The five tracks involved two cases that were currently on Montgomery’s civil docket, one he had recently ruled on, and two from his days in criminal court. The criminal cases entailed convicted defendants who had threatened the judge. The civil cases had large money stakes riding on the judge’s ruling or impending ruling.
It had been Bosch’s experience that threats made by criminals heading off to prison were mostly hollow. They were the last gasps of people crushed by the system and who had nothing left but the ability to throw empty promises of revenge at those they perceived as their tormentors. Bosch had been threatened many times in his years as a police officer and detective, and not once had the person who issued the remark acted on it.
And so he took up the two tracks involving threats from Montgomery’s days on the criminal bench first, not because he believed them to be the best shot but because he wanted to get through them quickly in order to concentrate on the cases involving large sums of money. Money was always the better motive.
He put a live recording of Charles Mingus at Carnegie Hall on the turntable, chosen for the twenty-four-minute version of “C Jam Blues” on side 1. The 1974 concert was up-tempo, high energy, and largely improvisational, and just what Bosch needed for wading through case reports. The concert, including Bosch favorite John Handy on tenor sax, helped put him into the proper groove.
The first threat involved a man sentenced to life without parole for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, who had been abducted and then tortured over a three-day period before perishing from loss of blood. There appeared to be no issue at trial that engaged the judge in any controversial decision against the defense. The suspect, Richard Kirk, had been arrested in possession of the knives and other tools linked forensically to the injuries sustained by the victim. He had also rented the warehouse where the torture-killing had taken place. A month after Kirk was sentenced to prison, the judge received an anonymous letter claiming that he would be eviscerated with a six-inch blade and would “bleed out like a slaughtered pig.” It was unsigned but had the hallmarks of Richard Kirk, who had committed much of his torture with a six-inch blade.
While Montgomery had not been eviscerated, he had been stabbed three times in a concentrated area of his torso under his right arm, suggesting a prison-style shanking—three quick thrusts with a blade.
When the threatening letter came in, a sheriff’s department investigation was opened and a fingerprint on the stamp attached to the anonymous letter was traced to a legal clerk who worked for Kirk’s defense attorney. When confronted, the defense attorney acknowledged taking the letter from Kirk while on a visit with his client to discuss an appeal. He said he never read the letter because it was in a sealed envelope. He simply handed it over to his clerk to mail. The investigation resulted in Kirk being placed in solitary confinement for a year and his attorney being quietly disciplined by the California Bar.
The incident also put Kirk on the radar of the detectives working Montgomery’s killing. Reyes requested a list of any prison associates of Kirk’s who had been released in the prior year, the theory being that Kirk might have somehow paid an inmate about to be paroled to hit Montgomery. The list included only one man who was paroled to Los Angeles a month before the Montgomery slaying. He was interviewed and alibied through cameras at the halfway house he was required to live in. Gustafson took the investigation no further once Herstadt became their primary suspect.
Bosch got up and flipped the record. The band Mingus had put together went into a song called “Perdido.” Bosch picked up the album cover and studied it. There were three photos of Mingus, his big arms around his stand-up bass, but none of the pictures fully revealed his face. In one shot his back was to the camera. It was the first time Bosch had noticed this and it was a curious thing. He went to his record stack and flipped through his other Mingus albums. Almost all of them clearly showed his face, including three where he was lighting or smoking a cigar. He wasn’t shy in life or on other album covers. The Carnegie Hall album photos were a mystery.
Bosch went back to work, moving on to the second threat from the criminal side of Montgomery’s history as a jurist. This one involved a case where a ruling by Montgomery was reversed on appeal and a new trial ordered because of an error the judge had made in his instructions to the jury.
The defendant was Thomas O’Leary, an attorney who had been convicted of two counts of cocaine possession. According to Gustafson’s summary of the case, O’Leary was snared in an undercover operation in which a Sheriff’s Department deputy posed as a drug dealer, engaged O’Leary to defend him, and paid for his services three different times with quantities of cocaine. Cameras in an undercover car recorded O’Leary receiving the drugs. At trial O’Leary conceded that he had received the drugs but put forward an entrapment defense, arguing that he had never previously accepted drugs in payment. He also claimed that the government was targeting him in retribution for his defending high-profile clients in other cases brought by the Sheriff’s narcotics unit. O’Leary’s contention was that he was not predisposed to break the law in such a way until the undercover deputy persuaded him to.
Part of the entrapment instruction Judge Montgomery gave to the jury was that O’Leary could not be convicted if the jury found that he had not been predisposed to commit the crime in the first incident. He erroneously refused to allow an additional instruction requested by the defense that if O’Leary was not convicted in the first incident then he could not be convicted in the following two because they were essentially the fruit of the first offense.
The jury found O’Leary not guilty of the first charge but convicted him on the second two, and Montgomery sentenced him to eleven years in prison. More than a year passed before the appellate court ruled in O’Leary’s favor, ordering him released from prison on bail and to face a new trial. The District Attorney’s Office decided not to pursue the case a second time and the charges against O’Leary were dropped. By that time he had been disbarred, and divorced by his wife. He was working as a legal assistant in a law firm. During the final hearing at which the charges were dropped and the case dismissed, O’Leary had lashed out at Montgomery, not specifically threatening him with violence but yelling in court that the judge would pay someday for the mistake that cost O’Leary his career, his marriage, and his life savings.
Gustafson and Reyes investigated O’Leary and checked out his alibi, determining that at the exact time of the murder, his employee ID for the law firm he worked at had registered at the security entrance to the company’s building. It wasn’t a complete alibi because there was no camera at the entrance. But Gustafson and Reyes did not pursue it further after Herstadt became suspect number one.
Bosch wrote a few notes down on a pad—ideas for how he might follow up on both of these tracks. But his gut told him that neither Kirk nor O’Leary was good for the killing, no matter how angry they were at Montgomery. He wanted to move on to the other three tracks to see if they were more viable.
He got up from the table to walk a bit before diving back in. His knee stiffened when he held it in a sitting position too long. He walked out onto the back deck of his house and checked out the view of the Cahuenga Pass. It was only midafternoon but the freeway down below was slow-moving and clogged in both directions. He realized he had worked straight through the morning. He was hungry but decided to put another hour into the case before going down the hill and getting something that would count as both lunch and dinner.
Back inside, the music had stopped and he went to the record stack to make another selection that would keep his momentum up. He decided to stay with a strong bass quarterbacking the band and started flipping through his Ron Carter albums.
He was interrupted by the doorbell.
27
Ballard was at the door.
“I need your help,” she said.
Bosch stepped back and let her enter. He then followed her in, noticing that she had a backpack over her shoulder. As she walked past t
he dining room table, she looked down at the documents stacked in separate piles.
“Is that the Montgomery case?” she asked.
“Uh, yes,” Bosch said. “We got a copy of the murder book in discovery. I’m just looking at the other—”
“Great, so you’re working here on it.”
“Where else would I—”
“No, that’s good. I want you to help me from here.”
She seemed nervous, ramped up. Bosch wondered if she had slept since finishing her shift.
“What are we talking about here, Renée?” he asked.
“I need you to monitor a wiretap when I’m not able to,” she said. “I have the software on my laptop and I can leave it with you.”
Bosch paused to gather his thoughts before replying.
“This is in regard to the Hilton case?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Our case. You can work on Montgomery, but when a call or text comes in you’ll get an alert on my laptop and you just need to monitor it. It’ll be good that you have something else to do while monitoring.”
She gestured toward the stacks spread on the table.
“Renée,” he said. “Is this a legal tap?”
Ballard laughed.
“Of course,” she said. “I got the search warrant signed this morning. Then spent the next two hours getting it set up with the providers—a landline and a cell. Text messages included. Then I went to the tech unit and had the software put on my laptop.”
“You went to Billy Thornton with this?” Bosch asked.
“Yes, Department 107. What’s wrong, Harry?”
“He wouldn’t have signed off on this without an approval from the department. I thought this was a case we were working. Now command staff knows about it?”
“I had a captain sign off on it and he won’t be a problem for us.”
“Who?”
“Olivas.”
“What?”
“Harry, all you need to know is that it’s a legit wire. We’re good to go.”
“Does Billy still have the jazz photo on his wall?”
“Jesus Christ, you don’t believe me, do you? Ben Webster, okay? ‘The Brute and the Beauty.’ Happy?”
“‘Beautiful.’”
“What?”
“Webster—they called him ‘the Brute and the Beautiful.’”
“Whatever. Are you satisfied?”
“Yeah, okay, I’m satisfied.”
“I can’t believe you’d think I’d forge a search warrant.”
Bosch knew he had to change the subject.
“Well, when did Olivas make captain?”
“Just got the bars.”
Bosch knew that Olivas was Ballard’s nemesis in the department—and she his. He decided he didn’t want to know how she got him to sign off on the warrant. Asking her would risk another rift between them.
“So, it’s been a long time since I worked a wiretap,” he said instead. “We used to have to go out to the wiretap room in Commerce to listen. You’re saying I can monitor it from here?”
“Totally,” Ballard said. “It’s all on the laptop.”
Bosch nodded.
“So, who are we listening to?” he asked.
“Elvin Kidd,” Ballard said. “Starting tomorrow. I want to get you set up and comfortable on it, and then after my shift tomorrow morning I’m going to go out to Rialto and shake his tree. Hopefully, he’ll get on the phone and call or text to ask his old friends in South L.A. what’s going on. We get an admission and we’ll take him down.”
Bosch nodded again.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Starving,” Ballard said.
“Good. Let’s get something to eat and talk this through. When was the last time you slept?”
“I don’t remember. But we had a deal, remember?”
“Right.”
Bosch drove. They went down the hill, crossed the freeway on Barham and over to the Smoke House by the Warner Brothers studio. Ballard reported that she had not eaten anything since a meal break on her last shift. She ordered a steak, a baked potato, and garlic toast to share. Bosch ordered a salad with grilled chicken. Ballard had brought her backpack into the restaurant and while they waited for their food she updated Bosch on her investigation, detailing her interview with Hilton’s former roommate, Nathan Brazil, which confirmed that Hilton was gay and in love with an unattainable man.
“It all leads to Kidd,” she said. “He owned that alley and he cleared everybody out, set up the meeting with Hilton, and then executed him.”
“And the motive?” Bosch asked.
“Pride. He couldn’t have this infatuated kid threatening his reputation. Did you look at the phone records in the murder book when you had it?”
“Yes, but just in a cursory way.”
“There were several calls from Hilton’s apartment line to a payphone number in South Central. It was in a shopping plaza at Slauson and Crenshaw, the heart of Rolling 60s turf. The original investigators didn’t do anything with it, thought it was a dealer connection, but I think Hilton was calling Kidd there or trying to reach him, and it was becoming a problem for him.”
Bosch sat back and considered her theory as their food arrived. Once the waiter was gone, he summarized.
“Forbidden love,” he said. “Lovers in prison, but outside that was a threat to Kidd’s position and power. It could get him ousted—maybe even killed.”
Ballard nodded.
“Nineteen-ninety?” she said. “That wasn’t going to go over on the gang streets.”
“That wouldn’t go over now,” Bosch said. “I heard about this case a few years before I quit where guys on a no-knock search warrant hit a stash house and caught a guy from Grape Street in bed with another guy. They used it to turn him into an inside man in five minutes flat. That was more leverage than holding a five-year sentence over his head. They know they can do the time if necessary, come out and be an operator. But nobody wants a gay rap in the gang. They get that and they’re done.”
They started to eat, both so hungry that they stopped talking. Bosch ran everything through his filters while silent and spoke when his hunger had been pushed back into its cage.
“So, tomorrow,” he said. “How are you going to push his buttons?”
“For one, I hope to catch him at home,” Ballard answered, her mouth still full with the last bite of her steak. “He’s married now and his business is in his wife’s name. When I start mentioning Hilton and their prior relationship, I hope he panics. I doubt the wife knows about his gay relationships. I have the sketchbook. I start showing the drawings and he’ll shit a brick.”
“But how does that get him on the phone? You’re making it between him and her.”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“I’m not sure yet. But you have to tie it back to the gang.”
“I thought about that, but then I put the risk on Dennard Dorsey. He’s in the Rolling 60s module at Men’s Central. If Kidd gets the word to somebody in there, Dorsey’s toast.”
“We need to scheme it some other way. Don’t use Dorsey.”
“There was another guy in the murder book who worked the street with Dorsey: Vincent Pilkey. But he died a few years back.”
“That was after Kidd left South Central, right? Think he’d know that Pilkey’s dead?”
Ballard shrugged and attacked the garlic toast.
“Hard to say,” she answered. “It could be risky using his name. Kidd might see right through the scam.”
“He might,” Bosch conceded.
He watched her eat the toast. She looked worn down, like a homeless person who had found a pizza crust in a trash can.
“I assume you’re going out there without backup,” he said.
“There is none,” she said. “This is you and me, and I need you on the phones.”
“What if I’m nearby? Someplace with Wi-Fi. There’s gotta be a Starbucks near whatever place you�
�re going. Or you can show me how to make my phone a hot spot. Maddie does that.”
“It’s too risky. You lose signal and you lose any calls that get made. I’ll be fine. It’s an in-and-out operation. I go in, light the fire, I get out. He—hopefully—starts making calls. Maybe texts.”
“We still need to figure out how you light the fire.”
“I think I just tell him I work cold cases, was assigned this one, and saw that he was never interviewed back in the day. I let it drop that back then there was a witness who described a shooter that looked a lot like him. He’ll deny, deny, I’ll leave, and my bet is he gets on the phone to try to find out who this witness is.”
Bosch thought about that and decided it could work.
“Okay,” he said. “Good.”
But he knew that if that was the plan, he needed to say something about Ballard’s readiness.
“Look, I know we made a deal and all that, but we’re talking about a high-risk move here and you need to be ready,” he said. “So, I have to say it: you look tired—and you can’t be tired when you do this. I think you should put it off until you’re ready.”
“I am ready,” Ballard protested. “And I can’t put it off. It’s a seventy-two-hour tap. That’s all the judge would give me. It starts as soon as the service providers begin sending the signal—which is supposed to be end of day today. So, we have three days to get this going. We can’t put it off.”
“Okay, okay. Then you take a sick day tonight so you can sleep.”
“I’m not doing that either. I’m needed on the late show and I’m not going to leave them high and dry.”
“Okay, then we go back to my house. I have a spare room you can use. You sleep on a bed, not sand, until it’s time to go to work tonight.”
“No. I have too much to do.”
“Then that’s too bad. You think this guy is safe because he’s supposedly not in the gang anymore. Well, he’s not safe—he’s dangerous. And I’m not going to monitor anything if I think there’s something wrong with the setup.”
The Night Fire Page 16