The Last Coyote Page 5

  The last pages in the murder book were a due diligence report dated November 3, 1962. The department’s homicide procedures called for all unsolved cases to be reviewed after a year by a new set of detectives with an eye toward looking for something that the first set of investigators might have missed. But, in practice, it was a rubber stamp process. Detectives didn’t relish the idea of finding the mistakes of their colleagues. Additionally, they had their own case loads to worry about. When assigned DDs, as they were called, they usually did little more than read through the file, make a few calls to witnesses and then send the binder to archives.

  In this case, the DD report by the new detectives, named Roberts and Jordan, drew the same conclusions as the reports by Eno and McKittrick. After two pages detailing the same evidence and interviews already conducted by the original investigators, the DD report concluded that there were no workable leads and the prognosis for “successful conclusion” of the case was hopeless. So much for due diligence.

  Bosch closed the murder book. He knew that after Roberts and Jordan had filed their report, the binder had been shipped to archives as a dead case. It had gathered dust there until, according to the checkout card, McKittrick pulled it out for unknown reasons in 1972. Bosch wrote McKittrick’s name under Conklin’s on the page in the notebook. Then he wrote the names of others he thought it would be useful to interview. If they were still alive and could be found.

  Bosch leaned back in his chair, realizing that the music had stopped and he hadn’t even noticed. He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. He still had most of the afternoon but he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  He went to the bedroom closet and took the shoebox off the shelf. It was his correspondence box, filled with letters and cards and photos he had wished to keep over the course of his life. It contained objects dated as far back as his time in Vietnam. He rarely looked in the box but his mind kept an almost perfect inventory of what was in it. Each piece had a reason for being saved.

  On top was the latest addition to the box. A postcard from Venice. From Sylvia. It depicted a painting she had seen in the Palace of the Doges. Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Blessed and the Damned.” It showed an angel escorting one of the blessed through a tunnel to the light of heaven. They both floated skyward. The card was the last he had heard from her. He read the back.

  Harry, thought you’d be interested in this piece of your namesake’s work. I saw it in the Palace. It’s beautiful. By the way, I love Venice! I think I could stay forever! S.

  But you don’t love me, Bosch thought as he put the card aside and began to dig through the other pieces in the box. He wasn’t distracted again. About halfway through the box he found what he was looking for.

  Chapter Six

  THE MIDDAY DRIVE out to Santa Monica was long. Bosch had to take the long way, the 101 to the 405 and then down, because the 10 was still a week away from being reopened. By the time he got into Sunset Park it was after three. The house he was looking for was on Pier Street. It was a small Craftsman bungalow set on the crest of a hill. It had a full porch with red bougainvillea running along the railing. He checked the address painted on the mailbox against the envelope that contained the old Christmas card on the seat next to him. He parked at the curb and looked at the card once more. It had been addressed to him five years earlier, care of the LAPD. He had never responded to it. Not until now.

  As he got out he could smell the sea and guessed that there might be a limited ocean view from the house’s western windows. It was about ten degrees cooler than it had been at his home and so he reached back into his car for the sport coat. He walked to the front porch while putting it on.

  The woman who answered the white door after one knock was in her mid-sixties and looked it. She was thin, with dark hair, but the gray roots were beginning to show and she was ready for another dye job. She wore thick red lipstick, a white silk blouse with blue seahorses on it over navy blue slacks. She readily smiled a greeting and Bosch recognized her, but he could see that his own image was completely alien to her. It had been almost thirty-five years since she had seen him. He smiled back anyway.

  “Meredith Roman?”

  She lost her smile as quickly as she had found it before.

  “That’s not my name,” she said in a clipped tone. “You have the wrong place.”

  She moved to close the door but Bosch put his hand on it to stop her. He tried to be as unthreatening about it as he could. But he could see panic starting in her eyes.

  “It’s Harry Bosch?” he said quickly.

  She froze and looked Bosch in the eyes. He saw the panic go away. Recognition and memories flooded her eyes like tears. The smile came back.

  “Harry? Little Harry?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, darling, c’mere.” She drew him into a tight hug and talked in his ear. “Oh, so good to see you after—let me look at you.”

  She pushed him back and held her hands wide as if appraising a roomful of paintings at once. Her eyes were animated and sincere. It made Bosch feel good and sad at the same time. He shouldn’t have waited so long. He should have visited for reasons other than the one that brought him here now.

  “Oh, come in, Harry. Come in.”

  Bosch entered a nicely furnished living room. The floor was red oak and the stucco walls were clean and white. The furniture was mostly matching white rattan. The place was light and bright but Bosch knew he was there to bring darkness.

  “Meredith is no longer your name?”

  “No, Harry, not for a long time.”

  “What do I call you?”

  “My name is Katherine. With a K. Katherine Register. Spelled like the cash register but you pronounce it ree as in reefer. That’s what my husband used to say. Boy, he was so straight. Outside of me the closest that man ever came to something illegal was to say the word.”

  “He used to say that?”

  “Have a seat, Harry, for crying out loud. Yes, used to. He passed away five years ago last Thanksgiving.”

  Bosch sat down on the couch and she took the chair across the glass coffee table.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, you didn’t know. You never even knew him and I’ve been a different person for a long time. Can I get you something? Some coffee or maybe something stronger?”

  It occurred to him that she had sent him the card on the Christmas soon after her husband’s death. He was hit with another wave of guilt for not having responded.

  “Harry?”

  “Oh, uh, no, I’m fine. I…do you want me to call you by your new name?”

  She started laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation and he joined in.

  “Call me any damn thing you want.” She laughed girlishly, a laugh he remembered from a long time before. “It’s great to see you. You know, to see how, uh…”

  “I turned out?”

  She laughed again.

  “I guess so. You know, I knew you were with the police because I had read your name in some of the news stories.”

  “I know you knew. I got the Christmas card you sent to the station. That must have been right after your husband died. I, uh, I’m sorry I never wrote back or visited. I should have.”

  “That’s okay, Harry, I know you’re busy with the job and a career and all…I’m glad you got my card. Do you have a family?”

  “Uh, no. How about you? Any children?”

  “Oh, no. No children. You have a wife, don’t you, a handsome man like you.”

  “No, I’m alone right now.”

  She nodded, seeming to sense that he wasn’t here to reveal his personal history to her anyway. For a long moment they just both looked at each other and Bosch wondered what she really thought of his being a cop. The initial delight in seeing each other was descending into the uneasiness that comes when old secrets come close to the surface.

  “I guess…”

  He didn’t finish the thought. He was grappling for a way into the c
onversation. His interviewing skills had deserted him.

  “You know, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d take a glass of water.” It was all he could think of.

  “Be right back.”

  She got up quickly and went to the kitchen. He heard her getting ice out of a tray. It gave him time to think. It had taken him an hour to drive to her house but he hadn’t given one thought to what this would be like or how he would get to what he wanted to say and ask. She came back in a few minutes with a glass of ice water. She handed it to him and put a round coaster made of cork on the glass-topped coffee table in front of him.

  “If you’re hungry, I can bring out some crackers and cheese. I just didn’t know how much time you—”

  “No, I’m fine. This is great, thanks.”

  He saluted her with the glass and drank half of it, then put it down on the table.

  “Harry, use the coaster. Getting rings out of the glass is murder.” Bosch looked down at what he had done.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  He corrected the placement of his glass.

  “You’re a detective.”

  “Yes. I work in Hollywood now…Uh, but I’m not really working right now. I’m on sort of a vacation.”

  “Oh, that must be nice.”

  Her spirits seemed to lift, as if she knew there was a chance he was not here on business. Bosch knew it was time to get to the point.

  “Uh, Mer—uh, Katherine, I need to ask you about something.”

  “What is it, Harry?”

  “I look around here and I see you have a very nice home, a different name, a different life. You’re no longer Meredith Roman and I know you don’t need me to tell you that. You’ve got…I think what I’m saying is the past may be a difficult thing to talk about. I know it is for me. And, believe me, I don’t want to hurt you in any way.”

  “You’re here to talk about your mother.”

  He nodded and looked down at the glass on the cork coaster.

  “Your mother and I were best friends. Sometimes I think I had almost as much a hand in raising you as she did. Until they took you away from her. From us.”

  He looked back up at her. Her eyes were looking hard at distant memories.

  “I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about her. We were just kids. Having a good time, you know. We never thought either of us could get hurt.”

  She suddenly stood up.

  “Harry, come here. I want to show you something.”

  He followed her down a carpeted hallway and into a bedroom. There was a four-poster bed with light blue coverings, an oak bureau and matching bedside tables. Katherine Register pointed to the bureau. There were several photos in ornate stand-up frames on top. Most of them were of Katherine and a man who seemed much older than she was in the photos. Her husband, Bosch guessed. But she pointed to one that was to the right side of the grouping. The photo was old, its color faded. It was a picture of two young women with a tiny boy of three or four.

  “I’ve always had that there, Harry. Even when my husband was alive. He knew my past. I told him. It didn’t matter. We had twenty-three great years together. You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong. I’m strong, Harry. Now, tell me why you came to vist me today.”

  Bosch reached for the framed photo and picked it up.

  “I want…” He looked up from the photo to her. “I’m going to find out who killed her.”

  An undecipherable look froze on her face for a moment and then she wordlessly took the frame out of his hands and put it back on the bureau. Then she pulled him into another deep embrace, her head against his chest. He could see himself holding her in the mirror over the bureau. When she pulled back and looked up at him he saw the tears were already down her cheeks. There was a slight tremor in her lower lip.

  “Let’s go sit down,” he said.

  She pulled two tissues out of a box on the bureau and he led her back to the living room and to her chair.

  “Do you want me to get you some water?”

  “No, I’m fine. I’ll stop crying, I’m sorry.”

  She wiped at her eyes with the tissues. He sat back down on the couch.

  “We used to say we were the two musketeers, both for one and one for both. It was stupid, but it was because we were so young and so close.”

  “I’m starting from scratch with it, Katherine. I pulled the old files on the investigation. It—”

  She made a dismissing sound and shook her head.

  “There was no investigation. It was a joke.”

  “That’s my sense of it, too, but I don’t understand why.”

  “Look, Harry, you know what your mother was.” He nodded and she continued. “She was a party girl. We both were. I’m sure you know that’s the polite way of saying it. And the cops really didn’t care that one of us ended up dead. They just wrote the whole damn thing off. I know you’re a policeman now, but that’s the way it was then. They just didn’t care about her.”

  “I understand. Things probably are not too much different now, believe it or not. But there has to have been more to it than that.”

  “Harry, I don’t know how much you want to know about your mother.”

  He looked at her.

  “The past made me strong, too. I can handle it.”

  “I’m sure it did…I remember that place where they put you. McEvoy or something like—”

  “McClaren.”

  “That’s it, McClaren. What a depressing place. Your mother would come home from visiting you and just sit down and cry her eyes out.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Katherine. What is it I should know about her?”

  She nodded but hesitated for a moment before continuing.

  “Mar knew some policemen. You understand?”

  He nodded.

  “We both did. It was the way it worked. You had to get along to go along. That’s what we called it anyway. And when you have that situation and she ends up dead, it’s usually best for the cops to just sweep it under the rug. Let sleeping dogs lie, as they say. You pick the cliché. They just didn’t want anyone embarrassed.”

  “Are you saying you think it was a cop?”

  “No. I’m not saying that at all. I have no idea who did it, Harry. I’m sorry. I wish I did. But what I’m saying is, I think those two detectives that were assigned to investigate this knew where it could lead. And they weren’t going to go that way because they knew what was good for them in the department. They weren’t stupid in that way and like I said, she was a party girl. They didn’t care. Nobody did. She got killed and that was that.”

  Bosch looked around the room, not sure what to ask next.

  “Do you know who the policemen she knew were?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “You knew some of the same policemen, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I had to. That was the way it worked. You used your contacts to keep you out of jail. Everybody was for sale. Back then, at least. Different people wanted different forms of payment. Some of them, money. Some of them, other things.”

  “It said in the mur—the file that you never had a record.”

  “Yes, I was lucky. I was picked up a few times but never booked once. They always turned me loose once I could make a call. I kept a clean record because I knew a lot of policemen, honey. You understand?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  She didn’t look away when she said it. All these years in the straight life and she still had a whore’s pride. She could talk about the low points of her life without flinching or batting an eye. It was because she had made it through and there was dignity in that. Enough to last the rest of her life.

  “Do you mind if I smoke, Harry?”

  “No, not if I can.”

  They took out cigarettes and Bosch got up to light them.

  “You can use that ashtray on the side table. Try not to get ashes on the
rug.”

  She pointed to a small glass bowl on the table at the other end of the couch. Bosch reached over for it and then held it with one hand while he smoked with the other. He looked down into it as he spoke.

  “The policemen you knew,” he said, “and who she probably knew, you don’t remember any names?”

  “I said it was a long time ago. And I doubt they had anything to do with this, with what happened to your mother.”

  “Irvin S. Irving. Do you remember that name?”