Bosch could see he was thinking in terms of being in on the bust, if there was one. If he put LAPD people into the drainage tunnels, the FBI wouldn’t be able to crowd the department out when the credit for the bust came. Pounds would receive a slap on the back from the chief if he could defend against such a maneuver.
But Bosch had come to believe that Rourke’s reasoning was sound and correct. A tunnel crew would stand a good chance of stumbling into the thieves and maybe getting killed.
“No,” Bosch told Pounds. “Let’s first see if we can get a fix on Tran and where he keeps his stash. For all we know, it might not even be a bank.”
Pounds stood up, having heard enough. He said Bosch was free to go. As the lieutenant headed to the interview room door he said, “Bosch, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with this incident tonight. It sounds to me like you did what you could. The lawyer got his feathers ruffled but he’ll settle down. Or just settle.”
Bosch didn’t say anything or smile at his meager joke.
“One thing,” Pounds continued. “The fact that this happened in front of Agent Wish’s home is a bit troubling because it has the appearance of impropriety. Just a hint, no? You were just walking her to the door, weren’t you?”
“I don’t really care how it appeared, Lieutenant,” Bosch answered. “I was off duty.”
Pounds looked at Bosch a moment, shook his head as if Bosch had ignored his outstretched hand, and then went through the door of the small room.
Bosch found Eleanor sitting by herself in an interview room next to his. Her eyes were closed and she had her head propped on her hands, her elbows up on the scarred wooden table. Her eyes opened as he walked in. She smiled and he immediately felt healed of fatigue, frustration and anger. It was a smile a child gives another when they’ve gotten away with something on the adults.
“All done?” she said.
“Yeah. You?”
“Been done more than an hour. You are the one they wanted to grill.”
“As usual. Rourke has left?”
“Yeah, he split. Said he wants me to check in with him every other hour tomorrow. After what happened tonight, he thinks he hasn’t kept a tight enough rein on this.”
“Or you.”
“Yeah. It looks like there is some of that, too. He wanted to know what we were doing at my place. I told him you were just walking me to my door.”
Bosch sat down wearily at the other side of the table and dug a finger into a cigarette pack in search of the last one. He put it in his mouth but didn’t light it.
“Besides being titillated or jealous of what we might have been doing, who does Rourke think tried to take us out?” he asked. “A drunk driver, like my people seem to think?”
“He did mention the drunk driver theory. He also asked whether I have a jealous ex-boyfriend. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a great amount of concern that it might have something to do with our case.”
“I hadn’t thought of the ex-boyfriend angle. What did you tell him?”
“You’re as conniving as he is,” she said, flashing her brilliant smile. “I told him it wasn’t any of his business.”
“Good going. Is it mine?”
“The answer is no.” She let him hang over the cliff a few seconds, then added, “That is, no jealous ex-boyfriends. So, can we leave now and get to where we were”—she looked at her watch—“about four hours ago?”
Bosch was awake in Eleanor Wish’s bed long before dawn light crept around the curtain drawn across the sliding glass door. Unable to defeat insomnia, he finally got up and took a shower in the downstairs bathroom. After, he looked through her kitchen cabinets and refrigerator and began to put together a breakfast of coffee, eggs and cinnamon raisin bagels. He couldn’t find any bacon.
When he heard the shower upstairs go off, he carried a glass of orange juice up and found her in front of the bathroom mirror. She was naked and braiding her hair, which she’d divided into three thick hanks. He was entranced by her and watched as she expertly maneuvered her hair into a French braid. She then accepted the juice and a long kiss from Bosch. She put on her short robe and they went downstairs to eat.
After, Harry opened the kitchen door and stood just outside it while he smoked a cigarette.
“You know,” he said, “I’m just happy nothing happened.”
“You mean last night on the street?”
“Yeah. To you. I don’t know how I’d’ve handled it. I know we just met and all, but . . . uh, I care. You know?”
“Me too.”
Bosch had taken a shower, but his clothes were as fresh as the ashtray in a used car. After a while he said he had to leave, to go by his house and change. Eleanor said she would go into the bureau and check for fallout from last night’s activities and get whatever was on file about Binh. They agreed to meet at Hollywood Station, on Wilcox, because it was closest to Binh’s business, and Bosch needed to turn in his damaged car, anyway. She walked him to the door and they kissed as if she were seeing him off to a day at the office at the accounting firm.
When Bosch got to his house, he found no messages on the phone machine and no sign that the place had been entered. He shaved and changed clothes and then headed down the hill through Nichols Canyon and then over to Wilcox. He was at his desk, updating the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Report forms, when Eleanor came in at ten. The squad room was full and most of the detectives who were male stopped what they were doing to check her out. She had an uncomfortable smile on her face when she sat down in the steel chair next to the homicide table.
“Anything wrong?”
“I just think I would rather walk through Biscailuz,” she said, referring to the sheriff’s jail downtown.
“Oh. Yeah, these guys can leer better than most flashers. You want a glass of water?”
“No. I’m fine. Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
They took Bosch’s new car, which was actually at least three years old and had seventy-seven thousand miles on it. The station fleet manager, a permanent desk assignee since he’d had four fingers blown off by a pipe bomb he stupidly picked up one Halloween, said it was the best he could do. Budget restraints had halted the replacement of cars, though repairing the old ones actually cost the department more. At least, Bosch learned after starting the car, the air conditioner worked reasonably well. There was a light Santa Ana condition kicking up and the forecast was for an unseasonably warm holiday weekend.
Eleanor’s research on Binh showed he had an office and business on Vermont near Wilshire. There were more Korean-run shops in the area than Vietnamese, but they coexisted. As near as Wish had been able to find out, Binh controlled a number of businesses that imported cheap clothing and electronic and video merchandise from the Orient and then moved it through Southern California and Mexico. Many of the items turistas thought they were getting on the cheap in Mexico and then bringing back to the States had already been here. It all seemed successful on paper, though it was small-time. Still, it was enough to make Bosch question if Binh even needed the diamonds. Or ever had any.
Binh owned the building his office and discount video equipment store was based in. It was a 1930s auto showroom that had been converted years before Binh had ever seen it. Unreinforced concrete block fronted with wide picture windows and guaranteed to come down in a decent shaker. But for someone who had made it out of Vietnam the way Binh had, earthquakes were probably viewed as a minor inconvenience, not a risk.
After they found an empty parking space across the street from Ben’s Electronics, Bosch told Eleanor he wanted her to handle the questioning, at least at first. Bosch said he figured that Binh might be more inclined to talk to the feds than to the locals. They decided on a plan to small-talk him and then ask about Tran. Bosch didn’t tell her that he also had a second plan in mind.
“Doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place run by a guy with a box full of diamonds in a bank vault,” Bosch said as th
ey got out of the car.
“That is had in the bank,” she said. “And remember, he couldn’t flaunt that stuff. He had to be like every other Joe Immigrant. The appearance of living day to day. The diamonds, if there were any, were the collateral for this place, for his American success story. But it had to look like he made it from scratch.”
“Wait a second,” Bosch said as they got to the other side of the street. He told Eleanor he had forgotten to ask Jerry Edgar to fill in on a court appearance for him that afternoon. He pointed to a pay phone at a service station next to Binh’s building and trotted over. Eleanor stayed behind, looking in the windows of the store.
Bosch called Edgar but didn’t say anything about a court appearance.
“Jed, I need a favor. You won’t even have to get up.”
Edgar hesitated, as Bosch thought he would.
“What do you need?”
“You aren’t supposed to say it like that. You’re supposed to say, ‘Sure, Harry, what do you need?’”
“Come on, Harry, we both know we’re under the glass. We’ve got to be careful. Tell me what you need. I’ll tell you if I can do it.”
“All I want you to do is buzz me in ten minutes. I need to get out of a meeting. Just buzz me, and when I call in, just put the phone down for a couple minutes. And if I don’t call in, buzz me again in five minutes. That’s it.”
“That’s all you need? Just the buzz?”
“Right. Ten minutes from now.”
“Okay, Harry,” Edgar said, relief in his voice. “Hey, I heard about your thing last night. That was close. And word around here is that it wasn’t no drunk driver. You watch your ass.”
“Always. What’s going on with Sharkey?”
“Nothing. I ran down his crew like you told me. Two of ’em told me they were with him that night. I think they were rolling faggots. They said they lost sight of him after he got in a car. That was a couple hours before the desk got the call that he was in the tunnel up at the bowl. I figure whoever was in that car did him.”
“Description?”
“The car? Not very good. Dark color, American sedan. Something new. That’s about it.”
“What kind of headlights?”
“Well, I showed ’em the car book and they picked different taillights. One guy’s got round, the other says rectangle. But on the headlights. They both said they—”
“Square, side-by-side squares.”
“Right. Hey, Harry, you thinking this is the car that came down on you and the FBI woman? Jesus! We ought to get together on this.”
“Later. Maybe later. Meantime, buzz me in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes, right.”
Bosch hung up and went back to Eleanor, who was looking through the plate-glass window at the ghetto blasters on display. They entered the store, shook off two salesmen, walked around a stack of boxed camcorders on sale for $500 each and told a woman standing at a cash register station in the back that they were there to see Binh. The woman stared blankly at them until Eleanor showed her badge and federal ID card.
“You wait here,” the woman said and then disappeared through a door located behind the cash counter. There was a small mirrored window in the door that reminded Bosch of the interview room back at Wilcox. He looked at his watch. He had eight minutes.
The man who emerged from the door behind the cash register looked to be about sixty years old. He had white hair. He was short but Bosch could tell he had once been physically powerful for his size. Built wide and low to the ground, he now was softened by an easier life than he had had in his native land. He wore silver-framed glasses with a pink tint and an open-collar shirt and golf slacks. His breast pocket sagged with the weight of almost a dozen pens and a clip-on pocket flashlight. Ngo Van Binh was low key all the way.
“Mr. Binh? My name is Eleanor Wish. I am from the FBI. This is Detective Bosch, LAPD. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Yes,” he said, the stern expression on his face unchanging.
“It’s about the break-in at the bank where you had a safe-deposit box.”
“I reported no loss, my deposit box had sentimental occupants only.”
Diamonds ranked fairly high up there on the sentimental range, Bosch thought. “Mr. Binh, can we go back to your office and talk privately?” he said instead.
“Yes, but I suffered no loss. You look. It is in the reports.”
Eleanor held her hand out, urging Binh to lead the way. They followed him through the door with the mirror window and into a warehouselike storage room. There were hundreds of boxes of electronic appliances on steel shelves going to the ceiling. They passed through into a smaller room that was a repair or assembly shop. There was a woman sitting at a tool bench with a bowl of soup held to her mouth. She did not look up as they passed. There were two doors at the back of the shop, and the procession went through one into Binh’s office. It was here that Binh shed his peasant trappings. The office was large and plush, with a desk and two chairs to the right and a dark leather L-shaped couch to the left. The couch was at the edge of an Oriental rug that featured a three-headed dragon poised to strike. The couch faced two walls of shelves filled by books and stereo and video equipment, much finer than what Bosch had seen out front. We should have braced him at his home, Bosch thought. Seen how he lived, not how he worked.
Bosch quickly scanned the room and saw a white telephone on the desk. It would be perfect. It was an antique, the kind where the handset was cradled above a rotary dial. Binh moved toward his desk but Bosch quickly spoke up.
“Mr. Binh? Would it be okay if we sat over here on the couch? We’d like to keep this as informal as possible. We sit at desks all day, to tell you the truth.”
Binh shrugged his shoulders as though it made no difference to him, that they were inconveniencing him no matter where they sat. It was a distinctly American gesture, and Bosch believed his seeming difficulty with English was a front used to better insulate him. Binh sat down on one side of the L-shaped couch and Eleanor and Bosch took the other. “Nice office,” Bosch said and looked around. He saw no other phone in the room.
Binh nodded. He offered no tea or coffee, no small talk. He just said, “What do you want, please?”
Bosch looked at Eleanor.
She said, “Mr. Binh, we are just retracing our steps. You reported no financial loss in the vault break-in. We—”
“That is right. No loss.”
“That is correct. What did you keep in the box?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Papers and such, no value. I told this to everyone already.”
“Yes, we know. We are sorry to bother you again. But the case remains open and we have to go back and see if we missed anything. Could you tell me in specific detail what papers you lost? It might help us, if we make a recovery of property and can identify who it belongs to.”
Eleanor took a small notebook and pen out of her purse. Binh looked at his two visitors as if he could not possibly see how his information could help. Bosch said, “You’d be surprised sometimes what little things can—”
His pager tone sounded and Bosch pulled the device off his belt and looked at the number display. He stood up and looked around, as if he was just noticing the room for the first time. He wondered if he was overdoing it.
“Mr. Binh, can I use your phone? It’ll be local.”
Binh nodded, and Bosch walked to the front of the desk, leaned over and picked up the handset. He made a show of checking the pager number again, then dialed Edgar’s number. He remained standing with his back to Eleanor and Binh. He looked up at the wall, as if studying the silk tapestry that hung there. He heard Binh begin to describe to Eleanor the immigration and citizenship papers that had been taken from his safe-deposit box. Bosch put the pager in his coat pocket and came out with the small pocketknife, the T-9 phone bug and the small battery he had disconnected from his own phone.
“This is Bosch, who pa
ged me?” he said into the phone when Edgar picked up. After Edgar put the phone down, he said, “I’ll hold a few minutes, but tell him I’m in the middle of an interview. What’s so important?”
With his back still to the couch and Binh still talking, Bosch turned slightly to the right and cocked his head as if he were holding the phone to his left ear, where Binh could not see it. Bosch brought the handset down to stomach level, used the knife to pop off the earpiece cover—clearing his throat as he did this—and then pulled out the audio receiver. With one hand he connected the bug to its battery—he had practiced doing it earlier while waiting for the new car in the fleet yard at Wilcox. Then he used his fingers to shove the bug and battery into the barrel of the handset. He put the receiver back in and snapped on the cover, coughing loudly to camouflage any sound.
The Black Echo (1992) Page 31
