The Black Echo (22 page)

He wasn’t out but a few months before he was picked up for a bank robbery. They must have had him cold. He pleaded guilty and took five years back to Lompoc. He would have been out in three but two years into the sentence he was busted in an escape attempt. He got five more years and was transferred to Terminal Island.

Meadows was paroled from TI in 1988. All those years in stir, Bosch thought. He never knew, never heard from him. What would he have done if he had heard? He thought about that for a moment. It probably changed Meadows more than the war. He was paroled to a halfway house for Vietnam vets. The place was called Charlie Company and was on a farm north of Ventura, about forty miles from Los Angeles. He stayed there nearly a year.

After that there were no further contacts, according to Meadows’s sheet. The marks beef that had prompted Meadows to call Bosch a year earlier had never been processed. It wasn’t on the sheet. No other known contact with police upon his release from prison.

There was another sheet in the package. This one was handwritten and Bosch guessed it was Wish’s clean, legible hand. It was a work and home history. Gathered from records searches of Social Security and DMV records, the entries ran vertically down the left side of the paper. But there were gaps. Time periods unaccounted for. Meadows had worked for the Southern California Water District when he first came back from Vietnam. He was a pipeline inspector. He lost the job after four months for excessive tardiness and sick-outs. From there he must have tried his hand at dealing heroin, because the next lawful employment was not listed until after he got out of Wayside in 1979. He went to work for DWP as an underground inspector-storm drainage division. Lost the job six months later for the same reasons as with the water district. There were a few other sporadic employments. After he left Charlie Company he caught on with a gold mining company in the Santa Clarita Valley for a few months. Nothing else.

There were almost a dozen home addresses listed. Most of them were apartments in Hollywood. There was a house in San Pedro, prior to the 1979 bust. If he was dealing at the time, he was probably getting it at the port in Long Beach, Bosch thought. The San Pedro address would have been convenient.

Bosch also saw that he had lived in the Sepulveda apartment since leaving Charlie Company. There was nothing else in the file about the halfway house or what Meadows did there. Bosch found the name of Meadows’s parole officer on the copies of his six-month evaluation reports. Daryl Slater, worked out of Van Nuys. Bosch wrote it down in the notebook. He also wrote down the address of Charlie Company. He then spread the arrests sheet, the work and home history, and the parole reports out in front of him. On a new piece of paper he began to write out a chronology beginning with Meadows’s being sent to federal prison in 1981.

When he was done, many of the gaps were closed. Meadows served a total of six and a half years in the federal pen. He was paroled in early 1988, when he was sponsored by the Charlie Company program. He spent ten months in the program before moving to the apartment in Sepulveda. Parole reports showed he secured a job as a drill operator in the gold mine in the Santa Clarita Valley. He completed parole in February 1989 and he quit his job a day after his PO signed him off. No known employment since, according to the Social Security Administration. IRS said Meadows hadn’t filed a return since 1988.

Bosch went into the kitchen and got a beer out and made a ham and cheese sandwich. He stood by the sink eating and drinking and trying to organize things about the case in his head. He believed that Meadows had been scheming from the time he walked out of TI, or at least Charlie Company. He’d had a plan. He worked legitimate jobs until he cleared parole, and then he quit and the plan was set into action. Bosch felt sure of it. And he felt that it was therefore likely that, at either the prison or the halfway house, Meadows had hooked up with the men who had burglarized the bank with him. And then killed him.

The doorbell rang. Bosch checked his watch and saw it was eleven o’clock. He walked to the door and looked through the peephole and saw Eleanor Wish staring at him. He stepped back, glanced at the mirror in the entrance hall and saw a man with dark, tired eyes looking back at him. He smoothed his hair and opened the door.

“Hello,” she said. “Truce?”

“Truce. How’d you know where I-never mind. Come in.”

She was wearing the same suit as earlier, hadn’t been home yet. He saw her notice the files and paperwork on the card table.

“Working late,” he said. “Just looking over some things in the file on Meadows.”

“Good. Um, I happened to be out this way and I just wanted, I just came by to say that we… Well, it’s been a rough week so far. For both of us. Maybe tomorrow we can start this partnership over.”

“Yes,” he said. “And, listen, I’m sorry for what I said earlier… and I’m sorry about your brother. You were trying to say something nice and I… Can you stay a few minutes, have a beer?”

He went to the kitchen and got two fresh bottles. He handed her one and led her through the sliding door to the porch. It was cool out, but there was a warm wind occasionally blowing up the side of the dark canyon. Eleanor Wish looked out at the lights of the Valley. The spotlights from Universal City swept the sky in a repetitive pattern.

“This is very nice,” she said. “I’ve never been in one of these. They’re called cantilevers?”

“Yes.”

“Must be scary during an earthquake.”

“It’s scary when the garbage truck drives by.”

“So how’d you end up in a place like this?”

“Some people, the ones down there with the spotlights, gave me a bunch of money once to use my name and my so-called technical advice for a TV show. So I didn’t have anything else to do with it. When I was growing up in the Valley I always wondered what it would be like to live in one of these things. So I bought it. It used to belong to a movie writer. This is where he worked. It’s pretty small, only one bedroom. But that’s all I’ll ever need, I guess.”

She leaned on the railing and looked down the slope into the arroyo. In the dark there was only the dim outline of the live oak grove below. He also leaned over, and absentmindedly peeled bits of the gold foil label off his beer bottle and dropped them. The gold glinted in the darkness as it fluttered down out of sight.

“I have questions,” he said. “I want to go up to Ventura.”

“Can we talk about it tomorrow? I didn’t come up to go over the files. I’ve been reading those files for almost a year now.”

He nodded and stayed quiet, deciding to let her get to whatever it was that brought her. After some time she said, “You must be very angry about what we did to you, the investigation, us checking you out. Then what happened yesterday. I’m sorry.”

She took a small sip from her bottle and Bosch realized he had never asked if she wanted a glass. He let her words hang out there in the dark for a few long moments.

“No,” he finally said. “I’m not angry. The truth is, I don’t really know what I am.”

She turned and looked at him. “We thought you’d drop it when Rourke made trouble for you with your lieutenant. Sure, you knew Meadows, but that was a long time ago. That’s what I don’t get. It’s not just another case for you. But why? There must be something more. Back in Vietnam? Why’s it mean so much to you?”

“I guess I have reasons. Reasons that have nothing to do with the case.”

“I believe you. But whether I believe you is not the point. I’m trying to know what’s going on. I need to know.”

“How’s your beer?”

“It’s fine. Tell me something, Detective Bosch.”

He looked down and watched a little piece of the printed foil disappear in the black.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Actually I do know and I don’t. I guess it goes back to the tunnels. Shared experience. It’s nothing like he saved my life or I saved his. Not that easy. But I feel something is owed. No matter what he did or what kind of fuckup he became after. Maybe if I had done more than make a few calls for him last year. I don’t know.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “When he called you last year he was well into this caper. He was using you then. It’s like he’s using you now, even though he’s dead.”

He’d run out of label to peel. He turned around and leaned his back on the railing. He fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket with one hand, put it in his mouth but didn’t light it.

“Meadows,” he said and shook his head at the memory of the man. “Meadows was something else… Back then, we were all just a bunch of kids, afraid of the dark. And those tunnels were so damn dark. But Meadows, he wasn’t afraid. He’d volunteer and volunteer and volunteer. Out of the blue and into the black. That’s what he said going on a tunnel mission was. We called it the black echo. It was like going to hell. You’re down there and you could smell your own fear. It was like you were dead when you were down there.”

They had gradually turned so that they were facing each other. He searched her face and saw what he thought was sympathy. He didn’t know if that’s what he wanted. He was long past that. But he didn’t know what he wanted.

“So all of us scared little kids, we made a promise. Every time anybody went down into one of the tunnels we made a promise. The promise was that no matter what happened down there, nobody would be left behind. Didn’t matter if you died down there, you wouldn’t be left behind. Because they did things to you, you know. Like our own psych-ops. And it worked. Nobody wanted to be left behind, dead or alive. I read once in a book that it doesn’t matter if you’re lying beneath a marble tombstone on a hill or at the bottom of an oil sump, when you’re dead you’re dead.

“But whoever wrote that wasn’t over there. When you’re alive but you’re that close to dying, you think about those things. And then it does matter… And so we made the promise.”

Bosch knew he hadn’t explained a thing. He told her he was going to get another beer. She said she was fine. When he came back out she smiled at him and said nothing.

“Let me tell you a story about Meadows,” he said. “See, the way they worked it was, they’d assign a couple, maybe three of us tunnel rats to go out with a company. So when they’d come across a tunnel, we’d zip on down, check it out, mine it, whatever.”

He took a long pull on the fresh beer.

“And so once, this would have been in 1970, Meadows and me were tagging at the back of a patrol. We were in a VC stronghold and, man, it was just riddled with tunnels. Anyway, we were about three miles from a village called Nhuan Luc when we lost a point man. He got-I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear this. With your brother and all.”

“I do want to hear. Please.”

“So this point got shot by a sniper who was in a spider hole. That was what they called the little entrances to a tunnel network. So somebody took out the sniper and then me and Meadows had to go down the hole to check it out. We went down, and right away we had to split up. This was a big network. I followed one line one way and he went the other. We had said we’d go for fifteen minutes, set charges with a twenty-minute delay, then head back, setting more along the way… I remember I found a hospital down there. Four empty grass mats, a cabinet of supplies, all just sitting in the middle of this tunnel. I remember I thought, Jesus Christ, what’s going to be around the bend, a drive-in movie or something? I mean these people had dug themselves in… Anyway, there was a little altar in there and there was incense burning. Still burning. I knew then that they were still in there somewhere, the VC, and it scared me. I set a charge and hid it behind the altar, and then I started back as fast as I could. I set two more charges along the way, timing everything so it would all go off at once. So I get back to the drop-in point, you know, the original spider hole, and no Meadows. I waited a few minutes and it’s getting close. You don’t want to be down there when the C-4 goes. Some of those tunnels are a hundred years old. There was nothing I could do, so I climbed out. He wasn’t up top either.”

He stopped to drink some beer and think about the story. She watched intently but didn’t prod him.

“A few minutes later my charges went off and the tunnel, at least the part I had been in, came down. Whoever was in there was dead and buried. We waited a couple hours for the smoke and dust to settle. We hooked a Mighty Mite fan up and blew air down the entry shaft, and then you could see smoke being pushed out and coming up out of the air vents and other spider holes all around the jungle.

“And when it was clear, me and another guy went in to find Meadows. We thought he was dead, but we had the promise; no matter what, we were going to get him out and send him home. But we didn’t find him. Spent the rest of the day down there looking, but all we found were dead VC. Most of them had been shot, some had cut throats. All of them had ears slashed off. When we came up, the top told us we couldn’t wait anymore. We had orders. We pulled out, and I had broken the promise.”

Bosch was staring blankly out into the night, seeing only the story he was telling.

“Two days later, another company was in the village, Nhuan Luc, and somebody found a tunnel entrance in a hootch. They get their rats to check it out, and they aren’t in that tunnel more than five minutes when they find Meadows. He was just sitting like Buddha in one of the passageways. Out of ammo. Talking gibberish. Not making sense, but he was okay. And when they tried to get him to come up with them, he didn’t want to. They finally had to tie him up and put a rope on him and have the patrol up there pull him out. Up in the sunlight they saw he was wearing a necklace of human ears. Strung with his tags.”

He finished the beer and walked in off the balcony. She followed him to the kitchen, where he got a fresh bottle. She put her half-finished bottle on the counter.

“So that’s my story. That was Meadows. He went to Saigon for some R and R but he came back. He couldn’t stay away from the tunnels. After that one, though, he was never the same. He told me that he just got mixed up and lost down there. He just kept going in the wrong direction, killing anything he came across. The word was that there were thirty-three ears on his necklace. And somebody asked me once why Meadows let one of the VC keep an ear. You know, accounting for the odd number. And I told him that Meadows let them all keep an ear.”