The Black Echo (1992) Read online

  Rourke shook his head.

  “Harry, don’t be ridiculous. I understand your feelings, but let’s calm down and think for a minute. The witness was snatched off the street and interviewed at Hollywood Station, then dropped off at a public youth shelter.

  “And, lastly, you’re being followed around by your own department, Detective. I’m sorry, but even your own people apparently don’t trust you.”

  Bosch’s face grew dark. He felt betrayed in a sense. Rourke could only have known about the tail through Wish. She had made Lewis and Clarke. Why hadn’t she said anything to him instead of Rourke? Bosch looked over at her but she was looking down at her desk. He looked back at Rourke, who was nodding his head as if it were on a spring.

  “Yes, she made the tail on you the first day.” Rourke looked around the empty squad room, obviously wishing he had a larger audience. He was moving his weight from one foot to the other now, like a boxer in his corner impatiently waiting for the next round to begin so he could deliver the knockout punch on a fading opponent. Wish continued to sit silently at her desk. And in that moment it seemed to Bosch to be a million years ago that they had held each other in her bed. Rourke said, “Maybe you should look at yourself and your own department before running around making reckless accusations.”

  Bosch said nothing. He just stood up and headed to the door.

  “Harry, where are you going?” Eleanor called from her desk.

  He turned around and looked at her a moment, then he kept walking.

  Lewis and Clarke picked up Bosch’s Caprice as soon as it came out of the federal garage. Clarke was driving. Lewis dutifully noted the time on the surveillance log.

  He said, “He’s got a bug up his ass, better move up on him some.”

  Bosch had turned west on Wilshire and was heading for the 405. Clarke increased his speed to stay with him in the morning rush hour traffic.

  “I’d have a bug somewhere if I’d just lost my only witness,” Clarke said. “If I’d gotten him killed.”

  “How you figure?”

  “You saw it. He stuffed the kid in that shelter and went his merry way. I don’t know what that kid saw or what he told them, but it was important enough for him to have to be eliminated. Bosch shoulda taken better care. Kept him under lock and key.”

  They went south on the 405. Bosch was ten cars ahead, now staying in the slow lane. The freeway was thick with a stinking, polluting mass of moving steel.

  “I think he’s going for the 10,” Clarke said. “He’s going into Santa Monica. Maybe back to her place, probably forgot his toothbrush. Or she’s coming back to meet him for a nooner. You know what I say? I say we let him go and we go back to talk to Irving. I think we can build something on this witness thing. Maybe dereliction of duty. There is enough to get an administrative hearing. He’d at least get bounced out of homicide, and if Harry Bosch ain’t allowed to be on the homicide table then he’ll pick up and leave. One more notch on our barrel.”

  Lewis thought about his partner’s idea. It wasn’t bad. It could work. But he didn’t want to pull off the surveillance without Irving’s say-so.

  “Keep with him,” he said. “When he stops somewhere, I’ll drop a quarter and see what Irving wants to do. When he buzzed me this morning about the kid, he seemed pretty stoked. Like things were getting good. So I don’t want to pull off without his say-so.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, how’d Irving know about the kid getting snuffed so fast?”

  “I don’t know. Watch it here. He’s taking the 10.”

  They followed the gray Caprice onto the Santa Monica Freeway. They were now going away from the working city, against the grain, and were in lighter traffic. But Bosch no longer was speeding. And he went past the Clover Field and Lincoln exits to Eleanor Wish’s home, staying on the freeway until it curved through the tunnel and came out below the beach cliffs as the Pacific Coast Highway

  . He headed north along the coast, with the sun bright overhead and the Malibu mountains just opaque whispers ahead in the haze.

  “Now what?” Clarke said.

  “I don’t know. Hang back some.”

  There wasn’t much traffic on the PCH and they were having trouble keeping at least one car between them and Bosch’s car at all times. Though Lewis still believed that most cops never bothered to check if they were being followed, today he was making an exception to that theory with Bosch. His witness had been murdered; he might instinctively think someone had been following him, or still was.

  “Yeah, just hang back. We got all day and so does he.”

  Bosch’s pace held steady for the next four miles, until he turned into a parking lot next to Alice’s and the Malibu pier. Lewis and Clarke cruised by. After a half mile Clarke made an illegal U-turn and headed back. When they pulled into the parking lot, Bosch’s car was still there but they didn’t see him.

  “The restaurant again?” Clarke said. “He must love the place.”

  “It’s not even open this early.”

  They both began looking around in all directions. There were four other cars at the end of the lot, and the racks on top of them said they belonged to the cluster of surfers rising and falling on the seas south of the pier. Finally, Lewis saw Bosch and pointed. He was halfway to the end of the pier, walking, with his head down and his hair blowing a hundred different ways. Lewis looked around for the camera and realized it was still in the trunk. He took a pair of binoculars out of the glove compartment and trained them on Bosch’s diminishing figure. He watched until Bosch reached the end of the wooden planking and leaned his elbows on the railing.

  “What’s he doing?” Clarke asked. “Let me see.”

  “You’re driving. I’m watching. He’s not doing anything anyway. Just leaning there.”

  “He’s got to be doing something.”

  “He’s thinking. Okay? . . . There. He’s lighting a cigarette. Happy? He’s doing something. . . . Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “Shit. We should’ve had the camera ready.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ shit? That’s your job today. I’m driving. What’s he doing?”

  “He dropped something. Into the water.”

  Through the field glasses Lewis saw Bosch’s body leaning limply on the railing. He was looking down into the water below. There was no one else on the pier as far as Lewis could see.

  “What did he drop? Can you see?”

  “How the fuck do I know what he dropped? I can’t see the surface from here. Do you want for me to go out there and get one of the surfer boys to paddle over and see for us? I don’t know what he dropped.”

  “Cool your jets. I was just asking. Now, can you remember the color of this object he dropped?”

  “It looked white, like a ball. But it sort of floated.”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t see the surface.”

  “I meant it floated down. I think it was a tissue or some kind of paper.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Just standing there at the railing. He’s looking down into the water.”

  “Crisis of conscience time. Maybe he’ll jump and we can forget this whole damned thing.”

  Clarke giggled at his feeble joke. Lewis didn’t.

  “Yeah, right. I’m sure that’s going to happen.”

  “Give me the glasses and go call in. See what Irving wants to do.”

  Lewis handed over the binoculars and got out. First, he went to the trunk, opened it and got out the Nikon. He attached a long lens and then took it around to the driver’s window and handed it to Clarke.

  “Get a picture of him out there, so we’ll have something to show Irving.”

  Then Lewis trotted over to the restaurant to find a phone. He was back in less than three minutes. Bosch was still leaning on the rail at the end of the pier.

  “Chief says under no circumstances are we to break off the tail,” Lewis said. “He also said our reports sucked ass. He wants more detail,
and more pictures. Did you get him?”

  Clarke was too busy watching through the camera to answer. Lewis picked up the binoculars and looked. Bosch remained unmoving. Lewis couldn’t figure it. What is he doing? Thinking? Why come all the way out here to think?

  “Fucking Irving, that figures,” Clarke suddenly said, dropping the camera into his lap to look at his partner. “And yeah, I got a few pictures of him. Enough to make Irving happy. But he’s not doing anything. Just leaning there.”

  “Not anymore,” Lewis said, still looking through the binoculars. “Start her up. It’s showtime.”

  Bosch walked off the pier after dropping the crumpled hypnotism memo into the water. Like a flower cast on a spoiled sea, it held its own on the surface for a few brief moments and then sank out of sight. His resolve to find Meadows’s killer was now stronger: now he sought justice for Sharkey as well. As he made his way on the old planking of the pier he saw the Plymouth that had been following him pull out of the restaurant lot. It’s them, he thought. But no matter. He didn’t care what they had seen, or thought they had seen. There were new rules now, and Bosch had plans for Lewis and Clarke.

  He drove east on the 10 into downtown. He never bothered to check his mirror for the black car because he knew it would be there. He wanted it to be there.

  When he got to Los Angeles Street

  , he parked in a no-parking zone in front of the U.S. Administration Building. On the third floor Bosch walked through one of the crowded waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The place smelled like a jail—sweat, fear and desperation. A bored woman was sitting behind a sliding glass window working on the Times crossword. The window was closed. On the sill was a plastic paper-ticket dispenser like they use at a meat-market counter. After a few moments she looked up at Bosch. He was holding his badge up.

  “Do you know a six-letter word for a man of constant sorrow and loneliness?” she asked after sliding the window open and then checking her nail for damage.

  “Bosch.”

  “What?”

  “Detective Harry Bosch. Buzz me in. I want to see Hector V.”

  “Have to check first,” she said in a pouty way. She whispered something into the phone, then reached to Bosch’s badge case and put her finger on the name on the ID card. Then she hung up.

  “He says go on back.” She buzzed the lock on the door next to the window. “He says you know the way.”

  Bosch shook Hector Villabona’s hand in a cramped squad room much smaller than Bosch’s own.

  “I need a favor. I need some computer time.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  That’s what Bosch liked about Hector V. He never asked what or why before deciding. He was a let’s-do-it type of guy. He didn’t play bullshit games that Bosch had come to believe everybody in his profession played. Hector rolled his chair over to an IBM on a desk against the wall and entered his password. “You want to run names, right? How many?”

  Bosch wasn’t going to bullshit him, either. He showed him the list of thirty-four names. Hector whistled lowly and said, “Okay, we’ll run them through, but these are Vietnamese. If their cases were not worked out of this office their files won’t be here. I’ll only have what’s on the computer. Dates of entry, documentation, citizenship, whatever is on the computer. You know how it is, Harry.”

  Bosch did. But he also knew that Southern California was where most of the Vietnamese refugees made their homes after making the trip. Hector started typing in the names with two fingers, and twenty minutes later Bosch was looking at a printout from the computer.

  “What are we looking for, Harry?” Hector said as he studied the list with him.

  “I don’t know. What do you see that is unusual?”

  A few moments passed and Bosch thought Hector would say nothing was unusual. A dead end. But Bosch was wrong.

  “Okay, on this one I think you will find he was connected.”

  The name was Ngo Van Binh. It meant nothing to Bosch other than it had come from the B list; Binh had reported nothing stolen from his safe-deposit box.

  “Connected?”

  “He had some kind of pull,” Hector said. “Connected politically, I guess you would call it. See, his case number has the prefix GL. Those are files handled by our special cases bureau in D.C. Usually, SCB doesn’t deal with people from the masses. Very political. Handles people like the shah and the Marcoses, Russian defectors if they are scientists or ballerinas. Stuff like that. Stuff I never see.”

  He nodded his head and put his finger on the printout.

  “Okay, then we have the dates, they are too close. It happened too fast, which tells me this case was greased. I don’t know this guy from Adam, but I know this guy knew people. Look at the date of entry, May 4, 1975. That’s just four days after the guy left Vietnam. You figure the first day is getting to Manila and the last day is getting to the States. That leaves only two days in between in Manila for him to get approval and get his ticket punched for the mainland. And at that time, I mean, man, they were coming in by the boatload to Manila. No way in two days unless it was greased. So what that means is this guy, this Binh, already had approval. He was connected. It’s not that unusual, because a lot of people were. We got a lot of people out of there when the shit hit the fan. A lot of them were the elite. A lot of them just had money to pay to make them elite.”

  Bosch looked at the date Binh had left Vietnam. April 30, 1975. The same day Meadows left Vietnam for the last time. The day Saigon fell to the North Army.

  “And this DOD?” Villabona said, pointing at another date. “Very short time to receive documentation. May 14. That’s ten days after arrival this guy gets a visa. That’s too fast for the average Joe. Or in this case, the average Ngo.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Hard to say. He could have been an operative. He could’ve just had enough money to get him on a helicopter. Lotta rumors still floating around from that time. People getting rich. Seats on military transports going for ten grand. No question visas going for more. Nothing ever confirmed.”

  “Can you pull the file on this guy?”

  “Yeah. If I was in D.C.”

  Bosch just looked at him, and Hector finally said, “All GLs are there, Harry. That’s where the people that people are connected to are. Get it?”

  Bosch didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t get mad, Harry. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll make a couple calls. You going to be around later?”

  Bosch gave him the FBI’s number but didn’t say it was the FBI. Then they shook hands again and Bosch left. In the first-floor lobby he watched through the smoked-glass doors, looking for Lewis and Clarke. When he finally saw the black Plymouth turn the corner as the two IAD detectives finished another circuit of the block, Bosch walked through the doors and down the steps to his car. In his peripheral vision he saw the IAD car slow and turn into the curb while they waited for him to get in his car and drive off.

  Bosch did as they wanted. Because it was what he wanted.

  Woodrow Wilson Drive

  winds counterclockwise around and up the side of the Hollywood Hills, the cracked, patchwork asphalt never wide enough at any point for two cars to pass without a cautious slowing. Going up, the homes on the left crawl vertically up the hillside. They are the old money, solid and secure. Spanish tile and stucco. To the right, the newer houses fearlessly swing their wood frame rooms out over the brown brush arroyos and daisies in the canyon. They are balanced on stilts and hope and cling as tenuously to the edge of the hill as their owners do to their positions at the studios down below. Bosch’s home was fourth from the end on the right side.

  As he drove around the final bend, the house came into sight. He looked at the dark wood, the shoebox design, seeking a sign that it had somehow changed—as if the exterior of the house could tell him if something was wrong with the interior. He checked the rearview then and caught the front end of the black Plymouth nosing around
the curve. Bosch pulled into the carport next to his house and got out. He went inside without looking back at the tail car.

  He had gone to the pier to think about what Rourke had said. And in doing so he thought about the hang-up call that was on his phone tape. Now, he went to the kitchen and played back his messages. First there was the hang-up call, which had come in Tuesday, and then a message from Jerry Edgar in the predawn hours today, when Edgar had called looking for Bosch to get him out to the Hollywood Bowl. Bosch rewound the tape and listened to the hang-up call again, silently chastising himself for not having picked up on its significance the first time he heard it. Someone had called, listened to his taped message and then hung up after the first message beep. The hang-up was on the tape. Most people, if they didn’t want to leave a message, would simply hang up as soon as they heard Bosch’s tape-recorded voice saying he wasn’t in. Or, if they thought he was home, would have called out his name after the beep. But this caller had listened to the tape and then didn’t hang up until after the beep. Why? Bosch had missed it at first, but now thought the call had been a transmitter test.