Michael Connelly (79 page)

It was a security building but it really wasn’t. Bosch slipped the lock on the front gate with a butter knife he kept with
his picks in the glove compartment of the Caprice. The next door, the one leading to the lobby, he didn’t have to worry about.
It needed to be oiled and showed this by not snapping all the way closed. Bosch went through the door, checked a listing of
tenants and found Moore’s name listed next to number seven, on the third floor.

Moore’s place was at the end of a hallway that split the center of the floor. At the door, Harry saw the police evidence sticker
had been placed across the jamb. He cut it with the small pen knife attached to his key chain and then knelt down to look
at the lock. There were two other apartments on the hallway. He heard no TV sound or talking coming from either. The lighting
in the hall was good, so he didn’t need the flashlight. Moore had a standard pin tumbler dead bolt on the door. Using a curved
tension hook and sawtooth comb, he turned the lock in less than two minutes.

With his handkerchief-wrapped hand on the knob ready to open the door, he wondered again how prudent he was in coming here.
If Irving or Pounds found out, he’d be back on the street in blue before the first of the year. He looked down the hall behind
him once more and opened the door. He had to go in. Nobody else seemed to care what had happened to Cal Moore and that was
fine. But Bosch did care for some reason. He thought maybe he would find that reason here.

Once inside the apartment, he closed and relocked the door. He stood there, a couple of feet inside, letting his eyes adjust.
The place smelled musty and was dark, except for the bluish-white glow of the Scientology light that leaked through the sheer
curtains over the living room window. Bosch walked into the room and switched on the lamp on an end table next to an old misshapen
sofa. The light revealed that the place had come furnished in the same decor it had maybe twenty years ago. The navy blue
carpet was worn flat as Astroturf in pathways from the couch to the kitchen and to the hallway that went off to the right.

He moved farther in and took quick glances in the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom. He was struck by the emptiness
of the place. There was nothing personal here. No pictures on the walls, no notes on the refrigerator; no jacket hung over
the back of a chair. There wasn’t even a dish in the sink. Moore had lived here but it was almost as if he hadn’t existed.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, so he started in the kitchen. He opened cabinets and drawers. He found a box of cereal,
a can of coffee and a three-quarters-empty bottle of Early Times. In another cabinet he found an unopened bottle of sweet
rum with a Mexican label. Inside the bottle was a stalk of sugar cane. There was some silverware and cooking tools in the
drawers, several books of matches from Hollywood area bars like Ports and the Bullet.

The freezer was empty, except for two trays of ice. On the top shelf in the refrigerator section below there was a jar of
mustard, a half-finished package of now-rancid bologna and a lone can of Budweiser, its plastic six-pack collar still choking
it. On the lower shelf on the door was a two-pound bag of Domino sugar.

Harry studied the sugar. It was unopened. Then he thought, What the hell, I’ve come this far. He took it out and opened it
and slowly poured it into the sink. It looked like sugar to him. It tasted like sugar to him. There was nothing else in the
bag. He turned on the hot water and watched as the white mound was washed down the drain.

He left the bag on the counter and went into the bathroom. There was a toothbrush in the holder, shaving equipment behind
the mirror. Nothing else.

In the bedroom Bosch first went into the walk-in closet. An assortment of clothes was on hangers and more filled a plastic
laundry basket on the floor. On the shelf there was a green plaid suitcase and a white box with the word “Snakes” printed
on it. Bosch first dumped the basket over and checked the pockets of the dirty shirts and pants. They were empty. He picked
through the hanging clothes until he reached the back of the closet and found Moore’s dress uniform wrapped in plastic. Once
you left patrol, there was really only one reason to save it. To be buried in. Bosch thought saving it was a bad omen, a lack
of confidence. As required by the department, he kept one uniform, to be worn in time of civil crisis such as a major earthquake
or riot. But he had dumped his dress blues ten years ago.

He brought down the suitcase; it was empty and smelled musty. It had not been used for some time. He pulled down the boot
box but could tell it was empty before he opened it. There was some tissue paper inside it.

Bosch put it back up on the shelf, remembering how he had seen Moore’s one boot standing upright on the tile in the bathroom
at the Hideaway. He wondered if Moore’s killer had had difficulty pulling it off to complete the suicide scene. Or had he
ordered Moore to take it off first? Probably not. The blow to the back of the head that Teresa found meant Moore probably
hadn’t known what hit him. Bosch envisioned the killer, his identity cloaked in shadow, coming up from behind and swinging
the stock of the shotgun against the back of Moore’s head. Moore goes down. The killer pulls off the boot, drags him into
his bathroom, props him against the tub and pulls both triggers. Wipe off the triggers, press the dead man’s thumb against
the stock and rub his hands on the barrels to make convincing smears. Then set the boot upright on the tile. Add the splinter
from the stock and the scene was set. Suicide.

The queen-sized bed was unmade. On the night table was a couple of dollars in change and a small framed photograph of Moore
and his wife. Bosch bent over and studied it without touching it. Sylvia was smiling and appeared to be sitting in a restaurant,
or perhaps at a banquet table at a wedding. She was beautiful in the picture and her husband was looking at her as if he knew
it.

“You fucked up, Cal,” Harry said to no one.

He moved to the bureau, which was so old and scarred by cigarettes and knife-cut initials that the Salvation Army might even
reject it. In the top drawer were a comb and a cherrywood picture frame lying face down. Bosch picked up the frame and saw
that it was empty. He considered this for a few moments. The frame had a floral design carved into it. It would have been
expensive and obviously did not come with the apartment. Moore had brought it with him. Why was it empty? He would have liked
to be able to ask Sheehan if he or anybody else had taken a photograph from the apartment as part of the investigation. But
he couldn’t without revealing he had been here.

The next drawer contained underwear and socks and a stack of folded T-shirts, nothing else. There were more clothes in the
third drawer, all having been neatly folded at a laundry. Beneath a stack of shirts was a skin magazine which announced on
the cover that nude photos of a leading Hollywood actress were provided inside. Bosch leafed through the magazine, more out
of curiosity than belief there would be a clue inside. He was sure the magazine had been pawed over by every dick and blue
suit who had been in the apartment during the investigation into Moore’s disappearance.

He put the magazine back after seeing that the photos of the actress were dark, grainy shots in which it could just barely
be determined that she was barebreasted. He assumed they were from an early movie, made before she had enough clout to control
the exploitation of her body. He imagined the disappointment of the men who bought the magazine only to discover those shots
were the payoff on the cover’s lurid promise. He imagined the actress’s anger and embarrassment. And he wondered what they
did for Cal Moore. A vision of Sylvia Moore flashed in his head. He shoved the magazine under the shirts and closed the drawer.

The last drawer of the bureau contained two things, a folded pair of faded blue jeans and a white paper bag that was crumpled
and soft with age and contained a thick stack of photographs. It was what he had come for. Bosch instinctively knew this when
he picked the bag up. He took it out of the bedroom, hitting the switch turning off the ceiling light as he went through the
door.

Sitting on the couch next to the light, he lit a cigarette and pulled the stack of photos from the bag. Immediately he recognized
that most of them were faded and old. These photographs somehow seemed more private and invasive than even those in the skin
mag. They were pictures that documented Cal Moore’s unhappy history.

The photos seemed to be in some kind of chronological order. Bosch could tell this because they moved from faded black and
white to color. Other benchmarks, like clothing and cars, also seemed to prove this.

The first photo was a black-and-white shot of a young Latina in what looked like a white nurse’s uniform. She was dark and
lovely and wore a girlish smile and a look of mild surprise as she stood next to a swimming pool, her arms behind her back.
Bosch saw the edge of a round object behind her and then realized she was holding a servant tray behind her back. She had
not wanted to be photographed with the tray. She wasn’t a nurse. She was a maid. A servant.

There were other photographs of her in the stack, extending over several years. Age was kind to her but it still exacted its
toll. She retained an exotic beauty but worry lines formed and her eyes lost some of their warmth. In some of the photographs
Bosch leafed through, she held a baby, then she posed with a little boy. Bosch looked closely and even with the print being
black and white he could see that the boy with dark hair and complexion had light-colored eyes. Green eyes, Bosch thought.
It was Calexico Moore and his mother.

In one of the photos the woman and the small boy stood in front of a large white house with a Spanish-tile roof. It looked
like a Mediterranean villa. Rising behind the mother and boy, but unclear because of the focus, was a tower. Two darkly blurred
windows, like empty eyes, were near the top. Bosch thought about what Moore had said to his wife about growing up in a castle.
This was it.

In another of the photos the boy stood rigidly next to a man, an Anglo with blond hair and darkly tanned skin. They stood
next to the sleek form of a late-fifties Thunderbird. The man held one hand on the hood and one on the boy’s head. They were
his possessions, the photo seemed to say. The man squinted into the camera.

But Bosch could see his eyes. They were the same green eyes of his son. The man’s hair was thinning on top and by comparing
photos of the boy with his mother taken at about the same time, Bosch guessed that Moore’s father had been at least fifteen
years older than his mother. The photo of the father and son was worn around the edges from handling. Much more worn than
any of the others in the stack.

The next grouping of photos changed the venue. They were pictures from what was probably Mexicali. There were fewer photos
to document a longer period of time. The boy was growing by leaps and the backgrounds of the photos had a third-world quality
to them. They were shot in the barrio. More often than not there were crowds of people in the background, all Mexicans, all
having that slight look of desperation and hope Bosch had seen in the ghettos of L.A.

And now there was another boy. He was the same age or slightly older. He seemed stronger, tougher. He was in many of the same
frames with Cal. A brother maybe, Bosch thought.

It was in this grouping of photos that the mother began to show clearly the advance of age. The girl who hid the servant’s
tray was gone. A mother used to the harshness of life had replaced her. The photos now took on a haunting quality. It bothered
Harry to study them because he believed that he understood the hold the pictures had on Moore.

The last black-and-white photo showed the two boys, shirtless and sitting back to back on a picnic table, laughing at a joke
preserved forever in time. Calexico was a young teenager with a guileless smile on his face. The other boy, maybe a year or
two older, looked like trouble. He had a hard, sullen look in his eyes. In the picture Cal had his right arm cocked and was
making a muscle for the photographer. Bosch saw the tattoo was already there. The devil with a halo. Saints and Sinners.

In the photos after that, the other boy never appeared again. These were color shots taken in Los Angeles. Bosch recognized
City Hall shooting up in the background of one of them and the fountain in Echo Park in another. Moore and his mother had
come to the United States. Whoever the other boy was, he had been left behind.

Toward the end of the stack, the mother dropped out of the photos as well. Harry wondered if that meant she was dead. The
final two pictures were of Moore as an adult. The first was his graduation from the police academy. There was a shot of a
class of newly sworn officers gathered on the grass outside what was later renamed the Daryl F. Gates Auditorium. They were
throwing their hats into the air. Bosch picked Moore out of the crowd. He had his arm around the shoulder of another probee
and there was genuine joy in his face.

And the last photo was of Moore in dress uniform pulling a young Sylvia close in a smiling cheek-to-cheek embrace. Her skin
was smoother then, her eyes brighter and her hair longer and fuller. But she was still very much the same as now, still a
beautiful woman.

He pushed the photographs back into the bag and put it on the couch next to him. He looked at the bag and was curious why
the photos had never been mounted in an album or put on display. They were just glimpses of a lifetime kept in a bag and ready
to go.

But he knew the reason. At his home he had stacks of his own pictures that he would never mount in a book, that he felt the
need to hold when he looked at them. They were more than pictures of another time. They were parts of a life, a life that
could not go forward without knowing and understanding what was behind.

Bosch reached up to the lamp and turned it off. He smoked another cigarette, the glow of its tip floating in the dark. He
thought about Mexico and Calexico Moore.