Trunk Music (10 page)

“Uh, no, the whole lot’s on voice mail now.”

“So Aliso had voice mail? How do I get into it?”

“Well, you’ve got to have his code. It’s a three-digit code. You call the voice mail computer, punch in the code and you pick up your messages.”

“How do I get his code?”

“You don’t. He programmed it himself.”

“There’s no master code I can break in with?”

“Nope. It’s not that sophisticated a system, Bosch. I mean, what do you want, it’s phone messages.”

Bosch took out his notebook again and checked the notes for Aliso’s birthday.

“What’s the voice mail number?” he asked.

Meachum gave him the number and Bosch called the computer. After a beep he punched in 721 but the number was rejected. Bosch drummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. He tried 862, the numbers corresponding with TNA, and a computer voice told him he had four messages.

“Kiz, listen to this,” he said.

He put the phone on speaker and hung up. As the messages were played back Bosch took a few notes, but the first three messages were from men reporting on technical aspects of a planned film shoot, equipment rental and costs. Each call was followed by the electronic voice which reported when on Friday the call had come in.

The fourth message made Bosch lean forward and listen closely. The voice belonged to a young woman and it sounded like she was crying.

“Hey, Tone, it’s me. Call me as soon as you get this. I almost feel like calling your house. I need you. That bastard Lucky says I’m fired. And for no reason. He just wants to get his dick into Modesty. I’m so…I don’t want to have to work at the Palomino or any of those other places. The Garden. Forget it. I want to come out there to L.A. Be with you. Call me.”

The electronic voice said the call had come in at 4
A.M.
on Sunday — long after Tony Aliso was dead. The caller had not given her name. It was therefore obviously someone Aliso would have known. Bosch wondered if it was the woman Rhonda had mentioned, Layla. He looked at Rider and she just shook her shoulders. They knew too little to judge the significance of the call.

Bosch sat in the desk chair contemplating things a few moments. He opened a drawer but didn’t start through it. His eyes traveled up the wall to the right of the desk and roamed across the photos of the smiling Tony Aliso posed with celebrities. Some of them had written notes on the photos but they were hard to read. Bosch studied the photo of his celluloid alter ego, Dan Lacey, but couldn’t read the small note scrawled across the bottom of the photo. Then he looked past the ink and realized what he was looking at. On Aliso’s desk in the photo was an Archway mug crammed with pens and pencils.

Bosch took the photo off the wall and called Meachum’s name. Meachum came over.

“Somebody was in here,” Bosch told him.

“What are you talking about?”

“When was the trash can emptied outside?”

“How the hell would I know? What are —”

“The surveillance camera out there on the roof, how long you keep the tapes?”

Meachum hesitated a second but then answered.

“We roll ’em over every week. We’d have seven days off that camera. It’s all stop action, ten frames a minute.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

Bosch didn’t get home until four. That left him only three hours to sleep before an agreed-upon breakfast meeting with Edgar and Rider at seven-thirty, but he was too strung out on coffee and adrenaline to even think about shutting his eyes.

The house had the sour tang of a fresh-paint smell and he opened the sliders onto the back deck to let in the cool night air. He checked out the Cahuenga Pass below and watched the cars on the Hollywood Freeway cutting through. He was always amazed at how there were always cars on the freeway, no matter what the hour. In L.A. they never stopped.

He thought about putting on a CD, some saxophone music, but instead just sat down on the couch in the dark and lit a cigarette. He thought about the different currents running through the case. Going by the preliminary take on the victim, Anthony Aliso had been a financially successful man. That kind of success usually brought with it a thick insulation from violence and murder. The rich were seldom murdered. But something had gone wrong for Tony Aliso.

Bosch remembered the tape and went to his briefcase, which he had left on the dining room table. Inside it there were two video cassettes, the Archway surveillance tape and the copy of
Casualty of Desire
. He turned on the TV and put the movie in the video player. He began watching in the dark.

After viewing the tape it was obvious to Bosch that the movie deserved the fate it had received. It was badly lit and in some frames the end of a boom microphone hovered above the players. This was particularly jarring in scenes shot in the open desert where there should have been nothing above but blue sky. It was basic filmmaking gone wrong. And added to the amateurish look of the film were the poor performances of the players. The male lead, an actor Bosch had never seen before, was woodenly ineffective in portraying a man desperate to hold on to his young wife, who used sexual frustration and taunting to coerce him into committing crimes, eventually including murder, all for her morbid satisfaction. Veronica Aliso played the wife and was not much better an actor than the male lead.

When lighted well, she was stunningly beautiful. There were four scenes in which she appeared partially nude and Bosch watched these with a voyeuristic fascination. But overall it was not a good role for her, and Bosch also understood why her career, like her husband’s, had not moved forward. She might blame her husband and harbor resentment toward him, but the bottom line was that she was like thousands of beautiful women who came to Hollywood every year. Her looks could put a pause in your heart, but she could not act to save her life.

In the climactic scene of the film, in which the husband was apprehended and the wife cut him loose with the cops, she delivered her lines with the conviction and weight of a blank page of typing paper.

“It was him. He’s crazy. I couldn’t stop him until it was too late. Then I couldn’t tell anyone because it…it would look like I was the one who wanted them all dead.”

Bosch watched all the way through the credits and then rewound the tape by using the remote. He never got off the couch. He then turned the TV off and put his feet up on the couch. Looking through the open sliders he could see the light of dawn etching the ridgeline across the Pass. He still wasn’t tired. He kept thinking about the choices people make with their lives. He wondered what would have happened if the performances had been at least passable and the film had found a distributor. He wondered if that would have changed things now, if it would have kept Tony Aliso out of that trunk.

The meeting at the station with Billets didn’t start until nine-thirty. Though the squad room was deserted because of the holiday, they all rolled chairs into the lieutenant’s office and closed the door. Billets started things off by saying that members of the local media, apparently having picked up on the case by checking the coroner’s overnight log, were already beginning to take a more than routine interest in the Aliso murder. Also, she said, the department weight all the way up the line was questioning whether the investigation should be turned over to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. This, of course, grated on Bosch. Earlier in his career he had been assigned to RHD. But then a questionable on-duty shooting resulted in his demotion to Hollywood. And so it was particularly upsetting to him to think of turning over the case to the big shots downtown. If OCID had been interested, that would have been easier to accept. But Bosch told Billets that he could not accept turning the case over to RHD after his team had spent almost an entire night without sleep on it and had produced some viable leads. Rider jumped in and agreed with him. Edgar, still riding his sulk over being put on the paperwork, remained silent.

“Your point is well taken,” Billets said. “But when we’re done here, I have to call Captain LeValley at home and convince her we’ve got a handle on this. So let’s go over what we have. You convince me, I’ll convince her. She’ll then let them know how we feel about it downtown.”

Bosch spent the next thirty minutes talking for the team and carefully recounting the night’s investigation. The detective squad’s only television/VCR was kept in the lieutenant’s office because it wasn’t safe to leave it unlocked, even in a police station. He put in the tape Meachum had dubbed off the Archway surveillance tape and queued up the part that included the intruder.

“The surveillance camera this was shot from turns a frame every six seconds, so it’s pretty quick and jerky but we’ve got the guy on it,” Bosch said.

He hit the play button and the screen depicted a grainy black and white view of the courtyard and front of the Tyrone Power Building. The lighting made it appear to be late dusk. The time counter on the bottom of the screen showed the time and date to be eight-thirteen the evening before.

Bosch put the machine on slow motion, but still the sequence he wanted to show Billets was over very quickly. In six quick frames they showed a man go to the door of the building, hunch over the knob and then disappear inside.

“Actual time at the door was about thirty to thirty-five seconds,” Rider said. “It may look from the tape like he had a key, but that’s too long to open a door with a key. The lock was picked. Somebody good and fast.”

“Okay, here he comes back out,” Bosch said.

When the time counter hit eight-seventeen, the man was captured on the video emerging from the doorway. The video jumped and the man was in the courtyard heading toward the trash can, then it jumped and the man was walking away from the trash can. Then he was gone. Bosch backed the tape up and froze it on the last image of the man as he walked from the trash can. It was the best image. It was dark and the man’s face was blurred but still possibly recognizable if they ever found someone to compare it to. He was white, with dark hair and a stocky, powerful build. He wore a golf shirt with short sleeves, and the watch on his right wrist, visible just above one of the black gloves he wore, had a chrome band that glinted with the reflection of the courtyard light. Above the wrist was the dark blur of a tattoo on the man’s forearm. Bosch pointed these things out to Billets and added that he would be taking the tape to SID to see if this last frame, the best of those showing the intruder, could be sharpened in any way by computer enhancement.

“Good,” Billets said. “Now, what do you think he was doing in there?”

“Retrieving something,” Bosch said. “From the time he goes in until he comes out, we’ve got less than four minutes. Not a lot of time. Plus he had to pick the interior door to Aliso’s office. Whatever he is doing in there, he knocks an Archway mug off the desk and it breaks on the floor. He does what he was there to do, then gathers up the broken mug and the pens and dumps them in the trash can on his way out. We found the broken mug and the pens in the can last night.”

“Any prints?” Billets asked.

“Once we figured there was a break-in, we backed out and had Donovan come on out when he was done with the Rolls. He got prints but nothing we can use. He got Aliso’s and mine and Kiz’s. As you can see on the video, the guy wore gloves.”

“Okay.”

Bosch involuntarily yawned and Edgar and Rider followed suit. He drank from the cup of stale coffee he had brought into the office with him. He had long had the caffeine jitters but knew if he stopped feeding the beast now he would quickly crash.

“And the theory on what this intruder was retrieving?” Billets asked.

“The broken mug puts him at the desk rather than the files,” Rider said. “Nothing in the desk seemed disturbed. No empty files, nothing like that. We think it was a bug. Somebody put a bug in Aliso’s phone and couldn’t afford to let us find it. The phone was right next to the mug in the pictures on Aliso’s walls. The intruder somehow knocked it over. Funny thing is, we never checked the phone for a bug. If whoever this guy was had left well enough alone, we probably would have never tumbled to it.”

“I’ve been to Archway,” Billets said. “It’s got a wall around it. It’s got its own private security force. How’s this guy get in? Or are you suggesting an inside job?”

“Two things,” Bosch said. “There was a film shooting in progress at the studio on the New York Street set. That meant a lot of people in and out of the front gate. Maybe this guy was able to slip through with part of the shooting crew. The direction in which he walks off in the video is to the north. That’s where New York Street is. The gate is to the south. Also, the north side of the studio butts up against the Hollywood Cemetery. You’re right, there is a wall. But at night, after the cemetery is closed, it’s dark and secluded. Our guy could’ve climbed the wall there. Whatever way he did it, he had practice.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was taking a bug out of Tony Aliso’s phone, it had to have been planted there in the first place.”

Billets nodded.

“Who do you think he was?” she asked quietly.

Bosch looked at Rider to see if she wanted to answer. When she didn’t speak, he did.

“Hard to say. The timing is the catch. Aliso’s probably been dead since Friday night, his body’s not found till about six last night. Then this break-in comes at eight-thirteen. That’s after Aliso’s been found and after people start finding out about it.”

“But eight-thirteen, that’s before you talked to the wife?”

“Right. So that kind of threw a wrench into it. I mean, I was all set to say let’s go full speed on the wife and see what we get. Now, I’m not so sure. See, if she’s involved, this break-in doesn’t make sense.”

“Explain.”

“Well, first you’ve got to figure out why he was being bugged. And what’s the most likely answer? The wife put a PI or somebody on Tony to see if he was screwing around. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, saying that’s the case, if the wife was involved in putting her husband down into that trunk, why would she or her PI or whoever wait until last night — this is after the body’s been found — to pull the bug out of there? It doesn’t make sense. It only makes sense if the two things were not related, if the killing and the bug are separate. Understand?”