Angels Flight

by Michael Connelly

  He wondered if they had sensed something about him. A danger or maybe a sickness in him. He knew that some people had that power, that they could tell these things. With him, it would not be difficult. It was twenty-four hours since he had slept. He rubbed a hand across his face and it felt like damp stucco. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and felt the old pain that he had hoped would never be in his life again. It had been a long time since he had felt so alone, since he had felt like such an outsider in his own city. There was a tightness in his throat and chest now, a feeling of claustrophobia like a shroud about him, even in the open air.

  Once more he got the phone out. He checked the battery display and found it almost dead. Enough juice for one more call if he was lucky. He punched in the number for home and waited.

  There was one new message. Fearing the battery wouldn’t hold, he quickly punched in the playback code and held the phone back up to his ear. But the voice he heard was not Eleanor’s. It vas the sound of a voice distorted by cellophane wrapped around the receiver and then perforated with a fork.

  ‘Let this one go, Bosch,’ the voice said. ‘Any man who stands against cops is nothing but a dog and deserves to die like a dog. You do the right thing. You let it go, Bosch. You let it go.’

  13

  Bosch got to Parker Center twenty-five minutes before he was to meet with Deputy Chief Irving to update him on the investigation. He was alone, having left the other six members of the Elias team to conclude the canvass of the apartment building next to Angels Flight and then to pursue their next assignments. Stopping at the front counter he showed his badge to the uniformed officer and he told the man that he was expecting some information to be called in anonymously to the front desk within the next half-hour. He asked the officer to relay the information to him immediately in Chief Irving’s private conference room.

  Bosch then took an elevator up to the third floor rather than the sixth, where Irving’s office was located. He went down the hall to the Robbery-Homicide Division squad room and found it empty except for four detectives he had called earlier. They were Bates, O’Toole, Engersol and Rooker — the four detectives who had originally handled the call out to the Angels Flight murder scene. They looked suitably bleary-eyed, having been up half the night before the case was turned over to Bosch and his squad. Bosch had rousted them from sleep at nine and given them a half hour to meet him at Parker Center. It had been easy enough to get them in so quickly. Bosch had told them their careers depended on it.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time,’ Bosch began as he walked down the main aisle between the rows of desk, locking eyes with the four. Three of the detectives were standing around Rooker, who was seated at his desk. This was a clear giveaway. Whatever decisions had been made out at the scene, when it was only the four of them, Bosch was sure were made by Rooker. He was leader of the pack.

  Bosch stayed standing, stopping just outside the informal grouping of the other four. He started telling the story, using his hands in an informal manner, almost like a television news reporter, as if to underline that it was simply a story he was telling, not the threat that he was actually delivering.

  ‘The four of you get the call out,’ he said. ‘You get out there, push the uniforms back and make a perimeter. Somebody checks the stiffs and lo and behold the DL says one of them is Howard Elias. You then put — ’

  ‘There was no driver’s license, Bosch,’ Rooker said, interrupting. ‘Didn’t the cap tell you that?’

  ‘Yeah, he told me. But now I’m telling the story. So listen up, Rooker, and shut up. I’m trying to save your ass here and I don’t have a lot of time to do it.’

  He waited to see if anybody wanted to say anything more.

  ‘So like I said,’ he began again, looking directly at Rooker, ‘the DL identifies one of the stiffs as Elias. So you four bright guys put your heads together and figure there’s a good chance that it was a cop who did this. You figure Elias got what he had coming and more power to the badge who had the guts to put him down. That’s when you got stupid. You decided to help out this shooter, this murderer, by staging the robbery. You took off — ’

  ‘Bosch, you are full — ’

  ‘I said shut up, Rooker! I don’t have the time to hear a bunch of bullshit when you know it went down just like I said. You took off the guy’s watch and his wallet. Only you fucked up, Rooker. You scratched the guy’s wrist with the watch. Postmortem wound. It’s going to come up on the autopsy and that means you four are going to go down the toilet unless it gets contained.’

  He paused, waiting to see if Rooker had anything to say now. He didn’t.

  ‘Okay, sounds like I have your attention. Anybody want to tell me where the watch and wallet are?’

  Another pause while Bosch looked at his watch. It was a quarter to ten. The four RHD men said nothing.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ Bosch said, looking from face to face. ‘So this is what we’re going to do. I meet with Irving in fifteen minutes to give him the overview. He then holds the press conference. If the front desk downstairs doesn’t get a call with information as to the location of the gutter or trash can or whatever place this stuff was stashed, then I tell Irving the robbery was staged by people at the crime scene and it goes from there. Good luck to you guys then.’

  He scanned their faces again. They showed nothing but anger and defiance. Bosch expected nothing less.

  ‘Personally, I wouldn’t mind it going that way, seeing you people get what you got coming. But it will fuck the case—put hair on the cake, taint it beyond repair. So I’m being selfish about it and giving you a chance it makes me sick to give.’

  Bosch looked at his watch.

  ‘You’ve got fourteen minutes now.’

  With that he turned and started heading back out through the squad room. Rooker called after him.

  ‘Who are you to judge, Bosch? The guy was a dog. He deserved to die like a dog and who gives a shit? You should do the right thing, Bosch. Let it go.’

  As if it was his intention all along, Bosch casually turned behind an empty desk and came back up a smaller aisle toward the foursome. He had recognized the phrasing of the words Rooker had used. His demeanor disguised his growing rage. When he got back to the group, he broke their informal circle and leaned over Rooker’s desk, his palms down flat on it.

  ‘Listen to me, Rooker. You call my home again — whether it’s to warn me off or to just tell me the weather — and I’ll come looking for you. You won’t want that.’

  Rooker blinked but then raised his hands in surrender.

  ‘Hey, man, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talk — ’

  ‘Save it for somebody you can convince. At least you could’ve been a man and skipped the cellophane. That’s coward shit, boy.’

  Bosch had hoped that when he got to Irving’s conference room there would be at least a few minutes for him to look at his notes and put his thoughts together. But Irving was already seated at the round table, his elbows on the polished surface and the fingertips of both hands touching and forming a steeple in front of his chin.

  ‘Detective, have a seat,’ he said as Bosch opened the door. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Uh,’ Bosch said, putting his briefcase down flat on the table. ‘They’re still in the field. Chief, I was just going to drop my case off and then run down to get a cup of coffee. Can I get you something?’

  ‘No, and you do not have time for coffee. The media calls are starting. They know it was Elias. Somebody leaked. Probably in the coroner’s office. So it’s about to get crazy. I want to hear what is happening, starting right now. I have to brief the police chief, who will lead a press conference that has been scheduled for eleven. Sit down.’

  Bosch took a seat opposite Irving. He had worked a case out of the conference room once before. That seemed like a long time ago but he remembered it as the time he had earned Irving’s respect and probably as much trust as the deputy chief was willing to give to anyon
e else who carried a badge. His eyes moved across the surface of the table and he saw the old cigarette scar that he had left during the investigation of the Concrete Blonde case. That had been a difficult case but it seemed almost routine beside the investigation he was involved in now.

  ‘When are they coming in?’ Irving asked.

  He still had his fingers together like a steeple. Bosch had read in an interrogation manual that such body language denoted a feeling of superiority.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The members of your team, Detective. I told you I wanted them here for the briefing and then the press conference.’

  ‘Well, they’re not. Coming in. They are continuing the investigation. I thought that it didn’t make sense that all seven of us should just drop things to come in here when one of us could easily tell you the status of things.’

  Bosch watched angry flares of red explode high on Irving’s cheeks.

  ‘Once again we seem to have either a communication problem or the chain of command remains unclear to you. I specifically told you to have your people here.’

  ‘I must’ve misunderstood, Chief,’ Bosch lied. ‘I thought the important thing was the investigation. I remembered that you wanted to be brought up to date, not that you wanted everybody here. In fact, I doubt there is enough room in here for everybody. I — ’

  ‘The point is I wanted them here. Do your partners have phones?’

  ‘Edgar and Rider?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘They have phones but they’re dead. We’ve been running all night. Mine’s dead.’

  ‘Then page them. Get them in here.’

  Bosch slowly got up and headed to the phone which was on top of the storage cabinet that ran along one wall of the room. He called Rider and Edgar’s pagers, but when he punched in the return number he added an extra seven at the end. This was a long-standing code they used. The extra seven — as in code seven, the radio call for out of service — meant they should take their time in returning the pages, if they returned them at all.

  ‘Okay, Chief,’ Bosch said. ‘Hopefully, they’ll call in. What about Chastain and his people?’

  ‘Never mind them. I want your team back here by eleven for the press conference.’

  Bosch moved back to his seat.

  ‘How come?’ he asked, though he knew exactly why. ‘I thought you said the police chief was going — ’

  ‘The chief will lead it. But we want to have a show of force. We want the public to know we have top-notch investigators on this case.’

  ‘You mean top-notch black investigators, don’t you?’

  Bosch and Irving held hard stares for a moment.

  ‘Your job, Detective, is to solve this case and solve it as quickly as you can. You are not to concern yourself with other matters.’

  ‘Well, that’s kind of hard to do, Chief, when you are pulling my people out of the field. Can’t solve anything quickly if they’ve got to be here for every dog and pony show you people cook up.’

  ‘That is enough, Detective.’

  ‘They are top-notch investigators. And that’s what I want to use them for. Not as cannon fodder for the department’s race relations. They don’t want to be used that way, either. That in itself is ra — ’

  ‘Enough, I said! I do not have time to debate racism, institutional or otherwise with you, Detective Bosch. We are talking about public perceptions. Suffice it to say that if we mishandle this case or its perceptions from the outside, this city could be burning again by midnight.’

  Irving paused to look at his watch.

  ‘I meet the police chief in twenty minutes. Could you please begin to enlighten me with the accomplishments of the investigation up to this point?’

  Bosch reached over and opened his briefcase. Before he could reach for his notebook the phone on the cabinet rang. He got up and went to it.

  ‘Remember,’ Irving said, ‘I want them here by eleven.’

  Bosch nodded and picked up the phone. It wasn’t Edgar or Rider and he had not expected that it would be.

  ‘This is Cormier downstairs in the lobby. This Bosch?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You just got a message here. Guy wouldn’t give a name. He just said to tell you that what you need is in a trash can in the MetroLink station, First and Hill. It’s in a manila envelope. That’s it.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  He hung up and looked at Irving.

  ‘It was something else.’

  Bosch sat back down and took his notebook out of his briefcase along with the clipboard with the crime scene reports, sketches and evidence receipts attached to it. He didn’t need any of it to summarize the case but he thought it might be reassuring to Irving to see the accumulation of paper the case was engendering.

  ‘I’m waiting, Detective,’ the deputy chief said by way of prompting him.

  Bosch looked up from the paperwork.

  ‘Where we are is pretty much point zero. We have a good idea what we have. We don’t have much of a handle on the who and why.’

  ‘Then what have we got, Detective?’

  ‘We’re going with Elias being the primary target in what looks like an outright assassination.’

  Irving brought his head down so that his clasped hands hid his face.

  ‘I know that’s not what you want to hear, Chief, but if you want the facts, that’s what the facts point to. We have — ’

  ‘The last thing Captain Garwood told me was that it looked like a robbery. The man was wearing a thousand-dollar suit, walking through downtown at eleven o’clock at night. His watch and wallet are missing. How can you discount the possibility of a robbery?’

  Bosch leaned back and waited. He knew Irving was venting steam. The news Bosch was giving him was guaranteed to put ulcers on his ulcers once the media picked it up and ran.

  ‘The watch and wallet have been located. They weren’t stolen.’

  ‘Where?’

  Bosch hesitated, though he had already anticipated the question. He hesitated because he was about to lie to a superior on the behalf of four men who did not deserve the benefit of the risk he was taking.

  ‘In his desk drawer at the office. He must’ve forgotten them when he closed up and headed to his apartment. Or maybe he left them on purpose in case he got robbed.’

  Bosch realized he would still need to come up with an explanation in his reports when the autopsy on Elias revealed the postmortem scratches on his wrist. He would have to write it off as having occurred while the body was being manipulated or moved by the investigators.

  ‘Then perhaps it was an armed robber who shot Elias when he did not turn over a wallet,’ Irving said, oblivious to Bosch’s internal discomfort. ‘Perhaps it was a robber who shot first and searched for valuables second.’

  ‘The sequence and manner of the shots suggests otherwise. The sequence suggests a personal tie—rage transmitted from one person to Elias. Whoever did this knew Elias.’

  Irving put his hands down on the table and leaned a few inches toward its center. He seemed impatient when he spoke.

  ‘All I am saying is that you cannot completely eliminate these other possible scenarios.’

  ‘That might be true but we’re not pursuing those scenarios. I believe it would be a waste of time and I don’t have the manpower.’

  ‘I told you I wanted a thorough investigation. I want no stone unturned.’

  ‘Well, we’ll get to those stones later. Look, Chief, if you are focusing on this so you can tell the media it might be a robbery, then fine, say it might be. I don’t care about what you tell the media. I’m just trying to tell you where we stand and where we’re going to be looking.’

  ‘Fine. Proceed.’

  He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture.

  ‘We need to look at the man’s files and draw up lists of potential suspects. The cops who Elias really nailed in court or vilified in the media over the years. Or both. The grudges. And the cops he would have
tried to nail beginning Monday.’

  Irving showed no reaction at all. It seemed to Bosch he was already thinking about the next hour, when he and the police chief would go out on a cliff and address the media about such a dangerous case.

  ‘We are being handicapped,’ Bosch continued. ‘Carla Entrenkin has been appointed by the warrants judge as a special master to oversee the protection of Elias’s clients. She’s in his office right now and won’t let us in.’

  ‘I thought you said you found the man’s wallet and watch in the office.’

  ‘I did. That was before Carla showed up and kicked us out.’

  ‘How did she get appointed?’

  ‘She says the judge called her, thought she’d be perfect. She and a deputy from the DA are there. I’m hoping to get the first batch of files this afternoon.’

  ‘Okay, what else?’

  ‘There’s something you should know. Before Carla made us leave, we came across a couple things of interest. The first is some notes Elias kept at his desk. I read through them and there were indications that he had a source in here. Parker Center, I mean. A good source, somebody who apparently knew how to find and get access to old files — unsubstantiated IAD investigations. And there were indications of a dispute. The source either couldn’t or wouldn’t provide something Elias wanted on the Black Warrior thing.’

  Irving went quiet for a second, staring at Bosch, processing. When he spoke again his voice was more distant still.

  ‘Was this source identified?’

  ‘Not in what I saw, which wasn’t a lot. It was coded.’

  ‘What was it that Elias wanted? Could it be related to the killings?’

  ‘I don’t know. If you want me to pursue it as a priority I will. I was thinking that other things would be the priority. The cops he dragged into court in the past, the ones he was going to pull in starting Monday. Also, there was a second thing we found in the office before we got kicked out.’