The Last Coyote (34 page)

Chapter Forty-seven

WHEN CARMEN HINOJOS
opened her waiting room door she seemed pleasantly surprised to see Bosch sitting on the couch.

“Harry! Are you all right? I didn’t expect to see you here today.”

“Why not? It’s my time, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I read in the paper you were at Cedars.”

“I checked out.”

“Are you sure you should have done that? You look…”

“Awful?”

“I didn’t want to say that. Come in.”

She ushered him in and they took their usual places.

“I actually look better than I feel right now.”

“Why? What is it?”

“Because it was all for nothing.”

His statement put a confused look on her face.

“What do you mean? I read the story today. You solved the murders, including your mother’s. I thought you’d be quite different than this.”

“Well, don’t believe everything you read, Doctor. Let me clarify things for you. What I did on my so-called mission was cause two men to be murdered and another to die by my own hands. I solved, let’s see, I solved one, two, three murders, so that’s good. But I didn’t solve the murder I set out to solve. In other words, I’ve been running around in circles causing people to die. So, how did you expect me to be during our session?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I had a couple beers with lunch but it was a long lunch and I think that a minimum of two beers is required considering what I just told you. But I am not drunk, if that is what you want to know. And I’m not working, so what’s the difference?”

“I thought we agreed to cut back on—”

“Oh, fuck that. This is the real world here. Isn’t that what you called it? The real world? Between now and the last time we talked, I’ve killed someone, Doc. And you want to talk about cutting back on booze. Like it means anything anymore.”

Bosch took out his cigarettes and lit one. He kept the pack and the Bic on the arm of the chair. Carmen Hinojos watched him for a long time before speaking again.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s go to what I think is the heart of the problem. You said you didn’t solve the murder you set out to solve. That, of course, is your mother’s death. I am only going by what I read, but today’s
Times
attributes her killing to Gordon Mittel. Are you telling me that you now know that to be incontro-vertibly wrong?”

“Yes. I now know that to be incontrovertibly wrong.”

“How?”

“Simple. Fingerprints. I went down to the morgue, got Mittel’s prints and had them compared to those on the murder weapon, the belt. No match. He didn’t do it. Wasn’t there. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m not sitting here with a guilty conscience over Mittel. He was a man who decided to kill people and then had them killed. Just like that. At least two times I’m sure of, then he was going to have me killed, too. So I say fuck him. He got what he had coming. But I’ll carry Pounds and Conklin around with me for a long time. Maybe forever. And one way or another, I’ll pay for it. It’s just that it would make that weight easier to carry if there had been a reason. Any good reason. Know what I mean? But there isn’t a reason. Not anymore.”

“I understand. I don’t—I’m not sure how to proceed with this. Do you want to talk some about your feelings in regard to Pounds and Conklin?”

“Not really. I’ve thought about it enough already. Neither man was innocent. They did things. But they didn’t have to die like they did. Especially Pounds. Jesus. I can’t talk about it. I can’t even think about it.”

“Then how will you go on?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I have to pay.”

“What is the department going to do, any idea?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s bigger than the department to decide. I have to decide my penance.”

“Harry, what does that mean? That concerns me.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to the closet. I’m not that type.”

“The closet?”

“I’m not going to stick a gun in my mouth.”

“Through what you’ve said here today, it is already clear you have accepted responsibility for what happened to these two men. You’re facing it. In effect, you are denying denial. That is a foundation you can build on. I am concerned about this talk about penance. You have to go on, Harry. No matter what you do to yourself, it doesn’t bring them back. So the best you can do is go on.”

He didn’t say anything. He suddenly grew tired of all the advice, of her intervention in his life. He was feeling resentful and frustrated.

“Do you mind if we cut the session short today?” he asked. “I’m not feeling so hot.”

“I understand. It’s no problem. But I want you to promise me something. Promise me we will talk again before you make any decisions.”

“You mean about my penance?”

“Yes, Harry.”

“Okay, we’ll talk.”

He stood up and attempted a smile but it came out more like a frown. Then he remembered something.

“By the way, I apologize for not getting back to you the other night when you called. I was waiting on a call and couldn’t talk and then I just kind of forgot. I hope you were just checking on me and it wasn’t too important.”

“Don’t worry about it. I forgot myself. I was just calling to see how you made it through the rest of the afternoon with Chief Irving. I also wanted to see if you wanted to talk about the photos. It doesn’t matter now.”

“You looked at them?”

“Yes. I had a couple of comments but—”

“Let’s hear them.”

Bosch sat back down. She looked at him, weighing his suggestion, and decided to go ahead.

“I have them here.”

She bent down to get the envelope out of one of the lower drawers of the desk. She almost disappeared from Bosch’s view. Then she was up and placed the envelope on the desk.

“I guess you should take these back.”

“Irving took the murder book and the evidence box. He’s got it all now except for those.”

“You sound like you’re unhappy about that, or that you don’t trust him with it. That’s a change.”

“Aren’t you the one who said I don’t trust anyone?”

“Why don’t you trust him?”

“I don’t know. I just lost my suspect. Gordon Mittel’s clear and I’m starting from ground zero. I was just thinking about the percentages…”

“And?”

“Well, I don’t know the numbers but a significant number of homicides are reported by the actual doer. You know, the husband who calls up crying, saying his wife is missing. More often than not, he’s just a bad actor. He killed her and thinks calling the cops helps convince everybody he’s clean. Look at the Menendez brothers. One of ’em calls up boohooing about mom and dad being dead. Turns out he and the brother were the ones who shotgunned them. There was a case up in the hills a few years back. This little girl was missing. It was Laurel Canyon. It made the papers, TV. So the people up there organized search parties and all of that and a few days later one of the searchers, a teenaged boy who was one of the girl’s neighbors, found her body under a log near Lookout Mountain. It turned out he was the killer. I got him to confess in fifteen minutes. The whole time of the search I was just waiting for the one who would find the body. It was percentages. He was a suspect before I even knew who it was.”

“Irving found your mother’s body.”

“Yes. And he knew her before that. He told me once.”

“It seems like a stretch to me.”

“Yeah. Most people probably thought that about Mittel, too. Right up until they fished him out of the hot tub.”

“Isn’t there an alternative scenario? Isn’t it possible that maybe the original detectives were correct in their assumption back then that there was a sex killer out there and that tracking him was hopeless?”

“There’s always alternative scenarios.”

“But you always seem drawn toward finding someone of power, a person of the establishment, to blame. Maybe that’s not the case here. Maybe it’s a symptom of your larger desire to blame society for what happened to your mother…and to you.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t want to hear this.

“You know, all this psychobabble…I don’t…Can we just talk about the photos?”

“I’m sorry.”

She looked down at the envelope as if she was seeing right through it to the photos inside it.

“Well, it was very difficult for me to look at them. As far as their forensic value goes, there wasn’t a lot there. The photos show what I would call a statement homicide. The fact that the ligature, the belt, was still wrapped around her neck seems to indicate that the killer wanted police to know exactly what he did, that he had been deliberate, that he had had control over this victim. I also think the choice of placement is significant as well. The trash bin had no top. It was open. That suggests that placing the body there may not have been an effort to hide it. It was also a—”

“He was saying she was trash.”

“Right. Again, a statement. If he was just getting rid of a body, he could’ve put it anywhere in that alley, but he chose the open dumpster. Subconsciously or not, he was making a statement about her. So to make a statement such as that about a person, he would have to have known her to some degree. Known about her. Known she was a prostitute. Known enough to judge her.”

Irving came to Bosch’s mind again but he said nothing.

“Well,” he said instead, “couldn’t it have been a statement about all women? Could it be some sick fuck who—excuse me—some nut who hated all women and thought all women were trash? That way he wouldn’t have to have known her. Maybe somebody who simply wanted to kill a prostitute, any prostitute, to make a statement about them.”

“Yes, that’s a possibility, but like you I’m going with the percentages. The kind of sick fuck you are talking about—which, incidentally, in psychobabble we call a sociopath—is much rarer than the one who keys on specific targets, specific women.”

Bosch shook his head dismissively and looked out the window.

“What is it?”

“It’s just frustrating, that’s all. There wasn’t much in the murder book about them taking a hard look at anybody in her circle, any of the neighbors, nothing like that. To do it now is impossible. It makes me feel like it’s hopeless.”

He thought of Meredith Roman. He could go to her to ask about his mother’s acquaintances and customers, but he didn’t know if he had the right to reawaken that part of her life.

“You have to remember,” Hinojos said, “in 1961 a case like this would probably have seemed impossible to solve. They wouldn’t even have known how to start. It just didn’t happen as often as today.”

“They’re almost impossible to solve today, too.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Bosch thought about the possibility that the killer was some hit-and-run nut. A serial killer who was long gone into the darkness of time. If that was the case, then his private investigation was over. It was a failure.

“Do you have anything else on the photos?”

“That’s really all I had—no, wait. There was one thing. And you may already have this.”

She picked the envelope up and opened it. She reached in and began sliding out a photo.

“I don’t want to look at that,” Bosch said quickly.

“It’s not a photo of her. Actually, it’s her clothing, laid out on a table. Is that okay to look at?”

She paused, her hand holding the photo half in and half out of the envelope. Bosch waved his hand, telling her to go ahead.

“I’ve already seen the clothes.”

“Then you’ve probably already considered this.”

She slid the photo to the edge of the desk and Bosch leaned forward to study it. It was a color photo that had yellowed with age, even inside the envelope. The same items of clothing he had found in the evidence box were spread out on a table in a formation that outlined a body, in the way a woman might put them out on a bed before dressing. It reminded Bosch of cutouts for paper dolls. Even the belt with the sea shell buckle was there, but it was between the blouse and the black skirt, not at the imaginary neck.

“Okay,” she said. “What I found odd here was the belt.”

“The murder weapon.”

“Yes. Look, it has the large silver shell as the buckle and there are smaller silver shells as ornamentation. It’s rather showy.”

“Right.”

“But the buttons on the blouse are gold. Also, the photos of the body, they show she was wearing gold teardrop earrings and a gold neck chain. Also a bracelet.”

“Right, I know that. They were in the evidence box, too.”

Bosch didn’t understand what she was getting at.

“Harry, this is not a universal rule or anything, that’s why I hesitate to bring it up. But usually people—women—don’t mix and match gold and silver. And it appears to me your mother was well dressed on this evening. That she had jewelry on that matched the buttons of her blouse. She was coordinated and she had style. What I am saying is that I don’t think she would have worn this belt with those other items. It was silver and it was showy.”

Bosch said nothing. Something was poking its way into his mind and its point was sharp.

“And lastly, this skirt buttons on the hip. It’s a style that is still around and I even have something similar to it myself. What’s so functional about it is that because of the wide waistband it can be worn with or without a belt. There are no loops.”

Bosch stared at the photo.

“No loops.”

“Right.”

“So what you’re saying is…”

“This might not have been her belt. It might have—”

“But it was. I remember it. The sea shell belt. I gave it to her for her birthday. I identified it for the cops, for McKittrick the day he came to tell me.”

“Well…then that shoots down everything I was going to say. I guess maybe when she came into the apartment the killer was already waiting with it.”

“No, it didn’t happen in her apartment. They never found the crime scene. Listen, never mind whether it was her belt or not, what were you going to say?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just a theory about it possibly being the property of another woman who may have been the motivating factor behind the killer’s action. It’s called aggression transference. It doesn’t make sense now with this evidence but there are examples of what I was going to suggest. A man takes his exgirlfriend’s stockings and strangles another woman with them. In his mind, he’s strangling the girlfriend. Something like that. I was going to suggest it could have happened in this case with the belt.”