Trunk Music Read online

  Bosch looked up and saw a small spray of blood splattered on the inside of the trunk lid. He studied the spots for a long moment and then stepped back and straightened up. He appraised the entire view of the trunk now, his mind checking off an imaginary list. Because no blood drips had been found on the access road into the clearing, he had no doubts that the man had been killed here in the trunk. Still, there were other unknowns. Why here? Why no shoes and socks? Why were the bindings taken off the wrists? He put these questions aside for the time being.

  “You check for the wallet?” he asked without looking at the two others.

  “Not yet,” Edgar replied. “Recognize him?”

  For the first time Bosch looked at the face as a face. There was still fear etched on it. The man had closed his eyes. He had known what was coming. Bosch wondered if the whitish material in the eyes was dried tears.

  “No, do you?”

  “Nope. It’s too messy, anyway.”

  Bosch gingerly lifted the back of the leather coat and saw no wallet in the back pockets of the dead man’s pants. He then opened the jacket and saw the wallet was there in an inside pocket that carried a Fred Haber men’s shop label on it. Bosch could also see a paper folder for an airline ticket in the pocket. With his other hand he reached into the jacket and removed the two items.

  “Get the lid,” he said as he backed away.

  Edgar closed it over as gently as an undertaker closing a coffin. Bosch then walked over to his briefcase, squatted down and put the two items down on it.

  He opened the wallet first. There was a full complement of credit cards in slots on the left side and a driver’s license behind a plastic window on the right. The name on the license said Anthony N. Aliso.

  “Anthony N. Aliso,” Edgar said. “Tony for short. TNA. TNA Productions.”

  The address was in Hidden Highlands, a tiny enclave off Mulholland in the Hollywood Hills. It was the kind of place that was surrounded by walls and had a guard shack manned twenty-four hours a day, mostly by off-duty or retired LAPD cops. The address went well with the Rolls-Royce.

  Bosch opened the billfold section and found a sheaf of currency. Without taking the money out, he counted two one-hundred-dollar bills and nine twenties. He called the amount out so that Rider could make a note of it. Next he opened the airline folder. Inside was the receipt for a one-way ticket on an American Airlines flight departing Las Vegas for LAX at 10:05 Friday night. The name on the ticket matched the driver’s license. Bosch checked the back flap of the ticket folder, but there was no sticker or staple indicating that a bag had been checked by the ticket holder. Curious, Bosch left the wallet and the ticket on the case and went to look into the car through the windows.

  “No luggage?”

  “None,” Rider said.

  Bosch went back to the trunk and raised the lid again. Looking in at the body, he hooked a finger up the left sleeve of the jacket and pulled it up. There was a gold Rolex watch on the wrist. The face was encircled with a ring of tiny diamonds.

  “Shit.”

  Bosch turned around. It was Edgar.

  “What?”

  “You want me to call OCID?”

  “Why?”

  “Wop name, no robbery, two in the back of the head. It’s a whack job, Harry. We oughta call OCID.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll tell you right now that’s what Bullets is gonna wanna do.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Bosch appraised the body again, looking closely at the contorted, bloodied face. Then he closed the lid.

  Bosch stepped away from the car and to the edge of the clearing. The spot offered a brilliant view of the city. Looking east across the sprawl of Hollywood, he could easily pick up the spires of downtown in the light haze. He saw the lights of Dodger Stadium were on for the twilight game. The Dodgers were dead even with Colorado with a month to go and Nomo due to pitch the game. Bosch had a ticket in his inside coat pocket. But he knew that bringing it along had been wishful thinking. He wouldn’t get anywhere near the stadium tonight. He also knew Edgar was right. The killing had all the aspects of a mob hit. The Organized Crime Intelligence Division should be notified—if not to take over the investigation entirely, then at least to offer advice. But Bosch was delaying that notification. It had been a long time since he’d had a case. He didn’t want to give it up yet.

  He looked back down at the Bowl. It looked like a sellout to him, the crowd seated in an elliptical formation going up the opposite hill. The seating sections furthest away from the music shell were the highest up the hill and at an almost even level with the clearing where the Rolls was parked. Bosch wondered how many of the people were watching him at that moment. Again he thought of the dilemma he faced. He had to get the investigation going. But he knew that if he pulled the body out of the trunk with such an audience watching, there likely would be hell to pay for the bad public relations such a move would cause the city and the department.

  Once again Edgar seemed to know his thoughts.

  “Hell, Harry, they won’t care. At the jazz festival a few years back, there was a couple up on this spot doing the nasty for half an hour. When they were done, they got a standing ovation. Guy stands up buck naked and takes a little bow.”

  Bosch looked back at him to see if he was serious.

  “I read it in the Times. The ‘Only in L.A.’ column.”

  “Well, Jerry, this is the Philharmonic. It’s a different crowd, know what I mean? And I don’t want this to end up in ‘Only in L.A.,’ okay?”

  “Okay, Harry.”

  Bosch looked at Rider. She hadn’t said much of anything yet.

  “What do you think, Kiz?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the three.”

  Rider was small, five feet and no more than a hundred pounds with her gun on. She would never have made it before the department relaxed the physical requirements to attract more women. She had light brown skin. Her hair was straightened and kept short. She wore jeans and a pink oxford shirt beneath a black blazer. On her small body, the jacket did not do much to disguise a 9mm Glock 17 holstered on her right hip.

  Billets had told him that she had worked with Rider in Pacific. Rider had worked robbery and fraud cases but was called out on occasion to work homicides in which there were overlying financial aspects. Billets had said Rider could break a crime scene down as well as most veteran homicide detectives. She had pulled strings to get Rider’s transfer approved but was already resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t stay long in the division. Rider was marked for travel. Her double minority status coupled with the facts that she was good at what she did and had a guardian angel—Billets wasn’t sure who—at Parker Center practically guaranteed her stay in Hollywood would be short. It was a bit of final seasoning before she headed downtown to the Glass House.

  “What about the OPG?” Bosch asked.

  “Held up on that,” Rider said. “Thought we’d be here a while before we moved the car.”

  Bosch nodded. It was what he expected her to say. The official police garage was usually last on the call-out list. He was just stalling, trying to make a decision while asking questions he already knew the answers to.

  Finally he made his decision on what to do.

  “Okay, go ahead and call,” he said. “Tell them to come now. And tell them to bring a flatbed. Okay? Even if they’ve got a hook in the neighborhood, make ’em turn around. Tell ’em it’s gotta be a flat. There’s a phone in my briefcase.”

  “Got it,” Rider said.

  “Why the flatbed, Harry?” Edgar asked.

  Bosch didn’t answer.

  “We’re moving the whole show,” Rider said.

  “What?” Edgar asked.

  Rider went to the briefcase without answering. Bosch held back a smile. She knew what he was doing, and he began to see some of the promise Billets had talked about. He got out a cigarette and lit it. He put the burnt match into the cellophane around the pack and replaced
it in the pocket of his coat.

  He noticed as he smoked that the sound at the edge of the clearing, where he could look directly down into the Bowl, was much better. After a few moments he was even able to identify the piece being played.

  “Sheherazade,” he said.

  “What’s that, Harry?” Edgar asked.

  “The music. It’s called Sheherazade. Ever heard it?”

  “I’m not sure I’m hearing it now. All the echoes, man.”

  Bosch snapped his fingers. Out of the blue a thought had pushed through. In his mind he saw the studio’s arched gate, the replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

  “That address on Melrose,” Bosch said. “That’s near Paramount. One of those feeder-fish studios right nearby. I think it’s Archway.”

  “Yeah? I think you’re right.”

  Rider walked up then.

  “We got a flat on the way,” she said. “ETA is fifteen. I checked on SID and ME. Also on the way. SID has somebody just wrapped up a home invasion in Nichols Canyon, so they should be right over.”

  “Good,” Bosch said. “Either of you go over the story with the swinging stick, yet?”

  “Not since the preliminary,” Edgar said. “Not our type. Thought we’d leave him for the three.”

  The unspoken meaning of this was that Edgar had sensed the racist animosity Powers radiated toward himself and Rider.

  “Okay, I’ll take him,” Bosch said. “I want you two to finish the charting, then do another sweep of the immediate area. Take different areas this time.”

  He realized he had just told them things he didn’t need to tell them.

  “Sorry. You know what to do. All I’m saying is let’s take this one by the numbers. I’ve got a feeling it’s going eight by ten on us.”

  “What about OCID?” Edgar asked.

  “I told you, not yet.”

  “Eight by ten?” Rider said, a confused expression on her face.

  “Eight by ten case,” Edgar told her. “Celebrity case. Studio case. If that’s a hotshot from the industry in that trunk, somebody from Archway, we’re going to get some media on this. More than some. A dead guy in the trunk of his Rolls is news. A dead industry guy in the trunk of his Rolls is bigger news.”

  “Archway?”

  Bosch left them there as Edgar filled her in on the facts of life when it came to murder, the media and the movie business in Hollywood.

  Bosch licked his fingers to put the cigarette out and then put it with the used match in the cellophane wrapper. He slowly began walking the quarter mile back to Mulholland, once again searching the gravel road in a back-and-forth manner. But there was so much debris on the gravel and in the nearby brush that it was impossible to know if anything—a cigarette butt, a beer bottle, a used condom—was related to the Rolls or not. The one thing he looked closest for was blood. If there was blood on the road that could be linked to the victim, it could indicate that he was killed elsewhere and left in the clearing. No blood probably meant the killing had taken place right there.

  He realized as he made the fruitless search that he was feeling relaxed, maybe even happy. He was back on the beat and following his mission once again. Mindful that the man in the trunk had to have perished for him to feel this way, Bosch quickly wrote that guilt off. The man would have ended up in the trunk whether Bosch had ever made it back to the homicide table or not.

  When Bosch got to Mulholland he saw the fire trucks. There were two of them and a battalion of firefighters standing around them, seemingly waiting for something. He lit another cigarette and looked at Powers.

  “You’ve got a problem,” the uniform cop said.

  “What?”

  Before Powers answered, one of the firefighters stepped up. He wore the white helmet of a battalion chief.

  “You in charge?” he asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “Chief Jon Friedman,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “The show down in the Bowl is supposed to end in ninety minutes. After that we’ve got the fireworks. Problem is this fellow says you got yourself a dead body up there and a crime scene. That’s the problem. If we can’t get up there to set up a safety position for the fireworks, there isn’t going to be any fireworks. We can’t allow it. If we’re not in position, we could see the whole down slope of these hills go up with one errant missile. Know what I mean?”

  Bosch noticed Powers smirking at his dilemma. Bosch ignored him and returned his attention to Friedman.

  “Chief, how long do you need to set up?”

  “Ten minutes max. We just got to be there before the first one goes up.”

  “Ninety minutes?”

  “About eighty-five now. There’s gonna be a lot of angry people down there if they don’t get their fireworks.”

  Bosch realized he wasn’t as much making decisions as having them made for him.

  “Chief, hold here. We’ll be out in an hour and fifteen. Don’t cancel the show.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Count on it.”

  “Detective?”

  “What, Chief?”

  “You’re breaking the law with that cigarette.”

  He nodded toward the graffiti-covered sign.

  “Sorry, Chief.”

  Bosch walked out to the road to stamp out the smoke while Friedman headed back to his people to radio in that the show would go on. Bosch realized the danger and caught up to him.

  “Chief, you can say the show will go on, but don’t put anything out on the air about the body. We don’t need the media out here, helicopters swooping over.”

  “I gotcha.”

  Bosch thanked him and turned his attention to Powers.

  “You can’t clear a scene in an hour and fifteen,” Powers said. “The ME isn’t even here.”

  “Let me worry about that, Powers. You write something up yet?”

  “Not yet. Been dealing with these guys. Would’ve helped if one of you folks had a two-way with you up there.”

  “Then why don’t you run it down for me from the start.”

  “What about them?” Powers asked, nodding in the direction of the clearing. “Why isn’t one of them talking to me? Edgar and Rider?”

  “Because they’re busy. You want to run it down for me or not?”

  “I already told you.”

  “From the start, Powers. You told me what you did once you checked the car out. What made you check it?”

  “There’s nothin’ much to tell. I usually make a pass by here each watch, chase away the dirtbags.”

  He pointed across Mulholland and up to the crest of the hill. There was a line of houses, most on cantilevers, clinging to the crestline. They looked like mobile homes suspended in air.

  “People up there call the station all the time, say they got campfires going down here, beer parties, devil worship, who knows what. Guess it ruins their view. And they don’t want nothin’ to spoil that million-dollar view. So I come up and sweep out the trash. Mostly bored little pissants from the Valley. Fire Department used to have a lock on the gate here, but a deuce plowed through it. That was six months ago. Takes the city at least a year to repair anything ’round here. Shit, I requisitioned batteries for my Mag three weeks ago and I’m still waiting for them. If I didn’t buy them myself, I’d be working the fuckin’ night watch without a flashlight. City doesn’t care. This ci—”

  “So what about the Rolls, Powers? Let’s stay on the subject.”

  “Yeah, well, I usually make it by after dark, but because of the show in the Bowl I swung by early today. Saw the Rolls then.”

  “You came on your own? No complaint from up the hill?”

  “No. Today I just cruised it on my own. On account of the show. I figured there might be some trespassers.”

  “Were there?”

  “A few—people waiting to hear the music. Not the usual crowd, though. That’s refined music, I guess you’d c
all it. I chased ’em out anyway, and when they were gone, the Rolls was what was left. But there was no driver for it.”

  “So you checked it out.”

  “Yeah, and I know the smell, man. Popped it with the slim and there he was. The stiff. Then I backed out and called the pros.”