Echo Park (20 page)

Thinking quickly, Bosch came up with what he thought was a way out.

“Look, I’m not investigating anything. I’m looking for something. I lost my challenge coin out here yesterday. I’m just looking for it.”

“What?”

“My RHD chip. It must’ve come out of my pocket when I was sliding down the embankment or something. I got home last night and it wasn’t in my pocket.”

As he spoke Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out the coin he was claiming to have lost. It was a heavy metal coin about the size and width of a casino chip. One side showed a gold detective’s badge and the other side showed the caricature of a detective—suit, hat, gun and exaggerated chin—set against an American flag background. It was known as a challenge coin or chip and was a carryover from the practice of elite and specialized military units. Upon acceptance into the unit a soldier is given a challenge coin and is expected to carry it always. At any time or place a fellow unit member can ask to see the coin. This most often takes place in a bar or canteen. If the soldier fails to be carrying the coin, then he picks up the tab. The tradition had been observed for several years in the RHD. Bosch had been given his coin upon returning from retirement.

“Fuck the coin, Harry,” Pratt said angrily. “You can replace it for ten bucks.
Stay away
from the investigation. Go home and stay home until you hear from me. Am I clear?”

“You’re clear.”

“Besides, what the fuck? If you lost your coin out there the Forensics people would have found it already. They went over that scene with a metal detector looking for cartridges.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, I sort of forgot about that.”

“Yeah, Harry, you forgot? Are you bullshitting with me?”

“No, Top, I’m not. I forgot. I was bored and decided to come look for it. I saw Randolph’s people and decided to keep my head down. I just didn’t think they’d call in my plate.”

“Well, they did. And then I got the call. I don’t like blowback like this, Harry. You know that.”

“I’m going home right now.”

“Good. Stay there.”

Pratt didn’t wait for Bosch’s response. He clicked off and Bosch closed his phone. He flipped the heavy coin into the air, caught it in his palm, badge side up, and pocketed it. He then walked to his car.

24

S
OMETHING ABOUT BEING TOLD
to go home made Bosch not go home. After leaving Beachwood Canyon he made a stop at St. Joe’s to check in on Kiz Rider. She had changed locations again. She was now out of ICU and on a regular patient floor. She didn’t have a private room but the other bed in the room was empty. They often did that for cops.

Speaking was still difficult for her and the malaise of depression she exhibited that morning had not lifted. Bosch didn’t stay long. He passed on a get-well from Jerry Edgar and then left, finally going home as instructed and hauling in the two cartons and files he had collected earlier from the Open-Unsolved Unit.

He put the cartons on the floor in the dining room and spread the files out on the table. There was a lot and he knew he could probably occupy himself for at least a couple days with what he had taken from the office. He went over to the stereo and turned it on. He knew that he already had the Coltrane-Monk collaboration from Carnegie Hall in the machine. The player was on shuffle and the first song out was called “Evidence.” Bosch took that as a good sign as he went back to the table.

To begin he had to take an inventory of exactly what he had so he could decide how to approach his review of the material. First and foremost was the copy of the investigative record in the current case Raynard Waits was being prosecuted for. This had been turned over by Olivas but not studied closely by Bosch and Rider because their assignments and priorities were the Fitzpatrick and Gesto cases. On the table Bosch also had the Fitzpatrick murder book Rider had pulled out of Archives as well as his secret copy of the Gesto murder book, of which he had already completed a review.

Finally, on the floor were the two plastic cartons containing whatever pawn records had been salvaged after Fitzpatrick’s business was torched and then soaked by fire hoses during the 1992 riots.

There was a small drawer in the side of the dining room table. Bosch figured that it had been designed for silverware but since he used the table more often to work on than to eat on, the drawer contained an assortment of pens and legal pads. He withdrew one of each, deciding that he needed to write down the important aspects of the current investigation. After twenty minutes and three torn-off and crumpled pages, his free-form thoughts had filled less than half a page.

                / arrest

Echo Park

              \ escape (Red Line)

Who is Waits? Where is the castle? (destination: Echo Park)

Beachwood Canyon—setup, false confession

Who benefits? Why now?

Bosch studied the notes for a few moments. He knew that the last two questions he had written were actually the starting point. If things had gone according to plan, who would have benefited from Waits’s false confession? Waits, for one, by avoiding a death sentence. But the real winner was the real killer. The case would have been closed, all investigations halted. The real killer would escape justice.

Bosch looked at the two questions again.
Who benefits? Why now?
He considered them carefully and then reversed their order and considered them again. He came to a single conclusion. His continued investigations of the Marie Gesto case had created a need for something to be done now. He had to believe that he had knocked too hard on someone’s door and that the entire Beachwood Canyon plan had come about because of pressure he was continuing to exert on the case.

This conclusion led to the answer to the other question at the bottom of the sheet.
Who benefits?
Bosch wrote:

Anthony Garland—Hancock Park

For thirteen years Bosch’s instinct had told him Garland was the one. But beyond his instincts there was no evidence directly connecting Garland to the murder. Bosch had not yet been made privy to the evidence, if any, that was developed during the excavation of the body and the autopsy, but he doubted that after thirteen years there would be anything usable—no DNA or forensics that could tie the killer to the body.

Garland was a suspect under the “replacement victim” theory. That is, his rage toward the woman who had dropped him led him to kill a woman who reminded him of her. The shrinks would call it a long-shot theory but Bosch now moved it front and center. Do the math, he thought. Garland was the son of Thomas Rex Garland, wealthy oil baron from Hancock Park. O’Shea was in a highly contested election battle, and money was the gasoline that kept a campaign engine running. It was not inconceivable that a quiet approach had been made to T. Rex, a deal struck and a plan enacted. O’Shea gets the money he needs to win the election, Olivas gets the head investigator nod in O’Shea’s office and Waits takes the fall for Gesto while Garland takes a ride on it.

It was said that L.A. was a sunny place for shady people. Bosch knew that better than most. He had no hesitation in believing Olivas had been part of such a scheme. And the thought of O’Shea, a career prosecutor, selling his soul for a shot at the top slot didn’t give him pause for very long either.

“Run, you coward! How’s your bullshit deal looking now?”

He opened his phone and called Keisha Russell at the
Times.
After several rings he checked his watch and saw it was a few minutes after five. He realized she was probably on deadline and ignoring her calls. He left a message at the prompt, asking her to call back.

Since it was so late in the day Bosch decided he had earned a beer. He went to the kitchen and got an Anchor Steam out of the box. He was happy he had gone high end the last time he bought beer. He took the bottle out on the deck and watched as the heart of rush hour gripped the freeway below. The traffic slowed to a crawl and the incessant sound of car horns of every variety began. It was just far enough away to be less than intrusive. Bosch was glad he was not down there in the fight.

His phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. It was Keisha Russell calling back.

“Sorry, I was going over tomorrow’s story with the copyeditor.”

“I hope you spelled my name right.”

“Actually, you’re not in this one, Harry. Surprise.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“What can you do for me?”

“Uh, I was actually going to ask you to do something for me.”

“Of course you were. What could it be?”

“You’re a political reporter now, right? Does that mean you look at campaign contributions?”

“I do. I review every filing by every one of my candidates. Why?”

He walked back inside and muted the stereo.

“This is off the record, Keisha. I’d like to know who has been supporting Rick O’Shea’s campaign.”

“O’Shea? Why?”

“I’ll tell you when I can tell you. I just need the information right now.”

“Why do you always do this to me, Harry?”

It was true. They had danced like this many times in the past. But their history was that Bosch was always true to his word when he said he would tell her when he could tell her. He hadn’t double-crossed her once. And so her protests were banter, a mere prequel to her doing what Bosch wanted her to do. That was part of the dance as well.

“You know why,” he said, playing his part. “Just help me out and there will be something for you when the time is right.”

“Someday I want to decide when the time is right. Hold on.”

She clicked off and was gone for almost a minute. As he waited Bosch stood over the spread of documents on the dining room table. He knew that he was spinning his wheels with this angle on O’Shea and Garland. They could not be touched at the moment. They were guarded by money and the law and the rules of evidence. Bosch knew the correct angle of investigation was to go at Raynard Waits. His job was to find him and break open the case.

“Okay,” Russell said after getting back on the line. “I have the most up-to-date filing. What do you want to know?”

“How up-to-date is up-to-date?”

“This was filed last week. Friday.”

“Who are his main contributors?”

“There’s nobody who is really big, if that is what you mean. He’s mostly running a grassroots campaign. Most of his contributors are fellow lawyers. Almost all of them.”

Bosch thought of the Century City law firm that handled things for the Garland family and had gotten the court orders preventing Bosch from questioning Anthony Garland about Marie Gesto without an attorney present. The head of the firm was Cecil Dobbs.

“Is one of those lawyers Cecil Dobbs?”

“Um . . . yes, C. C. Dobbs, Century City address. He gave a thousand.”

Bosch remembered the lawyer in his collection of videotaped interviews with Anthony Garland.

“What about Dennis Franks?”

“Franks, yes. A lot of people from that firm contributed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, according to election law, you give your home and work address when you make a contribution. Dobbs and Franks have a Century City work address and, let’s see, nine, ten, eleven other people gave the same address. They each gave a thousand, too. It’s probably all the lawyers in the same firm.”

“So thirteen thousand dollars from there. Is that it?”

“That’s it from there, yes.”

Bosch thought about whether to specifically ask if the name Garland was on the contributors list. He didn’t want her making phone calls or snooping around in his investigation.

“No big corporate contributors?”

“Nothing of major consequence. Why don’t you tell me what you are looking for, Harry? You can trust me.”

He decided to go for it.

“You have to hold on to it until you hear from me. No phone calls, no inquiries. You just sit on this, right?”

“Right, until I hear from you.”

“Garland. Thomas Rex Garland, Anthony Garland, anybody like that on there?”

“Mmmm, no. Isn’t Anthony Garland the kid you were looking at once for Marie Gesto?”

Bosch almost cursed out loud. He was hoping she wouldn’t make the connection. A decade earlier, when she was a hellion on the cop beat, she had come across a search warrant application he had filed in an effort to search Anthony Garland’s home. The application had been rejected for lack of probable cause but the filing was public record, and at the time, Russell, the ever industrious reporter, routinely combed through the search warrants at the courthouse. Bosch had talked her out of writing a story identifying the scion of the local oil family as a suspect in the Gesto murder but here it was a decade later and she remembered the name.

“You can’t do anything with this, Keisha,” he responded.

“What are you doing? Raynard Waits confessed to Gesto. Are you saying that was bullshit?”

“I’m not saying anything. I was simply curious about something, that’s all. Now, you cannot do anything with this. We have a deal. You sit on this until you hear from me.”

“You’re not my boss, Harry. How come you are talking to me like you’re my boss?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t want you running off and going crazy on this. It could hurt what I’ve got going. We have a deal, right? You just said I can trust you.”

It was a long time before she answered.

“Yes, we have a deal. And, yes, you can trust me. But if this is going where I think you are going with it, I want updates and reports. I’m not just going to sit around waiting to hear from you after you get the full package put together. If I don’t hear from you, Harry, I’m going to get nervous. When I get nervous I do some crazy things, make some crazy phone calls.”

Bosch shook his head. He should never have made the call to her.

“I understand, Keisha,” he said. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

He closed the phone, wondering what fresh hell he might have just unleashed on earth and when it would come back to bite him. He trusted Russell but only to the limit he could trust any reporter. He finished his beer and went to the kitchen for another. As soon as he popped the top his phone buzzed.

It was Keisha Russell again.

“Harry, have you ever heard of GO! Industries?”

He had. GO! Industries was the current corporate titling of a company started eighty years earlier as Garland Oil Industries. The company had a logo in which the word GO! had wheels and was slanted forward to look as if it were a speeding car.

“What about it?” he responded.

“Headquartered downtown in the ARCO plaza. I count twelve employees of GO! making one-thousand-dollar contributions to O’Shea. How’s that?”

“That’s fine, Keisha. Thanks for calling back.”

“Did O’Shea take a payoff to put Gesto on Waits? Is that it?”

Bosch groaned into the phone.

“No, Keisha, that’s not what happened and that’s not what I am looking at. If you make any calls in this regard you will compromise what I am doing and could be putting yourself, me, and others in danger. Now would you please drop it until I can tell you exactly what is going on and when you can run with it?”

Once again she hesitated before answering, and it was in that space of silence that Bosch began to wonder if he could still trust her. Maybe her move from police to politics had changed something in her. Maybe, as with most who worked in the realm of politics, her sense of integrity had been sanded down by exposure to the world’s oldest profession: political whoring.

“Okay, Harry, I got it. I was just trying to help. But you remember what I said. I want to hear from you. Soon!”

“You will, Keisha. Good night.”

He closed the phone and tried to shake off his concerns about the reporter. He thought about the information he had gotten from her. Between GO! and the law firm of Cecil Dobbs, O’Shea had received at least twenty-five thousand in campaign contributions from people who could be directly tied to the Garlands. It was spread out and legal, but nevertheless, it was a strong indication that Bosch was on the right track.