Trunk Music (43 page)

Bosch raised his head and looked at his watch. Billets would be back in three hours. He picked up the empty cup, used his palm to push the dead cigarette and its ashes into it and dropped it into the trash can under the table. He stood up, lit another cigarette and took a walk down the aisle between the crime tables. He tried to clear his mind, to get ready for the next round.

He thought about paging Edgar to see if he and Rider had found anything yet, anything at all that could help, but decided against it. They knew that time was important. They would have either called or come back if they had something.

As he stood at the far end of the squad room and these thoughts traveled through his mind, his eyes fell on the sex crimes table, and he realized after a moment that he was looking at a Polaroid photo of the girl who had come into the station with her mother on Friday to report that she had been raped. The photo was on the top of a stack of Polaroids that were paper-clipped to the outside of the case envelope. Detective Mary Cantu had left it on the top of her pile for Monday. Without thinking about it, Bosch pulled the stack of photos from beneath the clip and began to look through them. The girl had been badly mistreated and the bruises documented on her body by Cantu’s camera were a depressing testament to all that was wrong with the city. Bosch always found it easier to deal with victims who were no longer living. The live ones haunted him because they could never be consoled. Not fully. They were forever left with the question why.

Sometimes Bosch thought of his city as some kind of vast drain that pulled all bad things toward a spot where they swirled around in a deep concentration. It was a place where it seemed the good people were often outnumbered by the bad. The creeps and schemers, the rapists and killers. It was a place that could easily produce someone like Powers. Too easily.

Bosch put the photos back under the clip, embarrassed by his thoughtless voyeurism of the girl’s pain. He went back to the homicide table, picked up the phone and dialed his home number. It was nearly twenty-four hours since he had been to his house, and his hope was that Eleanor Wish would answer — he had left the key under the mat — or there might be a message from her. After three rings the line was picked up and he heard his own voice on tape tell himself to leave a message. He punched in his code to check for messages and the machine told him he had none.

He stood there a long moment thinking about Eleanor, the phone still at his ear, when suddenly he heard her voice.

“Harry, is that you?”

“Eleanor?”

“I’m here, Harry.”

“Why didn’t you answer?”

“I didn’t think it would be for me.”

“When did you get there?”

“Last night. I’ve been waiting for you. Thanks for leaving the key.”

“You’re welcome…. Eleanor, where’d you go?”

There was a beat of silence before she answered.

“I went back to Vegas. I needed to get my car…clear out my bank account, things like that. Where have you been all night?”

“Working. We have a new suspect. We’re holding him here. Did you go by your apartment?”

“No. There was no reason to. I just did what I had to do and drove back.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“That’s okay. I was worried about where you were, but I didn’t want to call you there in case you were in the middle of something.”

Bosch wanted to ask her what came next for them, but he felt such a sense of happiness that she was there in his home that he didn’t dare to ruin the moment.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be tied up,” he said.

Bosch heard the heavy doors in the station’s rear hallway open and bang shut. Footsteps were coming toward the squad room.

“Do you have to go?” Eleanor asked.

“Um…”

Edgar and Rider walked into the squad room. Rider carried a brown evidence bag with something heavy in it. Edgar carried a closed cardboard box across which someone had stenciled
Xmas
with a Magic Marker. He also had a broad smile on his face.

“Yeah,” Bosch said, “I think I better go.”

“Okay, Harry, I’ll see you.”

“You’ll be there?”

“I’ll be here.”

“Okay, Eleanor, I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

He hung up and looked up at his two partners. Edgar was still smiling.

“We got your Christmas present here, Harry,” Edgar said. “We got Powers right here in this box.”

“You got the boots?”

“No. No boots. We got better than boots.”

“Show me.”

Edgar lifted the lid off the box. Off the top he took out a manila envelope. He then tilted the box so that Bosch could look in. Bosch whistled.

“Merry Christmas,” Edgar said.

“You count it?” Bosch asked, his eyes still on the stacks of currency with rubber bands around them.

“Each bundle has a number on it,” Rider said. “You add them all up, it equals four hundred eighty thousand. It looks like it’s everything.”

“Not a bad present, eh Harry?” Edgar said excitedly.

“No. Where was it?”

“Attic crawl space,” Edgar said. “One of the last places we looked. Box was just sitting there in front of me as soon as I stuck my head up.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay, what else?”

“Found these under his mattress.”

From the envelope Edgar withdrew a stack of photos. They were six by four in size and each had the date of the photograph digitally printed on the bottom left corner. Bosch put them on the table in front of them and looked through them, carefully picking them up by the corners. He hoped Edgar had handled them the same way.

The first photo was of Tony Aliso getting into a car at the valet stand in front of the Mirage. The next was of him walking to the door of Dolly’s. Following that was a series of shots of him outside Dolly’s talking to the man Aliso knew as Luke Goshen. It was dark outside in these shots and they were taken from a distance, but the neon-glutted entrance of the club was lit as brightly as daylight and Aliso and Goshen were easily recognizable.

Then there were photos from the same location but the date at the bottom corner had changed. They showed a young woman leaving the club and walking to Aliso’s car. Bosch recognized her. It was Layla. There were also pictures of Tony and Layla poolside at the Mirage. The last shot was of Tony leaning his deeply tanned body over Layla’s lounge chair and kissing her on the mouth.

Bosch looked up at Edgar and Rider. Edgar was smiling again. Rider wasn’t.

“Just like we thought,” Edgar said. “He cased this guy over there in Vegas. That shows he had the knowledge to set this whole thing up. Him and the widow. We got ’em, Harry. This shows premeditation, lying in wait, the works. We got ’em both, nine ways to Sunday.”

“Maybe.” He looked at Rider. “What’s up with you, Kiz?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know. It just seems too easy. The place was very clean. No old boots, no sign that Veronica ever even set foot in that place. Then we find these so easy. It was like we were supposed to find it all. I mean, why would he take the time to get rid of the boots but leave the photos under the mattress? I can see him wanting to hang on to the money, but putting it in the attic seems pretty lame.”

She moved her hand toward the photos and the cash in a dismissive gesture. Bosch nodded his agreement and leaned back in his chair.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “He’s not that stupid.”

He thought about the similarity to the gun being planted on Goshen. That, too, turned out to be too easy.

“I think it’s a setup,” Bosch said. “Veronica did this. He took the photos for her. He probably told her to destroy them, but she didn’t. She hung on to them just in case. She probably snuck them back in under his bed and put the cash up in the attic. Was it easy to get to?”

“Easy enough,” Rider said. “Fold-down ladder.”

“Wait a minute, why would she set him up?” Edgar asked.

“Not from the start,” Bosch said. “It was like a fall-back position. If things started to go wrong, if we got too close, she had Powers out there ready to take the fall. Maybe when she sent Powers after the suitcase she went to his place with the photos and the cash. Who knows when it started? But I bet when I tell Powers we found this stuff in his house, his eyes are going to pop. Whaddaya got in the bag, Kiz, the camera?”

She nodded and put the bag on the table without opening it.

“Nikon with a telephoto on it, credit card receipt for his purchase of it.”

Bosch nodded and his thoughts strayed a bit. He was trying to think about how he was going to work the photos and money with Powers. It was their shot at breaking him. It had to be played right.

“Hold on, hold on,” Edgar said, a look of confusion on his face. “I still don’t get this. What makes you say it was a setup? Maybe he was holding the cash and the photos and they were going to split it all after the heat died down. Why does it have to be that she set him up?”

Bosch looked at Rider and then back at Edgar.

“’Cause Kiz is right. It’s too easy.”

“Not if he thought we didn’t have a clue, if he thought he was clear right up to the moment we jumped out of the bushes up there in the woods.”

Bosch shook his head.

“I don’t know. I don’t think he would have played it the way he did when I was just talking to him. Not if he knew he had this stuff back at his place. I go with it being a setup. She’s putting it all on him. We pull her in and she’ll feed us some story about the guy being obsessed with her. Maybe, if she’s any kind of actress, she tells us, yes, she had an affair with him but then she broke it off. But he wouldn’t go away. He killed her old man so he could have her all to himself.”

Bosch leaned back and looked at them, waiting for their response.

“I think it’s good,” Rider said. “It could work.”

“Except we don’t believe it,” Bosch said.

“So what’s she get out of this?” Edgar asked, refusing to drop his disagreement. “She’s givin’ up the money puttin’ it in his pad. What’s that leave her?”

“The house, the cars, insurance,” Bosch said. “Whatever’s left of the company — and the chance to get away.”

But it was a weak answer and he knew it. A half million dollars was a lot of cash to use to set somebody up. It was the one flaw in the theory he had just spun.

“She got rid of her husband,” Rider said. “Maybe that was all that was important to her.”

“He’d been screwing around on her for years,” Edgar said. “Why now? What was different this time?”

“I don’t know,” Rider said. “But there was something different or something else we don’t know about. That’s what we have to find out.”

“Yeah, well, good luck,” Edgar said.

“I’ve got an idea,” Bosch said. “If anyone knows what that something else is, it’s Powers. I want to try to scam him and I think I know how. Kiz, you still got that tape, the one with Veronica in it?

“
Casualty of Desire?
Yeah. It’s in my drawer.”

“Go get it and set it up in the lieutenant’s office. I’m going to grab some more coffee and I’ll meet you there.”

Bosch stepped into interview room three with the box of cash turned so that the side that said
Xmas
on it was held against his chest. He hoped it looked like any common cardboard box. He watched Powers for a sign of recognition and got none. Powers was sitting just as Bosch had left him. Ramrod straight, his arms behind him as if by choice. He looked at Bosch with deadpan eyes that were ready and waiting for the next go-round. Bosch put the box on the floor where it would be shielded from view, pulled out the chair and sat across from him again. He then reached down, opened the box and took out a tape recorder and a file folder. He put them on the table in plain sight.

“I told you, Bosch, no taping. If you got the camera on the other side of the glass going, then you’re ripping off my rights, too.”

“No camera, no tape, Powers. This is just to play you something, that’s all. Now, where were we?”

“We were to the point of put up or shut up. You cut me loose or you get my lawyer in here.”

“Well, actually, a couple of things have come up. I thought you might want to know about them first. You know, before you make a decision like that.”

“Fuck that. I’m through with this shit. Get me the phone.”

“Do you own a camera, Powers?”

“I said get — a camera? What about it?”

“Do you own a camera? It’s a pretty straightforward question.”

“Yes. Everybody owns a camera. What about it?”

Bosch studied him for a moment. He could feel the momentum and control start to maybe shift just a bit. It was coming across the table from Powers. He could feel it. Bosch played a thin smile on his face. He wanted Powers to know that from this point on it was slipping away from him.

“Did you take the camera with you when you went to Vegas last March?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I take it on all my vacations. Didn’t know it was a crime. The fucking legislature, what will they think of next?”

Bosch let him have his smile but didn’t return it.

“Is that what you called it?” he said quietly. “A vacation?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I called it.”

“That’s funny, because that’s not what Veronica is calling it.”

“I don’t know anything about that or her.”

His eyes momentarily looked away from Bosch. It was the first time, and again Bosch felt the balance shifting. He was playing it right. He felt it. Things were shifting.

“Sure you know about it, Powers. And you know her pretty good, too. She just told us all about it. She’s in the other room right now. Turns out she was weaker than I thought. My money had been on you. You know the saying, the bigger they are the harder they fall, all of that. I thought you’d be the one but it was her. Edgar and Rider broke her down a little while ago. Amazing how crime scene photos can work on somebody’s guilty conscience. She told us everything, Powers. Everything.”

“You’re so full of bullshit, Bosch, and it’s getting pretty old. Where’s the phone?”

“This is how she tells it. You —”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You met her when you went up there that night to take the burglary report. One thing led to another and pretty soon you two were having a little romance. An affair to remember. Only she came to her senses and broke it off. She still loved ol’ Tony. She knew he traveled a lot, strayed a lot, but she was used to that. She needed him. So she cut you off. Only, and this is according to her, you wouldn’t be cut off. You kept after her, calling her, following her when she’d leave the estate up there. It was getting scary. I mean, what could she do? Go to Tony and say this guy I had an affair with is following me all the time? She —”