The Black Echo (35 page)

“Description?”

“The car? Not very good. Dark color, American sedan. Something new. That’s about it.”

“What kind of headlights?”

“Well, I showed ’em the car book and they picked different taillights. One guy’s got round, the other says rectangle. But on the headlights. They both said they-”

“Square, side-by-side squares.”

“Right. Hey, Harry, you thinking this is the car that came down on you and the FBI woman? Jesus! We ought to get together on this.”

“Later. Maybe later. Meantime, buzz me in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes, right.”

Bosch hung up and went back to Eleanor, who was looking through the plate-glass window at the ghetto blasters on display. They entered the store, shook off two salesmen, walked around a stack of boxed camcorders on sale for $500 each and told a woman standing at a cash register station in the back that they were there to see Binh. The woman stared blankly at them until Eleanor showed her badge and federal ID card.

“You wait here,” the woman said and then disappeared through a door located behind the cash counter. There was a small mirrored window in the door that reminded Bosch of the interview room back at Wilcox. He looked at his watch. He had eight minutes.

The man who emerged from the door behind the cash register looked to be about sixty years old. He had white hair. He was short but Bosch could tell he had once been physically powerful for his size. Built wide and low to the ground, he now was softened by an easier life than he had had in his native land. He wore silver-framed glasses with a pink tint and an open-collar shirt and golf slacks. His breast pocket sagged with the weight of almost a dozen pens and a clip-on pocket flashlight. Ngo Van Binh was low key all the way.

“Mr. Binh? My name is Eleanor Wish. I am from the FBI. This is Detective Bosch, LAPD. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes,” he said, the stern expression on his face unchanging.

“It’s about the break-in at the bank where you had a safe-deposit box.”

“I reported no loss, my deposit box had sentimental occupants only.”

Diamonds ranked fairly high up there on the sentimental range, Bosch thought. “Mr. Binh, can we go back to your office and talk privately?” he said instead.

“Yes, but I suffered no loss. You look. It is in the reports.”

Eleanor held her hand out, urging Binh to lead the way. They followed him through the door with the mirror window and into a warehouselike storage room. There were hundreds of boxes of electronic appliances on steel shelves going to the ceiling. They passed through into a smaller room that was a repair or assembly shop. There was a woman sitting at a tool bench with a bowl of soup held to her mouth. She did not look up as they passed. There were two doors at the back of the shop, and the procession went through one into Binh’s office. It was here that Binh shed his peasant trappings. The office was large and plush, with a desk and two chairs to the right and a dark leather L-shaped couch to the left. The couch was at the edge of an Oriental rug that featured a three-headed dragon poised to strike. The couch faced two walls of shelves filled by books and stereo and video equipment, much finer than what Bosch had seen out front. We should have braced him at his home, Bosch thought. Seen how he lived, not how he worked.

Bosch quickly scanned the room and saw a white telephone on the desk. It would be perfect. It was an antique, the kind where the handset was cradled above a rotary dial. Binh moved toward his desk but Bosch quickly spoke up.

“Mr. Binh? Would it be okay if we sat over here on the couch? We’d like to keep this as informal as possible. We sit at desks all day, to tell you the truth.”

Binh shrugged his shoulders as though it made no difference to him, that they were inconveniencing him no matter where they sat. It was a distinctly American gesture, and Bosch believed his seeming difficulty with English was a front used to better insulate him. Binh sat down on one side of the L-shaped couch and Eleanor and Bosch took the other. “Nice office,” Bosch said and looked around. He saw no other phone in the room.

Binh nodded. He offered no tea or coffee, no small talk. He just said, “What do you want, please?”

Bosch looked at Eleanor.

She said, “Mr. Binh, we are just retracing our steps. You reported no financial loss in the vault break-in. We-”

“That is right. No loss.”

“That is correct. What did you keep in the box?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Papers and such, no value. I told this to everyone already.”

“Yes, we know. We are sorry to bother you again. But the case remains open and we have to go back and see if we missed anything. Could you tell me in specific detail what papers you lost? It might help us, if we make a recovery of property and can identify who it belongs to.”

Eleanor took a small notebook and pen out of her purse. Binh looked at his two visitors as if he could not possibly see how his information could help. Bosch said, “You’d be surprised sometimes what little things can-”

His pager tone sounded and Bosch pulled the device off his belt and looked at the number display. He stood up and looked around, as if he was just noticing the room for the first time. He wondered if he was overdoing it.

“Mr. Binh, can I use your phone? It’ll be local.”

Binh nodded, and Bosch walked to the front of the desk, leaned over and picked up the handset. He made a show of checking the pager number again, then dialed Edgar’s number. He remained standing with his back to Eleanor and Binh. He looked up at the wall, as if studying the silk tapestry that hung there. He heard Binh begin to describe to Eleanor the immigration and citizenship papers that had been taken from his safe-deposit box. Bosch put the pager in his coat pocket and came out with the small pocketknife, the T-9 phone bug and the small battery he had disconnected from his own phone.

“This is Bosch, who paged me?” he said into the phone when Edgar picked up. After Edgar put the phone down, he said, “I’ll hold a few minutes, but tell him I’m in the middle of an interview. What’s so important?”

With his back still to the couch and Binh still talking, Bosch turned slightly to the right and cocked his head as if he were holding the phone to his left ear, where Binh could not see it. Bosch brought the handset down to stomach level, used the knife to pop off the earpiece cover-clearing his throat as he did this-and then pulled out the audio receiver. With one hand he connected the bug to its battery-he had practiced doing it earlier while waiting for the new car in the fleet yard at Wilcox. Then he used his fingers to shove the bug and battery into the barrel of the handset. He put the receiver back in and snapped on the cover, coughing loudly to camouflage any sound.

“Okay,” Bosch said into the phone. “Well, tell him I’ll call back when I am through here. Thanks, man.”

He put the phone back on the desk while returning the knife to his pocket. He went back to the couch, where Eleanor was writing in a notebook. When she was finished she looked at Bosch and Bosch knew without any sign that now the interview would shift into a new direction.

“Mr. Binh,” she said. “Are you sure that is all you had in the box?”

“Yes, sure, why do you ask me so much?”

“Mr. Binh, we know who you are and the circumstances of your coming to this country. We know you were a police officer.”

“Yes, so? What’s it mean?”

“We also know other things-”

“We know,” Bosch cut in, “you were very highly paid as a police officer in Saigon, Mr. Binh. We know that for some of your work you were paid in diamonds.”

“What does this mean, what he says?” Binh said, looking at Eleanor and gesturing with his hand to Bosch. He was lapsing into the defense of language barrier. He seemed to know less English as the interview went on.

“It means what he says,” she answered. “We know about the diamonds you brought here from Vietnam, Captain Binh. We know you kept them in the safe-deposit box. We believe the diamonds were the motivation for the vault break-in.”

The news didn’t shake him, he may have already considered as much. He did not move. He said, “This not true.”

“Mr. Binh, we’ve got your package,” Bosch said. “We know all about you. We know what you were in Saigon, what you did. We know what you took with you when you came here. I don’t know what you are into now-it all looks legit, but we don’t really care. What we do care about is who ripped off that bank. And they ripped it off because of you. They took the collateral for all this and everything else you’ve got. Now, I don’t think we are telling you something that you probably haven’t figured out or thought about on your own. In fact, you might have even thought your old partner Nguyen Tran was behind it because he knew what you had and maybe where it was. Not a bad guess, but we don’t think so. In fact, we think he is next on the list.”

Not a crack formed on the stone that was Binh’s face.

“Mr. Binh, we want to talk to Tran,” Bosch said. “Where is he?”

Binh looked down through the coffee table in front of him to the three-headed dragon on the rug beneath it. He put his hands together on his lap, shook his head and said, “Who is this Tran?”

Eleanor glared at Bosch and tried to salvage what rapport she had had with the man before he butted in.

“Captain Binh, we’re not interested in taking any action against you. We simply want to stop another vault break-in before it happens. Can you help us, please?”

Binh didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands.

“Look, Binh, I don’t know what you’ve got going on this,” Bosch said. “You might have people out there trying to find the same people we are, I don’t know. But I’m telling you right now, you are out of it. So tell us where Tran is.”

“I don’t know this man.”

“We are your only hope. We have to get to Tran. The people that ripped you off, they are in the tunnels again. Right now. If we don’t get to Tran this weekend, there won’t be anything left for you or him.”

Binh remained a stone, as Bosch expected. Eleanor stood up.

“Think about it, Mr. Binh,” she said.

“We’re running out of time, and so is your old partner,” Bosch said as they headed for the door.

After walking through the showroom door Bosch looked both ways for traffic and ran across Vermont to the car. Eleanor walked it, anger making her strides stiff and jerky. Bosch got in and reached to the floor behind the front seat for the Nagra. He turned it on and set the recording speed at its fastest level. He didn’t think the wait would be long. He hoped all the electronic equipment in the store would not skew the reception. Eleanor got in the passenger side and started to complain.

“That was magnificent,” she said. “We’ll never get anything out of that guy now. He’s just going to call up Tran and-what the hell is that?”

“Something I picked up from the shooflies. They dropped a bug in my phone. Oldest trick in the IAD book.”

“And you just put it in…” She pointed across the street and Bosch nodded.

“Bosch, do you realize what could happen to us, what this means? I’m going back in there and getting-”

She opened the car door but he reached across and pulled it closed.

“You don’t want to do that. This is our only way to get to Tran. Binh wasn’t going to tell us, no matter how we handled the interview, and deep down behind those angry eyes you know it. So it’s this or nothing. Binh warns Tran and we never know where he is, or we use this to maybe find him. Maybe. We’ll probably know soon enough.”

Eleanor looked straight forward and shook her head.

“Bosch, this could mean our jobs. How could you do this without consulting me?”

“For that reason. It could mean
my
job. You didn’t know.”

“I’d never prove it. The whole thing looks like a setup. I keep him occupied while you do your little charade on the phone.”

“It was a setup, only you didn’t know. Besides, Binh and Tran are not the targets of our investigation. We are not gathering evidence against them, just from them. This will never go in a report. And if he finds the bug, he can’t prove I put it there. There was no register number. I looked. The suits weren’t stupid enough to make it traceable. We’re clear. You’re clear. Don’t worry.”

“Harry, that is hardly reassur-”

The red light on the Nagra flicked on. Someone was using Binh’s phone. Bosch checked to make sure the tape was rolling.

“Eleanor, you make the call,” Bosch said, holding the recorder up on the palm of his hand. “Turn it off if you want. Your choice.”

She turned and looked at the recorder, then at Bosch. Just then the dialing stopped and it was silent in the car. A phone began to ring at the other end of Binh’s call. She turned away. Someone answered the phone. A few words were exchanged in Vietnamese and then more silence. Then a new voice was on the line and a conversation began, also in Vietnamese. Bosch could tell one of the voices belonged to Binh. The other sounded like a man about Binh’s age. It was Binh and Tran, together again. Eleanor shook her head and forced a short laugh.

“Brilliant, Harry, now who do we get to translate? We aren’t letting anyone else know about this. We can’t risk it.”

“I don’t want to translate it.” He turned the receiver off and rewound the tape. “Get out your little pad and pen.”

Bosch adjusted the recorder to its slowest speed and hit the play button. When the dialing started, it was slow enough that Bosch could count the clicks. Bosch called the numbers out to Eleanor, who wrote them down. They had the number Binh had dialed.

The phone number was a 714 area code. Orange County. Bosch switched the receiver on; the telephone conversation between Binh and the unknown man was continuing. He turned it off and picked up the radio microphone. He gave a dispatcher the phone number and asked for the name and address that went with it. It would take a few minutes while someone looked it up in a reverse directory. Meantime, Bosch started the car and headed south toward Interstate 10. He had already connected with the 5 and was heading into Orange County when the dispatcher got back to him.