Harry Bosch 02 - The Black Ice

by Michael Connelly

  The queen-sized bed was unmade. On the night table were 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 serving 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 photographs 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, anyway."

  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 motorcycle cops coming in in procession on curving Valley Circle Boulevard always made a good front-page photo.

  "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."