The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  “So he didn’t know who Fox was either?” Irving asked.

  “That’s what he said. He just said he was innocent. If you find that hard to take, the alternative is harder; that this prosecutor would openly consort with these types of people. So, I’m going with Arno’s story. He didn’t know.”

  “Okay, he didn’t know he was being compromised. So what was in it for Fox and…your mother?”

  “Fox is easy. Once Conklin went with her, Fox had a nice hook into him and he could reel him in whenever he wanted. Marjorie is something else and I’ve been thinking about it but it still isn’t clear. But you can say this, most women in that situation are looking for a way out. She could have played along with Fox’s plan because she had her own plan. She was looking for a way out of the life.”

  Irving nodded and added to the hypothesis.

  “She had a boy in the youth hall and wanted to get him out. Being with Arno could only help.”

  “That’s right. The thing of it was, Arno and Marjorie did something none of the three of them expected. They fell in love. Or at least Conklin did. And he believed she did, too.”

  Irving took a chair in the corner, crossed his legs and stared thoughtfully at Bosch. He said nothing. Nothing about his demeanor indicated he was anything else but totally interested and believing in Bosch’s story. Bosch’s arm was getting tired of holding the ice pack up and he wished he could lie down. But there was only the table in the examination suite. He continued the story.

  “So they fall in love and their relationship continues and somewhere along the line she tells him. Or maybe Mittel did some checking and told him. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that at some point Conklin knew the score. And again, he surprises everybody.”

  “How?”

  “On October twenty-seven, nineteen sixty-one, he proposes marriage to Marj—”

  “He told you this? Arno told you this?”

  “He told me tonight. He wanted to marry her. She wanted to marry him. On that night back then, he finally decided to chuck it all, to risk losing everything he had to gain the one thing he wanted most.”

  Bosch reached into his jacket on the table and took out his cigarettes. Irving spoke up.

  “I don’t think this is a—nothing, never mind.”

  Bosch lit a smoke with his lighter.

  “It was the bravest act of his life. You realize that? That took balls to be willing to risk everything like that…But he made a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “He called his friend Gordon Mittel to ask him to go with them to Vegas to be best man. Mittel refused. He knew it would be the end of a promising political career for Conklin, maybe even his own career, and he wanted no part of it. But then he went further than just refusing to be best man. See, he saw Conklin as the white horse on which he would be able to ride into the castle. He had big plans for himself and Conklin and he wasn’t going to sit back and let some…some Hollywood whore ruin it. He knew from Conklin’s call that she had gone home to pack. So Mittel went there and intercepted her somehow. Maybe told her that Conklin had sent him. I don’t know.”

  “He killed her.”

  Bosch nodded and this time he didn’t go dizzy.

  “I don’t know where, maybe in his car. He made it look like a sex crime by tying the belt around her neck and tearing up her clothes. The semen…it was already there because she had been with Conklin…After she was dead, Mittel took the body to the alley near the Boulevard and put her in the trash. The whole thing stayed a secret for a lot of years after that.”

  “Until you came along.”

  Bosch didn’t answer. He was savoring his cigarette and the relief of the end of the case.

  “What about Fox?” Irving asked.

  “Like I said, Fox knew about Marjorie and Arno. And he knew they were together the night before Marjorie was found dead in that alley. That knowledge gave Fox a powerful piece of leverage over an important man, even if the man was innocent. Fox used it. In who knows how many ways. Within a year he was on Arno’s campaign payroll. He was hooked on him like a bloodsucking leech. So Mittel, the fixer, finally stepped in. Fox died in a hit and run while supposedly handing out Conklin campaign fliers. Would’ve been easy to set up, make it look like it was an accident and the driver just fled. But that’s no surprise. The same guy who worked the Marjorie Lowe case worked the hit and run. Same result. Nobody ever arrested.”

  “McKittrick?”

  “No. Claude Eno. He’s dead now. Took his secrets with him. But Mittel was paying him off for twenty-five years.”

  “The bank statements?”

  “Yeah, in the briefcase. You look, you’ll probably find records somewhere linking Mittel to the payments. Conklin said he didn’t know about them and I believe him…You know, somebody ought to check all the elections Mittel worked on over the years. They’ll probably find out he was a rat fucker that could’ve held his own in the Nixon White House.”

  Bosch ground his cigarette out on the side of a trash can next to the table and dropped the butt in. He started to feel very cold and put his jacket back on. It was smudged with dirt and dried blood.

  “You look like a mess in that, Harry,” Irving said. “Why don’t you—”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know, he didn’t even scream.”

  “What?”

  “Mittel. He didn’t even scream when he went down that hill. I can’t figure that out.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s just one of those—”

  “And I didn’t push him. He jumped me in the brush and when we rolled, he went over. He didn’t even scream.”

  “I understand. No one is saying—”

  “All I did was start to ask questions about her and people started dying.”

  Bosch was staring at an eye chart on the far wall of the room. He could not figure out why they would have such a thing in an emergency room examination suite.

  “Christ…Pounds…I—”

  “Yes, I know what happened,” Irving interrupted.

  Bosch looked over at him.

  “You do?”

  “We interviewed everyone in the squad. Edgar told me that he made a computer run for you on Fox. My only conclusion is that Pounds either overheard or somehow got wind of it. I think he was monitoring what your close associates were doing after you went on ISL. Then he must’ve taken it a step further and stumbled into Mittel and Vaughn. He ran DMV traces on the parties involved. I think it got back to Mittel. He had the connections that would have warned him.”

  Bosch was silent. He wondered if Irving really believed that scenario or if he was signaling to Bosch that he knew what had really happened and was letting it go by. It didn’t matter. Whether or not Irving blamed him or took departmental action against him, Bosch’s own conscience would be the hardest thing to live with.

  “Christ,” he said again. “He got killed instead of me.”

  His body started shuddering then. As if saying the words out loud had started some kind of exorcism. He threw the ice pack into the trash can and wrapped his arms around himself. But the shuddering wouldn’t stop. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again, that his shaking was not a temporary affliction but a permanent part of him now. He had the warm salty taste of tears in his mouth and he realized then that he was crying. He turned his face away from Irving and tried to tell him to leave but he couldn’t say anything. His jaw was locked as tight as a fist.

  “Harry?” he heard Irving say. “Harry, you okay?”

  Bosch managed to nod, not understanding how Irving could not see his body shaking. He moved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and pulled it closed around him. He felt something in his left pocket and started absentmindedly pulling it out.

  “Look,” Irving was saying, “the doctor said you could get emotional. This knock on the head…they do weird things to you. Don’t wor—Harry, are you sure you’re okay? You’re turning blue, son. I’m
gonna—I’ll go get the doctor. I’ll—”

  He stopped as Bosch managed to remove the object from his jacket. He held his palm upright. Clasped in his shaking hand was a black eight ball. Much of it was smeared with blood. Irving took it from him, having to practically pry his fingers off it.

  “I’ll go get somebody,” was all he said.

  Then Bosch was alone in the room, waiting for someone to come and the demon to leave.

  Chapter Forty-four

  BECAUSE OF THE concussion, Bosch’s pupils were dilated unevenly and purple hemorrhages bulged below them. He had a hell of a headache and a one-hundred-degree temperature. As a precaution, the emergency room physician ordered that he be admitted and monitored, not allowed to sleep until four in the morning. He tried to pass the time by reading the newspaper and watching the talk shows but they only seemed to worsen the pain. Finally, he just stared at the walls until a nurse came in, checked on him and told him he could sleep. After that, nurses kept coming into his room and waking him at two-hour intervals. They checked his eyes and temperature and asked if he was okay. They never gave him anything for the headache. They told him to go back to sleep. If he dreamed of the coyote during the short sleep cycles, or anything else, he didn’t remember it.

  Finally, at noon, he got up for good. He was unsteady on his feet at first but equilibrium quickly came back to him. He made his way into the bathroom and studied his image in the mirror. He burst out laughing at what he saw, though it was not that funny. It was just that he seemed to be about to laugh or cry or do both at any given moment.

  He had a small shaved spot on his skull where there was an L-shaped seam of stitches. It hurt when he touched the wound but he laughed about that, too. He managed to comb hair over it with his hand, fairly well camouflaging the injury.

  The eyes were another matter. Still dilated unevenly and now cracked with red veins, they looked like the bad end of a two-week bender. Below them, deep purple triangles pointed to the corners of the eyes. A double shiner. Bosch didn’t think he’d ever had one before.

  Stepping back into the room he saw that his briefcase had been left by Irving next to the bed table. He bent to pick it up and almost lost his balance, grabbing on to the table at the last moment. He got back into bed with the briefcase and began examining its contents. He had no purpose in mind, he just wanted to be doing something.

  He leafed through his notebook, finding it hard to concentrate on the words. He then re-read the five-year-old Christmas card from Meredith Roman, now Katherine Register. He realized he needed to call her, that he wanted to tell her what happened before she read about it in the paper or heard it on the news. He found her number in his notebook and dialed on the room’s phone. He got her answering machine and left a message.

  “Meredith, uh, Katherine…this is Harry Bosch. I need to talk to you today when you get a minute. Some things have happened and I think you’ll, uh, feel better about things when you hear from me. So, give me a call.”

  Bosch left a variety of numbers on the tape, including his mobile, the Mark Twain and the hospital room and then hung up.

  He opened the accordion pocket in the lid of the briefcase and slipped out the photo Monte Kim had given him. He studied his mother’s face for a long time. The thought that eventually poked through was a question. Bosch had no doubt from what Conklin had said that he had loved her. But he wondered if she really loved Conklin back. Bosch remembered a time when she had visited him at McClaren. She had promised to get him out. At the time, the legal effort was going slowly and he knew that she had no faith in courts. When she made the promise, he knew she wasn’t thinking about the law, only ways to get around it, to manipulate it. And he believed she would have found a way to do it if her time hadn’t been taken away.

  He realized, looking at the photo, that Conklin might simply have been part of the promise, part of the manipulation. Their marriage plan was her way of getting Harry out. From unwed mother with an arrest record to wife of an important man. Conklin would be able to get Harry out, to win back Marjorie Lowe’s custody of her son. Bosch considered that love may have had nothing to do with it on her part, that it was only opportunity. In all the visits to McClaren, she had never spoken of Conklin or any man in particular. If she had truly been in love, wouldn’t she have told him?

  And in considering that question, Bosch realized that his mother’s effort to save him was what might ultimately have led to her death.

  “Mr. Bosch, are you okay?”

  The nurse moved quickly into the room and put the food tray down on the table with a rattle. Bosch didn’t answer her. He barely noticed her. She took the napkin off the tray and used it to wipe the tears off his cheeks.

  “It’s okay,” she soothed. “It’s okay.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s the injury. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Head injuries jumble the emotions. One minute you’re crying, the next you’re laughing. Let me open these curtains. Maybe that will cheer you up.”

  “I think I just want to be left alone.”

  She ignored him and opened the curtains and Bosch had a view of another building twenty yards away. It did cheer him up, though. The view was so bad it made him laugh. It also reminded him he was in Cedars. He recognized the other medical tower.

  The nurse then closed his briefcase so she could roll the table over the bed. On the tray was a plate containing Salisbury steak, carrots and potatoes. There was a roll that looked as hard as the eight ball he had found in his pocket the night before and some kind of red dessert wrapped in plastic. The tray and its smell made him feel the onset of nausea.

  “I’m not going to eat this. Is there any Frosted Flakes?”

  “You have to eat a full meal.”

  “I just woke up. You people kept me up all night. I can’t eat this. It’s making me sick.”

  She quickly picked up the tray and headed to the door.

  “I’ll see what I can do. About the Frosted Flakes.”

  She looked back at him and smiled before heading out the door.

  “Cheer up.”

  “Yeah, that’s the prescription.”

  Bosch didn’t know what to do with himself but wait for time to pass. He started thinking about his encounter with Mittel, about what was said and what was meant. There was something about it that bothered him.

  He was interrupted by a beeping sound coming from the side panel of the bed. He looked down and found it was the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Harry?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Jazz. Are you okay?”

  There was a long silence. Bosch didn’t know if he was ready for this yet, but now it was unavoidable.

  “Harry?”

  “I’m fine. How’d you find me?”

  “The man who called me yesterday. Irving something. He—”

  “Chief Irving.”

  “Yes. He called and told me you were hurt. He gave me the number.”

  That annoyed Bosch but he tried not to show it.

  “Well, I’m fine, but I can’t really talk.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “It’s just a long story. I don’t want to go through it now.”

  Now she was quiet. It was one of those moments when both people try to read the silence, pick up each other’s meanings in what they weren’t saying.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Jasmine?”

  “I…”

  More silence.

  “Do you want me to tell you now?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Who?”

  “Irving.”

  “It wasn’t from him. He doesn’t know. It was somebody else. Somebody trying to hurt me.”

  “It was a long time ago, Harry. I want to tell you what happened…but not on the phone.”

  He closed his eyes and thought for a minute. Just hearing her voice ha
d renewed his sense of connection to her. But he had to question whether he wanted to get into this.

  “I don’t know, Jazz. I’ve got to think about—”

  “Look, what was I supposed to do? Wear a sign or something to warn you away from the start? You tell me, when was a good time for me to tell you? Was it right after that first lemonade? Should I have said, ‘Oh, by the way, six years ago I killed the man I was living with when he tried to rape me for the second time in the same night?’ Would that have been proper?”