Angels Flight (1998)

by Michael Connelly

  “What are you thinking, Harry?”

  He looked up. Rider was in the doorway of the train, coming aboard.

  “Nothing. Everything. We’re really just getting started on this. There’s a lot to do.”

  “No rest for the weary.”

  “Say that again.”

  His pager sounded and he grabbed it off his belt with the urgency of a man who has had one go off in a movie theater. He recognized the number on the display but couldn’t remember where he had seen it before. He took the phone out of his briefcase and punched it in. It was the home of Deputy Chief Irvin Irving.

  “I spoke with the chief,” he said. “He will handle Reverend Tuggins. He is not to be your concern.”

  Irving put a sneer into the word Reverend.

  “Okay. He isn’t.”

  “So where are we?”

  “We’re still at the scene, just finishing up. We need to canvass the building over here for witnesses, then we’ll clear out. Elias kept an apartment downtown. That was where he was headed. We need to search that and his office as soon as the search warrants are signed.”

  “What about next of kin on the woman?”

  “Perez should be done by now, too.”

  “Tell me how it went at the Elias home.”

  Since Irving had not asked before, Bosch assumed he was asking now because the chief of police wanted to know. Bosch quickly went over what had happened and Irving asked several questions about the reaction of Elias’s wife and son. Bosch could tell he asked them from the standpoint of public relations management. He knew that, just as with Preston Tuggins, the way in which Elias’s family reacted to his murder would have a direct bearing on how the community reacted.

  “So it does not at this time sound as though we can enlist the widow or the son in helping us contain things, correct?”

  “As of now, that’s correct. But once they get over the initial shock, maybe. You also might want to talk to the chief about calling the widow personally. I saw his picture on the wall in the house with Elias. If he’s talking to Tuggins, maybe he could also talk to the widow about helping us out.”

  “Maybe.”

  Irving switched gears and told Bosch that his office’s conference room on the sixth floor of Parker Center was ready for the investigators. He said that the room was unlocked at the moment but in the morning Bosch would be given keys. Once the investigators moved in, the room was to remain locked at all times. He said that he would be in by ten and was looking forward to a more expanded rundown of the investigation at the team meeting.

  “Sure thing, Chief,” Bosch said. “We should be in from the canvass and the searches by then.”

  “Make sure you are. I will be waiting.”

  “Right.”

  Bosch was about to disconnect when he heard Irving’s voice.

  “Excuse me, Chief?”

  “One other matter. I felt because of the identity of one of the victims in this case that it was incumbent upon me to notify the inspector general. She seemed — how do I put this — she seemed acutely interested in the case when I explained the facts we had at that time. Using the word acutely is probably an understatement.”

  Carla Entrenkin. Bosch almost cursed out loud but held it back. The inspector general was a new entity in the department: a citizen appointed by the Police Commission as an autonomous civilian overseer with ultimate authority to investigate or oversee investigations. It was a further politicizing of the department. The inspector general answered to the police commission which answered to the city council and the mayor. And there were other reasons Bosch almost cursed as well. Finding Entrenkin’s name and private number in Elias’s phone book bothered him. It opened up a whole set of possibilities and complications.

  “Is she coming out here to the scene?” he asked.

  “I think not,” Irving said. “I waited to call so that I could say the scene was clearing. I saved you that headache. But do not be surprised if you hear directly from her in the daylight.”

  “Can she do that? I mean, talk to me without going through you? She’s a civilian.”

  “Unfortunately, she can do whatever she wants to. That is how the Police Commission set up the job. So what it means is that this investigation, wherever it goes, it better be seamless, Detective Bosch. If it is not, we will be hearing from Carla Entrenkin about it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good, then all we need is an arrest and all will be fine.”

  “Sure, Chief.”

  Irving disconnected without acknowledging. Bosch looked up. Chastain and Baker were stepping onto the train.

  “There’s only one thing worse than having the IAD tagging along on this,” he whispered to Rider. “That’s the inspector general watching over our shoulders.”

  Rider looked at him.

  “You’re kidding? Carla I’mthinkin’ is on this?”

  Bosch almost smiled at Rider’s use of the nickname bestowed on Entrenkin by an editorialist in the police union’s Thin Blue Line newsletter. She was called Carla I’mthinkin’ because of her tendency toward slow and deliberate speech whenever addressing the Police Commission and criticizing the actions or members of the department.

  Bosch would have smiled but the addition of the inspector general to the case was too serious.

  “Nope,” he said. “Now we got her, too.”

  9

  AT the top of the hill they found Edgar and Fuentes had returned from notifying Catalina Perez’s family of her death, and Joe Dellacroce had returned from Parker Center with completed and signed search warrants. Court-approved searches were not always needed for the home and business of the victim of a homicide. But it made good sense to get warrants in high-profile cases. Such cases attracted high-profile attorneys if they eventually resulted in arrest. These attorneys invariably created their high profiles by being thorough and good at what they did. They exploited mistakes, took the frayed seams and loose ends of cases and ripped open huge holes — often big enough for their clients to escape through. Bosch was already thinking that far ahead. He knew he had to be very careful.

  Additionally, he believed a warrant was particularly necessary to search Elias’s office. There would be numerous files on police officers and cases pending against the department. These cases would most likely proceed after being taken on by new attorneys, and Bosch needed to balance the preservation of attorney-client privacy with the need to investigate the killing of Howard Elias. The investigators would no doubt need to proceed carefully while handling these files. It was the reason he had called the district attorney’s office and asked Janis Langwiser to come to the scene.

  Bosch approached Edgar first, taking him by the arm and nudging him over to the guardrail overlooking the steep drop-off to Hill Street

  . They were out of earshot of the others.

  “How’d it go?”

  “It went the way they all go. About a million other places I’d rather be than watching the guy get the news. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I know. You just tell him or did you ask him some questions?”

  “We asked, but we didn’t get very many answers. The guy said his wife was a housecleaner and she had a gig somewhere over here. She took the bus over. He couldn’t give an address. Said his wife kept all of that stuff in a little notebook she carried.”

  Bosch thought for a moment. He didn’t remember any notebook in the evidence inventory. Balancing his briefcase on the guardrail, he opened it and took out the clipboard on which he had the accumulated paperwork from the crime scene. On top was the yellow copy of the inventory Hoffman had given him before he had left. It listed Victim #2’s belongings but there was no notebook.

  “Well, we’ll have to check with him again later on. We didn’t get any notebook.”

  “Well, send Fuentes back. The husband didn’t speak English.”

  “All right. Anything else?”

  “No. We did the usual checklist. Any enemies, any problems,
anybody giving her trouble, anybody stalking her, so on and so forth. Nada. The husband said she wasn’t worried about anything.”

  “Okay. What about him?”

  “He looked legit. Like he got hit in the face with the big frying pan called bad luck. You know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Hit hard. And there was as much surprise there as anything else.”

  “Okay.”

  Bosch looked around to make sure they were not being overheard. He spoke low to Edgar.

  “We’re going to split up now and go with the searches. I want you to take the apartment Elias kept over at The Place. I was — ”

  “So that’s where he was going.”

  “Looks like it. I was just up there with Chastain, did a drive-by. I want you to take your time this time. I also want you to start in his bedroom. Go to the bed and take the phone book out of the top drawer of the table with the phone on it. Bag it and seal it so nobody can look at it until we get everything back to the office.”

  “Sure. How come?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Just get to it before anybody else. Also, take the tape from the phone machine in the kitchen. There’s a message we want to keep.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay then.”

  Bosch stepped away from the guardrail and approached Dellacroce.

  “Any problems with the paper?”

  “Not really — except for waking the judge twice.”

  “Which judge?”

  “John Houghton.”

  “He’s okay.”

  “Well, it didn’t sound like he appreciated having to do everything twice.”

  “What did he say about the office?”

  “Had me add in a line about preserving the sanctity of attorney-client privilege.”

  “That’s it? Let me see.”

  Dellacroce took the search warrants out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed Bosch the one for the office at the Bradbury. Bosch scanned through the stock wording on the first page of the declaration and got to the part Dellacroce had talked about. It looked okay to him. The judge was still allowing the search of the office and the files, but was simply saying that any privileged information gleaned from the files must be germane to the murder investigation.

  “What he’s saying is that we can’t go through the files and turn what we get over to the city attorney’s office to help defend those cases,” Dellacroce said. “Nothing goes outside our investigation.”

  “I can live with that,” Bosch said.

  He called everybody into a huddle. He noticed Fuentes was smoking and tried not to think about his own desire for a cigarette.

  “Okay, we’ve got the search warrants,” he said. “This is how we’re gonna split it up. Edgar, Fuentes and Baker, you three take the apartment. I want Edgar on lead. The rest of us will go to the office. You guys on the apartment, I also want you to arrange for interviews of all the doormen in the building. All shifts. We need to find out as much about this guy’s routines and personal life as we can. We’re thinking there may be a girlfriend somewhere. We need to find out who that was. Also, on the key chain there is a key to a Porsche and a Volvo. My guess is Elias drove the Porsche and it’s probably in the parking garage at the apartment building. I want you to take a look at that, too.”

  “The warrants don’t specify a car,” Dellacroce protested. “Nobody told me about a car when I was sent to work up the warrants.”

  “Okay, then just find the car, check it out through the windows and we’ll get a search warrant if you see something and think it is necessary.”

  Bosch was looking at Edgar as he said this last part. Edgar almost imperceptibly nodded, meaning that he understood that Bosch was telling him to find the car and to simply open it and search it. If anything of value to the investigation was found, then he would simply back out, get a warrant and they would act as if they had never been in the car in the first place. It was standard practice.

  Bosch looked at his watch and wrapped it up.

  “Okay, it’s five-thirty now. We should be done with the searches by eight-thirty max. Take anything that even looks of interest and we’ll sift through it all later. Chief Irving has set up the command post for this investigation in the conference room next to his office at Parker. But before we go back there, I want to meet everybody right back here at eight-thirty.”

  He pointed up to the tall apartment building overlooking Angels Flight.

  “We’ll canvass this building then. I don’t want to wait until later, have people get out for the day before we can get to them.”

  “What about the meeting with Deputy Chief Irving?” Fuentes asked.

  “That’s set for ten. We should make it. If we don’t, don’t worry about it. I’ll take the meeting and you people will proceed. The case comes first. He’ll go along with that.”

  “Hey, Harry?” Edgar said. “If we get done before eight-thirty, all right if we get breakfast?”

  “Yes, it’s all right, but I don’t want to miss anything. Do not hurry the search just so you can get pancakes.”

  Rider smiled.

  “Tell you what,” Bosch said. “I’ll make sure we have doughnuts here at eight-thirty. If you can, just wait until then. Okay, so let’s do it.”

  Bosch took out the key ring they had taken from the body of Howard Elias. He removed the keys to the apartment and the Porsche key and gave them to Edgar. He noted that there were still several keys on the ring that were unaccounted for. At least two or three would be to the office and another two or three for his home in Baldwin Hills. That still left four keys and Bosch thought about the voice he had heard on the answering machine. Maybe Elias had keys to a lover’s home.

  He put the keys back in his pocket and told Rider and Dellacroce to drive cars down the hill and over to the Bradbury. He said he and Chastain would take the train down and walk over, making a check of the sidewalks Elias would have covered between his office building and the lower Angels Flight terminus. As the detectives broke up and headed toward their assignments, Bosch went to the station window and looked in on Eldrige Peete. He was sitting on the chair by the cash register, earplugs in place and his eyes closed. Bosch rapped gently on the window but the train operator was startled anyway.

  “Mr. Peete, I want you to send us down once more and then you can close up, lock up and go home to your wife.”

  “Okay, whatever you say.”

  Bosch nodded and turned to head to the train, then he stopped and looked back at Peete.

  “There’s a lot of blood. Do you have someone who is going to clean up the inside of the train before it opens tomorrow?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get that. I’ve got a mop and bucket back here in the closet. I called my supervisor. Before you got here. He said I gotta clean Olivet up so she’s ready to go in the morning. We start at eight Satadays.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Okay, Mr. Peete. Sorry you have to do that.”

  “I like to keep the cars clean.”

  “Also, down at the bottom, they left fingerprint dust all over the turnstile. It’s nasty stuff if you get that on your clothes.”

  “I’ll get that, too.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Well, thanks for your help tonight. We appreciate it.”

  “Tonight? Hell, it’s morning a’ready.”

  Peete smiled.

  “I guess you’re right. Good morning, Mr. Peete.”

  “Yeah, not if you ask them two that were on the train.”

  Bosch started away and then once more came back to the man.

  “One last thing. This is going to be a big story in the papers. And on TV. I’m not telling you what to do but you might want to think about taking your phone off the hook, Mr. Peete. And maybe not answering your door.”

  “I gotcha.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m gonna sleep all day, anyway.”

  Bosch nodded to him one last time and got on the t
rain. Chastain was already on one of the benches near the door. Bosch walked past him and again went down the steps to the end where Howard Elias’s body had fallen. He was careful again not to step in the pooled and coagulated blood.