Trunk Music

by Michael Connelly

  Because of the small take and sloppy method used by the robbers, Bosch immediately thought the suspects were a couple of hypes looking for a quick score to buy their next balloon of heroin. They had not even bothered to hide the car’s license plate, which the boy had spotted and memorized as they drove away.

  After he was finished with the boy and his mother, he went to the teletype machine and put out a wanted on the car with a description of the suspects. He found when he did this that there was already a wanted out on the vehicle for its use in two prior robberies in the last week. A lot of good that did the kid who lost a day’s pay, Bosch thought. The robbers should have been picked up before they got to the boy. But this was the big city, not a perfect world. Disappointments like that didn’t stay long with Bosch.

  By this time the squad room had pretty much cleared out for lunch. Bosch saw only Mary Cantu at the sex crimes table, probably working on the paper from that morning’s walk-in job.

  Edgar and Rider were gone, apparently having decided it would be better to go separately to Musso’s. As Bosch got up to leave, he noticed that the blinds were still drawn over the window to the lieutenant’s office. Billets was still in there, he knew. He went to the homicide table and put the copy of the murder book into his briefcase and then went and knocked on her door. Before she could answer, he opened the door and stuck his head in.

  “I’m going to go catch some lunch and then go downtown for the IAD thing. You won’t have anybody out on the counter.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll put Edgar or Rider up there after lunch. They’re just waiting around for a case, anyway.”

  “Okay then, I’ll see you.”

  “Uh, Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry for what happened earlier. Not for what I said. I meant what I said, but I should have taken you in here and spoken to you. Doing it out there in front of the others was wrong. I apologize.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Have a nice weekend.”

  “You, too.”

  “I’ll try, Lieutenant.”

  “Grace.”

  “Grace.”

  Bosch got to Musso and Frank’s Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard at exactly twelve-thirty and parked in the back. The restaurant was a Hollywood landmark, having been on the Boulevard since 1924. In its heyday it had been a popular destination for Hollywood’s elite. Fitzgerald and Faulkner held forth. Chaplin and Fairbanks once raced each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser having to pick up the dinner tab. The restaurant now subsisted mostly on its past glory and faded charm. Its red leather padded booths still filled every day for lunch and some of the waiters looked and moved as if they had been there long enough to have served Chaplin. The menu hadn’t changed in all the years Bosch had been eating there—this in a town where the hookers out on the Boulevard lasted longer than most restaurants.

  Edgar and Rider were waiting in one of the prized round booths, and Bosch slid in after they were pointed out by the maître d’—he was apparently too old and tired to walk Bosch over himself. They were both drinking iced tea and Bosch decided to go along with that, though privately he lamented that they were in the place that made the best martini in the city. Only Rider was looking at the menu. She was new in the division and hadn’t been to Musso’s enough times to know what the best thing was to order for lunch.

  “So what are we doing?” Edgar asked while she looked.

  “We’ve got to start over,” Bosch said. “The Vegas stuff was all misdirection.”

  Rider glanced over the top of the menu at Bosch.

  “Kiz, put that down,” he said. “If you don’t get the chicken pot pie you’re making a mistake.”

  She hesitated, nodded and put the menu aside.

  “What do you mean, misdirection?” she asked.

  “I mean whoever killed Tony wanted us to go that way. And they planted the gun out there to make sure we stayed out there. But they screwed up. They didn’t know the guy they planted the gun on was a fed who would have a bunch of other feds as an alibi. That was the screwup. Now, once I learned that our suspect was an agent, I thought Joey Marks and his people must have figured out he was a fed and set the whole thing up to taint him.”

  “I still think that sounds good,” Edgar said.

  “It does, or it did until last night,” Bosch said as an ancient waiter in a red coat came to the table.

  “Three chicken pot pies,” Bosch said.

  “Do you want something to drink?” the waiter asked.

  Hell with it, Bosch decided.

  “Yeah, I’ll have a martini, three olives. You can bring them some more iced tea. That’s it.”

  The waiter nodded and slowly glided away without writing anything on his pad.

  “Last night,” Bosch continued, “I learned from a source that Joey Marks did not know the man he thought was named Luke Goshen was a plant. He had no idea he was an informant, let alone an agent. In fact, once we picked Goshen up, Joey was engaged in a plan to try to find out whether Goshen was going to stand up or talk. This was because he had to decide whether to put a contract on him in the Metro jail.”

  He waited a moment to let them think about this.

  “So, you can see with that information in the mix now, the second theory no longer works.”

  “Well, who’s the source?” Edgar asked.

  “I can’t tell you that, guys. But it’s solid. It’s the truth.”

  He watched their eyes float down to the table. He knew they trusted him, but they also knew how informants were often the most skilled liars in the game. It was a tough call to base everything from here on out on an informant.

  “Okay,” Bosch said. “The source was Eleanor Wish. Jerry, have you told Kiz about all of that?”

  Edgar hesitated, then nodded.

  “Okay, then you know who she is. She overheard all of what I told you while they had her in that house. Before we got there, both Joey and the lawyer, Torrino, were there. She overheard them and from what she heard, they didn’t know about Goshen. See, that whole abduction was part of the test. They knew the only way I could find out where the safe house was would be to get it from Goshen. That was the test, to see if he was talking or not.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes while Edgar and Rider digested this.

  “Okay,” Edgar finally said. “I see what you’re saying. But if Vegas was one big fucking red herring, how does the gun get over there in the agent’s house?”

  “That’s what we have to figure out. What if there was someone outside of Tony’s mob connections but close enough to him to know he was washing money and the reason why he made all the trips to Vegas? Someone who either had personal knowledge or maybe followed Tony to Vegas and watched how he worked, how he picked up the money from Goshen, everything? Someone who knew exactly how he did it, who knew Goshen could be set up to take the fall, and that Tony’d be coming back on Friday with a lot of money in his briefcase?”

  “They would be able to set the whole thing up, as long as they could get into the agent’s house to plant the gun,” Edgar answered.

  “Right. And getting into the house would be no problem. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. He was away at the club for long stretches at a time. Anybody could get in, plant the gun, and get out. The question is who?”

  “You’re talking about either his wife or his girlfriend,” Edgar said. “Both could have had that kind of access.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “So which one do we set up on? The three of us can’t do both, not on a freelance like this.”

  “We don’t need to,” Bosch said. “I think the choice is obvious.”

  “Which?” Edgar said. “The girlfriend?”

  Bosch looked at Rider, giving her the chance to answer. She saw his look and then her eyes narrowed as she went to work.

  “It…it can’t be the girlfriend because…because she called Tony on Sunday morning. On the voice mail. Why would she call
the guy if she knew he was dead?”

  Bosch nodded. She was good.

  “Could have been part of a setup,” Edgar said. “Another misdirection.”

  “Could be but I doubt it,” Bosch said. “Plus, we know she worked Friday night. That would make it kind of tough for her to be over here whacking Tony.”

  “So then it’s the wife,” Edgar said. “Veronica.”

  “Right,” Bosch said. “I think she was lying to us, acting like she didn’t know anything about her husband’s business when she knew everything. I think this whole thing was her plan. She wrote the letters to the IRS and to the OCID. She wanted to get something going against Tony, then when he ended up dead it would point toward a mob hit. Trunk music. Planting the gun on Goshen was just icing. If we found it, fine. If we didn’t, then we’d be sniffing around Vegas until we shelved the case.”

  “You’re saying she did this all on her own?” Edgar asked.

  “No,” Bosch said. “I’m just saying I think this was her plan. But she had to have had help. An accomplice. It took two to do the actual hit and she sure didn’t take the gun to Vegas. After the kill, she stays at the house and waits while the accomplice goes to Vegas and plants the gun while Luke Goshen’s at the club.”

  “But wait a minute,” Rider said. “We’re forgetting something. Veronica Aliso had it very cushy in her existing life. Tony was raking in the bread with his washing machine. They had the big house in the hills, the cars…why would she want to kill the cash cow? How much was in that briefcase?”

  “According to the feds, four hundred and eighty thousand,” Bosch said.

  Edgar whistled softly. Rider shook her head.

  “I still don’t see it,” she said. “That’s a hell of a lot of money, but Tony was making at least that much a year. In business terms, killing him was a short-term gain/long-term loss for her. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Then there is something else running through all of this that we don’t know about yet,” Bosch said. “Maybe he was about to dump her. Maybe that old lady in Vegas who said Tony was going to go away with Layla was telling the truth. Or maybe there’s money somewhere we don’t know about. But for now I can’t see anybody else fitting into this picture but her.”

  “But what about the gatehouse?” Rider said. “The log shows she never left Friday, the whole night. And she had no visitors.”

  “Well, we’ve got to work on that,” Bosch said. “There had to have been a way for her to get in and out.”

  “What else?” Edgar asked.

  “We start over,” Bosch said. “I want to know everything about her. Where’d she come from, who are her friends, what does she do in that house all day long and what did she do and who did she do it with all those times Tony was away?”

  Rider and Edgar nodded.

  “There’s got to be an accomplice. And my guess is that it’s a man. And I’ll bet we’ll find him through her.”

  The waiter came up with a tray and put it down on a folding cart. They watched silently as he prepared the meal. There were three separate chicken pot pies on the tray. The waiter used a fork and spoon to take the top crust off each and put it on a plate. Next he scooped the contents of each pie out and put it on the crust, served the three cops their dishes and put down fresh glasses of iced tea for Edgar and Rider. He then poured Bosch’s martini from a small glass carafe and floated away without a word.

  “Obviously,” Bosch said, “we have to do this quietly.”

  “Yeah,” Edgar said, “and Bullets also put us on the top of the rotation. Next call comes in, me and Kiz get it. And we hafta work it without you. That’s going to take us away from this.”

  “Well, do what you can. If you get a body you get a body, nothing we can do about that. Meantime, this is what I propose. You two work on Veronica’s background, see what you can find. You got any sources at the Times or the trades?”

  “I know a couple at the Times,” Rider said. “And there’s a woman I once had a case with—she was a vic—who’s a receptionist or something at Variety.”

  “You trust ’em?”

  “I think I can.”

  “See if they’ll pull a search on Veronica for you. She had a brief flash of fame a while back. Her fifteen minutes. Maybe there were some stories about her, stories that would have names of people we could talk to.”

  “What about talking to her again?” Edgar asked.

  “I don’t think we should do it yet. I want to have something to talk to her about.”

  “What about neighbors?”

  “You can do that. Maybe she’ll look out the window and see you, give her something to think about. If you go up there, see if you can take another look at the gate log. Talk to Nash. I’m sure you can turn him without needing another search warrant. I’d like to take a look at the whole year, know who has been going in to see her, especially while Tony was out of town. We have Tony’s credit records and can construct his travel history. You’ll be able to know when she was in that house alone.”

  Bosch raised his fork. He hadn’t had a bite of food yet, but his mind was too full of the case and what needed to be done.

  “The other thing is we need as much of the case file as we can get. All we’ve got is the copy of the murder book. I’m going down to Parker Center for my little chat with the IAD. I’ll swing by USC and get a copy of the autopsy. The feds already have it. I’ll also go talk to Donovan in SID and see if he came up with anything we pulled out of the car. Also, he’s got the shoe prints. I’ll get copies, hopefully before the feds come in and take everything. Anything else I’m missing?”

  The other two shook their heads.

  “You want to see what we get and then put our heads together after work?”

  They nodded.

  “Cat and Fiddle, about six?”

  They nodded again. They were too busy eating to talk. Bosch took his first bite of food, which was already getting cold. He joined them in their silence, thinking about the case.

  “It’s in the details,” he said after a few moments.

  “What?” Rider asked.

  “The case. When you get one like this, the answer is always in the details. You watch, when we break it, the answer will have been sitting in the files, in the book. It always happens.”

  The interview with Chastain at Internal Affairs began as Bosch expected it would. He sat with Zane, his defense rep, at a gray government table in one of the IAD interview rooms. An old Sony cassette player was turned on and everything said in the room was recorded. In police parlance, Chastain was locking up Bosch’s story. Getting his words and explanation in as much detail as possible down on tape. Chastain really wouldn’t begin his investigation until after Bosch’s story was locked in. He would then hunt for flaws in it. All he had to do was catch Bosch in a single lie and he could take him to a Board of Rights hearing. Depending on the size and import of the lie, he could seek a penalty ranging from suspension to dismissal.

  In a dull and laborious drone, Chastain read prepared questions from a legal pad and Bosch slowly and carefully answered them with as few words as possible. It was a game. Bosch had played it before. In the fifteen minutes they had before reporting to IAD, Zane had counseled Bosch on how it would go and how they should proceed. Like a good criminal defense lawyer, he never directly asked Harry if he had planted the gun. Zane didn’t really care. He simply looked at IAD as the enemy, as a group of bad cops with the sole purpose of going after good cops. Zane was part of the old school who thought all cops were inherently good and though sometimes the job turned them bad, they should not be persecuted by their own.

  Everything was routine for a half hour. But then Chastain threw an unexpected pitch at them.

  “Detective Bosch, do you know a woman named Eleanor Wish?”