The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

“Yeah, I think that’s it. He said she went to a party, was hired as kind of a decoration to be on some guy’s arm. He said it was in Hancock Park. He didn’t have the address. He said he had nothing to do with setting it up. That didn’t make sense to us. You know, a pimp not knowing where…not knowing where one of his girls was. It was the one thing we had and when we started leaning on him about it, Conklin stepped in like a referee.”

  “He didn’t want you leaning on him.”

  “Craziest thing I ever saw. Here was the next DA—everybody knew he was going to run. Here he was taking this bastard’s side against us…Sorry about that bastard comment.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Conklin was trying to make it seem like we were out of line, while all the time this big-piece-of-shit Fox was sitting there smiling with a toothpick in the side of his mouth. It’s what, thirty-somethin’ years ago and I can still remember that toothpick. Galled the Jesus out of me. So to make a long story short, we never did get to brace him on having set up the date she went on.”

  The boat rocked on a high wake and Bosch looked around and didn’t see any other boat. It was weird. He looked out across the water and for the first time realized how different it was from the Pacific. The Pacific was a cold and forbidding blue, the Gulf a warm green that invited you.

  “We left,” McKittrick continued. “I figured we’d have another shot at him. So we left and started to work on his alibi. It turned out to be good. And I don’t mean it was good because his own witnesses said it was. We did the work. We found some independent people. People that didn’t know him. As I remember it, it was rock solid.”

  “You remember where he was?”

  “Spent part of the night in a bar over there on Ivar, place a lot of the pimps hung around. Can’t remember the name of it. Then later he drove out to Ventura, spent most of the rest of the night in a card room until he got a phone call, then he split. The other thing about this was that it didn’t smack of an alibi set up for this particular night. This was his routine. He was well known in all of these places.”

  “What was the phone call?”

  “We never knew. We didn’t know about it until we started checking his alibi and somebody mentioned it. We never got to ask Fox about it. But to be honest, we didn’t care too much at that point. Like I said, his alibi was solid and he didn’t get the call until later in the morning. Four, five o’clock. The vic—your mother had been dead a good long while by then. TOD was midnight. The call didn’t matter.”

  Bosch nodded but it was the kind of detail he would not have left open if it had been his investigation. It was too curious a detail. Who calls a poker room that early in the morning? What kind of call would make Fox up and leave the game?

  “What about the prints?”

  “I had ’em checked anyway and they didn’t match those on the belt. He was clean. The dirtbag was clear.”

  Bosch thought of something.

  “You did check the prints on the belt against the victim’s, right?”

  “Hey, Bosch, I know you highfalutin’ guys think you’re the cat’s ass now but we were known for having a brain or two back in those days.”

  “Sorry.”

  “There were a few prints on the buckle that were the victim’s. That’s it. The rest were definitely the killer’s because of their location. We got good direct lifts and partials on two other spots where it was clear the belt had been grasped by the full hand. You don’t hold a belt that way when you’re putting it on. You hold it that way when you’re putting it around someone’s neck.”

  They were both silent after that. Bosch couldn’t figure out what McKittrick was telling him. He felt deflated. He had thought that if he got McKittrick to open up, the old cop would point the finger at Fox or Conklin or somebody. But he was doing none of that. He really wasn’t giving Bosch anything.

  “How come you remember so many details, Jake? It’s been a long time.”

  “I’ve had a long time to think about it. When you finish up, Bosch, you’ll see, there’ll always be one. One case that stays with you. This is the one that stayed with me.”

  “So what was your final take on it?”

  “My final take? Well, I never got over that meeting at Conklin’s office. I guess you had to be there but it just…it just seemed that the one that was in charge of that meeting was Fox. It was like he was calling the shots.”

  Bosch nodded. He could see that McKittrick was struggling for an explanation of his feelings.

  “You ever interview a suspect with his lawyer there jumpin’ in and out of the conversation?” McKittrick asked. “You know, ‘Don’t answer this, don’t answer that.’ Shit like that.”

  “All the time.”

  “Well, it was like that. It was like Conklin, the next DA for Chrissake, was this shitheel’s lawyer, objecting all the time to our questions. What it came down to was that if you didn’t know who he was or where we were, you’d’ve sworn he was working for Fox. Both of them, Mittel, too. So, I felt pretty sure Fox had his hooks into Arno. Somehow he did. And I was right. It was all confirmed later.”

  “You mean when Fox died?”

  “Yeah. He got killed in a hit and run while working for the Conklin campaign. I remember the newspaper story on it didn’t say nothin’ about his background as a pimp, as a Hollywood Boulevard hoodlum. No, he was just this guy who got run down. Joe Innocent. I tell ya, that story must’ve cost Arno a few dollars and made a reporter a little richer.”

  Bosch could tell there was more so he said nothing.

  “I was in Wilshire dicks by then,” McKittrick continued. “But I got curious when I heard about it. So I called over to Hollywood to see who was on it. It was Eno. Big surprise. And he never made a case on anybody. So that about confirmed what I was thinking about him, too.”

  McKittrick stared off across the water to where the sun was getting low in the sky. He threw his empty beer can at the bucket. It missed and bounced over the side into the water.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “I guess we should head in.”

  He started reeling in his line.

  “What do you think Eno got out of all of this?”

  “I don’t know exactly. He might’ve just been trading favors, something like that. I’m not saying he got rich, but I think he got something out of the deal. He wouldn’t do it for nothing. I just don’t know what it was.”

  McKittrick started taking the rods out of the pipes and stowing them on hooks along the sides of the stern.

  “In 1972 you checked the murder book out of archives, how come?”

  McKittrick looked at him curiously.

  “I signed the same checkout slip a few days ago,” Bosch explained. “Your name was still on it.”

  McKittrick nodded.

  “Yeah, that was right after I put in my papers. I was leaving, going through my files and stuff. I’d hung on to the prints we took off the belt. Kept the card. Also hung on to the belt.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. I didn’t think it would be safe in that file or in the evidence room. Not with Conklin as DA, not with Eno doing him favors. So I kept the stuff. Then a bunch of years went by and it was there when I was cleaning shit out and going to Florida. So right before I decided to punch out, I put the print card back in the murder book and went down and put the belt back in the evidence box. Eno was already in Vegas, retired. Conklin had crashed and burned, was out of politics. The case was long forgotten. I put the stuff back. I guess maybe I hoped someday somebody like you would take a look at it.”

  “What about you? Did you look at the book when you put the card back?”

  “Yeah, and I saw I had done the right thing. Somebody had gone through it, stripped it. They pulled the Fox interview out of it. Probably was Eno.”

  “As the second man on the case you had to do the paper, right?”

  “Right. The paperwork was mine. Most of it.”

  “What did you put on the Fox interview summary that
would have made Eno need to pull it?”

  “I don’t remember anything specific, just that I thought the guy was lying and that Conklin was out of line. Something like that.”

  “Anything else you remember that was missing?”

  “Nah, nothing important, just that. I think he just wanted to get Conklin’s name out of it.”

  “Yeah, well, he missed something. You’d noted his first call on the Chronological Record. That’s how I knew.”

  “Did I? Well, good for me. And here you are.”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right, we’re heading in. Too bad they weren’t really biting today.”

  “I’m not complaining. I got my fish.”

  McKittrick stepped behind the wheel and was about to start the engine when he thought of something.

  “Oh, you know what?” He moved to the cooler and opened it. “I don’t want Mary to be disappointed.”

  He pulled out the plastic bags that contained the sandwiches his wife had made.

  “You hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither.”

  He opened the bags and dumped the sandwiches over the side. Bosch watched him.

  “Jake, when you pulled out that gun, who’d you think I was?”

  McKittrick didn’t say anything as he neatly folded the plastic bags and put them back in the cooler. When he straightened up, he looked at Bosch.

  “I didn’t know. All I knew was that I thought I might have to take you out here and dump you like those sandwiches. Seems like I’ve been hiding out here all my life, waiting for them to send somebody.”

  “You think they’d go that far over time and distance?”

  “I don’t have any idea. The more time that goes by, the more I doubt it. But old habits die hard. I always keep a gun nearby. Doesn’t matter that most times I don’t even remember why.”

  They rode in from the Gulf with the engine roaring and the soft spray of the sea in their faces. They didn’t talk. That was done with. Occasionally, Bosch glanced over at McKittrick. His old face fell under the shadow of his cap brim. But Bosch could see his eyes in there, looking at something that had happened a long time before and no longer could be changed.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  AFTER THE BOAT trip Bosch felt the onset of a headache from the combination of too much beer and too much sun. He begged off an invitation to dinner from McKittrick, saying he was tired. Once in his car, he took a couple of Tylenol caplets out of his overnighter, downed them without any liquid chaser and hoped they would do the job. He took out his notebook and reviewed some of the things he had written about McKittrick’s story.

  He had come to like the old cop by the end of the fishing trip. Maybe he saw some of himself in the older man. McKittrick was haunted because he had let the case go. He had not done the right thing. And Bosch knew he was guilty of the same during all the years he had ignored the case that he knew was there waiting for him. He was making up for that now, and so was McKittrick by talking to him. But both of them knew it might be too little too late.

  Bosch wasn’t sure what he would do next when he got back to Los Angeles. It seemed to him that his only move was to confront Conklin. He was reluctant to do this because he knew he would go into such a confrontation soft, with only his suspicions and no hard evidence. Conklin would have the upper hand.

  A wave of desperation came over him. He did not want the case to come to this. Conklin hadn’t flinched in almost thirty-five years. He wouldn’t with Bosch in his face now. Harry knew he needed something else. But he had nothing.

  He started the car but left it in Park. He turned the air conditioner on high and added what McKittrick had told him into the stew of what he already knew. He began formulating a theory. For Bosch, this was one of the most important components of homicide investigation. Take the facts and shake them down into hypothesis. The key was not to become beholden to any one theory. Theories changed and you had to change with them.

  It seemed clear from McKittrick’s information that Fox had a hold on Conklin. What was it? Well, Bosch thought, Fox dealt in women. The theory that emerged was that Fox had gotten a hook into Conklin through a woman, or women. The news clips at the time reported Conklin was a bachelor. The morals of the time would have dictated then as now that as a public servant and soon-to-be candidate for top prosecutor, Conklin needed not necessarily to be celibate but, at least, not to have succumbed privately to the very vices he was publicly attacking. If he had done that and was exposed, he could kiss his political career good-bye, let alone his position as commander of the DA commandos. So, Bosch concluded, if this was Conklin’s flaw and it was through Fox that such dalliances were arranged, then Fox would hold an almost unbeatable hand when it came to having juice with Conklin. It would explain the unusual circumstances of the interview McKittrick and Eno conducted with Fox.

  The same theory, Bosch knew, would work to an even greater degree if Conklin had done more than succumb to the vice of sex but had gone further: if he had killed a woman Fox had sent to him, Marjorie Lowe. For one thing, it would explain how Conklin knew for sure that Fox was in the clear on the murder—because he was the killer himself. For another, it would explain how Fox got Conklin to run interference for him and why he was later hired as a Conklin campaign worker. The bottom line was, if Conklin was the killer, Fox’s hook would be set even deeper and it would be set for good. Conklin would be like that wahoo at the end of the line, a pretty fish unable to get away.

  Unless, Bosch knew, the man at the other end of the line and holding the rod were to go away somehow. He thought about Fox’s death and saw how it fit. Conklin let some time separate one death from the other. He played like a hooked fish, even agreeing to Fox’s demand for a straight job with the campaign, and then, when all seemed clear, Fox was run down in the street. Maybe a payoff to a reporter kept the victim’s background quiet—if the reporter even knew it, and a few months later Conklin was crowned district attorney.

  Bosch considered where Mittel would fit into the theory. He felt it was unlikely that all of this had transpired in a vacuum. It was Bosch’s guess that Mittel, as Conklin’s right-hand man and enforcer, would know what Conklin knew.

  Bosch liked his theory but it angered him, largely because that was all it was, theory. He shook his head as he realized he was back to ground zero. All talk, no evidence of anything.

  He grew weary thinking about it and decided to put the thoughts aside for a while. He turned the air down because it was too cool against his sunburned skin and put the car in gear. As he slowly cruised through Pelican Cove toward the gatehouse, his thoughts drifted to the woman who was trying to sell her dead father’s condo. She had signed the name Jazz on the self-portrait. He liked that.

  He turned the car around and drove toward her unit. It was still daylight and no lights shone from behind the building’s windows when he got there. He couldn’t tell if she was there or not. Bosch parked nearby and watched for a few minutes, debating what he should do, if anything at all.

  Fifteen minutes later, when it seemed that indecisiveness had paralyzed him, she stepped out the front door. He was parked nearly twenty yards away, between two other cars. His paralytic affliction eased enough for him to slide down in his seat to avoid detection. She walked out into the parking lot and behind the row of cars which included Bosch’s rental. He didn’t move or turn to follow her movement. He listened. He waited for the sound of a car starting. Then what, he wondered. Follow her? What are you doing?

  He jerked upright at the sound of sharp rapping on the window next to him. It was her. Bosch was flustered but managed to turn the key so he could lower the window.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Bosch, what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been sitting out here. I saw you.”

  “I…”

  He was too humiliated to finish.

  “I don’t know whether to call security
or not.”

  “No, don’t do that. I, uh, I was just—I was going to go to your door. To apologize.”

  “Apologize? Apologize for what?”

  “For today. For earlier, when I was inside. I—you were right, I wasn’t looking to buy anything.”

  “Then what were you doing?”

  Bosch opened the car door and stepped out. He felt disadvantaged with her looking down at him in the car.

  “I’m a cop,” he said. “I needed to get in here to see someone. I used you and I’m sorry. I am. I didn’t know about your father and all of that.”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “That’s the dumbest story I’ve ever heard. What about L.A., was that part of the story?”