Michael Connelly (69 page)

He thought he heard the short, high-pitched bark of the coyote in the distance behind the house. Teresa raised her head off
his chest and then they heard the animal’s lonesome baying.

“Timido,” he heard her say quietly.

Harry felt the guilt pass over him again. He thought of Teresa. Had he tricked her into telling him? He didn’t think so. Maybe,
again, it was guilt over what he had not yet done. What he knew he would do with the information she had given.

She seemed to know his thoughts were away from her. Perhaps a change in his heartbeat, a slight tensing in his muscles.

“Nothing,” she said.

“What?”

“You asked what I was going to do. Nothing. I’m not going to get involved in this bullshit any further. If they want to bury
it, let them bury it.”

Harry knew then that she would make a good permanent chief medical examiner for the county of Los Angeles.

He felt himself falling away from her in the dark.

Teresa rolled off him and sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window at the three-quarter moon. They had left the
curtain open. The coyote howled once more. Bosch thought he could hear a dog answering somewhere in the distance.

“Are you like him?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Timido. Alone out there in the dark world.”

“Sometimes. Everybody is sometimes.”

“Yes, but you like it, don’t you?”

“Not always.”

“Not always…”

He thought about what to say. The wrong word and she’d be gone.

“I’m sorry if I’m distant,” he tried. “There’s a lot of things…”

He didn’t finish. There was no excuse.

“You do like living up here in this little, lonely house, with the coyote as your only friend, don’t you?”

He didn’t answer. The face of Sylvia Moore inexplicably came back into his mind. But this time he felt no guilt. He liked
seeing her there.

“I have to go,” Teresa said. “Long day tomorrow.”

He watched her walk naked into the bathroom, picking her purse up off the night table as she went. He listened as the shower
ran. He imagined her in there, cleaning all traces of him off and out of her and then splashing on the all-purpose perfume
she always carried in her purse to cover up any smells left on her from her job.

He rolled to the side of the bed to the pile of his clothes on the floor and got out his phone book. He dialed while the water
still ran. The voice that answered was dulled with sleep. It was near midnight.

“You don’t know who this is and I never talked to you.”

There was silence while Harry’s voice registered.

“Okay, okay. Got it. I understand.”

“There’s a problem on the Cal Moore autopsy.”

“Shit, I know that, man. Inconclusive. You don’t have to wake me up to —”

“No, you don’t understand. You are confusing the autopsy with the press release on the autopsy. Two different things. Understand
now?”

“Yeah …I think I do. So, what’s the problem?”

“The assistant chief of police and the acting chief ME don’t agree. One says suicide, the other homicide. Can’t have both.
I guess that’s what you call inconclusive in a press release.”

There was a low whistling sound in the phone.

“This is good. But why would the cops want to bury a homicide, especially one of their own? I mean, suicide makes the department
look like shit as it is. Why bury a murder unless it means there’s something —”

“Right,” Bosch said and he hung up the phone.

A minute later the shower was turned off and Teresa came out, drying herself with a towel. She was totally unabashed about
her nakedness with him and Harry found he missed that shyness. It had eventually left all the women he became involved with
before they eventually left him.

He pulled on blue jeans and a T-shirt while she dressed. Neither spoke. She looked at him with a thin smile and then he walked
her out to her car.

“So, we still have a date for New Year’s Eve?” she asked after he opened the car door for her.

“Of course,” he said, though he knew she would call with an excuse to cancel it.

She leaned up and kissed him on the lips, then slipped into the driver’s seat.

“Good-bye, Teresa,” he said, but she had already closed the door.

• • •

It was midnight when he came back inside. The place smelled of her perfume. And his own guilt. He put Frank Morgan’s
Mood Indigo
on the CD player and stood there in the living room without moving, just listening to the phrasing on the first solo, a song
called “Lullaby.” Bosch thought he knew nothing truer than the sound of a saxophone.

Sleep was not a possibility. Bosch knew this. He stood on the porch looking down on the carpet of lights and let the chill
air harden his skin and his resolve. For the first time in months he felt invigorated. He was in the hunt again. He let everything
about the cases pass through his mind and made a mental list of people he had to see and things he had to do.

On top was Lucius Porter, the broken-down detective whose pullout was too timely, too coincidental to be coincidental. Harry
realized he was becoming angry just thinking about Porter. And embarrassed. Embarrassed at having stuck his neck out for him
with Pounds.

He went to his notebook and then dialed Porter’s number one more time. He was not expecting an answer and he wasn’t disappointed.
Porter had at least been reliable in that respect. He checked the address he had written down earlier and headed out.

Driving down out of the hills he did not pass another car until he reached Cahuenga. He headed north and got on the Hollywood
Freeway at Barham. The freeway was crowded but not so that traffic was slow. The cars moved northward at a steady clip, a
sleekly moving ribbon of lights. Out over Studio City, Bosch could see a police helicopter circling, a shaft of white light
cast downward on a crime scene somewhere. It almost seemed as if the beam was a leash that held the circling craft from flying
high and away.

He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to
the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider
in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.

There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon night. So many ways to live. And
to die. You could be riding in the back of a studio’s black limo, or just as easily the back of the coroner’s blue van. The
sound of applause was the same as the buzz of a bullet spinning past your ear in the dark. That randomness. That was L.A.

There was flash fire and flash flood, earthquake, mudslide. There was the drive-by shooter and the crack-stoked burglar. The
drunk driver and the always curving road ahead. There were killer cops and cop killers. There was the husband of the woman
you were sleeping with. And there was the woman. At any moment on any night there were people being raped, violated, maimed.
Murdered and loved. There was always a baby at his mother’s breast. And, sometimes, a baby alone in a Dumpster.

Somewhere.

Harry exited on Vanowen in North Hollywood and went east toward Burbank. Then he turned north again into a neighborhood of
rundown apartments. Bosch could tell by the gang graffiti it was a mostly Latino neighborhood. He knew Porter had lived here
for years. It was all he could afford after paying alimony and for his booze.

He turned into the Happy Valley Trailer Park and found Porter’s double-wide at the end of Greenbriar Lane. The trailer was
dark, not even a light on above the door, and there was no car under the aluminum-roofed carport. Bosch sat in his car smoking
a cigarette and watching for a while. He heard mariachi music wafting into the neighborhood from one of the Mexican clubs
over on Lankershim. Soon it was drowned out by a jet that lumbered by overhead on its way to Burbank Airport. He reached into
the glove compartment for a leather pouch containing his flashlight and picks and got out.

After the third knock went unanswered, Harry opened the pouch. Breaking into Porter’s place did not give him pause. Porter
was a player in this game, not an innocent. To Bosch’s mind, Porter had forfeited protection of his privacy when he had not
been straight with him, when he hadn’t mentioned that Moore had been the one who found Juan Doe #67’s body. Now Bosch was
going to find Porter and ask him about that.

He took out the miniature flashlight, turned it on and then held it in his mouth as he stooped down and worked a pick and
tiny pressure wrench into the lock. It took him only a few minutes to push the pins and open the door.

A sour odor greeted Bosch when he entered. He recognized it as the smell of a drunk’s sweat. He called Porter’s name but got
no answer.

He turned on the lights as he moved through the rooms. There were empty glasses on nearly every horizontal surface. The bed
was unmade and the sheets were a dingy white. Amidst the glasses on the night table was an ashtray overloaded with butts.
There was also a statue of a saint Bosch could not identify. In the bathroom off the bedroom, the bathtub was filthy, a toothbrush
was on the floor and in the wastebasket there was an empty bottle of whiskey, a brand either so expensive or so cheap that
Harry had never heard of it. But he suspected it was the latter.

In the kitchen, there was another empty bottle in the trash can. There were also dirty dishes piled on the counters and sink.
He opened the refrigerator and saw only a jar of mustard and an egg carton. Porter’s place was very much like its owner. It
showed a marginal life, if it could be called that at all.

Back in the living room Bosch picked a framed photograph up off a table next to a yellow couch. It was a woman. Not too attractive,
except to Porter maybe. An ex-wife he couldn’t get over. Maybe. Harry put the photo back down and the phone rang.

He traced the noise to the bedroom. The phone was on the floor next to the bed. He picked up on the seventh ring, waited a
moment and in a voice designed to appear jerked from sleep said, “Huh?”

“Porter?”

“Yeah.”

The line went dead. It hadn’t worked. But had Bosch recognized the voice? Pounds? No, not Pounds. Only one word spoken. But,
still, the accent was there. Spanish, he thought. He filed it away in his mind and got up off the bed. Another plane crossed
above and the trailer shuddered. He went back into the living room where he made a half-hearted search of a one-drawer desk,
though he knew that no matter what he found it wouldn’t solve the immediate problem: where was Porter?

Bosch turned all the lights off and relocked the front door as he left. He decided to start in North Hollywood and work his
way south toward downtown. In every police division there was a handful of bars that carried a heavy clientele of cops. Then
after two, when they closed, there were the all-night bottle clubs. Mostly they were dark pits where men came to drink hard
and quietly, as if their lives depended on it. They were havens from the street, places to go to forget and forgive yourself.
It was at one of these Bosch believed he would find Porter.

He began with a place on Kittridge called the Parrot. But the bartender, a one-time cop himself, said he hadn’t seen Porter
since Christmas Eve. Next, he went to the 502 on Lankershim and then Saint’s on Cahuenga. They knew Porter in these places
but he hadn’t been at either tonight.

It went like that until two. By then, Bosch had worked his way down into Hollywood. He was sitting in his car in front of
the Bullet, trying to think of nearby bottle-club locations, when his pager went off. He checked the number and didn’t recognize
it. He went back into the Bullet to use the pay phone. The lights in the bar came on after he dialed. Last call was over.

“Bosch?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Rickard. Bad time?”

“Nah. I’m at the Bullet.”

“Hell, man, then you’re close by.”

“For what? You got Dance?”

“Nah, not quite. I’m at a rave behind Cahuenga and south of the boulevard. Couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d do some hunting.
No Dance but I got my eye on one of his old salesmen. One of the ones that was on the shake cards in the file. Name’s Kerwin
Tyge.”

Bosch thought a moment. He remembered the name. He was one of the juvies the BANG team had stopped and checked out, tried
to scare off the street. His name was on one of the file cards in the ice file Moore had left behind.

“What’s a rave?”

“An underground. They got a warehouse off this alley. A fly-by-night party. Digital music. They’ll run all night, ’til about
six. Next week it will be somewhere else.”

“How’d you find it?”

“They’re easy to find. The record stores on Melrose put out the phone numbers. You call the number, get on the list. Twenty
bucks to get in. Get stoned and dance ’til dawn.”

“He selling black ice?”

“Nah, he’s selling sherms out front.”

A sherm was a cigarette dipped in liquid PCP. Went for twenty bucks a dip and would leave its smoker dusted all night. Tyge
apparently was no longer working for Dance.