"What are you talking about?"
"You read me, I read you. I know he told you something that's got you going."
Bosch nodded. It sure didn't seem like three years since they had worked together.
"Irving. Or at least I think he gave me Irving."
"Tell it."
Bosch took her through the story Verloren had told him less than an hour before. He finished with Verloren's description, limited as it was, of the two men with badges who came to his restaurant and threatened him in order to make him back off the racial angle.
"Sounds like Irving to me, too," Rider said.
"And one of his poodles. Maybe it was McClellan."
"Maybe. So you think Verloren was straight? He's been on the Nickel a long time."
"I think so. He claims to have been sober for three years this time. But you know, grinding over something for seventeen years, pretty soon perceptions become facts. Still, everything he said just seems to fit into the underpinnings of this. I think they pushed this case, Kiz. It was going in one direction and they pushed it the other way. Maybe they knew what was coming, that the city was going to burn. Rodney King wasn't the gasoline. He was only the match. Things had been building and maybe the powers that be looked at this case and said for the public good, we have to go the other way. They sacrificed justice for Rebecca Verloren."
They were crossing over the 101 Freeway on the Los Angeles Street overpass. Eight lanes of crawling traffic smoked beneath them. The sun was bright, reflecting off windshields and buildings and concrete. Bosch put on his Ray-Bans.
The traffic was loud, too, and Rider had to raise her voice.
"That's not like you, Harry."
"What isn't?"
"Looking for a good reason for them to have done something so wrong. You usually look for the sinister angle."
"Are you telling me you found the sinister angle in that PDU file?"
She nodded glumly.
"I think so," she said.
"And they just let you waltz in there and get it?"
"I got in to see the man first thing this morning. I brought him a cup of coffee from Starbucks-he hates the cafeteria crap. That got me in. Then I told him what we had and what I wanted to do, and the bottom line is he trusts me. So he more or less let me have a look around in Special Archives."
"The Public Disorder Unit came and went long before he was here. Did he know about it?"
"I'm sure after he took the job he was briefed. Maybe even before he took it."
"Did you tell him specifically about Mackey and the Chatsworth Eights?"
"Not specifically. I just told him the case we caught was connected to an old PDU investigation and I needed to get into Special Archives to look for a file. He sent Lieutenant Hohman with me. We went in, found the file and I had to look through it while Hohman sat across a table from me. You know what, Harry? There are a hell of a lot of files in Special Archives."
"Where all the bodies are buried . . ."
Bosch wanted to say something more but wasn't sure how to say it. Rider looked at him and read him.
"What, Harry?"
He didn't say anything at first but she waited him out.
"Kiz, you said the man on six trusts you. Do you trust him?"
She looked him in the eye when she answered.
"Like I trust you, Harry. Okay?"
Bosch looked at her.
"That's good enough for me."
Rider made a move to turn down Arcadia but Bosch pointed toward the old pueblo, the place where the City of Angels was founded. He wanted to take the long way and walk through.
"I haven't been down here in a while. Let's check this out."
They cut through the circular courtyard where the padres blessed the animals every Easter and then past the Instituto Cultural Mexicano. They followed the curving arcade of cheap souvenir booths and churro stands. Recorded mariachi music came from unseen speakers, but in counterpoint was the sound of a live guitar.
They found the musician sitting on a bench in front of the Avila Adobe. They stopped and listened as the old man played a Mexican ballad Bosch thought he had heard before but could not identify.
Bosch studied the mud-walled structure behind the musician and wondered if Don Francisco Avila had any idea what he was helping to set in motion when he staked his claim to the spot in 1818. A city would grow tall and wide from this place. A city as great as any other. And just as mean. A destination city, a city of invention and reinvention. A place where the dream seemed as easy to reach as the sign they put up on the hill, but a place where the reality was always something different. The road to that sign on the hill had a locked gate across it.
It was a city full of haves and have-nots, movie stars and extras, drivers and the driven, predators and prey. The fat and the hungry and little room in between. A city that despite all of that still had them lining up and waiting every day behind the bomb barriers to get in and stay in.
Bosch pulled the fold of money from his pocket and dropped a five in the old musician's basket. He and Rider then cut through the old Cucamonga Winery, its cask rooms converted into galleries and artists' stalls, and out to Alameda. They crossed the street to the train station, its clock tower rising in front of them. In the front walkway they passed a sundial with an inscription cut into its granite pedestal.
Vision to See Faith to Believe Courage to Do
Union Station was designed to mirror the city it served and the way in which it was supposed to work. It was a melting pot of architectural styles-Spanish Colonial, Mission, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, Southwestern and Moorish design flourishes among them. But unlike the rest of the city, where the pot more often than not boiled over, the styles at the train station blended smoothly into something unique, something beautiful. Bosch loved it for that.
Through the glass doors they came into the cavernous entry hall, and an archway three stories tall led to the immense waiting room beyond. As Bosch took it in he remembered that he used to walk over here not only for cigarettes, but also to renew himself a little bit. Going to Union Station was like paying a visit to church, a cathedral where the graceful lines of design and function and civic pride all intersected. In the central waiting room the voices of travelers rose into its high empty spaces and were transformed into a choir of languid whispers.
"I love this place," Rider said. "Did you ever see the movie Blade Runner?"
Bosch nodded. He had seen it.
"This was the police station, right?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Did you ever see True Confessions?" he asked.
"No, was it good?"
"Yeah, you should see it. Another take on the Black Dahlia and LAPD conspiracy."
She groaned.
"Thanks, but I don't think that's what I need right now."
They got cups of coffee at Union Bagel and then walked into the waiting room, where rows of brown leather seats were lined up like luxurious pews. Bosch looked up as he was always drawn to do. Six huge chandeliers hung forty feet above them in two rows. Rider looked up, too.
Bosch then pointed to two side-by-side seats open near the newsstand. They sat down on the soft padded leather and put their cups on the wide wooden armrests.
"You ready to talk about this now?" Rider asked.
"If you are," he answered. "What was in the file you saw in Special Archives? What was so sinister?"
"For one thing, Mackey is in there."
"As a suspect in Verloren?"
"No, the file has nothing to do with Verloren. Verloren was not even a blip on the screen as far as the file goes. It's all about an investigation that went down and was buttoned up before Rebecca Verloren was even pregnant, let alone snatched from her bed in the night."
"All right, then what's it got to do with us?"
"Maybe nothing and maybe everything. You know the guy Mackey lives with, William Burkhart?"
"Yeah."
"He's in there, too. Only back then
he was better known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That was his moniker in this gang, the Eights."
"Okay."
"In March of 'eighty-eight Billy Blitzkrieg went away for a year for vandalizing a synagogue in North Hollywood. Property damage, graffiti, defecation, the whole thing."
"The hate crime. He was the only one they bagged?"
She nodded.
"They got a latent off a spray can they found in a gutter trap about a block from the synagogue. So he went down for it. Took a plea or they would have made an example of him and he knew it."
Bosch nodded. He didn't want to say anything that would interrupt her flow.
"In the reports and in the press Burkhart-or Blitzkrieg or whatever you want to call him-was portrayed as the leader of the Eights. They said he called for nineteen eighty-eight to be a year of racial and ethnic upheaval to honor their beloved Adolf Hitler. You know the crap. RaHoWa, revenge of the white trash and all that. They all ran around in Minnesota Vikings jerseys-the Vikings apparently were a pure race. They all wore number eighty-eight."
"I'm getting the picture."
"Anyway, they had a lot on Burkhart. They had him cold on the synagogue and they had the feds chomping at the bit to do a civil rights dance on his pointy little head. There were a lot of crimes, beginning right at the start of the year, when they toasted New Year's by burning a cross on a black family's lawn in Chatsworth. After that there were more cross burnings, threatening phone calls, bomb scares. The synagogue break-in. They even trashed a Jewish daycare center in Encino. This was all in early January. They also started going to street corners, picking up Mexican laborers and taking them out into the desert, where they assaulted or abandoned them or both, usually both. To use their terminology, they were fomenting disharmony, which they believed would help lead to a separation of the races."
"Yeah, I've heard the song."
"Okay, well, like I said, they were ready to make Burkhart the poster boy for all of this and, if they went with it to Justice, he could have ended up going away for a ten-year minimum in a federal pen."
"So it was a no-brainer. He took a deal."
Rider nodded.
"He took a year in Wayside and a five-year tail, and the rest of it went away. And the Eights went away with it. They were broken up and that was the end of the threat. All of this went down by the end of March, long before Verloren."
As he thought about all of this Bosch watched a woman in a hurry as she pulled a young girl by the hand toward the gateway to the Metroline tracks. The woman was also lugging a heavy suitcase and her focus was only on the gate ahead. The child was pulled along with her face turned upward as she looked at the ceiling. She was smiling at something. Bosch looked up and saw a child's balloon trapped in one of the ceiling's vaulted squares. One child's disaster was another's secret smile. The balloon was orange and white and shaped like a fish, and Bosch knew because of his daughter that it was an animated character named Nemo. He had a flash of his daughter but just as quickly pushed it away so he could concentrate. He looked at Rider.
"So where was Mackey in all of this?" he asked.
"He was sort of the runt of the litter," Rider answered. "One of the minions. He was thought to be the perfect recruit. High school dropout with no life and no prospects. He was on probation for burglary and his juvie jacket was full of pops for car theft, burglary and drugs. So he was just the kind of guy they were looking for. A loser they could mold into a white warrior. But once they jumped him in they found out he was-to use a quote from Burkhart-dumber than a nigger off the boat. He apparently was so stupid that they had to take him off the graffiti runs because he couldn't even spell their basic racist vocabulary. In fact, his homey name in the group became Wej. Not like you wedge your way into a door. Wej like Jew spelled backwards because that was how he sprayed it once on a synagogue wall."
"Dyslexic?"
"I'd say."
Bosch shook his head.
"Even with the giveaways in the Verloren scene, I'm not seeing this guy."
"I agree. I think he had a part but not the main part. He doesn't have it between the ears."
Bosch decided to drop Mackey and double back to the beginning of her report.
"So if they had all of this intel on these guys, how come only Burkhart went down?"
"I'm getting to that."
"This is where the high jingo comes in?"
"You got it. You see, Burkhart was a leader of the Eights but he wasn't the leader."
"Ah."
"The leader was identified as a guy named Richard Ross. He was older than the others. A true believer. He was twenty-one and was the smooth talker who recruited Burkhart and then most of the other Eights and got the whole thing going."
Bosch nodded. Richard Ross was a common name but he thought he knew where this was going.
"This Richard Ross, was that as in Richard Ross Junior?"
"Exactly. The good Captain Ross's prodigy."
Captain Richard Ross had been the longtime head of Internal Affairs Division during the early part of Bosch's career in the department. He was now retired.
For Bosch the rest of the story tumbled into place.
"So they kept Junior out of it and saved Senior and the department all the embarrassment," he said. "They laid it all on Burkhart, Ross's second in command. He went away to Wayside and the group was broken up. Chalk it all up to youthful misadventure."
"You got it."
"And let me guess: all the intel came from Richard Ross Junior."
"You're good. It was part of the deal. Richard Junior gave up everybody and it was all PDU needed to quietly splinter the group. Junior then got to walk away from it."
"All in a day's work for Irving."
"And you know what's funny? I think Irving is a Jewish name."
Bosch shook his head.
"Whether it is or isn't, it's not very funny," he said.
"Yeah, I know."
"Not if Irving saw an angle."
"Reading between the lines of the report, I would say he saw all the angles."
"This deal gave him control of IAD. I mean real, absolute control over who was investigated and how investigations were conducted. It put Ross deep in his pocket. It explains a lot about what was going on back then."
"It was mostly before my time."
"So they take care of the Eights and Irving gets a nice big prize in having Richard Ross Senior wearing a collar on the poodle squad," Bosch said, thinking out loud. "But then Rebecca Verloren ends up dead by a gun stolen from a guy the Eights had been harassing, a gun likely stolen by one of the little runts they let run free. Their whole deal could fall apart if the murder came back on the Eights and then on them."
"That's right. So they step in and push the investigation. They steer it away and nobody ever goes down for it."
"Motherfuckers," Bosch whispered.
"Poor Harry. You still must have a lot of rust from your lay-off. You thought maybe they pushed the case because they were trying to save the city from burning. It was nothing so heroic."
"No, they were just trying to save their own asses and the position the deal with Ross had given them. Given Irving."
"This is all supposition," Rider cautioned.
"Yeah, just reading between the fucking lines."
Bosch felt the strongest craving for a cigarette he'd had in at least a year. He looked over at the newsstand and saw all of the packages in the racks behind the counter. He looked away. He looked up at the balloon trapped at the ceiling. He thought he knew how Nemo felt being stuck up there.
"When did Ross retire?" he asked.
"'Ninety-one. He rode it out until he hit twenty-five years-they allowed him that-and then he retired. I checked-he moved up to Idaho. I ran Junior on the box, too, and he'd already moved up there ahead of him. Probably one of those gated white enclaves where he felt right at home."
"And he was probably up there laughing his ass off when this place came apart after Rodney King
in 'ninety-two."
"Probably, but not for long. He was killed in a DUI in 'ninety-three. He was coming back from an antigovernment rally out in the boonies. What goes around comes around, I guess."
A dull thud hit Bosch in the stomach. He had started liking Richard Ross Jr. for the Verloren killing. He could have used Mackey to procure the weapon and maybe help carry the victim up the hill. But now he was dead. Could their investigation be leading them to such a dead end? Would they end up going back to Rebecca Verloren's parents and telling them their long-dead daughter had been taken from them by someone who also was long dead? What kind of justice would that be?
The Closers Page 19