The Black Box (8 page)

It wasn’t until he was two hours into the project, his back and neck getting stiff with the physically repetitive work of charting the cards, that Bosch found something that put a live wire into his blood. A teenager identified on the shake card as a Rolling 60s “BG,” or baby gangster, was stopped for loitering at Florence and Crenshaw on February 9, 1992. The name on his driver’s license was Charles William Washburn. His street name, according to the card, was “2 Small.” At sixteen years old and five foot three, he had already managed to get the signature Rolling 60s tattoo—the number sixty on a gravestone signifying gang loyalty until death on his left biceps. What drew Bosch’s attention was the address on his driver’s license. Charles “2 Small” Washburn lived on West 66th Place, and when Bosch charted the address on the map, he pinpointed it to a property backing up to the alley where Anneke Jespersen had been murdered. Looking at it on the map, Bosch estimated that Washburn lived no more than fifty feet from the spot where Jespersen’s body was found.

Bosch had never worked in a gang-specific unit but he had investigated several gang-related murders over the years. He knew that a baby gangster was a kid who was primed for membership but hadn’t officially been jumped in. There was a cost of admission, and that was usually a show of neighborhood or gang pride, a piece of work, a showing of dedication. Routinely this meant an act of violence, sometimes even a murder. Anybody with a 187 on their record was elevated to full gangster status forthwith.

Bosch leaned back in his chair and tried to stretch the muscles
of his shoulders. He thought about Charles Washburn. In early 1992 he was a gangster wannabe, probably looking for his chance to break in. Less than three months after the cops stopped and interviewed him at Florence and Crenshaw, a riot breaks out in his neighborhood and a photojournalist is shot point blank in the alley behind his house.

It was too close a confluence of things to be ignored. He reached for the murder book put together twenty years earlier by the Riot Crimes Task Force.

“Chu, can you run a name for me?” he asked without turning to look at his partner.

“Just a sec.”

Chu was lightning quick on the computer. Bosch’s computer skills were poor. It was routine for Chu to run names on the National Crime Information Center database.

Bosch started flipping through the pages of the murder book. It had hardly been a full field investigation but there had been a canvas of the homes along the alley’s fence line. He found the thin sheaf of reports and started reading names.

“Okay, give it to me,” Chu said.

“Charles William Washburn. DOB seven-four-seventy-five.”

“Born on the fourth of you-lie.”

Bosch heard his partner’s fingers start flying across the keyboard. Meantime, Harry found a canvas report for the Washburn address on West 66th Place. On June 20, 1992, a full fifty days after the murder, two detectives knocked on the door and talked to a Marion Washburn, age fifty-four, and a Rita Washburn, thirty-four, mother and daughter residents of the home. They offered no information about the shooting in the alley
on May 1. The interview was short and sweet and took only a paragraph in the report. There was no mention of a third generation of the family being in the house. No mention of sixteen-year-old Charles Washburn. Bosch slapped the murder book closed.

“Got something,” Chu said.

Bosch rotated in his chair to look at his partner’s back.

“Give it to me. I need something.”

“Charles William Washburn, AKA Two Small—but with the number two—has a long arrest record. Drugs mostly, assaults. . . . He’s got a child endangerment on there, too. Let’s see, two installments in the penitentiary and right now out free but wanted since July on a child-support warrant. Whereabouts unknown.”

Chu turned and looked at him.

“Who is he, Harry?”

“Somebody I gotta look at. Can you print that?”

“On the way.”

Chu sent the NCIC report to the unit’s community printer. Bosch keyed the password into his phone and called Jordy Gant.

“Charles ‘Two Small’ Washburn, the two like the number two. You know him?”

“‘Two Small’ . . . uh, that sounds—hold on a second.”

The line went silent and Bosch waited almost a minute before Gant came back on.

“He’s in the current intel. He’s a Sixties guy. First row of the pyramid type of guy. He’s not your shot caller. Where’d you get his name?”

“The black box. In ’ninety-two he lived on the other side of
the fence from the Jespersen crime scene. He was sixteen at the time and probably looking to get in with the Sixties.”

Bosch heard typing over the phone as he talked. Gant was doing a further search.

“We have a bench warrant issued from department one-twenty downtown,” he said. “Charles wasn’t paying his baby mama like he was supposed to. Last known address is the house on Sixty-sixth Place. But that’s four years old.”

Bosch knew a bench warrant for a deadbeat dad in South L.A. was almost meaningless. It would hardly draw the attention of a Sheriff’s Department pickup team unless there was some sort of media attention attached. Instead, it was a warrant that would sit in the data banks waiting to rise up the next time Washburn intersected with law enforcement and his name was run through the computer. But as long as he stayed low, he stayed free.

“I’m going to swing by the old homestead and see if I get lucky,” Bosch said.

“You want some backup?” Gant asked.

“No, I’ve got it covered. But what you can do is bump up the heat on the street.”

“You got it. I’ll put the word out on Two Small. Meantime, happy hunting, Harry. Let me know if you get him or you need me out there.”

“Yeah, will do.”

Bosch hung up and turned to Chu.

“Ready to take a ride?”

Chu nodded but with a reluctant frown.

“You coming back by four?”

“You never know. If my guy’s there, it might take some time. You want me to get somebody else?”

“No, Harry. I just have something to do tonight.”

Bosch was reminded that he was under explicit orders from his daughter not to be late for dinner.

“What, hot date?” he asked Chu.

“Never mind, let’s go.”

Chu stood up, ready to go rather than answer questions about his private life.

The Washburn house was a small ranch with a threadbare lawn and a Ford junker on blocks in the driveway. Bosch and Chu had circled the block before stopping in front and determined that the west corner of the house’s rear yard was no more than twenty feet from the spot in the alley where Anneke Jespersen was put up against a wall and shot.

Bosch knocked firmly on the door and then stepped to the side of the stoop. Chu took the other side. The door had an iron security gate across it. It was locked.

Eventually the door opened and a woman in her midtwenties stood looking at them through the grate. There was a small boy at her side, an arm wrapped around her leg at the thigh.

“What do you want?” she asked indignantly after correctly sizing them up as cops. “I didn’t call no po-lice.”

“Ma’am,” Bosch said. “We’re just looking for Charles Washburn. We have this address as his home address. Is he here?”

The woman shrieked and it took Bosch a few seconds to realize she was laughing.

“Ma’am?”

“You talking about Two Small? That Charles Washburn?”

“That’s right. Is he here?”

“Now, why would he be here? You people are so stupid. That man owes me money. Why would he be here? He step foot ’round here, he better have that money.”

Bosch now understood. He looked down at the boy in the doorway and then back up at the woman.

“What is your name, please?”

“Latitia Settles.”

“And your son?”

“Charles Junior.”

“Do you have any idea where Charles Senior would be? We have the warrant for him for not making his payments to you. We’re looking for him.”

“’Bout damn time. Every time I see his ass driving by I call you people but nobody comes, nobody does a damn thing. Now you here and I haven’t seen that little man in two months.”

“What do you hear, Latitia? Do people tell you they’ve seen him around?”

She shook her head emphatically.

“He’s gone.”

“What about his mother and his grandmother? They used to live in this house.”

“His grandmother’s dead and his moms moved up to Lancaster a long time ago. She got outta this place.”

“Does Charles go up there?”

“I don’t know. He used to go up and see her for birthdays and such. I don’t know anymore if he’s dead or alive. All I
know is my son ain’t seen a dentist or a doctor and he’s got no new clothes his whole life.”

Bosch nodded.
And he doesn’t have a father
, he thought. He also didn’t say that if they apprehended Charles Washburn, it wasn’t because they were going to make him pay his child support.

“Latitia, do you mind if we come in?”

“What for?”

“To just look around, make sure the place is safe.”

She banged the grate.

“We safe, don’t worry about that.” “So, we can’t come in?”

“No, I don’t want nobody in here seeing this mess. I’m not ready for that.”

“Okay, what about the backyard? Can we step back there?”

She seemed confused by the question but then shrugged.

“Knock yourself out but he ain’t out there.” “Is the gate at the back unlocked?”

“It’s broke.”

“Okay, we’ll go around.”

Bosch and Chu left the front step and walked over to the driveway, which went down the side of the house and ended at a wooden fence. Chu had to lift the gate and hold it up on one rusted hinge to open it. They then moved into a backyard strewn with old and broken toys and household furniture. There was a dishwasher lying on its side, and it reminded Bosch of being in the alley twenty years before, when appliances beyond saving were stacked there.

The left side of the property was the rear wall of the former
tire rims store on Crenshaw. Bosch went to the rear fence line that separated the yard from the alley. It was too tall for him to see over, so he pulled over a tricycle that was missing a rear wheel.

“Careful, Harry,” Chu said.

Bosch put one foot on the seat of the trike and pulled himself up on the fence. He looked across the alley to the spot where Anneke Jespersen had been murdered twenty years before.

Bosch dropped down to the ground and started walking the fence line, pressing his hand on each plank, looking for a loose one or maybe even a trapdoor that would give someone quick access to and from the alley. Two-thirds of the way down, a plank that he pressed on popped back. He stopped and looked closer and then pulled the board toward himself. It was not attached to the upper or lower cross-braces. He easily pulled the plank out of the fence, creating a ten-inch-wide opening.

Chu came up next to him and studied the opening.

“Somebody small could easily slide through there and have access to the alley,” he said.

“What I was thinking,” Bosch replied.

It was stating the obvious. The question was whether the plank had come loose over time or had been a hidden portal back when Charles “2 Small” Washburn had lived here as a sixteen-year-old baby G looking for a shot at being real G.

Bosch told Chu to take a photo of the opening in the fence with his phone. He’d print it later and put it in the book. He then pushed the plank back into place and turned to survey
the rest of the yard once more. He saw Latitia Settles standing in the open back door of the house, watching him through another iron gate. He knew that she had to be guessing that they weren’t really looking for Charles because he hadn’t paid child support.

6

B
osch came home to a birthday cake on the table and his daughter in the kitchen making dinner with instructions from a cookbook.

“Wow, smells good,” he said.

He had the Jespersen murder book under his arm.

“Stay out of the kitchen,” she said. “Go out on the deck till I tell you it’s ready. And put that work on the shelf—at least until after dinner. Turn on the music, too.”

“Yes, boss.”

The dining-room table was set for two. After putting the murder book literally on a shelf in the bookcase behind it, he turned on the stereo and opened the CD drawer. His daughter had already loaded the tray with five of his favorite discs. Frank Morgan, George Cables, Art Pepper, Ron Carter, and Thelonious Monk. He set it on random play and stepped out onto the deck.

Outside on the table, there was a bottle of Fat Tire waiting for him in a clay flowerpot filled with ice. This puzzled him. Fat Tire was one of his favorite beers, but he rarely kept
alcohol in the house and knew he had not purchased any beer recently. His daughter, at sixteen, looked older than her years but not old enough to buy beer without getting her driver’s license checked.

He cracked open the bottle and took a long pull. It felt good going down, burning the back of his throat with its cold bite. It was a welcome relief after a day of walking the gun and narrowing in on Charles Washburn.

A plan had been set with the help of Jordy Gant. By the last roll call the next day, all patrol officers and gang units in South Bureau would have seen Washburn’s photo and been told he was a high-priority pickup. The legal cause would be the child-support warrant, but once Washburn was in custody, Bosch would be alerted and he would go see him with something else to talk about entirely.

Still, Bosch could not rest on a BOLO. He had work to do. Forgetting it was his birthday, he had brought the murder book home with the plan of combing through every page, looking for any reference to Washburn and anything else he had missed or not followed up on.

But now he was rethinking that plan. His daughter was making him a birthday dinner and that would be his priority. There could be nothing better in the world than to have her full attention.

Beer in hand, Bosch looked out across the canyon where he had lived for more than twenty years. He knew its colors and contours by heart. He knew the sound of the freeway from down at the bottom. He knew the trail the coyotes took into the deeper vegetation. And he knew he never wanted to leave this place. He was here till the end.