The Last Coyote (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

N
OW
B
OSCH COULDN’T
lose her in a blizzard. As the drive grew longer, he found himself in a growing sense of an almost adolescent euphoria of anticipation. He was captured by the directness of this woman and he was wondering how and what that would translate to when they were making love.

She led him north to Tampa and then into an area called Hyde Park. Overlooking the bay, the neighborhood consisted of old Victorian and Craftsman-style houses with sweeping front porches. Her home was an apartment above the three-car garage set behind a gray Victorian with green trim.

As they got to the top of the steps and she was putting the key into the knob, Bosch thought of something and didn’t know what to do. She opened the door and looked at him. She read him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. But I was thinking, maybe I should go find a drugstore or something and then come back.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got what you’ll need. But can you stand out here for a second? I just want to make a mad dash inside and clean up a few things.”

He looked at her.

“I don’t care about that.”

“Please?”

“Okay. Take your time.”

He waited for about three minutes and then she opened the door and pulled him in. If she had cleaned up, she had done it in the dark. The only light came from what Bosch could see was the kitchen. She took his hand and led him away from the light to a darkened hallway that gave way to her bedroom. Here she turned on the light, revealing a sparely furnished room. A wrought-iron bed with a canopy was the centerpiece. There was a night table of unfinished wood next to it, a matching unfinished bureau and an antique Singer sewing machine table on which stood a blue vase with dead flowers in it. There was nothing hung on any of the walls, though Bosch saw a nail protruding from the plaster above the vase. Jasmine noticed the flowers and quickly took the vase off the table and headed out the door.

“I have to go dump this. I haven’t been here in a week and forgot to change them.”

Moving the flowers raised a slightly acrid smell in the room. While she was gone Bosch looked at the nail again and thought he could see the delineation of a rectangle on the wall. Something had hung there, he decided. She hadn’t come in to clean up. If she had, she would have gotten rid of the flowers. She’d come in to take down a painting.

When she came back into the room, she put the empty vase back on the table.

“Would you like another beer? I have some wine, too.”

Bosch moved toward her, intrigued even more by her mysteries.

“No, I’m fine.”

Without further word they embraced. He could taste beer and garlic and cigarette smoke as he kissed her but didn’t care. He knew she was getting the same from him. He pressed his cheek against hers and with his nose he came across the spot on her neck where she had dabbed perfume. Night-blooming jasmine.

They moved onto the bed, each taking pieces of clothing off between hard kisses. Her body was beautiful, the tan lines distinct. He kissed her lovely small breasts and gently pushed her back on the bed. She told him to wait and she rolled to the side and from the drawer of the bed table extracted a strip of three condom packages and handed it to him.

“Is this wishful thinking?” he asked.

They both burst out laughing and it seemed to make things all the better.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see.”

For Bosch, sexual encounters had always been a question of timing. The desires of two individuals rose and subsided on their own courses. There were emotional needs separate from physical needs. And sometimes all of those things clicked together in a person and then clicked in tandem with those of the other person. Bosch’s encounter with Jasmine Corian was one of those times. The sex created a world without intrusion. One so vital that it could have lasted an hour or maybe only a few minutes and he wouldn’t have known the difference. At the end, he was above her, looking into her open eyes, and she clutched his upper arms as if she were holding on for her life. Both of their bodies shuddered in unison and then he lay still on top of her, catching his breath from the hollow between her neck and shoulder. He felt so good he had the urge to laugh out loud but he didn’t think she’d understand. He stifled it and made it sound like a muffled cough.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly.

“I’ve never felt better.”

Eventually, he moved off her, backing down over her body. He kissed both of her breasts, then sat up with her legs on either side of him. He removed the condom while using his body to shield her view of the process.

He got up and walked to the door he hoped was the bathroom and found it was a closet. The next door he tried was the bathroom and he flushed the condom down the toilet. He absentmindedly wondered if it would end up somewhere in Tampa Bay.

When he came back from the bathroom she was sitting up with the sheet bunched around her waist. He found his sport coat on the floor and got out his cigarettes. He gave her one and lit it. Then he bent over and kissed her breasts again. Her laugh was infectious and it made him smile.

“You know, I like it that you didn’t come equipped.”

“Equipped? What are you talking about?”

“You know, that you offered to go to the drugstore. It shows what kind of man you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you had come over here from L.A. with a condom in your wallet, that would’ve been so…I don’t know, premeditated. Like some guy just on the make. The whole thing would have had no spontaneity. I’m glad you weren’t like that, Harry Bosch, that’s all.”

He nodded, trying to follow her line of thought. He wasn’t sure he understood. And he wondered what he should think of the fact that she
was
equipped. He decided to drop it and lit his cigarette.

“How’d you hurt your hand like that?”

She had noticed the marks on his fingers. Bosch had taken the Band-Aids off while flying over. The burns had healed to the point that they looked like red welts on two of his fingers.

“Cigarette. I fell asleep.”

He felt he could tell her the truth about everything about himself.

“God, that’s scary.”

“Yeah. I don’t think it will happen again.”

“Do you want to stay with me tonight?”

He moved closer to her and kissed her on the neck.

“Yes,” he whispered.

She reached over and touched the zipper scar on his left shoulder. The women he was with in bed always seemed to do this. It was an ugly mark and he never understood why they were drawn to touch it.

“You got shot?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s even scarier.”

He hiked his shoulders. It was history and he never really thought about it anymore.

“You know, what I was trying to say before is that you’re not like most cops I’ve known. You’ve got too much of your humanity left. How’d that happen?”

He shook his shoulders again like he didn’t know.

“Are you okay, Bosch?”

He stubbed out his cigarette.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

“I don’t know. You know what that guy Marvin Gaye sang about, don’t you? Before he got killed by his own dad? He sang about sexual healing. Said it’s good for the soul. Something like that. Anyway, I believe it, do you?”

“I suppose.”

“I think you need healing in your life, Bosch. That’s the vibe I’m getting.”

“You want to go to sleep now?”

She lay down again and pulled the sheet up. He walked around the room naked, turning out the lights. When he was under the sheet in the dark, she turned on her side so her back was to him and told him to put his arm around her. He moved up close behind her and did. He loved her smell.

“How come people call you Jazz?”

“I don’t know. They just do. Because it goes with the name.”

After a few moments she asked him why he had asked that.

“Because. You smell like both your names. Like the flower and the music.”

“What does jazz smell like?”

“It smells dark and smoky.”

They were silent for a long while after that and eventually Bosch thought she was asleep. But he still could not make it down. He lay with his eyes open, looking at the shadows of the room. Then she spoke softly to him.

“Bosch, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. What’s the worst thing? What’s the thing that keeps you awake at night if you think about it too hard?”

He thought for a few moments before answering.

“I don’t know.” He forced an uneasy and short laugh. “I guess I’ve done a lot of bad things. I suppose a lot of them are to myself. At least I think about them a lot…”

“What’s one of them? You can tell me.”

And he knew that he could. He thought he could tell her almost anything and not be judged harshly.

“When I was a kid—I grew up mostly in a youth hall, like an orphanage. When I was new there, one of the older kids took my shoes, my sneakers. They didn’t fit him or anything but he did it because he knew he could do it. He was one of the rulers of the roost and he took ’em. I didn’t do anything about it and it hurt.”

“But you didn’t do it. That’s not what I—”

“No, I’m not done. I just told you that because you had to know that part. See, when I got older and I was one of the big shots in the place, I did the same thing. I took this new kid’s shoes. He was smaller, I couldn’t even put ’em on. I just took them and I…I don’t know, I threw them out or something. But I took them because I could. I did the same thing that was done to me…And sometimes, even now, I think about it and I feel bad.”

She squeezed his hand in a way he thought was meant to be comforting but said nothing.

“Is that the kind of story you wanted?”

She just squeezed his hand again. After a while he spoke.

“I think the one thing I did that I regret the most, though, was maybe letting a woman go.”

“You mean like a criminal?”

“No. I mean like we lived—we were lovers and when she wanted to go, I didn’t really…do anything. I didn’t put up a fight, you know. And when I think about it, sometimes I think that maybe if I had, I could’ve changed her mind…I don’t know.”

“Did she say why she was leaving?”

“She just got to know me too well. I don’t blame her for anything. I’ve got baggage. I guess maybe I can be hard to take. I’ve lived alone most of my life.”

Silence filled the room again and he waited. He sensed that there was something more she wanted to say or be asked. But when she spoke he wasn’t sure if she was talking about him or herself.

“They say when a cat is ornery and scratches and hisses at everybody, even somebody who wants to comfort it and love it, it’s because it wasn’t held enough when it was a kitten.”

“I never heard that before.”

“I think it’s true.”

He was quiet a moment and moved his hand up so that it was touching her breasts.

“Is that what your story is?” he asked. “You weren’t held enough.”

“Who knows.”

“What was the worst thing you ever did to yourself, Jasmine? I think you want to tell me.”

He knew she wanted him to ask it. It was true confessions time and he began to believe that the whole night had been directed by her to arrive at this one question.

“You didn’t try to hold on to someone you should have,” she said. “I held on to someone I shouldn’t have. I held on too long. Thing is, I knew what it was leading to, deep down I knew. It was like standing on the tracks and seeing the train coming at you but being too mesmerized by the bright light to move, to save yourself.”

He had his eyes open in the dark still. He could barely see the outline of her shoulder and cheek. He pulled himself closer to her, kissed her neck and in her ear whispered, “But you got out. That’s what’s important.”

“Yeah, I got out,” she said wistfully. “I got out.”

She was silent for a while and then reached up under the covers and touched his hand. It was cupped over one of her breasts. She held her hand on top of it.

“Good night, Harry.”

He waited a while, until he heard the measured breathing of her sleep, and then he was finally able to drift off. There was no dream this time. Just warmth and darkness.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I
N THE MORNING
Bosch awoke first. He took a shower and borrowed Jasmine’s toothbrush without asking. Then he dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before and went out to his car to retrieve his overnight bag. Once he was dressed in fresh clothes he ventured into the kitchen to see about coffee. All he found was a box of tea bags.

Leaving the idea behind, he walked around the apartment, his steps creaking on the old pine floors. The living room was as spare as the bedroom. A sofa with an off-white blanket spread on it, a coffee table, an old stereo with a cassette but no CD player. No television. Again, nothing on the walls but the telltale indication that there had been. He found two nails in the plaster. They weren’t rusted or painted over. They hadn’t been there very long.

Through a set of French doors the living room opened up to a porch enclosed in windows. There was rattan furniture out here and several potted plants, including a dwarf orange tree with fruit on it. The entire porch was redolent with its smell. Bosch stepped close to the windows and by looking south down the alley behind the property, he could see the bay. The morning sun’s reflection on it was pure white light.

He walked back across the living room to another door on the wall opposite the French doors. Immediately upon opening this door, he could smell the sharp tang of oils and turpentine. This was where she painted. He hesitated but only for a moment, then walked in.

The first thing he noticed was that the room had a window that gave a direct view of the bay across the backyards and garages of three or four houses down the alley. It was beautiful and he knew why she chose this room for her art. At center on a paint-dappled drop cloth was an easel but no stool. She painted standing. He saw no overhead lamp or artificial light source anywhere else in the room. She painted only by true light.

He walked around the easel and found the canvas on it had been untouched by the painter. Along one of the side walls was a high work counter with various tubes of paint scattered about.

There were palette boards and coffee cans with brushes stacked in them. At the end of the counter was a large laundry sink for washing up.

Bosch noticed more canvases leaning against the wall under the counter. They were faced inward and appeared to be unused pieces like the one on the easel, waiting for the artist’s hand. But Bosch suspected otherwise. Not with the exposed nails in the walls in the other rooms of the apartment. He reached under the counter and slid a few of the canvases out. As he did this he almost felt as if he was on some case, solving some mystery.

The three portraits he pulled out were painted in dark hues. None were signed though it was obvious all were the work of one hand. And that hand was Jasmine’s. Bosch recognized the style from the painting he had seen at her father’s house. Sharp lines, dark colors. The first one he looked at was of a nude woman with her face turned away from the painter and into the shadows. The sense Bosch felt was that the darkness was taking the woman, rather than her turning to the darkness. Her mouth was completely in shadow. It was as if she was mute. The woman, Bosch knew, was Jasmine.

The second painting seemed to be part of the same study as the first. It was the same nude in shadow, though she was now facing the viewer. Bosch noted that in the portrait Jasmine had given herself fuller breasts than in reality and he wondered if this was done on purpose and had some meaning, or was perhaps a subliminal improvement made by the painter. He noticed that beneath the veneer of gray shadow over the painting there were red highlights on the woman. Bosch knew little about the art, but he knew this was a dark portrait.

Bosch looked at the third painting he had pulled out and found this to be unattached to the first two, save for the fact that again it was a nude portrait of Jasmine. But this piece he clearly recognized as a reinterpretation of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, a painting that had always fascinated Bosch but that he had only seen in books. In the piece before him, the figure of the frightened person was Jasmine. The location had been transferred from Munch’s horrific, swirling dreamscape, to the Skyway bridge.

Bosch clearly recognized the bright yellow vertical piping of the bridge’s support span.

“What are you doing?”

He jumped as if stabbed in the back. It was Jasmine, at the door of the studio. She wore a silk bathrobe she held closed with her arms. Her eyes were puffy. She had just woken up.

“I’m looking at your work, is that okay?”

“This door was locked.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

She reached to the doorknob and turned it, as if that could disprove his claim.

“It wasn’t locked, Jazz. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you didn’t want me in here.”

“Could you put those back under there, please?”

“Sure. But why’d you take them off the walls?”

“I didn’t.”

“Was it because they’re nudes, or is it because of what they mean?”

“Please don’t ask me about this. Put them back.”

She left the doorway and he put the paintings back where he found them. He left the room and found her in the kitchen filling a tea kettle with water from the sink. Her back was to him and he walked in and lightly put a hand on her back. Even so, she started slightly at his touch.

“Jazz, look, I’m sorry. I’m a cop. I get curious.”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. You want some tea?”

She had stopped filling the kettle but did not turn around or make a move to put it on the stove.

“No. I was thinking maybe I could take you out for breakfast.”

“When do you leave? I thought you said the plane’s this morning.”

“That was the other thing I was thinking about. I could stay another day, leave tomorrow, if you want me to. I mean, if you’ll have me. I’d like to stay.”

She turned around and looked at him.

“I want you to stay, too.”

They embraced and kissed but she quickly pulled back.

“It’s not fair, you brushed your teeth. I have monster breath.”

“Yeah, but I used your toothbrush, so it evens out.”

“Gross. Now I have to get a new one.”

“That’s right.”

They smiled and she gave him a tight hug around the neck, his trespass in her studio seemingly forgotten.

“You call the airline and I’ll get ready. I know where we can go.”

When she pulled away he held her in front of him. He wanted to bring it up again. He couldn’t help it.

“I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“How come those paintings aren’t signed?”

“They’re not ready to be signed.”

“The one at your father’s was signed.”

“That was for him, so I signed it. Those others are for me.”

“The one on the bridge. Is she going to jump?”

She looked at him a long time before answering.

“I don’t know. Sometimes when I look at it, I think she is. I think the thought is there, but you never know.”

“It can’t happen, Jazz.”

“Why not?”

“Because it can’t.”

“I’ll get ready.”

She broke away from him then and left the kitchen.

He went to the wall phone next to the refrigerator and dialed the airline. While making the arrangements to fly out Monday morning, he decided on a whim to ask the airline agent if it was possible to route his new flight back to Los Angeles through Las Vegas. She said not without a three-hour-and-fourteen-minute layover. He said he’d take it. He had to pay fifty dollars on top of the seven hundred they already had from him in order to make the needed changes. He put it on his credit card.

He thought about Vegas as he hung up. Claude Eno might be dead but his wife was still cashing his checks. She might be worth the fifty-dollar layover.

“Ready?”

It was Jasmine calling from the living room. Bosch stepped out of the kitchen and she was waiting for him in cut-off jeans and a tank top beneath a white shirt she left open and tied above her waist. She already had on sunglasses.

She took him to a place where they poured honey on top of the biscuits and served the eggs with grits and butter. Bosch hadn’t had grits since basic training at Benning. The meal was delicious. Neither of them spoke much. The paintings and the conversation they had before falling asleep the night before were not mentioned. It seemed that what they had said was better left for the dark shadows of night, and maybe her paintings, too.

When they were done with their coffee, she insisted on picking up the check. He got the tip. They spent the afternoon cruising in her Volkswagen with the top down. She took him all over the place, from Ybor City to St. Petersburg Beach, burning up a tank of gas and two packs of cigarettes. By late in the afternoon they were at a place called Indian Rocks Beach to look at the sunset over the Gulf.

“I’ve been a lot of places,” Jasmine told him. “I like the light here the best.”

“Ever been out to California?”

“No, not yet.”

“Sometimes the sunset looks like lava pouring down on the city.”

“That must be beautiful.”

“It makes you forgive a lot, forget a lot…That’s the thing about Los Angeles. It’s got a lot of broken pieces to it. But the ones that still work, really do work.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“I’m curious about something.”

“Here we go again. What?”

“If you don’t show your paintings to anybody, how do you make a living?”

It was from out of left field but he had been thinking about it all day.

“I have money from my father. Even before he died. It’s not a lot but I don’t need a lot. It’s enough. If I don’t feel the need to sell my work when it is finished, then as I am doing it, it won’t be compromised. It will be pure.”

It sounded to Bosch like a convenient way of explaining away the fear of exposing oneself. But he let it go. She didn’t.

“Are you always a cop? Always asking questions?”

“No. Only when I care about someone.”

She kissed him quickly and walked back to the car.

After stopping by her place to change, they had dinner in a Tampa steak house where the wine list was actually a book so thick it came on its own pedestal. The restaurant itself seemed to be the work of a slightly delusional Italian decorator, a dark blend of gilded rococo, garish red velvet and classical statues and paintings. It was the kind of place he would expect her to suggest. She mentioned that this meateater’s palace was actually owned by a vegetarian.

“Sounds like somebody from California.”

She smiled and was quiet for a while after that. Bosch’s mind wandered to the case. He had spent the entire day without giving it a thought. Now a pang of guilt thrummed in his mind. It was almost as if he felt he was shunting his mother aside to pursue the selfish pleasure of Jasmine’s company. Jasmine seemed to read him and to know he was privately debating something.

“Can you stay another day, Harry?”

He smiled but shook his head.

“I can’t. I gotta go. But I’ll be back. As soon as I can.”

Bosch paid for dinner with a credit card he guessed was reaching its limit and they headed back to her apartment. Knowing their time together was drawing to a close, they went right to the bed and made love.

The feel of her body, its taste and its scent seemed perfect to Bosch. He didn’t want the moment to end. He’d had immediate attractions to women before in his life and had even acted on them. But never one that felt so fully engaging and complete. He guessed that it was because of all he did not know about her. That was the hook. She was a mystery. Physically, he could not get any closer than he was to her during these moments, yet there was so much of her hidden, unexplored. They made love in gentle rhythm and held each other in a deep, long kiss at the end.

Later, he lay on his side, next to her, his arm across the flatness of her belly. One of her hands traced circles in his hair. The true confessions began.

“Harry, you know, I haven’t been with a lot of men in my life.”

He didn’t respond because he didn’t know what the proper response could be. He was well past caring about a woman’s sexual history for anything other than health reasons.

“What about you?” she asked.

He couldn’t resist.

“I haven’t been with a lot of men, either. In fact, none, as far as I know.”

She punched him on the shoulder.

“You know what I mean.”

“The answer is no. I haven’t been with a lot of women in my life. Not enough, at least.”

“I don’t know, the men that I’ve been with, most of them, it’s like they wanted something from me I didn’t have. I don’t know what it was but I just didn’t have it to give. Then I either left too soon or stayed too long.”

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her.

“Sometimes I think that I know strangers better than I know anybody else, even myself. I learn so much about people in my job. Sometimes I think I don’t even have a life. I only have their life…I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I think you do. I understand. Maybe everybody’s like this.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

They were quiet for a while after that. Bosch leaned down and kissed her breasts, holding a nipple between his lips for a long moment. She brought her hands up and held his head to her chest. He could smell the jasmine.

“Harry, have you ever had to use your gun?”

He pulled his head up. The question seemed out of place. But through the darkness he could see her eyes on him, watching and waiting for an answer.

“Yes.”

“You killed someone.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

She said nothing else.

“What is it, Jazz?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering how that would be. How you would go on.”

“Well, all I can tell you is that it hurts. Even when there was no choice and they had to go down, it hurts. You just have to go on.”

She was silent. Whatever she had needed to hear from him he hoped she had gotten. Bosch was confused. He didn’t know why she had asked such questions and wondered if she was testing him in some way. He lay back on his pillow and waited for sleep but confusion kept it away from him. After a while she turned on the bed and put her arm over him.