The Black Ice hb-2

by Michael Connelly

  “Mrs. Moore, why did you come here at”-he looked at his watch; it was 10:45-“so late to get your husband’s dress blues?”

  “Call me Sylvia.”

  “Sure.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know why now. I haven’t been sleeping-I mean at all-since it… since he was found. I don’t know. I just felt like taking a drive. I just got the key to the place today, anyway.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “Assistant Chief Irving. He came by, said they were through with the apartment and if there was anything I wanted I could take it. Trouble is, there isn’t. I had hoped I’d never see this place. Then the man at the funeral home called and said he needed the dress uniform if I had it. Here I am.”

  Bosch picked the bag of photographs up off the couch and held it out to her.

  “What about these? Do you want them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ever see them before?”

  “I think some of them. At least, some of them seemed familiar. Some of them I know I never saw.”

  “Why do you think that is? A man keeps photographs his whole life and never shows some of them to his wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Strange.” He opened the bag and while he was looking through the photos said, “What happened to his mother, do you know?”

  “She died. Before I knew him. Had a tumor in her head. He was about twenty, he said.”

  “What about his father?”

  “He told me he was dead. But I told you, I don’t know if that was true. Because he never said how or when. When I asked, he said he didn’t want to talk about it. We never did.”

  Bosch held up the photo of the two boys on the picnic table.

  “Who’s this?”

  She stepped close to him and looked at the photo. He studied her face. He saw flecks of green in her brown eyes. There was a light scent of perfume.

  “I don’t know who it is. A friend, I guess.”

  “He didn’t have a brother?”

  “Not one he ever told me about. He told me when we got married, he said I was his only family. He said… said he was alone except for me.”

  Now Bosch looked at the photo.

  “Kinda looks like him to me.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What about the tattoo?”

  “What about it?”

  “He ever tell you where he got it, what it means?”

  “He told me he got it in the village he grew up in. He was a boy. Actually, it was a barrio. I guess. They called it Saints and Sinners. That’s what the tattoo means. Saints and Sinners. He said that was because the people that lived there didn’t know which they were, which they would be.”

  He thought of the note found in Cal Moore’s back pocket.I found out who I was. He wondered if she realized the significance of this in terms of the place he grew up. Where each young boy had to find out who he was. A saint or a sinner.

  Sylvia interrupted his thoughts.

  “You know, you didn’t really say why you were already here. Sitting in the dark thinking. You had to come here to do that?”

  “I came to look around, I guess. I was trying to shake something loose, get a feel for your husband. That sound stupid?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Good.”

  “And did you? Did you shake something loose?”

  “I don’t know yet. Sometimes it takes a little while.”

  “You know, I asked Irving about you. He said you weren’t on the case. He said you only came out the other night because the other detectives had their hands full with the reporters and… and the body.”

  Like a schoolboy, Bosch felt a tingling of excitement. She had asked about him. It didn’t matter that now she knew he was freelancing on the case, she had made inquiries about him.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s true, to a degree. Technically, I am not on the case. But I have other cases that are believed to be tied in with the death of your husband.”

  Her eyes never left his. He could see she wanted to ask what cases but she was a cop’s wife. She knew the rules. In that moment he was sure she did not deserve what she had been handed. None of it.

  He said, “It really wasn’t you, was it? The tip to IAD. The letter.”

  She shook her head no.

  “But they won’t believe you. They think you started the whole thing.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What did Irving say? When he gave you the key to this place.”

  “Told me that if I wanted the money, the pension, I should let it go. Not get any ideas. As if I did. As if I cared anymore. I don’t. I knew that Cal went wrong. I don’t know what he did, I just knew he did it. A wife knows without being told. And that as much as anything else ended it between us. But I didn’t send any letter like that. I was a cop’s wife to the end. I told Irving and the guy who came before him that they had it wrong. But they didn’t care. They just wanted Cal.”

  “You told me before it was Chastain who came?”

  “It was him.”

  “What exactly did he want? You said something about he wanted to look inside the house.”

  “He held up the letter and said he knew I wrote it. He said I might as well tell him everything. Well, I told him I didn’t write it and I told him to get out. But at first he wouldn’t leave.”

  “What did he say he wanted, specifically?”

  “He– I don’t really remember it all. He wanted bank account statements and he wanted to know what properties we had. He thought I was sitting there waiting for him to come so I could give him my husband. He said he wanted the typewriter and I told him we didn’t even have one. I pushed him out and closed the door.”

  He nodded and tried to compute these facts into those he already had. It was too much of a whirlwind.

  “You don’t remember anything about what the letter said?”

  “I didn’t really get the chance to read it. He didn’t show it to me to read because he thought-and he and the others still believe-that it came from me. So I only read a little before he put it back in his briefcase. It said something about Cal being a front for a Mexican. It said he was giving protection. It said something along the lines that he had made a Faustian pact. You know what this is, right? A deal with the devil.”

  Bosch nodded. He was reminded that she was a teacher. He also realized that they had been standing in the living room for at least ten minutes. But he made no move to sit down. He feared that any sudden movement would break the spell, send her out the door and away from him.

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have gotten so allegorical if I had written it, but essentially that letter was correct. I mean, I didn’t know what he had done but I knew something happened. I could see it was killing him inside.

  “Once– this was before he left-I finally asked him what was happening and he just said he had made a mistake and he would try to correct it himself. He wouldn’t talk about it with me. He shut me out.”

  She sat down on the edge of an upholstered chair, holding the dress blues on her lap. The chair was an awful green color and there were cigarette burns on its right arm. Bosch sat down on the couch next to the bag of photos.

  She said, “Irving and Chastain. They don’t believe me. They just nod their heads when I tell them. They say the letter had too many intimate details. It had to be me. Meanwhile, I guess somebody is happy out there. Their little letter brought him down.”

  Bosch thought of Kapps and wondered if he could have known enough details about Moore to have written the letter. He had set up Dance. Maybe he had tried to set up Moore first. It seemed unlikely. Maybe the letter had come from Dance because he wanted to move up the ladder and Moore was in the way.

  Harry thought of the coffee can he had seen in the kitchen cabinet and wondered if he should ask her if she wanted some. He didn’t want the time with her to end. He wanted to smoke but didn’t want to risk having
her ask him not to.

  “Do you want any coffee? There is some in the kitchen I could make.”

  She looked toward the kitchen as if its location or cleanliness had a role in her answer. Then she said no, she wasn’t planning to stay that long.

  “I am going to Mexico tomorrow,” Bosch said.

  “Mexicali?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the other cases?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he told her about them. About black ice and Jimmy Kapps and Juan Doe #67. And he told her of the ties to both her husband and Mexicali. It was there he hoped to unravel the whirlwind.

  He finished the story by saying, “As you can tell, people like Irving, they want this to go by. They don’t really care who killed Cal because he had crossed. They write him off like a bad debt. They are not going to pursue it because they don’t want it to blow up in their faces. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I was a cop’s wife, remember?”

  “Right. So you know. The thing about this is I care. Your husband was putting a file together for me. A file on black ice. It makes me think like maybe he was trying to do something good. He might have been trying to do the impossible. To cross back. It might’ve been what got him killed. And if it is, then I’m not letting it go by.”

  They were quiet a long time after that. Her face looked pained but her eyes remained sharp and dry. She pulled the suit up higher on her lap. Bosch could hear a police helicopter circling somewhere in the distance. It wouldn’t be L.A. without police helicopters and spotlights circling at night.

  “Black ice,” she said after a while in a whispery voice.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s funny, that’s all.” She was quiet a few moments and seemed to look around the room, realizing this was the place her husband had come to after leaving her. “Black ice. I grew up in the Bay Area-San Francisco mostly-and that was something we always were told to watch out for. But, you know, it was the other black ice we were told about.”

  She looked at him then and must have read his confusion.

  “In the winter, on those days when it really gets cold after a rain. When the rain freezes on the road, that’s black ice. It’s there on the road, on the black asphalt, but you can’t see it. I remember my father teaching me to drive and he was always saying, ‘Watch out for the black ice, girl. You don’t see the danger until you are in it. Then it’s too late. You’re sliding out of control.’”

  She smiled at the memory and said, “Anyway, that was the black ice I knew. At least while I was growing up. Just like coke used to be a soda. The meaning of things can change on you.”

  He just looked at her. He wanted to hold her again, touch the softness of her cheek with his own.

  “Didn’t your father ever tell you to watch out for the black ice?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know him. I sorta taught myself to drive.”

  She nodded and didn’t say anything but didn’t look away.

  “It took me about three cars to learn. By the time I finally got it down, nobody would dare lend me a car. Nobody ever told me about the black ice, either.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you hung up on the past, too, Harry?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I guess we all are. What’s that saying? Through studying the past we learn our future. Something like that. You seem to me to be a man still studying, maybe.”

  Her eyes seemed to look into him. They were eyes with great knowledge. And he realized that for all of his desires the other night, she did not need to be held or healed of pain. In fact, she was the healer. How could Cal Moore have run from this?

  He changed the subject, not knowing why, only that he must push the attention away from himself.

  “There’s a picture frame in the bedroom. Carved cherrywood. But no picture. You remember it?”

  “I’ll have to look.”

  She stood, leaving her husband’s suit on the chair, and moved into the bedroom. She looked at the frame in the top drawer of the bureau a long time before saying she didn’t recognize it. She didn’t look at Bosch until after she said this.

  They stood there next to the bed looking at each other in silence. Bosch finally raised his hand, then hesitated. She took a step closer to him and that was the sign that his touch was wanted. He caressed her cheek, the way she had done it herself when she had studied the photograph earlier and thought she was alone. Then he dropped his hand down the side of her throat and around the back of her neck.

  They stared at each other. Then she came closer and brought her mouth up to his. Her hand came to his neck and pulled him to her and they kissed. She held him and pressed herself against him in a way that revealed her need. He saw her eyes were closed now and at that moment Bosch realized she was his reflection in a mirror of hunger and loneliness.

  They made love on her husband’s unmade bed, neither of them paying mind to where they were or what this would mean the next day or week or year. Bosch kept his eyes closed, wanting to concentrate on other senses-her smell and taste and touch.

  Afterward, he pulled himself back, so that his head lay on her chest between her freckled breasts. She had her hands in his hair and was drawing her fingers through the curls. He could hear her heart beating in rhythm with his.

  Chapter 19

  It was after oneA.M. by the time Bosch turned the Caprice onto Woodrow Wilson and began the long, winding ascent to his house. He saw the spotlights tracing eights on the low-lying clouds over Universal City. On the road he had to navigate his way around cars double-parked outside holiday parties and a discarded Christmas tree, a few strands of lonely tinsel still clinging to its branches, that had blown into his path. On the seat next to him were the lone Budweiser from Cal Moore’s refrigerator and Lucius Porter’s gun.

  All his life he believed he was slumming toward something good. That there was meaning. In the youth shelter, the foster homes, the Army and Vietnam, and now the department, he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty. He had learned to fill that hollowness with isolation and work. Sometimes drink and the sound of the jazz saxophone. But never people. He never let anyone in all the way.

  And now he thought he had seen Sylvia Moore’s eyes. Her true eyes, and he had to wonder if she was the one who could fill him.

  “I want to see you,” he had said when they separated outside The Fountains.

  “Yes,” was all she said. She touched his cheek with her hand and got into her car.

  Now Bosch thought about what that one word and the accompanying touch could mean. He was happy. And that was something new.

  As he rounded the last curve, slowing for a car with its brights on to pass, he thought of the way she had looked at the picture frame for so long before saying she did not recognize it. Had she lied? What were the chances that Cal Moore would have bought such an expensive frame after moving into a dump like that? Not good, was the answer.

  By the time he pulled the Caprice into the carport, he was full of confusing feelings. What had been in the picture? What difference did it make that she had held that back? If she did. Still sitting in the car, he opened the beer and drank it down quickly, some of it spilling onto his neck. He would sleep tonight, he knew.

  Inside, he went to the kitchen, put Porter’s gun in a cabinet and checked the phone machine. There were no messages. No call from Porter saying why he had run. No call from Pounds asking how it was going. No call from Irving saying he knew what Bosch was up to.

  After two nights with little sleep, Bosch looked forward to his bed as he did on few other nights. It was most often this way, part of a routine he kept. Nights of fleeting res
t or nightmares followed by a single night when exhaustion finally drove him down hard into a dark sleep.

  As he gathered the covers and pillows about him, he noticed there was still the trace of Teresa Corazon’s powdery perfume on them. He closed his eyes and thought about her for a moment. But soon her image was pushed out of his mind by Sylvia Moore’s face. Not the photo from the bag or the night stand, but the real face. Weary but strong, her eyes focused on Bosch’s own.

  The dream was like others Harry had had. He was in the dark place. A cavernous blackness enveloped him and his breath echoed in the dark. He sensed, or rather, he knew in the way he had knowledge of place in all his dreams that the darkness ended ahead and he must go there. But this time he was not alone. That was what was different. He was with Sylvia, and they huddled in the black, their sweat stinging their eyes. Harry held her and she held him. And they did not speak.

  They broke from each other’s embrace and began to move through the darkness. There was dim light ahead and Harry headed that way. His left hand was extended in front of him, his Smith Wesson in its grasp. His right hand was behind him, holding hers and leading her along. And as they came into the light Calexico Moore was waiting there with the shotgun. He was not hidden, but he stood partially silhouetted by the light that poured into the passage. His green eyes were in shadow. And he smiled. Then he raised the shotgun.

  “Who fucked up?” he said.

  The roar was deafening in the blackness. Bosch saw Moore’s hands fly loose from the shotgun and up away from his body like tethered birds trying to take flight. He back-stepped wildly into the darkness and was gone. Not fallen, but disappeared. Gone. Only the light at the end of the passage remained in his wake. In one hand Harry still gripped Sylvia’s hand. In the other, the smoking gun.

  He opened his eyes then.

  Bosch sat up on the bed. He saw pale light leaking around the edges of the curtains on the windows facing east. The dream had seemed so short, but he realized because of the light he had slept until morning. He held his wrist up to the light and checked his watch. He had no alarm clock because he never needed one. It was six o’clock. He rubbed his face in his palms and tried to reconstruct the dream. This was unusual for him. A counselor at the sleep dysfunction lab at the VA had once told him to write down what he remembered from his dreams. It was an exercise, she said, to try to inform the conscious mind what the subconscious side was saying. For months he kept a notebook and pen by the bed and dutifully recorded his morning memories. But Bosch had found it did him no good. No matter how well he understood the source of his nightmares, he could not eliminate them from his sleep. He had dropped out of the sleep deprivation counseling program years ago.