The Black Echo (15 page)

That was it. Bosch closed the file but kept the photo of Sharkey. He thanked Thelia King and left the small office. He was walking through the station’s rear hallway, past the lockup benches, when he placed the familiarity in the photo. The hair was longer now and in dreadlocks, the defiance crowding out the hurt in the face, but Sharkey had been the kid who was cuffed to the juvie bench early that morning. Bosch felt sure of it. Thelia had missed it on the computer search because the arrest had not yet been logged in. Bosch cut into the watch commander’s office, told the lieutenant what he was looking for and was led to a box labeled A.M. Watch. Bosch looked through the reports stacked in the box until he found the paperwork on Edward Niese.

Sharkey had been picked up at 4A.M. loitering near a newsstand on Vine. A patrol officer thought he was hustling. After he grabbed him he ran a computer check and learned he was a runaway. Bosch checked the day’s arrest sheet and learned the kid had been held until 9A.M., when his probation officer came and got him. Bosch called the PO at Sylmar Juvenile Hall but learned that Sharkey had already been arraigned before a juvenile court referee and was released to the custody of his mother.

“And that’s his biggest problem,” the PO said. “He’ll be gone by tonight, back on the street. I guarantee it. And I told the ref that, but he wasn’t going to book the kid into the monkey house just ’cause he was caught loitering and his mother happens to be a telephone whore.”

“A what?” Bosch asked.

“It should be in the file. Yeah, while Sharkey’s on the street, dear old mom is at home telling guys on the phone how she’s gonna piss in their mouths and put rubber bands on their dicks. Advertises in skin mags. She gets forty bucks for fifteen minutes. Takes MasterCard, Visa, puts ’em on hold while she checks on another line to make sure the number is valid and they got credit. Anyway, she’s been doing it, near as I can tell, five years now. Edward’s formative years were listening to this shit. I mean, no wonder the kid’s a scammer and runner. What do you expect?”

“How long ago did he leave with her?”

“ ’Bout noon. You want to catch him there, you better go. You got the address?”

“Yeah.”

“And Bosch, one thing: Don’t be expecting no whore when you get there. His mom, she doesn’t look like the part she plays on the phone, if you know what I mean. Her voice might do the job but her looks would scare a blind man.”

Bosch thanked him for the warning and hung up. He took the 101 out to the Valley and then the 405 north to the 118 and west. He got off in Chatsworth and drove into the rocky bluffs at the top corner of the Valley. There was a condominium community built on what he knew was once a movie ranch. It had been one of the places Charlie Manson and his crew used to hide out. Parts of one member of that crew’s body were supposedly still missing and buried around there someplace. It was near dusk when Bosch got there. People were off work and getting home. A lot of traffic on the development’s thin roads. A lot of closing doors. A lot of calls to Sharkey’s mother. Bosch was too late.

“I have no time to talk to more police,” Veronica Niese said when she answered the door and looked at the badge. “As soon as I get him home he is out the door again. I don’t know where he goes. You tell me. That’s your job. I have three calls waiting, one long distance. I gotta go.”

She was in her late forties, fat and wrinkled. She obviously wore a wig and the dilation of her eyes did not match. She had the dirty-socks smell of a speed addict. Her callers were better off with their fantasies, with just a voice with which to construct a body and face.

“Mrs. Niese, I’m not looking for your son for something he did. I need to talk to him because of something he saw. He could possibly be in danger.”

“Oh, bullshit. I’ve heard that line before.”

She closed the door and he just stood there. After a few moments he could hear her on the phone, and he thought it was a French accent but couldn’t be sure. He could only make out a few of the sentences but they made him blush. He thought about Sharkey and realized he wasn’t really a runaway, because there was nothing here to run away from. He left the doorstep and went back to the car. That would be it for the day. And he was out of time. Lewis and Clarke must have paper out on him by now. He’d be assigned to a desk at IAD by morning. He drove back to the station and signed out. Everyone was already gone and there were no messages on his desk, not even from his lawyer. On the way home he stopped by the Lucky and bought four bottles of beer, a couple from Mexico, a lager from England called Old Nick and a Henry’s.

He expected to find a message from Lewis and Clarke on his phone tape when he got home. He wasn’t wrong, but the message was not what he expected.

“I know you’re there, so listen,” said a voice Bosch recognized as Clarke’s. “They can change their mind but they can’t change ours. We’ll see you around.”

There were no other messages. He played Clarke’s message over three times. Something had gone wrong for them. They must have been called off. Could his lame threat to the FBI to go to the media have worked? Even as he thought the question, he doubted the answer was yes. So then, what happened? He sat down in the watch chair and began drinking the beers, the Mexicans first, and looking through the war scrapbook he had forgotten to put away. When he had opened it Sunday night he had opened a dark memory. He now found himself entranced by it, the distance of time having faded the threat as well as the photos. Sometime after dark the phone rang and Harry picked it up before the tape machine.

“Well,” said Lieutenant Harvey Pounds, “the FBI now thinks they might have been too harsh. They’ve reassessed and want you back in. You are to aid their investigation in any way they request. That comes down from administration, Parker Center.”

Pounds’s voice betrayed his astonishment at the reversal.

“What about IAD?” Bosch asked.

“Nothing filed on you. Like I said, the FBI is backing away, so is IAD. For now.”

“So I am back in.”

“You’re back in. Not my choice. Just so you know, they went over me, because I told them to blow it out their collective asses. Something about this stinks, but I guess that will have to wait for later. For now, you are on detached assignment. You are working with them until further notice.”

“What about Edgar?”

“Don’t worry about Edgar. He’s not your concern anymore.”

“Pounds, you act like you did me a favor putting me on the homicide table when they kicked me out from Parker Center. I did you the favor, man. So if you’re looking for apologies from me, you aren’t getting any.”

“Bosch, I’m not looking for anything from you. You fucked yourself. Only problem with that is that you may have fucked me in the process. If it was up to me, you wouldn’t be near this case. You’d be checking pawnshop lists.”

“But it isn’t up to you, is it?”

He hung up before Pounds could reply. He stood there thinking for a few moments and his hand was still on the phone when it rang again.

“What?”

“Rough day, right?” Eleanor Wish said.

“I thought it was somebody else.”

“Well, I guess you’ve heard.”

“I heard.”

“You’ll be working with me.”

“How come you called off the dogs?”

“Simple, we want to keep the investigation out of the papers.”

“There’s more to it.”

She didn’t say anything but she didn’t hang up. Finally, he thought of something to say.

“Tomorrow, what do I do?”

“Come see me in the morning. We’ll go from there.”

Bosch hung up. He thought about her, and about how he didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t walk away now. He went into the kitchen and took the bottle of Old Nick from the refrigerator.

Lewis stood with his back to the passing traffic, using his wide body to block the sound from intruding into the pay phone.

“He starts with the FBI-er, the bureau, tomorrow morning,” Lewis said. “What do you want us to do?”

Irving didn’t answer at first. Lewis envisioned him on the other end of the line, jaw worked into a clench. Popeye face, Lewis thought and smirked. Clarke walked over from the car then and whispered, “What’s so funny? What did he say?”

Lewis batted him away and made a don’t-bother-me face at his partner.

“Who was that?” Irving asked.

“It was Clarke, sir. He’s just anxious to know our assignment.”

“Did Lieutenant Pounds talk to the subject?”

“Yes sir,” Lewis said, wondering if Irving was taping the call. “The lieutenant said the, uh, subject has been told he is to work with the F-the bureau. They are consolidating the murder and the bank investigations. He is working with Special Agent Eleanor Wish.”

“What’s his scam…?” Irving said, though no reply was expected, or offered by Lewis. There was silence on the phone line for a while because Lewis knew better than to interrupt Irving’s thoughts. He saw Clarke approaching the phone booth again and he waved him away and shook his head as if he were dealing with an impetuous child. The doorless phone booth was at the bottom of Woodrow Wilson Drive, next to the Barham Boulevard crossing over the Hollywood Freeway. Lewis heard the sound of a semi thunder by on the freeway and felt warm air blow into the booth. He looked up at the lights of the houses on the hillside and tried to pinpoint which one came from Bosch’s stilt house. It was impossible to tell. The hill looked like a giant, fat Christmas tree with too many lights.

“He must have some kind of leverage on them,” Irving finally said. “He’s muscled his way into it. I’ll tell you what your assignment is. You two stay on him. Not so he knows. But stay with him. He is up to something. Find out what. And build your one point eighty-one case along the way. The Federal Bureau of Investigation may have withdrawn its complaint, but we will not back off.”

“What about Pounds, you still want him copied?”

“That is Lieutenant Pounds, Detective Lewis. And yes, copy him your daily surveillance log. That will be enough for him.”

Irving hung up without another word.

“Very good, sir,” Lewis said to the dead phone. He didn’t want Clarke to know he had been slighted. “We’ll stay with it. Thank you, sir. Good night.”

Then he, too, hung up, privately embarrassed that his commander had not deemed it necessary to say good night to him. Clarke quickly walked up.

“So?”

“So we pick him up again tomorrow morning. Bring your piss bottle.”

“That’s it? Just surveillance?”

“At this time.”

“Shit. I want to search that fucker’s house. Break some stuff. He’s probably got the shit from that heist sitting up there.”

“If he was involved, I doubt he would be so stupid. We sit back for now. If he’s dirty on this, we’ll see.”

“Oh, he’s dirty. Don’t worry.”

“We’ll see.”

Sharkey sat on the concrete block wall that fronted a parking lot on Santa Monica Boulevard. He closely watched the lighted front of the 7-Eleven across the street, checking out who was coming and who was going. Mostly tourist trade and couples. No singles yet. None that fit the bill. The boy called Arson sauntered over and said, “This ain’t going nowhere, budro.”

Arson’s hair was red and waxed into spiky flames. He wore black jeans and a dirty black T-shirt. He was smoking a Salem. He wasn’t stoned but he was hungry. Sharkey looked at him and then past him to where the third boy, the one known as Mojo, sat on the ground near the bikes. Mojo was shorter and wider, with his black hair slicked back in a knob behind his head. Acne scars marked his face forever as sullen.

“Give it a few more minutes,” Sharkey said.

“I want to eat, man,” Arson said.

“Well, what do you think I’m trying to do? We all want to eat.”

“Maybe we could see how Bettijane’s doing,” Mojo said. “She’ll have made enough for us to eat.”

Sharkey looked over at him and said, “You two go ahead. I’m staying till I score. I’m gonna eat.”

As he said this he watched a maroon Jaguar XJ6 pull into the convenience store’s lot.

“How about the guy in the pipe?” Arson asked. “You think they found him yet? We could go up there and check him out, see if there is any bread. I don’t know why you didn’t have the balls to do it last night, Shark.”

“Hey, you go up there by yourself and check it out if you want,” Sharkey said. “See who has balls then.”

He hadn’t told them that he had called 911 about the body. That would be harder for them to forgive than his fear of going into the pipe. A lone man got out of the Jaguar. He looked like late thirties, brush cut, baggy white slacks and shirt, sweater draped around his shoulders. Sharkey saw no one waiting in the car.

“Hey, check out the Jag,” he said. The other two looked over at the store. “This is it. I’m going.”

“We’ll be here,” Arson said.

Sharkey got off the wall and trotted across the boulevard. He watched the Jag’s owner through the windows of the store. He had an ice cream in his hand and was looking at the magazine rack. His eyes were constantly on the prowl as he looked at the other men in the store. Sharkey was encouraged as he saw the man head toward the counter to pay for the ice cream. He squatted against the front of the store, the grille of the Jag four feet away.

When the man came out, Sharkey waited for their eyes to lock and the man to smile before he spoke up.

“Hey, mister?” he said as he got up. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”

The man looked around the parking lot before answering.

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Well, I was wondering if you might go in and get me a beer. I’ll give you the money and all. I just want a beer. To relax, you know?”

The man hesitated. “I don’t know… that would be illegal, wouldn’t it? You’re not twenty-one. I could get in trouble.”

“Well,” Sharkey said with a smile, “do you have any beer at home? Then you wouldn’t have to be buying it. Just giving somebody a beer ain’t no crime.”

“Well…”

“I wouldn’t stay long. We could probably relax each other a little bit, you know?”