a black-and-white shot of a young Latina in what looked like a white nurse’s uniform. She was dark and lovely and wore a girlish smile and a look of mild surprise as she stood next to a swimming pool, her arms behind her back. Bosch saw the edge of a round object behind her and then realized she was holding a servant tray behind her back. She had not wanted to be photographed with the tray. She wasn’t a nurse. She was a maid. A servant.

  There were other photographs of her in the stack, extending over several years. Age was kind to her but it still exacted its toll. She retained an exotic beauty but worry lines formed and her eyes lost some of their warmth. In some of the ph
otographs Bosch leafed through, she held a baby, then she posed with a little boy. Bosch looked closely and even with the print being black and white he could see that the boy with dark hair and complexion had light-colored eyes. Green eyes, Bosch thought. It was Calexico Moore and his mother.

  In one of the photos the woman and the small boy stood in front of a large white house with a Spanish-tile roof. It looked like a Mediterranean villa. Rising behind the mother and boy, but unclear because of the focus, was a tower. Two darkly blurred windows, like empty eyes, were near the top. Bosch thought about what Moore had said to his wife about growing up in a castle. This was it.

  In another of the photos the boy stood rigidly next to a man, an Anglo with blond hair and darkly tanned skin. They stood next to the sleek form of a late-fifties Thunderbird. The man held one hand on the hood and one on the boy’s head. They were his possessions, the photo seemed to say. The man squinted into the camera.

  But Bosch could see his eyes. They were the same green eyes of his son. The man’s hair was thinning on top and by comparing photos of the boy with his mother taken at about the same time, Bosch guessed that Moore’s father had been at least fifteen years older than his mother. The photo of the father and son was worn around the edges from handling. Much more worn than any of the others in the stack.

  The next grouping of photos changed the venue. They were pictures from what was probably Mexicali. There were fewer photos to document a longer period of time. The boy was growing by leaps and the backgrounds of the photos had a third-world quality to them. They were shot in the barrio. More often than not there were crowds of people in the background, all Mexicans, all having that slight look of desperation and hope Bosch had seen in the ghettos of L.A.

  And now there was another boy. He was the same age or slightly older. He seemed stronger, tougher. He was in many of the same frames with Cal. A brother maybe, Bosch thought.

  It was in this grouping of photos that the mother began to show clearly the advance of age. The girl who hid the servant’s tray was gone. A mother used to the harshness of life had replaced her. The photos now took on a haunting quality. It bothered Harry to study them because he believed that he understood the hold the pictures had on Moore.

  The last black-and-white photo showed the two boys, shirtless and sitting back to back on a picnic table, laughing at a joke preserved forever in time. Calexico was a young teenager with a guileless smile on his face. The other boy, maybe a year or two older, looked like trouble. He had a hard, sullen look in his eyes. In the picture Cal had his right arm cocked and was making a muscle for the photographer. Bosch saw the tattoo was already there. The devil with a halo. Saints and Sinners.

  In the photos after that, the other boy never appeared again. These were color shots taken in Los Angeles. Bosch recognized City Hall shooting up in the background of one of them and the fountain in Echo Park in another. Moore and his mother had come to the United States. Whoever the other boy was, he had been left behind.

  Toward the end of the stack, the mother dropped out of the photos as well. Harry wondered if that meant she was dead. The final two pictures were of Moore as an adult. The first was his graduation from the police academy. There was a shot of a class of newly sworn officers gathered on the grass outside what was later renamed the Daryl F. Gates Auditorium. They were throwing their hats into the air. Bosch picked Moore out of the crowd. He had his arm around the shoulder of another probee and there was genuine joy in his face.

  And the last photo was of Moore in dress uniform pulling a young Sylvia close in a smiling cheek-to-cheek embrace. Her skin was smoother then, her eyes brighter and her hair longer and fuller. But she was still very much the same as now, still a beautiful woman.

  He pushed the photographs back into the bag and put it on the couch next to him. He looked at the bag and was curious why the photos had never been mounted in an album or put on display. They were just glimpses of a lifetime kept in a bag and ready to go.

  But he knew the reason. At his home he had stacks of his own pictures that he would never mount in a book, that he felt the need to hold when he looked at them. They were more than pictures of another time. They were parts of a life, a life that could not go forward without knowing and understanding what was behind.

  Bosch reached up to the lamp and turned it off. He smoked another cigarette, the glow of its tip floating in the dark. He thought about Mexico and Calexico Moore.

  “You fucked up,” he whispered again.

  He had told himself he had to come here to get a feel for Moore. That was how he had sold it to himself. But sitting there in the dark he knew there was more to it. He knew he had come because he wanted to understand a life’s course that could not be explained. The only one with all the answers to all of the questions was Cal Moore. And he was gone.

  He looked at the white neon glow on the curtains across the room and they looked like ghosts to him. It made him think of the worn photo of the father and son, fading to white. He thought of his own father, a man he never knew and did not meet until he was on his death bed. By then it had been too late for Bosch to change his own life’s course.

  He heard a key hit the dead bolt on the other side of the front door. He was up, with his gun out, moving quickly across the room to the hallway. He went into the bedroom first but then went back into the hall and into the bathroom because it afforded a better view of the living room. He dropped his cigarette into the toilet and heard it hiss as it died.

  He heard the front door open and then a few seconds of silence. Then a light went on in the living room and he stepped back into the dark recesses of his hiding spot. In the medicine cabinet mirror he saw Sylvia Moore standing in the middle of the living room looking around as if it was her first time in the apartment. Her eyes fell on the white bag on the couch and she picked it up. Bosch watched her as she looked through the photographs. She lingered over the last one. It was the one of her. She held her hand to her cheek as if charting the changes of time.

  When she was done, she put the photographs back in the bag and placed it back on the couch. She then started for the hallway and Bosch moved further back, silently stepping into the bathtub. Now a light came from the bedroom and he heard the closet door open. Hangers scraping on the bar. Bosch holstered his gun and then stepped out of the tub and the bathroom and into the hallway.

  “Mrs. Moore? Sylvia?” he called from the hall, unsure how to get her attention without scaring her.

  “Who’s that?” came the high-pitched, frightened reply.

  “It’s me, Detective Bosch. It’s okay.”

  She came out of the bedroom closet then, the fright wide in her eyes. She carried the hanger with her dead husband’s dress uniform on it.

  “Jesus, you scared me. What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  She held the uniform up in front of her as if Bosch had walked in on her while she was undressed. She took one step back toward the bedroom door.

  “You followed me?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “No, I didn’t follow you. I was already here.”

  “In the dark?”

  “Yes. I was thinking. When I heard somebody opening the door I went into the bathroom. Then when I saw it was you, I didn’t know how to come out without scaring you. Sorry. You scared me. I scared you.”

  She nodded once, seeming to accept his explanation. She was wearing a light blue denim shirt and unbleached blue jeans. Her hair was tied behind her head and she wore earrings made of a pinkish crystal. Her left ear had a second earring. It was a silver crescent moon with a star hooked on its bottom point. She put on a polite smile. Bosch became aware that he had not shaved in a day.

  “Did you think it was the killer?” she said when he said nothing else. “Kind of like coming back to the scene of the crime?”

  “Maybe. Something like that… Actually, no, I don’t know what I thought. This isn’t the scene of the crime, anyw
ay.”

  He nodded toward the uniform she carried.

  “I have to take this by McEvoy Brothers tomorrow.”

  She must have read the frown on his face.

  “It’s a closed-casket service. Obviously. But I think he would’ve liked it this way, wearing the dress blues. Mr. McEvoy asked me if I had it.”

  Harry nodded. They were still in the hallway. He backed out into the living room and she followed.

  “What do you hear from the department? How are they going to handle it? The funeral, I mean.”

  “Who knows? But as of now, they are saying he went down in the line of duty.”

  “So he’s going to get the show.”

  “I think so.”

  A hero’s farewell, Bosch thought. The department wasn’t into self-flagellation. It wasn’t going to announce to the world that a bad cop was put down by the bad people he had done bad things for. Not unless it had to. And not when it could throw a hero’s funeral at the media and then sit back and watch sympathetic stories on seven different channels that night. The department needed all the sympathy it could get.

  He also realized that a line-of-duty death meant the widow would get full pension rights. If Sylvia Moore wore a black dress, dabbed at her eyes with a tissue at appropriate times and kept her mouth shut, she’d get her husband’s paycheck for the rest of her life. Not a bad deal. Either way. If Sylvia was the one who tipped IAD, she now stood to lose the pension if she pressed it or went public. The department could claim Cal had been killed because of his extracurricular activities. No pension. Bosch was sure this didn’t have to be explained to her.

  “So when’s the funeral?” he asked.

  “It’s Monday at one. At the San Fernando Mission Chapel. The burial is at Oakwood, up in Chatsworth.”

  Well, Bosch thought, if they are going to put on the show, that’s the place to do it. A couple hundred motor cops coming in in procession on curving Valley Circle Boulevard always made a good front-page photo.