The Black Echo (5 page)

Bosch walked out of the closet and left the bedroom. He stopped in the hallway bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There was a half-used tube of toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin and a single, empty insulin syringe box. When he closed the cabinet, he looked at himself and saw weariness in his eyes. He smoothed his hair.

Harry walked back to the living room and sat on the couch, in front of the unfinished solitaire hand. Edgar came in.

“Meadows rented the place last July first,” he said. “The landlady’s back. It was supposed to be a month-to-month lease but he paid for eleven months up front. Four bills a month. That’s nearly five grand in cash he put down. Said she didn’t ask him for references. She just took the money. He lived-”

“She said he paid for eleven months?” Bosch interrupted. “Was it a deal, pay for eleven, get the twelfth free?”

“Nah, I asked her about that and she said no, it was him. That’s just the way he wanted to pay. Said he’d move out June first, this year. That’s-what-ten days from now? She said he told her he moved out here on some kind of job, she thinks from Phoenix. Said he was some kind of shift supervisor for the tunnel dig on the subway project downtown. She got the impression that’s all his job would take, eleven months, and then he’d go back to Phoenix.”

Edgar was looking in his notebook, reviewing his conversation with the landlady.

“That’s about it. She ID’d him off the Polaroid, too. She also knew him as Fields. Bill Fields. Said he kept odd hours, like he was on a night shift or something. Said she saw him last week coming home one morning, getting dropped off from a beige or tan Jeep. No license number because she wasn’t looking. But she said he was all dirty, that’s how she knew he was coming home from work.”

They were silent for a few moments, both thinking.

Bosch finally said, “J. Edgar, I have a deal for you.”

“You got a deal for me? Okay, let me hear it.”

“You go home now or back to your open house or whatever. I’ll take this from here. I’ll go pull the tape at the com center, go back to the office and start the paper going. I’ll see if Sakai made next-of-kin notification. I think, if I remember right, that Meadows was from Louisiana. Anyway, I’ve got the autopsy skedded for tomorrow at eight. I’ll take that, too, on my way in.

“Now, your end is tomorrow you finish up last night’s TV thing and take it over to the DA. Shouldn’t be any problems with it.”

“So you’re taking the end that’s dipped in shit and letting me skate. The transvestite-offs-transvestite case is as cut and dried as they come. No pun intended.”

“Yeah. There’s one thing I’d also want. On your way in from the Valley tomorrow, stop by the VA in Sepulveda and see if you can talk them into letting you see Meadows’s file. Might have some names that could help. Like I said before, he was supposedly talking to a shrink in the outpatient care unit and in one of those circle jerks. Maybe one of those guys was spiking with him, knows what happened here. It’s a long shot, I know. If they give you a hard time, give me a call and I’ll work on a search warrant.”

“Sounds like a deal. But I’m worried about you, Harry. I mean, you and I haven’t been partners too long, and I know you probably want to work your way back downtown to Robbery-Homicide, but I don’t see the percentage in busting your balls on this one. Yeah, this place has been turned over, but that isn’t the question. The question is why. And on the face of things, nothing really stirs me. It looks to me like somebody dumped Meadows down at the reservoir after he croaked and searched his place to find his stash. If he had one.”

“Probably that’s the way it was,” Bosch said after a few moments. “But a couple things still bother me. I want to puzzle with it a little more until I’m sure.”

“Well, like I said, no problem with me. You’re giving me the clean end of the stick.”

“I think I’m going to look around a little more. You go ahead, and I’ll see you tomorrow when I get back in from the cut.”

“Okay, partner.”

“And Jed?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s got nothing to do with getting downtown again.”

Bosch sat alone, thinking, and scanning the room for secrets. His eyes eventually came down on the cards spread out before him on the coffee table. Solitaire. He saw that all four aces were up. He picked up the deck of remaining cards and went through it, peeling off three cards at a time. In the course of going through he came across the two and three of spades and the two of hearts. The game hadn’t stalled. It had been interrupted. And never finished.

He became restless. He looked down into the green glass ashtray and saw that all the butts were nonfiltered Camels. Was that Meadows’s brand or his killer’s? He got up and walked around the room. The faint smell of urine hit him again. He walked back into the bedroom. He opened the drawers of the bureau and stared at their contents once more. Nothing turned in his mind. He went to the window and looked out at the back end of another apartment building across an alley. There was a man with a supermarket cart in the alley. He was poking through a Dumpster with a stick. The cart was half full of aluminum cans. Bosch walked away and sat down on the bed and put his head back against the wall where the headboard should have been and the white paint was a dingy gray. The wall felt cool against his back.

“Tell me something,” he whispered to no one.

Something had interrupted the card game and Meadows had died here, he believed. Then he was taken to the pipe. But why? Why not leave him? Bosch leaned his head back to the wall and looked straight across the room. It was at that moment that he noticed a nail in the wall. The nail was about three feet above the bureau and had been painted white along with the wall at some point a long time ago. That was why he hadn’t noticed it before. He got up and went to look behind the bureau. In the three-inch space between it and the wall, he saw the edge of a fallen picture frame. With his shoulder, he pushed the heavy bureau away from the wall and picked up the frame. He stepped backward and sat on the edge of the bed studying it. The glass was cracked into an intricate spiderweb that had probably occurred when the frame fell. The damaged glass partially obscured an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. It was grainy and fading to a brownish yellow around the edges. The photo was more than twenty years old. Bosch knew this because between two cracks in the glass he saw his own, young face staring out and smiling.

Bosch turned the frame over and carefully bent back the tin prongs that kept the cardboard backing in place. As he was sliding the yellowed photo out, the glass finally gave way and the pieces dropped to the floor in shatters. He moved his feet away from the glass but didn’t get up. He studied the photograph. There were no markings on front or back to tell where or when it had been taken. But he knew it must have been sometime in late 1969 or early 1970, because some of the men in the picture were dead after that.

There were seven of them in the photo. All tunnel rats. All shirtless and proudly displaying their T-shirt tan lines and tattoos, each man’s dog tags taped together to keep them from jangling while they crawled through the tunnels. They had to have been in the Echo Sector of Cu Chi District, but Bosch could not tell or remember what village. The soldiers stood in a trench, positioned on both sides of a tunnel entrance no wider than the pipe in which Meadows would later be found dead. Bosch looked at himself and thought that his smile in the photograph was foolish. He was embarrassed by it now, in light of what was still to come after the moment was captured. Then he looked at Meadows in the photo and saw the thin smile and vacant stare. The others had always said Meadows would have a thousand-yard stare in an eight-by-eight room.

Bosch looked down at the glass between his feet and saw a pink piece of paper about the size of a baseball card. He picked it up by its edges and studied it. It was a pawn ticket from a shop downtown. The customer name on it was William Fields. It listed one item pawned: an antique bracelet, gold with jade inlay. The ticket was dated six weeks earlier. Fields had gotten $800 for the bracelet. Bosch slipped it into an evidence envelope from his pocket and stood up.

The trip downtown took an hour because of the traffic heading to Dodger Stadium. Bosch spent the time thinking about the apartment. It had been searched, but Edgar was right. It was a rush job. The pants pockets were the obvious tip. But the bureau drawers should’ve been put back in correctly, and the photo and the hidden pawn slip should not have been missed. What had been the hurry? He concluded it was because Meadows’s body was in the apartment. It had to be moved.

Bosch exited on Broadway and headed south past Times Square to the pawnshop located in the Bradbury Building. Downtown L.A. was as quiet as Forest Lawn on most weekends, and he didn’t expect to find the Happy Hocker open. He was curious and just wanted to drive by and take a look at the place before heading to the communications center. But when he drove past the storefront he saw a man outside with an aerosol can painting the wordOPEN in black on a sheet of plywood. The board stood in place of the shop’s front window. Bosch could see shards of glass on the dirty sidewalk below the plywood. He pulled to the curb. The spray painter was inside by the time he got to the door. He stepped through the beam of an electric eye, which sounded a bell from somewhere above all the musical instruments hanging from the ceiling.

“I’m not open, not Sundays,” a man called from the back. He was standing behind a chrome cash register that was atop a glass counter.

“That’s not what the sign you just painted says.”

“Yes, but that is for tomorrow. People see boards over your windows they think you’re out of business. I’m not out of business. I’m open for business, except for weekends. I just have a board out there for a few days. I paintedOPEN so people will know, you see? Starting tomorrow.”

“Do you own this business?” Bosch said as he pulled his ID case out and flipped open his badge. “This will only take a couple minutes.”

“Oh, police. Why din’t you say? I been waiting all day for you police.”

Bosch looked around, confused, then put it together.

“You mean the window? I’m not here about that.”

“What do you mean? The patrol police said to wait for detective police. I waited. I been here since fiveA.M. this morning.”

Bosch looked around the shop. It was filled with the usual array of brass musical instruments, electronic junk, jewelry and collectibles. “Look, Mr.-”

“Obinna. Oscar Obinna pawnshops of Los Angeles and Culver City.”

“Mr. Obinna, detectives don’t roll on vandalism reports on weekends. I mean, they might not even be doing that during the week anymore.”

“What vandalism? This was a breakthrough. Grand robbery.”

“You mean a break-in? What was taken?”

Obinna gestured to two glass counter cases that flanked the cash register. The top plate in each case had been smashed into a thousand pieces. Bosch walked up closer and could see small items of jewelry, cheap-looking earrings and rings, nestled among the glass. But he also saw velvet-covered jewelry pedestals, mirrored plates and wood ring pegs where pieces should have been but weren’t. He looked around and saw no other damage in the store.

“Mr. Obinna, I can call the duty detective and see if anyone is going to come out today, and if so when they will be here. But that is not what I’ve come for.”

Bosch then pulled out the clear plastic envelope with the pawn ticket in it. He held it up for Obinna to see.

“Can I see this bracelet please?” The moment he said it he felt a bad premonition come over him. The pawnbroker, a small, round man with olive skin and dark hair noodled over a bare cranium, looked at Bosch incredulously, his dark bushy eyebrows knitted together.

“You’re not going to take the report on my cases?”

“No sir, I’m investigating a murder. Can you please show me the bracelet pawned on this ticket? Then I will call the detective bureau and find out if anyone is coming today on your break-in. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“Aygh! You people! I cooperate. I send my lists each week, even take pictures for your pawn men. Then all I ask for is one detective to investigate a robbery and I get a man who says his job is murder. I been waiting now since fiveA.M. in the morning.”

“Give me your phone. I’ll get somebody over.”

Obinna took the receiver off a wall phone behind one of the damaged counters and handed it across. Bosch gave him the number to dial. While Bosch talked to the duty detective at Parker Center, the shopkeeper looked up the pawn ticket in a logbook. The duty detective, a woman Bosch knew had not been involved in a field investigation during her entire career with the Robbery-Homicide Division, asked Bosch how he had been, then told him that she had referred the pawnshop break-in to the local station even though she knew there would be no detectives there today. The local station was Central Division. Bosch walked around the counter and dialed the detective bureau there anyway. There was no answer. While the phone rang on unanswered, Bosch began a one-sided conversation.

“Yeah, this is Harry Bosch, Hollywood detectives, I’m just trying to check on the status of the break-in over at the Happy Hocker on Broadway… He is. Do you know when?… Uh huh, uh huh… Right, Obinna, O-B-I-N-N-A.”

He looked over and Obinna nodded at the correct spelling.

“Yeah, he’s here waiting… Right… I’ll tell him. Thank you.”

He hung up the phone. Obinna looked at him, his bushy eyebrows arched.

“It’s been a busy day, Mr. Obinna,” Bosch said. “The detectives are out, but they’ll get here. Shouldn’t be too much longer. I gave the watch officer your name and told him to get ’em over here as soon as possible. Now, can I see the bracelet?”

“No.”

Bosch dug a cigarette out of a package he pulled from his coat pocket. He knew what was coming before Obinna spread his arm across one of the damaged display cases.

“Your bracelet, it is gone,” the pawnbroker said. “I looked it up here in my record. I see that I had it here in the case because it was a fine piece, very valuable to me. Now it is gone. We are both victims of the robber, yes?”