Angels Flight (1998) Read online

  “So? How’d you figure it out?”

  “Well, we were — Edgar was with me, Rider had court — we were about to close it out. We had looked around the place and found nothing really wrong — except for the note. I couldn’t find the notebook that the page had been torn out of. And that didn’t sit right. I mean, it didn’t mean she didn’t kill herself, but it was a loose end, you know? A what is wrong with this picture sort of thing.”

  “Okay, so you thought somebody was in there and took the notebook?”

  “Maybe. I didn’t know what to think. I told Edgar to take another look around and this time we switched and searched through things the other guy had searched the first time.”

  “And you found something Edgar had missed.”

  “He didn’t miss it. It just didn’t register with him. It did with me.”

  “What was it already?”

  “In her refrigerator there was a shelf for the eggs. You know, like little indentations that you sit the eggs in?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I noticed on some of the eggs she had written a date. All the same date. It was the same day she was flying up to Portland.”

  Bosch looked over at Chastain to see if there was a reaction. The IAD man had a confused look on his face. He didn’t get it.

  “They were hard-boiled eggs. The ones with dates on them had been hard-boiled. I took one over to the sink and cracked it. It was hard-boiled.”

  “Okay.”

  He still didn’t get it.

  “The date on the eggs was probably the date she had boiled them,” Bosch said. “You know, so she could tell the boiled ones from the others and she’d know how old they were. And it just hit me then. You don’t boil a bunch of eggs so they’re ready for when you want them and then go kill yourself. I mean, what’s the point?”

  “So it was a hunch.”

  “More than that.”

  “But you just knew. Homicide.”

  “It changed things. We started to look at things differently. We began a homicide investigation. It took a few days but we got it. Friends told us about some guy who was giving her trouble. Harassing her, stalking her because she turned him down on a date. We asked around the apartment and we started looking at the apartment manager.”

  “Shit, I shoulda guessed it was him.”

  “We talked to him and he fucked up just enough for us to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. In his place we found the notebook that the supposed suicide note had been torn from. It was like a diary where she wrote down her thoughts and things. This guy found a page where she was talking about life being bad and knew he could use it as a suicide note. We found other stuff that was hers.”

  “Why’d he keep the stuff?”

  “Because people are stupid, that’s why, Chastain. You want clever killers, watch TV. He kept the stuff because he never thought we’d think it wasn’t a suicide. And because he was in the notebook. She wrote about him stalking her, about how she was sort of flattered and scared of him at the same time. He probably got off on reading it. He kept it.”

  “When’s the trial?”

  “Couple months.”

  “Sounds like a slam dunk.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. So was O.J.”

  “What did he do, drug her somehow, then put her in the tub and cut her?”

  “He was letting himself in her apartment when she was out. There was stuff in the diary about her thinking someone had been creeping her place. She was a runner — did three miles a day. We think that was when he liked to go in. She had prescription painkillers in the medicine cabinet — she got hurt playing racquetball a couple years before. We think he took the pills on one of his visits and dissolved them in orange juice. The next time he went in he poured it into the juice bottle in her fridge. He knew her habits, knew that after jogging she liked to sit on the steps out front, drink her juice and cool down. She may have realized she had been drugged and looked around for help. It was him who came. He took her back inside.”

  “He rape her first?”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “He probably tried but he couldn’t get it up.”

  They drove in silence for a few moments.

  “You’re cool, Bosch,” Chastain said. “Nothing gets by you.”

  “Yeah, I wish.”

  7

  CHASTAIN parked the car in the passenger loading zone in front of the modern high-rise building called The Place. Before they were out of the car the night doorman came through the glass entrance to either greet them or tell them to move. Bosch got out and explained that Howard Elias had been murdered less than a block away and that they needed to check his apartment to make sure there were no additional victims or someone needing help. The doorman said no problem but wanted to go along. Bosch told him in a tone that invited no debate to wait in the lobby for other officers who would be arriving.

  Howard Elias’s apartment was on the twentieth floor. The elevator moved quickly but the silence between Bosch and Chastain made the trip seem longer.

  They found their way to 20E and Bosch knocked on the door and rang the doorbell on the wall next to it. After getting no response, Bosch stooped and opened his briefcase on the floor, then took the keys out of the evidence bag Hoffman had given him earlier.

  “You think we ought to wait on the warrant?” Chastain asked.

  Bosch looked up at him as he closed the briefcase and snapped the locks.

  “No.”

  “That was a line of bullshit you gave the doorman, that people maybe needed help.”

  Bosch stood up and started trying keys in the door’s two locks.

  “Remember what you said before about me eventually having to trust you? This is where I start to trust you, Chastain. I don’t have the time to wait on a warrant. I’m going in. A homicide case is like a shark. It’s gotta keep moving or it drowns.”

  He turned the first lock.

  “You and your fucking fish. First fighting fish, now a shark.”

  “Yeah, you keep sticking around, Chastain, you might even learn how to catch something.”

  Just as he said the line he turned the second lock. He looked at Chastain and winked, then opened the door.

  They entered a medium-sized living room with expensive leather furnishings, cherrywood bookcases, and windows and a balcony with an expansive southern view across downtown and the civic center. The place was neatly kept except for sections of Friday morning’s Times spread across the black leather couch and an empty coffee mug on the glass-topped coffee table.

  “Hello?” Bosch called out, just to be sure the place was empty. “Police. Anyone home?”

  No answer.

  Bosch put his briefcase down on the dining room table, opened it and took a pair of latex gloves out of a cardboard box. He asked Chastain if he wanted a pair but the IAD man declined.

  “I’m not going to be touching anything.”

  They separated and began moving through the apartment on a quick initial survey. The rest of the place was as neat as the living room. It was a two-bedroom and had a master suite with its own balcony facing west. It was a clear night. Bosch could see all the way to Century City. Past those towers the lights dropped off in Santa Monica to the sea. Chastain came into the bedroom behind him.

  “No home office,” he said. “The second bedroom looks like a guest room. Maybe for stashing witnesses.”

  “Okay.”

  Bosch scanned the contents of the top of the bureau. There were no photos or anything of a strong personal nature. Same with the small tables on either side of the bed. It looked like a hotel room and in a way it was — if Elias only used it for overnight stays while readying cases for court. The bed was made and this stood out to Bosch. Elias was in the middle of preparations for a major trial, working day and night, yet he had stopped to make his bed that morning when supposedly it would just be he returning at the end of the day. No way, Bosch thought. Either he made the bed because there would be
someone else in the apartment or someone else made the bed.

  Bosch ruled out a maid because a maid would have picked up the strewn newspaper and the empty coffee cup in the living room. No, it was Elias who had made the bed. Or someone who was with him. It was gut instinct based on his long years of delving into human habits, but at that moment Bosch felt reasonably sure that there now was another woman in the mix.

  He opened the drawer of the bed table where a phone sat and found a personal phone book. He opened it and flipped through the pages. There were many names he recognized. Most were lawyers Bosch had heard about or even knew. He stopped when he came across one name. Carla Entrenkin. She, too, was an attorney specializing in civil rights cases — or had been until a year earlier, when the Police Commission appointed her inspector general of the Los Angeles Police Department. He noted that Elias had her office and home number listed. The home number was in darker, seemingly more recent, ink. It looked to Bosch as though the home number had been added well after the business number had been recorded in the book.

  “Whaddaya got?” Chastain said.

  “Nothing,” Bosch answered. “Just a bunch of lawyers.”

  He closed the phone book as Chastain stepped over to look. He tossed it back in the drawer and closed it.

  “Better leave it for the warrant,” he said.

  They conducted a casual search of the rest of the apartment for the next twenty minutes, looking in drawers and closets, under beds and couch cushions, but not disturbing anything they found. At one point Chastain called out from the bathroom off the master bedroom.

  “Got two toothbrushes here.”

  “Okay.”

  Bosch was in the living room, studying the books on shelves. He saw one he had read years before, Yesterday Will Make You Cry by Chester Himes. He felt Chastain’s presence and turned around. Chastain stood in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He was holding a box of condoms up for Bosch to see.

  “These were hidden in the back of a shelf under the sink.”

  Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded.

  In the kitchen there was a wall-mounted telephone with an answering machine. There was a flashing light on it and the digital display showed there was one message waiting to be played. Bosch pushed the playback button. It was a woman’s voice on the message.

  “Hey, it’s me. I thought you were going to call me. I hope you didn’t fall asleep on me.”

  That was it. After the message, the machine reported that the call had come in at 12:01 A.M. Elias was already dead by then. Chastain, who had come into the kitchen from the living room when he heard the voice, just looked at Bosch and hiked his shoulders after the message was played. Bosch played it again.

  “Doesn’t sound like the wife to me,” Bosch said.

  “Sounds white to me,” Chastain said.

  Bosch thought he was right. He played the message one more time, this time concentrating on the tone of the woman’s voice. There was a clear sense of intimacy in the voice. The time of the call and the woman’s assumption that Elias would know her voice supported this conclusion as well.

  “Condoms hidden in the bathroom, two toothbrushes, mystery woman on the phone,” Chastain said. “Sounds like we got a girlfriend in the works. That could make things interesting.”

  “Maybe,” Bosch said. “Somebody made the bed this morning. Any female stuff in the medicine cabinet?”

  “Nothing.”

  Chastain went back to the living room. After Bosch was finished in the kitchen, he felt he had seen enough for the time being and slid open the glass door leading from the living room to the balcony. He leaned on the iron railing and checked his watch. It was 4:50. He then pulled the pager off his belt to make sure he hadn’t turned it off by mistake.

  The pager was on, the battery not dead. Eleanor had not tried to reach him. He heard Chastain come out onto the balcony behind him. Bosch spoke without turning to look at him.

  “Did you know him, Chastain?”

  “Who, Elias? Yeah, sort of.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve worked cases he later went to court on. I got subpoenaed and deposed. Plus, the Bradbury. He’s got his office there, we’ve got offices there. I’d see him every now and then. But if you’re asking if I played golf with the guy, the answer is no. I didn’t know him like that.”

  “The guy made a living suing cops. When he got into court he always seemed to have real good information. Inside stuff. Some say better stuff than he should have had access to through legal discovery. Some say he might’ve had sources inside — ”

  “I wasn’t a snitch for Howard Elias, Bosch,” Chastain said, his voice tight. “And I don’t know anyone in IAD who was. We investigate cops. I investigate cops. Sometimes they deserve it and sometimes it turns out they don’t. You know as well as I do that there has to be somebody to police the police. But snitching to the likes of Howard Elias and his bunch, that’s the lowest of the low, Bosch. So fuck you very much for asking.”

  Bosch looked at him now, studying the way the anger was moving into his dark eyes.

  “Just asking,” he said. “Had to know who I am dealing with.”

  He looked back out across the city and then down to the plaza below. He saw Kiz Rider and Loomis Baker crossing toward Angels Flight with a man Bosch assumed was Eldrige Peete, the train operator.

  “All right, you asked,” Chastain said. “Can we get on with it now?”

  “Sure.”

  They were silent during the elevator ride down. It wasn’t until they were in the lobby that Bosch spoke.

  “You go on ahead,” he said. “I’m gonna see if there’s a can around here. Tell the others I’ll be right there.”

  “Sure.”

  The doorman had overheard the exchange from his little lobby desk and told Bosch the rest room was around the corner behind the elevators. Bosch headed that way.

  In the rest room Bosch put his briefcase on the sink counter and got his phone out. He called his house first. When the machine picked up he punched in the code to play all new messages. Only his own message played back to him. Eleanor hadn’t got it.

  “Shit,” he said as he hung up.

  He then called information and got the number for the Hollywood Park poker room. The last time Eleanor had not come home she had told him she was playing cards there. He called the number and asked for the security office. A man identifying himself as Mr. Jardine answered and Bosch gave his name and badge number. Jardine asked him to spell his name and give the number again. He was obviously writing it down.

  “Are you in the video room?”

  “Sure am. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for somebody and there is a good chance she is at one of your tables right now. I was wondering if you could look at the tubes for me.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  Bosch described his wife but could not give any description on clothes because he had not checked the closets at the house. He then waited two minutes while Jardine apparently studied the video screens connected to the surveillance cameras in the poker room.

  “Uh, if she’s here, I’m not seeing her,” Jardine finally said. “We don’t have very many women in here this time of night. And she doesn’t match the ones we’ve got. I mean, she could have been in here earlier, maybe one or two o’clock. But not now.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Hey, you got a number. I’ll take a walk around the place, call you back if I see anything.”

  “I’ll give you my pager. But if you see her, don’t approach her. Just give me a page.”

  “Will do.”

  After giving the man his pager number and hanging up, Bosch thought about the card clubs in Gardena and Commerce but decided not to call. If Eleanor was going to stay local she would have gone to Hollywood Park. If she didn’t go there she’d go to Vegas or maybe the Indian place in the desert near Palm Springs. He tried not to think about that and focused his mind back on the
case.

  Bosch next called the district attorney’s night switchboard after getting the number out of his phone book. He asked to be connected to the on-call prosecutor and was eventually connected to a sleepy attorney named Janis Langwiser. She happened to be the same prosecutor who had filed charges in the so-called hard-boiled eggs case. She had recently moved over from the city attorney’s office and it had been the first time Bosch had worked with her. He had enjoyed her sense of humor and enthusiasm for her job.