Angels Flight (1998) Read online

  “I can control you people but not the coroner’s people or anyone else who learns about this through official channels in the next few hours. I figure by ten hundred the media will be all over this with full knowledge of the victims’ identities. So I want a briefing in the conference room at ten hundred. After I am up-to-date I will brief the chief of police and one of us will address the media with the bare minimum of information we wish to put out. Any problem with that?”

  “Chief, that barely gives us six hours,” Bosch said. “I don’t know how much more we’ll know by then. We’ve got a lot of legwork to do before we can sit down and start sifting through — ”

  “That is understood. You are to feel no pressure from the media. I do not care if the press conference is merely to confirm who is dead and nothing else. The media will not be running this case. I want you to run with it full bore, but at ten hundred I want everyone back at my conference room. Questions?”

  There were none.

  “Okay, then I will turn it over to Detective Bosch and leave you people to it.”

  He turned directly to Bosch and handed him a white business card.

  “You have all my numbers there. Lieutenant Tulin’s as well. Anything comes up that I should know about, you call me forthwith. I do not care what time it is or where you are at. You call me.”

  Bosch nodded, took the card and put it in his jacket pocket.

  “Go to it, people. As I said before, let the chips fall where they may.”

  He left the room and Bosch heard Rider whisper, “Yeah, right.”

  Bosch turned and looked at the faces of the new team, coming to Chastain’s last.

  “You know what he’s doing, don’t you?” Bosch said. “He thinks we can’t work together. He thinks we’ll be like those fighting fish that you put in the same bowl and they go nuts trying to get at each other. Meantime, the case is never cleared. Well, it’s not going to happen. Anything anybody in here’s ever done to me or anyone else, forget about it. I let it go. This case is the thing. There are two people in that train that somebody blew away without so much as a second thought. We’re going to find that person. That’s all I care about now.”

  He held Chastain’s eyes until he finally saw a slight nod of agreement. Bosch nodded back. He was sure all the others had seen the exchange. He then took out his notebook and opened it to a fresh page. He handed it to Chastain.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “I want everybody to write down their names followed by their home and pager numbers. Cell phones, too, if you got ’em. I’ll make a list up and everybody will get copies. I want everybody in communication. That’s the trouble with these big gang bangs. If everybody isn’t on the same wavelength, something can slip through. We don’t want that.”

  Bosch stopped and looked at the others. They were all watching him, paying attention. It seemed that for the moment the natural animosities were relaxed, if not forgotten.

  “Okay,” he said. “This is how we’re going to break this down from here on out.”

  6

  ONE of the men from IAD was a Latino named Raymond Fuentes. Bosch sent him along with Edgar to the address on Catalina Perez’s identification cards to notify her next of kin and to handle the questions about her. It was most likely the dead-end part of the investigation — it seemed apparent that Elias was the primary target — and Edgar tried to protest. But Bosch cut him off. The explanation he would share privately with Edgar later was that he needed to spread the IAD men out in order to give him better control of things. So Edgar went with Fuentes. And Rider was sent with a second IAD man, Loomis Baker, to interview Eldrige Peete at Parker Center and then bring him back to the scene. Bosch wanted the train operator at the scene to go over what he had seen and to operate the train as he had before discovering the bodies.

  That left Bosch, Chastain and the last IAD man, Joe Dellacroce. Bosch dispatched Dellacroce to Parker Center as well, to draw up a search warrant for Elias’s office. He then told Chastain that the two of them would go to Elias’s home to make the death notification to his next of kin.

  After the group split up, Bosch walked to the crime scene van and asked Hoffman for the keys found on the body of Howard Elias. Hoffman looked through the crate he had placed his evidence bags in and came out with a bag containing a ring with more than a dozen keys on it.

  “From the front pants pocket, right side,” Hoffman said.

  Bosch studied the keys for a moment. There seemed to be more than enough keys for the lawyer’s home, office and cars. He noticed that there was a Porsche key on the ring as well as a Volvo key. He realized that when the investigators finished the current crop of tasks, one assignment he would have to make would be to put someone on locating Elias’s car.

  “Anything else in the pockets?”

  “Yeah. In the left front he had a quarter.”

  “A quarter.”

  “Costs a quarter to ride Angels Flight. That’s probably what that was for.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “And in the inside coat pocket was a letter.”

  Bosch had forgotten that Garwood had mentioned the letter.

  “Let’s see that.”

  Hoffman looked through his crate again and came up with a plastic evidence bag. Inside it was an envelope. Bosch took it from the crime scene tech and studied it without removing it. The envelope had been addressed to Elias’s office by hand. There was no return address. On the left lower corner the sender had written PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL . Bosch tried to read the postmark but the light was bad. He wished he still carried a lighter.

  “It’s your neck of the woods, Harry,” Hoffman said. “Hollywood. Mailed Wednesday. He probably got it Friday.”

  Bosch nodded. He turned the bag over and looked at the back of the envelope. It had been cleanly cut open along the top. Elias or his secretary had opened it, probably at his office, before he had put it into his pocket. There was no way of knowing if the contents had been examined since.

  “Anybody open it?”

  “We didn’t. I don’t know what happened before we got here. I understand that the first detectives saw the name on there and then recognized the body. But I don’t know if they actually looked at the letter.”

  Bosch was curious about the contents of the envelope but knew it wasn’t the right time or place to open it.

  “I’m going to take this, too.”

  “You got it, Harry. Let me just get you to sign it out. And the keys, too.”

  Bosch waited while Hoffman got a chain-of-evidence form out of his kit. He squatted down and put the envelope and keys into his briefcase. Chastain came over, ready to leave the scene.

  “You want to drive or you want me to?” Bosch said as he snapped his case closed. “I’ve got a slick. What have you got?”

  “I still have a plain jane. Runs like dogshit but at least I don’t stand out like dogshit on the street.”

  “That’s good. You got a bubble?”

  “Yes, Bosch, even IAD guys have to respond to calls now and then.”

  Hoffman held a clipboard and pen out to Bosch and he signed his initials next to the two pieces of crime scene evidence he was taking with him.

  “Then you drive.”

  They started walking across California Plaza to where the cars were parked. Bosch pulled his pager off his belt and made sure it was running properly. The battery light was still green. He hadn’t missed any pages. He looked up at the tall towers surrounding them, wondering if they could possibly interfere with a page from his wife, but then he remembered the page from Lieutenant Billets had come through earlier. He clipped the pager back to his belt and tried to think about something else.

  Following Chastain’s lead they came to a beat-up maroon LTD that was at least five years old and about as impressive-looking as a Pinto. At least, Bosch thought, it isn’t painted black and white.

  “It’s unlocked,” Chastain said.

  Bosch went to the passenger side door and got in the car
. He got his cell phone out of his briefcase and called the central dispatch center. He asked for a Department of Motor Vehicles run on Howard Elias and was given the dead man’s home address as well as his age, driving record and the plate numbers of the Porsche and Volvo registered in his and his wife’s names. Elias had been forty-six. His driving record was clean. Bosch thought that the lawyer was probably the most cautious driver in the city. The last thing Elias probably ever wanted to do was draw the attention of an LAPD patrol cop. It made driving a Porsche seem almost a waste.

  “Baldwin Hills,” he said after closing the phone. “Her name is Millie.”

  Chastain started the engine, then plugged the flashing emergency light — the bubble — into the lighter and put it on the dashboard. He drove the car quickly down the deserted streets toward the 10 Freeway.

  Bosch was silent at first, not sure how to break the ice with Chastain. The two men were natural enemies. Chastain had investigated Bosch on two different occasions. Both times Bosch was grudgingly cleared of any wrongdoing, but only after Chastain was forced to back off. It seemed to Bosch that Chastain had a hard-on for him that felt close to a vendetta. The IAD detective seemed to take no joy in clearing a fellow cop. All he wanted was a scalp.

  “I know what you are doing, Bosch,” Chastain said once they got onto the freeway and started west.

  Bosch looked over at him. For the first time he considered how physically similar they were. Dark hair going gray, full mustache beneath dark brown-black eyes, a lean, almost wiry build. Almost mirror images, yet Bosch had never considered Chastain to be the kind of physical threat that Bosch knew he projected himself. Chastain carried himself differently. Bosch had always carried himself like a man afraid of being cornered, like a man who wouldn’t allow himself to be cornered.

  “What? What am I doing?”

  “You’re thinning us out. That way you have better control.”

  He waited for Bosch to reply but only got silence.

  “But eventually, if we’re going to do this thing right, you are going to have to trust us.”

  After a pause, Bosch said, “I know that.”

  Elias lived on Beck Street in Baldwin Hills, a small section of upper-middle-class homes south of the 10 Freeway and near La Cienega Boulevard. It was an area known as the black Beverly Hills — a neighborhood where affluent blacks moved when they did not wish to have their wealth take them out of their community. As Bosch considered this he thought that if there was anything that he could like about Elias, it was the fact that he didn’t take his money and move to Brentwood or Westwood or the real Beverly Hills. He stayed in the community from which he had risen.

  With little middle-of-the-night traffic and Chastain cruising on the freeway at ninety, they got to Beck Street

  in less than fifteen minutes. The house was a large brick colonial with four white columns holding up a two-story portico. It had the feeling of a Southern plantation and Bosch wondered if it was some kind of statement being made by Elias.

  Bosch saw no lights from behind any of the windows and the hanging light in the portico was dark as well. This didn’t sit right with him. If this was Elias’s home, why wasn’t a light left on for him?

  There was a car in the circular driveway that was neither a Porsche nor a Volvo. It was an old Camaro with fresh paint and chromed wheels. To the right of the house there was a detached two-car garage but its door was closed. Chastain pulled into the drive and stopped behind the Camaro.

  “Nice car,” Chastain said. “Tell you what, I wouldn’t leave a car like that out overnight. Even in a neighborhood like this. Too close to the jungle.”

  He turned the car off and reached to open his door.

  “Let’s wait a second here,” Bosch said.

  He opened his briefcase, got out the phone and called dispatch again. He asked for a double check on the address for Elias. They had the right place. He then asked the dispatcher to run the plate on the Camaro. It came back registered to a Martin Luther King Elias, age eighteen. Bosch thanked the dispatcher and clicked off.

  “We got the right place?” Chastain asked.

  “Looks like it. The Camaro must be his son’s. But it doesn’t look like anyone was expecting dad to come home tonight.”

  Bosch opened his door and got out, Chastain doing the same. As they approached the door Bosch saw the dull glow of a bell button. He pushed it and heard the sharp ringing of a chime inside the quiet house.

  They waited and pushed the bell button two more times before the portico light came on above them and a woman’s sleepy but alarmed voice came through the door.

  “What is it?”

  “Mrs. Elias?” Bosch said. “We’re police. We need to talk to you.”

  “Police? What for?”

  “It’s about your husband, ma’am. Can we come in?”

  “I need some identification before I open this door.”

  Bosch took out his badge wallet and held it up but then noticed there was no peephole.

  “Turn around,” the woman’s voice said. “On the column.”

  Bosch and Chastain turned and saw the camera mounted on one of the columns. Bosch walked up to it and held up his badge.

  “You see it?” he said loudly.

  He heard the door open and turned around. A woman in a white robe with a silk scarf wrapped around her head looked out at him.

  “You don’t have to yell,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  She stood in the one-foot opening of the door but made no move to invite them in.

  “Howard is not here. What do you want?”

  “Uh, can we come in, Mrs. Elias? We want — ”

  “No, you can’t come in my house. My home. No policeman has ever been in here. Howard wouldn’t have it. Neither will I. What do you want? Has something happened to Howard?”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am, I’m afraid. It would really be better if we — ”

  “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “You killed him! You people finally killed him!”

  “Mrs. Elias,” Bosch started, wishing he had better prepared himself for the assumption he should have known the woman would make. “We need to sit down with you and — ”

  Again he was cut off, but this time it was by an unintelligible, animal-like sound from deep in the woman. Its anguish was resonant. The woman bowed her head and leaned into the doorjamb. Bosch thought she might fall and made a move to grab her shoulders. The woman recoiled as if he were a monster reaching out to her.

  “No! No! Don’t you touch me! You — you murderers! Killers! You killed my Howard. Howard!”

  The last word was a full-throated scream that seemed to echo through the neighborhood. Bosch looked behind him, half-expecting to see the street lined with onlookers. He knew he had to contain the woman, get her inside or at least quiet. She was moving into a full-fledged wail now. Meantime, Chastain just stood there, paralyzed by the scene unfolding before him.

  Bosch was about to make another attempt to touch the woman when he saw movement from behind her and a young man grabbed hold of her from behind.

  “Ma! What? What is it?”

  The woman turned and collapsed against the young man.

  “Martin! Martin, they killed him! Your father!”

  Martin Elias looked up over his mother’s head and his eyes burned right through Bosch. His mouth formed the horrible Oh of shock and pain that Bosch had seen too many times before. He suddenly realized his mistake. He should have made this call with either Edgar or Rider. Rider, probably. She would have been a calming influence. Her smooth demeanor and the color of her skin would have done more than Bosch and Chastain combined.

  “Son,” Chastain said, coming out of his inertia. “We need to settle down a bit here and go inside to talk about this.”

  “Don’t you call me son. I’m not your goddamn son.”

  “Mr. Elias,” Bosch said forcefully. Everyone, including Chastain, looked at him. He then continued, in a calmer, softer voice. �
�Martin. You need to take care of your mother. We need to tell you both what has happened and to ask you a few questions. The longer we stand here cursing and yelling, the longer it will be before you can take care of your mother.”

  He waited a moment. The woman turned her face back into her son’s chest and began to cry. Martin then stepped back, pulling her with him, so that there was room for Bosch and Chastain to enter.

  For the next fifteen minutes Bosch and Chastain sat with the mother and son in a nicely furnished living room and detailed what was known of the crime and how the investigation would be handled. Bosch knew that to them it was like a couple of Nazis announcing they would investigate war crimes, but he also knew that it was important to go through the routine, to do his best to assure the victim’s family that the investigation would be thorough and aggressive.