The Black Ice (1993) Page 11

  “You know what I mean? The diagram said this had been charted in the bathtub. Is this . . . too much? I know you knew him.”

  “Not that well. Go on.”

  “So I examined this piece, not really expecting anything more than what I was seeing earlier. But I was wrong. There was hemorrhagic demarcation in the lobe along the skull lining.”

  She took a hit off his wineglass and breathed heavily, as if casting out a demon.

  “And so, you see Harry, that was a big fucking problem.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “You sound like Irving. ‘Tell me why. Tell me why.’ Well, it should be obvious. For two reasons. First of all you don’t have that much hemorrhage on instant death like that. There is not much bleeding in the brain lining when the brain has been literally disconnected from the body in a split second. But while there is some room for some debate on that—I’ll give that to Irving—there is no debate whatsoever on the second reason. This hemorrhaging was clearly indicative of a contre-coup injury to the head. No doubt in my mind at all.”

  Harry quickly reviewed the physics he had learned over the ten years he had been watching autopsies. Contre-coup brain injury is damage that occurs to the side of the brain opposite the insult. The brain, in effect, was a Jell-O mold inside the skull. A jarring blow to the left side often did its worst damage to the right side because the force of impact pushed the Jell-O against the right side of the skull. Harry knew that for Moore to have the hemorrhage Teresa described to the front of the brain, he would have to be struck from behind. A shotgun blast to the face would not have done it.

  “Is there any way . . . ,” he trailed off, unclear of what he wanted to ask. He suddenly became aware of his body’s pangs for a cigarette and smacked the end of a fresh pack on his palm.

  “What happened?” he asked as he opened it.

  “Well, when I started explaining, Irving got all uptight and kept asking, ‘Are you sure? Is that a hundred percent accurate? Aren’t we jumping the gun?’ and on and on like that. I think it was pretty clear. He didn’t want this to be anything other than a suicide. The minute I raised a doubt he started talking about jumping to conclusions and the need to move slowly. He said the department could be embarrassed by what an investigation could lead to if we did not proceed slowly and cautiously and correctly. Those were his words. Asshole.”

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Bosch said.

  “Right. So I just flat-out told them I was not going to rule it a suicide. And then . . . then they talked me out of ruling it a homicide. So that’s where the inconclusive comes from. A compromise. For now. It makes me feel like I am guilty of something. Those bastards.”

  “They’re just going to drop it,” Bosch said.

  He couldn’t figure it out. The reluctance had to be because of the IAD investigation. Whatever Moore was into, Irving must believe it either led him to kill himself or got him killed. And either way Irving didn’t want to open that box without knowing first what was in it. Maybe he never wanted to know. That told Bosch one thing: he was on his own. No matter what he came up with, turning it over to Irving and RHD would get it buried. So if Bosch went on with it, he was freelancing.

  “Do they know that Moore was working on something for you?” Teresa asked.

  “By now they do, but they probably didn’t when they were with you. Probably won’t make any difference.”

  “What about the Juan Doe case? About him finding the body.”

  “I don’t know what they know on that.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. What will you do?”

  She was silent for a long time, then she got up and walked to him. She leaned into him and kissed him on the lips. She whispered, “Let’s forget about all of this for a while.”

  • • •

  He conceded to her in their lovemaking, letting her lead and direct him, use his body the way she wanted. They had been together often enough so that they were comfortable and knew each other’s ways. They were beyond the stages of curiosity or embarrassment. At the end, she was straddled over him as he leaned back, propped on pillows, against the headboard. Her head snapped back and her clipped nails dug painlessly into his chest. She made no sound at all.

  In the darkness he looked up and saw the glint of silver dripping from her ears. He reached up and touched the earrings and then ran his hands down her throat, over her shoulders and breasts. Her skin was warm and damp. Her slow methodical motion drew him further into the void where everything else in the world could not go.

  When they were both resting, she still huddled on top of him, a sense of guilt came over him. He thought of Sylvia Moore. A woman he had met only the night before, how could she intrude on this? But she had. He wondered where the guilt came from. Maybe it was for what was still ahead of them.

  He thought he heard the short, high-pitched bark of the coyote in the distance behind the house. Teresa raised her head off his chest and then they heard the animal’s lonesome baying.

  “Timido,” he heard her say quietly.

  Harry felt the guilt pass over him again. He thought of Teresa. Had he tricked her into telling him? He didn’t think so. Maybe, again, it was guilt over what he had not yet done. What he knew he would do with the information she had given.

  She seemed to know his thoughts were away from her. Perhaps a change in his heartbeat, a slight tensing in his muscles.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You asked what I was going to do. Nothing. I’m not going to get involved in this bullshit any further. If they want to bury it, let them bury it.”

  Harry knew then that she would make a good permanent chief medical examiner for the county of Los Angeles.

  He felt himself falling away from her in the dark.

  Teresa rolled off him and sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window at the three-quarter moon. They had left the curtain open. The coyote howled once more. Bosch thought he could hear a dog answering somewhere in the distance.

  “Are you like him?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Timido. Alone out there in the dark world.”

  “Sometimes. Everybody is sometimes.”

  “Yes, but you like it, don’t you?”

  “Not always.”

  “Not always . . .”

  He thought about what to say. The wrong word and she’d be gone.

  “I’m sorry if I’m distant,” he tried. “There’s a lot of things . . .”

  He didn’t finish. There was no excuse.

  “You do like living up here in this little, lonely house, with the coyote as your only friend, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. The face of Sylvia Moore inexplicably came back into his mind. But this time he felt no guilt. He liked seeing her there.

  “I have to go,” Teresa said. “Long day tomorrow.”

  He watched her walk naked into the bathroom, picking her purse up off the night table as she went. He listened as the shower ran. He imagined her in there, cleaning all traces of him off and out of her and then splashing on the all-purpose perfume she always carried in her purse to cover up any smells left on her from her job.

  He rolled to the side of the bed to the pile of his clothes on the floor and got out his phone book. He dialed while the water still ran. The voice that answered was dulled with sleep. It was near midnight.

  “You don’t know who this is and I never talked to you.”

  There was silence while Harry’s voice registered.

  “Okay, okay. Got it. I understand.”

  “There’s a problem on the Cal Moore autopsy.”

  “Shit, I know that, man. Inconclusive. You don’t have to wake me up to—”

  “No, you don’t understand. You are confusing the autopsy with the press release on the autopsy. Two different things. Understand now?”

  “Yeah . . . I think I do. So, what’s the problem?”


  “The assistant chief of police and the acting chief ME don’t agree. One says suicide, the other homicide. Can’t have both. I guess that’s what you call inconclusive in a press release.”

  There was a low whistling sound in the phone.

  “This is good. But why would the cops want to bury a homicide, especially one of their own? I mean, suicide makes the department look like shit as it is. Why bury a murder unless it means there’s something—”

  “Right,” Bosch said and he hung up the phone.

  A minute later the shower was turned off and Teresa came out, drying herself with a towel. She was totally unabashed about her nakedness with him and Harry found he missed that shyness. It had eventually left all the women he became involved with before they eventually left him.

  He pulled on blue jeans and a T-shirt while she dressed. Neither spoke. She looked at him with a thin smile and then he walked her out to her car.

  “So, we still have a date for New Year’s Eve?” she asked after he opened the car door for her.

  “Of course,” he said, though he knew she would call with an excuse to cancel it.

  She leaned up and kissed him on the lips, then slipped into the driver’s seat.

  “Good-bye, Teresa,” he said, but she had already closed the door.

  • • •

  It was midnight when he came back inside. The place smelled of her perfume. And his own guilt. He put Frank Morgan’s Mood Indigo on the CD player and stood there in the living room without moving, just listening to the phrasing on the first solo, a song called “Lullaby.” Bosch thought he knew nothing truer than the sound of a saxophone.

  11

  Sleep was not a possibility. Bosch knew this. He stood on the porch looking down on the carpet of lights and let the chill air harden his skin and his resolve. For the first time in months he felt invigorated. He was in the hunt again. He let everything about the cases pass through his mind and made a mental list of people he had to see and things he had to do.

  On top was Lucius Porter, the broken-down detective whose pullout was too timely, too coincidental to be coincidental. Harry realized he was becoming angry just thinking about Porter. And embarrassed. Embarrassed at having stuck his neck out for him with Pounds.

  He went to his notebook and then dialed Porter’s number one more time. He was not expecting an answer and he wasn’t disappointed. Porter had at least been reliable in that respect. He checked the address he had written down earlier and headed out.

  Driving down out of the hills he did not pass another car until he reached Cahuenga. He headed north and got on the Hollywood Freeway at Barham. The freeway was crowded but not so that traffic was slow. The cars moved northward at a steady clip, a sleekly moving ribbon of lights. Out over Studio City, Bosch could see a police helicopter circling, a shaft of white light cast downward on a crime scene somewhere. It almost seemed as if the beam was a leash that held the circling craft from flying high and away.

  He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.

  There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon night. So many ways to live. And to die. You could be riding in the back of a studio’s black limo, or just as easily the back of the coroner’s blue van. The sound of applause was the same as the buzz of a bullet spinning past your ear in the dark. That randomness. That was L.A.

  There was flash fire and flash flood, earthquake, mudslide. There was the drive-by shooter and the crack-stoked burglar. The drunk driver and the always curving road ahead. There were killer cops and cop killers. There was the husband of the woman you were sleeping with. And there was the woman. At any moment on any night there were people being raped, violated, maimed. Murdered and loved. There was always a baby at his mother’s breast. And, sometimes, a baby alone in a Dumpster.

  Somewhere.

  Harry exited on Vanowen in North Hollywood and went east toward Burbank. Then he turned north again into a neighborhood of rundown apartments. Bosch could tell by the gang graffiti it was a mostly Latino neighborhood. He knew Porter had lived here for years. It was all he could afford after paying alimony and for his booze.

  He turned into the Happy Valley Trailer Park and found Porter’s double-wide at the end of Greenbriar Lane

  . The trailer was dark, not even a light on above the door, and there was no car under the aluminum-roofed carport. Bosch sat in his car smoking a cigarette and watching for a while. He heard mariachi music wafting into the neighborhood from one of the Mexican clubs over on Lankershim. Soon it was drowned out by a jet that lumbered by overhead on its way to Burbank Airport. He reached into the glove compartment for a leather pouch containing his flashlight and picks and got out.

  After the third knock went unanswered, Harry opened the pouch. Breaking into Porter’s place did not give him pause. Porter was a player in this game, not an innocent. To Bosch’s mind, Porter had forfeited protection of his privacy when he had not been straight with him, when he hadn’t mentioned that Moore had been the one who found Juan Doe #67’s body. Now Bosch was going to find Porter and ask him about that.

  He took out the miniature flashlight, turned it on and then held it in his mouth as he stooped down and worked a pick and tiny pressure wrench into the lock. It took him only a few minutes to push the pins and open the door.

  A sour odor greeted Bosch when he entered. He recognized it as the smell of a drunk’s sweat. He called Porter’s name but got no answer.

  He turned on the lights as he moved through the rooms. There were empty glasses on nearly every horizontal surface. The bed was unmade and the sheets were a dingy white. Amidst the glasses on the night table was an ashtray overloaded with butts. There was also a statue of a saint Bosch could not identify. In the bathroom off the bedroom, the bathtub was filthy, a toothbrush was on the floor and in the wastebasket there was an empty bottle of whiskey, a brand either so expensive or so cheap that Harry had never heard of it. But he suspected it was the latter.

  In the kitchen, there was another empty bottle in the trash can. There were also dirty dishes piled on the counters and sink. He opened the refrigerator and saw only a jar of mustard and an egg carton. Porter’s place was very much like its owner. It showed a marginal life, if it could be called that at all.

  Back in the living room Bosch picked a framed photograph up off a table next to a yellow couch. It was a woman. Not too attractive, except to Porter maybe. An ex-wife he couldn’t get over. Maybe. Harry put the photo back down and the phone rang.

  He traced the noise to the bedroom. The phone was on the floor next to the bed. He picked up on the seventh ring, waited a moment and in a voice designed to appear jerked from sleep said, “Huh?”

  “Porter?”

  “Yeah.”

  The line went dead. It hadn’t worked. But had Bosch recognized the voice? Pounds? No, not Pounds. Only one word spoken. But, still, the accent was there. Spanish, he thought. He filed it away in his mind and got up off the bed. Another plane crossed above and the trailer shuddered. He went back into the living room where he made a half-hearted search of a one-drawer desk, though he knew that no matter what he found it wouldn’t solve the immediate problem: where was Porter?

  Bosch turned all the lights off and relocked the front door as he left. He decided to start in North Hollywood and work his way south toward downtown. In every police division there was a handful of bars that carried a heavy clientele of cops. Then after two, when they closed, there were the all-night bottle clubs. Mostly they were dark pits where men came to drink hard and quietly, as if their lives depended on it. They were havens from the street, places to go to forget and forgive yourself. It was at one of these Bosch believed he would find Porter.

  He began with a place on Kittr
idge called the Parrot. But the bartender, a one-time cop himself, said he hadn’t seen Porter since Christmas Eve. Next, he went to the 502 on Lankershim and then Saint’s on Cahuenga. They knew Porter in these places but he hadn’t been at either tonight.

  It went like that until two. By then, Bosch had worked his way down into Hollywood. He was sitting in his car in front of the Bullet, trying to think of nearby bottle-club locations, when his pager went off. He checked the number and didn’t recognize it. He went back into the Bullet to use the pay phone. The lights in the bar came on after he dialed. Last call was over.

  “Bosch?”

  “Yeah.”