The Black Echo Page 3

  Edgar held a small notepad in one hand, a gold Cross pen in the other.

  “William Joseph Meadows, 7–21–50. That sound like him, Harry?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “Well, you were right, we have multiple contacts. But not just hype shit. We’ve got bank robbery, attempted robbery, possession of heroin. We got a loitering right here at the dam a year or so ago. And he did have a couple hype beefs. The one in Van Nuys you were talking about. What was he to you, a CI?”

  “No. Get an address?”

  “Lives up in the Valley. Sepulveda, up by the brewery. Tough neighborhood to sell a house in. So if he wasn’t an informant, how’d you know this guy?”

  “I didn’t know him — at least recently. I knew him in a different life.”

  “What does that mean? When did you know the guy?”

  “Last time I saw Billy Meadows was twenty years ago, or thereabouts. He was — it was in Saigon.”

  “Yeah, that’d make it about twenty years.” Edgar walked over to the Polaroids and looked down at the three faces of Billy Meadows. “You know him good?”

  “Not really. About as well as anybody got to know somebody there. You learned to trust people with your life, then when it’s over you realize you didn’t really even know most of them. I never saw him once I got back here. Talked to him once on the phone last year, that’s all.”

  “How’d you make him?”

  “I didn’t, at first. Then I saw the tattoo on his arm. That brought the face back. I guess you remember guys like him. I do, at least.”

  “I guess . . .”

  They let the silence sit there awhile. Bosch was trying to decide what to do, but could only wonder about the coincidence of being called to a death scene to find Meadows. Edgar broke the reverie.

  “So you want to tell me what you’ve got that looks hinky here? Donovan over there looks like he’s getting ready to shit his pants, all the work you’re putting him through.”

  Bosch told Edgar about the problems, the absence of distinguishable tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head, the broken finger and that there was no knife.

  “No knife?” his partner said.

  “Needed something to cut the can in half to make a stove — if the stove was his.”

  “Could’ve brought the stove with him. Could have been that somebody went in there and took the knife after the guy was dead. If there was a knife.”

  “Yeah, could have been. No tracks to tell us anything.”

  “Well, we know from his sheet he was a blown-out junkie. Was he like that when you knew him?”

  “To a degree. A user and seller.”

  “Well, there you go, longtime addict, you can’t predict what they’re going to do, when they’re going to get off the shit or on it. They’re lost people, Harry.”

  “He was off it, though — at least I thought he was. He’s only got one fresh pop in his arm.”

  “Harry, you said you hadn’t seen the guy since Saigon. How do you know whether he was off or on?”

  “I hadn’t seen him, but I talked to him. He called me once, last year sometime. July or August, I think. He’d been pulled in on another track marks beef by the hype car up in Van Nuys. Somehow, maybe reading newspapers or something — it was about the same time as the Dollmaker thing — he knew I was a cop, and he calls me up at Robbery-Homicide. He calls me from Van Nuys jail and asks if I could help him out. He would’ve only done, what, thirty days in county, but he was bottomed out, he said. And he, uh, just said he couldn’t do the time this time, couldn’t kick alone like that. . . .”

  Bosch trailed off without finishing the story. After a long moment Edgar prompted him.

  “And? . . . Come on, Harry, what’d you do?”

  “And I believed him. I talked to the cop. I remember his name was Nuckles. Good name for a street cop, I thought. And then I called the VA up there in Sepulveda and I got him into a program. Nuckles went along with it. He’s a vet, too. He got the city attorney to ask the judge for diversion. So anyway, the VA outpatient clinic took Meadows in. I checked about six weeks later and they said he’d completed, had kicked and was doing okay. I mean, that’s what they told me. Said he was in the second level of maintenance. Talking to a shrink, group counseling. . . . I never talked to Meadows after that first call. He never called again, and I didn’t try to look him up.”

  Edgar referred to his pad. Bosch could see the page he was looking at was blank.

  “Look, Harry,” Edgar said, “that was still almost a year ago. A long time for a hype, right? Who knows? He could have fallen off the wagon and kicked three times since then. That’s not our worry here. The question is, what do you want to do with what we have here? What do you want to do about today?”

  “Do you believe in coincidence?” Bosch asked.

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “There are no coincidences.”

  “Harry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But you know what I think? I don’t see anything here that’s screaming in my face. Guy crawls into the pipe, in the dark maybe he can’t see what he’s doing, he puts too much juice in his arm and croaks. That’s it. Maybe somebody else was with him and smeared the tracks going out. Took his knife, too. Could be a hundred dif—”

  “Sometimes they don’t scream, Jerry. That’s the problem here. It’s Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions. Don’t you see that that’s what they are counting on?”

  “Who is ‘they, ’ Harry?”

  “Whoever did this.”

  He shut up for a minute. He was convincing no one, and that almost included himself. Playing to Edgar’s sense of dedication was wrong. He’d be off the job as soon as he put in twenty. He’d then put a business card–sized ad in the union newsletter — “LAPD retired, will cut commission for brother officers” — and make a quarter million a year selling houses to cops or for cops in the San Fernando Valley or the Santa Clarita Valley or the Antelope Valley or whatever valley the bulldozers aimed at next.

  “Why go in the pipe?” Bosch said then. “You said he lived up in the Valley. Sepulveda. Why come down here?”

  “Harry, who knows? The guy was a junkie. Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he croaked himself up there and his friends dragged his dead ass down here because they didn’t want to be bothered with explaining it.”

  “That’s still a crime.”

  “Yeah, that’s a crime, but let me know when you find a DA that’ll file it for you.”

  “His kit looked clean. New. The other tracks on his arm look old. I don’t think he was slamming again. Not regularly. Something isn’t right.”

  “Well, I don’t know. . . . You know, AIDS and everything, they’re supposed to keep a clean kit.”

  Bosch looked at his partner as if he didn’t know him.

  “Harry, listen to me, what I’m telling you is that he may have been your foxhole buddy twenty years ago but he was a junkie this year. You’ll never be able to explain every action he took. I don’t know about the kit or the tracks, but I do know that this does not look like one we should bust our humps on. This is a nine-to-fiver, weekends and holidays excluded.”

  Bosch gave up — for the moment.

  “I’m going up to Sepulveda,” he said. “Are you coming, or are you going back to your open house?”

  “I’ll do my job, Harry,” Edgar said softly. “Just because we don’t agree on something doesn’t mean I’m not gonna do what I’m paid to do. It’s never been that way, never will be. But if you don’t like the way I do business, we’ll go see Ninety-eight tomorrow morning and see about a switch.”

  Bosch was immediately sorry for the cheap shot, but didn’t say so. He said, “Okay. You go on up there, see if anybody’s home. I’ll meet you after I sign off on the scene.”

  Edgar walked over to the pipe and took one of the Polaroid photos of Meadows. He sl
ipped it into his coat pocket, then walked down the access road toward his car without saying another word to Bosch.

  After Bosch took off his jumpsuit and folded it away in the trunk of his car, he watched Sakai and Osito slide the body roughly onto a stretcher and then into the back of a blue van. He started over, thinking about what would be the best way to get the autopsy done as a priority, meaning by at least the next day instead of four or five days later. He caught up with the coroner’s tech as he was opening the driver’s door.

  “We’re outta here, Bosch.”

  Bosch put his hand on the door, holding it from opening enough for Sakai to climb in.

  “Who’s doing the cutting today?”

  “On this one? Nobody.”

  “Come on, Sakai. Who’s on?”

  “Sally. But he’s not going near this one, Bosch.”

  “Look, I just went through this with my partner. Not you, too, okay?”

  “Bosch, you look. You listen. I’ve been working since six last night and this is the seventh scene I’ve been to. We got drive-bys, floaters, a sex case. People are dying to meet us, Bosch. There is no rest for the weary, and that means no time for what you think might be a case. Listen to your partner for once. This one is going on the routine schedule. That means we’ll get to it by Wednesday, maybe Thursday. I promise Friday at the latest. And tox results is at least a ten-day wait, anyway. You know that. So what’s your goddam hurry?”

  “Are. Tox results are at least a ten-day wait.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Just tell Sally I need the prelim done today. I’ll be by later.”

  “Christ, Bosch, listen to what I’m telling you. We’ve got bodies on gurneys stacked in the hall that we already know are one eighty-sevens and need to be cut. Salazar is not going to have time for what looks to me and everybody else around here except you like a hype case. Cut and dried, man. What am I going to say to him that’s going to make him do the cut today?”

  “Show him the finger. Tell him there were no tracks in the pipe. Think of something. Tell him the DB was a guy who knew needles too well to’ve OD’d.”

  Sakai put his head back against the van’s side panel and laughed loudly. Then he shook his head as if a child had made a joke.

  “And you know what he’ll say to me? He’ll say that it doesn’t matter how long he’d been spiking. They all fuck up. Bosch, how many sixty-five-year-old junkies do you see around? None of them go the distance. The needle gets them all in the end. Just like this guy in the pipe.”

  Bosch turned and looked around to make sure none of the uniforms were watching and listening. Then he turned back to Sakai’s face.

  “Just tell him I’ll be by there later,” he said quietly. “If he doesn’t find anything on the prelim, then fine, you can stick the body at the end of the line in the hall, or you can park it down at the gas station on Lankershim. I won’t care then, Larry. But you tell him. It’s his decision, not yours.”

  Bosch dropped his hand from the door and stepped back. Sakai got in the van and slammed the door. He started the engine and looked at Bosch through the window for a long moment before rolling it down.

  “Bosch, you’re a pain in the ass. Tomorrow morning. It’s the best I can do. Today is no way.”

  “First cut of the day?”

  “Just leave us alone today, okay?”

  “First cut?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. First cut.”

  “Sure, I’ll leave you alone. See you tomorrow, then.”

  “Not me, man. I’ll be sleeping.”

  Sakai rolled the window back up and the van moved away. Bosch stepped back to let it pass, and when it was gone he was left staring at the pipe. It was really for the first time then that he noticed the graffiti. Not that he hadn’t seen that the exterior of the pipe was literally covered with painted messages, but this time he looked at the individual scrawls. Many were old, faded together — a tableau of letters spelling threats either long forgotten or since made good. There were slogans: Abandon LA. There were names: Ozone, Bomber, Stryker, many others. One of the fresher tags caught his eye. It was just three letters, about twelve feet from the end of the pipe — Sha. The three letters had been painted in one fluid motion. The top of the S was jagged and then contoured, giving the impression of a mouth. A gaping maw. There were no teeth but Bosch could sense them. It was as though the work wasn’t completed. Still, it was good work, original and clean. He aimed the Polaroid at it and took a photo.

  Bosch walked to the police van, putting the exposure in his pocket. Donovan was stowing his equipment on shelves and the evidence bags in wooden Napa Valley wine boxes.

  “Did you find any burned matches in there?”

  “Yeah, one fresh one,” Donovan said. “Burned to the end. It was about ten feet in. It’s there on the chart.”

  Bosch picked up a clipboard on which there was a piece of paper with a diagram of the pipe showing the body location and where the other material taken from the pipe had been. Bosch noticed that the match was found about fifteen feet from the body. Donovan then showed him the match, sitting at the bottom of its own plastic evidence bag. “I’ll let you know if it matches the book in the guy’s kit,” he said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Bosch said, “What about the uniforms? What’d they find?”

  “It’s all there,” Donovan said, pointing to a wooden bin in which there were still more plastic evidence bags. These contained debris picked up by patrol officers who had searched the area within a fifty-yard radius of the pipe. Each bag contained a description of the location where the object had been found. Bosch took each bag out and examined its contents. Most of it was junk that would have nothing to do with the body in the pipe. There were newspapers, clothing rags, a high-heeled shoe, a white sock with dried blue paint in it. A sniff rag.

  Bosch picked up a bag containing the top to a can of spray paint. The next bag contained the spray paint can. The Krylon label said it was Ocean Blue. Bosch hefted the bag and could tell there was still paint in the can. He carried the bag to the pipe, opened it and, touching the nozzle with a pen, sprayed a line of blue next to the letters Sha. He sprayed too much. The paint ran down the curved side of the pipe and dripped onto the gravel. But Bosch could see the colors matched.

  He thought about that for a moment. Why would a graffiti tagger throw half a can of paint away? He looked at the writing on the evidence bag. It had been found near the edge of the reservoir. Someone had attempted to throw the can into the lake but came up short. Again he thought, Why? He squatted next to the pipe and looked closely at the letters. He decided that whatever the message or name was, it wasn’t finished. Something had happened that made the tagger stop what he was doing and throw the can, the top and his sniff sock over the fence. Was it the police? Bosch took out his notebook and wrote a reminder to call Crowley after midnight to see if any of his people had cruised the reservoir during the A.M. watch.

  But what if it wasn’t a cop that made the tagger throw the paint over the fence? What if the tagger had seen the body being delivered to the pipe? Bosch thought about what Crowley had said about an anonymous caller reporting the body. A kid, no less. Was it the tagger who called? Bosch took the can back to the SID truck and handed it to Donovan.

  “Print this after the kit and the stove,” he said. “I think it might belong to a witness.”

  “Will do,” Donovan said.

  Bosch drove down out of the hills and took the Barham Boulevard ramp onto the northbound Hollywood Freeway. After coming up through the Cahuenga Pass he went west on the Ventura Freeway and then north again on the San Diego Freeway. It took about twenty minutes to go the ten miles. It was Sunday and traffic was light. He exited on Roscoe and went east a couple of blocks into Meadows’s neighborhood on Langdon.

  Sepulveda, like most of the suburban communities within Los Angeles, had both good and bad neighborhoods. Bosch wasn’t expecting trimmed lawns and curbs lined with Volvos on Meadows�
�s street, and he wasn’t disappointed. The apartments were at least a decade past being attractive. There were bars over the windows of the bottom units and graffiti on every garage door. The sharp smell of the brewery on Roscoe wafted into the neighborhood. The place smelled like a 4 A.M. bar.

  Meadows had lived in a U-shaped apartment building that had been built in the 1950s, when the smell of hops wasn’t yet in the air, gangbangers weren’t on the street corner and there was still hope in the neighborhood. There was a pool in the center courtyard but it had long been filled in with sand and dirt. Now the courtyard consisted of a kidney-shaped plot of brown grass surrounded by dirty concrete. Meadows had lived in an upstairs corner apartment. Bosch could hear the steady drone of the freeway as he climbed the stairs and moved along the walkway that fronted the apartments. The door to 7B was unlocked and it opened into a small living room–dining room–kitchen. Edgar was leaning against a counter, writing in his notebook. He said, “Nice place, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Bosch said and looked around. “Nobody home?”

  “Nah. I checked with a neighbor next door and she hadn’t seen anybody around since the day before yesterday. Said the guy that lived here told her his name was Fields, not Meadows. Cute, huh? She said he lived all by himself. Been here about a year, kept to himself, mostly. That’s all she knew.”

  “You show her the picture?”

  “Yeah, she made him. Didn’t like looking at a picture of a dead guy, though.”

  Bosch walked into a short hallway that led to a bathroom and a bedroom. He said, “You pick the door?”

  “Nah — it was unlocked. No shit, I knock a couple times and I’m fixing to get my pouch outta the car and finesse the lock when, for the hell of it, I try the door.”

  “And it opens.”

  “It opens.”

  “You talk to the landlord?”

  “Landlady’s not around. Supposed to be, but maybe she went out to eat lunch or score some horse. I think everybody I seen around here is a spiker.”