The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  “You owe me big time, Bosch. I killed it.”

  He felt relief and annoyance at the same time. It was typical thinking for a reporter.

  “What are you talking about?” he countered. “You owe me big time for saving your ass.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that. I’m still going to check this out tomorrow. If it falls the way you said, I’m going to Irving to complain about Brockman. I’ll burn him.”

  “You just did.”

  Realizing she had just confirmed Brockman as the source, she laughed uneasily.

  “What did your editor say?”

  “He thinks I’m an idiot. But I told him there’s other news in the world.”

  “Good line.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to keep that one in my computer. So what’s going on? And what’s happening with those clips I got you?”

  “The clips are still percolating. I can’t really talk about anything yet.”

  “Figures. I don’t know why I keep helping you, Bosch, but here goes. Remember you asked about Monte Kim, the guy who wrote that first clip I gave you?”

  “Yeah. Monte Kim.”

  “I asked about him around here and one of the old rewrite guys told me he’s still alive. Turns out that after he left the Times he worked for the DA’s office for a while. I don’t know what he’s doing now but I got his number and his address. He’s in the Valley.”

  “Can you give it to me?”

  “I guess so, since it was in the phonebook.”

  “Damn, I never thought of that.”

  “You might be a good detective, Bosch, but you wouldn’t make much of a reporter.”

  She gave him the number and address, said she’d be in touch and hung up. Bosch put the phone down on the seat and thought about this latest piece of information as he drove into Hollywood. Monte Kim had worked for the district attorney. Bosch had a pretty good idea which one that would be.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  THE MAN BEHIND the front desk at the Mark Twain didn’t seem to recognize Bosch, though Harry was reasonably sure he was the same man he had dealt with before while renting rooms for witnesses. The counterman was tall and thin and had the hunched-over shoulders of someone carrying a heavy burden. He looked like he’d been behind the desk since Eisenhower.

  “You remember me? From down the street?”

  “Yeah, I remember. I didn’t say anything ’cause I didn’t know if this was an undercover job or not.”

  “No. No undercover. I wanted to know if you have one of the big rooms in the back open. One with a phone.”

  “You want one?”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Who you going to put in there this time? I don’t want no gangbangers again. Last time, they—”

  “No, no gangbangers. Only me. I want the room.”

  “You want the room?”

  “That’s right. And I won’t paint on the walls. How much?”

  The desk man seemed nonplussed by the fact that Bosch wanted to stay there himself. He finally recovered and told Bosch he had his choice: thirty dollars a day, two hundred a week or five hundred a month. All in advance. Bosch paid for a week with his credit card and waited anxiously while the man checked to make sure the charge would clear.

  “Now, how much for the parking space in the loading zone out front?”

  “You can’t rent that.”

  “I want to park out front, make it harder for one of your other tenants to rip my car off.”

  Bosch took out his money and slid fifty dollars across the counter.

  “If parking enforcement comes by, tell them it’s cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You the manager?”

  “And owner. Twenty-seven years.”

  “Sorry.”

  Bosch went out to get his things. It took him three trips to bring everything up to room 214. The room was in the back and its two windows looked across an alley to the back of a one-story building that housed two bars and an adult film and novelties store. But Bosch had known all along it would be no garden spot. It wasn’t the kind of place where he would find a terry cloth robe in the closet and mints on the pillow at night. It was just a couple of notches up from the places where you slid your money to the clerk through a slot in the bulletproof glass.

  One room had a bureau and a bed, which had only two cigarette burns in the bedspread, and a television mounted in a steel frame that was bolted to the wall. There was no cable, no remote and no courtesy TV Guide. The other room had a worn green couch, a small table for two and a kitchenette that had a half refrigerator, a bolted-down microwave and a two-coil electric range. The bathroom was off the hallway that connected the two rooms and came complete with white tile that had yellowed like old men’s teeth.

  Despite the drab circumstances and his hopes that his stay would be temporary, Bosch tried his best to transform the hotel room into a home. He hung some clothes in the closet, put his toothbrush and shaving kit in the bathroom and set the answering machine up on the phone, though nobody knew his number. He decided that in the morning he’d call the telephone company and have a forwarding tape put on his old line.

  Next he set up the stereo on the bureau. For the time being he just placed the speakers on the floor on either side of the bureau. He then rummaged through his box of CDs and came across a Tom Waits recording called “Blue Valentine.” He hadn’t listened to it in years so he put it on.

  He sat down on the bed near the phone and listened and thought for a few minutes about calling Jazz in Florida. But he wasn’t sure what he could say or ask. He decided it might be better to just let it go for now. He lit a cigarette and went to the window. There was nothing happening in the alley. Across the tops of the buildings he could see the ornate tower of the nearby Hollywood Athletic Club. It was a beautiful building. One of the last in Hollywood.

  He closed the musty curtains, turned around and studied his new home. After a while he yanked the spread off the bed along with the other covers and then remade it with his own sheets and blanket. He knew it was a small gesture of continuity but it made him feel less lonely. It also made him feel a little bit as though he knew what he was doing with his life at that point and it made him forget for a few more moments about Harvey Pounds.

  Bosch sat on the newly made bed and leaned back on the pillows propped against the headboard. He lit another cigarette. He studied the wounds on his two fingers and saw that the scabs had been replaced with hard pink skin. They were healing nicely. He hoped the rest of him would, too. But he doubted it. He knew he was responsible. And he knew he had to pay. Somehow.

  He absentmindedly pulled the phone off the bed table and placed it on his chest. It was an old one with a rotary dial. Bosch lifted the receiver and looked at the dial. Who was he going to call? What was he going to say? He replaced the receiver and sat up. He decided he had to get out.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  MONTE KIM LIVED on Willis Avenue in Sherman Oaks in the midst of a ghost town of apartment buildings red-tagged after the quake. Kim’s apartment building was a gray-and-white Cape Cod affair that sat between two empties. At least they were supposed to be empty. As Bosch pulled up he saw lights go out in one of the buildings. Squatters, he guessed. Like Bosch had been, always on alert for the building inspector.

  Kim’s building looked as though it had been either completely spared by the quake or already completely repaired. Bosch doubted it was the latter. He believed the building was more a testament to the serendipitous violence of nature, and maybe a builder who didn’t cut corners. The Cape Cod had stood up while the buildings around it cracked and slid.

  It was a common, rectangular building with apartment entrances running down each side of it. But to get to one of the doors, you had to be buzzed through a six-foot-tall electronic gate. The cops called them “feel good” gates because they made the dwellers inside feel safer, but they were worthless. All they did was put up a barrier for legitimate visito
rs to the building. Others could simply climb over, and they did, all over the city. Feel good gates were everywhere.

  He said only that it was the police when Kim’s voice sounded on the intercom and he was buzzed in. He took the badge wallet out of his pocket as he walked down to apartment eight. When Kim opened up, Bosch shoved the open badge wallet through the door and about six inches from his face. He held it so his finger was across the badge and obscured the marking that said LIEUTENANT. He then pulled the wallet back quickly and put it away.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the name on there,” Kim said, still blocking the way.

  “Hieronymus Bosch. But people call me Harry.”

  “You’re named for the painter.”

  “Sometimes I feel old enough that I think he was named for me. Tonight’s one of those nights. Can I come in? This shouldn’t take long.”

  Kim led him into the living room with a confused look on his face. It was a decent-sized and neat room with a couch and two chairs and a gas fireplace next to the TV. Kim took one of the chairs and Bosch sat on the end of the couch. He noticed a white poodle sleeping on the carpet next to Kim’s chair. Kim was an overweight man with a wide, florid face. He wore glasses that pinched his temples and what was left of his hair was dyed brown. He wore a red cardigan sweater over a white shirt and old khakis. Bosch guessed Kim wasn’t quite sixty. He had been expecting an older man.

  “I guess this is where I ask, ‘What’s this all about?’ ”

  “Yeah, and I guess this is where I tell you. Problem is I’m not sure how to begin. I’m investigating a couple of homicides. You can probably help. But I wonder if you’d indulge me and let me ask you some questions going a while back? Then, when we’re done, I’ll explain why.”

  “Seems unusual but…”

  Kim raised his hands and waved off any problems. He made a movement in his chair as if to get more comfortable. He checked the dog and then squinted his eyes as if that might better help him understand and answer the questions. Bosch could see a film of sweat developing in the defoliated landscape that had once been his scalp.

  “You were a reporter for the Times. How long did that last?”

  “Oh, boy, that was just a few years in the early sixties. How do you know that?”

  “Mr. Kim, let me ask these questions first. What kind of reporting did you do?”

  “Back then they called us cub reporters. I was on the crime beat.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “Currently, I work out of my home. I’m in public relations. I have an office upstairs in the second bedroom. I had an office in Reseda but the building was condemned. You could see daylight through the cracks.”

  He was like most people in L.A. He didn’t have to preface his remarks by saying he was talking about earthquake damage. It was understood.

  “I have several small accounts,” he continued. “I was a local spokesman for the GM plant in Van Nuys until they closed it down. Then I went out on my own.”

  “What made you quit the Times back in the sixties?”

  “I got—Am I a suspect in something?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Kim. I’m just trying to get to know you. Indulge me. I’ll get to the point. You were saying why you quit the Times.”

  “Yes, well, I got a better job. I was offered the position of press spokesman for the district attorney at the time, Arno Conklin. I took it. Better pay, more interesting than the cop beat and a brighter future.”

  “What do you mean, brighter future?”

  “Well, actually I was wrong about that. When I took the job I thought the sky would be the limit with Arno. He was a good man. I figured I’d eventually—you know, if I stayed with him—ride with him to the governor’s mansion, maybe the Senate in Washington. But things didn’t turn out. I ended up with an office in Reseda with a crack in the wall I could feel the wind come through. I don’t see why the police would be interested in all—”

  “What happened with Conklin? Why didn’t things turn out?”

  “Well, I’m not the expert on this. All I know is that in sixty-eight he was planning on running for attorney general and the office was practically his for the taking. Then he just…dropped out. He quit politics and went back to practice law. And it wasn’t to harvest the big corporate bucks that sit out there when these guys go into private practice. He opened a one-man law firm. I admired him. As far as I heard, sixty percent or better of his practice was pro bono. He was working for free most of the time.”

  “Like he was serving a penance or something?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Why’d he drop out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Weren’t you part of the inner circle?”

  “No. He didn’t have a circle. He had one man.”

  “Gordon Mittel.”

  “Right. You want to know why he didn’t run, ask Gordon.” Then it clicked in Kim’s brain that Bosch had introduced the name Gordon Mittel to the conversation. “Is this about Gordon Mittel?”

  “Let me ask the questions first. Why do you think Conklin didn’t run? You must have some idea.”

  “He wasn’t officially in the race in the first place, so he didn’t have to make any public statement about dropping out. He just didn’t run. There were a lot of rumors, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, lots of stuff. Like he was gay. There were others. Financial trouble. Supposedly there was a threat from the mob that if he won, they’d kill him. Just stuff like that. None of it was ever more than backroom talk amongst the town politicos.”

  “He was never married?”

  “Not as far as I know. But as far as him being gay, I never saw anything like that.”

  Bosch noted that the top of Kim’s head was slick now with sweat. It was already warm in the room but he kept the cardigan on. Bosch made a quick change of tracks.

  “Okay, tell me about the death of Johnny Fox.”

  Bosch saw the quick glimmer of recognition pass behind the glasses but then it disappeared. But it was enough.

  “Johnny Fox, who’s that?”

  “C’mon, Monte, it’s old news. Nobody cares what you did. I just need to know the story behind the story. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re talking about when I was a reporter? I wrote a lot of stories. That was thirty-five years ago. I was a kid. I can’t remember everything.”

  “But you remember Johnny Fox. He was your ticket to that brighter future. The one that didn’t happen.”

  “Look, what are you doing here? You’re not a cop. Did Gordon send you? After all these years, you people think I…”

  He stopped.

  “I am a cop, Monte. And you’re lucky I got here before Gordon did. Something’s coming undone. The ghosts are coming back. You read in the paper today about that cop found in his trunk in Griffith Park?”

  “I saw it on the news. He was a lieutenant.”

  “Yeah. He was my lieutenant. He was looking into a couple old cases. Johnny Fox was one of them. Then he ended up in his trunk. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little nervous and pushy, but I need to know about Johnny Fox. And you wrote the story. You wrote the story after he got killed that made him out to be an angel. Then you end up on Conklin’s team. I don’t care what you did, I just want to know what you did.”

  “Am I in danger?”

  Bosch hiked his shoulders in his best who-knows-and-who-cares gesture.

  “If you are, then we can protect you. You don’t help us, we can’t help you. You know how it goes.”

  “Oh my God! I knew this—What other cases?”

  “One of Johnny’s girls who got killed about a year before him. Her name was Marjorie Lowe.”

  Kim shook his head. He didn’t recognize the name. He ran his hand over his scalp, using it like a squeegee to move the sweat into the thicker hair. Bosch could tell he had perfectly primed the fat man to answer the questions.

  “So what abo
ut Fox?” Bosch asked. “I don’t have all night.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything. All I did was a favor for a favor.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He composed himself for a long moment before speaking.