The Last Coyote (26 page)

“I do. But whoever called could have also used the name of an important person as bait to draw Pounds out. That actual person may not have been involved at all.”

“That’s also true. But I think that whatever was said, it would have to have been convincing to get Pounds out at night, by himself.”

“Maybe it was someone he already knew.”

“Maybe. But then he probably would have told his wife the name.”

“True.”

“Did he take anything with him? A briefcase, files, anything?”

“Not that we know of. The wife was in the TV room. She didn’t see him actually go out the door. We’ve been over all of this with her, we’ve been all over the house. There’s nothing. His briefcase was in his office at the station. He didn’t even take it home with him. There’s nothing to go on. To be honest, you were the best candidate and you’re clear now. It brings me back to my question. Could what you’ve been doing have had anything to do with this?”

Bosch could not bring himself to tell Irving what he thought, what he knew in his gut had happened to Pounds. It wasn’t the guilt that stopped him, though. It was the desire to keep his mission to himself. In that moment he realized that vengeance was a singular thing, a solo mission, something never to be spoken of out loud.

“I don’t know the answer,” he said. “I told Pounds nothing. But he wanted me to go down. You know that. The guy’s dead but he was an asshole and he wanted me to go down. So he’d have had his ear to the ground for anything about me. A couple people have seen me around in the last week. Word could’ve gotten back to him and he could’ve blundered into something. He wasn’t much of an investigator. He could’ve made a mistake. I don’t know.”

Irving looked at him through dead eyes. Bosch knew he was trying to determine how much was true and how much was bullshit. Bosch spoke first.

“He said he was going to meet someone important.”

“Yes.”

“Look, Chief, I don’t know what McKittrick told you about the conversation I had out there with him, but you know there were important people involved back…you know, with my mother. You were there.”

“Yes, I was there, but I wasn’t part of the investigation, not after the first day.”

“Did McKittrick tell you about Arno Conklin?”

“Not today. But back then. I remember once when I asked him what was happening with the case, he told me to ask Arno. He said Arno was running interference for someone on it.”

“Well, Arno Conklin was an important person.”

“But now? He’s an old man if he’s even still alive.”

“He’s alive, Chief. And you have to remember something. Important men surround themselves with important men. They’re never alone. Conklin may be old but there could be someone else who isn’t.”

“What are you telling me, Bosch?”

“I’m telling you to leave me alone. I have to do this. I’m the only one who can. I’m telling you to keep Brockman and everybody else away from me.”

Irving stared at him a long moment and Bosch could tell he didn’t know which way to go with this. Bosch stood up.

“I’ll keep in touch.”

“You’re not telling me everything.”

“It’s better that way.”

He stepped through the door into the hallway, remembered something and then stepped back into the room with Irving.

“How am I going to get home? You brought me here.”

Irving reached over to the phone.

Chapter Thirty-five

BOSCH WENT THROUGH
the fifth-floor door to the Internal Affairs Division and found no one behind the counter. He waited a few moments for Toliver to show up since Irving had just ordered him to drive Bosch home, but the young IAD detective never showed. Bosch figured it was just one more mind game they were trying to play with him. He didn’t want to walk around the counter and have to find Toliver so he just yelled his name out. Behind the counter was a door that was slightly ajar and he was reasonably sure Toliver heard the call.

But the person who stepped through the door was Brockman. He stared at Bosch for a long moment without saying anything.

“Look, Brockman, Toliver is supposed to run me home,” Bosch said to him. “I don’t want anything else to do with you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s too bad.”

“Just get Toliver.”

“You better watch out for me, Bosch.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll be watching.”

“Yeah, and you won’t see me coming.”

Bosch nodded and looked past him to the door where he expected Toliver to step out any moment. He just wanted to diffuse the situation and get his ride home. He considered walking out and catching a cab, but he knew in rush hour it would probably cost him fifty bucks. He didn’t have it on him. Plus, he liked the idea of having an IAD shine chauffeur him home.

“Hey, killer?”

Bosch looked back at Brockman. He was getting tired of this.

“What’s it like to fuck another killer? Must really be something, to go all the way to Florida for it.”

Bosch tried to stay cool but he felt his face betray himself. For he suddenly knew who and what Brockman was talking about.

“What are you talking about?”

Brockman’s face lit up with a bully’s delight as he read Bosch’s surprised look.

“Oooh, baby! She didn’t even bother telling you, did she?”

“Tell me what?”

Bosch wanted to reach over the counter and drag Brockman across it but at least outwardly he maintained his cool.

“Tell you what? I’ll tell you what. I think your whole story stinks and I’m going to bust it open. Then Mr. Clean upstairs isn’t going to be able to protect you.”

“He said you were told to leave me alone, that I was clear.”

“Fuck him and fuck you. When I come in with your alibi in a bag, he’s not going to have a choice but to cut you loose.”

Toliver stepped through the doorway behind the counter. He was holding a set of car keys in his hands. He stood silently behind Brockman with his eyes down.

“First thing I did was run her on the computer,” Brockman said. “She’s got a record, Bosch. You didn’t know that? She’s a killer, just like you. Takes one to know one, I guess. Nice couple.”

Bosch wanted to ask a thousand questions but he wouldn’t ask any of this man. He felt a deep void opening inside as he began jettisoning his feelings for Jazz. He realized that she had left all the signs out for him but he hadn’t read them. Even so, the feeling that descended on him with the strongest grip was one of betrayal.

Bosch pointedly ignored Brockman and looked at Toliver.

“Hey, kid, you going to give me a ride or what?”

Toliver moved around the counter without answering.

“Bosch, I already got you on an association beef,” Brockman said. “But I’m not satisfied.”

Bosch went to the hallway door and opened it. It was against LAPD regulations to associate with known criminals. Whether Brockman could make a charge like that stick was the least of Bosch’s worries. He headed out the door with Toliver following. Before it closed Brockman yelled after them.

“Give her a kiss for me, killer.”

Chapter Thirty-six

AT FIRST
,
BOSCH
sat silently next to Jerry Toliver on the ride back to his house. He had a waterfall of thoughts dropping through his mind and decided to simply ignore the young IAD detective. Toliver left the police scanner on and the sporadic chatter was the only thing resembling conversation in the car. They had caught the crest of the evening commute out of downtown and were moving at an excruciatingly slow pace toward the Cahuenga pass.

Bosch’s guts ached from the wracking convulsions of nausea of an hour earlier and he kept his arms crossed in front of him as if he were cradling a baby. He knew he had to compartmentalize his thoughts. As much as he was confused and curious about what Brockman had alluded to in regard to Jasmine, he knew he had to put it aside. At the moment, Pounds and what had happened to him were more important.

He tried to piece together the chain of events and the conclusion he drew was obvious. His stumbling into the party at Mittel’s and delivery of the photocopy of the
Times
clip had set off a reaction that ended with the murder of Harvey Pounds, the man whose name he had used. Though he had given Mittel only the name at the party, it was somehow traced back to the real Pounds, who was then tortured and killed.

Bosch guessed that it was the DMV calls that had doomed Pounds. Fresh from receiving the threatening news clip at the fund-raiser from a man who had introduced himself as Harvey Pounds, Mittel likely would have put his lengthy arm out to find out who this man was and what his purpose was. Mittel had connections from L.A. to Sacramento to Washington, D.C. He could have quickly found out that Harvey Pounds was a cop. Mittel’s campaign financing work had put a good number of legislators in seats in Sacramento. He would certainly have the connections in the capital city to find out if anyone was running traces on his name. And if he had that done, then he would have learned that Harvey Pounds, an LAPD lieutenant, had inquired not only about him but about four other men who would be of vital interest to him as well. Arno Conklin, Johnny Fox, Jake McKittrick and Claude Eno.

True, all the names were involved in a case and conspiracy almost thirty-five years old. But Mittel was at the center of that conspiracy and the snooping around by Pounds would be more than enough, Bosch believed, for someone of his position to take some kind of action to find out what Pounds was doing.

Because of the approach the man he thought was Pounds had made at the party, Mittel had probably concluded he was being set upon by a chiseler, an extortionist. And he knew how to eliminate the problem. Like Johnny Fox had been eliminated.

That was the reason Pounds had been tortured, Bosch knew. For Mittel to make sure the problem went no further than Pounds, he had to know who else knew what Pounds knew. The problem was that Pounds didn’t know anything himself. He had nothing to give. He was tormented until his heart could take it no longer.

A question that remained unanswered in Bosch’s mind was what Arno Conklin knew of all this. He had not yet been contacted by Bosch. Did he know of the man who approached Mittel? Did he order the hit on Pounds or was it solely Mittel’s reaction?

Then Bosch saw a bump in his theory that needed refining. Mittel had come face to face with him posing as Harvey Pounds at the fund-raiser. The fact that Pounds was tortured before he died indicated that Mittel was not present at the time, or he would have seen that they were brutalizing the wrong man. Bosch wondered now if they understood that they had, in fact, killed the wrong man, and if they would be looking for the right one.

He mulled over the point that Mittel could not have been there and decided that it fit. Mittel was not the type to get involved in the blood work. He’d have no problem calling the shots, he just wouldn’t want to see them fired. Bosch realized the surfer in a suit had also seen him at the party and, therefore, could not have been directly involved in the killing of Harvey Pounds, either. That left the man Bosch had seen through the French doors at the house. The man with the wide body and thick neck whom he had seen Mittel show the newspaper clip to. The man who had slipped and fallen while coming down the driveway for Bosch.

Bosch realized that he didn’t know how close he had come to being where Pounds was now. He reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and started to light one.

“Do you mind not smoking?” Toliver asked, his first words of the thirty-minute journey.

“Yeah, I do mind.”

Bosch finished lighting the smoke and put his Bic away. He lowered the window.

“There. You happy? The exhaust fumes are worse than the smoke.”

“It’s a nonsmoking vehicle.”

Toliver tapped his finger on a plastic magnet that was on the dashboard ashtray cover. It was one of the little doodads that were distributed when the city passed a widespread antismoking law that forbade the practice in all city buildings and allowed for half of the department’s fleet to be declared nonsmoking vehicles. The magnet showed a cigarette in the middle of a red circle with a slash through it. Beneath the circle it said THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. Bosch reached over, peeled the magnet off and threw it out the open window. He saw it bounce once on the pavement and stick on the door of a car one lane over.

“Now it’s not. Now it’s a smoking car.”

“Bosch, you’re really fucked, you know that?”

“Write me up, kid. Add it to the association beef your boss is working on. I don’t care.”

They were silent for a few moments and the car crept further away from Hollywood.

“He’s bluffing you, Bosch. I thought you knew that.”

“How so?”

He was surprised that Toliver was turning.

“He’s just bluffing, that’s all. He’s still hot about what you did with that table. But he knows it won’t stick. It’s an old case. Voluntary manslaughter. A domestic violence case. She walked on five years probation. All you have to do is say you didn’t know and it gets shitcanned.”

Bosch could almost guess what the case was about. She had practically told him during true confessions. She stayed too long with someone. That was what she had said. He thought of the painting he had seen in her studio. The gray portrait with the highlights red like blood. He tried to pull his mind away from it.

“Why’re you telling me this, Toliver? Why are you going against your own?”

“Because they’re not my own. Because I want to know what you meant by what you said to me in the hallway.”

Bosch couldn’t even remember what he said.

“You told me it wasn’t too late. Too late for what?”

“Too late to get out,” Bosch said, recalling the words he had thrown as a taunt. “You’re still a young guy. You better get yourself out of IAD before it’s too late. You stay too long and you’ll never get out. Is that what you want, spend your career busting cops for trading hookers dime bags?”

“Look, I want to work out of Parker and I don’t want to wait ten years like everybody else. It’s the easiest and fastest way for a white guy to get in there.”

“It’s not worth it, is what I’m telling you. Anybody stays in IAD more than two, three years, they’re there for life because nobody else wants ’em, nobody else trusts ’em. They’re lepers. You better think about it. Parker Center isn’t the only place in the world to work.”

A few moments of silence passed as Toliver tried to muster a defense.

“Somebody’s got to police the police. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that.”

“That’s right. But in this department nobody polices the police who police the police. Think about that.”

The conversation was interrupted by the sharp tone he recognized as his mobile phone. On the back seat of the car were the items the searchers had taken from his apartment. Irving had ordered it all returned. Among them was his briefcase and inside it he heard his phone. He reached back, flipped the briefcase open and grabbed the phone.

“Yeah. It’s Bosch.”

“Bosch, it’s Russell.”

“Hey, I got nothing to tell you yet, Keisha. I’m still working on it.”

“No, I have something to tell you. Where are you?”

“I’m in the soup. The 101 coming up to Barham, my exit.”

“Well, I have to talk to you, Bosch. I’m writing a story for tomorrow. You will want to comment, I think, if only in your defense.”

“My defense?”

A dull thud went through him and he felt like saying, What now? But he held himself in check.

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you read my story today?”

“No, I haven’t had the time. What—”

“It’s about the death of Harvey Pounds. Today I have a follow…It concerns you, Bosch.”

Jesus, he thought. But he tried to keep calm. He knew that if she detected any panic in his voice she would gain confidence in whatever it was she was about to write. He had to convince her she had bad information. He had to undermine that confidence. Then he realized Toliver was sitting next to him and would hear everything he said.

“I have a problem talking now. When is your deadline?”

“Now. We have to talk now.”

Bosch looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes until six.

“You can go to six, right?”

He’d worked with reporters before and knew that was the deadline for the
Times’s
first edition.

“No, I can’t go to six. If you want to say something, say it now.”

“I can’t. Give me fifteen minutes and then call back. I can’t talk now.”

There was a pause and then she said, “Bosch, I can’t push it far past then. You better be able to talk then.”

They were at the Barham exit now and they’d be up to his house in ten minutes.

“Don’t worry about it. In the meantime, you go warn your editor that you might be pulling the story.”

“I will not.”

“Look, Keisha, I know what you’re going to ask me about. It’s a plant and it’s wrong. You have to trust me. I’ll explain in fifteen minutes.”

“How do you know it’s a plant?”

“I know. It came from Angel Brockman.”

He flipped the phone closed and looked over at Toliver.

“See, Toliver? Is that what you want to do with your job? With your life?”

Toliver said nothing.

“When you get back, you can tell your boss that he can shove tomorrow’s
Times
up his ass. There isn’t going to be any story. See, even the reporters don’t trust IAD guys. All I had to do was mention Brockman. She’ll start backpedaling when I tell her I know what’s going on. Nobody trusts you guys, Jerry. Get out of it.”

“Oh, and like
everybody
trusts you, Bosch.”

“Not everybody. But I can sleep at night and I’ve been on the job twenty years. Think you’ll be able to? What have you got in, five, six years? I’ll give you ten, Jerry. That’s all for you. Ten and out. But you’ll look like one of these guys who puts in thirty.”

His prediction was met with a stony silence from Toliver. Bosch didn’t know why he even cared. Toliver was part of the team trying to put him in the dirt. But something about the young cop’s fresh face gave him the benefit of the doubt.

They made the last curve on Woodrow Wilson and Bosch could see his house. He could also see a white car with a yellow plate parked in front of it and a man wearing a yellow construction helmet standing in front holding a toolbox. It was the city building inspector. Gowdy.

“Shit,” Bosch said. “This one of IAD’s tricks, too?”

“I don’t—if it is, I don’t know anything about it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Without a further word Toliver stopped in front of the house and Bosch got out with his returned property. Gowdy recognized him and immediately came over as Toliver pulled away from the curb.

“Listen, you’re not living in this place, are ya?” Gowdy asked. “It’s been red-tagged. We gotta call said somebody bootlegged the electric.”

“I gotta call, too. See anybody? I was just going to check it out.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Bosch. I can see you’ve made some repairs. You gotta know something, you can’t repair this place, you can’t even go in. You gotta demolition order and it’s overdue. I’m gonna put in a work order and have a city contractor do it. You’ll get the bill. No use waitin’ any longer. Now, you might as well get out of here because I’m going to pull the electric and padlock it.”

He bent down to put the toolbox on the ground and proceeded to open it up and retrieve a set of stainless steel hinges and hasp locks he would apply to the doors.

“Look, I’ve got a lawyer,” Bosch said. “He’s trying to work it out with you people.”

“There’s nothing to work out. I’m sorry. Now if you go in there again, you’re subject to arrest. If I find these locks have been tampered with, you’re also subject to arrest. I’ll call North Hollywood Division. I’m not fooling with you anymore.”

For the first time it occurred to Bosch that it might be a show, that the man might want money. He probably didn’t even know Bosch was a cop. Most cops couldn’t afford to live up here and wouldn’t want to if they could. The only reason Bosch could afford it was he had bought the property with a chunk of money he had made years earlier on a TV movie deal based on a case he had solved.

“Look, Gowdy,” he said, “just spell it out, okay? I’m slow about these things. Tell me what you want and you’ve got it. I want to save the house. That’s all I care about.”

Gowdy looked at him for a long moment and Bosch realized he had been wrong. He could see the indignation in Gowdy’s eyes.

“You keep talking like that and you could go to jail, son. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to forget what you just said. I—”

“Look, I’m sorry…” Bosch looked back at the house. “It’s just like, I don’t know, the house is the only thing I’ve got.”

“You’ve got more than that. You just haven’t thought about it. Now, I’m going to cut you a break here. I’ll give you five minutes to go inside and get what you need. After that, I’m putting the locks on it. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is. If that house goes down the hill on the next one, maybe you’ll thank me.”

Bosch nodded.