Michael Connelly (50 page)

With Meyer sitting by watching, Bosch quickly moved through the interviews with the poker dealers in an hour. He was able to establish that Aliso usually played the five-to-ten table. This meant each hand started with a five-dollar ante and each deal carried a minimum bet of five dollars and a maximum of ten. Three raises were allowed per deal. Since the game was seven card stud, that meant there were five deals per hand. Bosch quickly realized that if a table was full with eight players, each hand could easily result in several hundred dollars being at stake in the pot. Aliso was playing in a league far removed from the Friday night poker games Bosch had participated in with the dicks from the detective bureau.

According to the dealers, Aliso had played for about three hours on Thursday night and had come out about even. He played another two hours early Friday evening, and it was estimated that he left the tables a couple thousand short. None of them recalled Aliso ever being a big winner or loser during previous visits. He always came out a few thousand light or heavy. He seemed to know when to quit.

The dealers also noted that Aliso was always quick with the gratuity. His standard tip was ten dollars in chips for every win, a twenty-five chip on particularly big pots. It was that practice more than anything else that endeared him to their memories. He always played alone, drank gin and tonic and small-talked with the other players. In recent months, the dealers said, Aliso had been in the company of a young blond woman, barely into her twenties. She never played but would work the slots nearby and come back to Tony when she needed more money. Tony never introduced her to anybody and none of the dealers ever overheard her name. In his notebook, where Bosch jotted this down, he wrote “Layla?” after this entry.

After the dealers came Aliso’s favorite sports book clerk. She was a mousy-looking bottle-blonde named Irma Chantry. She lit a cigarette as soon as she sat down and talked in a voice that indicated she had never gone long without a smoke. She said that on both of the last two nights Aliso had been in town he had bet on the Dodgers.

“He had a system,” she said. “He always doubled up until he won.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, that first night he put a grand down on the Dodgers to win. They lost. So the next day he comes in and puts down two big ones on them again. They won. So after you take out the casino vig, he was almost a grand up for the trip. Except he never picked it up.”

“He didn’t collect?”

“Nope. But that’s not unusual. His chit was good as long as he kept it. He could come in anytime and we’d stick it in the computer. It’d happened before. He’d win but he wouldn’t collect until the next time he was in town.”

“How do you know he didn’t take it to another clerk?”

“Tony wouldn’t do that. He always cashed out with me, that way he could tip me. He always said I was his lucky charm.”

Bosch thought a moment. He knew the Dodgers had played at home Friday night and Aliso’s plane left Las Vegas at ten. Therefore, it was a pretty safe bet that Aliso had to be at McCarran International or already on his plane heading back to L.A. before the game was over. But there was no betting receipt found in his wallet or on his person. Harry considered the missing briefcase again. Would it have been in there? Could a betting slip worth four thousand dollars minus the vig be motive for his murder? It seemed unlikely, but still, it was something to pursue. He looked at Irma, who was drawing so hard on her cigarette that he could see the outline of her teeth on her cheeks.

“What if somebody else cashed the bet? With another clerk. Is there any way to tell that?”

Irma hesitated and Meyer broke in.

“There’s a good chance,” he said. “Each receipt is coded with a clerk number and time the bet was placed.”

He looked at Irma.

“Irma, you remember taking very many two-thousand-dollar bets on the Dodgers on Friday?”

“Nope, not a one, other than Tony’s.”

“We’ll get on it,” Meyer said to Bosch. “We’ll start going through the cashed receipts going back to Friday night. If Mr. Aliso’s bet was cashed, then we’ll know when it was cashed and we’ll have video of who cashed it.”

Bosch looked at Irma again. She was the only one of the casino employees he had talked to who had referred to Aliso by his first name. He wanted to ask her if there was something more than a gambling relationship between them. But he knew that it was likely that employees were forbidden by the casino to date or fraternize with the guests. He couldn’t ask her in front of Meyer and expect a straight reply. He made a mental note to track Irma down later and then excused her from the interview.

Bosch looked at his watch and saw he had forty minutes until the conference call with Billets and the others. He asked Meyer if he’d had a chance to get the surveillance tapes from the eye in the sky over the poker pit for Thursday and Friday.

“I just want to see the guy gambling,” he said. “I want to get a feel for him in life.”

“I understand and, yes, the tapes are ready for viewing. I told you we wanted to cooperate completely.”

They left the office and walked down a corridor to a tech room. The room was dimly lit and very quiet except for the thrum of an air conditioner. There were six consoles arranged in two lines where men in gray blazers sat and watched banks of six video monitors per console. On the video screens Bosch could see various overhead views of gambling tables. Each console had an electronic control board that allowed the operator to change focus or magnification of a particular camera view.

“If they wanted to,” Meyer whispered, “they could tell you what cards a player is holding at any blackjack table in the house. It’s amazing.”

Meyer led Bosch to a supervisor’s office off the tech room. There was more video equipment as well as a bank of tape storage units. There was a small desk and another man in a gray blazer sat behind it. Meyer introduced him as Cal Smoltz, the supervisor.

“Cal, are we set up?”

“This screen here,” Smoltz said, pointing to one of the fifteen-inch monitors. “We’ll start with Thursday. I had one of the dealers come in and ID your guy. He shows up at eight-twenty on Thursday and plays until eleven.”

He started the tape. It was grainy black and white, similar to the quality of the Archway surveillance tape, but this one was filmed in real time. No jerking movements. It began with the man Bosch recognized as Aliso being led to an open chair at a table by a pit boss. The pit boss carried a rack of chips which he put down on the table in front of Aliso’s spot. Aliso nodded and exchanged smiles with the dealer, a woman Bosch had interviewed earlier, and began to play.

“How much in the rack?” Bosch asked.

“Five hundred,” Smoltz said. “I’ve already gone through this on fast speed. He never buys another rack and at the end when he cashes out, he looks like he’s just shy of a full rack. You want it on real time or fast speed?”

“Speed it up.”

Bosch watched closely as the tape sped through the hours. He saw Aliso take four gin and tonics, fold early on most of the deals, win five big pots and lose six others. It was pretty uneventful. Smoltz slowed the tape down when the time counter neared eleven, and Bosch watched as Aliso called for the pit boss, cashed out and left the frame of the camera.

“Okay,” Smoltz said. “On Friday, we have two tapes.”

“How come?” Bosch asked.

“He played at two tables. When he first showed up, there wasn’t a seat open at the five-and-dime table. We only have one because there aren’t that many customers who want to play for those stakes. So he played on a one-to-five until something came open. This tape is the one-to-five, the cheaper table.”

Another video began and Bosch watched as Aliso went through the same motions as in the other tape. This time, Bosch noticed, Aliso was wearing the leather sports jacket. He also noticed that while Aliso exchanged the routine nod and smile with the dealer, he thought he saw Aliso nod at a player across the table. It was a woman and she nodded back. But the angle of the camera was bad and Bosch could not see her face. He told Smoltz to keep it on real-time play and he watched the tape for a few minutes, waiting to see if any other acknowledgment would pass between the two players.

It appeared that no further communication was occurring between the two. But five minutes into the tape a dealer rotation occurred, and when the new dealer sat down, also a woman Bosch had interviewed an hour earlier, she acknowledged both Aliso and the woman across the table from him.

“Can you freeze it there?” Bosch asked.

Without answering, Smoltz froze the image on the screen.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Which dealer is that?”

“That’s Amy Rohrback. You talked to her.”

“Right. Hank, could you bring her back up here?”

“Uh, sure. Can I ask why?”

“This player,” Bosch said, pointing on the screen to the woman across from Aliso. “She acknowledged Aliso when he sat down. Amy Rohrback just acknowledged her. She must be a regular. She knew Aliso and Rohrback. I might want to talk to her and your dealer might know her name.”

“Okay, I’ll go get her, but if she’s in the middle of a dealing rotation I’ll have to wait.”

“That’s fine.”

While Meyer went down to the casino, Bosch and Smoltz continued to review the tapes on fast speed. Aliso played for twenty-five minutes at the one-to-five table before the pit boss came around, picked up his rack of chips and moved him to the more expensive five-to-ten table. Smoltz put in the tape for that table and Aliso played there, losing miserably, for two more hours. Three times he bought five-hundred-dollar racks of chips and each time he quickly lost them. Finally, he put the few remaining chips he had left down as a tip for the dealer and got up and left the table.

The tape was finished and Meyer still hadn’t returned with Rohrback. Smoltz said he would spool up the tape with the mystery woman on it so it would be ready. When it was, Bosch told him to fastforward it to see if there was ever a moment when her face was visible. Smoltz did so and after five minutes of straining to watch the quick movements of the people on the tape, Bosch saw the mystery woman look up at the camera.

“There! Back it up and slow it down.”

Smoltz did so and Bosch watched the screen as the woman took out a cigarette, lit it and leaned her head back, her face toward the ceiling camera, and exhaled. The discharged smoke blurred her image. But before it had done so, Bosch thought he had recognized her. He was frozen to silence. Smoltz backed the tape up to the moment her face was most clearly visible and froze the image on the screen. Bosch just stared silently.

Smoltz was saying something about the image being the best they could hope for when the door opened and Meyer came back in. He was alone.

“Uh, Amy had just started a deal set, so it’s going to be another ten minutes or so. I gave her the message to come back up.”

“You can call down there and tell her never mind,” Bosch said, his eyes still on the screen.

“Really? How come?”

“I know who she is.”

“Who is she?”

Bosch was silent a moment. He didn’t know if it was seeing her light the cigarette or some pang of deeper anxiety, but he dearly wanted a cigarette.

“Just somebody. I knew her a long time ago.”

Bosch sat on the bed with the phone on his lap, waiting for the conference call. But his mind was far off. He was remembering a woman he had long believed was out of his life. What had it been now, four, five years? His mind was such a rush of thoughts and emotions, he couldn’t remember for sure. It had been long enough, he realized. It should be no surprise to him that she was out of prison by now.

“Eleanor Wish,” he said out loud.

He thought of the jacaranda trees outside her townhouse in Santa Monica. He thought of them making love and the small crescent scar barely visible on her jawline. He remembered the question she had asked him so long ago, when they were making love. “Do you believe you can be alone and not be lonely?”

The phone rang. Bosch jerked out of his reverie and answered. It was Billets.

“Okay, Harry, we’re all here. Can you hear me all right?”

“It’s not good but it probably won’t get any better.”

“Right, city equipment. Okay, let’s start by everybody kind of reporting on the day’s events. Harry, you want to go first?”

“All right. There’s not a lot to tell.”

He went over the details of what he had done so far, stressing the missing betting receipt as something to watch for. He told of his review of the surveillance tapes but left out mention of his recognizing Eleanor Wish. He had decided that there was no definitive sign of a connection between her and Aliso and that for the time being he would keep it to himself. He ended his summary by telling the others of his plans to check out Dolly’s, the place Aliso had last called from his office line at Archway, and the woman named Layla who was mentioned when Bosch called there.

Next it was Edgar’s turn. He announced the flavor-of-the-month screenwriter had been cleared through alibi and Edgar’s own gut instinct that the young man might have rightfully hated Aliso but was not of the personality type that would act on that hate with a twenty-two.

Edgar said he had also interviewed the employees at the garage where Aliso had his car washed and waxed while he went to Las Vegas. Part of the service was airport pickup, and Edgar said the man who picked Aliso up said that Tony was alone, relaxed and in no hurry.

“It was a routine pickup,” Edgar said. “Aliso took his car and went home. Gave the guy a twenty-buck tip. So whoever put him down, they intercepted him on the way home. My guess is it was somewhere up there on Mulholland. Lot of deserted curves. You could stop a guy if you did it quick. Probably two people.”

“What did the valet say about luggage?” Bosch asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Edgar said. “He said that as near as he could remember, Tony had the two bags the wife described, a silver briefcase and one of those hanging bags. He hadn’t checked either one for the flight.”

Bosch nodded, though he was alone.

“What about the media?” Bosch said. “We put anything out yet?”