The Last Coyote (19 page)

“No, put it back. It’s beautiful.”

McKittrick roughly pulled the hook from the gulping mouth of the fish and then held the catch out to Bosch.

“You want to hold it? Must be twelve, thirteen pounds.”

“Nah, I don’t need to hold it.”

Bosch stepped closer and ran his finger along the slick skin of the fish. He could almost see himself in the reflection of its scales. He nodded to McKittrick and the fish was thrown back into the water. For several seconds it remained motionless, about two feet below the surface. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, Bosch thought. Finally, the fish seemed to come out of it and darted down into the depths. Bosch put the hook through one of the eyelets on his pole and put the pole back in its pipe. He was done fishing. He got another beer out of the cooler.

“Hey, you want a sandwich, go ahead,” McKittrick said.

“No. I’m fine.”

Bosch wished the fish hadn’t interrupted them.

“You were saying that you guys got the call from Conklin.”

“Yeah, Arno. Only I had it wrong. The request for a meeting was only for Claude. Not me. Eno went alone.”

“Why only Eno?”

“I never knew and he acted like he didn’t know, either. I just assumed it was because he and Arno had a prior relationship of some kind.”

“But you don’t know what.”

“No. Claude Eno was about ten years older than me. He’d been around.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, I can’t tell you what happened. I can only tell you what my partner said happened. Understand?”

He was telling Bosch that he didn’t trust his own partner. Bosch had known that feeling himself at times and nodded that he understood.

“Go ahead.”

“He came back from the meeting saying Conklin asked him to lay off Fox because Fox was clear on this case and Fox was working as an informant on one of the commando investigations. He said Fox was important to him and he didn’t want him compromised or roughed up, especially over a crime he didn’t commit.”

“How was Conklin so sure?”

“I don’t know. But Eno told me that he told Conklin that assistant DA’s, no matter who they are, didn’t decide whether someone was clear or not for the police, and that we weren’t backing off until we talked to Fox for ourselves. Faced with that, Conklin said he could deliver Fox to be interviewed and fingerprinted. But only if we did it on Conklin’s turf.”

“Which was…?”

“His office in the old courthouse. That’s gone now. They built that big square thing right before I left. Horrible-looking thing.”

“What happened in the office? Were you there for that?”

“Yeah, I was there but nothing happened. We interviewed him. Fox was there with Conklin, so was the Nazi.”

“The Nazi?”

“Conklin’s enforcer, Gordon Mittel.”

“He was there?”

“Yup. I guess he was sort of watching out for Conklin while Conklin was watching out for Fox.”

Bosch showed no surprise.

“Okay, so what did Fox tell you?”

“Like I said, not much. At least, that’s how I remember it. He gave us an alibi and the names of the people who could verify it. I took his prints.”

“What’d he say about the victim?”

“He said pretty much what we’d already heard from her girlfriend.”

“Meredith Roman?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it. He said she went to a party, was hired as kind of a decoration to be on some guy’s arm. He said it was in Hancock Park. He didn’t have the address. He said he had nothing to do with setting it up. That didn’t make sense to us. You know, a pimp not knowing where…not knowing where one of his girls was. It was the one thing we had and when we started leaning on him about it, Conklin stepped in like a referee.”

“He didn’t want you leaning on him.”

“Craziest thing I ever saw. Here was the next DA—everybody knew he was going to run. Here he was taking this bastard’s side against us…Sorry about that bastard comment.”

“Forget it.”

“Conklin was trying to make it seem like we were out of line, while all the time this big-piece-of-shit Fox was sitting there smiling with a toothpick in the side of his mouth. It’s what, thirty-somethin’ years ago and I can still remember that toothpick. Galled the Jesus out of me. So to make a long story short, we never did get to brace him on having set up the date she went on.”

The boat rocked on a high wake and Bosch looked around and didn’t see any other boat. It was weird. He looked out across the water and for the first time realized how different it was from the Pacific. The Pacific was a cold and forbidding blue, the Gulf a warm green that invited you.

“We left,” McKittrick continued. “I figured we’d have another shot at him. So we left and started to work on his alibi. It turned out to be good. And I don’t mean it was good because his own witnesses said it was. We did the work. We found some independent people. People that didn’t know him. As I remember it, it was rock solid.”

“You remember where he was?”

“Spent part of the night in a bar over there on Ivar, place a lot of the pimps hung around. Can’t remember the name of it. Then later he drove out to Ventura, spent most of the rest of the night in a card room until he got a phone call, then he split. The other thing about this was that it didn’t smack of an alibi set up for this particular night. This was his routine. He was well known in all of these places.”

“What was the phone call?”

“We never knew. We didn’t know about it until we started checking his alibi and somebody mentioned it. We never got to ask Fox about it. But to be honest, we didn’t care too much at that point. Like I said, his alibi was solid and he didn’t get the call until later in the morning. Four, five o’clock. The vic—your mother had been dead a good long while by then. TOD was midnight. The call didn’t matter.”

Bosch nodded but it was the kind of detail he would not have left open if it had been his investigation. It was too curious a detail. Who calls a poker room that early in the morning? What kind of call would make Fox up and leave the game?

“What about the prints?”

“I had ’em checked anyway and they didn’t match those on the belt. He was clean. The dirtbag was clear.”

Bosch thought of something.

“You did check the prints on the belt against the victim’s, right?”

“Hey, Bosch, I know you highfalutin’ guys think you’re the cat’s ass now but we were known for having a brain or two back in those days.”

“Sorry.”

“There were a few prints on the buckle that were the victim’s. That’s it. The rest were definitely the killer’s because of their location. We got good direct lifts and partials on two other spots where it was clear the belt had been grasped by the full hand. You don’t hold a belt that way when you’re putting it on. You hold it that way when you’re putting it around someone’s neck.”

They were both silent after that. Bosch couldn’t figure out what McKittrick was telling him. He felt deflated. He had thought that if he got McKittrick to open up, the old cop would point the finger at Fox or Conklin or somebody. But he was doing none of that. He really wasn’t giving Bosch anything.

“How come you remember so many details, Jake? It’s been a long time.”

“I’ve had a long time to think about it. When you finish up, Bosch, you’ll see, there’ll always be one. One case that stays with you. This is the one that stayed with me.”

“So what was your final take on it?”

“My final take? Well, I never got over that meeting at Conklin’s office. I guess you had to be there but it just…it just seemed that the one that was in charge of that meeting was Fox. It was like he was calling the shots.”

Bosch nodded. He could see that McKittrick was struggling for an explanation of his feelings.

“You ever interview a suspect with his lawyer there jumpin’ in and out of the conversation?” McKittrick asked. “You know, ‘Don’t answer this, don’t answer that.’ Shit like that.”

“All the time.”

“Well, it was like that. It was like Conklin, the next DA for Chrissake, was this shitheel’s lawyer, objecting all the time to our questions. What it came down to was that if you didn’t know who he was or where we were, you’d’ve sworn he was working for Fox. Both of them, Mittel, too. So, I felt pretty sure Fox had his hooks into Arno. Somehow he did. And I was right. It was all confirmed later.”

“You mean when Fox died?”

“Yeah. He got killed in a hit and run while working for the Conklin campaign. I remember the newspaper story on it didn’t say nothin’ about his background as a pimp, as a Hollywood Boulevard hoodlum. No, he was just this guy who got run down. Joe Innocent. I tell ya, that story must’ve cost Arno a few dollars and made a reporter a little richer.”

Bosch could tell there was more so he said nothing.

“I was in Wilshire dicks by then,” McKittrick continued. “But I got curious when I heard about it. So I called over to Hollywood to see who was on it. It was Eno. Big surprise. And he never made a case on anybody. So that about confirmed what I was thinking about him, too.”

McKittrick stared off across the water to where the sun was getting low in the sky. He threw his empty beer can at the bucket. It missed and bounced over the side into the water.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I guess we should head in.”

He started reeling in his line.

“What do you think Eno got out of all of this?”

“I don’t know exactly. He might’ve just been trading favors, something like that. I’m not saying he got rich, but I think he got something out of the deal. He wouldn’t do it for nothing. I just don’t know what it was.”

McKittrick started taking the rods out of the pipes and stowing them on hooks along the sides of the stern.

“In 1972 you checked the murder book out of archives, how come?”

McKittrick looked at him curiously.

“I signed the same checkout slip a few days ago,” Bosch explained. “Your name was still on it.”

McKittrick nodded.

“Yeah, that was right after I put in my papers. I was leaving, going through my files and stuff. I’d hung on to the prints we took off the belt. Kept the card. Also hung on to the belt.”

“Why?”

“You know why. I didn’t think it would be safe in that file or in the evidence room. Not with Conklin as DA, not with Eno doing him favors. So I kept the stuff. Then a bunch of years went by and it was there when I was cleaning shit out and going to Florida. So right before I decided to punch out, I put the print card back in the murder book and went down and put the belt back in the evidence box. Eno was already in Vegas, retired. Conklin had crashed and burned, was out of politics. The case was long forgotten. I put the stuff back. I guess maybe I hoped someday somebody like you would take a look at it.”

“What about you? Did you look at the book when you put the card back?”

“Yeah, and I saw I had done the right thing. Somebody had gone through it, stripped it. They pulled the Fox interview out of it. Probably was Eno.”

“As the second man on the case you had to do the paper, right?”

“Right. The paperwork was mine. Most of it.”

“What did you put on the Fox interview summary that would have made Eno need to pull it?”

“I don’t remember anything specific, just that I thought the guy was lying and that Conklin was out of line. Something like that.”

“Anything else you remember that was missing?”

“Nah, nothing important, just that. I think he just wanted to get Conklin’s name out of it.”

“Yeah, well, he missed something. You’d noted his first call on the Chronological Record. That’s how I knew.”

“Did I? Well, good for me. And here you are.”

“Yeah.”

“All right, we’re heading in. Too bad they weren’t really biting today.”

“I’m not complaining. I got my fish.”

McKittrick stepped behind the wheel and was about to start the engine when he thought of something.

“Oh, you know what?” He moved to the cooler and opened it. “I don’t want Mary to be disappointed.”

He pulled out the plastic bags that contained the sandwiches his wife had made.

“You hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

He opened the bags and dumped the sandwiches over the side. Bosch watched him.

“Jake, when you pulled out that gun, who’d you think I was?”

McKittrick didn’t say anything as he neatly folded the plastic bags and put them back in the cooler. When he straightened up, he looked at Bosch.

“I didn’t know. All I knew was that I thought I might have to take you out here and dump you like those sandwiches. Seems like I’ve been hiding out here all my life, waiting for them to send somebody.”

“You think they’d go that far over time and distance?”

“I don’t have any idea. The more time that goes by, the more I doubt it. But old habits die hard. I always keep a gun nearby. Doesn’t matter that most times I don’t even remember why.”

They rode in from the Gulf with the engine roaring and the soft spray of the sea in their faces. They didn’t talk. That was done with. Occasionally, Bosch glanced over at McKittrick. His old face fell under the shadow of his cap brim. But Bosch could see his eyes in there, looking at something that had happened a long time before and no longer could be changed.

Chapter Twenty-six

A
FTER THE BOAT
trip bosch felt the onset of a headache from the combination of too much beer and too much sun. He begged off an invitation to dinner from McKittrick, saying he was tired. once in his car, he took a couple of Tylenol caplets out of his overnighter, downed them without any liquid chaser and hoped they would do the job. He took out his notebook and reviewed some of the things he had written about McKittrick’s story.

He had come to like the old cop by the end of the fishing trip. Maybe he saw some of himself in the older man. McKittrick was haunted because he had let the case go. He had not done the right thing. And Bosch knew he was guilty of the same during all the years he had ignored the case that he knew was there waiting for him. He was making up for that now, and so was McKittrick by talking to him. But both of them knew it might be too little too late.

Bosch wasn’t sure what he would do next when he got back to Los Angeles. It seemed to him that his only move was to confront Conklin. He was reluctant to do this because he knew he would go into such a confrontation soft, with only his suspicions and no hard evidence. Conklin would have the upper hand.

A wave of desperation came over him. He did not want the case to come to this. Conklin hadn’t flinched in almost thirty-five years. He wouldn’t with Bosch in his face now. Harry knew he needed something else. But he had nothing.

He started the car but left it in Park. He turned the air conditioner on high and added what McKittrick had told him into the stew of what he already knew. He began formulating a theory. For Bosch, this was one of the most important components of homicide investigation. Take the facts and shake them down into hypothesis. The key was not to become beholden to any one theory. Theories changed and you had to change with them.

It seemed clear from McKittrick’s information that Fox had a hold on Conklin. What was it? Well, Bosch thought, Fox dealt in women. The theory that emerged was that Fox had gotten a hook into Conklin through a woman, or women. The news clips at the time reported Conklin was a bachelor. The morals of the time would have dictated then as now that as a public servant and soon-to-be candidate for top prosecutor, Conklin needed not necessarily to be celibate but, at least, not to have succumbed privately to the very vices he was publicly attacking. If he had done that and was exposed, he could kiss his political career good-bye, let alone his position as commander of the DA commandos. So, Bosch concluded, if this was Conklin’s flaw and it was through Fox that such dalliances were arranged, then Fox would hold an almost unbeatable hand when it came to having juice with Conklin. It would explain the unusual circumstances of the interview McKittrick and Eno conducted with Fox.

The same theory, Bosch knew, would work to an even greater degree if Conklin had done more than succumb to the vice of sex but had gone further: if he had killed a woman Fox had sent to him, Marjorie Lowe. For one thing, it would explain how Conklin knew for sure that Fox was in the clear on the murder—because he was the killer himself. For another, it would explain how Fox got Conklin to run interference for him and why he was later hired as a Conklin campaign worker. The bottom line was, if Conklin was the killer, Fox’s hook would be set even deeper and it would be set for good. Conklin would be like that wahoo at the end of the line, a pretty fish unable to get away.

Unless, Bosch knew, the man at the other end of the line and holding the rod were to go away somehow. He thought about Fox’s death and saw how it fit. Conklin let some time separate one death from the other. He played like a hooked fish, even agreeing to Fox’s demand for a straight job with the campaign, and then, when all seemed clear, Fox was run down in the street. Maybe a payoff to a reporter kept the victim’s background quiet—if the reporter even knew it, and a few months later Conklin was crowned district attorney.

Bosch considered where Mittel would fit into the theory. He felt it was unlikely that all of this had transpired in a vacuum. It was Bosch’s guess that Mittel, as Conklin’s right-hand man and enforcer, would know what Conklin knew.

Bosch liked his theory but it angered him, largely because that was all it was, theory. He shook his head as he realized he was back to ground zero. All talk, no evidence of anything.

He grew weary thinking about it and decided to put the thoughts aside for a while. He turned the air down because it was too cool against his sunburned skin and put the car in gear. As he slowly cruised through Pelican Cove toward the gatehouse, his thoughts drifted to the woman who was trying to sell her dead father’s condo. She had signed the name Jazz on the self-portrait. He liked that.

He turned the car around and drove toward her unit. It was still daylight and no lights shone from behind the building’s windows when he got there. He couldn’t tell if she was there or not. Bosch parked nearby and watched for a few minutes, debating what he should do, if anything at all.

Fifteen minutes later, when it seemed that indecisiveness had paralyzed him, she stepped out the front door. He was parked nearly twenty yards away, between two other cars. His paralytic affliction eased enough for him to slide down in his seat to avoid detection. She walked out into the parking lot and behind the row of cars which included Bosch’s rental. He didn’t move or turn to follow her movement. He listened. He waited for the sound of a car starting. Then what, he wondered. Follow her? What are you doing?

He jerked upright at the sound of sharp rapping on the window next to him. It was her. Bosch was flustered but managed to turn the key so he could lower the window.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bosch, what are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been sitting out here. I saw you.”

“I…”

He was too humiliated to finish.

“I don’t know whether to call security or not.”

“No, don’t do that. I, uh, I was just—I was going to go to your door. To apologize.”

“Apologize? Apologize for what?”

“For today. For earlier, when I was inside. I—you were right, I wasn’t looking to buy anything.”

“Then what were you doing?”

Bosch opened the car door and stepped out. He felt disadvantaged with her looking down at him in the car.

“I’m a cop,” he said. “I needed to get in here to see someone. I used you and I’m sorry. I am. I didn’t know about your father and all of that.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“That’s the dumbest story I’ve ever heard. What about L.A., was that part of the story?”

“No. I’m from L.A. I’m a cop there.”

“I don’t know if I’d go around admitting that if I were you. You guys’ve got some bad PR problems.”

“Yeah, I know. So…” He felt his courage rising. He told himself he was flying out in the morning and it didn’t matter what happened because he’d never see her or this state again. “You said something before about lemonade but I never got any. I was thinking, maybe I could tell you the story, apologize and have some lemonade or something.”

He looked over toward the door of the condo.

“You L.A. cops are pushy,” she said but she was smiling. “One glass and the story better be good. After that, we both gotta go. I’m driving up to Tampa tonight.”

They started walking toward the door and Bosch realized he had a smile on his face.

“What’s in Tampa?”

“It’s where I live and I miss it. I’ve been down here more than up there since I put the condo on the market. I want to spend a Sunday at my own place and in my own studio.”

“That’s right, a painter.”

“I try to be.”

She opened the door for him and allowed him in first.

“Well, that’s okay by me. I have to get to Tampa sometime tonight. I fly out in the morning.”

While nursing a tall glass of lemonade, Bosch explained his scam of using her to get into the complex to see another resident and she didn’t seem upset. In fact, he could tell she admired the ingenuity of it. Bosch didn’t tell her how it had backfired anyway when McKittrick had pulled a gun on him. He gave her a vague outline of the case, never mentioning its personal connection to himself and she seemed intrigued by the whole idea of solving a murder that happened thirty-three years earlier.

The one glass of lemonade turned into four and the last two were spiked nicely with vodka. They took care of what was left of Bosch’s headache and put a nice bloom on everything. Between the third and the fourth she asked if he would mind if she smoked and he lit cigarettes for both of them. And as the sky darkened over the mangroves outside, he finally turned the conversation toward her. Bosch had sensed a loneliness about her, a mystery of some sort. Behind the pretty face there were scars. The kind that couldn’t be seen.

Her name was Jasmine Corian but she said that friends called her Jazz. She spoke of growing up in the Florida sun, of never wanting to leave it. She had married once but it was a long time ago. There was nobody in her life now and she was used to it. She said she concentrated most of her life on her art and, in a way, Bosch understood what she meant. His own art, though few would call it that, took most of his life as well.

“What do you paint?”

“Portraits mostly.”

“Who are they?”

“Just someone I know. Maybe I’ll paint you, Bosch. Someday.”

He didn’t know what to say to that so he made a clumsy transition to safer ground.

“Why don’t you give this place to a realtor to sell? That way you could stay in Tampa and paint.”

“Because I wanted the diversion. I also didn’t want to give a realtor the five percent. This is a nice complex. These units sell pretty well without realtors. A lot of Canadian investment. I think I’ll sell it. This was only the first week I’ve run the ad.”

Bosch just nodded and wished he had kept the conversation on her painting instead of realtors. The clumsy change seemed to have clogged things up a bit.

“I was thinking, you want to have dinner?”

She looked at him solemnly, as if the request and her answer had far deeper implications. They probably did. At least, he thought they did.

“Where would we go?”

That was a stall but he played along.

“I don’t know. It’s not my town. Not my state. You could pick a place. Around here or on the way up to Tampa. I don’t care. I’d like your company, though, Jazz. If you want to.”

“How long has it been since you were with a woman? I mean on a date.”

“On a date? I don’t know. A few months, I guess. But, look, I’m not a hard-luck case. I’m just in town and alone and thought maybe you’d—”

“It’s okay, Harry. Let’s go.”

“To eat?”

“Yes, to eat. I know a place on the way up. It’s above Longboat. You’ll have to follow me.”

He smiled and nodded.

She drove a Volkswagen Beetle convertible that was powder blue with one red fender. He couldn’t lose her in a hailstorm let alone the slow-moving Florida highways.

Bosch counted two drawbridges that they had to stop for before they got to Longboat Key. From there they headed north for the length of the island, crossed a bridge onto Anna Maria Island and finally stopped at a place called the Sandbar. They walked through the bar and sat on a deck overlooking the Gulf. It was cool and they ate crabs and oysters chased with Mexican beer. Bosch loved it.

They didn’t talk much but didn’t need to. It was always in the silences that Bosch felt most comfortable with the women who had moved through his life. He felt the vodka and beer working on him, warming him toward her, sanding off any sharp edges to the evening. He felt a desire for her growing and tugging at him. McKittrick and the case had somehow been pushed into the darkness at the back of his mind.

“This is good,” he said when he was finally nearing his capacity for food and drink. “It’s great.”

“Yeah, they do it right. Can I tell you something, Bosch?”

“Go ahead.”

“I was only kidding about what I was saying about L.A. cops before. But I have known some cops before…and you seem different. I don’t know what it is but it’s like you’ve got too much of yourself left, you know?”

“I guess.” He nodded. “Thanks. I think.”

They both laughed and then in a hesitant move, she leaned over and kissed him quickly on the lips. It was nice and he smiled. He could taste garlic.

“I’m glad you’re already sunburned or you’d be turning red again.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I mean, that was a nice thing to say.”

“You want to come home with me, Bosch?”

Now he hesitated. Not because there was any deliberation in his answer. But he wanted her to have the chance to withdraw it in case she had spoken too quickly. After a moment of silence from her he smiled and nodded.

“Yes, I would like that.”

They left then and cut inland to the freeway. Bosch wondered as he tailed the Volkswagen if she would change her mind as she drove alone. He got his answer at the Skyway bridge. As he pulled up to the tollbooth with his dollar already in hand, the tolltaker shook his head and waved off the money.

“Nope. That lady in the bug got ya covered.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know her?”

“Not yet.”

“I think you’re goin’ to. Good luck.”

“Thanks.”