Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Short Stories (4 page)

“Merry Christmas, Sugar Ray.”

Sugar Ray nodded and looked down. Bosch knew it was time to leave him alone. He reached over and gripped his shoulder for a moment.

“Why?” Sugar Ray asked.

“Why what?”

“Why did you do this for me? You think you’re playing Santa Claus or something?”

Bosch smiled and squatted down next to the chair. He was now looking up into the old man’s eyes.

“I did it to try to make us even, I guess.”

The old man just looked at him, waiting.

“In December nineteen sixty-nine I was on a hospital ship in the South China Sea.”

Bosch touched his left side, just above the hip.

“I got bamboo-bladed in a tunnel four days before. You probably don’t remember this but—”

“The USS
Sanctuary.
Off Danang. Of course I remember. You were one of the boys in the blue bathrobes, huh?”

Sugar Ray smiled. Bosch nodded and continued.

“I remember the announcement that the show was canceled because the seas were too high and the fog too thick. The big Hueys with all the equipment couldn’t land. We had all been waiting on deck. We saw the choppers coming in through the mist and then just turning around to go back.”

Sugar Ray raised a finger.

“You know, it was Mr. Bob Hope who told our pilot to turn that son of a bitch around again and put it down on that boat.”

Bosch nodded. He had heard it was Hope. One chopper turned again and came to the
Sanctuary.
The small one. The one with the headliners onboard.

“I remember it was Bob Hope, Connie Stevens, you and a beautiful black girl from that TV show.”

“Teresa Graves.
Laugh-In
.”

“Man, you remember everything.”

“Just ’cause I’m old doesn’t mean I can’t remember. The man on the moon was there, too.”

Bosch smiled. Sugar Ray was filling in details he had forgotten.

“Neil Armstrong, yeah. But the rest of the band—the Playboy All-Stars—was on one of the other choppers and it went back to Danang. It was only you and you carried your own ax. You played for us. Solo.”

Bosch looked at the instrument in the old man’s gray hands. He remembered the day on the
Sanctuary
as clearly as he remembered any other moment of his life.

“You played ‘The Sweet Spot’ and then ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”

“I played the ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ too. By request of a young man in the front row. He’d lost both his legs and he asked me to play that waltz.”

Bosch nodded solemnly.

“Bob Hope told us his jokes and Connie Stevens sang ‘Promises, Promises.’ A cappella. In less than an hour it was all over and the chopper took off. Man, I can’t explain it but it meant something. It made something right in a messed-up world, you know? I was only nineteen years old and I wasn’t sure how or why I was even over there.

“Anyway, I’ve listened to a lot of saxophone since then but I haven’t heard it any better.”

Bosch nodded and stood up. His knee creaked loudly. He guessed it wouldn’t be too long before he was in one of these places. If he was lucky.

“I just wanted to tell you that,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You were in the tunnels over there, huh? I heard about them.”

Bosch nodded.

“Coulda used you going about this bin Laden character.”

He pointed up to the TV, as if that were where the terrorist was.

Bosch shook his head.

“Nah, it’s a different game. Back then they gave you a flashlight and a forty-five, said good luck and dropped you in a hole. Now it’s sound and motion detectors, heat sensors, infrared… it’s a different game.”

“Maybe. But a hunter is still a hunter.”

Bosch look lu">Bosched at him for a moment before speaking.

“Take it easy, Sugar Ray.”

He headed toward the door and one more time Sugar Ray stopped him.

“Hey, Santa Claus.”

Bosch turned back.

“You strike me as a man who is alone in the world,” Sugar Ray said. “That true?”

Bosch nodded without hesitation.

“Most of the time.”

“You got plans for Christmas dinner?”

Bosch hesitated. He finally shook his head.

“No plans.”

“Then, come back here at three tomorrow. We have a dinner and I can bring a guest. I’ll sign you up.”

Bosch hesitated. He had been alone so often on Christmases past that he thought it might be too late, that being around anyone might be intolerable.

“Don’t worry,” Sugar Ray said. “They won’t put your turkey in the blender as long as you’ve got teeth.”

Bosch smiled.

“All right, Sugar Ray, I’ll be by.”

“Then, I’ll see you then.”

Bosch walked down the yellowed corridor and out into the night. As he headed to the car he heard Christmas music still playing from an open window somewhere. It was an instrumental, slow and heavy on the saxophone. He stopped and it took him a moment to recognize it as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” He stood there on the walkway and listened until the end of the song.

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge John Houghton for recounting and sharing the experience on the USS
Sanctuary
that inspired this story.

Father’s Day

The victim’s tiny body was left alone in the emergency room enclosure. The doctors, after halting their resuscitation efforts, had solemnly retreated and pulled the plastic curtains closed around the bed. The entire construction, management and purpose of the hospital was to prevent death. When the effort failed, nobody wanted to see it.

The curtains were opaque. Harry Bosch looked like a ghost as he approached and then split them to enter. He stepped into the enclosure and stood somber and alone with the dead. The boy’s body took up less than a quarter of the big metal bed. He had worked thousands of cases but nothing ever touched Bosch liket di the sight of a young child’s lifeless body. Fifteen months old. Cases in which the child’s age was still counted in months were the most difficult of all. He knew that if he dwelled too long he would start to question everything—from the meaning of life to his mission in it.

The boy looked like he was only asleep. Bosch made a quick study, looking for any bruising or other sign of mishap. The child was naked and uncovered, his skin as pink as a newborn’s. Bosch saw no sign of trauma except for an old scrape on the boy’s forehead.

He pulled on gloves and very carefully moved the body to check it from all angles. His heart sank as he did this but he saw nothing that was suspicious. When he was finished, he covered the body with the sheet—he wasn’t sure why—and slipped back through the plastic curtains shrouding the bed.

The boy’s father was in a private waiting room down the hall. Bosch would eventually get to him but the paramedics who had transported the boy had agreed to stick around to be interviewed. Bosch looked for them first and found both men—one old, one young, one to mentor, one to learn—sitting in the crowded ER waiting room. He invited them outside so they could speak privately.

The dry summer heat hit them as soon as the glass doors parted. Like walking out of a casino in Vegas. They walked to the side so they would not be bothered but stayed in the shade of the portico. He identified himself and told them he would need the written reports on their rescue effort as soon as they were completed.

“For now, tell me about the call.”

The senior man did the talking. His name was Ticotin.

“The kid was already in full arrest when we got there,” he began. “We did what we could but the best thing was just to ice him and transport him—try to get him in here and see what the pros could do.”

“Did you take a body temperature reading at the scene?” Bosch asked.

“First thing,” Ticotin said. “It was one-oh-six-eight. So you gotta figure the kid was up around one-oh-eight, one-oh-nine before we got there. There was no way he was going to come back from that. Not a little baby like that.”

Ticotin shook his head as though he was frustrated by having been sent to rescue someone who could not be rescued. Bosch nodded as he took out his notebook and wrote down the temperature reading.

“You know what time that was?” he asked.

“We arrived at twelve seventeen so I would say we took the BT no more than three minutes later. First thing you do. That’s the protocol.”

Bosch nodded again and wrote the time—12:20
P.M.
—next to the temperature reading. He looked up and tracked a car coming quickly into the ER lot. It parked and his partner, Ignacio Ferras, got out. He had gone directly to the accident scene, while Bosch had gone directly to the hospital. Bosch siht=al. Bosgnaled him over. Ferras walked with anxious speed. Bosch knew he had something to report but Bosch didn’t want him to say it in front of the paramedics. He introduced him and then quickly got back to his questions for the paramedics.

“Where was the father when you got there?”

“They had the kid on the floor by the back door, where he had brought him in. The father was sort of collapsed on the floor next to him, screaming and crying like they do. Kicking the floor.”

“Did he ever say anything?”

“Not right then.”

“Then when?”

“When we made the decision to transport and work on the kid in the truck, he wanted to go. We told him he couldn’t. We told him to get somebody from the office to drive him.”

“What were his words?”

“He just said, ‘I want to go with him. I want to be with my son.’ Stuff like that.”

Ferras shook his head as if in pain.

“At any time did he talk about what had happened?” Bosch asked.

Ticotin checked his partner, who shook his head.

“No,” Ticotin said. “He didn’t.”

“Then how were you informed of what had happened?”

“Well, initially, we heard it from dispatch. Then one of the office workers, a lady, she told us when we got there. She led us to the back and told us along the way.”

Bosch thought he had all he was going to get but then thought of something else.

“You didn’t happen to take an exterior air temperature reading for that spot, did you?”

The two paramedics looked at each other and then at Bosch.

“Didn’t think to,” Ticotin said. “But it’s gotta be at least ninety-five with the Santa Anas kicking up like this. I don’t remember a June this hot.”

Bosch remembered a June he had spent in a jungle but wasn’t going to get into it. He thanked the paramedics and let them get back to duty. He put his notebook away and looked at his partner.

“Okay, tell me about the scene,” he said.

“We’ve got to charge this guy, Harry,” Ferras said urgently.

“Why? What did you find?”

“It’s not what I found. It’s because it was just a kid, Harry. What kind of father would let this happen? How could he forget?”

Ferras had become a father for the first time six months earlier. Bosch knew this. The experience had made him a professional dad and every Monday he came into the squad with a new batch of photos. To Bosch, the kid looked the same week to week, but not to Ferras. He was in love with being a father, with having a son.

“Ignacio, you’ve got to separate your own feelings about it from the facts and the evidence, okay? You know this. Calm down.”

“I know, I know. It’s just that, how could he forget, you know?”

“Yeah, I know, and we’re going to keep that in mind. So tell me what you found out over there. Who’d you talk to?”

“The office manager.”

“And what did he say?”

“It’s a lady. She said that he came in through the back door shortly after ten. All the sales agents park in the back and use the back door—that’s why nobody saw the kid. The father came in talking on the cell phone. Then he got off and asked if he’d gotten a fax but there was no fax. So he made another call and she heard him ask where the fax was. Then he waited for the fax.”

“How long did he wait?”

“She said not long but the fax was an offer to buy. So he called the client and that started a whole back-and-forth with calls and faxes and he completely forgot about the kid. It was at least two hours, Harry. Two hours!”

Bosch could almost share his partner’s anger, but he had been on the mission a couple decades longer than Ferras and knew how to hold it in when he had to and when to let it go.

“Harry, something else, too.”

“What?”

“The baby had something wrong with him.”

“The manager saw the kid?”

“No, I mean, always. Since birth. She said it was a big tragedy. The kid was handicapped. Blind, deaf, a bunch of things wrong. Fifteen months old and he couldn’t walk or talk and never could even crawl. He just cried a lot.”

Bosch nodded as he tried to plug this information into everything else he knew and had accumulated. Just then another car came speeding into the parking lot. It pulled into the ambulance shoot in front of the ER doors. A woman leaped out and ran into the ER, leaving the car running and the door open.

“That’s probably the mother,” Bosch said. “We better get in there.”

Bosch started trotting toward the ER doors and Ferras followed. They went through the ER waiting room and down a hallway where the father had been placed in a private room to wait.

As Bosch got close he did not hear any screaming or crying or fists on flesh—things that wouldn’t have surprised him. The door was open and when he turned in he saw the parents of the dead boy embracing each other, but not a tear lined any of their cheeks. Bosch’s initial, split-second reaction was that he was seeing relief in their young faces.

They separated when they saw Bosch enter, followed by Ferras.

“Mr. and Mrs. Helton?” he asked.

They nodded in unison. But the man corrected Bosch.

“I’m Stephen Helton and this is my wife, Arlene Haddon.”

“I’m Detective Bosch with the Los Angeles Police Department and this is my partner, Detective Ferras. We are very sorry for the loss of your son. It is our job now to investigate William’s death and to learn exactly what happened to him.”

Helton nodded as his wife stepped close to him and put her face into his chest. Something silent was transmitted.