Angels Flight (15 page)

“I’m not talking about that and you know it. I’m talking about a conflict of interest. A reason you shouldn’t be anywhere near this case.”

Entrenkin shook her head in an I-don’t-understand gesture but her face clearly showed she feared what Bosch knew.

“You know what I’m saying,” Bosch said. “You and him. Elias. I was in his apartment. Must’ve been just before you got there. Too bad we missed each other. We could’ve settled all of this then.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about but I was just led to believe by Miss Langwiser that you people waited on warrants before entering his apartment and the office. Are you telling me that is not true?”

Bosch hesitated, realizing he had made a mistake. She could now turn his move away or back on him.

“We had to make sure no one was hurt or in need of help in the apartment,” he said.

“Sure. Right. Just like the cops who jumped the fence at O. J. Simpson’s house. Just wanting to make sure everybody was okay.”

She shook her head again.

“The continued arrogance of this department amazes me. From what I had heard about you, Detective Bosch, I expected more.”

“You want to talk about arrogance? You were the one who went in there and removed evidence. The inspector general of the department, the one who polices the police. Now you want to — ”

“Evidence of what? I did no such thing!”

“You cleared your message off the phone machine and you took the phone book with your name and numbers in it. I’m betting you had your own key and garage pass. You came in through the garage and nobody saw you. Right after Irving called to tell you Elias was dead. Only Irving didn’t know that you and Elias had something going on.”

“That’s a nice story. I’d like to see you try to prove any of it.”

Bosch held his hand up. On his palm were Elias’s keys.

“Elias’s keys,” he said. “There’s a couple on there that don’t fit his house or his apartment or his office or his cars. I was thinking of maybe pulling your address from DMV and seeing if they fit your door, Inspector.”

Entrenkin’s eyes moved quickly away from the keys. She turned and walked back into Elias’s office. Bosch followed and watched as she slowly walked around the desk and sat down. She looked as if she might cry. Bosch knew he had broken her with the keys.

“Did you love him?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did you love — ”

“How dare you ask me that?”

“It’s my job. There’s been a murder. You’re involved.”

She turned away from him and looked to her right. She was staring through the window at the painting of Anthony Quinn. Again, the tears appeared to be barely holding back.

“Look, Inspector, can we try to remember one thing? Howard Elias is dead. And believe it or not, I want to get the person who did it. Okay?”

She nodded tentatively. He continued, talking slowly and calmly.

“In order to get this person, I’m going to need to know everything I can about Elias. Not just what I know from television and newspapers and other cops. Not just from what’s in his files. I’ve got to know — ”

Out in the reception area someone tried the locked door and then knocked sharply on the glass. Entrenkin got up and went to the door. Bosch waited in Elias’s office. He listened as Entrenkin answered the door and spoke to Langwiser.

“Give us a few minutes, please.”

She closed the door without waiting for a response, locked it again and came back to Elias’s office, where she took the seat behind the desk. Bosch spoke to her in a voice low enough not to be heard outside of the office.

“I’ve got to know it all,” he said. “We both know you are in a position to help. So can’t we come to some sort of truce here?”

The first tear fell down Entrenkin’s cheek, soon followed by another on the other side. She leaned forward and began opening drawers in the desk.

“Bottom left,” Bosch said from memory of his inventory of the desk.

She opened the drawer and removed the box of tissues. She placed it on her lap, took one tissue and dabbed at her cheeks and eyes. She began to speak.

“It’s funny how things change so quickly . . .”

A long silence went by.

“I knew Howard superficially for a number of years. When I was practicing law. It was strictly professional, mostly ‘How are you’s in the hallways of the federal building. Then when I was appointed inspector general, I knew it was important that I knew the critics of the police department as well as I knew the department. I arranged to meet Howard. We met right here — him sitting right here . . . It went from there. Yes, I loved him . . .”

This confession brought more tears and she pulled out several tissues to take care of them.

“How long were you two . . . together?” Bosch asked.

“About six months. But he loved his wife. He wasn’t going to leave her.”

Her face was dry now. She returned the tissue box to its drawer and it seemed as though the clouds that had crossed her face moments before were gone. Bosch could see she had changed. She leaned forward and looked at him. She was all business.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Detective Bosch. But only with you. Despite everything . . . I think if you give me your word then I can trust you.”

“Thank you. What is your deal?”

“I will only talk to you. In return I want you to protect me. And by that I mean keep the source of your information confidential. You don’t have to worry, nothing I tell you would be admitted in court anyway. You can keep everything I tell you in background. It may help you, it may not.”

Bosch thought about this for a moment.

“I should be treating you as a suspect, not a source.”

“But you know in your gut that it wasn’t me.”

He nodded.

“It wasn’t a woman’s murder,” he said. “It’s got male written all over it.”

“It’s got cop written on it, too, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe. That’s what I’m going to find out — if I could just get to the case and not have to worry about the community and Parker Center politics and everything else.”

“Then do we have an agreement?”

“Before making any agreement like that I have to know something first. Elias had a source inside Parker. Somebody with high access. Somebody who could get him unsustained IAD files. I need — ”

“It wasn’t me. Believe me, I may have crossed a line when I began a relationship with him. That was my heart, not my head. But I didn’t cross the line you are talking about. Never in a hundred years. Contrary to what most of your fellow officers think, my goal is to save and improve the department. Not destroy it.”

Bosch looked at her blankly. She took it as disbelief.

“How would I get him files? I am public enemy number one in that department. If I went in to get files, or even just made a request for them, the word would spread around that building and out into the ranks faster than an earthquake wave.”

Bosch studied her defiant face. He knew she was right. She wouldn’t make much of a deep cover source. He nodded.

“Then we have an agreement?” she asked.

“Yes. With one asterisk.”

“And what is that?”

“If you lie one time to me and I find out about it, all bets are off.”

“That is more than acceptable to me. But we can’t talk now. I want to finish the files so that you and your people can pursue all leads. Now you know why I want this case solved not only for the sake of the city but for myself. What do you say we meet later? When the files are done.”

“Fine with me.”

As Bosch crossed Broadway fifteen minutes later he could see the garage doors of the Grand Central Market had been rolled up. It was years since he had been in the market, maybe decades. He decided to cut through it to Hill Street and the Angels Flight terminus.

The market was a huge conglomeration of food booths, produce stalls and butcher shops. Vendors sold cheap trinkets and candy from Mexico. And though the doors had just opened and there were more sellers readying for the day than buyers inside, the overwhelming smell of oil and fried food already hung heavy in the air. As he made his way through Bosch picked up pieces of conversations, delivered in staccato snippets of Spanish. He saw a butcher carefully placing the skinned heads of goats on ice in his refrigerated display case next to the neat rows of sliced oxtail. At the far end old men sat at picnic tables, nursing their cups of thick, dark coffee and eating Mexican pastries. Bosch remembered his promise to Edgar to bring doughnuts before they began the canvass. He looked around and found no doughnuts but bought a bag of churros, the crisp-fried dough sticks with cinnamon sugar that were the Mexican alternative.

As he came out on the Hill Street side of the market he glanced to his right and saw a man standing in the spot where Baker and Chastain had found the cigarette butts hours earlier. The man had a blood-stained apron wrapped around his waist. He wore a hair net. He snaked his hand in underneath the apron and came out with a pack of smokes.

“Got that right,” Bosch said out loud.

He crossed the street to the Angels Flight arch and waited behind two Asian tourists. The train cars were passing each other at the midpoint on the tracks. He checked the names painted above the doors of each car. Sinai was going up and Olivet was coming down.

A minute later, Bosch followed the tourists as they stepped onto Olivet. He watched as they unknowingly sat on the same bench where Catalina Perez had died about ten hours earlier. The blood had been cleaned away, the wood too dark and old to reveal any stain. He didn’t bother telling them the recent history of their spot. He doubted they understood his language anyway.

Bosch took the spot where he had sat before. He yawned again the moment the weight was off his feet. The car jerked and started its ascent. The Asians started taking photos. Eventually they got around to using sign language to ask Bosch to take one of their cameras and take photos of them. He obliged, doing his part for the tourist trade. They then quickly took the camera back and moved to the other end of the car.

He wondered if they had sensed something about him. A danger or maybe a sickness in him. He knew that some people had that power, that they could tell these things. With him, it would not be difficult. It was twenty-four hours since he had slept. He rubbed a hand across his face and it felt like damp stucco. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and felt the old pain that he had hoped would never be in his life again. It had been a long time since he had felt so alone, since he had felt like such an outsider in his own city. There was a tightness in his throat and chest now, a feeling of claustrophobia like a shroud about him, even in the open air.

Once more he got the phone out. He checked the battery display and found it almost dead. Enough juice for one more call if he was lucky. He punched in the number for home and waited.

There was one new message. Fearing the battery wouldn’t hold, he quickly punched in the playback code and held the phone back up to his ear. But the voice he heard was not Eleanor’s. It was the sound of a voice distorted by cellophane wrapped around the receiver and then perforated with a fork.

“Let this one go, Bosch,” the voice said. “Any man who stands against cops is nothing but a dog and deserves to die like a dog. You do the right thing. You let it go, Bosch. You let it go.”

Chapter 13

B
OSCH got to Parker Center twenty-five minutes before he was to meet with Deputy Chief Irving to update him on the investigation. He was alone, having left the other six members of the Elias team to conclude the canvass of the apartment building next to Angels Flight and then to pursue their next assignments. Stopping at the front counter he showed his badge to the uniformed officer and told the man that he was expecting some information to be called in anonymously to the front desk within the next half hour. He asked the officer to relay the information to him immediately in Chief Irving’s private conference room.

Bosch then took an elevator up to the third floor rather than the sixth, where Irving’s office was located. He went down the hall to the Robbery-Homicide Division squad room and found it empty except for four detectives he had called earlier. They were Bates, O’Toole, Engersol and Rooker — the four detectives who had originally handled the call out to the Angels Flight murder scene. They looked suitably bleary-eyed, having been up half the night before the case was turned over to Bosch and his squad. Bosch had rousted them from sleep at nine and given them a half hour to meet him at Parker Center. It had been easy enough to get them in so quickly. Bosch had told them their careers depended on it.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Bosch began as he walked down the main aisle between the rows of desks, locking eyes with the four. Three of the detectives were standing around Rooker, who was seated at his desk. This was a clear giveaway. Whatever decisions had been made out at the scene, when it was only the four of them, Bosch was sure were made by Rooker. He was leader of the pack.

Bosch stayed standing, stopping just outside the informal grouping of the other four. He started telling the story, using his hands in an informal manner, almost like a television news reporter, as if to underline that it was simply a story he was telling, not the threat that he was actually delivering.

“The four of you get the call out,” he said. “You get out there, push the uniforms back and make a perimeter. Somebody checks the stiffs and lo and behold the DL says one of them is Howard Elias. You then put — ”

“There was no driver’s license, Bosch,” Rooker said, interrupting. “Didn’t the cap tell you that?”

“Yeah, he told me. But now I’m telling the story. So listen up, Rooker, and shut up. I’m trying to save your ass here and I don’t have a lot of time to do it.”

He waited to see if anybody wanted to say anything more.

“So like I said,” he began again, looking directly at Rooker, “the DL identifies one of the stiffs as Elias. So you four bright guys put your heads together and figure there’s a good chance that it was a cop who did this. You figure Elias got what he had coming and more power to the badge who had the guts to put him down. That’s when you got stupid. You decided to help out this shooter, this murderer, by staging the robbery. You took off — ”