The Black Box (12 page)

“I had him moved down to the D bureau. You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

Bosch saw a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on a counter behind the patrol lieutenant’s desk. It was open and there were only two doughnuts left, probably sitting there since the morning’s roll call.

“Hey, does anybody mind?”

He pointed toward the doughnuts.

“Knock yourself out,” Gant said.

Bosch took a glazed doughnut and ate it in four bites while he followed Gant down the back hallway of the station to the detective bureau.

They entered the sprawling squad room of desks, file cabinets, and piles of paperwork. Most of the desks were empty and Bosch figured the detectives were out working cases or on lunch break. He saw a tissue box on one of the empty desks and pulled out three tissues to wipe the sugar off his fingers.

A patrol officer was sitting outside the door of one of the two interrogation rooms. He stood up as Gant and Bosch
approached. Gant introduced him as Chris Mercer, the patrolman who had spotted 2 Small Washburn.

“Nice work,” Bosch said, shaking his hand. “Did you read him the words?”

Meaning his constitutional rights and protections.

“I did.”

“Great.”

“Thank you, Chris,” Gant said. “We’ll take it from here.”

The officer gave a mock salute and headed out. Gant looked at Bosch.

“Any particular way you want to do this?”

“We have anything on him besides the warrant?”

“A little. He had a half ounce of weed on him.”

Bosch frowned. It wasn’t much.

“He also had six hundred dollars cash.”

Bosch nodded. That made things a little better. He might be able to work with the money, depending on how smart Washburn was about current drug laws.

“I’m going to run a game on him, see if I can get him to hurt himself. I think it’s our best shot. Put him in a corner so he has to talk his way out.”

“Okay, I’ll play along if you need it.”

On the wall between the doors to the two interrogation rooms was a documents file. Bosch pulled a standard rights-waiver form, folded it, and put it in his inside coat pocket.

“Open it and let me go in first,” he said.

Gant did so and Bosch walked into the interrogation room with a dark look on his face. Washburn was sitting at a small table, his wrists bound by snap ties to the back of his chair. As advertised, he was a small man who wore baggy clothes
to help disguise how little he was. On the table was a plastic evidence bag containing the items found in his clothing at the time of his arrest. Bosch took the chair directly across from him. Gant pulled the third chair back to the door and sat down as if guarding it. He was a few feet behind Bosch’s left shoulder.

Bosch lifted the evidence bag and looked through it. A wallet, cell phone, set of keys, the money roll, and the plastic bag containing the half ounce of marijuana.

“Charles Washburn,” he said. “They call you Two Small, right? With a number two. That’s clever. Was that you who came up with that?”

He looked up from the bag to Washburn, who didn’t reply. Bosch looked back down at the evidence bag and shook his head.

“Well, we’ve got a problem here, Two Small. You know what the problem is?”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“Well, you know what I’m not seeing in this bag?”

“Don’t matter to me.”

“I’m not seeing a pipe or even any papers. And then you got this big wad of cash in here with the reefer. You know what all that adds up to now, don’t you?”

“It adds up to you letting me call my lawyer. And don’t bother talking to me ’cause I got nothin’ to say to your ass. Just bring me the phone and I call my guy up.”

Through the bag Bosch pushed the main button on 2 Small’s phone, and the screen came to life. As he expected, the phone was password protected.

“Oops, you need a password.”

Bosch held it up for Washburn to see.

“Give it to me and I’ll call your lawyer for you.”

“No, that’s okay. Put me back in the tank and I’ll use the pay phone in there.”

“Why not this one? You probably have your guy on speed dial, don’t you?”

“’Cause that ain’t my phone and I don’t know the password.”

Bosch knew the phone probably had call information and contact lists that could lead to further trouble for Washburn. Two Small had no choice but to deny ownership, even if it was laughable.

“Really? That’s sort of strange, since this came out of your pocket. Along with the weed and the money.”

“You people put that shit on me. I want to call a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded and turned to Gant and addressed him. He was strolling along a very thin constitutional line here.

“You know what that means, Jordy?”

“Tell me.”

“It means this guy had a controlled substance in one pocket and a wad of cash in the other. See, not carrying a pipe was a mistake. Because without carrying a means of personal consumption, the law views that as possession with intent to sell. And that bumps it up to a felony. His lawyer will probably tell him all of that.”

“What are you talking about, man?” Washburn protested. “That idn’t even half a lid. I ain’t selling it and you fucking know it.”

Bosch looked back at him.

“Are you talking to me?” he asked. “Because you just told
me you wanted a lawyer, and when you say that, I gotta shut it down. You want to talk to me now?”

“All I’m sayin’ is I wasn’t sellin’ shit.”

“Do you want to talk to me?”

“Yeah, I’ll talk to you if it gets this bullshit taken care of.”

“Well, then, we gotta do it right.”

Bosch pulled the rights waiver out of his jacket pocket and had Washburn sign it. Bosch doubted his play would stand up to Supreme Court scrutiny but he didn’t think it would ever come to that.

“Okay, Two Small, let’s talk,” he said. “All I know here is what’s in the bag. It says you’re a drug dealer, and that’s how we have to charge you.”

Bosch saw Washburn flex the muscles in his thin shoulders and hang his head down. Bosch checked his watch.

“But don’t get all anxious about that, Two Small. Because the weed is the least of my worries. It’s just something I’m going to be able to hold you with, because my guess is that a guy who doesn’t pay his child support isn’t going to have enough dough to put up a twenty-five-grand bond.”

Bosch raised the bag containing the weed again.

“This will keep you inside while I work out this other thing I’ve got on my plate.”

Washburn looked up.

“Yeah, bullshit. I’ll be out. I got people.”

“Yeah, well, people seem to disappear when it’s time to put up money.”

Bosch turned and looked at Gant.

“You ever notice that, Jordy?”

“I have. People seem to scatter, especially when they know
a brother is going down. They think, why bother putting up a bond if he ain’t goin’ nowhere but the slam?”

Bosch nodded as he looked back at Washburn.

“What is this bullshit?” Washburn said. “Why you on me, man? What I do?”

Bosch drummed the fingers of one hand on the table.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Two Small. I work in downtown and I wouldn’t come all the way down here just to bust somebody’s chops on a dime bag. See, I work homicide. I work cold cases. You know what that means? I work old cases. Years old. Sometimes twenty years old.”

Bosch gauged Washburn for a reaction but didn’t register a change.

“Like the one we’re going to talk about.”

“I don’t know nothing about no homicide. You got the wrong motherfucker there.”

“Yeah? Really? That’s not what I heard. I guess some people have been talking some shit about you, then.”

“That’s right. So, take that shit outta here.”

Bosch leaned back as if maybe he was considering following Washburn’s order, but then he shook his head once.

“No, I can’t do that. I got a witness, Charles. Actually, an ear witness—you know what that is?”

Washburn looked away when he answered.

“The only thing I know is that you’re full of shit.”

“I got a witness who heard you cop to the crime, man. She said you told her. You were acting like a big man and told her how you put the white bitch against the wall and popped her. She said you were real proud of it because it was going to grease you right into the Sixties.”

Washburn tried to stand up but his bindings pulled him right back into his seat.

“White bitch? Man, what the fuck you talking? Was that Latitia you talking about? She’s full a shit. She’s just trying to cause me trouble on account I ain’t paid her in four months. Her lyin’ ass will say anything.”

Bosch leaned his elbows down on the table and moved closer to Washburn.

“Yeah, well, I don’t name informants, Charles. But I can tell you that you’ve got a big problem here, because I did some checking based on what I was told, and it turns out that in nineteen ninety-two, a white woman was murdered in the alley right behind your house. So this isn’t no made-up shit.”

Washburn’s eyes lit with recognition.

“You mean that reporter bitch during the riots? You ain’t putting that on me, man. I’m clean on that and you can tell your ear witness that she keep lyin’ and she’s going to get fucked up.”

“Charles, I am not sure you want to be threatening witnesses in front of two law enforcement officers. Now you see if something were to happen to Latitia, whether or not she was a witness, you are going to be the first person we come after, you understand?”

Washburn said nothing and Bosch pressed on.

“Actually, I have more than one witness, Charles. I’ve got another person from the neighborhood who said you had a gun back then. A Beretta, as a matter of fact, and that’s just the kind of gun used to kill the woman in the alley.”

“
That
gun? I found that gun in my backyard, man!”

There. Washburn had made an admission. But he also had
given a plausible explanation. It seemed too genuine and extemporaneous to be made up. Bosch had to go with it.

“Your yard? You want me to believe you just found it in your backyard?”

“Look, man, I was sixteen years old. My moms wouldn’t even let me go outside during the riot. She had a lock on my bedroom door from the outside and bars on the window. She put me in there and locked me in, man. You go check with her on it.”

“So, when did you find this gun?”

“When it was over, man. All over. I went out back and there it was in the grass when I was mowin’ the lawn. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t even know about that killin’ till my moms told me some police came ’n’ knocked on the door.”

“Did you tell your moms about the gun?”

“No. Fuck, no, I wasn’t going to tell her about no gun. And by then I didn’t even have it no more.”

Bosch made a furtive glance over his shoulder to Gant. Harry was moving out of his zone here. Washburn’s story had the desperation and detail of truth. Whoever had shot Jespersen could’ve tossed the murder weapon over the fence to get rid of it.

Gant picked up on the glance and stood up. He pulled his chair over next to Bosch’s. He was an equal player now.

“Charles, you’ve got a serious thing here,” he said in a tone that imparted that seriousness perfectly. “You have to know that we know more about this than you ever could. You can dig yourself out of a hole here if you don’t bullshit us. If you lie, we’re going to know it.”

“Okay,” Washburn said meekly. “What I gotta say?”

“You gotta tell us what you did with that gun twenty years ago.”

“I gave it away. First I hid it, then I gave it away.”

“To who?”

“A guy I knew but he’s gone now.”

“I’m not going to ask you again. Who?”

“His name was Trumond but I never knew if that was his real name or not. On the street they called him True Story.”

“Is that a nickname? What was his last name?”

Gant was following standard interview technique in asking some questions he already knew the answers to. It helped gauge the interview subject’s veracity and sometimes provided a strategic advantage when the subject thought the interviewer knew less than he actually did.

“I don’t know, man,” Washburn said. “But he’s dead now. He got clipped a few years back.”

“Who clipped him?”

“I don’t know. He was street. Somebody jus’ took ’m down, you know? It happens.”

Gant leaned back in his chair, and this was a signal to Bosch to take the lead back if he wanted it.

He did.

“Tell me about the gun.”

“Like you said, a Beretta. It was black.”

“Where exactly did you find it in your yard?”

“I don’t know, by the swing set. It was just there in the grass, man. I didn’t see it and ran over it with the lawn mower, put a big fucking scratch on the metal.”

“Where was the scratch?”

“Right down the side of the barrel.”

Bosch knew the scratch could be an identifier if the gun was ever found. More important, the scratch would help confirm Washburn’s story.

“Did the weapon still work?”

“Oh, yeah, it worked. Worked fine. I fired it right there, put a slug in one of the fence posts. Surprised me, I was hardly pullin’ the trigger.”

“Your mother hear the shot?”

“Yeah, she came out but I’d put it in my pants under my shirt. I told her it was the lawn mower backfiring.”

Bosch wondered about the slug in the fence post. If it was still there, it would further corroborate the story. He moved on.

“All right, so you said your mother had you locked up in your room during the riots, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, so when did you find the gun? The riots pretty much ended after three days. May first was the last night. Do you remember when you found the gun?”

Washburn shook his head like he was annoyed.

“That’s too far back, man. I can’t remember what day. I just remember I found the gun is all.”

“Why did you give it to Tru Story?”

“’Cause he was the street boss. I give it to him.”

“You mean he was a boss in the Rolling Sixties Crips, correct?”

“Yes, correct!”

He said it in a mocking white man’s voice. It was clear he wanted to talk to Gant and not Bosch. Harry glanced toward Gant and he took the lead back.