The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch nodded again as he tried to see it the way it was that day.

  “What made them think the shot came from over there?” he asked, pointing.

  Soto translated and the man shrugged at first, and then one of the men still on the bench answered in a cadence too fast for Bosch to understand.

  “He said he heard the shot and ran for cover. The other two men followed but weren’t sure they had heard anything. They just saw everybody running.”

  “What did he see?”

  Two men shook their heads and the third said, “Nada.”

  “Did they know Merced?”

  Again Soto translated and listened.

  “Not really,” she finally told Bosch. “They knew him from the plaza, waiting for jobs.”

  Bosch stepped away and walked toward the escalators that led down to the underground Metro station. The glass structure that served as its roof had a distinct Aztec motif and was designed as a giant eagle’s wing sheltering the entrance. The feathers of the wing were multicolored glass panels that threw the sun across the plaza in blends of color.

  There was a wide tiled staircase between the up and down escalators. Bosch turned at the top of the stairs and looked back across the plaza. He then scanned to the left across 1st Street at the music store, where the camera had captured the Merced shooting. Bosch moved a small step to his right and figured that he was very close to where the picnic table that Merced had sat on had been located. He knew this assumption had no forensic validity. A ballistics team would deal with that later. But for now Bosch knew he was near the spot where Merced was sitting when he caught the bullet.

  He looked back toward Boyle Avenue, in the direction the bullet had come from. Since Bosch had now discounted the idea that the bullet had been fired from a passing car or even from ground level, his eyes focused across the street on the structure that occupied the corner across from the plaza. In earlier years Bosch had known the Boyle Hotel well. Unofficially but better known as Hotel Mariachi, the three-story stone building of Queen Anne design was more than a hundred years old and one of the oldest standing structures in all of Los Angeles. But it had fallen into disrepair over the decades until it was little more than a cockroach-infested flophouse for traveling mariachis and transients. More than once Bosch had gone into Hotel Mariachi with a mug shot in hand, looking for a suspect he had traced from a crime scene.

  But all was different now. The Boyle Hotel had gotten a multimillion-dollar makeover in concurrence with the Metro station project at Mariachi Plaza. It was no longer even a hotel. It was a mixed-use complex offering affordable apartments and commercial spaces. Its redbrick facade and signature rooftop cupola were preserved in the renovation process, but even at so-called affordable rates, the rents were too high for most of the mariachis who passed through East L.A. They had to rent elsewhere now.

  Soto came over to Bosch and followed the line of his stare.

  “You think the shot came from there?” she asked.

  “Could have,” Bosch said. “Let’s go check it out.”

  They walked back across the plaza, Bosch seeing that more and more musicians were starting to crowd around the benches and tables. It was almost five and time to look for and hope for work. Bosch noticed a small shop behind one gathering of musicians. Libros Schmibros. The sign on the door said it was a bookstore and lending library. He pointed at it without breaking stride.

  “Before this was all Latino, it was Jewish,” he said. “In the twenties and thirties. By the fifties everybody was moving out to Fairfax.”

  “White flight,” Soto said.

  “Sort of. I think one of my grandparents lived here. Something about this place I remember. The old Hollenbeck station, coming here with my mother in the fifties . . .”

  There was some kind of hazy, vaguely uncomfortable memory Bosch couldn’t get at. For the first eleven years of his life he lived with his mother, and at times they were as transient as the denizens of the old Hotel Mariachi. There were too many places to remember and it was all fifty years ago. He tried to change the subject.

  “Where’d you grow up, Lucy?”

  “All over. My mother’s side was from Orange County down by El Toro and my father’s family was from up here. His parents got pushed out of Chavez Ravine in the forties. They ended up in Westlake and I was born there. But I mostly grew up in the Valley. Pacoima.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I guess that means you’re not a Dodgers fan, then,” he said.

  “Never gone to a single game and never will,” she said. “My father would kill me if he ever heard I went.”

  It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city’s history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

  For decades Chavez Ravine was a poor enclave of Mexican immigrants who were crowded in shacks packed among the hills and tried to make their way in a place where they were needed but not necessarily wanted. The end of World War II brought new prosperity to the city and federal money to provide housing for the poor. The plan was to move everyone out of Chavez Ravine, steamroll it, and then rebuild it, creating an orchard of low-income housing towers to which the former inhabitants of the little valley would be invited to return. The development would even be given a name that reflected the grand American dream of reaching for the brass ring: Elysian Park Heights.

  Some left the ravine willingly and some had to be pushed out. Houses, churches, and schools were razed. But no towers were ever built. By then the world had changed. Building towers for the poor was labeled socialism. The new mayor called it un-American spending. Instead, the city of the future decided it needed a professional sports team to secure its image and standing as more than a movie colony and hazy outpost on the western edge of the country. The Brooklyn Dodgers came west and a gleaming baseball stadium was built where those towers for the poor were supposed to be. The residents of Chavez Ravine were permanently scattered, their heirs carrying a deep-seated grudge to this day, and Elysian Park Heights was a pretty name that never made it past the blueprints.

  Bosch was silent until they crossed Boyle and came to the double doors of what once was Hotel Mariachi. The door was locked and there was a keypad next to it for contacting tenants and the management. Soto looked at Bosch.

  “You want to go in?”

  “Might as well.”

  She pushed the button next to a sticker that said “Oficina.” The lock was buzzed open without any inquiry over the intercom as to who they were. Bosch looked up to see a camera mounted overhead in the corner of the door’s trim.

  Soto opened the door and they entered a vestibule. There were a building directory and a map inside glass cases attached to the wall. Bosch looked at the map first and realized that the restoration project had also been a consolidation project. Three buildings had been joined into one complex. The front building—the original Boyle Hotel, also known on nineteenth-century plat maps as Cummings Block—was now repurposed as commercial space, and the two adjoining buildings were apartment buildings. Bosch moved on to the directory and saw a variety of small office listings, most of them for Attorney/Abogado.

  Bosch saw a set of stairs to the right of the doorway and started up.

  “The manager’s office is down here, Harry,” Soto said.

  “I know,” he said. “We can stop by after looking around.”

  On the second floor Bosch saw three separate glass-doored entrances to offices, two of which were for attorneys, the signs on both doors promising Se Habla Español. The third office—room 211—appeared to be unrented and empty.

  Bosch stepped back and looked around the hallway. It was clean and bright, not what he remembered from previous visits to the building. He remembered tiny apartments an
d at the end of the hall a communal bathroom that smelled like a sewer. He was happy the building had been saved from such disrespect and disrepair.

  Harry headed up the stairs to the next level and Soto trailed behind him. On the third floor, there were more offices, half of which appeared vacant. He tried a door marked “Roof” and it was unlocked. He took the next set of stairs up to the cupola and Soto followed him up.

  The cupola had a 360-degree view, including an expansive reach across the bridge back to downtown. Bosch could see the concrete river and the train tracks that wrapped around downtown like a ribbon. Turning east he looked down on the plaza. He saw the members of one band putting their instruments into their minivan—they had gotten an evening gig.

  “Do you think the shot came from up here?” Soto asked.

  Bosch shook his head.

  “I doubt it. Too open. And the angle is probably too steep.”

  He raised his arms as if sighting down the barrel of a rifle. He pointed the imaginary gun at the top of the Metro stairs. He nodded to himself. It was too steep for a bullet to go through Merced’s instrument and torso at the apparent angle.

  “I also think this is restored up here. I don’t think there was anything up here ten years ago.”

  Bosch noticed a man sitting by himself on a bench in the plaza. He was looking up at Bosch. The door at the bottom of the stairs to the cupola opened and a woman quickly came up to them, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. Soto moved toward her, pulling her badge to show her they were police. The woman spoke too fast for Bosch to understand, but he didn’t really need to. He knew that she was upset that they were on the roof.

  Eventually Soto translated.

  “This is Mrs. Blanca. She said we can’t be up here and we should have gone to the management office first. I told her we apologize.”

  “Ask if she worked here before the renovation.”

  Blanca shook her head and said no before the question was translated.

  “You speak English?” Bosch asked.

  “A little bit, yes,” Blanca said.

  “Well, you answer any way you would like. This building—it’s protected, right? Historical Society?”

  “Yes, it has landmark status. First built in 1889.”

  “What happened to the hotel records when they came in to renovate?”

  The woman looked confused and Soto translated the question and the answer.

  “She said all of the old hotel books and the front desk were saved by the Historical Society. They’re in city storage now but they want to make a display here.”

  Bosch nodded. He had seen nothing in the investigative logs kept by Rodriguez and Rojas about knocking on doors or interviewing anyone in Hotel Mariachi about what they had seen or heard during the shooting in the plaza.

  He thought that was a mistake.

  9

  Bosch stayed late at the office, rereading the reports and summaries in the murder book and writing down any new observations or questions that came to him. His daughter was always busy on Wednesday nights with the Police Explorer unit she had joined at Hollywood Station. It was a group open to high school kids who were considering careers in law enforcement. They got a firsthand look at police work and often took part in ride-alongs and other operations. It was usually a full evening of activities, so there was no reason for him to go home, even though the day had started before dawn with the phone call from Captain Crowder.

  The football field–size squad room had cleared out for the day and Bosch enjoyed the complete silence of the space and the darkness beyond the windows. He intermittently got up from his cubicle and walked the length of the room, wandering among the other cubicles and looking at the way other detectives set up and decorated their desks. He noticed that in several of the pods the detectives had gotten rid of the Department-issued, government-grade desk chairs and replaced them with high-end models with adjustable arms and lumbar-support systems. Of course, this being the LAPD, the owners of these chairs had secured them to their desks with bicycle locks when they left for the day.

  Bosch thought it was all pretty sad. Not because personal property wasn’t safe in the Police Administration Building, but because the Department was more and more becoming a deskbound institution. Keyboards and cell phones were the main tools of the modern investigator. Detectives sat in twelve-hundred-dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels. Gone were the days of thick rubber soles and function over form, when a detective’s motto was “Get off your ass and go knock on doors.” Bosch’s tour of the squad room left him feeling melancholy, like maybe it was the right time for him to be winding down his career.

  He worked till eight and then packed everything into his briefcase, left the building, and walked down Main Street to the Nickel Diner. He sat at a table by himself and ordered the flat iron steak and a bottle of Newcastle. He was just getting used to eating alone again. His relationship with Hannah Stone had ended earlier in the year and that meant a lot of evenings by himself. He was about to pull some of his work materials out of his briefcase but then decided to give the work a rest while he ate. He passed the time talking with Monica, the owner, and she topped off his meal with a maple-glazed-bacon doughnut on the house. It put a new charge in his bloodstream and he decided it was too early to go home to his empty house.

  On the way back to the PAB he stopped by the Blue Whale to see who was playing and who was coming later in the month, and he was pleasantly surprised to see Grace Kelly on the stage with a four-piece band. Grace was a young saxophonist with a powerful sound. She also sang. Bosch had some of her music on his phone and at times thought she was channeling the late, great Frank Morgan, one of his favorite sax men. But he had never seen her perform live, so he paid the cover, ordered another beer, and sat at the back of the room, his briefcase on the floor between his feet.

  He enjoyed the set, particularly the interplay between Grace and her rhythm section. But she closed with a solo and it stabbed deeply into Bosch’s heart. The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope. It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was.

  Bosch left after the first set to go back to the PAB. Along the two-block walk he texted his daughter to see if she was still out with the Explorers. She texted back right away saying she was already at home and about to go to sleep, tired from the day of school followed by the Explorers gig. Bosch checked his watch and realized time had moved swiftly. It was almost eleven. He then called Maddie to say good night and tell her he would work late since she was already going to bed.

  “You’ll be all right if I don’t get home until later?”

  “Of course, Dad. Are you working?”

  “Yeah, I’m heading back to the PAB from eating. Just need to go over some stuff.”

  “Well, it sounds like you’re drinking.”

  “I had a beer at dinner. I’m fine. I’ll only be a couple more hours.”

  “Be safe.”

  “I will. What did they have you kids doing tonight?”

  “We were at a DUI roadblock. Mostly just observing. There was one guy. He wasn’t drunk but he was completely naked. It was gross.”

  “Yeah, well, welcome to Hollyweird Division. I hope you’re not scarred for life by that.”

  “I’ll get over it. They wrapped him in a blanket and booked him.”

  “Good. Now go to sleep and I’ll see you in the morning before school.”

  Bosch disconnected and wondered once again if his daughter really wanted to be a cop or if she was going through the motions to please him in some way. He thought maybe he should talk to Dr. Hinojos about it. Maddie spent an hour with her every month, seeing the police psychologist in an unofficial capacity. Hinojos did it as a favor, having volunteered her time since Maddie had
come to live with Bosch following her mother’s death.

  When he got back to the squad room, it was still deserted, but his eyes immediately stopped at his partner’s desk. Soto’s handbag was sitting on her chair. She usually dropped it there in the morning when she came in and went to get coffee. She’d take out just the money she needed and leave the purse on her chair. But it was now 11 p.m. and there was the purse. He wondered at first if she had forgotten it when she left earlier but that seemed impossible because she kept her keys and, when off duty, her weapon in the large leather bag.

  He did a 360 and scanned the squad room. There was no sign of her. But now he thought he had picked up the slight whiff of coffee. Soto was there. Somewhere.

  He pulled his phone and shot her a text asking where she was. Her answer made him even more confused.

  Home. About to hit the hay. Why?

  Now Bosch didn’t know what to do. He texted back.

  Nothing. Just wondering.

  When he sent the second text, he thought he heard a slight bell tone from somewhere close by. Bosch always kept his text notification on vibration alert, since most of his messages came from his daughter and he didn’t want a dinging text to interrupt something at work. But Soto was different. She had hers set to an audible tone, and Bosch was sure he had just heard it. He typed out another text.

  See you tomorrow.

  He hit send and this time stood perfectly still and listened. Almost immediately he heard the bell again. He tracked it to the open door of the case closet on the other side of the squad room.

  The case closet was actually a huge storage room where all the murder books and evidence boxes from case files under consideration by the Open-Unsolved Unit were stored. The space was big but the cases were so many that the year before, the Department had installed a rolling shelving system like the one often found in college library stacks and big law firms in which the rows of shelves are on tracks and can be collapsed. It allowed for more storage in a confined space. When a detective needed to get to a specific murder book, he or she had to crank open the row where that book resided. Each pairing of detectives in the OU had both sides of an entire row for their cases.