Michael Connelly (69 page)

“So how’s the case going?” she asked.

“I don’t have a case anymore.”

She creased her brow and frowned.

“What happened? I thought you were bringing your suspect back.”

“I did. But it’s no longer my case. Not since my suspect turned out to be a bureau agent with an alibi.”

“Oh, Harry.” She looked down. “Are you in trouble?”

Bosch put his glass on the counter and folded his arms.

“I’m on a desk for the time being. I’ve got the squints investigating me. They think—along with the bureau—that I planted evidence against the agent. The gun. I didn’t. But I guess somebody did. When I figure out who, then I’ll be okay.”

“Harry, how did this —”

He shook his head, moved toward her and put his mouth on hers. He gently took the glass out of her hand and put it on the counter behind her.

After they made love, Bosch went into the kitchen to open a bottle of beer and make dinner. He peeled an onion and chopped it up along with a green pepper. He then cleared the cutting board into a frying pan and sautéed the mixture with butter, powdered garlic and other seasonings. He added two chicken breasts and cooked them until the meat was easy to shred and pull away from the bone with a fork. He added a can of Italian tomato sauce, a can of crushed tomatoes and more seasonings. He finished by pouring a shot of red wine from Eleanor’s bottle in. While it all simmered, he put a pot of water on to boil for rice.

It was the best dinner he knew how to cook in a kitchen. He would have preferred grilling something on the deck, but the grill had been hauled away when the original house was demolished after the earthquake. While he had replaced the house, he had not yet gotten around to getting a new grill. He decided as he mixed rice into the boiling water that if Eleanor chose to stay for a while, he would get the grill.

“Smells good.”

He turned and she was standing in the doorway. She was dressed in blue jeans and a denim shirt. Her hair was damp from the shower. Bosch looked at her and felt the desire to make love to her again.

“I hope it tastes good,” he said. “This is a new kitchen, but I don’t really know how to use it yet. Never did much cooking.”

She smiled.

“I can tell already it will be good.”

“Tell you what, will you stir this every few minutes while I take a shower?”

“Sure. I’ll set the table.”

“Okay. I was thinking we’d eat out on the deck. It doesn’t smell like paint out there.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I mean it will be nice out there. I’m not complaining about the paint. In fact, that was all a ruse, you know, to leave the wall half painted like that. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

She smiled.

“A regular Tom Sawyer, detective third grade.”

“Maybe not for long.”

His comment ruined the moment and she stopped smiling. He silently chastised himself on the way back to the bedroom.

After his shower, Bosch put the last part of his recipe into the frying pan. He took a handful of frozen peas and mixed them into the simmering chicken-and-tomato stew. As he brought the food and wine out to the picnic table on the deck, he told Eleanor, who was standing at the railing, to have a seat.

“Sorry,” he said as they settled in. “I forgot about a salad.”

“This is all I need.”

They started the meal in silence. He waited.

“I like it a lot,” she finally said. “What do you call this?”

“I don’t know. My mother just called it Chicken Special. I think that’s what it was called in a restaurant where she first had it.”

“A family recipe.”

“The only one.”

They ate quietly for a few minutes during which Bosch surreptitiously tried to watch her to see if she really enjoyed the food. He was pretty sure she did.

“Harry,” Eleanor said after a while, “who are the agents involved in this?”

“They’re from all over; Chicago, Vegas, L.A.”

“Who from L.A.?”

“Guy named John O’Grady? You know him?”

It had been more than five years since she had worked in the bureau’s L.A. field office. FBI agents moved around a lot. He doubted she would know O’Grady and she said she didn’t.

“What about John Samuels? He’s the AUSA on it. He’s from the OC strike force.”

“Samuels I know. Or knew. He was an agent for a while. Not a particularly good one. Had the law degree and when he figured out he wasn’t much of an investigator, he decided he wanted to prosecute.”

She started laughing and shook her head.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just something they used to say about him. It’s kind of gross.”

“What?”

“Does he still have his mustache?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they used to say that he could sure put a case together for prosecution, but as far as investigating it out on the street went, he couldn’t find shit if it was in his own mustache.”

She laughed again—a little too hard, Bosch thought. He smiled back.

“Maybe that’s why he became a prosecutor,” she added.

Something occurred to Bosch then and he quickly withdrew into his thoughts. Eventually he heard Eleanor’s voice.

“What?”

“You disappeared. I asked what you were thinking. I didn’t think it was that bad a joke.”

“No, I was just thinking about what a bottomless hole I’m in. About how it doesn’t really matter whether Samuels actually believes I’m dirty on this. He needs me to be dirty.”

“How so?”

“They’ve got cases to make with their undercover guy against Joey Marks and his crew. And they’ve got to be ready and able to explain how a murder weapon got to be in their guy’s house. Because if they can’t explain it, then Joey’s lawyers are going to shove it down their throats, make it look like their guy is tainted, is a killer worse than the people he was after. That gun has reasonable doubt written all over it. So the best way to explain away the gun is to blame it on the LAPD. On me. A bad cop from a bad department who found the gun in the weeds and planted it on the guy he thought did it. The jury will go along. They’ll make me out to be this year’s Mark Fuhrman.”

He saw the humor was long gone from her face now. There was obvious concern in her eyes but he thought there was also sadness. Maybe she understood, too, how well he was boxed in.

“The alternative is to prove that Joey Marks or one of his people planted the gun because they somehow knew Luke Goshen was an agent and needed to discredit him. Though that’s the likely truth, it’s a harder road to follow. It’s easier for Samuels just to throw the mud on me.”

He looked down at his half-finished dinner and put his knife and fork on the plate. He couldn’t eat any more. He took a long drink of wine and then kept the glass in his hand, ready.

“I think I’m in big trouble, Eleanor.”

The gravity of his situation was finally beginning to weigh on him. He’d been operating on his faith that the truth would win out and now clearly saw how little truth would have to do with the outcome. He looked up at her. Their eyes connected and he saw that she was about to cry. He tried to smile.

“Hey, I’ll think of something,” he said. “I might be riding a desk for the time being, but I’m not taking both oars out of the water. I’m going to figure this out.”

She nodded but her face still looked distraught.

“Harry, remember when you found me in the casino that first night and we went to the bar at Caesar’s and you tried to talk to me? Remember what you said about doing things differently if you had the chance to go back?”

“Yes, I remember.”

She wiped her eyes with her palms, before any tears could show.

“I have to tell you something.”

“You can tell me anything, Eleanor.”

“What I told you about me paying Quillen and the street tax and all of that . . . there’s more to it.”

She looked at him with intensity now, trying to read his reaction before going further. But Bosch sat stone still and waited.

“When I first went to Vegas after getting out of Frontera, I didn’t have a place or a car and I didn’t know anyone. I just thought I’d give it a shot. You know, playing cards. And there was a girl I knew from Frontera. Her name was Patsy Quillen. She told me to look up her uncle—that was Terry Quillen—and that he’d probably stake me after he checked me out and saw me play. Patsy wrote him and gave me an introduction.”

Bosch sat silently, listening. He now had an idea where this was going but couldn’t figure out why she was telling him.

“So he staked me. I got the apartment and some money to play with. He never said anything about Joey Marks, though I should have known the money came from somewhere. It always does. Anyway, later, when he finally told me who had really staked me, he said I shouldn’t worry because the organization he worked for didn’t want me to pay the nut back. What they wanted was just the interest. Two hundred a week. The tax. I didn’t think I had a choice. I’d already taken the money. So I started paying. In the beginning it was tough. I didn’t have it a couple times and it was double the next week plus that week’s regular tax. You get behind and there’s no way out.”

She looked down at her hands and clasped them on the table.

“What did they make you do?” Bosch asked quietly, also averting his eyes.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “I was lucky . . . they knew about me. I mean, that I had been an agent. They figured they could use my skills, as dormant as they were. So they had me just watch people. Mostly in casinos. But there were a few times I followed them outside. Most of the time I didn’t even know exactly who they were or why they wanted the information, but I just watched, sometimes played at the same tables, and reported to Terry what the guy was winning or losing, who he was talking to, any nuances of his game . . . you know, things like that.”

She was just rambling now, putting off the meat of what she had to tell him, but Bosch didn’t say anything. He let her go on.

“A couple days I watched Tony Aliso for them. They wanted to know how much he was dropping at the tables and where he was going, the usual stuff. But as it turned out, he wasn’t losing. He actually was quite good at cards.”

“Where did you watch him go?”

“Oh, he’d go out to dinner, to the strip club. He’d run errands, things like that.”

“You ever see him with a girl?”

“One time. I followed him on foot from the Mirage into Caesar’s and then into the shopping arcade. He went to Spago for a late lunch. He was alone and then the girl showed up. She was young. I thought at first it was like an escort thing, but then I could tell, he knew her. After lunch they went back to his hotel room for a while and when they came out, they took his rental and he took her to get a manicure and to buy cigarettes and to a bank while she opened an account. Just errands. Then they went to the strip club in North Vegas. When he left, he was alone. I figured then she was a dancer.”

Bosch nodded.

“Were you watching Tony last Friday night?” Bosch asked.

“No. That was just coincidence that we ended up at the same table. It was because he was waiting to go to the high-stakes table. I actually hadn’t done anything for them in a month or so, other than pay the weekly tax, until . . . Terry . . .”

Her voice trailed off. They were finally at the point of no return.

“Until Terry what, Eleanor?”

She looked toward the fading horizon. The lights across the Valley were coming on and the sky was pink neon mixed with gray paint. Bosch kept his eyes on her. She spoke while still watching the end of the day.

“Quillen came to my apartment after you took me home from Metro. He took me to the house where you found me. They wouldn’t tell me why and they told me not to leave. They said nobody would get hurt if I just did what I was told. I sat around that place for two days. They only put the handcuffs on me that last night. It was like they knew you’d be coming then.”

She let a beat of silence follow. It was there if Bosch wanted to use it but he didn’t say a word.

“I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that the whole thing was something less than an abduction.”

She looked back down at her hands now.

“And that’s obviously why you didn’t want us to call out Metro,” Bosch said quietly.

She nodded.

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you everything before. I’m really sorry, Harry. I . . .”

Now Bosch felt his own words sticking in his throat. Her story was understandable and believable. He even felt for her and understood that she was in her own bottomless pit. He saw how she had believed she had no choices. What he couldn’t see, and what hurt him, was why she couldn’t tell him everything from the start.

“Why couldn’t you tell me, Eleanor?” he managed to get out. “I mean right away. Why didn’t you tell me that night?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I wanted . . . I guess I hoped it would just go away and you would never have to know.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

She looked right at him.

“Because I hated not telling you everything . . . and because while I was there at that house I heard something that you need to know now.”

Bosch closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Harry. Very sorry.”

He nodded. He was, too. He washed his hands over his face. He didn’t want to hear this but knew he had to. His mind raced, jumping between feelings of betrayal and confusion and sympathy. One moment his thoughts were of Eleanor and the next they were on the case. They knew. Someone had told Joey Marks about Eleanor and him. He thought of Felton and Iverson, then Baxter and every cop he had seen at Metro. Someone had fed Marks the information and they used Eleanor as bait for him. But why? Why the whole charade? He opened his eyes and looked at Eleanor with a blank stare.

“What was it that you heard and that I need to know?”

“It was the first night. I was kept in that back room, where the TV was, where you came and got me. I was kept in there and the Samoans were there, in and out. But from time to time there were people in other parts of the house. I heard them talking.”

“Gussie and Quillen?”

“No, Quillen left. I know his voice and it wasn’t him. And I don’t think it was Gussie. I think it was Joey Marks and someone else, probably the lawyer, Torrino. Whoever it was, I heard the one man call the other Joe at one point. That’s how come I think it was Marks.”