“Veronica Aliso. What about my husband, Detective? Is he hurt?”
Bosch leaned forward in his chair. No matter how many times he did this, he never got used to it and he was never sure he was doing it the right way.
“Mrs. Aliso…I am very sorry, but your husband is dead. He was the victim of a homicide. I am sorry to have to tell you this.”
He watched her closely and she said nothing at first. She instinctively crossed her arms in front of her and brought her face down in a pained grimace. There were no tears. Not yet. In his experience, Bosch had seen them come either right away—as soon as they opened the door and saw him and knew—or much later, when it sank in that the nightmare was reality.
“I don’t…How did this happen?” she asked, her eyes staring down at the floor.
“He was found in his car. He’d been shot.”
“In Las Vegas?”
“No. Here. Not far. It looks like he was coming home from the airport when…when he was somehow stopped by somebody. We’re not sure yet. His car was found off Mulholland Drive. Down by the Bowl.”
He watched her a little more. She still had not looked up. Bosch felt a sense of guilt pass over him. Guilt because he was not watching this woman with sympathy. He had been in this place too many times for that. Instead, he watched her with an eye for false mannerisms. In these situations his suspicion outweighed his compassion. It had to.
“Can I get you anything, Mrs. Aliso?” Rider asked. “Water? Do you have coffee? Do you want something stronger?”
“No. I’m fine. Thank you. It’s just a terrible shock.”
“Do you have any children in the house?” Rider asked.
“No, we…no children. Do you know what happened? Was he robbed?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Bosch said.
“Of course.…Can you tell me, was there much pain?”
“No, there was no pain,” Bosch said.
He thought of the tears welled in Tony Aliso’s eyes. He decided not to tell her about that.
“It must be hard, your job,” she said. “Telling people this sort of thing.”
He nodded and looked away. For a moment he thought of the old squad room joke about the easiest way to do next-of-kin notification. When Mrs. Brown opens the door, you say, “Are you the widow Brown?”
He looked back at the widow Aliso.
“Why did you ask if it happened in Las Vegas?”
“Because that was where he was.”
“How long was he supposed to be there?”
“I don’t know. He never scheduled it with a return. He always bought open-ended tickets so he could come back when he wanted to. He always said he’d be back when his luck changed. For the worse.”
“We have reason to believe he came back to Los Angeles on Friday night. His car wasn’t found until this evening. That’s two days, Mrs. Aliso. Did you try to call him in Las Vegas during that time?”
“No. We usually didn’t speak when he was over there.”
“And how often was it that he went?”
“Once or twice a month.”
“For how long each time?”
“Anywhere from two days to once he spent a week. Like I said, it all depended on how he was doing.”
“And you never called him there?” Rider asked.
“Rarely. Not at all this time.”
“Was it business or pleasure that took him there?” Bosch asked.
“He always told me it was both. He said he had investors to see. But it was an addiction. That’s what I believed. He loved to gamble and could afford to do it. So he went.”
Bosch nodded but didn’t know why.
“This last time, when did he go?”
“He went Thursday. After leaving the studio.”
“You saw him last then?”
“Thursday morning. Before he went to the studio. He left for the airport from there. It’s closer.”
“And you had no idea when to expect him back.”
He said it as a statement. It was out there for her to challenge if she wanted to.
“To be honest, I was just beginning to wonder tonight. It usually doesn’t take long for that place to separate a man from his money. I thought it was a little long, yes. But I didn’t try to track him down. And then you came.”
“What did he like to play over there?”
“Everything. But poker the most. It was the only game where you weren’t playing against the house. The house took a cut, but you were playing against the other players. That’s how he explained it to me once. Only he called the other players schmucks from Iowa.”
“Was he always alone over there, Mrs. Aliso?”
Bosch looked down at his notebook and acted as if he was writing something important and that her answer wasn’t. He knew it was cowardly.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Did you ever go with him at all?”
“I don’t like to gamble. I don’t like that city. That city is a horrible place. They can dress it up all they want, it’s still a city of vices and whores. Not just the sexual kind.”
Bosch studied the cool anger in her dark eyes.
“You didn’t answer the question, Mrs. Aliso,” Rider said.
“What question?”
“Did you ever go to Las Vegas with him?”
“At first, yes. But I found it boring. I haven’t been in years.”
“Was your husband in any kind of serious debt?” Bosch asked.
“I don’t know. If he was, he didn’t tell me. You can call me Veronica.”
“You never asked if he was getting into trouble?” Rider asked.
“I just assumed that he would tell me if he was.”
She turned the hard dark eyes on Rider now, and Bosch felt a weight lift off him. Veronica Aliso was challenging them to disagree.
“I know this probably makes me some kind of a suspect, but I don’t care,” she said. “You have your job to do. It must be obvious to you that my husband and I…let’s just say we coexisted here. So as to your questions about Nevada, I couldn’t tell you whether he was a million up or a million down. Who knows, he could’ve beaten the odds. But I think he would have bragged about it if he had.”
Bosch nodded and thought about the body in the trunk. It didn’t seem like that of a man who had beaten any odds.
“Where did he stay in Las Vegas, Mrs. Aliso?”
“Always at the Mirage. I do know that. You see, not all of the casinos have poker tables. The Mirage has a classy one. He always said that if I needed to call, call there. Ask for the poker pit if there is no answer in the room.”
Bosch took a few moments to write this down. He found that often silence was the best way to get people to talk and reveal themselves. He hoped Rider realized that he was leaving holes of silence in the interview on purpose.
“You asked if he went there alone.”
“Yes?”
“Detectives, in the course of your investigation I believe you will undoubtedly learn that my husband was a philanderer. I ask only one thing of you, please do your best to keep that information from me. I simply don’t want to know.”
Bosch nodded and was silent a moment while he composed his thoughts. What kind of woman wouldn’t want to know, he wondered. Maybe one who already did. He looked back at her and their eyes connected again.
“Aside from gambling, was your husband in any other kind of trouble as far as you know?” he asked. “Work-related, financial?”
“As far as I know he wasn’t. But he kept the finances. I could not tell you what our situation is at the moment. When I needed money I asked him, and he always said cash a check and tell him the amount. I have a separate account for household expenses.”
Without looking up from the notebook, Bosch said, “Just a few more and we’ll leave you alone for now. Did your husband have any enemies that you know of? Anybody who would want to harm him?”
“He worked in Hollywood. Back stabb
ing is considered an art form there. Anthony was as skilled at it as anyone else who has been in the industry twenty-five years. Obviously that means there could always be people who were unhappy with him. But who would do this, I don’t know.”
“The car…the Rolls-Royce is leased to a production company over at Archway Studios. How long had he worked there?”
“His office was there, but he didn’t work for Archway per se. TNA Productions is his…was his own company. He simply rented an office and a parking spot on the Archway lot. But he had about as much to do with Archway as you do.”
“Tell us about his production company,” Rider said. “Did he make films?”
“In a manner of speaking. You could say he started big and ended small. About twenty years ago he produced his first film. The Art of the Cape. If you saw it, you were one of the few. Bullfight movies are not popular. But it was critically acclaimed, played the film festival circuit and then the art houses and it was a good start for him.”
She said that Aliso had managed to make a couple more films for general release. But after that his production and moral values steadily declined, until he was producing a procession of exploitative dreck.
“These films, if you want to call them that, are notable only for the number of exposed breasts in them,” she said. “In the business, it’s called straight-to-video stock. In addition to that Tony was quite successful in literary arbitrage.”
“What is that?”
“He was a speculator. Mostly scripts, but he did manuscripts, books on occasion.”
“And how would he speculate on them?”
“He’d buy them. Wrap up the rights. Then when they became valuable or the author became hot, he’d go to market with them. Do you know who Michael St. John is?”
The name sounded familiar but Bosch could not place it. He shook his head. Rider did the same.
“He’s one of the screenwriters of the moment. He’ll be directing studio features within a year or so. He’s the flavor-of-the-month, so to speak.”
“Okay.”
“Well, eight years ago when he was in the USC film school and was hungry and was trying to find an agent and trying to catch the attention of the studios, my husband was one of the vultures who circled overhead. You see, my husband’s films were so low-budget that he’d get students to shoot them, direct them, write them. So he knew the schools and he knew talent. Michael St. John was one he knew had talent. Once when he was desperate, he sold Anthony the rights to three of his student screenplays for two thousand dollars. Now, anything with St. John’s name on it goes for at least six figures.”
“What about these writers, how do they take this?”
“Not well. St. John was trying to buy his scripts back.”
“You think he could have harmed your husband?”
“No. You asked me what he did and I told you. If you are asking who would kill him, I don’t know.”
Bosch jotted a couple of notes down.
“You mentioned that he said that he saw investors when he went to Las Vegas,” Rider said.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us who they were?”
“Schmucks from Iowa, I would assume. People he would meet and persuade to invest in a movie. You’d be surprised how many people jump at a chance to be part of a Hollywood movie. And Tony was a good salesman. He could make a two-million budget flick sound like the sequel to Gone With the Wind. He convinced me.”
“How so?”
“He talked me into being in one of his movies once. That’s how I met him. Made it sound like I was going to be the new Jane Fonda. You know, sexy but smart. It was a studio picture. Only the director was a coke addict and the writer couldn’t write and the movie was so bad it was never released. That was it for my career and Tony never made a studio picture again. He spent the rest of his life making video garbage.”
Looking around the tall-ceilinged room at the paintings and furniture, Bosch said, “Doesn’t look like he did too badly at it.”
“No, he didn’t,” she responded. “I guess we have those people from Iowa to thank for that.”
Her bitterness was stifling. Bosch looked down at his notebook just so he could avert his eyes from her.
“All this talk,” she said then. “I need some water. Do either of you want something?”
“Water would be fine,” Bosch said. “We’re not going to be much longer.”
“Detective Rider?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“I’ll be right back.”
While she was gone Bosch stood up and looked around the living room in a manner that suggested he wasn’t really interested. He said nothing to Rider. He was standing near a side table looking at a carved glass figurine of a nude woman when Veronica Aliso came back in with two glasses of ice water.
“I just want to ask you a few more questions about this past week,” Bosch said.
“Fine.”
He sipped from his glass and remained standing.
“What would your husband have taken with him to Las Vegas as far as luggage went?”
“Just his overnighter.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was a hanging bag that, you know, folded over. It was green with brown leather trim and straps. He had a name tag on it.”
“Did he take a briefcase or any work with him?”
“Yes, his briefcase. It was one of those aluminum shell kind. You know, they are lightweight but impossible to break into or something. Is the luggage missing?”
“We’re not sure. Do you know where he kept the key to the briefcase?”
“On his key chain. With the car keys.”
There had been no car keys in the Rolls or on Aliso’s body. Bosch realized that the reason they might have been taken was to open the briefcase. He put the glass down next to the figurine and looked at it again. He then began writing the descriptions of the briefcase and hanging bag in his notebook.
“Did your husband wear a wedding ring?”
“No. He did wear quite an expensive watch, though. It was a Rolex. I gave it to him.”
“The watch was not taken.”
“Oh.”
Bosch looked up from his notebook.
“Do you remember what your husband was wearing on Thursday morning? When you last saw him?”
“Um, just clothes…uh, he had on his white pants and a blue shirt and his sport coat.”
“His black leather sport coat?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Aliso, do you remember if you hugged him or kissed him good-bye?”
This seemed to fluster her, and Bosch immediately regretted the way he had phrased the question.
“I’m sorry. What I meant was that we found some fingerprints on the jacket. On the shoulder. And if you might have touched him there on the day he left, it could explain this piece of evidence.”
She was quiet a moment and Bosch thought that she was finally going to begin to cry. But instead, she said, “I might have but I don’t remember…. I don’t think I did.”
Bosch opened his briefcase and looked for a print screen. He found one in one of the pockets. It looked like a photo slide but the center was a double-sided screen with ink between the screens. A thumb could be pressed on the A side and a fingerprint would be imprinted on a card held against the B side.
“I want to take your thumbprint so we can compare it to the print taken off the jacket. If you did not touch him there, then it might be a good lead for us.”
She stepped over to him and he pressed her right thumb down on the print screen. When he was done she looked at her thumb.
“No ink.”
“Yes, that’s nice. No mess. We just started using these a few years ago.”
“The print on the jacket, did it belong to a woman?”
He looked at her and held her eyes for a moment.
“We won’t know for sure until we get a match.”
As he put the card and the
print screen back in the briefcase, he noticed the evidence bag containing the poppers. He took it out and held it up for her to look at.
“Do you know what these are?”
She narrowed her eyes and shook her head no.
“Amyl nitrate poppers. Some people use them to enhance sexual performance and satisfaction. Do you know if your husband ever used these?”
Trunk Music (1996) Page 6