The Black Ice (1993) Page 5

  And it had killed him. It was a thought that pushed a fist into Bosch’s guts, into the most secret folds of his heart.

  5

  Thursday, the morning after Christmas, was one of those days the postcard photographers pray for. There was no hint of smog in the sky. The fire in the hills had burned out and the smoke had long been blown over the hills by Pacific breezes. In its stead the Los Angeles basin basked under a blue sky and puffy cumulus clouds.

  Bosch decided to take the long way down out of the hills, driving on Woodrow Wilson until it crossed Mulholland and then taking the winding route through Nichols Canyon. He loved the views of the hills covered with blue wisteria and violet ice plants, topped with aging million-dollar homes that gave the city its aura of fading glory. As he drove he thought of the night before and how it had made him feel to comfort Sylvia Moore. It made him feel like a cop in a Rockwell painting. Like he had made a difference.

  Once he was out of the hills he took Genesee to Sunset and then cut over to Wilcox. He parked behind the station and walked past the fenced windows of the drunk tank into the detective bureau. The gloom in the squad room was thicker than cigarette smoke in a porno theater. The other detectives sat at their tables with their heads down, most talking quietly on the phone or with their faces buried in the paperwork that haunted their lives with its never-ceasing flow.

  Harry sat down at the homicide table and looked across at Jerry Edgar, his some-of-the-time partner. There were no permanently assigned partners anymore. The bureau was shorthanded and there was a departmental hiring and promotion freeze because of budget cuts. They were down to five detectives on the homicide table. The bureau commander, Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds, managed this by working detectives solo except on key cases, dangerous assignments or when making arrests. Bosch liked working on his own, anyway, but most of the other detectives complained about it.

  “What’s going on?” Bosch asked Edgar. “Moore?”

  Edgar nodded. They were alone at the table. Shelby Dunne and Karen Moshito usually came in after nine and Lucius Porter was lucky if he was sober enough to get in by ten.

  “Little while ago Ninety-eight came out of the box and said they got the fingerprint match. It was Moore. He blew his own shit away.”

  They were silent for a few minutes after that. Harry scanned the paperwork on his desk but couldn’t help thinking about Moore. He imagined Irving or Sheehan or maybe even Chastain calling Sylvia Moore to tell her the identification was confirmed. Harry could see his slim connection to the case disappearing like smoke. Without having to turn, he realized someone was standing behind him. He looked around to see Pounds looking down at him.

  “Harry, c’mon in.”

  An invitation to the glass box. He looked at Edgar, who raised his eyes in a who-knows gesture. Harry got up and followed the lieutenant into his office at the head of the squad room. It was a small room with windows on three sides that enabled Pounds to look out on his charges but limit his actual contact with them. He didn’t have to hear them or smell them or know them. The blinds that were often used to cut off his sight of them were open this morning.

  “Sit down, Harry. I don’t have to tell you not to smoke. Have a good Christmas?”

  Bosch just looked at him. He was uncomfortable with this guy calling him Harry and asking him about Christmas. He hesitantly sat down.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Let’s not get hostile, Harry. I’m the one who should be hostile. I just heard you spent a good part of Christmas night at that dump motel, the Hideaway, where nobody in this world would want to be and where Robbery-Homicide happened to be conducting an investigation.”

  “I was on call,” Bosch said. “And I should have been called out to the scene. I went by to see what was going on. Turned out, Irving needed me, anyway.”

  “That’s fine, Harry, if you leave it at that. I have been told to tell you not to get any ideas about the Moore case.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like it means.”

  “Look, if you—”

  “Never mind, never mind.” Pounds raised his hands in a calming gesture, then pinched the bridge of his nose, signifying the onset of a headache. He opened the center drawer of his desk and took out a small tin of aspirin. He took two without water.

  “Enough said, okay?” Pounds said. “I’m not—I don’t need to get into—”

  Pounds made a choking sound and jumped up from his desk. He moved past Bosch and out of the box to the water fountain near the entrance to the bureau. Bosch didn’t even watch him. He just sat in his chair. Pounds was back in a few moments and continued.

  “Excuse me. Anyway, what I was saying was that I don’t need an argument with you every time I bring you in here. I really think you have to work through this problem you have with dealing with the command structure of this department. You take it to extremes.”

  Bosch could still see chalky white aspirin caking at the corners of his mouth. Pounds cleared his throat again.

  “I was just passing on an aside in your best—”

  “Why doesn’t Irving pass it on himself?”

  “I didn’t say—look, Bosch, forget it. Just forget it. You’ve been told and that’s that. If you have any ideas about last night, about Moore, drop them. It’s being handled.”

  “I am sure it is.”

  The warning delivered, Bosch stood up. He wanted to throw this guy through his glass wall but would settle for a cigarette out behind the drunk tank.

  “Siddown,” Pounds said. “That’s not why I brought you in.”

  Bosch sat down again and quietly waited. He watched Pounds try to compose himself. He opened the drawer again and pulled out a wood ruler, which he absentmindedly manipulated in his hands while he began to talk.

  “Harry, you know how many homicides we’ve caught in the division this year?”

  The question came from left field. Harry wondered what Pounds was up to. He knew he had handled eleven cases himself, but he had been out of the rotation for six weeks during the summer while in Mexico recovering from the bullet wound. He figured the homicide squad for about seventy cases in the year. He said, “I have no idea.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you,” Pounds said. “Right now we are at sixty-six homicides for the year to date. And, of course, we’ve still got five days to go. Probably, we’ll pick up another. I’m thinking, at least one. New Year’s Eve is always trouble. We’ll pro—”

  “So what about it? I remember we had fifty-nine last year. Murder is going up. What else is new?”

  “What is new is that the number of cases we have cleared is going down. It is less than half that number. Thirty-two out of sixty-six cases have been cleared. Now, a good number of those cases have been cleared by you. I have you with eleven cases. Seven have been cleared by arrest or other. We have warrants out on two others. Of the two you have open, one is idle pending developments and you are actively pursuing the James Kappalanni matter. Correct?”

  Bosch nodded. He didn’t like the way this was going but wasn’t sure why.

  “The problem is the overall record,” Pounds said. “When taken in its entirety, . . . well, it’s a pitiful record of success.”

  Pounds slapped the ruler hard into his palm and shook his head. An idea was forming in Harry’s mind about what this was about, but still there was a part missing. He wasn’t sure exactly what Pounds was up to.

  “Think of it,” Pounds continued. “All those victims—and their families!—for whom justice eludes. And then, and then, think how badly the public’s confidence in us, in this department, will erode when the L.A. Times trumpets across their Metro page that more than half the killers in Hollywood Division walk away from their crimes?”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about public confidence going down,” Bosch said. “I don’t think it can.”

  Pounds rubbed the bridge of his nose again and quietly said,
“This is not the time for your unique cynical view of the job, Bosch. Don’t bring your arrogance in here. I can take you off that table and put you on autos or maybe juvies any time I want to make the move. Get me? I’d gladly take the heat when you took a beef to the union.”

  “Then where’s your homicide clearance rate going to be? What’s it going to say in the Metro section then? Two thirds of the killers in Hollywood walk?”

  Pounds put the ruler back in the drawer and closed it. Bosch thought there was a thin smile on his face and he began to believe he had just talked his way into a trap. Pounds then opened another drawer and brought a blue binder up onto the desk. It was the type used to keep record of a murder investigation but Bosch saw few pages inside it.

  “Point well taken,” Pounds said. “Which brings us to the point of this meeting. See, we’re talking about statistics, Harry. We clear one more case and we’re at the halfway mark. Instead of saying more than half get away, we can say half of the killers are caught. If we clear two more, we can say more than half are cleared. Get me?”

  Pounds nodded when Bosch said nothing. He made a show of straightening the binder on his desk, then he looked directly at Bosch.

  “Lucius Porter won’t be back,” he said. “Talked to him this morning. He is going stress-related. Said he is getting a doctor lined up.”

  Pounds reached into the drawer and pulled up another blue murder book. Then another. Bosch could see what was happening now.

  “And I hope he has a good one lined up,” Pounds was saying as he added the fifth and sixth binders to the pile. “Because last I checked this department doesn’t consider cirrhosis of the liver a stress-related malady. Porter’s a lush, simple as that. And it’s not fair that he claim a stress disability and take early retirement because he can’t handle his booze. We’re going to bust him at the administrative hearing. I don’t care if he has Mother Theresa as his lawyer. We’ll bust him.”

  He tapped his finger on top of the pile of blue binders. “I’ve looked through these cases—he has eight open cases—and it’s just pathetic. I’ve copied the chronologies and I’m going to verify them. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts they are replete with fraudulent entries. He was sitting on a stool somewhere, his head on the bar, when he says he was interviewing wits or doing the legwork.”

  Pounds shook his head sadly.

  “You know, we lost our checks and balances when we stopped partnering our investigators. There was nobody to watch this guy. Now I’m sitting here with eight open investigations that were as slipshod as anything I’ve ever seen. For all I know, each one could’ve been cleared.”

  And whose idea was it to make detectives work solo, Bosch wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, he said, “You ever hear the story about when Porter was in uniform about ten years back? He and his partner stopped one time to write up a citation for some shitbag they saw sitting on a curb drinking in public. Porter was driving. It was routine—just a misdee writeup—so he stayed behind the wheel. He’s sitting there when the shitbag stands up and caps his partner in the face. Standing there, both hands on his cite book, takes it right between the eyes and Porter sat there watching.”

  Pounds looked exasperated.

  “I know that story, Bosch,” Pounds said. “They re-enact it for every class of recruits that goes through the academy. A lesson in what not to do, how not to fuck up. But it’s ancient history. If he wanted a stress-out, he should’ve taken it then.”

  “That’s the point, man. He didn’t take it then when he could have. He tried to make it through. Maybe he tried for ten years and then he just went down in the flood of all the shit in the world. What do you want him to do? Take the same out Cal Moore took? You get a star in your file for saving the city the pension?”

  Pounds did not speak for a few seconds, then said, “Very eloquent, Bosch, but in the long run it is none of your business what happens to Porter. I should not have brought it up. But I did so you would understand what I have to say now.”

  He went through his housekeeping trick of making sure all the corners were aligned on the stack of blue binders. Then he pushed the stack across the desk toward Bosch.

  “You are taking Porter’s caseload. I want you to shelve the Kappalanni matter for a few days. You’re not getting anywhere at the moment. Put it down until after the first and dive into this.

  “I want you to take Porter’s eight open cases and study them. Do it quickly. I want you to look for the one you think you can do something with quickly and then hit it with everything you’ve got for the next five days—until New Year’s Day. Work the weekend, I’ll approve the overtime. If you need one of the others on the table to double up with you, no problem. But put somebody in jail, Harry. Go get me an arrest. I—we need to clear one more case to get to that halfway mark. The deadline is midnight, New Year’s Eve.”

  Bosch just looked at him over the stack of binders. He had the full measure of this man now. Pounds wasn’t a cop anymore. He was a bureaucrat. He was nothing. He saw crime, the spilling of blood, the suffering of humans, as statistical entries in a log. And at the end of the year the log told him how well he did. Not people. Not the voice from within. It was the kind of impersonal arrogance that poisoned much of the department and isolated it from the city, its people. No wonder Porter wanted out. No wonder Cal Moore pulled his own plug. Harry stood up and picked up the stack of binders and stared at Pounds with a look that said, I know you. Pounds turned his eyes away.

  At the door, Bosch said, “You know, if you bust Porter down, he’ll just get sent back here to the table. Then where will you be? Next year how many cases will there still be open?”

  Pounds’s eyebrows went up as he considered this.

  “If you let him go, you’ll get a replacement. A lot of sharp people on the other tables. Meehan over on the juvenile table is good. You bring him over to our table and I bet you’ll see your stats go up. But if you go ahead and bust Porter and bring him back, we might be doing this again next year.”

  Pounds waited a moment, to make sure Bosch was done, before speaking.

  “What is it with you, Bosch? When it comes to investigations Porter couldn’t carry your lunch. Yet you’re standing there trying to save his ass. What’s the point?”

  “There is no point, Lieutenant. I guess that’s the point. Get me?”

  He carried the binders to his spot at the table and dropped them on the floor next to his chair. Edgar looked at him. So did Dunne and Moshito, who had recently arrived.

  “Don’t ask,” Harry said.

  He sat down and looked at the pile at his feet and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. What he wanted was a cigarette but there was no smoking in the squad room, at least while Pounds was around. He looked up a number in his Rolodex and dialed. The call was not picked up until the seventh ring.

  “What now?”

  “Lou?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Bosch.”

  “Oh, yeah, Harry. Sorry, I didn’t know who was calling. What’s going on? You hear I’m going for a stress-out?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m calling. I got your cases—Pounds gave ’em to me—and, uh, I want to try to turn one real quick, like by the end of the week. I was wondering if you had any idea—you think you might know which one I should hit? I’m starting from scratch.”

  There was a long silence on the phone.

  “Harry, shit,” he finally said and for the first time Bosch realized he might already be drunk. “Aw, damn. I didn’t think that cocksucker would dump it all on you. I, uh, Harry . . . Harry, I didn’t do too good on . . .”

  “Hey, Lou. It’s no biggee, you know? My decks were cleared. I’m just looking for a place to start. If you can’t point me, that’s okay. I’ll just look through the stuff.”

  He waited and realized the others at the table had been listening to him and not even acting like they weren’t.

  “Fuck it,” Porter said. “I, aw fuck it, I don’t know, H
arry. I—I haven’t been on it, you know what I mean. I been kinda fallin’ apart here. You hear about Moore? Shit, I saw the news last night. I . . .”

  “Yeah, it’s too bad. Listen, Lou, don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll look through the stuff. I got the murder books here and I’ll look through ’em.”

  Nothing.

  “Lou?”

  “Okay, Harry. Give me a call back if you want. Maybe later I’ll think of something. Right now I’m not too fucking good.”

  Bosch thought a few moments before saying anything else. In his mind he pictured Porter on the other end of the line standing in total darkness. Alone.

  “Listen,” he said in a low voice. “You better . . . you have to watch out for Pounds on your application. He might ask the suits to check you out, you know what I mean, put a couple of guys on you. You gotta stay out of the bars. He might try to bust your application. Understand?”