ASSISTANT CHIEF Irvin S. Irving stood in the open doorway of the examination suite. Bosch was sitting on the side of the padded table holding an ice pack to his head. The doctor had given it to him after putting in the stitches. He noticed Irving when he adjusted the bag in his hand.
“How do you feel?”
“I’ll live, I guess. That’s what they tell me, at least.”
“Well, that’s better than you can say for Mittel. He took the high dive.”
“Yeah. What about the other one?”
“Nothing on him. We got his name, though. You told the uniforms Mittel called him Jonathan. So that means he’s probably Jonathan Vaughn. He’s worked for Mittel for a long time. They’re working on it, checking the hospitals. Sounds like you might’ve hurt him enough that he’d come in.”
“Vaughn.”
“We’re trying to do a background on him. So far, not much. He’s got no record.”
“How long was he with Mittel?”
“That we’re not sure of. We’ve talked to Mittel’s people at the law firm. Not what you’d call cooperative. But they say Vaughn has been around forever. He was described by most people as Mittel’s personal valet.”
Bosch nodded and put the information away.
“There’s also a driver. We picked him up but he isn’t saying much. A little surfer punk. He couldn’t talk if he wanted to anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“His jaw is broken. Wired shut. He won’t talk about that, either.”
Bosch just nodded again and looked at him. There didn’t seem to be anything hidden in what he had said.
“The doctor said you have a severe concussion but the skull is not fractured. Minor laceration.”
“Could’ve fooled me. My head feels like the Goodyear blimp with a hole in it.”
“How many stitches?”
“I think he said eighteen.”
“He said you’ll probably have headaches and keep the knot up there and the eye hemorrhages for a few days. It’ll look worse than it is.”
“Well, nice to know he’s telling somebody what’s going on. I haven’t heard anything from him. Just the nurses.”
“He’ll be in in a minute. He was probably waiting for you to come out of it a little more.”
“Come out of what?”
“You were a little dazed when we got up there to you, Harry. You sure you want to talk about this now? It can wait. You’re hurt and need to take it-”
“I’m okay. I want to talk. You been by the scene at Park La Brea?”
“Yes, I was there. I was there when we got the call from Mount Olympus. I’ve got your briefcase in the car, by the way. You left it there, didn’t you? With Conklin?”
He started to nod but stopped because it made things swirl.
“Good,” he said. “There’s something there I want to keep.”
“The photo?”
“You looked through it?”
“Bosch! You must be groggy. It was found at the scene of a crime.”
“Yeah, I know, sorry.”
He waved off his objection. He was tired of fighting.
“So, the crew working the scene up on the hill already told me what happened. At least, the early version based on the physicals. What I’m not clear about is what got you up there. You know, how all of this figures. You want to run it down for me or wait until maybe tomorrow?”
Bosch nodded once and waited a moment for his mind to clear. He hadn’t tried to collect the story into one cohesive thought yet. He thought about it some more and finally gave it a shot.
“I’m ready.”
“Okay, I want to read you your rights first.”
“What, again?”
“It’s just a procedure so it doesn’t look like we’re cutting any slack to one of our own. You’ve got to remember, you were at two places tonight and at both somebody took a big fall. It doesn’t look good.”
“I didn’t kill Conklin.”
“I know that and we have the security guard’s statement. He says you left before Conklin took the dive. So you’re gonna be okay. You’re clear but I have to follow procedure. Now, you still want to talk?”
“I waive my rights.”
Irving read them to him from a card anyway and Bosch waived them again.
“Okay, then, I don’t have a waive form. You’ll have to sign that later.”
“You want me to tell the story?”
“Yes, I want you to tell the story.”
“Okay, here we go.”
But then he stopped as he tried to put it into words.
“Harry?”
“Okay, here it is. In 1961 Arno Conklin met Marjorie Lowe. He was introduced by local scumbucket Johnny Fox, who made his living off making such introductions and arrangements. Usually for money. This initial meeting between Arno and Marjorie was at the St. Pat’s party at the Masonic Lodge on Cahuenga.”
“That’s the photo in the briefcase, right?”
“Right. Now, at that first meeting, according to Arno ’s story, which I believe, he didn’t know that Marjorie was a pro and Fox was a pimp. Fox arranged the introduction because he probably saw the opportunity and had one eye on the future. See, if Conklin knew it was a pay-to-play sort of thing, he would have walked away. He was the top county vice commando. He would have walked away.”
“So he didn’t know who Fox was either?” Irving asked.
“That’s what he said. He just said he was innocent. If you find that hard to take, the alternative is harder; that this prosecutor would openly consort with these types of people. So, I’m going with Arno ’s story. He didn’t know.”
“Okay, he didn’t know he was being compromised. So what was in it for Fox and…your mother?”
“Fox is easy. Once Conklin went with her, Fox had a nice hook into him and he could reel him in whenever he wanted. Marjorie is something else and I’ve been thinking about it but it still isn’t clear. But you can say this, most women in that situation are looking for a way out. She could have played along with Fox’s plan because she had her own plan. She was looking for a way out of the life.”
Irving nodded and added to the hypothesis.
“She had a boy in the youth hall and wanted to get him out. Being with Arno could only help.”
“That’s right. The thing of it was, Arno and Marjorie did something none of the three of them expected. They fell in love. Or at least Conklin did. And he believed she did, too.”
Irving took a chair in the corner, crossed his legs and stared thoughtfully at Bosch. He said nothing. Nothing about his demeanor indicated he was anything else but totally interested and believing in Bosch’s story. Bosch’s arm was getting tired of holding the ice pack up and he wished he could lie down. But there was only the table in the examination suite. He continued the story.
“So they fall in love and their relationship continues and somewhere along the line she tells him. Or maybe Mittel did some checking and told him. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that at some point Conklin knew the score. And again, he surprises everybody.”
“How?”
“On October twenty-seven, nineteen sixty-one, he proposes marriage to Marj-”
“He told you this? Arno told you this?”
“He told me tonight. He wanted to marry her. She wanted to marry him. On that night back then, he finally decided to chuck it all, to risk losing everything he had to gain the one thing he wanted most.”
Bosch reached into his jacket on the table and took out his cigarettes. Irving spoke up.
“I don’t think this is a-nothing, never mind.”
Bosch lit a smoke with his lighter.
“It was the bravest act of his life. You realize that? That took balls to be willing to risk everything like that…But he made a mistake.”
“What?”
“He called his friend Gordon Mittel to ask him to go with them to Vegas to be best man. Mittel refused. He knew it would be the end of a promising political career for Conklin, maybe even his own career, and he wanted no part of it. But then he went further than just refusing to be best man. See, he saw Conklin as the white horse on which he would be able to ride into the castle. He had big plans for himself and Conklin and he wasn’t going to sit back and let some…some Hollywood whore ruin it. He knew from Conklin’s call that she had gone home to pack. So Mittel went there and intercepted her somehow. Maybe told her that Conklin had sent him. I don’t know.”
“He killed her.”
Bosch nodded and this time he didn’t go dizzy.
“I don’t know where, maybe in his car. He made it look like a sex crime by tying the belt around her neck and tearing up her clothes. The semen…it was already there because she had been with Conklin…After she was dead, Mittel took the body to the alley near the Boulevard and put her in the trash. The whole thing stayed a secret for a lot of years after that.”
“Until you came along.”
Bosch didn’t answer. He was savoring his cigarette and the relief of the end of the case.
“What about Fox?” Irving asked.
“Like I said, Fox knew about Marjorie and Arno. And he knew they were together the night before Marjorie was found dead in that alley. That knowledge gave Fox a powerful piece of leverage over an important man, even if the man was innocent. Fox used it. In who knows how many ways. Within a year he was on Arno ’s campaign payroll. He was hooked on him like a bloodsucking leech. So Mittel, the fixer, finally stepped in. Fox died in a hit and run while supposedly handing out Conklin campaign fliers. Would’ve been easy to set up, make it look like it was an accident and the driver just fled. But that’s no surprise. The same guy who worked the Marjorie Lowe case worked the hit and run. Same result. Nobody ever arrested.”
“McKittrick?”
“No. Claude Eno. He’s dead now. Took his secrets with him. But Mittel was paying him off for twenty-five years.”
“The bank statements?”
“Yeah, in the briefcase. You look, you’ll probably find records somewhere linking Mittel to the payments. Conklin said he didn’t know about them and I believe him…You know, somebody ought to check all the elections Mittel worked on over the years. They’ll probably find out he was a rat fucker that could’ve held his own in the Nixon White House.”
Bosch ground his cigarette out on the side of a trash can next to the table and dropped the butt in. He started to feel very cold and put his jacket back on. It was smudged with dirt and dried blood.
“You look like a mess in that, Harry,” Irving said. “Why don’t you-”
“I’m cold.”
“Okay.”
“You know, he didn’t even scream.”
“What?”
“Mittel. He didn’t even scream when he went down that hill. I can’t figure that out.”
“You don’t have to. It’s just one of those-”
“And I didn’t push him. He jumped me in the brush and when we rolled, he went over. He didn’t even scream.”
“I understand. No one is saying-”
“All I did was start to ask questions about her and people started dying.”
Bosch was staring at an eye chart on the far wall of the room. He could not figure out why they would have such a thing in an emergency room examination suite.
“Christ…Pounds…I-”
“Yes, I know what happened,” Irving interrupted.
Bosch looked over at him.
“You do?”
“We interviewed everyone in the squad. Edgar told me that he made a computer run for you on Fox. My only conclusion is that Pounds either overheard or somehow got wind of it. I think he was monitoring what your close associates were doing after you went on ISL. Then he must’ve taken it a step further and stumbled into Mittel and Vaughn. He ran DMV traces on the parties involved. I think it got back to Mittel. He had the connections that would have warned him.”
Bosch was silent. He wondered if Irving really believed that scenario or if he was signaling to Bosch that he knew what had really happened and was letting it go by. It didn’t matter. Whether or not Irving blamed him or took departmental action against him, Bosch’s own conscience would be the hardest thing to live with.
“Christ,” he said again. “He got killed instead of me.”
His body started shuddering then. As if saying the words out loud had started some kind of exorcism. He threw the ice pack into the trash can and wrapped his arms around himself. But the shuddering wouldn’t stop. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again, that his shaking was not a temporary affliction but a permanent part of him now. He had the warm salty taste of tears in his mouth and he realized then that he was crying. He turned his face away from Irving and tried to tell him to leave but he couldn’t say anything. His jaw was locked as tight as a fist.
“Harry?” he heard Irving say. “Harry, you okay?”
Bosch managed to nod, not understanding how Irving could not see his body shaking. He moved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and pulled it closed around him. He felt something in his left pocket and started absentmindedly pulling it out.
“Look,” Irving was saying, “the doctor said you could get emotional. This knock on the head…they do weird things to you. Don’t wor-Harry, are you sure you’re okay? You’re turning blue, son. I’m gonna-I’ll go get the doctor. I’ll-”
He stopped as Bosch managed to remove the object from his jacket. He held his palm upright. Clasped in his shaking hand was a black eight ball. Much of it was smeared with blood. Irving took it from him, having to practically pry his fingers off it.
“I’ll go get somebody,” was all he said.
Then Bosch was alone in the room, waiting for someone to come and the demon to leave.