Trunk Music

by Michael Connelly

  “I got an alibi, so I’m in the clear.”

  “You’re not in the clear till we say you are. What’s your story?”

  “No. I’m gonna tell my lawyer what it is.”

  “You’re hurting yourself, Goshen. You’ve got nothing to lose telling me.”

  “Except my freedom, right?”

  “I could go out, verify your story. Maybe then I’d start listening to your story about the gun being planted.”

  “Yeah, right, that’s like puttin’ the inmates in charge of the prison. Talk to my lawyer, Bosch. Now get me a fucking phone.”

  Bosch stood up and signaled for him to put his arms behind his back. He did so and Bosch cuffed him again, then left the room.

  After Bosch filled them in on how Goshen had won round one, Felton told Iverson to take a phone into the interview room and allow the suspect to call his lawyer.

  “I guess we’ll let him stew,” Felton said when he and Bosch were alone. “See how he likes his first taste of incarceration.”

  “He told me he did three years down in Mexico.”

  “He tells that to a lot of people he’s trying to impress. Like the tattoos. When we were backgrounding him after he showed up a couple years ago, we never found anything about a Mexican prison and as far as we know, he’s never ridden a Harley, let alone with any motorcycle gang. I think a night in county might soften him up. Maybe by round two we’ll have the ballistics back.”

  Bosch said he had to use a phone to call his CO to check on what the plan was for the gun.

  “Just pick an empty desk out there,” Felton said. “Make yourself at home. Listen, I’ll tell you how this most likely will go and you can tell your Lieutenant Billets. The lawyer he calls is most likely going to be Mickey Torrino. He’s Joey Marks’s top guy. He’s going to object to extradition and meantime try to get bail. Any bail will do. All they want to do is get him out of our hands and into their hands and then they can make their decision.”

  “What decision?”

  “Whether or not to whack him. If Joey thinks Lucky might flip, he’ll just take him out to the desert somewhere and we’ll never see him again. Nobody will.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “So you go make your call and I’ll call over to the prosecutor’s office, see if we can’t get an X hearing scheduled. I think the sooner the better. If you can get Lucky to L.A., he’s going to be even more likely to start thinking about cutting a deal. That is, if we don’t break him first.”

  “It’d be nice to have the ballistics before the extradition hearing. If we get a ballistics match, it will seal it. But things don’t move so quickly in L.A., if you know what I mean. I doubt there’s even been an autopsy.”

  “Well, make your call and then we’ll reconnoiter.”

  Bosch used an empty desk next to Iverson’s to make his call. He got Billets at her desk and he could tell she was eating. He quickly updated her on his failed effort to scam Goshen into talking and the plans to have the prosecutor’s office in Las Vegas handle the extradition hearing.

  “What do you want to do about the gun?” he asked when he was done.

  “I want it back here as soon as possible. Edgar talked somebody over at the coroner’s office into doing the cut this afternoon. We should have the bullets by tonight. If we have the gun, we can take the whole thing over to ballistics tomorrow morning. Today’s Tuesday. I doubt there’d be an extradition hearing before Thursday. We’d have an answer from ballistics by then.”

  “Okay, I’ll grab a plane.”

  “Good.”

  Bosch sensed something off about her tone. She was preoccupied by something other than ballistics and what she was eating.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “What’s up? Is there something I don’t know about?”

  She hesitated a moment and Bosch waited her out.

  “Actually, something’s come up.”

  Bosch’s face flashed warm. He guessed that Felton had screwed him and told Billets about the Eleanor Wish situation.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve made an ID on the guy who was in Tony Aliso’s office.”

  “That’s great,” Bosch said, relieved but confused by her somber tone. “Who?”

  “No, it’s not great. It was Dominic Carbone from OCID.”

  Bosch was stunned into silence for a long moment.

  “Carbone? What the…?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got some feelers out. I’d like you back here until we figure out what to do with this. Goshen will keep until the extradition hearing. He’s not going to be talking to anyone but his lawyer. If you can get back, I’d like us all to get together and hash this around. I haven’t talked to Kiz and Jerry yet today. They’re still working the financial trail.”

  “How’d you make the ID on Carbone?”

  “Pure luck. Things were kind of slow after I talked to you and the captain out there this morning. I took a drive downtown and stopped by Central. I’ve got a friend, she’s a lieutenant, too, up in OC. Lucinda Barnes, you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, I went up to see her. I wanted to kind of feel around, maybe get an idea why they took the pass on this one. And, lo and behold, we’re sitting there talking and this guy walks through the squad and I think I recognize him but I’m not sure from where. I ask who he is and she tells me that’s Carbone. And that’s when I remembered. He’s the guy on the tape. He had his suit jacket off and his sleeves rolled up. I even saw the tattoo. It’s him.”

  “You tell all this to your friend?”

  “Hell no. I just acted natural and got the hell out of there. I tell you, Harry, I don’t like this inside stuff. I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll figure something. Look, I’m going to go. I’ll be there as soon as I can. What you might want to do in the meantime, Lieutenant, is try to use some juice with ballistics. Tell them we’ll be coming in with a code three in the morning.”

  Billets said she would do what she could on that.

  After making arrangements to fly back to L.A., Bosch barely had time to take a cab back to the Mirage and check out and still make it by Eleanor’s apartment to say good-bye. But his knock on her door went unanswered. He didn’t know what kind of car she had, so it was impossible for him to check the lot to make sure she was gone. He went back to his rental and sat inside and waited as long as he could, until he was at risk of missing his flight. He then scribbled a message on a page from his notebook saying he would call her and went back to the door. He folded the page up tight and stuck it in the crack of the door jamb so that it would fall and be noticed the next time she opened the door.

  He wanted to wait around longer and talk to her in person but he couldn’t. Twenty minutes later he was leaving the security office of the airport. The gun from Goshen’s house was wrapped in an evidence bag and safely in his briefcase. Five minutes later he was aboard a jet headed for the city of angels.

  III

  BILLETS HAD A weighted and worried look on her face when Bosch stepped into her office.

  “Harry.”

  “Lieutenant. I dropped the gun at ballistics. They’re waiting on the bullets. Whoever it was you talked to over there, they snapped to.”

  “Good.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “They’re both over at Archway. Kiz spent the morning at the IRS and then went over to help Jerry with the interviews with Aliso’s associates. I also borrowed a couple of people from Major Fraud to help with the books. They’re tracing down these dummy corporations. They’re going to go after the bank accounts. Search and seizure. When we freeze the money, then maybe some real live people will come out of the woodwork and claim it. My theory is that this Joey Marks was not the only one Aliso was washing money for. There’s too much involved—if Kiz’s numbers are right. Aliso was probably working for every mob combine west of Chicago.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Oh, by the way,” she continued, “I told Jerry
that you’d take the autopsy so he can stay at Archway. Then I want everybody back here at six to talk about what we have.”

  “Okay, when’s the autopsy?”

  “Three-thirty. That going to be a problem?”

  “No. Can I ask you something, why’d you call Major Fraud in instead of OCID?”

  “For obvious reasons. I don’t know what to do about Carbone and OCID. I don’t know whether to bring in Internal Affairs, look the other way or what.”

  “Well, we can’t look the other way. They have something we need. And if you call in IAD, then forget it. That will freeze everything up down there and that will be that.”

  “What do they have that we need?”

  “It stands to reason that if Carbone was pulling a bug out of that office, then—”

  “There’s tapes. Jesus, I forgot about that.”

  They dropped into silence for a few moments. Bosch pulled the chair out across from her desk and finally sat down.

  “Let me take a run at Carbone, see if I can figure out what they were doing and get the tapes,” he said. “We’ve got the leverage.”

  “This may have something to do with the chief and Fitzgerald, you know.”

  “Maybe.”

  She was referring to the intradepartmental skirmish between Deputy Chief Leon Fitzgerald, commander of OCID for more than a decade, and the man who was supposed to be his boss, the chief of police. In the time Fitzgerald had run the OCID, he had taken on an aura akin to J. Edgar Hoover’s at the FBI, a keeper of secrets who would use them to protect his position, his division and his budget. It was believed by many that Fitzgerald had his minions investigate and keep tabs on more honest citizens, cops and elected officials of the city than the mobsters his division was charged with rooting out. And it was no secret within the department that there was an ongoing power struggle between Fitzgerald and the police chief. The chief wanted to rein in OCID and its deputy chief but Fitzgerald didn’t want to be reined in. In fact, he wanted his domain to broaden. He wanted to be police chief. The struggle was largely at a namecalling standstill. The chief could not fire Fitzgerald outright because of civil service protections; and he could not get backing to simply gut and overhaul OCID from the police commission, mayor or city council members because it was believed that Fitzgerald had thick files on all of them, including the chief. These elected and appointed officials did not know what was in those files but they had to assume that the worst things they had ever done were duly recorded. And therefore they would not back the chief’s move against Fitzgerald unless they and the chief were in a guaranteed no-lose position.

  Most of this was department legend or rumor, but Bosch knew even legend and rumor usually have some basis in reality. He was reluctant to step behind this curtain and possibly into this fight, as Billets clearly was, but offered to do so because he saw no alternative. He had to know what OCID had been doing and what it was that Carbone was trying to protect by breaking into the Archway office.

  “Okay,” Billets said after some long thought. “But be careful.”

  “Where’s the video from Archway?”

  She pointed to the safe on the floor behind her desk. It was used to secure evidence.

  “It will be safe,” she said.

  “It better be. It will probably be the only thing that keeps them off me.”

  She nodded. She knew the score.

  The OCID offices were on the third floor of Central Division in downtown. The division was located away from police headquarters at Parker Center because the work of the OCID involved many undercover operations and it would not be wise to have so many undercovers going in and out of a place as public as the so-called Glass House, Parker Center. But it was that separation that helped foster the deepening gulf between Leon Fitzgerald and the police chief.

  On the drive over from Hollywood, Bosch thought about a plan and knew just how he was going to play it by the time he got to the guard shack and flipped his ID to the rookie assigned parking lot duty. He read the name off the tag above the cop’s breast pocket and drove into the lot and over toward the back doors of the station, then put the car in park and got out his phone. He called the OCID’s main number and a secretary answered.

  “Yeah, this is Trindle down on the parking lot,” Bosch said. “Is Carbone there?”

  “Yes, he is. If you hold a—”

  “Just tell him to come down. Somebody busted into his car.”

  Bosch hung up and waited. In three minutes one of the doors at the rear of the station house opened and a man hurried out. Bosch recognized him from the Archway surveillance tape. Billets had been right on. Bosch put the car in drive and followed along behind the man. Eventually, he pulled up alongside him and lowered the window.

  “Carbone.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  He kept walking, barely giving Bosch a glance.

  “Slow down. Your car’s all right.”

  Carbone stopped and now looked closely at Bosch.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I made the call. I just wanted to get you out here.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m Bosch. We talked the other night.”

  “Oh, yeah. The Aliso caper.”

  Then it dawned on him that Bosch could have just taken the elevator up to the third floor if he wanted to see him.

  “What is this, Bosch? What’s going on?”

  “Why don’t you get in? I want to take a little ride.”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t like the way you’re doing this.”

  “Get in, Carbone. I think you better.”

  Bosch said it in a tone and with an accompanying stare that invited no choice but compliance. Carbone, who was about forty with a stocky build, hesitated a moment, then walked around the front of the car. He was wearing a nice dark blue suit like most mob cops liked to wear and he filled the car with the smell of a brisk cologne. Right away Bosch didn’t like him.

  They drove out of the parking lot and Bosch went north toward Broadway. There was a lot of traffic and pedestrians and they moved slowly. Bosch said nothing, waiting for Carbone.

  “Okay, so what’s so important you have to kidnap me away from the station?” he finally asked.

  Bosch drove another block without answering. He wanted Carbone to sweat a little.

  “You’ve got problems, Carbone,” he finally said. “I just thought I should tell you. See, I want to be your friend, Carbone.”

  Carbone looked at Bosch with caution.

  “I know I got problems,” he said. “I’m paying two different women child support, my house still has cracks in the walls from the earthquake and the union ain’t going to get us a raise again this year. So fuckin’ what?”

  “Those aren’t problems, man. Those are inconveniences. I’m talking about real problems. About the break-in you did the other night over at Archway.”

  Carbone was silent for a long moment and Bosch wasn’t sure but he thought the man was holding his breath.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Take me back.”

  “No, Carbone, see, that’s the wrong answer. I’m here to help you, not hurt you. I’m your friend. And that goes for your boss, Fitzgerald, too.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay, then I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. I called you Sunday night and asked you about my stiff named Aliso. You call me back and tell me not only is OCID taking a pass, but you never heard of the guy. But as soon as you hang up the phone, you get over to Archway, break into the guy’s office and pop the bug you people planted in his phone. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Bosch looked over at him for the first time and he saw the face of a man whose mind is racing to find a way out. Bosch knew he had him now.

  “Bullshit, that’s what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, you dumb fuck? Next time you decide to do a little breaking and entering, look
up. Check for cameras. Rodney King Rule Number One, don’t get caught on tape.”

  He waited a moment to let that sink in and then put the final nails in the coffin.

  “You knocked the mug off the desk and broke it. You then dumped it outside hoping nobody would notice anything. And one last thing about the rules. If you’re going to do a B&E in short sleeves, then you ought to get yourself a Band-Aid or somethin’ and cover up that tattoo on your arm, know what I mean? That’s a slam-bang identifier when you got it on tape. And, Carbone, you’re on tape, lots of tape.”