The Black Echo (6 page)

Obinna smiled, apparently happy to share his woe. Bosch looked into the glitter of sharp glass in the bottom of the case. He nodded and said, “Yes.”

“You are a day late, detective. A shame.”

“Did you say only these two cases were robbed?”

“Yes. A smash and grab. Quick. Quick.”

“What time?”

“Police called me at four-thirty in the morning. That is the time of the alarm. I came at once. The alarm, when the window was smashed, the alarm went off. The officers found no one. They stayed until I came. Then I begin to wait for detectives that do not come. I cannot clean up my cases until they get here to investigate this crime.”

Bosch was thinking of the time scheme. The body dumped sometime before the anonymous 911 call at 4A.M. The pawnshop broken into about the same time. A bracelet pawned by the dead man taken. There are no coincidences, he told himself.

“You said something about pictures. Lists and pictures for the pawn detail?”

“Yes, LAPD, that is true. I turn over lists of everything I take in to the pawn detectives. It is the law. I cooperate fully.”

Obinna nodded his head and frowned mournfully into the broken display case.

“What about the pictures?” Bosch said.

“Yes, pictures. These pawn detectives, they ask me to take pictures of my best acquisitions. Help them better identify for stolen merchandise. It is not the law, but I say sure, I cooperate fully. I buy the Polaroid kind of camera. I keep pictures if they want to come and look. They never do. It’s bullshit.”

“You have a picture of this bracelet?”

Obinna’s eyebrows arched again as he considered the idea for the first time.

“I think,” he said, and then he disappeared through a black curtain in a doorway behind the counter. He came out a few moments later with a shoe box full of Polaroid photos with yellow carbon slips paper-clipped to them. He rustled through the photos, occasionally pulling one out, raising his eyebrows, and then sliding it back into place. Finally, he found what he wanted.

“Here. There it is.”

Bosch took the photo and studied it.

“Antique gold with carved jade, very nice,” Obinna said. “I remember it, top line. No wonder the shitheel that broke through my window took it. Made in the 1930s, Mexico… I gave the man eight hundred dollars. I have not often paid such a price for a piece of jewelry. I remember, very big man, he came here with the ring for the Super Bowl. Nineteen eighty-three. Very nice. I gave him one thousand dollars. He did not come back for it.”

He held out his left hand to display the oversized gold ring, which seemed even larger on his small finger.

“The guy who pawned the bracelet, you remember him as well?” Bosch asked.

Obinna looked puzzled. Bosch decided that watching his eyebrows was like watching two caterpillars charging each other. He took one of the Polaroids of Meadows out of his pocket and handed it to the pawnbroker. He studied it closely.

“The man is dead,” Obinna said after a moment. The caterpillars seemed to quiver with fear. “The man looks dead.”

“I don’t need your help for that,” Bosch said. “I want to know if he pawned the bracelet.”

Obinna handed the photo back. He said, “I think yes.”

“He ever come in here and pawn anything else, before or after the bracelet?”

“No. I think I’d remember him. I’ll say no.”

“I need to take this,” Bosch said, holding up the Polaroid of the bracelet. “If you need it back, give me a call.”

He put one of his business cards on the cash register. The card was one of the cheap kind, with his name and phone number handwritten on a line. As he walked to the front door, crossing under a row of banjos, Bosch looked at his watch. He turned to Obinna, who was looking through the box of Polaroids again.

“Mr. Obinna, the watch officer, he said to tell you that if the detectives didn’t get here in a half hour, you should go home and they will be by in the morning.”

Obinna looked at him without saying a word. The caterpillars charged and collided. Bosch looked up and saw himself in the polished brass elbow of a saxophone that hung overhead. A tenor. Then he turned and walked out the door, heading to the com center to pick up the tape.

The watch sergeant in the com center beneath City Hall let Bosch record the 911 call off one of the big reel-to-reels that never stop rolling and recording the cries of the city. The voice of the emergency operator was female and black. The caller was male and white. The caller sounded like a boy.

“Nine one one emergency. What are you reporting?”

“Uh, uh-”

“Can I help you? What are you reporting?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m reporting you have a dead guy in a pipe.”

“You said you are reporting a dead body?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What do you mean a pipe, sir?”

“He is in a pipe up by the dam.”

“What dam is that?”

“Uh, you know, where they got the water reservoir and everything, the Hollywood sign.”

“Is that the Mulholland Dam, sir? Above Hollywood?”

“Yeah, that’s it. You got it. Mulholland. I couldn’t remember the name.”

“Where is the body?”

“They have a big old pipe up there. You know, the one that people sleep in. The dead guy is in the pipe. He’s there.”

“Do you know this person?”

“No, man, no way.”

“Is he sleeping?”

“Shit, no.” The boy laughed nervously. “He’s dead.”

“How are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m just telling you. If you don’t want to-”

“What is your name, sir?”

“What is this? What do you need my name for? I just saw it. I didn’t do it.”

“How am I to know this is a legitimate call?”

“Check the pipe, you’ll know. I don’t know what else to tell you. What’s my name got to do with anything?”

“For our records, sir. Can you give me your name?”

“Uh, no.”

“Sir, will you stay there until an officer arrives?”

“No, I’m already gone. I’m not there, man. I’m down-”

“I know, sir. I have a readout here that says you are at a pay phone on Gower near Hollywood Boulevard. Will you wait for the officer?”

“How-? Never mind, I gotta go now. You check it out. The body is there. A dead guy.”

“Sir, we would like to talk-”

The line was disconnected. Bosch put the cassette tape in his pocket and headed out of the com center the way he had come in.

It had been ten months since Harry Bosch had been on the third floor at Parker Center. He had worked in RHD-the Robbery-Homicide Division-for almost ten years, but never came back after his suspension and transfer from the Homicide Special squad to Hollywood detectives. On the day he got the word, his desk was cleared by two goons from Internal Affairs named Lewis and Clarke. They dumped his stuff on the homicide table at Hollywood Station, then left a message on his phone tape at home saying that’s where he could find it. Now, ten months later, he was back on the hallowed floor of the department’s elite detective squad, and he was glad it was Sunday. There would be no faces he knew. No reason to look away.

Room 321 was empty except for the weekend duty detective, whom Bosch didn’t know. Harry pointed to the back of the room and said, “Bosch, Hollywood detectives. I have to use the box.”

The duty man, a young guy with a haircut he had kept when he split the Marine Corps, had a gun catalog open on his desk. He looked back at the computers along the back wall as if to make sure they were still there and then back at Bosch.

“S’pose to use the one in your own division,” he said.

Bosch walked by him. “I don’t have the time to go out to Hollywood. I got an autopsy in twenty minutes,” he lied.

“You know, I’ve heard of you, Bosch. Yeah. The TV show and all of that. You used to be on this floor. Used to.”

The last line hung in the air like smog and Bosch tried to ignore it. As he went back to the computer terminals, he couldn’t help but let his eyes wander over his old desk. He wondered who used it now. It was cluttered, and he noticed the cards on the Rolodex were crisp and unworn at the edges. New. Harry turned around and looked at the duty man, who was still watching him.

“This your desk when you aren’t pulling Sundays?”

The kid smiled and nodded his head.

“You deserve it, kid. You’re just right for the part. That hair, that stupid grin. You’re going to go far.”

“Just ’cause you got busted out of here for being a one-man army… Ah, fuck you, Bosch, you has-been.”

Bosch pulled a chair on casters away from a desk and pushed it in front of the IBM PC sitting on a table against the rear wall. He hit the switch and in a few moments the amber-colored letters appeared on the screen: “Homicide Information Tracking Management Automated Network.”

For a moment Bosch smiled at the department’s unceasing need for acronyms. It seemed to him that every unit, task force and computer file had been christened with a name that gave its acronym the sound of eliteness. To the public, acronyms meant action, large numbers of manpower applied to vital problems. There was HITMAN, COBRA, CRASH, BADCATS, DARE. A hundred others. Somewhere in Parker Center there was someone who spent all day making up catchy acronyms, he believed. Computers had acronyms, even ideas had acronyms. If your special unit didn’t have an acronym, then you weren’t shit in this department.

Once he was in the HITMAN system, a template of case questions appeared on the screen and he filled in the blanks. He then typed in three search keys: “Mulholland Dam,” “overdose” and “staged overdose.” He then pushed the execute key. Half a minute later, the computer told him that a search of eight thousand homicide cases-about ten years’ worth-stored on the computer’s hard disk had come up with only six hits. Bosch called them up one by one. The first three were unsolved slayings of young women who were found dead on the dam in the early 1980s. Each was strangled. Bosch glanced quickly at the information and went on. The fourth case was a body found floating in the reservoir five years earlier. Cause of death was not drowning but otherwise unknown. The last two were drug overdoses, the first of which occurred during a picnic at the park above the reservoir. It looked pretty straightforward to Bosch and he went on. The last hit was a DB found in the pipe fourteen months earlier. Cause of death was later determined to be heart stoppage due to an overdose of tar heroin.

“Decedent known to frequent area of the dam and sleep in pipe,” the computer readout said. “No further follow-up.”

It was the death that Crowley, the Hollywood watch sergeant, had mentioned when he woke Bosch up that morning. Bosch pushed a key and printed out the information on the last death, though he didn’t think it figured into his case. He signed off and shut down the computer, then he sat there a moment thinking. Without getting out of the chair he rolled over to another PC. He turned it on and fed his password in. He took the Polaroid out of his pocket, looked at the bracelet and typed in its description for a stolen property records search. This in itself was an art. He had to describe the bracelet the way he believed other cops would, cops who might be typing in descriptions of a whole inventory of jewelry taken in a robbery or burglary. He described the bracelet simply as “antique gold bracelet with carved jade dolphin design.” He pressed the search key and in thirty seconds the computer screen said “No hit.” He tried it again, typing “gold-and-jade bracelet” and then punching the search key. This time there were 436 hits. Too many. He needed to thin the herd. He typed “gold bracelet with jade fish” and pressed search. Six hits. That was more like it.

The computer said a gold bracelet with carved jade fish had turned up on four crime reports and two departmental bulletins that had been entered into the computer system since its development in 1983. Bosch knew that because of the immense duplication of records in any police department, all six entries could be and probably were from the same case or report of a missing or stolen bracelet. He called the abbreviated crime reports up on the computer screen and found that his suspicion was correct. The reports were generated by a single burglary in September at Sixth and Hill downtown. The victim was a woman named Harriet Beecham, age seventy-one, of Silver Lake. Bosch tried to place the location in his mind but could not think of what building or business was there. There was no summary of the crime on the computer; he would have to go to records and pull a hard copy. But there was a limited description of the gold-and-jade bracelet, and several other pieces of jewelry taken from Beecham. The bracelet Beecham reported lost could or could not have been the one that Meadows had pawned-the description was too vague. There were several supplementary report numbers given on the computer report and Bosch wrote them all down in his notebook. It seemed to him as he did this that Harriet Beecham’s loss had generated an unusual amount of paper.

He next called up the information on the two bulletins. Both had come from the FBI, the first issued two weeks after Beecham had been burglarized. It was then reissued three months later when Beecham’s jewelry had still not turned up. Bosch wrote down the bulletin number and turned off the computer. He went across the room to the robbery/commercial burglary section. On a steel shelf that ran along the back wall were dozens of black binders that held the bulletins and BOLOs from past years. Bosch took down the one marked September and began looking through it. He quickly realized that the bulletins were not in chronological order and weren’t all issued in September. In fact, there was no order. He might have to look through all ten months since Beecham’s burglary to find the bulletin he needed. He pulled an armful of the binders off the shelf and sat down at the burglary table. A few moments later he felt the presence of someone across the table from him.

“What do you want?” he said without looking up.

“What do I want?” the duty detective said. “I want to know what the fuck you are doing, Bosch. This isn’t your place anymore. You can’t just come in here like you’re running the crew. Put that shit back on the shelf, and if you want to look through it come back down here tomorrow and ask, goddammit. And don’t give me any bullshit about an autopsy. You’ve already been here a half hour.”