The Black Echo (1992) Page 17

  “We’ve got too much else to do,” he began. “You would have spent the rest of the afternoon getting her statement and booking that guy. In fact, it’s a state beef, so I would’ve had to book him. And it’s a flopper; can go felony or misdemeanor. And one look at that girl and the DA would have gone misdee if he filed it at all. It wasn’t worth it. It’s the life down here, Agent Wish.”

  She looked at him with smoldering eyes, the same eyes he had seen when he had gripped her wrist to keep her from leaving the restaurant.

  “Bosch, I had decided it was worth it. Don’t ever do that again.”

  They stood there trying to outstare each other until the girl came out of the bathroom. She wore faded jeans that were split at the knees and a black tank top. No shoes, and Bosch noticed her toenails were painted red. She sat on the bed without saying anything.

  “We need to find Sharkey,” Bosch said.

  “About what? You got a cigarette?”

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out for her. He gave her a match and she lit it herself.

  “About what?” she said again.

  “About Saturday night,” Wish said curtly. “We do not want to arrest him. We do not want to hassle him. We only want to ask him a few questions.”

  “What about me?” the girl said.

  “What about you?” Wish said.

  “Are you going to hassle me?”

  “You mean are we going to turn you over to Division of Youth Services, don’t you?” Bosch looked at Wish to try to gauge a reaction. He got no reading. He said, “No, we won’t call DYS if you help us. What’s your name? Your real name.”

  “Bettijane Felker.”

  “All right, Bettijane, you don’t know where Sharkey is? All we want to do is talk to him.”

  “All I know is that he’s working.”

  “What do you mean? Where?”

  “Boytown. He’s probably taking care of business with Arson and Mojo.”

  “Those the other guys in the crew?”

  “Right.”

  “Where in Boytown did they say they were going?”

  “They didn’t. They just go where the queers are, I guess. You know.”

  The girl either couldn’t be more specific or wouldn’t be. Bosch knew it didn’t matter. He had the addresses from the shake cards and knew he’d find Sharkey somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard

  .

  “Thank you,” he said to the girl and started heading toward the door. He was halfway down the hall before Wish came out of the room, walking after him at a brisk, angry pace. Before she said anything he stopped at a pay phone in the hallway by the office. He took out a small phone book he always carried, looked up the number for DYS and dialed. He was put on hold for two minutes before an operator transferred him to an automated tape line on which he reported the date and time and the location of Bettijane Felker, suspected runaway. He hung up wondering how many days it would be before they got the message and how many days after that it would be before they got to Bettijane.

  They were all the way into West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard

  and she was still hot. Bosch had tried to defend himself but realized there was no chance. So he sat there quietly and listened.

  “It’s a matter of trust, that’s all,” Wish said. “I don’t care how long or short we work together. If you are going to keep up the one-man army stuff, there will never be the trust we need to succeed.”

  He stared at the mirror on the passenger’s side, which he had adjusted so he could watch the car that had pulled away from the curb and followed them from the Blue Chateau. He was sure now it was Lewis and Clarke. He had seen Lewis’s huge neck and crew cut behind the wheel when the car had pulled up within three car lengths at a traffic signal. He didn’t tell Wish they were being followed. And if she had noticed the tail, she hadn’t said so. She was too involved in other things. He sat there watching the tail car and listening to her complaints about how badly he had handled things.

  Finally he said, “Meadows was found Sunday. Today is Tuesday. It is a fact of life in homicide that the odds, the likelihood, of solving a homicide grow longer as each day on the calendar flips by. And so, I’m sorry. I did not think it would help us to waste a day booking some asshole who was probably baited into a motel room by a hooker sixteen years old going on thirty. I also did not think it would be worth waiting for DYS to come out to pick up the girl because I would bet a paycheck that DYS already knows that girl and knows where she is, if they want her. In short, I wanted to get on with it, leave other people’s jobs to other people and do my job. And that meant doing what we are doing now. Slow down up here at Ragtime. It’s one of the spots I got off the shake cards.”

  “We both want to solve this, Bosch. So don’t be so goddam condescending, as if you have this noble mission and I am just along for the ride. We are both on it. Don’t forget it.”

  She slowed in front of the open-air café, where pairs of men sat in white wrought-iron chairs at glass-top tables, drinking ice tea with slices of orange hooked on the rim of beveled glasses. A few of the men looked at Bosch and then looked away uninterested. He scanned the dining area but didn’t see Sharkey. As the car cruised past, he looked down the side alley and saw a couple of young men hanging around, but they were too old to be Sharkey.

  They spent the next twenty minutes driving around gay bars and restaurants, keeping mostly on Santa Monica, but did not see the boy. Bosch watched as the Internal Affairs car kept pace, never more than a block back. Wish never said anything about them. But Bosch knew that law officers were usually the last to notice a surveillance because they were the last to ever think they might be followed. They were the hunters, not the prey.

  Bosch wondered what Lewis and Clarke were doing. Did they expect that he would break some law or cop rule with an FBI agent in tow? He began to wonder if the two IAD detectives weren’t just hotdogging on their own time. Maybe they wanted him to see them. Some kind of a psych-out. He told Wish to pull to a curb in front of Barnie’s Beanery and he jumped out to use the pay phone near the old bar’s screen door. He dialed the Internal Affairs nonpublic number, which he knew by heart, having had to call in twice a day when he was put on home duty the year before while they investigated him. A woman, the desk officer, answered the phone.

  “Is Lewis or Clarke there?”

  “No, sir, they’re not. Can I take a message?”

  “No thanks. Uh, this is Lieutenant Pounds, Hollywood detectives. Are they just out of the office? I need to check a point with them.”

  “I believe they are code seven till P.M. watch.”

  He hung up. They were off duty until four. They were scamming, or Bosch had simply kicked them too hard in the balls this time and now they were going after him on their own time. He got back in the car and told Wish he had checked his office for messages. It was as she merged the car back into traffic that he saw the yellow motorbike leaning on a parking meter about a half block from Barnie’s. It was parked in front of a pancake restaurant.

  “There,” he said and pointed. “Go on by and I’ll get the number. If it’s his, we’ll sit on it.”

  It was Sharkey’s bike. Bosch matched the plate to his notes from the kid’s CRASH file. But there was no sign of the boy. Wish drove around the block and parked in the same spot in front of Barnie’s that they had been in before.

  “So, we wait,” she said. “For this kid you think might be a witness.”

  “Right. It’s what I think. But two of us don’t need to waste the time. You can leave me here if you want. I’ll go in the beanery, order a pitcher of Henry’s and a bowl of chili and watch from the window.”

  “That’s all right. I’m staying.”

  Bosch settled back for a wait. He took out his cigarettes but she nailed him before he got one out of the pack.

  “Have you heard of the draft risk assessment?” she asked.

  “The what?”

  “Secondhand cigarette
smoke. It’s deadly, Bosch. The EPA came out last month, officially. Said it’s a carcinogen. Three thousand people are getting lung cancer a year from passive smoking, they call it. You are killing yourself and me. Please don’t.”

  He put the cigarettes back in his coat pocket. They were quiet as they watched the bike, which was chain-locked to the parking meter. Bosch took a few glances at the side-view mirror but didn’t see the IAD car. He glanced over at Wish, too, whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. Santa Monica Boulevard

  steadily got crowded with cars as the apex of rush hour approached. Wish kept her window closed to cut down on the carbon monoxide. It made the car very hot.

  “Why do you keep staring at me?” she asked about an hour into the surveillance.

  “At you? I didn’t know that I was.”

  “You were. You are. You ever have a female partner before?”

  “Nope. But that’s not why I would be staring. If I was.”

  “Why then? If you were.”

  “I’d be trying to figure you out. You know, why you are here, doing this. I always thought, I mean at least I heard, that the bank squad over at the FBI was for dinosaurs and fuckups, the agents too old or too dumb to use a computer or trace some white-collar scumbag’s assets through a paper trail. Then, here you are. On the heavy squad. You’re no dinosaur, and something tells me you’re no fuckup. Something tells me you’re a prize, Eleanor.”

  She was quiet a moment, and Bosch thought he saw the trace of a smile play on her lips. Then it was gone, if it had been there at all.

  “I guess that is a backhanded compliment,” she said. “If it is, thank you. I have my reasons for choosing where I am with the bureau. And believe me, I do get to choose. As far as the others in the squad, I would not characterize any of them as you do. I think that attitude, which, by the way, seems to be shared by many of your fellow—”

  “There’s Sharkey,” he said.

  A boy with blond dreadlocks had come through a side alley between the pancake shop and a mini-mall. An older man stood with him. He wore a T-shirt that said The Gay 90s Are Back! Bosch and Wish stayed in the car and watched. Sharkey and the man exchanged a few words and then Sharkey took something from his pocket and handed it over. The man shuffled through what looked like a stack of playing cards. He took a couple of cards and gave the rest back. He then gave Sharkey a single green bill.

  “What’s he doing?” Wish asked.

  “Buying baby pictures.”

  “What?”

  “A pedophile.”

  The older man headed off down the sidewalk and Sharkey walked to his motorbike. He hunched over the chain and lock.

  “Okay,” Bosch said, and they got out of the car.

  That would be enough for today, Sharkey thought. Time to kick. He lit a cigarette and bent over the seat of his motorbike to work the combination on the Master lock. His dreads flopped down past his eyes and he could smell some of the coconut stuff he had put in his hair the night before at the Jaguar guy’s house. That was after Arson had broken the guy’s nose and the blood got everywhere. He stood up and was about to wrap the chain around his waist when he saw them coming. Cops. They were too close. Too late to run. Trying to act like he hadn’t yet seen them, he quickly made a mental list of everything in his pockets. The credit cards were gone, already sold. The money could have come from anywhere, some of it did. He was cool. The only thing they’d have would be the queer guy’s identification if they had a lineup. Sharkey was surprised the guy had made a report. No one ever had before.

  Sharkey smiled at the two approaching cops, and the man held up a tape recorder. A tape recorder? What was this? The man hit the play button and after a few seconds Sharkey recognized his own voice. Then he recognized where it had come from. This wasn’t about the Jaguar guy. This was about the pipe.

  Sharkey said, “So?”

  “So,” said the man, “we want you to tell us about it.”

  “Man, I didn’t have anything to do with it. You ain’t going to put that—Hey! You’re the guy from the police station. Yeah, I saw you there the next night. Well, you ain’t going to get me to say I did that shit up there.”

  “Take it down a notch, Sharkey,” the man said. “We know you didn’t do it. We just want to know what you saw, is all. Lock your bike up again. We’ll bring you back.”

  The man gave his name and the woman’s. Bosch and Wish. He said she was FBI, which really confused things. The boy hesitated, then stooped and locked the bike again.

  Bosch said, “We just want to take a ride over to Wilcox to ask you some questions, maybe draw a picture.”

  “Of what?” Sharkey asked.

  Bosch didn’t answer; he just gestured with his hand to come along and then pointed up the block at a gray Caprice. It was the car Sharkey had seen in front of the Chateau. As they walked, Bosch kept his hand on Sharkey’s shoulder. Sharkey wasn’t as tall as Bosch yet, but they shared the same wiry build. The boy wore a tie-dyed shirt of purple and yellow shades. Black sunglasses hung around his neck on orange string. The boy put them on as they approached the Caprice.

  “Okay, Sharkey,” Bosch said at the car. “You know the procedure. We’ve got to search you before you go in the car. That way we won’t have to cuff you for the ride. Put everything on the hood.”

  “Man, you said I was no suspect,” Sharkey protested. “I don’t have to do this.”

  “I told you, procedure. You get it all back. Except the pictures. We can’t do that.”

  Sharkey looked first at Bosch and then Wish, then he started putting his hands in the pockets of his frayed jeans.

  “Yeah, we know about the pictures,” Bosch said.

  The boy put $46.55 on the hood along with a pack of cigarettes and book of matches, a small penknife on a key chain and a deck of Polaroid photos. They were photos of Sharkey and the other guys in the crew. In each, the model was naked and in various stages of sexual arousal. As Bosch shuffled through them, Wish looked over his shoulder and then quickly looked away. She picked up the pack of cigarettes and looked through it, finding a single joint among the Kools.

  “I guess we have to keep that, too,” Bosch said.

  They drove to the police station on Wilcox because it was rush hour and it would have taken them an hour to get to the Federal Building in Westwood. It was after six by the time they got into the detective bureau, and the place was deserted, everybody having gone home. Bosch took Sharkey into one of the eight-by-eight interview rooms. There was a small, cigarette-scarred table and three chairs in the room. A handmade sign on one wall said No Sniveling! He sat Sharkey down in the Slider—a wooden chair with its seat heavily waxed and a quarter-inch of wood cut off the bottom of the front two legs. The incline was not enough to notice, but enough that the people who sat in the chair could not get comfortable. They would lean back like most hard cases and slowly slide off the front. The only thing they could do was lean forward, right into the face of their interrogator. Bosch told the boy not to move, then stepped outside to plan a strategy with Wish, shutting the door. She opened the door after he closed it.

  She said, “It’s illegal to leave a juvenile in a closed room unattended.”

  Bosch closed the door again.

  “He isn’t complaining,” he said. “We’ve got to talk. What’s your feel for him? You want him, or you want me to take it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  That settled it. That was a no. An initial interview with a witness, a reluctant witness at that, required a skillful blend of scamming, cajoling, demanding. If she didn’t know, she didn’t go.

  “You’re supposed to be the expert interrogator,” she said in what seemed to Bosch to be a mocking voice. “According to your file. I don’t know if that’s using brains or brawn. But I’d like to see how it’s done.”

  He nodded, ignoring the jab. He reached into his pocket for the boy’s cigarettes and matches.

  “Go in and give him these. I want to go ch
eck my desk for messages and set up a tape.” When he saw the look on her face as she eyed the cigarettes, he added, “First rule of interrogation: make the subject think he is comfortable. Give ’im the cigarettes. Hold your breath if you don’t like it.”

  He started to walk away but she said, “Bosch, what was he doing with those pictures?”

  So that was what was bothering her, he thought. “Look. Five years ago a kid like him would have gone with that man and done who knows what. Nowadays, he sells him a picture instead. There are so many killers—diseases and otherwise—these kids are getting smart. It’s safer to sell your Polaroids than to sell your flesh.”

  She opened the door to the interview room and went in. Bosch crossed the squad room and checked the chrome spike on his desk for messages. His lawyer had finally called back. So had Bremmer over at the Times, though he had left a pseudonym they had both agreed on earlier. Bosch didn’t want anybody snooping around his desk to know the press had called.