The Black Echo (30 page)

Bosch did. But he also knew that Southern California was where most of the Vietnamese refugees made their homes after making the trip. Hector started typing in the names with two fingers, and twenty minutes later Bosch was looking at a printout from the computer.

“What are we looking for, Harry?” Hector said as he studied the list with him.

“I don’t know. What do you see that is unusual?”

A few moments passed and Bosch thought Hector would say nothing was unusual. A dead end. But Bosch was wrong.

“Okay, on this one I think you will find he was connected.”

The name was Ngo Van Binh. It meant nothing to Bosch other than it had come from the B list; Binh had reported nothing stolen from his safe-deposit box.

“Connected?”

“He had some kind of pull,” Hector said. “Connected politically, I guess you would call it. See, his case number has the prefix GL. Those are files handled by our special cases bureau in D.C. Usually, SCB doesn’t deal with people from the masses. Very political. Handles people like the shah and the Marcoses, Russian defectors if they are scientists or ballerinas. Stuff like that. Stuff I never see.”

He nodded his head and put his finger on the printout.

“Okay, then we have the dates, they are too close. It happened too fast, which tells me this case was greased. I don’t know this guy from Adam, but I know this guy knew people. Look at the date of entry, May 4, 1975. That’s just four days after the guy left Vietnam. You figure the first day is getting to Manila and the last day is getting to the States. That leaves only two days in between in Manila for him to get approval and get his ticket punched for the mainland. And at that time, I mean, man, they were coming in by the boatload to Manila. No way in two days unless it was greased. So what that means is this guy, this Binh, already had approval. He was connected. It’s not that unusual, because a lot of people were. We got a lot of people out of there when the shit hit the fan. A lot of them were the elite. A lot of them just had money to pay to make them elite.”

Bosch looked at the date Binh had left Vietnam. April 30, 1975. The same day Meadows left Vietnam for the last time. The day Saigon fell to the North Army.

“And this DOD?” Villabona said, pointing at another date. “Very short time to receive documentation. May 14. That’s ten days after arrival this guy gets a visa. That’s too fast for the average Joe. Or in this case, the average Ngo.”

“So what do you think?”

“Hard to say. He could have been an operative. He could’ve just had enough money to get him on a helicopter. Lotta rumors still floating around from that time. People getting rich. Seats on military transports going for ten grand. No question visas going for more. Nothing ever confirmed.”

“Can you pull the file on this guy?”

“Yeah. If I was in D.C.”

Bosch just looked at him, and Hector finally said, “All GLs are there, Harry. That’s where the people that people are connected to are. Get it?”

Bosch didn’t say anything.

“Don’t get mad, Harry. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll make a couple calls. You going to be around later?”

Bosch gave him the FBI’s number but didn’t say it was the FBI. Then they shook hands again and Bosch left. In the first-floor lobby he watched through the smoked-glass doors, looking for Lewis and Clarke. When he finally saw the black Plymouth turn the corner as the two IAD detectives finished another circuit of the block, Bosch walked through the doors and down the steps to his car. In his peripheral vision he saw the IAD car slow and turn into the curb while they waited for him to get in his car and drive off.

Bosch did as they wanted. Because it was what he wanted.

Woodrow Wilson Drive winds counterclockwise around and up the side of the Hollywood Hills, the cracked, patchwork asphalt never wide enough at any point for two cars to pass without a cautious slowing. Going up, the homes on the left crawl vertically up the hillside. They are the old money, solid and secure. Spanish tile and stucco. To the right, the newer houses fearlessly swing their wood frame rooms out over the brown brush arroyos and daisies in the canyon. They are balanced on stilts and hope and cling as tenuously to the edge of the hill as their owners do to their positions at the studios down below. Bosch’s home was fourth from the end on the right side.

As he drove around the final bend, the house came into sight. He looked at the dark wood, the shoebox design, seeking a sign that it had somehow changed-as if the exterior of the house could tell him if something was wrong with the interior. He checked the rearview then and caught the front end of the black Plymouth nosing around the curve. Bosch pulled into the carport next to his house and got out. He went inside without looking back at the tail car.

He had gone to the pier to think about what Rourke had said. And in doing so he thought about the hang-up call that was on his phone tape. Now, he went to the kitchen and played back his messages. First there was the hang-up call, which had come in Tuesday, and then a message from Jerry Edgar in the predawn hours today, when Edgar had called looking for Bosch to get him out to the Hollywood Bowl. Bosch rewound the tape and listened to the hang-up call again, silently chastising himself for not having picked up on its significance the first time he heard it. Someone had called, listened to his taped message and then hung up after the first message beep. The hang-up was on the tape. Most people, if they didn’t want to leave a message, would simply hang up as soon as they heard Bosch’s tape-recorded voice saying he wasn’t in. Or, if they thought he was home, would have called out his name after the beep. But this caller had listened to the tape and then didn’t hang up until after the beep. Why? Bosch had missed it at first, but now thought the call had been a transmitter test.

He went to the closet by the door and took out a pair of binoculars. He went to the living room window and looked through a crack in the curtain for the black Plymouth. It was a half-block farther up the hill. Lewis and Clarke had driven by the house, turned around and parked at the curb, facing downhill and ready to continue the tail if Bosch came out. Through the binoculars Bosch could see Lewis behind the wheel, watching the house. Clarke had his head back on the passenger seat and his eyes closed. Neither of them appeared to be wearing earphones. Still, Harry had to be sure. Without taking his eyes from the binoculars, he reached over to the front door and opened it a few inches and closed it. The men in the IAD car showed no reaction, no alert. Clarke’s eyes remained closed. Lewis continued picking his teeth with a business card.

Bosch decided that if they had dropped a bug on him, it was transmitting to a remote. It was safer that way. Probably a sound-activated minireel hidden on the exterior of the house. They’d wait until he drove away and then one of them would jump out of the car and quickly collect the reel, replacing it with a fresh one. They could then catch up the tail on him before he got down the hill to the freeway. He walked away from the window and made a quick survey of the living room and kitchen. He studied the underside of tables and electric fixtures but he didn’t find the bug and didn’t expect to. The smart place, he knew, was the phone, which he was saving for last. It had a ready power source, and placement there would provide sound intake of the immediate interior of the house as well as any conversations that came in through the phone.

Bosch picked up the phone and with a small penknife that was attached to his key chain he popped the cover off the mouthpiece. There was nothing there that shouldn’t be. Then he took the cover off the earpiece. It was there. Using the knife he carefully lifted out the speaker. Attached behind it by a small magnet was a small, flat, round transmitter about the size of a quarter. There were two wires attached to the device, which, he knew, was sound activated and called a T-9. One wire was wrapped around one of the phone’s receiver wires, piggybacking power for the bug. The other wire went into the barrel of the handset. Bosch gingerly pulled it, and out came the backup energy source: a small, thin power pack containing a single AA battery. The bug ran off the phone’s juice, but if the phone was disconnected from the wall, the battery could provide power for maybe another eight hours. Bosch disconnected the device from the phone and placed it on the table. It was now running off the battery. He just stared at it, thinking about what he was going to do. It was a standard police department wire. Pickup range, fifteen to twenty feet, designed to take in everything said in the room. The transmission range was minimal, maybe twenty-five yards at most, depending on how much metal was in the building.

Bosch went to the living room window again to look up the street. Lewis and Clarke still showed no sign of alert or that the bug had been discovered. Lewis was through picking his teeth.

Bosch turned on the stereo and put on a Wayne Shorter CD. He then went out a side door in the kitchen into the carport. He could not be seen from the IAD car. He found the tape recorder in the first place he looked; the junction box beneath the DWP electric meter on the back wall of the carport. The two-inch reels were turning to the sound of Shorter’s saxophone. The Nagra recorder, like the T-9, was wired to the house current but had a battery backup. Bosch disconnected it and brought it inside, where he set it on the table next to its counterpart.

Shorter was finishing “502 Blues.” Bosch sat in the watch chair, lit a cigarette and looked at the device as he tried to form a plan. He reached over, rewound the tape and pushed the play button. The first thing he heard was his own voice saying he wasn’t there, then Jerry Edgar’s message about the Hollywood Bowl. Then the next sounds were the door opening and closing twice, then Wayne Shorter’s sax. They had changed reels at least once since the test call had been made. Then he realized that Eleanor Wish’s visit had been taped. He thought about that and wondered if the bug had picked up what had been said on the back porch. Bosch’s stories about himself and Meadows. He grew angry thinking about the intrusion, the delicate moment stolen by the two men in the black Plymouth.

He shaved, showered and dressed in a fresh set of clothes, a tan summer suit with pink oxford shirt and blue tie. Then he went to the living room and loaded the bug and recorder into the pockets of his jacket. He took another look through the curtains with the field glasses: still no movement in the Internal Affairs car. He went out the side door again and carefully climbed down the embankment to the base of the first stilt, an iron I beam. He gingerly made his way across the incline beneath his house. He noticed along the way that the dried brush was sprinkled with pieces of gold foil, the beer label he had picked at and dropped from the porch when he was with Eleanor.

Once he got to the other side of his property, he picked his way across the hill, going under the next three stilt houses. After the third, he scrambled up the hillside and looked around the front corner into the street. He was now behind the black Plymouth. He picked the burrs off the cuffs of his pants and then walked casually into the road.

Bosch came up unnoticed on the passenger-side door. The window was down and just before he flung the door open he thought he could hear snoring coming from the car.

Clarke’s mouth was open and his eyes still shut when Bosch leaned in through the open door and grabbed both men by their silk ties. Bosch put his right foot on the doorsill for leverage and pulled both men toward him. Though there were two of them, the advantage belonged to Bosch. Clarke was disoriented and Lewis had little more idea what was happening. Pulling them by their ties meant that any struggle or resistance tightened the ties around their necks, cutting off their air. They came out almost willingly, tumbling like dogs on leashes and landing next to a palm tree planted three feet from the sidewalk. Their faces were red and sputtering. Their hands went to their necks, clawing at the knots of their ties as they fought to get air back into their pipes. Bosch’s hands went to their belts and yanked away the handcuffs. As the two IAD detectives were gulping air through their reopened throats Bosch managed to cuff Lewis’s left hand to Clarke’s right. Then, on the other side of the tree, he got Lewis’s right into the other set of cuffs. But Clarke realized what Bosch was doing and tried to stand up and pull away. Bosch grabbed his tie again and gave it a sharp yank down. Clarke’s head came forward and his face rammed the palm tree. He was momentarily stunned and Bosch slapped the last cuff on his wrist. Both IAD cops were wallowing on the ground then, locked to each other with the palm tree in the middle of the circle of their arms. Bosch unholstered their weapons, then stepped back to catch his own breath. He threw their guns onto the front seat of their car.

“You’re dead,” Clarke finally managed to croak through his swollen throat.

They worked their way up into standing positions, the palm tree between them. They looked like two grown men caught playing ring-around-the-rosy.

“Assaulting a fellow officer, two counts,” Lewis said. “Conduct unbecoming. We can get you for a half-dozen other things now, Bosch.” He coughed violently, spittle hitting Clarke’s suit coat. “Unhook us and maybe we can forget this.”

“No way. We aren’t forgetting a fucking thing,” Clarke said to his partner. “He’s going down like a flaming asshole.”

Bosch took the listening device out of his pocket and held it out on his palm for them to see. “Who’s going down?” he asked.

Lewis looked at the bug, recognizing what it was, and said, “We don’t know anything about that.”

“Course not,” Bosch said. He took the recorder out of his other pocket and held that out, too. “Sound-sensitive Nagras, that’s what you guys use on all your jobs, legal or not, isn’t it? Found it in my phone. Same time I notice that you two dummies have been following me all over the city. Don’t suppose you guys also dropped the bug on me so you could listen as well as watch?”

Neither Lewis nor Clarke answered and Bosch didn’t expect them to. He noticed a small drop of blood poised at the edge of one of Clarke’s nostrils. A car driving on Woodrow Wilson slowed and Bosch pulled his badge and held it up. The car kept going. The two IAD detectives did not call for help, which made Bosch begin to feel he was safe. This would be his play. The department had taken such bad publicity for illegally bugging officers, civil rights leaders, even movie stars in the past, that these two were not going to make an issue of this. Saving their own hides came before skinning Bosch.