A Darkness More Than Night (2000) Page 8

  “Forget the cafeteria here — it’s awful. There’s a Cupid’s up on Victory.”

  “You cops always eat at the best.”

  “It’s why we do what we do.”

  10

  They ate their hot dogs at an outdoor table without an umbrella. Though it was a mildly warm winter day, McCaleb found himself sweating. On any given day the Valley could be counted on to be fifteen to twenty degrees warmer than Catalina and he wasn’t used to the change. His internal heating and cooling systems had never been normal since the transplant and he was prone to quick chills and sweats.

  He began with some small talk about Bosch’s current case.

  “You ready to become Hollywood Harry with this case?”

  “Yeah, no thanks,” Bosch said between bites of what was billed as a Chicago dog. “I think I’d rather be on midnight shift in the Seventy-seventh.”

  “Well, you think you got it together? You got him?”

  “Never know. The DA’s office hasn’t won a big one since disco. I don’t know how it will go. The lawyers all say it depends on the jury. I always thought it was the quality of the evidence but I’m just a dumb detective. John Reason brought in O. J.’s jury consultant and they’re acting pretty happy with the twelve in the box. Shit, John Reason. See, I’m even calling the guy by the name the reporters use. It shows how good he is at controlling things, sculpting things.”

  He shook his head and took another bite of his lunch.

  “Who is the big guy I saw him with?” McCaleb asked. “The guy standing behind him like Lurch.”

  “Rudy Valentino, his investigator.”

  “That’s his name?”

  “No, it’s Rudy Tafero. He’s former LAPD. He worked Hollywood detectives until a few years back. People in the bureau called him Valentino ’cause of his looks. He got off on it. Anyway, he went private. Has a bail bonds license. Don’t ask me how but he started getting security contracts with a lot of Hollywood people. He showed up on this one right after we popped Storey. In fact, Rudy brought Storey to Fowkkes. Probably got a nice finder’s fee for that.”

  “And how about the judge? How’s he going to be?”

  Bosch nodded as if he had found something good in the conversation.

  “Shootin’ Houghton. He’s no Second Chance Lance. He’s no bullshit. He’ll slap Fowkkes down if he needs to. At least we have that going for us.”

  “Shootin’ Houghton?”

  “Under that black robe he’s usually strapped — or at least most people think so. About five years ago he had a Mexican Mafia case, and when the jury came in guilty a bunch of the defendants’ buddies and family in the audience got mad and nearly started a riot in the courtroom. Houghton pulled his Glock and put a round into the ceiling. It quieted things down pretty quick. Ever since he’s been reelected by the highest percentage of any incumbent judge in the county. Go in his courtroom and check the ceiling. The bullet hole’s still there. He won’t let anybody fix it.”

  Bosch took another bite and looked at his watch. He changed the subject, talking with his mouth full.

  “Nothing personal but I take it they’ve hit the wall on Gunn if they’re going to outside help already.”

  McCaleb nodded.

  “Something like that.”

  He looked down at the chili dog in front of him and wished he had a knife and fork.

  “What’s wrong? We didn’t have to come here.”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking. Between pancakes at Dupar’s this morning and this, I might need another heart by dinner.”

  “You want to stop your heart, next time you go to Dupar’s top it off with a stop at Bob’s Donuts. Right there in the Farmers’ Market. Raised glaze. A couple of those and you’ll feel your arteries harden and snap like icicles hanging off a house. They never came up with suspect one, right?”

  “Right. Nothing.”

  “So what makes you so interested?”

  “Same as Jaye. Something about this one. We think whoever it was might be just starting.”

  Bosch just nodded. His mouth was full.

  McCaleb appraised him. His hair was shorter than McCaleb had remembered it. More gray but that was to be expected. He still had the mustache and the eyes. They reminded him of Graciela’s, so dark there was almost no delineation between iris and pupil. But Bosch’s eyes were weary and slightly hooded by wrinkles at the corners. Still, they were always moving, observing. He sat leaning slightly forward, as if ready to move. McCaleb remembered that there had always been a spring-loaded feel to Bosch. He felt as though at any moment or for any reason Bosch could put the needle into the red zone.

  Bosch reached inside his suit coat and took out a pair of sunglasses and put them on. McCaleb wondered if that had been in response to realizing that McCaleb had been studying him. He bent down, raised up his chili dog and finally took a bite. It tasted delicious and deadly at the same time. He put the dripping mess back on the paper plate and wiped his hand on a napkin.

  “So tell me about Gunn. You said he was a scumbag. What else?”

  “What else? That’s about it. He was a predator. Used women, bought women. He murdered that girl in that motel room, no doubt in my mind.”

  “But the DA kicked the case.”

  “Yeah. Gunn claimed self-defense. He said some things that didn’t add up but not enough to add up to charges. He claimed self-defense and there wasn’t going to be enough to go against that in a trial. So they no-billed it, end of story, on to the next case.”

  “Did he ever know you didn’t believe him?”

  “Oh, sure. He knew.”

  “Did you try to sweat him at all?”

  Bosch gave him a look that McCaleb could read through the sunglasses. The last question went to Bosch’s credibility as an investigator.

  “I mean,” McCaleb said quickly, “what happened when you tried to sweat him?”

  “Actually, the truth is we never really got the chance. There was a problem. See, we did set it up. We brought him in and put him in one of the rooms. My partner and I were planning to leave him there a while, let him percolate a little and think about things. We were going to do all the paper, put it in the book and then take a run at him, try to break his story. We never got the chance. I mean, to do it right.”

  “What happened?”

  “Me and Edgar — that’s my partner, Jerry Edgar — we went down the hall to get a cup of coffee and talk about how we were going to play it. While we were down there the squad lieutenant sees Gunn sitting in the interview room and doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing there. He takes it upon himself to go in and make sure the guy’s been properly advised of his rights.”

  McCaleb could see the anger working its way into Bosch’s face, even six years after the fact.

  “You see, Gunn had come in as a witness and ostensibly as the victim of a crime. He said she came at him with the knife and he turned it on her. So we didn’t need to advise him. The plan was to go in there, shake his story down and get him to make a mistake. Once we had that, then we were going to advise him. But this dipshit lieutenant didn’t know any of this and he just went in and advised the guy. After that, we were dead. He knew we were coming after him. He asked for a lawyer as soon as we walked into the room.”

  Bosch shook his head and looked out onto the street. McCaleb followed his eyes. Across Victory Boulevard

  was a used-car lot with red, white and blue pennants flapping in the wind. To McCaleb, Van Nuys was always synonymous with car lots. They were all over, new and used.

  “So what did you say to the lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Say? I didn’t say anything. I just shoved him through the window of his office. I got a suspension out of it — involuntary stress leave. Jerry Edgar eventually took the case in to the DA and they sat on it a while and then finally kicked it.”

  Bosch nodded. His eyes rested on his empty paper plate.

  “I sort of blew it,” he said. “Yeah, I blew it.”
<
br />   McCaleb waited a moment before speaking. A gust of wind blew Bosch’s plate off the table and the detective watched it skitter across the picnic area. He made no move to chase it down.

  “You still working for that lieutenant?”

  “Nope. He’s no longer with us. Not too long after that he went out one night and didn’t come home. They found him in his car up in the tunnel in Griffith Park near the Observatory.”

  “What, he killed himself?”

  “No. Somebody did it for him. It’s still open. Technically.”

  Bosch looked back at him. McCaleb dropped his eyes and noticed that Bosch’s tie tack was a tiny pair of silver handcuffs.

  “What else can I tell you?” Bosch said. “None of this had anything to do with Gunn. He was just a fly in the ointment — the ointment being the bullshit they call the justice system.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you had time to do much background on him.”

  “None, actually. All that I told you took place in the span of eight or nine hours. Afterward, with what happened, I was off the case and the guy walked out the door.”

  “But you didn’t give up. Jaye told me you visited him in the drunk tank the night before he got himself killed.”

  “Yeah, he got popped on a duice while cruising whores on Sunset. He was in the tank and I got a call. I went in to take a look, maybe jerk his chain a little, see if he was ready to talk. But the guy was piss drunk, just lying there on the floor in the puke. So that was it. You could say that we didn’t communicate.”

  Bosch looked at McCaleb’s unfinished chili dog and then his watch.

  “Sorry, but that’s all I got. You going to eat that or can we go?”

  “Couple more bites, couple more questions. Don’t you want to have a smoke?”

  “I quit a couple years ago. I only smoke on special occasions.”

  “Don’t tell me, it was the Marlboro-man-gone-impotent sign on Sunset.”

  “No, my wife wanted us both to quit. We did.”

  “Your wife? Harry, you’re full of surprises.”

  “Don’t get excited. She’s come and gone. But at least I don’t smoke anymore. I don’t know about her.”

  McCaleb just nodded, feeling he had stepped too far into the other man’s personal world. He got back to the case.

  “So any theories on who killed him?”

  McCaleb took another bite while Bosch answered.

  “My guess is he probably met up with somebody just like himself. Somebody who crossed a line somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, I hope you and Jaye get the guy. But so far, whoever he or she is hasn’t done anything I’m too upset about. Know what I mean?”

  “It’s funny you mentioned a ‘she.’ You think it could have been a woman?”

  “I don’t know enough about it. But like I said, he preyed on women. Maybe one of them put a stop to it.”

  McCaleb just nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else to ask. Bosch had been a long shot anyway. Maybe he’d known it would come to this and he just wanted to reconnect with Bosch for other reasons. He spoke with his eyes down on his paper plate.

  “You still think about the girl on the hill, Harry?”

  He didn’t want to say out loud the name Bosch had given her.

  Bosch nodded.

  “From time to time I do. It sticks with me. They all do, I guess.”

  McCaleb nodded.

  “Yeah. So nothing . . . nobody ever made a claim on her?”

  “Nope. And I tried with Seguin one last time, went up to see him at Q last year, about a week before he got the juice. Tried one more time to find out from him but he just smiled at me. It was like he knew it was the last thing he could hold over me or something. He enjoyed it, I could tell. So I got up to leave and I told him to enjoy himself in hell and know what he said to me? He said, ‘I hear it’s a dry heat.’”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “Fucker. I drove up and back on my day off. Twelve hours in the car and the air-conditioner didn’t work.”

  He looked directly at McCaleb and even through the shades McCaleb again felt the bond he had known so long ago with this man.

  Before he could say anything he heard his phone begin to chirp from the pocket of his windbreaker, which was folded on the bench next to him. He struggled with the jacket to find the pocket and got to the phone before the caller hung up. It was Brass Doran.

  “I have some stuff for you. Not a lot, but maybe a start.”

  “You someplace I can call you back in a few minutes?”

  “Actually, I’m in the central conference room. We’re about to brainstorm a case and I’m the leader. It could be a couple hours before I’m free. You could call me at home tonight if you —”

  “No, hold on.”

  He held the phone down and looked at Bosch.

  “I better take this. I’ll talk to you later if anything comes up, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Bosch started getting up. He was going to carry his Coke with him.

  “Thanks,” McCaleb said, extending his hand. “Good luck with the trial.”

  Bosch shook his hand.

  “Thanks. We’ll probably need it.”

  McCaleb watched him walk out of the picnic area and to the sidewalk leading back to the courthouse. He brought the phone back up then.

  “Brass?”

  “Here. Okay, you were talking about owls in general, right? You don’t know the specific kind or breed, right?”

  “Right. It’s just a generic owl, I think.”

  “What color is it?”

  “Uh, it’s brown mostly. Like on the back and the wings.”

  As he spoke he took a couple of folded pages of notebook paper and a pen out of his pockets. He shoved his half-eaten chili dog out of the way and got ready to take notes.

  “Okay, modern iconography is what you’d expect. The owl is the symbol of wisdom and truth, denotes knowledge, the view of the greater picture as opposed to the small detail. The owl sees in the night. In other words, seeing through the darkness is seeing the truth. It is learning the truth, therefore, knowledge. And from knowledge comes wisdom. Okay?”

  McCaleb didn’t need to take notes. What Doran had said was obvious. But just to keep his head in it he wrote down a line.

  Seeing in the dark = Wisdom He then underlined the last word.

  “Okay, fine. What else?”

  “That’s basically what I have as far as contemporary application. But when I go backward it gets pretty interesting. Our friend the owl has totally rejuvenated his reputation. He used to be a bad guy.”

  “Tell me, Brass.”

  “Get your pencil out. The owl is seen repeatedly in art and religious iconography from early medieval through late Renaissance periods. It is found often depicted in religious allegorical displays — paintings, church panels and stations of the cross. The owl was —”

  “Okay, Brass, but what did it mean?”

  “I’m getting to that. Its meaning could be different from depiction to depiction and according to species depicted. But essentially its depiction was the symbol of evil.”

  McCaleb wrote the word down.

  “Evil. Okay.”

  “I thought you’d be more excited.”

  “You can’t see me. I’m standing on my hands here. What else you have?”

  “Let me run down the list of hits. These are taken from the extracts, the critical literature of the art of the period. References to depictions of owls come up as the symbol of — and I quote — doom, the enemy of innocence, the Devil himself, heresy, folly, death and misfortune, the bird of darkness, and finally, the torment of the human soul in its inevitable journey to eternal damnation. Nice, huh? I like that last one. I guess they didn’t sell too many bags of potato chips with owls on them back in the fourteen hundreds.”

  McCaleb didn’t answer. He was busy scribbling down the descriptions she had read to him.

  “Read that last one again.”

  Sh
e did and he wrote it down verbatim.

  “Now, there is more,” Doran said. “There is also some interpretation of the owl as being the symbol of wrath as well as the punishment of evil. So it obviously was something that meant different things at different times and to different people.”

  “The punishment of evil,” McCaleb said as he wrote it down.