Trunk Music (1996) Read online

  He thought about putting on a CD, some saxophone music, but instead just sat down on the couch in the dark and lit a cigarette. He thought about the different currents running through the case. Going by the preliminary take on the victim, Anthony Aliso had been a financially successful man. That kind of success usually brought with it a thick insulation from violence and murder. The rich were seldom murdered. But something had gone wrong for Tony Aliso.

  Bosch remembered the tape and went to his briefcase, which he had left on the dining room table. Inside it there were two video cassettes, the Archway surveillance tape and the copy of Casualty of Desire. He turned on the TV and put the movie in the video player. He began watching in the dark.

  After viewing the tape it was obvious to Bosch that the movie deserved the fate it had received. It was badly lit and in some frames the end of a boom microphone hovered above the players. This was particularly jarring in scenes shot in the open desert where there should have been nothing above but blue sky. It was basic filmmaking gone wrong. And added to the amateurish look of the film were the poor performances of the players. The male lead, an actor Bosch had never seen before, was woodenly ineffective in portraying a man desperate to hold on to his young wife, who used sexual frustration and taunting to coerce him into committing crimes, eventually including murder, all for her morbid satisfaction. Veronica Aliso played the wife and was not much better an actor than the male lead.

  When lighted well, she was stunningly beautiful. There were four scenes in which she appeared partially nude and Bosch watched these with a voyeuristic fascination. But overall it was not a good role for her, and Bosch also understood why her career, like her husband’s, had not moved forward. She might blame her husband and harbor resentment toward him, but the bottom line was that she was like thousands of beautiful women who came to Hollywood every year. Her looks could put a pause in your heart, but she could not act to save her life.

  In the climactic scene of the film, in which the husband was apprehended and the wife cut him loose with the cops, she delivered her lines with the conviction and weight of a blank page of typing paper.

  “It was him. He’s crazy. I couldn’t stop him until it was too late. Then I couldn’t tell anyone because it…it would look like I was the one who wanted them all dead.”

  Bosch watched all the way through the credits and then rewound the tape by using the remote. He never got off the couch. He then turned the TV off and put his feet up on the couch. Looking through the open sliders he could see the light of dawn etching the ridgeline across the Pass. He still wasn’t tired. He kept thinking about the choices people make with their lives. He wondered what would have happened if the performances had been at least passable and the film had found a distributor. He wondered if that would have changed things now, if it would have kept Tony Aliso out of that trunk.

  The meeting at the station with Billets didn’t start until nine-thirty. Though the squad room was deserted because of the holiday, they all rolled chairs into the lieutenant’s office and closed the door. Billets started things off by saying that members of the local media, apparently having picked up on the case by checking the coroner’s overnight log, were already beginning to take a more than routine interest in the Aliso murder. Also, she said, the department weight all the way up the line was questioning whether the investigation should be turned over to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. This, of course, grated on Bosch. Earlier in his career he had been assigned to RHD. But then a questionable on-duty shooting resulted in his demotion to Hollywood. And so it was particularly upsetting to him to think of turning over the case to the big shots downtown. If OCID had been interested, that would have been easier to accept. But Bosch told Billets that he could not accept turning the case over to RHD after his team had spent almost an entire night without sleep on it and had produced some viable leads. Rider jumped in and agreed with him. Edgar, still riding his sulk over being put on the paperwork, remained silent.

  “Your point is well taken,” Billets said. “But when we’re done here, I have to call Captain LeValley at home and convince her we’ve got a handle on this. So let’s go over what we have. You convince me, I’ll convince her. She’ll then let them know how we feel about it downtown.”

  Bosch spent the next thirty minutes talking for the team and carefully recounting the night’s investigation. The detective squad’s only television/VCR was kept in the lieutenant’s office because it wasn’t safe to leave it unlocked, even in a police station. He put in the tape Meachum had dubbed off the Archway surveillance tape and queued up the part that included the intruder.

  “The surveillance camera this was shot from turns a frame every six seconds, so it’s pretty quick and jerky but we’ve got the guy on it,” Bosch said.

  He hit the play button and the screen depicted a grainy black and white view of the courtyard and front of the Tyrone Power Building. The lighting made it appear to be late dusk. The time counter on the bottom of the screen showed the time and date to be eight-thirteen the evening before.

  Bosch put the machine on slow motion, but still the sequence he wanted to show Billets was over very quickly. In six quick frames they showed a man go to the door of the building, hunch over the knob and then disappear inside.

  “Actual time at the door was about thirty to thirty-five seconds,” Rider said. “It may look from the tape like he had a key, but that’s too long to open a door with a key. The lock was picked. Somebody good and fast.”

  “Okay, here he comes back out,” Bosch said.

  When the time counter hit eight-seventeen, the man was captured on the video emerging from the doorway. The video jumped and the man was in the courtyard heading toward the trash can, then it jumped and the man was walking away from the trash can. Then he was gone. Bosch backed the tape up and froze it on the last image of the man as he walked from the trash can. It was the best image. It was dark and the man’s face was blurred but still possibly recognizable if they ever found someone to compare it to. He was white, with dark hair and a stocky, powerful build. He wore a golf shirt with short sleeves, and the watch on his right wrist, visible just above one of the black gloves he wore, had a chrome band that glinted with the reflection of the courtyard light. Above the wrist was the dark blur of a tattoo on the man’s forearm. Bosch pointed these things out to Billets and added that he would be taking the tape to SID to see if this last frame, the best of those showing the intruder, could be sharpened in any way by computer enhancement.

  “Good,” Billets said. “Now, what do you think he was doing in there?”

  “Retrieving something,” Bosch said. “From the time he goes in until he comes out, we’ve got less than four minutes. Not a lot of time. Plus he had to pick the interior door to Aliso’s office. Whatever he is doing in there, he knocks an Archway mug off the desk and it breaks on the floor. He does what he was there to do, then gathers up the broken mug and the pens and dumps them in the trash can on his way out. We found the broken mug and the pens in the can last night.”

  “Any prints?” Billets asked.

  “Once we figured there was a break-in, we backed out and had Donovan come on out when he was done with the Rolls. He got prints but nothing we can use. He got Aliso’s and mine and Kiz’s. As you can see on the video, the guy wore gloves.”

  “Okay.”

  Bosch involuntarily yawned and Edgar and Rider followed suit. He drank from the cup of stale coffee he had brought into the office with him. He had long had the caffeine jitters but knew if he stopped feeding the beast now he would quickly crash.

  “And the theory on what this intruder was retrieving?” Billets asked.

  “The broken mug puts him at the desk rather than the files,” Rider said. “Nothing in the desk seemed disturbed. No empty files, nothing like that. We think it was a bug. Somebody put a bug in Aliso’s phone and couldn’t afford to let us find it. The phone was right next to the mug in the pictures on Aliso’s walls. The intruder somehow knock
ed it over. Funny thing is, we never checked the phone for a bug. If whoever this guy was had left well enough alone, we probably would have never tumbled to it.”

  “I’ve been to Archway,” Billets said. “It’s got a wall around it. It’s got its own private security force. How’s this guy get in? Or are you suggesting an inside job?”

  “Two things,” Bosch said. “There was a film shooting in progress at the studio on the New York Street set. That meant a lot of people in and out of the front gate. Maybe this guy was able to slip through with part of the shooting crew. The direction in which he walks off in the video is to the north. That’s where New York Street is. The gate is to the south. Also, the north side of the studio butts up against the Hollywood Cemetery. You’re right, there is a wall. But at night, after the cemetery is closed, it’s dark and secluded. Our guy could’ve climbed the wall there. Whatever way he did it, he had practice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he was taking a bug out of Tony Aliso’s phone, it had to have been planted there in the first place.”

  Billets nodded.

  “Who do you think he was?” she asked quietly.

  Bosch looked at Rider to see if she wanted to answer. When she didn’t speak, he did.

  “Hard to say. The timing is the catch. Aliso’s probably been dead since Friday night, his body’s not found till about six last night. Then this break-in comes at eight-thirteen. That’s after Aliso’s been found and after people start finding out about it.”

  “But eight-thirteen, that’s before you talked to the wife?”

  “Right. So that kind of threw a wrench into it. I mean, I was all set to say let’s go full speed on the wife and see what we get. Now, I’m not so sure. See, if she’s involved, this break-in doesn’t make sense.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, first you’ve got to figure out why he was being bugged. And what’s the most likely answer? The wife put a PI or somebody on Tony to see if he was screwing around. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, saying that’s the case, if the wife was involved in putting her husband down into that trunk, why would she or her PI or whoever wait until last night—this is after the body’s been found—to pull the bug out of there? It doesn’t make sense. It only makes sense if the two things were not related, if the killing and the bug are separate. Understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “And that’s why I’m not ready to chuck everything and just look at the wife. Personally, I think she might be good for this. But there’s too much we don’t know right now. It doesn’t feel right to me. There’s something else running through all of this, and we don’t know what yet.”

  Billets nodded and looked at all the investigators.

  “This is good. I know there isn’t a lot that is solid yet, but it’s still good work. Anything else? What about the prints Art Donovan pulled off the victim’s jacket last night?”

  “For now we’ve struck out. He put them on AFIS, NCIC, the whole works, and got blanked.”

  “Damn.”

  “They’re still valuable. We come up with a suspect, the prints could be a clincher.”

  “Anything else from the car?”

  “No,” Bosch said.

  “Yes,” Rider said.

  Billets raised her eyebrows at the contradiction.

  “One of the prints Donovan found on the inside lip of the trunk lid,” Rider said. “It came back to Ray Powers. He’s the P–3 who found the body. He overstepped when he popped the trunk. He obviously left his print when he opened it. We caught it and no harm, no foul, but it was sloppy work and he should have never opened the trunk in the first place. He should’ve called us.”

  Billets glanced at Bosch and he guessed she was wondering why he hadn’t brought this to her attention. He looked down at her desk.

  “Okay, I’ll take care of it,” Billets said. “I know Powers. He’s been around and he should certainly know procedure.”

  Bosch could have defended Powers with the explanation the cop had given the day before but he let it go. Powers wasn’t worth it. Billets went on.

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “Well, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” Bosch said. “I once heard this story about a sculptor and somebody asked him how he turned a block of granite into a beautiful statue of a woman. And he said that he just chips away everything that isn’t the woman. That’s what we have to do now. We’ve got this big block of information and evidence. We’ve got to chip away everything that doesn’t count, that doesn’t fit.”

  Billets smiled and Bosch suddenly felt embarrassed about the analogy, though he believed it was accurate.

  “What about Las Vegas?” she asked. “Is that part of the statue or the part we need to chip away?”

  Now Rider and Edgar were smiling.

  “Well, we’ve got to go there, for one thing,” Bosch said, hoping he didn’t sound defensive. “Right now all we know is that this victim went there and was dead pretty soon after he came back. We don’t know what he did there, whether he won, lost, whether somebody tailed him back here from there. For all we know, he could’ve hit a jackpot there and was followed back here and ripped off. We’ve got a lot of questions about Las Vegas.”

  “Plus, there’s the woman,” Rider said.

  “What woman?” Billets asked.

  “Right,” Bosch said. “The last call made on Tony Aliso’s office line was to a club in North Las Vegas. I called it and got the name of a woman I think he was seeing over there. Layla. There was—”

  “Layla? Like that song?”

  “I guess. There also was a message from an unnamed woman on his office line. I think it might have been this Layla. We’ve got to talk to her.”

  Billets nodded, made sure Bosch was done and then laid down the battle plan.

  “All right,” Billets said. “First off, all media inquiries are to be directed to me. The best way to control information on this is to have it come from one mouth. For the moment, we’ll tell the reporters it is obviously under investigation and we are leaning toward a possible carjacking or robbery scenario. It’s innocuous enough and will probably appease them. Everyone okay with that?”

  The three detectives nodded.

  “Okay, I’m going to make a case with the captain to keep the case here with us. It looks to me like we have three or four avenues which need to be pursued vigorously. Granite that we have to chip away at, as Harry would say.

  “Anyway, it will also help me with the captain if we are already scrambling on these things. So, Harry, I want you to get on a plane as soon as possible and get to Vegas. I want you on that end of it. But if there’s nothing there, I want you to get in and get out. We’ll need you back here. Okay?”

  Bosch nodded. It would have been his choice if he were the one making the decisions, but he felt a pang of discomfort that she was doing it.

  “Kiz, you stick with the financial trail. I want to be in a position of knowing everything about this guy Anthony Aliso by tomorrow morning. You’re also going to have to go up to the house with the search warrant, so while you are there, take another shot at the wife, see what else you can get about the marriage when you’re picking up the records. I don’t know, if you get a chance, sit down with her, try to get a heart-to-heart.”

  “I don’t know,” Rider said. “I think we’re past the heart-to-heart. She’s a smart woman, smart enough to already know we’re taking a look at her. I almost think that to be safe we’ve got to advise her next time any of us talk to her. It was pretty close last night.”

  “Use your judgment on that,” Billets said. “But if you advise, she’s probably going to call her lawyer.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And Jerry, you—”

  “I know, I know, I’ve got the paper.”

  It was the first time he had spoken in fifteen minutes. Bosch thought he was carrying his sulk to the limit.

  �
�Yes, you have the paper. But I also want you on the civil cases and this screenwriter guy who was having the dispute with Aliso. It sounds to me to be the longest shot, but we’ve got to cover everything. Get that cleared up and it will help narrow our focus.”

  Edgar mock-saluted her.

  “Also,” she said, “while Harry’s putting together the trail in Vegas, I want you to put it together from the airport here. We’ve got his parking stub. I think you should start there. When I talk to the media I’ll also give a detailed description of the car—can’t be that many white Clouds around—and say we’re looking for anyone who might’ve seen it Friday night. I’ll say we’re trying to re-create the victim’s ride from the airport. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get some help from the John Qs out there.”