Michael Connelly (66 page)

“There a desk I can use for a few minutes? I have to make some phone calls.”

He hated to ask for such permission, having worked in this room for eight years.

“Just pick one,” she said. She still didn’t look up.

Bosch sat down at a desk that was reasonably clear of clutter. He called the Hollywood homicide table, hoping there would
still be someone there. Karen Moshito answered and Bosch asked if he had any messages.

“Just one. Somebody named Sylvia. No last name given.”

He took the number down, feeling his pulse quicken.

“Did you hear about Moore?” Moshito asked.

“You mean the ID? Yeah, I heard.”

“No. The cut is screwed up. Radio news says the autopsy is inconclusive. I never heard of a shotgun in the face being inconclusive.”

“When did this come out?”

“I just heard it on KFWB at five.”

Bosch hung up and tried Porter’s number once more. Again there was no answer and no tape recording picked up. Harry wondered
if the broken-down cop was there and just not answering. He imagined Porter sitting with a bottle in the corner of a dark
room, afraid to answer the door or the phone.

He looked at the number he had written down for Sylvia Moore. He wondered if she had heard about the autopsy. That was probably
it. She picked up after three rings.

“Mrs. Moore?”

“It’s Sylvia.”

“This is Harry Bosch.”

“I know.”

She didn’t say anything further.

“How are you holding up?”

“I think I’m okay. I …I called because I just want to thank you. For the way you were last night. With me.”

“Oh, well, you didn’t — it was…”

“You know that book I told you about last night?”

“
The Long Goodbye
?”

“There’s another line in it I was thinking about. ‘A white knight for me is as rare as a fat postman.’ I guess nowadays there
are a lot of fat postmen.” She laughed very softly, almost like her crying. “But not too many white knights. You were last
night.”

Bosch didn’t know what to say and just tried to envision her on the other end of the silence.

“That’s very nice of you to say. But I don’t know if I deserve it. Sometimes I don’t think the things I have to do make me
much of a knight.”

They moved on to small talk for a few moments and then said good-bye. He hung up and sat still for a moment, staring at the
phone and thinking about things said and unsaid. There was something there. A connection. Something more than her husband’s
death. More than just a case. There was a connection between them.

He turned the pages of the notebook back to the chronological chart he had made earlier.

He now started to add other dates and facts, even some that did not seem to fit into the picture at the moment. But his overriding
feeling was that his cases were linked and the link was Calexico Moore. He didn’t stop to consider the chart as a whole until
he was finished. Then he studied it, finding that it gave some context to the thoughts that had jumbled in his head in the
last two days.

But he couldn’t study it too long without thinking of Sylvia Moore.

Bosch took Los Angeles Street to Second and then up to the Red Wind. In front of St. Vibiana’s he saw an entourage of bedraggled,
homeless men leaving the church. They had spent the day sleeping in the pews and were now heading to the Union Street mission
for dinner. As he passed the
Times
building he looked up at the clock and saw it was exactly six. He turned on KFWB for the news. The Moore autopsy was the
second story, after a report on how the mayor had become the latest victim in a wave of kamikazi AIDS protests. He was hit
with a balloon full of pig blood on the white stone steps of City Hall. A group called Cool AIDS took credit.

“In other news, an autopsy on the body of Police Sergeant Calexico Moore was inconclusive in confirming that the narcotics
officer took his own life, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Meanwhile, police have officially classified
the death as suicide. The thirty-eight-year-old officer’s body was found Christmas Day in a Hollywood motel room. He had been
dead of a shotgun blast for about a week, authorities said. A suicide note was found at the scene but the contents have not
been released. Moore will be buried Monday.”

Bosch turned the radio off. The news report had obviously come from a press release. He wondered what was meant by the autopsy
results being inconclusive. That was the only grain of real news in the whole report.

After parking at the curb in front of the Red Wind he went inside but did not see Teresa Corazón. He went into the restroom
and splashed water on his face. He needed a shave. He dried himself with a paper towel and tried to smooth his mustache and
curly hair with his hand. He loosened his tie, then stood there a long moment staring at his reflection. He saw the kind of
man not many people approached unless they had to.

He got a package of cigarettes from the machine by the restroom door and looked around again but still didn’t see her. He
went to the bar and ordered an Anchor and then took it to an empty table by the front door. The Wind was becoming crowded
with the after-work crowd. People in business suits and dresses. There were a lot of combinations of older men with younger
women. Harry recognized several reporters from the
Times
. He began to think Teresa had picked a bad place to meet, if she intended to show up at all. With today’s autopsy story,
she might be noticed by the reporters. He drained the beer bottle and left the bar.

He was standing in the chilled evening air on the front sidewalk, looking down the street into the Second Street tunnel, when
he heard a horn honk and a car pulled to a stop in front of him. The electric window glided down. It was Teresa.

“Harry, wait inside. I’ll just find a place to park. Sorry I’m late.”

Bosch leaned into the window.

“I don’t know. Lot of reporters in there. I heard on the radio about the Moore autopsy. I don’t know if you want to risk getting
hassled.”

He could see reasons for it and against it. Getting her name in the paper improved her chances of changing acting chief ME
to permanent chief. But the wrong thing said or a misquote could just as easily change acting to interim or, worse yet, former.

“Where can we go?” she asked.

Harry opened the door and got in.

“Are you hungry? We can go down to Gorky’s or the Pantry.”

“Yeah. Is Gorky’s still open? I want some soup.”

It took them fifteen minutes to wend their way through eight blocks of downtown traffic and to find a parking space. Inside
Gorky’s they ordered mugs of home-brewed Russian beer and Teresa had the chicken-rice soup.

“Long day, huh?” he offered.

“Oh, yeah. No lunch. Was in the suite for five hours.”

Bosch needed to hear about the Moore autopsy but knew he could not just blurt out a question. He would have to make her want
to tell it.

“How was Christmas? You and your husband get together?”

“Not even close. It just didn’t work. He never could deal with what I do and now that I have a shot at chief ME, he resents
it even more. He left Christmas Eve. I spent Christmas alone. I was going to call my lawyer today to tell her to resume filing
but I was too busy.”

“Should’ve called me. I spent Christmas with a coyote.”

“Ahh. Is Timido still around?”

“Yeah, he still comes around every now and then. There was a fire across the pass. I think it spooked him.”

“Yeah, I read about that. You were lucky.”

Bosch nodded. He and Teresa Corazón had had an on-and-off relationship for four months, each meeting sparked with this kind
of surface intimacy. But it was a relationship of convenience, firmly grounded on physical, not emotional, needs and never
igniting into deep passion for either of them. She had separated earlier in the year from her husband, a UCLA Medical School
professor, and had apparently singled Harry out for her affections. But Bosch knew he was a secondary diversion. Their liaisons
were sporadic, usually weeks apart, and Harry was content to allow Teresa to initiate each one.

He watched her bring her head down to blow onto a spoonful of soup and then sip it. He saw slices of carrot floating in the
bowl. She had brown ringlets that fell to her shoulders. She held some of the tresses back with her hand as she blew on another
spoonful and then sipped. Her skin was a deep natural brown and there was an exotic, elliptical shape to her face accentuated
by high cheekbones. She wore red lipstick on full lips and there was just a whisper of fine white peach fuzz on her cheeks.
He knew she was in her mid-thirties but he had never asked exactly how old. Lastly, he noticed her fingernails. Unpolished
and clipped short, so as not to puncture the rubber gloves that were the tools of her trade.

As he drank the heavy beer from its heavy stein, he wondered if this was the start of another liaison or whether she really
had come to tell him of something significant in the autopsy results of Juan Doe #67.

“So now I need a date for New Year’s Eve,” she said, looking up from the soup. “What are you staring at?”

“Just watching you. You need a date, you got one. I read in the paper that Frank Morgan’s playing at the Catalina.”

“Who’s he and what does he play?”

“You’ll see. You’ll like him.”

“It was a dumb question anyway. If he’s someone you like, then he plays the saxophone.”

Harry smiled, more to himself than her. He was happy to know he had a date. Being alone on New Year’s Eve bothered him more
than Christmas, Thanksgiving, any of the other days. New Year’s Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you
in half if you were alone.

She smiled and said, “Harry, you’re so easy when it comes to lonely women.”

He thought of Sylvia Moore, remembering her sad smile.

“So,” Teresa said, seeming to sense that he was drifting away. “I bet you want to know about the bugs inside Juan Doe #67.”

“Finish your soup first.”

“Nope, that’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. I always get hungry, in fact, after a long day chopping up bodies.”

She smiled. She said things like that often, as if daring him not to like what she did for a living. He knew she was still
hooked by her husband. It didn’t matter what she said. He understood.

“Well, I hope you don’t miss the knives when they make you permanent chief. You’ll be cutting budgets then.”

“No, I’d be a hands-on chief. I’d handle the specials. Like today. But after today, I don’t know if they’ll ever make me permanent.”

Harry sensed that now he was the one who had shaken a bad feeling loose and sent her traveling with it. Now might be the right
time.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No. I mean I do, but I can’t. I trust you, Harry, but I think I have to keep this close for the time being.”

He nodded and let it go, but he intended to come back to it later and find out what had gone wrong on the Moore autopsy. He
took his notebook out of his coat pocket and put it on the table.

“Okay, then, tell me about Juan Doe #67.”

She pushed the soup bowl to the side of the table and pulled a leather briefcase onto her lap. She pulled out a thin manila
file and opened it in front of her.

“Okay. This is a copy so you can keep it when I’m done explaining. I went over the notes and everything else Salazar had on
this. I guess you know, cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma to the head. Crushing blows to the frontal, parietal,
sphenoid and supraorbital.”

As she described these injuries she touched the top of her forehead, the back of her head, her left temple and rim of her
left eye. She did not look up from the paperwork.