“What about the seal that Sharkey saw on the door?”
“Rourke said there was no seal. But there could have been one and they just took it off when they were leaving the Jeep out there.”
“Yeah,” Bosch said. After a few moments of thought, he said, “Does it bother you how everything is just coming together so well?”
“Should it?”
Bosch shrugged his shoulders. He looked up Wilshire. The curb in front of the fireplug was empty. Since they had come back from dinner Bosch hadn’t seen the white LTD, which he’d been sure was an IAD car. He didn’t know if Lewis and Clarke were around or had called it a night.
“Harry, good detective work pays off with cases that come together,” Eleanor told him. “I mean, we aren’t out of the dark on this by a long shot. But I think we finally have a measure of control. Damned sight better than we were three days ago. So why the worry when a few things finally start coming together?”
“Three days ago Sharkey was still alive.”
“Well, while you’re taking the blame for that, why don’t you add everybody else who has ever made a choice and gotten themselves killed. You can’t change those things, Harry. And you’re not supposed to be a martyr.”
“What do you mean, choice? Sharkey didn’t make any choice.”
“Yes, he did. When he chose the streets, he knew he might die on the streets.”
“You don’t believe that. He was a kid.”
“I believe that shit happens. I believe that the best you can do in this job is come out even. Some people win and some lose. Hopefully, half the time it is the good guys who win. That’s us, Harry.”
Bosch drank his cup dry and they sat in silence for a while after that. They had a clear view of the vault sitting at the center of the glass room like a throne. Out there in the open, polished and shiny under the bright ceiling lights, it said “Take me” to the world, he thought. And somebody would. We’re going to let them.
Wish picked up the radio handset, keyed the transmit button twice and said, “Broadway One to First, do you guys copy?”
“We copy, Broadway. Anything?” It was Houck’s voice on the comeback. There was a lot of static, as the radio waves ricocheted off the tall buildings in the area.
“Only checking. What’s your position?”
“We are due south of the front door of the pawnshop. A clear view of nothing going on.”
“We’re east. Can see the—” She clicked off the mike and looked at Bosch. “We forgot a code for the vault. Got any ideas?”
Bosch shook his head no, but then said, “Saxophone. I’ve seen saxophones hanging in pawnshop windows. Musical instruments, lots of them.”
She clicked the mike open again. “Sorry, First Street, had technical difficulty. We are east of the pawnshop, have the piano in the window in sight. No activity inside.”
“Stay awake.”
“That’s a K. Broadway out.”
Bosch smiled and shook his head.
“What?” she said. “What?”
“I’ve seen lots of musical instruments in pawnshops, but I don’t know about a piano. Who is going to take a piano to a pawnshop? You’d need a truck. We’ve blown our cover now.”
He picked up the radio mike, but without clicking the transmit button, and said, “Uh, First Street, check that. It’s not a piano in the window. That’s an accordion. Our mistake.”
She slugged him on the shoulder and told him to never mind the piano. They settled into an easy silence. Surveillance jobs were the bane of most detectives’ existence. But in his fifteen years on the job Bosch had never minded a single stakeout. In fact, many times he enjoyed them when he was with good company. He defined good company not by the conversation but by the lack of it. When there was no need to talk to feel comfortable, that was the right company. Bosch thought about the case and watched the traffic pass by the vault. He recapped the events as they had occurred, in order, from start to present. Revisiting scenes, listening to the dialogue over again. He found that often this reaccounting helped him make the next choice or step. What he mulled over now, poking at it like a loose tooth with his tongue, was the hit-and-run. The car that had come at them the night before. Why? What did they know at that point that made them so dangerous? It seemed to be a foolish move to kill a cop and a federal agent. Why was it undertaken? His mind then drifted to the night they had spent together after all the questions were asked by all the supervisors. Eleanor was spooked. More so than he. As he had held her in her bed, he felt as though he were calming a frightened animal. Holding and caressing her as she breathed into his neck. They had not made love. Just held each other. It had somehow seemed more intimate.
“Are you thinking about last night?” she asked then.
“How did you know?”
“A guess. Any ideas?”
“Well, I think it was nice. I think we—”
“I’m talking about who tried to kill us last night.”
“Oh. No, no ideas. I was thinking about the after.”
“Oh. . . . You know, I didn’t thank you, Harry, for being with me like that, not expecting anything.”
“I should thank you.”
“You’re sweet.”
They drifted into their own thoughts again. Leaning against the door with his head against the side window, Bosch rarely took his eyes off the vault. Traffic on Wilshire was light but steady. People heading to or from the clubs over on Santa Monica Boulevard or around Rodeo Drive. There was probably a premiere at nearby Academy Hall. It seemed to Bosch that every limousine in L.A. was working Wilshire this night. Stretch cars of all makes and colors cruised by, one by one. They moved so smoothly they seemed to float. They were beautiful, and intriguing with their black windows. Like exotic women in sunglasses. A car built just for this city, Bosch thought.
“Has Meadows been buried?”
The question surprised him. He wondered what tumble of thought led to it. “No,” he answered. “Monday, over at the veterans cemetery.”
“A Memorial Day funeral, sounds kind of fitting. So his life of crime did not disqualify him from being placed in such sacred ground?”
“No. He did his time over there in Vietnam. They’ve saved a space for him. There’s probably one there for me, too. Why did you ask?”
“I don’t know. Just thinking is all. Will you go?”
“If I’m not sitting here watching this vault.”
“That will be nice of you. I know he meant something to you. At one point in your life.”
He let it drop, but then she said, “Harry, tell me about the black echo. What you said the other day. What did you mean?”
For the first time he looked away from the vault and at Eleanor. Her face was in darkness, but headlights from a passing car lit the interior of the car for a moment and he could see her eyes on his. He looked back at the vault.
“There isn’t anything really to tell. It’s just what we called one of the intangibles.”
“Intangibles?”
“There was no name for it, so we made up a name. It was the darkness, the damp emptiness you’d feel when you were down there alone in those tunnels. It was like you were in a place where you felt dead and buried in the dark. But you were alive. And you were scared. Your own breath kind of echoed in the darkness, loud enough to give you away. Or so you thought. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Just . . . the black echo.”
She let some time slide between them before she said, “I think your going to the funeral is nice.”
“Is something wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. The way you’re talking. You haven’t seemed right since last night. Like something — I don’t know, forget it.”
“I don’t know, either, Harry. You know, after the adrenaline wore off, I guess I kind of just got scared. Made me start thinking about things.”
Bosch nodded his head but didn’t say anything. His mind drifted and he remembered a time in t
he Triangle when a company that had taken heavy casualties from sniper fire stumbled onto the entrance to a tunnel complex. Bosch, Meadows and a couple of other rats named Jarvis and Hanrahan were dropped at a nearby LZ and escorted to the hole. The first thing they did was drop a couple of LZ flares, a blue one and a red one, into the hole and blow the smoke in with a Mighty Mite fan, to find the other entrances in the jungle. Pretty soon ribbons of smoke started curling out of the ground at a couple dozen spots for two hundred yards in all directions. The smoke was coming up through the spider holes the snipers used as firing positions or to move in and out of the tunnels. There were so many of them, the jungle was turning purple from the smoke. Meadows was stoned. He popped a cassette into the portable tape player he always carried and started blasting Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” into the tunnel. It was one of Bosch’s most vivid memories, aside from his dreams, of the war.
He never liked rock and roll after that. The jolting energy of the music reminded him too much of the war.
“Did you ever go see the memorial?” Eleanor asked.
She didn’t have to say which one. There was only the one, in Washington. But then he remembered the long black replica he had watched them installing at the cemetery by the Federal Building.
“No,” he said after a while. “I’ve never seen it.”
After the air in the jungle cleared and the Hendrix tape was done, the four of them had gone into the tunnel while the rest of the company sat on backpacks and chowed and waited. An hour later, only Bosch and Meadows had come back. Meadows carried with him three NVA scalps. He held them up for the troops above ground and yelled, “You’re looking at the baddest blood brother in the black echo.” And so came the name. Later, they found Jarvis and Hanrahan in the tunnels. They had fallen into punji traps. They were dead.
Eleanor said, “I visited it when I was living in D.C. I couldn’t make myself go to the dedication in eighty-two. But a lot of years later I finally got the courage. I wanted to see my brother’s name. I thought maybe it would help me sort things out, you know, about what happened with him.”
“And did it?”
“No. Made it worse. It made me angry. It left me with this need for justice, if that makes sense. I wanted justice for my brother.”
The silence filled the car again and Bosch poured more coffee into his cup. He was beginning to feel the onset of caffeine jitters but couldn’t stop. He was addicted. He watched a couple of drunks who were stumbling down the street stop in front of the window before the vault. One of the men threw his hands up as if trying to gain a measure of the vault’s huge door. After a while they moved on. He thought of the rage Eleanor must have felt because of her brother. The helplessness. He thought of his own rage. He knew the same feelings, maybe not to the same degree but from a different perspective. Anybody who was touched by the war knew some part of those feelings. He had never worked it out completely and wasn’t sure he wanted to. The anger and sadness gave him something that was better than complete emptiness. Is that what Meadows felt? He wondered. The emptiness. Is that what bounced him from job to job and needle to needle until he was finally and fatally used up on this last mission? Bosch decided that he would go to Meadows’s funeral, that he owed him that much.
“You know what you were telling me the other day about that guy, the Dollmaker killer?” Eleanor asked.
“What about it?”
“IAD, they tried to make a case that you executed him?”
“Yes, I told you. They tried. But it wasn’t there. All they got me on was suspension for procedure violations.”
“Well, I just wanted to say that even if they were right, they were wrong. That would have been justice in my book. You knew what would happen with a guy like that. Look at the Night Stalker. He’ll never get the gas. Or it’ll take twenty years.”
Bosch felt uncomfortable. He had only thought of his motives and actions in the Dollmaker case when alone. He never spoke aloud about it. He didn’t know where she was going with this.
She said, “I know if it was true you could never admit it, but I think you either consciously or subconsciously made a decision. You went for justice for all those women, his victims. Maybe even for your mother.”
Shocked, Bosch turned to her and was about to ask how she knew about his mother and how she had come to think of her relation to the Dollmaker. Then he remembered the files again. It was probably in there somewhere. When he had applied to the department, he had to say on the forms if he or any close relatives had ever been the victim of a crime. He had been orphaned at eleven, he wrote, when his mother was found strangled in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard. He didn’t need to write what she did for a living. The location and crime said enough.
When he recovered his cool, Bosch asked Eleanor what her point was.
“No point,” she said. “I just . . . respect that. If it were me, I would have liked to have done the same thing, I think. I hope I would have been brave enough.”
He looked over at her, the darkness shielding both their faces. It was late now and no car lights drifted by to show them to each other.
“You go ahead and take the first shift sleeping,” he said. “I drank too much coffee.”
She didn’t answer. He offered to get out a blanket he had put in the trunk, but she declined.
“Did you ever hear what J. Edgar Hoover said about justice?” she asked.
“He probably said a lot, but I don’t recall any of it offhand.”
“He said that justice is incidental to law and order. I think he was right.”
She said nothing else and after a while he could hear her breathing turn deeper and longer. When the rare car drove by he would look over at her face as the light washed across it. She slept like a child, with her head leaning against her hands. Bosch cracked the window and lit a cigarette. He smoked and wondered if he could or would fall in love with her, and she with him. He was thrilled and disquieted by the thought, all at the same time.
PART VII
SATURDAY, MAY 26
Gray dawn came up over the street and filled the car with weak light. The morning also brought with it a gentle drizzle that wet the street and put a smear of condensation on the lower half of the windows of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. It was the first rain of any kind in months that Bosch could remember. Wish slept and he watched the vault: overhead lights still glowed on the chrome-and-brushed-steel finish. It was past six o’clock, but Bosch had forgotten the check-in call to Rourke and let Eleanor sleep. In fact, during the night he had never wakened her so that he could take a turn sleeping. He just never got tired. Houck checked in on the radio at three-thirty to make sure someone was awake. After that there were no disturbances and no activity in the vault room. For the rest of the night Bosch thought alternately of Eleanor Wish and the vault he watched.
He reached for the cup on the dashboard and checked for even a cold gulp of coffee, but it was empty. He dropped the empty over the seat to the floor. As he did this, he noticed the package from St. Louis on the backseat. He reached back and grabbed the manila envelope. He pulled out the thick sheaf of papers and idly looked through them while glancing up at the vault every few seconds.
Most of Meadows’s military records he had already seen. But he quickly noticed that there were several that had not been in the FBI jacket Wish had given him. This was a more complete record. There was a photostat of his draft report notice and medical exam. There were also medical records from Saigon. He had been treated twice for syphilis, once for acute stress reaction.
Paging through the package, he stopped when his eyes fell on a copy of a two-page letter from a Louisiana congressman named Noone. Curious, Bosch began to read. It was dated 1973 and was addressed to Meadows at the embassy in Saigon. The letter, bearing the official congressional seal, thanked Meadows for his hospitality and help during the congressman’s recent fact-finding visit. Noone noted that it had been a pleasant surprise to find a fellow New Iberian in the strange country.
Bosch wondered how much of a coincidence it had been. Meadows had probably been assigned to security for the congressman so they would hit it off and the legislator would go back to Washington with a high opinion of personnel and morale in Southeast Asia. There are no coincidences.
The second page of the letter congratulated Meadows on a fine career and referred to the good reports Noone had received from Meadows’s commanding officer. Bosch read on. Meadows’s involvement in stopping an illegal entry into the embassy hotel during the congressman’s stay was mentioned; a Lieutenant Rourke had furnished details of Meadows’s heroics to the congressman’s staff. Bosch felt a trembling below his heart, as if the blood was draining from it. The letter finished with some small talk about the home parish. There was the large, flowing signature of the congressman and a typed notation in the bottom left margin:
cc: U.S. Army, Records Division, Washington, D.C.
Lt. John H. Rourke, U.S. Embassy, Saigon, V.N.
The Daily Iberian; attention news editor
Bosch stared at the second page for a long time without moving or breathing. He actually thought he felt the beginning sensation of nausea and wiped his hand across his forehead. He tried to think if he had ever heard Rourke’s middle name or initial. He couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter. There was no doubt. No coincidences.
Eleanor’s pager sounded, startling them both like a shot. She sat forward and began fumbling with her purse until she found the pager and shut off the noise.
“Oh, God, what time is it?” she said, still disoriented.
He said it was six-twenty and only then remembered that they were supposed to have checked in with Rourke on a landline twenty minutes earlier. He slid the letter back into the stack of papers and put them back in the envelope. He threw it back on the backseat.
“I’ve got to call in,” Wish said.
“Hey, take a couple of minutes to wake up,” Bosch replied quickly. “I’ll call in. I’ve got to find a restroom anyway, and I’ll get some coffee and water.”
The Black Echo Page 34
