Trunk Music (23 page)

Bosch watched as Salazar used a dulled scalpel to scrape a sample of the whitish material from the corners of Aliso’s eyes. He placed the material in a paper bindle and put it in a petri dish. He placed the dish on a tray that held a small stand containing the test tubes filled with blood, urine and other samples of body materials to be scanned and tested.

“Think it was tears?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t think so. Too thick. He had something in his eyes or on his skin. We’ll find out what.”

Bosch nodded and Salazar proceeded to open the skullcap and examine the brain.

“The bullets mushed this puppy,” he said.

After a few minutes he used a pair of long tweezers to pick out two bullet fragments and drop them in a dish. Bosch stepped over and looked at them and frowned. At least one of the bullets had fragmented upon impact. The pieces were probably worthless for comparison purposes.

Then Salazar pulled out a complete bullet and dropped it in the tray.

“You might be able to work with this one,” he said.

Bosch took a look. The bullet had mushroomed on impact but about half the shaft was still intact, and he could see the tiny scratches made when it was fired through the barrel of a gun. He felt a twinge of encouragement.

“This might work,” he said.

The autopsy wrapped up in about ten more minutes. Overall, Aliso had gotten fifty minutes of Salazar’s time. It was more than most. Bosch checked a clipboard that was on the counter and saw that it was the eleventh autopsy of the day for Salazar.

Salazar cleaned the bullets and put them in an evidence envelope. As he handed it to Bosch, he told the detective that he would be informed of the results of the analysis of the samples retrieved from the body as soon as it was completed. The only other thing that he thought was worth mentioning was that the bruise on Aliso’s cheek was antemortem by four or five hours. This Bosch found to be very curious. He didn’t know how it fit in. It would mean that someone had roughed Aliso up while he was in Las Vegas, yet he had been killed here in L.A. He thanked Salazar, calling him Sally as many people did, and headed out. He was in the hallway before he remembered something and went back to the door of the autopsy suite. When he stuck his head in, he saw Salazar tying the sheet around the body, making sure the toe tag hung free and could be read.

“Hey, Sally, the guy had hemorrhoids, right?”

Salazar looked back at him with a quizzical look on his face.

“Hemorrhoids? No. Why do you ask?”

“I found a tube of Preparation H in his car. In the glove box. It was half used.”

“Hmmm…well, no hemorrhoids. Not on this one.”

Bosch wanted to ask him if he was sure but knew that would be insulting. He let it go for the moment and left.

Details fueled any investigation. They were important and not to be misplaced or forgotten. As he headed toward the glass exit doors of the coroner’s office, Bosch found himself bothered by the detail of the tube of Preparation H found in the glove box of the Silver Cloud. If Tony Aliso hadn’t suffered from hemorrhoids, then whom did the tube belong to and why was it in his car? He could dismiss it as probably being unimportant, but that wasn’t his way. Everything had its place in an investigation, Bosch believed. Everything.

His deep concentration on this problem caused Bosch to go through the glass doors and down the stairs to the parking lot before he saw Carbone standing there smoking a cigarette and waiting. When Bosch had dropped him off earlier, the OCID detective had begged for a couple of hours to get the tapes together. Bosch had agreed but hadn’t told him that he was heading to an autopsy. So he now assumed that Carbone had called the bureau in Hollywood and been told by Billets or someone else that he was at the coroner’s office. Bosch wouldn’t check this with Carbone because he didn’t want to show any kind of concern that the OCID detective had so easily found him.

“Bosch.”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody wants to talk.”

“Who? When? I want the tapes, Carbone.”

“Cool your jets for a couple minutes. Over here in the car.”

He led Bosch to the second parking row, where there was a car with its engine running and its dark-tinted windows all the way up.

“Hop in the back,” Carbone said.

Bosch nonchalantly walked to the door, still showing no concern. He opened it and ducked in. Leon Fitzgerald was sitting in the back. He was a tall man — more than six and a half feet — and his knees were pressed hard against the back of the driver’s seat. He wore a beautiful suit of blue silk and held the stub of a cigar between his fingers. He was almost sixty and his hair was a jet-black dye job. His eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, were pale gray. His skin was pasty white. He was a night man.

“Chief,” Bosch said, nodding.

He had never met Fitzgerald before but had seen him often enough at cop funerals and on television news reports. He was the embodiment of the OCID. No one else from the secretive division ever went on camera.

“Detective Bosch,” Fitzgerald said. “I know of you. Know of your exploits. Over the years you have been suggested to me more than once as a candidate for our unit.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

Carbone had come around and gotten in the driver’s seat. He started moving the car slowly through the lot.

“Because like I said, I know of you,” Fitzgerald was saying. “And I know you would not leave homicide. Homicide is your calling. Am I correct?”

“Pretty much.”

“Which brings us to the current homicide case you are pursuing. Dom?”

With one hand, Carbone passed a shoebox over the seat. Fitzgerald took it and put it on Bosch’s lap. Bosch opened it and found it full of audiocassette tapes with dates written on tape stuck to the cases.

“From Aliso’s phone?” he asked.

“Obviously.”

“How long were you on it?”

“We’d only been listening for nine days. It hadn’t been productive, but the tapes are yours.”

“And what do you want in return, Chief?”

“What do I want?”

Fitzgerald looked out the window, down at the railroad switching yard in the valley below the parking lot.

“What do I want?” he asked again. “I want the killer, of course. But I also want you to be careful. The department’s been through a lot these past few years. No need to hang our dirty laundry in public once again.”

“You want me to bury Carbone’s extracurricular activities.”

Neither Fitzgerald nor Carbone said anything but they didn’t have to. Everybody in the car knew that Carbone did what he did on orders. Probably orders from Fitzgerald himself.

“Then you’ve got to answer some questions.”

“Of course.”

“Why was there a bug on Tony Aliso’s phone?”

“Same reason there’s a bug on anyone’s phone. We heard things about the man and set about finding out if they were true.”

“What did you hear?”

“That he was dirty, that he was a scumbag, that he was a launderer for the mob in three states. We opened a file. We had just begun when he was killed.”

“Then when I called, why did you pass on it?”

Fitzgerald took a long pull on his cigar and the car filled with its smell.

“There’s a complicated answer to that question, Detective. Suffice it to say that we thought it best if we remained uninvolved.”

“The tap was illegal, wasn’t it?”

“It is extremely difficult under state law to gather the required information needed for a wiretap. The feds, they can get it done on a whim. We can’t and we don’t want to work with the feds all the time.”

“It still doesn’t explain why you passed. You could’ve taken the case from us and then controlled it, buried it, done whatever you wanted with it. No one would have known about illegal wiretaps or anything else.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it was a wrong choice.”

Bosch realized they had underestimated himself and his crew. Fitzgerald had believed the break-in would go unnoticed and therefore his unit’s involvement would not be discovered. Bosch understood the tremendous leverage he held over Fitzgerald. Word about the illegal wiretap would be all the police chief would need to rid himself of Fitzgerald.

“So what else do you have on Aliso?” he asked. “I want everything. If I hear at any point you held something back, then your little-black-bag job is going to get known. You know what I mean? It will get known.”

Fitzgerald turned from the window and looked at him.

“I know exactly what you mean. But you are making a mistake if you are going to smugly sit there and believe you have all the high cards in this game.”

“Then put whatever cards you have on the table.”

“Detective, I am about to fully cooperate with you, but know this. If you seek to hurt me or anyone in my division with the information you get here, I will hurt you more. For example, there’s this matter of your keeping company last night with a convicted felon.”

He let that hang in the air with his cigar smoke. Bosch was stunned and angry but managed to swallow down his urge to throttle Fitzgerald.

“There is a department prohibition against any officer knowingly associating with criminals. I’m sure you know that, Detective, and understand the need for such a safeguard. If this were to become known about you, then your job could be in jeopardy. Then where would you and your mission be?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He looked straight ahead, over the seat and out the front window. Fitzgerald leaned over so that he was almost whispering in his ear.

“This is what we know about you in just one hour,” he said. “What if we spend a day? A week? And it’s not just you, my friend. You can tell your lieutenant that there is a glass ceiling in the department for lesbians, especially if something like that should get out. Now her girlfriend, she could go further, her being black. But the lieutenant, she’d have to get used to Hollywood, you ask me.”

He leaned back to his spot and returned his voice to normal modulation.

“Do we have an understanding here, Detective Bosch?”

Bosch turned and finally looked at him.

“We have an understanding.”

After dropping the bullets retrieved from Tony Aliso’s head at the ballistics lab in Boyle Heights, Bosch made it back to the Hollywood Division just as the investigators were gathering in Billets’s office for the six o’clock meeting. Bosch was introduced to Russell and Kuhlken, the two fraud investigators, and everybody sat down. Also sitting in was a deputy district attorney. Matthew Gregson was from Special Prosecutions, a unit that handled organized crime cases as well as the prosecution of police officers and other delicate matters. Bosch had never met him.

Bosch gave his report first and concisely brought the others up to date on the occurrences in Las Vegas as well as the autopsy and his swing by the department’s gun shop. He said he’d been promised that the ballistics comparison would be done by ten the following morning. But Bosch made no mention of his meetings with Carbone and Fitzgerald. Not because of the threat Fitzgerald had made — or so Bosch told himself. But because the information he had gleaned from those meetings was best not discussed with such a large group in general and a prosecutor in particular. Apparently, feeling the same way, Billets asked him no questions in this regard.

When Bosch was finished, Rider went next. She said she had talked to the IRS auditor assigned to the TNA Productions case and gotten very little information.

“Basically, they have a whistle-blowing program,” she said. “You blow the whistle on a tax scofflaw and you get a share of whatever taxes the IRS finds it’s been cheated out of. That’s how this started. Only problem is, according to Hirschfield, he’s the IRS guy, this tip came in anonymously. Whoever blew the whistle didn’t want a share. He said they got a three-page letter outlining Tony Aliso’s money-washing scam. He would not show it to me because he claimed, anonymous or not, the guidelines of the program call for strict confidence and the specific language of the letter could lead to identification of the author. He —”

“That’s bullshit,” Gregson said.

“Probably,” Rider said. “But there was nothing I could do about it.”

“Afterwards, give me the guy’s name and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Sure. Anyway, they got this letter, did some preliminary looking at TNA’s corporate filings over the years and decided the letter had merit. They sent the audit letter to Tony on August 1 and were going to do him at the end of this month. That was it with him — oh, the one thing he would tell me about the letter was that it was mailed from Las Vegas. It was on the postmark.”

Bosch almost nodded involuntarily because that last bit of information fit with something Fitzgerald had told him.

“Okay, now for Tony Aliso’s associates. Jerry and I spent the better part of the day interviewing the core group of people he used when making this trash he called film. He basically raided the local film schools, low-rent acting schools and strip bars for the so-called artistic talent for these shoots, but there were five men that he repeatedly worked with to get them off the ground. We took them all one by one and it appears they were not privy to financing of the movies or the books Tony kept. We think they were in the dark. Jerry?”

“That’s right,” Edgar said. “I personally think Tony picked these guys because they were stupid and didn’t ask questions about that sort of stuff. He just sent them out, you know, over to USC or UCLA to grab some kid who’d want to direct or write one of these things. They’d go over to the Star Strip on La Cienega and talk girls into taking the bimbo parts. On and on, you know how it goes. Our conclusion is that this little money washing scam was Tony’s. Only he and his customers knew.”

“Which leads us to you guys,” Billets said, looking at Russell and Kuhlken. “You got anything to tell us, yet?”

Kuhlken said they were still waist-deep in the financial records but they had so far traced money from TNA Productions to dummy corporations in California, Nevada and Arizona. The money went into the corporation bank accounts and was then invested in other, seemingly legitimate, corporations. He said when the trail was fully documented they would be in a position to use the IRS and federal statutes to seize the money as the illegal funds of a racketeering enterprise. Unfortunately, Russell said, the documentation period was long and difficult. It would be another week before they could move.