Angle of Investigation Page 3

  As he approached the front doors of the retirement home he noticed that not much about it looked particularly splendid. It looked like a final stop for pensioners and people who hadn’t planned on living as long as they had. Quentin McKinzie, for example. Few jazzmen and drug users went the distance. He probably never thought he’d make it this far. According to the information Bosch got off the computer, he was seventy-two years old.

  Bosch entered and walked up to a welcome counter. The place smelled like most of the low-rent retirement homes he had ever been in. Urine and decay, the end of hopes and dreams. He asked for directions to Quentin McKinzie’s room. The woman behind the counter suspiciously eyed the saxophone under Bosch’s arm.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. “Evening visiting is by appointment only.”

  “Is that to give you time to clean the place up before the kids come by to see dear old dad?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t need an appointment. Where is Mr. McKinzie?”

  He held his badge up, a foot from her face. She looked at it for a long moment—longer than it took to read it—and then cleared her throat.

  “He’s in one-oh-seven. Down the hall on the left side. He’s probably sleeping.”

  Bosch nodded his thanks and headed down the hall.

  The door to 107 was ajar. The light was on in the room and Bosch could hear television sounds coming from inside. He knocked softly and didn’t get a response. He slowly pushed the door open and stuck his head in. He saw an old man sitting in a chair next to a bed. A television mounted high on the opposite wall was droning. The old man’s eyes were closed. He was gaunt and depleted, his body taking up only half of the chair. His black skin looked gray and powdery. Despite the thin face and loose skin gathering below his chin, Bosch recognized him. It was Sugar Ray McK.

  He stepped into the room and quietly came around the bed. The man didn’t stir. Bosch stood still for a moment, wondering what he should do. He decided not to wake the man. He put the instrument stand down on the floor in the corner. He then cradled the saxophone in it. He straightened up, took another look at the sleeping jazzman and nodded to him in some sort of unnoticed acknowledgment. As he headed out of the room he reached up and turned off the television.

  At the door he was stopped by a raspy voice.

  “Hey!”

  Bosch turned. Sugar Ray was awake and looking at him with rheumy eyes.

  “You turned off my box.”

  “Sorry, I thought you were asleep.”

  He came back into the room and reached up to turn the television on again.

  “Who are you, boy? You don’t work here.”

  Bosch turned to face him.

  “My name is Harry. Harry Bosch. I came—”

  Sugar Ray noticed the saxophone sitting in the corner of the room.

  “That’s my ax.”

  Bosch picked up the saxophone and handed it to him.

  “I found it. I saw your name in it and I wanted to get it back to you.”

  The man held the instrument like it was as precious as a new baby. He slowly turned it in his hands, studying it for flaws or maybe just wanting to look at it the way he would look at a loved one long gone away. Bosch felt a constriction rising in his chest as the jazzman brought the instrument to his mouth, licked the mouthpiece and then held it between his teeth. His chest rose as he drew in a breath.

  But as his fingers went to work and he blew out the riff, the wind escaped from the weak seal his lips made around the mouthpiece. Sugar Ray closed his eyes and tried again. The same result sounded from his instrument. He was too old and weak. His lungs were gone. He could no longer play.

  “It’s all right,” Bosch said. “You don’t have to play. I just thought it should be back with you, that’s all.”

  Sugar Ray cradled the instrument in his lap as if he were protecting it. He looked up at Bosch.

  “Where did you get this, Harry Bosch?”

  “I took it from a guy who stole it from a pawnshop.”

  Sugar Ray nodded like he knew the story.

  “Was it stolen from you?” Bosch asked.

  “No. I had it pawned. A fellow here did it for me so I could get money for the box. I don’t like being in the dayroom with the others. They’re all suicides waitin’ to happen. So I needed my own box.”

  He shook his head. His eyes went up to the tefy"up to tlevision on the wall over Bosch’s shoulder.

  “Imagine, a man trading the love of his life for that.”

  Bosch looked up at the tube and saw a commercial where a Santa Claus was drinking a cold beer after a long night of delivering presents and cheer. He looked back at Sugar Ray. He didn’t know whether to feel good or bad about what he had done. He had returned an instrument to a musician who could no longer play it.

  But as this indecision gripped his heart he saw Sugar Ray pull the saxophone closer to his body. He held it there tightly, as if it were all he had in the world. He brought his eyes to Bosch’s and in them Harry saw that he had done the right thing.

  “Merry Christmas, Sugar Ray.”

  Sugar Ray nodded and looked down. Bosch knew it was time to leave him alone. He reached over and gripped his shoulder for a moment.

  “Why?” Sugar Ray asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you do this for me? You think you’re playing Santa Claus or something?”

  Bosch smiled and squatted down next to the chair. He was now looking up into the old man’s eyes.

  “I did it to try to make us even, I guess.”

  The old man just looked at him, waiting.

  “In December nineteen sixty-nine I was on a hospital ship in the South China Sea.”

  Bosch touched his left side, just above the hip.

  “I got bamboo-bladed in a tunnel four days before. You probably don’t remember this but—”

  “The USS Sanctuary. Off Danang. Of course I remember. You were one of the boys in the blue bathrobes, huh?”

  Sugar Ray smiled. Bosch nodded and continued.

  “I remember the announcement that the show was canceled because the seas were too high and the fog too thick. The big Hueys with all the equipment couldn’t land. We had all been waiting on deck. We saw the choppers coming in through the mist and then just turning around to go back.”

  Sugar Ray raised a finger.

  “You know, it was Mr. Bob Hope who told our pilot to turn that son of a bitch around again and put it down on that boat.”

  Bosch nodded. He had heard it was Hope. One chopper turned again and came to the Sanctuary. The small one. The one with the headliners onboard.

  “I remember it was Bob Hope, Connie Stevens, you and a beautiful black girl from that TV show.”

  “Teresa Graves. Laugh-In.”

  “Man, you remember everything.”

  “Just ’cause I’m old doesn’t mean I can’t remember. The man on the moon was there, too.”

  Bosch smiled. Sugar Ray was filling in details he had forgotten.

  “Neil Armstrong, yeah. But the rest of the band—the Playboy All-Stars—was on one of the other choppers and it went back to Danang. It was only you and you carried your own ax. You played for us. Solo.”

  Bosch looked at the instrument in the old man’s gray hands. He remembered the day on the Sanctuary as clearly as he remembered any other moment of his life.

  “You played ‘The Sweet Spot’ and then ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”

  “I played the ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ too. By request of a young man in the front row. He’d lost both his legs and he asked me to play that waltz.”

  Bosch nodded solemnly.

  “Bob Hope told us his jokes and Connie Stevens sang ‘Promises, Promises.’ A cappella. In less than an hour it was all over and the chopper took off. Man, I can’t explain it but it meant something. It made something right in a messed-up world, you know? I was only nineteen years old and I wasn’t sure how or why I was even over there.<
br />
  “Anyway, I’ve listened to a lot of saxophone since then but I haven’t heard it any better.”

  Bosch nodded and stood up. His knee creaked loudly. He guessed it wouldn’t be too long before he was in one of these places. If he was lucky.

  “I just wanted to tell you that,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “You were in the tunnels over there, huh? I heard about them.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Coulda used you going about this bin Laden character.”

  He pointed up to the TV, as if that were where the terrorist was.

  Bosch shook his head.

  “Nah, it’s a different game. Back then they gave you a flashlight and a forty-five, said good luck and dropped you in a hole. Now it’s sound and motion detectors, heat sensors, infrared… it’s a different game.”

  “Maybe. But a hunter is still a hunter.”

  Bosch look lu">Bosched at him for a moment before speaking.

  “Take it easy, Sugar Ray.”

  He headed toward the door and one more time Sugar Ray stopped him.

  “Hey, Santa Claus.”

  Bosch turned back.

  “You strike me as a man who is alone in the world,” Sugar Ray said. “That true?”

  Bosch nodded without hesitation.

  “Most of the time.”

  “You got plans for Christmas dinner?”

  Bosch hesitated. He finally shook his head.

  “No plans.”

  “Then, come back here at three tomorrow. We have a dinner and I can bring a guest. I’ll sign you up.”

  Bosch hesitated. He had been alone so often on Christmases past that he thought it might be too late, that being around anyone might be intolerable.

  “Don’t worry,” Sugar Ray said. “They won’t put your turkey in the blender as long as you’ve got teeth.”

  Bosch smiled.

  “All right, Sugar Ray, I’ll be by.”

  “Then, I’ll see you then.”

  Bosch walked down the yellowed corridor and out into the night. As he headed to the car he heard Christmas music still playing from an open window somewhere. It was an instrumental, slow and heavy on the saxophone. He stopped and it took him a moment to recognize it as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” He stood there on the walkway and listened until the end of the song.

  The author would like to gratefully acknowledge John Houghton for recounting and sharing the experience on the USS Sanctuary that inspired this story.

  Father’s Day

  The victim’s tiny body was left alone in the emergency room enclosure. The doctors, after halting their resuscitation efforts, had solemnly retreated and pulled the plastic curtains closed around the bed. The entire construction, management and purpose of the hospital was to prevent death. When the effort failed, nobody wanted to see it.

  The curtains were opaque. Harry Bosch looked like a ghost as he approached and then split them to enter. He stepped into the enclosure and stood somber and alone with the dead. The boy’s body took up less than a quarter of the big metal bed. He had worked thousands of cases but nothing ever touched Bosch liket di the sight of a young child’s lifeless body. Fifteen months old. Cases in which the child’s age was still counted in months were the most difficult of all. He knew that if he dwelled too long he would start to question everything—from the meaning of life to his mission in it.

  The boy looked like he was only asleep. Bosch made a quick study, looking for any bruising or other sign of mishap. The child was naked and uncovered, his skin as pink as a newborn’s. Bosch saw no sign of trauma except for an old scrape on the boy’s forehead.

  He pulled on gloves and very carefully moved the body to check it from all angles. His heart sank as he did this but he saw nothing that was suspicious. When he was finished, he covered the body with the sheet—he wasn’t sure why—and slipped back through the plastic curtains shrouding the bed.

  The boy’s father was in a private waiting room down the hall. Bosch would eventually get to him but the paramedics who had transported the boy had agreed to stick around to be interviewed. Bosch looked for them first and found both men—one old, one young, one to mentor, one to learn—sitting in the crowded ER waiting room. He invited them outside so they could speak privately.

  The dry summer heat hit them as soon as the glass doors parted. Like walking out of a casino in Vegas. They walked to the side so they would not be bothered but stayed in the shade of the portico. He identified himself and told them he would need the written reports on their rescue effort as soon as they were completed.

  “For now, tell me about the call.”

  The senior man did the talking. His name was Ticotin.

  “The kid was already in full arrest when we got there,” he began. “We did what we could but the best thing was just to ice him and transport him—try to get him in here and see what the pros could do.”

  “Did you take a body temperature reading at the scene?” Bosch asked.

  “First thing,” Ticotin said. “It was one-oh-six-eight. So you gotta figure the kid was up around one-oh-eight, one-oh-nine before we got there. There was no way he was going to come back from that. Not a little baby like that.”

  Ticotin shook his head as though he was frustrated by having been sent to rescue someone who could not be rescued. Bosch nodded as he took out his notebook and wrote down the temperature reading.

  “You know what time that was?” he asked.

  “We arrived at twelve seventeen so I would say we took the BT no more than three minutes later. First thing you do. That’s the protocol.”

  Bosch nodded again and wrote the time—12:20 P.M.—next to the temperature reading. He looked up and tracked a car coming quickly into the ER lot. It parked and his partner, Ignacio Ferras, got out. He had gone directly to the accident scene, while Bosch had gone directly to the hospital. Bosch siht=al. Bosgnaled him over. Ferras walked with anxious speed. Bosch knew he had something to report but Bosch didn’t want him to say it in front of the paramedics. He introduced him and then quickly got back to his questions for the paramedics.

  “Where was the father when you got there?”

  “They had the kid on the floor by the back door, where he had brought him in. The father was sort of collapsed on the floor next to him, screaming and crying like they do. Kicking the floor.”

  “Did he ever say anything?”

  “Not right then.”

  “Then when?”

  “When we made the decision to transport and work on the kid in the truck, he wanted to go. We told him he couldn’t. We told him to get somebody from the office to drive him.”

  “What were his words?”

  “He just said, ‘I want to go with him. I want to be with my son.’ Stuff like that.”

  Ferras shook his head as if in pain.

  “At any time did he talk about what had happened?” Bosch asked.

  Ticotin checked his partner, who shook his head.

  “No,” Ticotin said. “He didn’t.”

  “Then how were you informed of what had happened?”

  “Well, initially, we heard it from dispatch. Then one of the office workers, a lady, she told us when we got there. She led us to the back and told us along the way.”

  Bosch thought he had all he was going to get but then thought of something else.

  “You didn’t happen to take an exterior air temperature reading for that spot, did you?”

  The two paramedics looked at each other and then at Bosch.

  “Didn’t think to,” Ticotin said. “But it’s gotta be at least ninety-five with the Santa Anas kicking up like this. I don’t remember a June this hot.”

  Bosch remembered a June he had spent in a jungle but wasn’t going to get into it. He thanked the paramedics and let them get back to duty. He put his notebook away and looked at his partner.

  “Okay, tell me about the scene,” he said.

  “We’ve got to charge this guy, Harry,” Ferras s
aid urgently.

  “Why? What did you find?”

  “It’s not what I found. It’s because it was just a kid, Harry. What kind of father would let this happen? How could he forget?”

  Ferras had become a father for the first time six months earlier. Bosch knew this. The experience had made him a professional dad and every Monday he came into the squad with a new batch of photos. To Bosch, the kid looked the same week to week, but not to Ferras. He was in love with being a father, with having a son.

  “Ignacio, you’ve got to separate your own feelings about it from the facts and the evidence, okay? You know this. Calm down.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just that, how could he forget, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know, and we’re going to keep that in mind. So tell me what you found out over there. Who’d you talk to?”

  “The office manager.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “It’s a lady. She said that he came in through the back door shortly after ten. All the sales agents park in the back and use the back door—that’s why nobody saw the kid. The father came in talking on the cell phone. Then he got off and asked if he’d gotten a fax but there was no fax. So he made another call and she heard him ask where the fax was. Then he waited for the fax.”

  “How long did he wait?”

  “She said not long but the fax was an offer to buy. So he called the client and that started a whole back-and-forth with calls and faxes and he completely forgot about the kid. It was at least two hours, Harry. Two hours!”

  Bosch could almost share his partner’s anger, but he had been on the mission a couple decades longer than Ferras and knew how to hold it in when he had to and when to let it go.

  “Harry, something else, too.”

  “What?”

  “The baby had something wrong with him.”

  “The manager saw the kid?”

  “No, I mean, always. Since birth. She said it was a big tragedy. The kid was handicapped. Blind, deaf, a bunch of things wrong. Fifteen months old and he couldn’t walk or talk and never could even crawl. He just cried a lot.”

  Bosch nodded as he tried to plug this information into everything else he knew and had accumulated. Just then another car came speeding into the parking lot. It pulled into the ambulance shoot in front of the ER doors. A woman leaped out and ran into the ER, leaving the car running and the door open.