City of Bones (22 page)

“Sheila.”

It was as if she had not spoken the name in so long she had to try it out to see if it still worked.

“Mrs. Waters, Arthur disappeared in nineteen eighty. Did you know about that?”

She shook her head.

“I was gone. I left almost ten years before that.”

“And you had no contact with your family at all?”

“I thought . . .”

She didn’t finish. Bosch waited.

“Mrs. Waters?”

“I couldn’t take them with me. I was young and couldn’t handle . . . the responsibility. I ran away. I admit that. I ran away. I thought that it would be best for them to not hear from me, to not even know about me.”

Bosch nodded in a way he hoped conveyed that he understood and agreed with her thinking at the time. It didn’t matter that he did not. It didn’t matter that his own mother had faced the same hardship of having a child too soon and under difficult circumstances but had clung to and protected him with a fierceness that inspired his life.

“You wrote them letters before you left? Your children, I mean.”

“How did you know that?”

“Sheila told us. What did you say in the letter to Arthur?”

“I just . . . I just told him I loved him and I’d always think about him, but I couldn’t be with him. I can’t really remember everything I said. Is it important?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. Your son had a letter with him. It might have been the one from you. It’s deteriorated. We probably won’t ever know. In the divorce petition you filed a few years after leaving home, you cited physical abuse as a cause of action. I need you to tell us about that. What was the physical abuse?”

She shook her head again, this time in a dismissive way, as if the question was annoying or stupid.

“What do you think? Sam liked to bat me around. He’d get drunk and it was like walking on eggshells. Anything could set him off, the baby crying, Sheila talking too loud. And I was always the target.”

“He would hit you?”

“Yes, he would hit me. He’d become a monster. It was one of the reasons I had to leave.”

“But you left the kids with the monster,” Edgar said.

This time she didn’t react as if struck. She fixed her pale eyes on Edgar with a deathly look that made Edgar turn his indignant eyes away. She spoke very calmly to him.

“Who are you to judge anyone? I had to survive and I could not take them with me. If I had tried none of us would have survived.”

“I’m sure they understood that,” Edgar said.

The woman stood up again.

“I don’t think I am going to talk to you anymore. I’m sure you can find your way out.”

She headed toward the arched doorway at the far end of the room.

“Mrs. Waters,” Bosch said. “If you don’t talk to us now, we will go get that court order.”

“Fine,” she said without looking back. “Do it. I’ll have one of my attorneys handle it.”

“And it will become public record at the courthouse in town.”

It was a gamble but Bosch thought it might stop her. He guessed that her life in Palm Springs was built squarely atop her secrets. And that she wouldn’t want anybody going down into the basement. The social gossips might, like Edgar, have a hard time viewing her actions and motives the way she did. Deep inside, she had a hard time herself, even after so many years.

She stopped under the archway, composed herself and came back to the couch. Looking at Bosch, she said, “I will only talk to you. I want him to leave.”

Bosch shook his head.

“He’s my partner. It’s our case. He stays, Mrs. Waters.”

“I will still answer questions from you only.”

“Fine. Please sit down.”

She did so, this time sitting on the side of the couch farthest from Edgar and closest to Bosch.

“I know you want to help us find your son’s killer. We’ll try to be as fast as we can here.”

She nodded once.

“Just tell us about your ex-husband.”

“The whole sordid story?” she asked rhetorically. “I’ll give you the short version. I met him in an acting class. I was eighteen. He was seven years older, had already done some film work and to top it off was very, very handsome. You could say I quickly fell under his spell. And I was pregnant before I was nineteen.”

Bosch checked Edgar to see if he was writing any of this down. Edgar caught the look and started writing.

“We got married and Sheila was born. I didn’t pursue a career. I have to admit I wasn’t that dedicated. Acting just seemed like something to do at the time. I had the looks but soon I found out every girl in Hollywood had the looks. I was happy to stay at home.”

“How did your husband do at it?”

“At first, very well. He got a recurring role on
First Infantry.
Did you ever watch it?”

Bosch nodded. It was a World War II television drama that ran in the mid to late sixties, until public sentiment over the Vietnam War and war in general led to declining ratings and it was cancelled. The show followed an army platoon as it moved behind German lines each week. Bosch had liked the show as a kid and always tried to watch it, whether he was in a foster home or the youth hall.

“Sam was one of the Germans. His blond hair and Aryan looks. He was on it the last two years. Right up until I got pregnant with Arthur.”

She let some silence punctuate that.

“Then the show got cancelled because of that stupid war in Vietnam. It got cancelled and Sam had trouble finding work. He was typecast as this German. He really started drinking then. And hitting me. He’d spend his days going to casting calls and getting nothing. He’d then spend his nights drinking and being angry at me.”

“Why you?”

“Because I was the one who had gotten pregnant. First with Sheila and then with Arthur. Neither was planned and it all added up to too much pressure on him. He took it out on whoever was close.”

“He assaulted you.”

“Assaulted? It sounds so clinical. But yes, he assaulted me. Many times.”

“Did you ever see him strike the children?”

It was the key question they had come to ask. Everything else was window dressing.

“Not specifically,” she said. “When I was carrying Arthur he hit me once. In the stomach. It broke my water. I went into labor about six weeks before my due date. Arthur didn’t even weigh five pounds when he was born.”

Bosch waited. She was talking in a way that hinted she would say more as long as he gave her the space. He looked out through the sliding door behind her at the golf course. There was a deep sand trap guarding a putting green. A man in a red shirt and plaid pants was in the trap, flailing with a club at an unseen ball. Sprays of sand were flying up out of the trap onto the green. But no ball.

In the distance three other golfers were getting out of two carts parked on the other side of the green. The lip of the sand trap shielded them from view of the man in the red shirt. As Bosch watched, the man checked up and down the fairway for witnesses, then reached down and grabbed his ball. He threw it up onto the green, giving it the nice arc of a perfectly hit shot. He then climbed out of the trap, holding his club with both hands still locked in their grip, a posture that suggested he had just hit the ball.

Finally, Christine Waters began to talk again and Bosch looked back at her.

“Arthur only weighed five pounds when he was born. He was small right up through that first year and very sickly. We never talked about it but I think we both knew that what Sam had done had hurt that boy. He just wasn’t right.”

“Aside from that incident when he struck you, you never saw him strike Arthur or Sheila?”

“He might have spanked Sheila. I don’t really remember. He never hit the children. I mean, he had me there to hit.”

Bosch nodded, the unspoken conclusion being that once she was gone, who knows who became the target? Bosch thought of the bones laid out on the autopsy table and all the injuries Dr. Golliher had catalogued.

“Is my hus—is Sam under arrest?”

Bosch looked at her.

“No. We’re in the fact-finding stage here. The indication from your son’s remains is that there is a history of chronic physical abuse. We’re just trying to figure things out.”

“And Sheila? Was she . . . ?”

“We haven’t specifically asked her. We will. Mrs. Waters, when you were struck by your husband, was it always with his hand?”

“Sometimes he would hit me with things. A shoe once, I remember. He held me on the floor and hit me with it. And once he threw his briefcase at me. It hit me in the side.”

She shook her head.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just that briefcase. He carried it with him to all his auditions. Like he was so important and had so much going on. And all he ever had in it were a few head shots and a flask.”

Bitterness burned in her voice, even after so many years.

“Did you ever go to a hospital or an emergency room? Is there any physical record of the abuse?”

She shook her head.

“He never hurt me enough that I had to go. Except when I had Arthur, and then I lied. I said I fell and my water broke. You see, Detective, it wasn’t something I wanted the world to know about.”

Bosch nodded.

“When you left, was that planned? Or did you just go?”

She didn’t answer for a long moment as she watched the memory first on her inside screen.

“I wrote the letters to my children long before I left. I carried them in my purse and waited for the right time. On the night I left, I put them under their pillows and left with my purse and only the clothes I was wearing. And my car that my father had given us when we got married. That was it. I’d had enough. I told him we needed medicine for Arthur. He had been drinking. He told me to go out and get it.”

“And you never went back.”

“Never. About a year later, before I came out to the Springs, I drove by the house at night. Saw the lights on. I didn’t stop.”

Bosch nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else to ask. While the woman’s memory of that early time in her life was good, what she was remembering wasn’t going to help make a case against her ex-husband for a murder committed ten years after she had last seen him. Maybe Bosch had known that all along—that she wouldn’t be a vital part of the case. Maybe he had just wanted to take the measure of a woman who had abandoned her children, leaving them with a man she believed was a monster.

“What does she look like?”

Bosch was momentarily taken aback by her question.

“My daughter.”

“Um, she’s blonde like you. A little taller, heavier. No children, not married.”

“When will Arthur be buried?”

“I don’t know. You would have to call the medical examiner’s office. Or you could probably check with Sheila to see if . . .”

He stopped. He couldn’t get involved in mending the thirty-year gaps in people’s lives.

“I think we’re finished here, Mrs. Waters. We appreciate your cooperation.”

“Definitely,” Edgar said, the sarcasm in his tone making its mark.

“You came all this way to ask so few questions.”

“I think that’s because you have so few answers,” Edgar said.

They walked to the door and she followed a few paces behind. Outside, under the portico, Bosch looked back at the woman standing in the open doorway. They held each other’s eyes for a moment. He tried to think of something to say. But he had nothing for her. She closed the door.

28

T
HEY pulled into the station lot shortly before eleven. It had been a sixteen-hour day that had netted very little in terms of evidence that could carry a case toward prosecution. Still, Bosch was satisfied. They had the identification and that was the center of the wheel. All things would come from that.

Edgar said good night and went straight to his car without going inside the station. Bosch wanted to check with the watch sergeant to see if anything had come up with Johnny Stokes. He also wanted to check for messages and knew that if he hung around until eleven he might see Julia Brasher when she got off shift. He wanted to talk to her.

The station was quiet. The midnight shift cops were up in roll call. The incoming and outgoing watch sergeants would be up there as well. Bosch went down the hallway to the detective bureau. The lights were out, which was in violation of an order from the Office of the Chief of Police. The chief had mandated that the lights in Parker Center and every division station should never be off. His goal was to let the public know that the fight against crime never slept. The result was that the lights glowed brightly every night in empty police offices across the city.

Bosch flicked on the row of lights over the homicide table and went to his spot. There were a number of pink phone message slips and he looked through these, but all were from reporters or related to other cases he had pending. He tossed the reporters’ messages in the trash can and put the others in his top drawer to follow up on the next day.

There were two department dispatch envelopes waiting on the desk for him. The first contained Golliher’s report and Bosch put it aside for reading later. He picked up the second envelope and saw it was from SID. He realized he had forgotten to call Antoine Jesper about the skateboard.

He was about to open the envelope when he noticed it had been dropped on top of a folded piece of paper on his calendar blotter. He unfolded it and read the short message. He knew it was from Julia, though she had not signed it.

Where are you, tough guy?

He had forgotten that he had told her to come by the squad room before she started her shift. He smiled at the note but felt bad about forgetting. He also thought once more about Edgar’s admonishment to be careful with the relationship.

He refolded the page and put it in his drawer. He wondered how Julia would react to what he wanted to talk about. He was dead tired from the long hours but didn’t want to wait until the next day.

The dispatch envelope from SID contained a one-page evidence analysis report from Jesper. Bosch read the report quickly. Jesper had confirmed that the board was made by Boneyard Boards Inc., a Huntington Beach manufacturer. The model was called a “Boney Board.” The particular model at hand was made from February 1978 until June 1986, when design variations created a slight change in the board’s nose.