All the power and money the Kincaids had amassed over generations was no match against the tide of anti-police sentiment and the racial underpinnings of the case. Harris was black, the Kincaids and the police and prosecutors on the case were white. The case against Harris was tainted beyond repair when Penny elicited what many perceived as a racist comment from Jack Kincaid during testimony about his many dealerships. After Kincaid detailed his many holdings, Penny asked why not one of the dealerships was in South Central Los Angeles. Without hesitation and before the prosecutor could object to the irrelevant question, Kincaid said he would never place a business in an area where the inhabitants had a propensity to riot. He said he made the decision after the Watts riots of 1965 and it was confirmed after the more recent riots of 1992.
The question and answer had little if anything to do with the murder of a twelve-year-old girl but proved to be the pivotal point in the trial. In later interviews jurors said Kincaid’s answer was emblematic of the city’s deep racial gulf. With that one answer sympathy swayed from the Kincaid family to Harris. The prosecution was doomed.
The jury acquitted Harris in four hours. Penny then turned the case over to his colleague, Howard Elias, for civil proceedings and Harris took his place next to Rodney King in the pantheon of civil rights victims and heroes in South L.A. Most of them deserved such honored status, but some were the creations of lawyers and the media. Whichever Harris was, he was now seeking his payday — acivil rights trial in which $10 million would be just the opening bid.
Despite the verdict and all the attached rhetoric, Bosch didn’t believe Harris’s claims of innocence or police brutality. One of the detectives Harris specifically accused of brutality was Bosch’s former partner, Frankie Sheehan, and Bosch knew Sheehan to be a total professional when dealing with suspects and prisoners. So Bosch simply thought of Harris as a liar and murderer who had walked away from his crime. He would have no qualms about rousting him and taking him downtown for questioning about Howard Elias’s murder. But Bosch also knew as he stood there with Rider that if he now brought Harris in, he would run the risk of compounding the alleged wrongs already done to him — at least in the eyes of much of the public and the media. It was a political decision as much as a police decision that he had to make.
“Let me think about this for a second,” he said.
He walked off by himself through the atrium. The case was even more perilous than he had realized. Any misstep could result in disaster — to the case, to the department, to careers. He wondered if Irving had realized all of this when he had chosen Bosch’s team for the case. Perhaps, he thought, Irving’s compliments were just a front for a real motive — leaving Bosch and his team dangling in the wind. Bosch knew he was now venturing into paranoia. It was unlikely that the deputy chief could have come up with such a plan so quickly. Or that he would even care about Bosch’s team with so much else at stake.
Bosch looked up and saw the sky was much brighter now. It would be a sunny and hot day.
“Harry?”
He turned. It was Rider.
“She’s off.”
He walked back to the group and Langwiser handed him his phone.
“You’re not going to like this,” she said. “Dave Sheiman wants to bring in a special master to look at the files before you do.”
“Special master?” Dellacroce asked. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s an attorney,” Langwiser said. “An independent attorney appointed by a judge who will oversee the files. He will be hired to protect the rights of those clients while still giving you people what you need. Hopefully.”
“Shit,” Bosch said, his frustration finally getting the better of him. “Why don’t we just stop the whole thing now and drop the damn case? If the DA’s office doesn’t care about us clearing it then we won’t care either.”
“Detective Bosch, you know it’s not like that. Of course we care. We just want to be safe. The warrant you have is still good for searching the office. Sheiman said you can even go through completed case files — which I am sure you need to look at as well. But the special master will have to come in and look at all pending files first. Remember, this person is not an adversary to you. He will give you everything you are entitled to see.”
“And when will that be? Next week? Next month?”
“No. Sheiman is going to go to work on that this morning. He’ll call Judge Houghton, apprise him of the situation, and see if he has any recommendations for a special master. With any luck, the appointment will be made today and you’ll have what you need from the files this afternoon. Tomorrow, at the very latest.”
“Tomorrow at the latest is too late. We need to keep moving on this.”
“Yeah,” Chastain chimed in. “Don’t you know an investigation is like a shark? It’s got to keep — ”
“All right, Chastain,” Bosch said.
“Look,” Langwiser said. “I’ll make sure Dave understands the urgency of the situation. In the meantime you’ll just have to be patient. Now do you want to keep standing down here talking about it or do you want to go up and do what we can in the office?”
Bosch looked at her for a long moment, annoyed by her chiding tone. The moment ended when the phone in his hand rang. It was Edgar and he was whispering. Bosch held a hand over his ear so he could hear.
“I didn’t hear that. What?”
“Listen, I’m in the bedroom. There’s no phone book in the bed table. I checked both bed tables. It’s not here.”
“What?”
“The phone book, it’s not here, man.”
Bosch looked at Chastain, who was looking back at him. He turned and walked away, out of earshot of the others. Now he whispered to Edgar.
“You sure?”
“Course I’m sure. I woulda found it if it was here.”
“You were first in the bedroom?”
“Right. First one in. It’s not here.”
“You’re in the bedroom to the right when you come down the hall.”
“Yeah, Harry. I’m in the right place. It’s just not here.”
“Shit.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. Continue the search.”
Bosch flipped the phone closed and put it in his pocket. He walked back to the others. He tried to act calm, as if the call had only been a minor annoyance.
“Okay, let’s go up and do what we can up there.”
They moved to the elevator, which was an open wrought-iron cage with ornate flourishes and polished brass trim.
“Why don’t you take the ladies up first,” Bosch said to Dellacroce. “We’ll come up after. That ought to distribute the weight pretty evenly.”
He took Elias’s key ring out of his pocket and handed it to Rider.
“The office key should be on there,” he said. “And never mind about that other thing with Harris for the time being. Let’s see what we’ve got in the office first.”
“Sure, Harry.”
They got on and Dellacroce pulled the accordion gate closed. The elevator rose with a jerking motion. After it was up one floor and those on it could not see them, Bosch turned to Chastain. The anger and frustration of everything going wrong flooded him then. He dropped his briefcase and with both hands grabbed Chastain by the collar of his jacket. He roughly pushed him against the elevator cage and spoke in a low, dark voice that was full of rage.
“Goddammit, Chastain, I’m only asking this one time. Where’s the fucking phone book?”
Chastain’s face flushed crimson and his eyes grew wide in shock.
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
He brought his hands up to Bosch’s and tried to free himself but Bosch maintained the pressure, leaning all of his weight into the other man.
“The phone book in the apartment. I know you took it and I want it back. Right the fuck now.”
Finally, Chastain tore himself loose. His jacket and shirt and tie were wrenched aske
w. He stepped away from Bosch as if he was scared and adjusted himself. He then pointed a finger at him.
“Stay away from me! You’re fucking nuts! I don’t have any phone book. You had it. I saw you put it in the goddamn drawer next to the bed.”
Bosch took a step toward him.
“You took it. When I was on the bal — ”
“I said stay away! I didn’t take it. If it’s not there, then somebody came in and took it after we left.”
Bosch stopped. It was an obvious explanation but it hadn’t even entered his mind. He had automatically thought of Chastain. He looked down at the tiles, embarrassed by how he’d let an old animosity cloud his judgment. He could hear the elevator gate opening on the fifth floor. He raised his eyes, fixed Chastain with a bloodless stare and pointed at his face.
“I find out otherwise, Chastain, I promise I’ll take you apart.”
“Fuck you! I didn’t take the book. But I am going to take your badge for this.”
Bosch smiled but not in a way that had any warmth.
“Go ahead. Write your ticket, Chastain. Anytime you can take my badge you can have it.”
11
THE others were inside Howard Elias’s law offices by the time Bosch and Chastain made it up to the fifth floor. The office was essentially three rooms: a reception area with a secretary’s desk, a middle room where there was a clerk’s desk and two walls of file cabinets, and then the third and largest room, Elias’s office.
As Bosch and Chastain moved through the offices the others stood silently and didn’t look at them. It was clear that they had heard the commotion in the lobby as they had taken the elevator up. Bosch didn’t care about that. He had already put the confrontation with Chastain behind him and was thinking about the search. He was hoping something would be found in the office that would give the investigation a focus, a specific path to follow. He walked through the three rooms making general observations. In the last room he noticed that through the windows behind Elias’s large polished wood desk he could see the huge face of Anthony Quinn. It was part of a mural depicting the actor with arms outstretched on the brick wall of a building across the street from the Bradbury.
Rider came into the office behind him. She looked out the window, too.
“You know every time I’m down here and see that I wonder who that is.”
“You don’t know?”
“César Chávez?”
“Anthony Quinn. You know, the actor.”
He got a nonresponse from her.
“Before your time, I guess. The mural is called the Pope of Broadway, like he’s watching over all the homeless around here.”
“Oh, I see.” She didn’t sound impressed. “How you want to do this?”
Bosch was still staring at the mural. He liked it, even though he had a hard time seeing Anthony Quinn as a Christlike figure. But the mural seemed to capture something about the man, a raw masculine and emotional power. Bosch stepped closer to the window and looked down. He saw the forms of two homeless people sleeping under blankets of newspapers in the parking lot beneath the mural. Anthony Quinn’s arms were outstretched over them. Bosch nodded. The mural was one of the little things that made him like downtown so much. Just like the Bradbury and Angels Flight. Little pieces of grace were everywhere if you looked.
He turned around. Chastain and Langwiser had entered the room behind Rider.
“I’ll work in here. Kiz and Janis, you two take the file room.”
“And what?” Chastain said. “Me and Del get the secretary’s desk?”
“Yeah. While you’re going through it, see if you can come up with her name and the name of the intern or clerk. We’ll need to talk to them today.”
Chastain nodded but Bosch could see he was annoyed about getting the weakest assignment.
“Tell you what,” Bosch added, “why don’t you go out first and see if you can find some boxes. We’re going to be taking a lot of files out of here.”
Chastain left the office without a word. Bosch glanced at Rider and saw her give him a look that told him he was acting like an asshole.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be in the file room.”
She left then, leaving just Langwiser and Bosch.
“Everything okay, Detective?”
“Everything’s fine. I’m going to get to work now. Do what I can until we hear about your special master.”
“Look, I’m sorry. But you called me out here to advise you and this is what I advise. I still think it is the right way to go.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
For most of the next hour Bosch methodically went through Elias’s desk, studying the man’s belongings, appointment calendar and paperwork. Most of his time was spent reading through a series of notebooks in which Elias had kept reminders to himself, lists of things to do, pencil drawings and general notes from phone calls. Each notebook was dated on the outside cover. It appeared that Elias filled the pages of one book every week or so with his voluminous notations and doodles. Nothing in the books jumped out at Bosch as being pertinent to the investigation. But he also knew that so little about the circumstances of Elias’s murder was known that something seeming unimportant in the notebooks at the moment might become important later.
Before starting to page through the most recent notebook, Bosch was interrupted by another call from Edgar.
“Harry, you said there was a message on the phone machine?”
“That’s right.”
“There ain’t now.”
Bosch leaned back in Elias’s chair and closed his eyes.
“Goddammit.”
“Yeah, it’s been cleared. I dicked around with it and it’s not a tape. Messages are stored on a microchip. The chip was cleared.”
“Okay,” Bosch replied, angrily. “Continue the search. When you’re done, talk to the security people about who’s been in and out of that place. See if they’ve got any video points in the lobby or parking garage. Somebody went in there after I left.”
“What about Chastain? He was with you, wasn’t he?”
“I’m not worried about Chastain.”
He flipped the phone closed and got up and went to the window. He hated the feeling growing inside — that he was being worked by the case, rather than the other way around.
He blew out his breath and went back to the desk and the last notebook that Howard Elias had kept. As he paged through, he came across repeated notes regarding someone referred to as “Parker.” Bosch did not believe this to be a person’s real name, but rather a code name for a person inside Parker Center. The notations were mostly lists of questions Elias apparently intended to ask “Parker,” as well as what looked like notes on conversations with this person. They were mostly in abbreviated form or the lawyer’s own version of shorthand and therefore difficult to decipher. But in other instances the notes were clear to Bosch. One notation clearly indicated to Bosch that Elias had a deeply connected source inside Parker Center.
PARKER:
GET ALL 51S — UNSUSTAINED
SHEEHAN
COBLENZ
ROOKER
STANWICK
Bosch recognized the names as belonging to four RHD detectives who were among the defendants in the Black Warrior case. Elias wanted the 51 reports — or citizen complaint files — on the four detectives. More specifically, Elias wanted the unsustained files, meaning he was interested in complaints against the four that had been investigated by the IAD but not substantiated. Such unsustained complaints were removed from officers’ personnel files as a matter of department policy and were therefore out of reach of a subpoena from a lawyer like Elias. The notation in the notebook told Bosch that Elias somehow knew that there were unsubstantiated prior complaints against the four and that he had a source in Parker Center who had access to the old files on those complaints. The first assumption was not a major leap; all cops had unsubstantiated complaints. It was part of being a cop. But someone with acce
ss to that sort of file was different. If Elias had such a source, it was a well-placed source.
One of the last references to Parker in the notebook appeared to be notes of a conversation, which Bosch assumed to have been a phone call to Elias at his desk. It appeared that Elias was losing his source.
PARKER WON’T
JEOPARDY/EXPOSURE
FORCE THE ISSUE?
Parker won’t what? Bosch wondered. Turn over the files Elias wanted? Did Parker believe that getting the files to Elias would expose him as a source? There wasn’t enough there for him to make a conclusion. There wasn’t enough for him to understand what “force the issue” meant either. He wasn’t sure what any of the notes might have to do with the killing of Howard Elias. Nevertheless, Bosch was intrigued. One of the department’s most vocal and successful critics had a mole inside Parker Center. There was a traitor inside the gate and it was important to know this.
Angels Flight (1998) Page 11
