The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  “I think you do. I understand. Maybe everybody’s like this.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  They were quiet for a while after that. Bosch leaned down and kissed her breasts, holding a nipple between his lips for a long moment. She brought her hands up and held his head to her chest. He could smell the jasmine.

  “Harry, have you ever had to use your gun?”

  He pulled his head up. The question seemed out of place. But through the darkness he could see her eyes on him, watching and waiting for an answer.

  “Yes.”

  “You killed someone.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  She said nothing else.

  “What is it, Jazz?”

  “Nothing. I was just wondering how that would be. How you would go on.”

  “Well, all I can tell you is that it hurts. Even when there was no choice and they had to go down, it hurts. You just have to go on.”

  She was silent. Whatever she had needed to hear from him he hoped she had gotten. Bosch was confused. He didn’t know why she had asked such questions and wondered if she was testing him in some way. He lay back on his pillow and waited for sleep but confusion kept it away from him. After a while she turned on the bed and put her arm over him.

  “I think you are a good man,” she whispered close to his ear.

  “Am I?” he whispered back.

  “And you will come back, won’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ll come back.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  BOSCH WENT TO every rental counter in McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas but none had a car left. He silently chastised himself for not making a reservation and walked outside the terminal into the dry crisp air to catch a cab. The driver was a woman and when Bosch gave the address, on Lone Mountain Drive, he could clearly see her disappointment in the rearview mirror. The destination wasn’t a hotel, so she wouldn’t be picking up a return fare.

  “Don’t worry,” Bosch said, understanding her problem. “If you wait for me, you can take me back to the airport.”

  “How long you gonna be? I mean, Lone Mountain, that’s way out there in the sand pits.”

  “I might be five minutes, I might be less. Maybe a half hour. I’d say no longer than a half hour.”

  “You waiting on the meter?”

  “On the meter or you. Whatever you want to do.”

  She thought about it a moment and put the car in drive.

  “Where are all the rental cars, anyway?”

  “Big convention in town. Electronics or something.”

  It was a thirty-minute ride out into the desert northwest of the strip. The neon-and-glass buildings retreated and the cab passed through residential neighborhoods until these, too, became sparse. The land was a ragged brown out here and dotted unevenly with scrub brush. Bosch knew the roots of every bush spread wide and sucked up what little moisture was in the earth. It made for a terrain that seemed dying and desolate.

  The houses, too, were few and far between, each one an outpost in a no-man’s-land. The streets had been gridded and paved long ago but the boomtown of Las Vegas hadn’t quite caught up yet. It was coming, though. The city was spreading like a patch of weeds.

  The road began to rise toward a mountain the color of cocoa mix. The cab shook as a procession of eighteen-wheel dump trucks thundered by with loads of sand from the excavation pits the driver had mentioned. And soon the paved roadway gave way to gravel and the cab sent up a tail of dust in its wake. Bosch was beginning to think the address the smarmy supervising clerk at City Hall had given him was a phony. But then they were there.

  The address to which Claude Eno’s pension checks were mailed each month was a sprawling ranch-style house of pink stucco and dusty white tile roof. Looking past it, Bosch could see where even the gravel road ended just past it. It was the end of the line. Nobody had lived farther away than Claude Eno.

  “I don’t know about this,” the driver said. “You want me to wait? This is like the goddamn moon out here.”

  She had pulled into the driveway behind a late 1970s-model Olds Cutlass. There was a carport where another car was parked hidden beneath a tarp that was blue in the further recesses of the carport but bleached nearly white along the surfaces sacrificed to the sun.

  Bosch took out his fold of money and paid the driver thirty-five dollars for the ride out. Then he took two twenties, ripped them in half and handed one side of each over the seat to her.

  “You wait, you get the other half of those.”

  “Plus the fare back to the airport.”

  “Plus that.”

  Bosch got out, realizing it would probably be the quickest forty bucks ever lost in Las Vegas if nobody answered the door. But he was in luck. A woman who looked to be in her late sixties opened the door before he could knock. And why not, he thought. In this house, you could see visitors coming for a mile.

  Bosch felt the blast of air-conditioning escaping through the open door.

  “Mrs. Eno?”

  “No.”

  Bosch pulled out his notebook and checked the address against the black numbers tacked on the front wall next to the door. They matched.

  “Olive Eno doesn’t live here?”

  “You didn’t ask that. I’m not Mrs. Eno.”

  “Can I please speak with Mrs. Eno then?” Annoyed with the woman’s preciseness, Bosch showed the badge he had gotten back from McKittrick after the boat ride. “It’s police business.”

  “Well, you can try. She hasn’t spoken to anybody, at least anybody outside her imagination, in three years.”

  She motioned Bosch in and he stepped into the cool house.

  “I’m her sister. I take care of her. She’s in the kitchen. We were in the middle of lunch when I saw the dust come up on the road and heard you arrive.”

  Bosch followed her down a tiled hallway toward the kitchen. The house smelled like old age, like dust and mold and urine. In the kitchen a gnome-like woman with white hair sat in a wheelchair, barely taking up half of the space it gave for an occupant. There was a slide-on tray in front of it and the woman’s gnarled pearl-white hands were folded together on top of it. There were milky blue cataracts on both eyes and they seemed dead to the world outside the body. Bosch noticed a bowl of applesauce on the nearby table. It only took him a few seconds to size up the situation.

  “She’ll be ninety in August,” said the sister. “If she makes it.”

  “How long has she been like this?”

  “Long time. I’ve been taking care of her for three years now.” She then bent into the gnome’s face and loudly added, “Isn’t that right, Olive?”

  The loudness of the question seemed to kick a switch and Olive Eno’s jaw started working but no sound that was intelligible issued. She stopped the effort after a while and the sister straightened up.

  “Don’t worry about it, Olive. I know you love me.”

  She wasn’t as loud with that sentence. Maybe she feared Olive might actually muster a denial.

  “What’s your name?” Bosch asked.

  “Elizabeth Shivone. What’s this about? I saw that badge of yours says Los Angeles, not Las Vegas. Aren’t you off the beat here a bit?”

  “Not really. It’s about her husband. One of his old cases.”

  “Claude’s been dead going on five years now.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Just died. His pump went out. Died right there on the floor, about where you’re standing.”

  They both looked down at the floor as if maybe his body was still there.

  “I came to look through his things,” Bosch said.

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking maybe he kept files from his time with the police.”

  “You better tell me what you’re doing here. This doesn’t sound right to me.”

  “I’m investigating a case he worked back in 1961. It’s still open.
Parts of the file are missing. I thought maybe he’d taken it. I thought maybe there might be something important that he kept. I don’t know what. Anything. I just thought it was worth a try.”

  He could see that her mind was working and her eyes suddenly froze for a second when her memory snagged on something.

  “There is something, isn’t there?” he said.

  “No. I think you should go.”

  “It’s a big house. Did he have a home office?”

  “Claude left the police thirty years ago. He built this house in the middle of nowhere just to be away from all of that.”

  “What did he do when he moved out here?”

  “He worked casino security. A few years at the Sands, then twenty at the Flamingo. He was getting two pensions and took good care of Olive.”

  “Speaking of which, who’s signing those pension checks these days?”

  Bosch looked at Olive Eno to make his point. The other woman was silent a long moment, then went on the offense.

  “Look, I could get power of attorney. Look at her. It wouldn’t be a problem. I take care of her, mister.”

  “Yeah, you feed her applesauce.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “You want somebody to make sure or do you want to let it end right here? I don’t really care what you’re doing, lady. I don’t really care if you’re even her sister or not. If I was betting, I’d say you’re not. But I don’t really care right now. I’m busy. I just want to look through Eno’s things.”

  He stopped there and let her think about it. He looked at his watch.

  “No warrant then, right?”

  “I don’t have a warrant. I’ve got a cab waiting. You make me get a warrant and I’m going to stop being such a nice guy.”

  Her eyes went up and down his body as if to measure how nice and how not nice he could be.

  “The office is this way.”

  She said the words as if they were bites out of wood planks. She swiftly led him down the hall again and then off to the left into a study. There was an old steel desk as the room’s centerpiece, a couple of four-drawer file cabinets, an extra chair and not much else.

  “After he died, Olive and I moved everything into those file cabinets and haven’t looked at it since.”

  “They’re all full?”

  “All eight. Have at it.”

  Bosch reached his hand into his pocket and took out another twenty-dollar bill. He tore it in half and gave one side to Shivone.

  “Take that out to the cab driver. Tell her I’m going to be a little longer than I thought.”

  She exhaled loudly, snatched the half and left the room. After she was gone Bosch went to the desk and opened each of the drawers. The first two he tried were empty. The next contained stationery and office supplies. The fourth drawer contained a checkbook that he quickly leafed through and saw it was an account covering household expenses. There was also a file containing recent receipts and other records. The last drawer in the desk was locked.

  He started with the bottom file drawers and worked his way up. Nothing in the first few seemed even remotely connected with what Bosch was working on. There were files labeled with the names of different casinos and gaming organizations. The files in another drawer were labeled by people’s names. Bosch looked through a few of these and determined they were files on known casino cheats. Eno had built a library of home intelligence files. By this time, Shivone had come back from her errand and had taken the seat opposite the desk. She was watching Bosch and he threw a few idle questions at her while he looked.

  “So what did Claude do for the casinos?”

  “He was a bird dog.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kind’ve an undercover thing. He mingled in the casinos, gambled with house chips, watched people. He was good at picking out the cheats and how they did it.”

  “Guess it takes one to know one, right?”

  “What’s that crack supposed to mean? He did a good job.”

  “I’m sure he did. Is that how he met you?”

  “I’m not answering any of your questions.”

  “Okay by me.”

  He had only the two top drawers left. He opened one and found it contained no files at all. Just an old, dust-covered Rolodex and other items that had probably sat on the top of the desk at one point. There was an ashtray, a clock and a pen holder made of carved wood that had Eno’s name carved on it. Bosch took the Rolodex out and put it on top of the cabinet. He blew the dust off it and then began turning it until he came to the C’s. He looked through the cards but found no listing for Arno Conklin. He met with similar failure when he tried to find a listing for Gordon Mittel.

  “You’re not going to look through that whole thing, are you?” Shivone asked in exasperation.

  “No, I’m just going to take it with me.”

  “Oh, no you don’t. You can’t just come in here and—”

  “I’m taking it. If you want to make a complaint about it, be my guest. Then I’ll make a complaint about you.”

  She went quiet after that. Bosch went on to the next drawer and found it contained about twelve files on old LAPD cases from the 1950s and early 1960s. Again, he didn’t have the time to study them, but he checked all the labels and none was marked Marjorie Lowe. By randomly pulling out a few of the files it became clear to him that Eno had made copies of files on some of his cases to take with him when he left the department. Of the random selections, all were murders, including two of prostitutes. Only one of the cases was closed.

  “Go get me a box or a bag or something for these files,” Bosch said over his shoulder. When he sensed the woman in the room had not moved, he barked, “Do it!”

  She got up and left. Bosch stood gazing at the files and thinking. He had no idea if these were important or not. He had no idea what they meant. He only knew he should take them in case they turned out to be important. But what bothered him more than what the files that were in the drawer could mean was the feeling that something was certainly missing. This was based on his belief in McKittrick. The retired detective was sure his former partner, Eno, had some kind of hold on Conklin, or at the very least, some kind of deal with him. But there was nothing here about that. And it seemed to Bosch that if Eno was holding something on Conklin, it would still be here. If he kept old LAPD files, then he kept whatever he had on Conklin. In fact, he would have kept it in a safe place. Where?

  The woman came back and dropped a cardboard box on the floor. It was the kind a case of beer had come in. Bosch put a foot-thick stack of files in it along with the Rolodex.

  “You want a receipt?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t want anything from you.”

  “Well, there is still something I need from you.”

  “This doesn’t end, does it?”

  “I hope it does.”

  “What do you want?”

  “When Eno died, did you help the old lady—uh, your sister, that is—did you help her clear out his safe deposit box?”

  “How’d—”

  She stopped herself but not soon enough.

  “How’d I know? Because it’s obvious. What I’m looking for, he would have kept in a safe place. What did you do with it?”

  “We threw everything away. It was meaningless. Just some old files and bank statements. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was old himself.”

  Bosch looked at his watch. He was running out of time if he was going to make his plane.

  “Get me the key for this desk drawer.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Hurry up, I don’t have a lot of time. You open it or I’ll open it. But if I do it, that drawer isn’t going to be much use to you anymore.”

  She reached into the pocket of her house dress and pulled out the house keys. She reached down and unlocked the desk drawer, pulled it open and then stepped away.

  “We didn’t know what any of it was, or what it meant.”

  “That’s
fine.”

  Bosch moved to the drawer and looked in. There were two thin manila files and two packs of envelopes with rubber bands holding them together. The first file he looked through contained Eno’s birth certificate, passport, marriage license and other personal records. He put it back in the drawer. The next file contained LAPD forms and Bosch quickly recognized them as the pages and reports that had been removed from the Marjorie Lowe murder book. He knew he had no time to read them at the moment and put the file in the beer box with the other files.