Echo Park Page 10
“He came in voluntarily. He came in looking like he was headed to a day at the beach. Anyway . . .”
He brought up the sound. On the screen, Garland was looking all around the room with a slight smile on his face.
“So this is where it happens, huh?” he asked.
“Where what happens?” Bosch asked.
“You know, you break the bad guys down and they confess to all the crimes.”
He smiled coyly.
“Sometimes,” Bosch said. “But let’s talk about Marie Gesto. Did you know her?”
“No, I told you I didn’t know her. Never saw her before in my life.”
“Before what?”
“Before you showed me her picture.”
“So if somebody told me you knew her, then they’d be lying.”
“Fucking-A right. Who told you that shit?”
“But you knew about the empty garage at the High Tower, right?”
“Yeah, well, my girlfriend had just moved out and so, yeah, I knew the place was empty. That doesn’t mean I stashed the car in there. Look, you asked me all of this stuff at the house. I thought there was something new going on here. Am I under arrest or something?”
“No, Anthony, you are not under arrest. I just wanted you to come down so we could go over some of this stuff.”
“I’ve already gone over it with you.”
“But that was before we knew some other things about you and about her. Now it’s important to go over the same ground again. Make a formal record of it.”
Garland’s face seemed to momentarily contort in anger. He leaned across the table.
“What things? What the fuck are you talking about? I had nothing to do with this. I’ve told you that at least twice now. Why aren’t you out there looking for the person who did it?”
Bosch waited until Garland calmed a bit before answering.
“Because maybe I think I’m with the person who did it.”
“Fuck you, man. You’ve got nothing on me because there’s nothing to get. I’ve told you this from day one. I’m not the guy!”
Now Bosch leaned across the table. Their faces were a foot apart.
“I know what you told me, Anthony. But that was before I went to Austin and talked to your girlfriend. She told me some things about you that, frankly, Anthony, require me to pay a little more attention.”
“Fuck her. She’s a whore!”
“Yeah? If she’s all of that, then why’d you get angry with her when she left you? Why did she have to run from you? Why didn’t you just let her go?”
“Because nobody leaves me. I leave them. Okay?”
Bosch leaned back and nodded.
“Okay. So in as much detail as you can remember, tell me what you did on September ninth of last year. Tell me where you went and who you saw.”
Using the remote, Bosch started fast-forwarding the tape.
“He didn’t have an alibi for the time we believed Marie was grabbed outside the supermarket. But we can skip ahead here because that part of the interview took forever.”
Rachel was now sitting up in the bed behind him with the sheet wrapped around her. Bosch looked back at her.
“What do you think of this guy so far?”
She shrugged her bare shoulders.
“He seems like a typical rich asshole. But that doesn’t make him a murderer.”
Bosch nodded.
“This now is two years later. The lawyers from his daddy’s firm slapped a TRO on me and I could only interview the kid if he had counsel present. So there’s nothing much here but there’s one thing I want you to see. His lawyer in this is Dennis Franks, an associate of Cecil Dobbs, a big-shot Century City guy who handles things for T. Rex.”
“T. Rex?”
“The father. Thomas Rex Garland. Likes to be called T. Rex.”
“Figures.”
Bosch slowed the fast-forward down a notch so he could better see where the action on the tape was. On the screen was Garland sitting at a table with a man right next to him. As the image moved in fast motion the lawyer and his client conferred many times in mouth-to-ear communications. Bosch finally slowed it to normal speed and the audio came back up. It was Franks, the lawyer, doing the talking.
“My client has fully cooperated with you but you continue to harass him at work and home with these suspicions and questions that have not one ounce of evidentiary support.”
“I’m working on that part of it, Counselor,” Bosch said. “And when I get it, there won’t be a lawyer in the world who can help him.”
“Fuck you, Bosch!” Garland said. “You better hope you never come for me alone, man. I’ll put you down in the dirt.”
Franks put a calming hand on Garland’s arm. Bosch was silent for a few moments before responding.
“You want to threaten me now, Anthony? You think I’m like one of those teenagers you cuff out in the oil fields and dump crude on? You think I’m going to go away with my tail between my legs?”
Garland’s face pinched together and turned dark. His eyes looked like frozen black marbles.
Bosch hit the pause button on the VCR remote.
“There,” he said to Rachel, pointing at the screen with the remote. “That’s what I wanted you to see. Look at his face. Pure, perfect rage. That’s why I thought it was him.”
Walling didn’t respond. Bosch glanced at her and she looked as though she had seen the face of pure, perfect rage before. She looked to be almost intimidated by it. Bosch wondered if she had seen it in one of the killers she had faced, or in someone else.
Bosch turned back to the television and hit the fast-forward button again.
“Now we jump almost ten years, to when I brought him in last April. Franks was gone and a new guy had the case in Dobbs’s office. He dropped the ball and never went back to the judge when the first restraining order expired. So I took another shot at him. He was surprised to see me. I grabbed him when he came out of Kate Mantilini’s at lunch one day. He probably thought I was long gone from his life.”
He stopped the fast-forward and played the tape. On the screen Garland looked older and wider. His face had spread and he wore his now-thinning hair cropped short. He wore a white shirt with a tie. The taped interviews had followed him from the end of boyhood to well into manhood.
This time he sat in a different interview room. This one was at Parker Center.
“If I’m not under arrest, then I should be free to go,” he said. “Am I free to go?”
“I was hoping you’d answer a few questions first,” Bosch replied.
“I answered all your questions years ago. This is a vendetta, Bosch. You will not give up. You will not leave me alone. Am I free to go or not?”
“Where did you hide her body?”
Garland shook his head.
“My God, this is unbelievable. When will this end?”
“It will never end, Garland. Not until I find her and not until I lock you up.”
“This is fucking crazy! You’re crazy, Bosch. What can I say to make you believe me? What can—”
“You can tell me where she is and then I’ll believe you.”
“Well, that’s the one thing I can’t tell you, because I don’t—”
Bosch suddenly killed the TV with the remote. For the first time, he realized how case-blind he had been, going after Garland as relentlessly as a dog chasing a car. He was unaware of the traffic, unaware that right in front of him in the murder book was the clue to the real killer. Watching the tape with Walling had heaped humiliation upon humiliation. He had thought by showing her the tape she would see why he had focused on Garland. She would understand and absolve him of the mistake. But now seeing it through the prism of Waits’s impending confession he couldn’t even absolve himself.
Rachel leaned toward him and touched his back, her soft fingers tracing down his spine.
“It happens to all of us,” she said.
Bosch nodded. Not to me, he thought.
“Fuck him. He’s still an asshole. I wouldn’t bother.”
Bosch smiled. She was trying to make it easy for him.
“You think?”
She pulled back the elastic waistband on his boxers and then snapped them against his back.
“I think I have at least another hour before I should be thinking about getting home.”
Bosch turned to look at her and she smiled.
10
THE NEXT MORNING Bosch and Rider walked from the Hall of Records to the CCB and despite the wait for an elevator still got to the DA’s office twenty minutes early. O’Shea and Olivas were ready for them. Everyone took the same seats as before. Bosch noticed that the posters that had been leaning against the wall were gone. They had probably been put to good use somewhere, maybe sent to the public hall where the candidates’ forum was scheduled for that night.
As he sat down Bosch saw the Gesto murder book on O’Shea’s desk. He took it without asking and immediately opened it to the chronological record. He combed through the 51s until he found the page for September 29, 1993. He looked at the entry Olivas had told him about the evening before. It was, as it had been read to Bosch, the last entry of the day. Bosch felt the deep sense of regret tug at him all over again.
“Detective Bosch, we all make mistakes,” O’Shea said. “Let’s just move on from it and do the best we can today.”
Bosch looked up at him and eventually nodded. He closed the book and put it back on the desk. O’Shea continued.
“I am told that Maury Swann is in the interview room with Mr. Waits and is ready to go. I have been thinking about this and I want to take the cases one at a time and in order. We start with Fitzpatrick and when we are satisfied by the confession, we move on to the Gesto case, and when we are satisfied there, we move on to the next one and so on.”
Everybody nodded except for Bosch.
“I am not going to be satisfied until we have her remains,” he said.
Now O’Shea nodded. He lifted a document off his desk.
“I understand that. If you can locate the victim based on the statements from Waits, then fine. If it is a matter of him leading us to the body, I have a release order ready to go to the judge. I would say that if we reach a point where we are taking this man out of lockup, then the security should be extraordinary. There will be a lot riding on this and we cannot have any mistakes.”
O’Shea took the time to look from detective to detective to make sure they understood the gravity of the situation. He would be gambling his campaign and political life on the security of Raynard Waits.
“We’ll be ready for anything,” Olivas said.
The look of concern on O’Shea’s face didn’t change.
“You’re going to have a uniformed presence, right?” he asked.
“I don’t think it is necessary—uniforms draw attention,” Olivas said. “We can handle him. But if you want it we’ll have it.”
“I think it would be good to have, yes.”
“No problem, then. We’ll either get a car from Metro to go with us or a couple deputies from the jail.”
O’Shea nodded his approval.
“Then, are we ready to start?”
“There’s one thing,” Bosch said. “We’re not sure who that is in the interview room waiting for us, but we’re pretty sure his name isn’t Raynard Waits.”
A look of surprise played off O’Shea’s face and immediately became contagious. Olivas dropped his mouth open an inch and leaned forward.
“We made him on fingerprints,” Olivas protested. “On the prior.”
Bosch nodded.
“Yes, the prior. As you know, when he was popped thirteen years ago for prowling, he first gave the name Robert Saxon along with the birth date of eleven/three/’seventy-five. This is the same name he used later that year when he called about Gesto, only then he gave the birth date of eleven/three/’seventy-one. But when he was pulled in on the prowling and they ran his prints through the computer, they matched the thumb to the DL of Raynard Waits, with a birth date of eleven/three/’seventy-one. So we keep getting the same month and day but different years. Anyway, when confronted with the thumbprint he copped to being Raynard Waits, saying he had given the false name and year because he was hoping to be handled as a juvenile. This is all in the file.”
“But where does all of it go?” O’Shea said impatiently.
“Just let me finish. He got probation for the prowling because it was a first offense. In the probation report bio he said he was born and raised in L.A., okay? We just came from the Hall of Records. There is no record of Raynard Waits being born in L.A. on that date or any other. There have been a lot of Robert Saxons born in L.A. but none on November third of either of the years mentioned in the files.”
“The bottom line,” Rider said, “is we don’t know who the man we are about to talk to is.”
O’Shea pushed back from his desk and stood up. He paced around the spacious office as he thought and spoke about this latest information.
“Okay, so what are you saying, that the DMV had the wrong prints on file or there was some sort of a mix-up?”
Bosch turned in his seat so he could look at O’Shea while he answered.
“I’m saying that this guy, whoever he really is, could have gone to the DMV thirteen, fourteen, years ago to set up a false ID. What do you need to get a driver’s license? Proof of age. Back then, you could buy phony IDs and birth certificates on Hollywood Boulevard, no problem. Or he could have bribed a DMV employee, could have done a lot of things. The point is, there is no record of him being born here in L.A., as he said he was. That puts all the rest in doubt.”
“Maybe that’s the lie,” Olivas said. “Maybe he is Waits and he lied about being born here. It’s like when you’re born out in Riverside, you tell everybody you’re from L.A.”
Bosch shook his head. He didn’t accept the logic Olivas was slinging.
“The name is false,” Bosch insisted. “Raynard is a take on a character from medieval folklore known as Reynard the Fox. It’s spelled with an e but it’s pronounced the same. Put that with the last name and you have ‘the little fox waits.’ Get it? You can’t convince me somebody gave him that name at birth.”
That brought a momentary silence to the room.
“I don’t know,” O’Shea said, thinking out loud. “Seems a little far-fetched, this medieval connection.”
“It’s only far-fetched because we can’t nail it down,” Bosch countered. “You ask me, it’s more far-fetched that this would be his given name.”
“So what are you saying?” Olivas asked. “That he changed his name and continued to use it, even after he had an arrest tail on it? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. But we don’t know the story behind it yet.”
“Okay, so what are you suggesting we do?” O’Shea asked.
“Not much,” Bosch said. “I’m just bringing it up. But I do think we ought to go on the record with it up there. You know, ask him to state his name, DOB, and place of birth. As if it is the routine way to start one of these interviews. If he gives us Waits, then we might be able to catch him in the lie down the road and prosecute him for everything. You said that was the deal; if he lies, he fries. We can turn it all against him.”
O’Shea was standing by the coffee table behind where Bosch and Rider sat. Bosch turned again, to watch him take in the suggestion. The prosecutor was grinding it over and nodding.
“I don’t see where it could hurt,” he finally said. “Just get it on the record but let it go at that. Real subtle and routine. We can come back to him on it later—if we find out more about this.”
Bosch looked at Rider.
“You’ll be the one starting out with him, asking about the first case. Your first question can be about his name.”
“Fi
ne,” she said.
O’Shea came back around the desk.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Are we ready? It’s time to go. I will try to stay with it as long as my schedule allows. Don’t be offended if I jump in from time to time with a question.”
Bosch answered by standing up. Rider followed suit and then Olivas.
“One last thing,” Bosch said. “We picked up a Maury Swann story yesterday that maybe you guys ought to know.”
Both Bosch and Rider took turns telling the story Abel Pratt had told them. By the end, Olivas was laughing and shaking his head and Bosch could tell by O’Shea’s face that he was trying to count how many times he had shaken Maury Swann’s hand in court. Maybe he was worrying about potential political fallout.
Bosch headed to the door of the office. He felt a mixture of excitement and dread rising. He was excited because he knew he was finally about to find out what had happened to Marie Gesto so long ago. At the same time, he dreaded finding out. And he dreaded the fact that the details he would soon learn would place a heavy burden on him. A burden he would have to transfer to a waiting mother and father up in Bakersfield.
11
TWO UNIFORMED SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES stood at the door to the interview room in which sat the man who called himself Raynard Waits. They stepped aside and allowed the prosecutorial entourage to enter. The room contained one long table. Waits and his defense attorney, Maury Swann, were sitting on one side of it. Waits was directly in the middle and Swann was to his left. When the investigators and the prosecutor entered, only Maury Swann stood. Waits was held to the arms of his chair with plastic snap cuffs. Swann, a thin man with black-framed glasses and a luxurious mane of silver hair, offered his hand but no one shook it.
Rider took the chair directly across the table from Waits, and Bosch and O’Shea sat on either side of her. Since Olivas would not be up in the interview rotation for some time, he took the last remaining chair, which was next to the door.