Michael Connelly (54 page)

“Have a good night,” he said and turned to the door.

“You, too, Officer,” Lucky said to his back. “Come back when you have time and can enjoy the show.”

The door opened by some unseen electronic means apparently controlled from the desk. Gussie allowed Bosch to leave first. He then followed behind as Bosch went through the main door to the valet stand. Bosch gave a Mexican man with a face like a crumpled paper lunch bag his parking stub. He and Gussie then waited in silence for the car to be brought up.

“No hard feelings, right?” Gussie finally said as the car was approaching. “I didn’t know you was a cop.”

Bosch turned to face him.

“No, you just thought I was a customer.”

“Yeah, right. And I had to do what the boss told me to do.”

He put his hand out. In his peripheral vision Bosch could see his car still coming. He took Gussie’s hand and in a sharp move pulled the big man toward him at the same time he raised his knee and drove it into his groin. Gussie let out an
oomph
and doubled over. Bosch let go of his hand and quickly jerked the tail of the man’s jacket up over his head, pinning his arms in the tangle. Finally, he brought his knee up into the jacket and felt it connect solidly with Gussie’s face. The big man fell backward onto the hood of a black Corvette parked near the door just as the valet jumped out of Bosch’s rental car and came scrambling around to defend his boss. The man was older and smaller than Bosch. This one wouldn’t even be close and Bosch wasn’t interested in any innocent bystanders. He held his finger up to stop the man.

“Don’t,” he said.

The man considered his situation while Gussie groaned through his tuxedo jacket. Finally, the valet raised his hands and stepped back, allowing Bosch a path to the car door.

“At least somebody around here makes the right choices,” Bosch said as he slid in.

He looked through the windshield and saw Gussie’s body slide down the slope of the Corvette’s hood and fall to the pavement. The valet ran to his side.

As Bosch pulled out onto Madison, he checked the rearview mirror. The valet was pulling the jacket back over Gussie’s head. Bosch could see blood on the bouncer’s white shirt.

Bosch was too keyed up to go back to the hotel to sleep. He also had a bad mix of emotions weighing on him. Seeing the naked woman dancing still bothered him. He didn’t even know her but thought he had invaded some private world of hers. He also felt angry at himself for lashing out at the brute, Gussie. But most of all, what bothered him was that he had played the whole scene wrong. He had gone to the strip club to try to get a line on Layla and he got nothing. At best, all he had come up with was the probable explanation for what the specks of glitter found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants and the shower drain were and where they came from. It wasn’t enough. He had to go back to L.A. in the morning and he had nothing.

When he got to a traffic light at the beginning of the Strip, he lit a cigarette, then took out his notebook and opened it to the page on which he had written down the address Felton had given him earlier in the night.

At Sands Boulevard he turned east and within a mile he came to the apartment complex where Eleanor Wish lived. It was a sprawling development with numbered buildings. It took him a while until he found hers and then figured out which unit was hers. He sat in his car and smoked and watched her lighted windows for a while. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or what he wanted.

Five years earlier Eleanor Wish had done the worst and the best to him. She had betrayed him, put him in danger and she had also saved his life. She had made love to him. And then it all went bad. Still, he had often thought about her, the old what-might-have-been blues. She had a hold on him through time. She had been cold to him this night but he thought for sure the hold went both ways. She was his reflection, he had always been sure of that.

He got out of the car, dropped his dead cigarette and went to her door. She answered his knock quickly, almost as if she was expecting him. Or someone.

“How’d you find me? Did you follow me?”

“No. I made a call, that’s all.”

“What happened to your lip?”

“It’s nothing. Are you going to ask me in?”

She backed up to allow him to enter. It was a small place with spare furnishings. It looked as though she was adding things over time, as she could afford them. He first noticed the print of Hopper’s
Nighthawks
on the wall over the couch. It was a painting that always struck a chord with him. He had once had the same print on his own wall. It had been a gift from her five years before. A good-bye gift.

He looked from the painting to her. Their eyes met and he knew everything she had said earlier had been a front. He stepped closer to her and touched her, put his hand on her neck and ran a thumb along her cheek. He looked closely at her face. It was resolute, determined.

“This time it’s been a long time for me,” she whispered.

And he remembered that he had told her the same on the night they’d first made love. That was a lifetime ago, Bosch thought. What am I doing now? Can you pick up after so long and so many changes?

He pulled her close and they held each other and kissed for a long moment and then she wordlessly led him to the bedroom, where she quickly unbuttoned her blouse and dropped her jeans to the floor. She pressed herself to him again and they kissed while she worked her hands up his shirt, opening it and pressing her skin to his. Her hair smelled of smoke from the tables, but there was an underlying scent of perfume that reminded him of a night five years before. He remembered the jacaranda trees outside her window and how they put a violet snow on the ground.

They made love with an intensity that Bosch had forgotten that he had. It was a bruising, huffing physical act devoid of love, invigorated and driven solely, it seemed, by lust and maybe a memory. When he was done she pulled him toward her, into her, in rhythmic thrusts until she, too, reached her moment and subsided. Then, with the clarity of thought that always comes after, they became embarrassed about their nakedness, about how they had coupled with the ferocity of animals and now looked at each other as human beings.

“I forgot to ask,” she said. “You’re not married now, are you?”

She giggled. He reached to the floor to where his jacket had been thrown and pulled out the cigarettes.

“No,” he said. “I’m alone.”

“I should’ve known. Harry Bosch, the loner. I should’ve known.”

She was smiling at him in the darkness. He saw it when the match flared. He lit the cigarette and then offered it to her. She shook her head no.

“How many women have there been since me? Tell me.”

“I don’t know, just a few. There was one, we were together about a year. That was the most serious one.”

“What happened to her?”

“She went to Italy.”

“For good?”

“Who knows?”

“Well, if you don’t know, then she isn’t coming back. At least to you.”

“Yeah, I know. That one’s been over a while.”

He was silent for a moment and then she asked him who else there had been.

“There was a painter I met in Florida on a case. That didn’t last long. After that, there’s you again.”

“What happened to the painter?”

Bosch shook his head as if to dismiss the inquiry. He didn’t really enjoy reviewing his ill-fated romantic record.

“Distance, I guess,” he said. “It just didn’t work. I couldn’t leave L.A., she couldn’t leave where she was.”

She moved closer to him and kissed him on the chin. He knew he needed a shave.

“What about you, Eleanor? Are you alone?”

“Yes. . . . The last man to make love to me was a cop. He was gentle but very strong. I don’t mean in a physical way. In a life way. It was a long time ago. At the time we both needed healing. We gave it to each other. . . .”

They looked at each other in the darkness for a long moment and then she came closer. Just before their mouths met she whispered, “A lot of time gone past.”

He thought about those words as she kissed him and then pushed him back on the pillows. She straddled him and started a gentle rocking motion with her hips. Her hair hung down around his face until he was in a perfect darkness. He ran his hands along her warm skin from her hips to her shoulders and then underneath to touch her breasts. He could feel her wetness on him but it was too soon for him.

“What’s the matter, Harry?” she whispered. “You want to rest a while?”

“I don’t know.”

He kept thinking of those words. A lot of time gone past. Maybe too much time. She kept rocking.

“I don’t know what I want,” he said. “What do you want, Eleanor?”

“All I want is the moment. We’ve fucked everything else up, it’s all we’ve got left.”

After a while he was ready and they made love again. She was very silent, her movements steady and gentle. She stayed on top of him, her face above him, breathing in short rhythmic clips. Near the end, when he was just trying to hang on, waiting for her, he felt a teardrop hit his cheek. He reached up and smeared the tears on her face with his thumbs.

“It’s all right, Eleanor, it’s all right.”

She put one of her hands on his face, feeling it in the dark as if she were a blind woman. In a short while they met at the moment when nothing in the world can intrude. Not words or even memories. It was just them together. They had the moment.

He slept on and off in her bed until nearly dawn. She slept soundly with her head on his shoulder but when he was lucky enough to doze off, it never lasted long. For the most part he lay there staring into the gray darkness, smelling their sweat and sex, wondering what road he was on now.

At six he extricated himself from her unconscious embrace and got dressed. When he was ready he kissed her awake and told her he must go.

“I go back to L.A. today but I want to come back to you as soon as I can.”

She nodded sleepily.

“Okay, Bosch, I’ll be waiting.”

It was finally cool outside. He lit his first smoke of the day as he walked to his car. When he pulled onto Sands to head up to the Strip, he saw the sun was throwing a golden light on the mountains west of town.

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.

When he got to his room, he noticed the message light was blinking. He called the operator and was told that someone named Captain Felton had called at one and then again at two and then someone named Layla at four. There were no messages or numbers left by either of the callers. Bosch put the phone down and frowned. He figured it was too early to call Felton. But it was the call from Layla that most interested him. If it had been the real Layla who had called, then how did she know where to reach him?

He decided that it had probably been through Rhonda. The night before when he had called from Tony Aliso’s office in Hollywood, he had asked Rhonda for directions from the Mirage. She could have passed that on to Layla. He wondered why she had called. Maybe she hadn’t heard about Tony until Rhonda had told her.

Still, he decided to put Layla on a back burner for the moment. With the financial probe Kizmin Rider had opened up in L.A., the focus of the case seemed to be shifting. It was important for them to talk to Layla but his priority was to get back to L.A. He picked the phone back up and called Southwest and booked a 10:30 flight to L.A. He figured that would give him time to check in with Felton, then check out the dealership where Rider said Tony Aliso had leased his cars and still make it back to the Hollywood Division by lunchtime.

Bosch stripped off his clothes and took a long hot shower, washing the sweat of the night away. When he was done he wrapped a towel around himself and used another to wipe the fog off the mirror so he could shave. He noticed that his lower lip had swollen on one side to the size of a marble and his mustache did little to hide it. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. He wondered as he got the bottle of Visine drops out of his shaving bag if Eleanor had found a single thing about him attractive.

When he stepped back into the room to get dressed, he was greeted by a man he had never seen before sitting in the chair by the window. He was holding a newspaper, which he put down when he noticed Bosch step into the room clad only in the towel.

“It’s Bosch, right?”

Bosch looked to the bureau and saw his gun was still sitting there. It was closer to the man in the chair but Bosch thought he might be able to get to it first.

“Easy now,” the man said. “We’re in this together. I’m a cop. With Metro. Felton sent me.”

“What the fuck you doing in my room?”

“I came up, got no answer. I could hear the shower. I had a friend from downstairs slip me in. I didn’t want to wait around in the hall. Go ahead, get dressed. Then I’ll tell you what we got.”

“Let me see some ID.”

The man got up and approached Bosch, pulling a wallet from his inside coat pocket and putting a bored look on his face. He opened the wallet, flashing the badge and ID card.

“Iverson. From Metro. Captain Felton sent me.”

“What’s so important that Felton had to send somebody to break into my room?”

“Look, I didn’t break in, okay? We’ve been calling all night and got no answer. We first of all wanted to make sure you were all right. And, secondly, the captain wants you to be in on the arrest, so he sent me over to try to find you. We gotta get going. Why don’t you get dressed?”