The Black Ice (1993) Page 9

“You know that book I told you about last night?”

  “The Long Goodbye?”

  “There’s another line in it I was thinking about. ‘A white knight for me is as rare as a fat postman.’ I guess nowadays there are a lot of fat postmen.” She laughed very softly, almost like her crying. “But not too many white knights. You were last night.”

  Bosch didn’t know what to say and just tried to envision her on the other end of the silence.

  “That’s very nice of you to say. But I don’t know if I deserve it. Sometimes I don’t think the things I have to do make me much of a knight.”

  They moved on to small talk for a few moments and then said good-bye. He hung up and sat still for a moment, staring at the phone and thinking about things said and unsaid. There was something there. A connection. Something more than her husband’s death. More than just a case. There was a connection between them.

  He turned the pages of the notebook back to the chronological chart he had made earlier.

  Nov. 9 Dance arrested

  Nov. 13 Jimmy Kapps dead

  Dec. 4 Moore, Bosch meet

  He now started to add other dates and facts, even some that did not seem to fit into the picture at the moment. But his overriding feeling was that his cases were linked and the link was Calexico Moore. He didn’t stop to consider the chart as a whole until he was finished. Then he studied it, finding that it gave some context to the thoughts that had jumbled in his head in the last two days.

  Nov. 1 BANG cya memo on black ice

  Nov. 9 Rickard gets tip—from Jimmy Kapps

  Nov. 9 Dance arrested, case kicked

  Nov. 13 Jimmy Kapps dead

  Dec. 4 Moore, Bosch meet—Moore holds back

  Dec. 11 Moore receives DEA briefing

  Dec. 18 Moore finds body—Juan Doe #67

  Dec. 18 Porter assigned Juan Doe case

  Dec. 19 Moore checks in, Hideaway—suicide?

  Dec. 24 Juan Doe #67 autopsy—bugs?

  Dec. 25 Moore’s body found

  Dec. 26 Porter pulls pin

  Dec. 26 Moore autopsy—inconclusive?

  But he couldn’t study it too long without thinking of Sylvia Moore.

  9

  Bosch took Los Angeles Street

  to Second and then up to the Red Wind. In front of St. Vibiana’s he saw an entourage of bedraggled, homeless men leaving the church. They had spent the day sleeping in the pews and were now heading to the Union Street

  mission for dinner. As he passed the Times building he looked up at the clock and saw it was exactly six. He turned on KFWB for the news. The Moore autopsy was the second story, after a report on how the mayor had become the latest victim in a wave of kamikazi AIDS protests. He was hit with a balloon full of pig blood on the white stone steps of City Hall. A group called Cool AIDS took credit.

  “In other news, an autopsy on the body of Police Sergeant Calexico Moore was inconclusive in confirming that the narcotics officer took his own life, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Meanwhile, police have officially classified the death as suicide. The thirty-eight-year-old officer’s body was found Christmas Day in a Hollywood motel room. He had been dead of a shotgun blast for about a week, authorities said. A suicide note was found at the scene but the contents have not been released. Moore will be buried Monday.”

  Bosch turned the radio off. The news report had obviously come from a press release. He wondered what was meant by the autopsy results being inconclusive. That was the only grain of real news in the whole report.

  After parking at the curb in front of the Red Wind he went inside but did not see Teresa Corazón. He went into the restroom and splashed water on his face. He needed a shave. He dried himself with a paper towel and tried to smooth his mustache and curly hair with his hand. He loosened his tie, then stood there a long moment staring at his reflection. He saw the kind of man not many people approached unless they had to.

  He got a package of cigarettes from the machine by the restroom door and looked around again but still didn’t see her. He went to the bar and ordered an Anchor and then took it to an empty table by the front door. The Wind was becoming crowded with the after-work crowd. People in business suits and dresses. There were a lot of combinations of older men with younger women. Harry recognized several reporters from the Times. He began to think Teresa had picked a bad place to meet, if she intended to show up at all. With today’s autopsy story, she might be noticed by the reporters. He drained the beer bottle and left the bar.

  He was standing in the chilled evening air on the front sidewalk, looking down the street into the Second Street

  tunnel, when he heard a horn honk and a car pulled to a stop in front of him. The electric window glided down. It was Teresa.

  “Harry, wait inside. I’ll just find a place to park. Sorry I’m late.”

  Bosch leaned into the window.

  “I don’t know. Lot of reporters in there. I heard on the radio about the Moore autopsy. I don’t know if you want to risk getting hassled.”

  He could see reasons for it and against it. Getting her name in the paper improved her chances of changing acting chief ME to permanent chief. But the wrong thing said or a misquote could just as easily change acting to interim or, worse yet, former.

  “Where can we go?” she asked.

  Harry opened the door and got in.

  “Are you hungry? We can go down to Gorky’s or the Pantry.”

  “Yeah. Is Gorky’s still open? I want some soup.”

  It took them fifteen minutes to wend their way through eight blocks of downtown traffic and to find a parking space. Inside Gorky’s they ordered mugs of home-brewed Russian beer and Teresa had the chicken-rice soup.

  “Long day, huh?” he offered.

  “Oh, yeah. No lunch. Was in the suite for five hours.”

  Bosch needed to hear about the Moore autopsy but knew he could not just blurt out a question. He would have to make her want to tell it.

  “How was Christmas? You and your husband get together?”

  “Not even close. It just didn’t work. He never could deal with what I do and now that I have a shot at chief ME, he resents it even more. He left Christmas Eve. I spent Christmas alone. I was going to call my lawyer today to tell her to resume filing but I was too busy.”

  “Should’ve called me. I spent Christmas with a coyote.”

  “Ahh. Is Timido still around?”

  “Yeah, he still comes around every now and then. There was a fire across the pass. I think it spooked him.”

  “Yeah, I read about that. You were lucky.”

  Bosch nodded. He and Teresa Corazón had had an on-and-off relationship for four months, each meeting sparked with this kind of surface intimacy. But it was a relationship of convenience, firmly grounded on physical, not emotional, needs and never igniting into deep passion for either of them. She had separated earlier in the year from her husband, a UCLA Medical School professor, and had apparently singled Harry out for her affections. But Bosch knew he was a secondary diversion. Their liaisons were sporadic, usually weeks apart, and Harry was content to allow Teresa to initiate each one.

  He watched her bring her head down to blow onto a spoonful of soup and then sip it. He saw slices of carrot floating in the bowl. She had brown ringlets that fell to her shoulders. She held some of the tresses back with her hand as she blew on another spoonful and then sipped. Her skin was a deep natural brown and there was an exotic, elliptical shape to her face accentuated by high cheekbones. She wore red lipstick on full lips and there was just a whisper of fine white peach fuzz on her cheeks. He knew she was in her mid-thirties but he had never asked exactly how old. Lastly, he noticed her fingernails. Unpolished and clipped short, so as not to puncture the rubber gloves that were the tools of her trade.

  As he drank the heavy beer from its heavy stein, he wondered if this was the start of another liaison or whether she really had come to tell him of something significant in the autops
y results of Juan Doe #67.

  “So now I need a date for New Year’s Eve,” she said, looking up from the soup. “What are you staring at?”

  “Just watching you. You need a date, you got one. I read in the paper that Frank Morgan’s playing at the Catalina.”

  “Who’s he and what does he play?”

  “You’ll see. You’ll like him.”

  “It was a dumb question anyway. If he’s someone you like, then he plays the saxophone.”

  Harry smiled, more to himself than her. He was happy to know he had a date. Being alone on New Year’s Eve bothered him more than Christmas, Thanksgiving, any of the other days. New Year’s Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you in half if you were alone.

  She smiled and said, “Harry, you’re so easy when it comes to lonely women.”

  He thought of Sylvia Moore, remembering her sad smile.

  “So,” Teresa said, seeming to sense that he was drifting away. “I bet you want to know about the bugs inside Juan Doe #67.”

  “Finish your soup first.”

  “Nope, that’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. I always get hungry, in fact, after a long day chopping up bodies.”

  She smiled. She said things like that often, as if daring him not to like what she did for a living. He knew she was still hooked by her husband. It didn’t matter what she said. He understood.

  “Well, I hope you don’t miss the knives when they make you permanent chief. You’ll be cutting budgets then.”

  “No, I’d be a hands-on chief. I’d handle the specials. Like today. But after today, I don’t know if they’ll ever make me permanent.”

  Harry sensed that now he was the one who had shaken a bad feeling loose and sent her traveling with it. Now might be the right time.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No. I mean I do, but I can’t. I trust you, Harry, but I think I have to keep this close for the time being.”

  He nodded and let it go, but he intended to come back to it later and find out what had gone wrong on the Moore autopsy. He took his notebook out of his coat pocket and put it on the table.

  “Okay, then, tell me about Juan Doe #67.”

  She pushed the soup bowl to the side of the table and pulled a leather briefcase onto her lap. She pulled out a thin manila file and opened it in front of her.

  “Okay. This is a copy so you can keep it when I’m done explaining. I went over the notes and everything else Salazar had on this. I guess you know, cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma to the head. Crushing blows to the frontal, parietal, sphenoid and supraorbital.”

  As she described these injuries she touched the top of her forehead, the back of her head, her left temple and rim of her left eye. She did not look up from the paperwork.

  “Any one of these was fatal. There were other defensive wounds which you can look at later. Um, he extracted wood splinters from two of the head injuries. Looks like you are talking about something like a baseball bat, but not as wide, I think. Tremendous crushing blows, so I think we are talking about something with some leverage. Not a stick. Bigger. A pick handle, shovel, something like—possibly a pool cue. But most likely something unfinished. Like I said, Sally pulled splinters out of the wounds. I’m not sure a pool cue with a sanded and lacquered finish would leave splinters.”

  She studied the notes a moment.

  “The other thing—I don’t know if Porter told you this, but this body most likely was dumped in that location. Time of death is at least six hours before discovery. Judging by the traffic in that alley and to the rear door of the restaurant, that body could not have gone unnoticed there for six hours. It had to have been dumped.”

  “Yeah, that was in his notes.”

  “Good.”

  She started turning through the pages. Briefly looking at the autopsy photos and putting them to the side.

  “Okay, here it is. Tox results aren’t back yet but the colors of the blood and liver indicate there will be nothing there. I’m just guessing—or, rather, Sally is just guessing, so don’t hold us to that.”

  Harry nodded. He hadn’t taken any notes yet. He lit a cigarette and she didn’t seem to mind. She had never protested before, though once when he was attending an autopsy she walked in from the adjoining suite and showed him a lung from a forty-year-old, three-pack-a-day man. It looked like an old black loafer that had been run over by a truck.

  “But as you know is routine,” she continued, “we took swabs and did the analysis on the stomach contents. First, in the earwax we found a kind of brown dust. We combed some of it out of the hair, and got some from the fingernails, too.”

  Bosch thought of tar heroin, an ingredient in black ice.

  “Heroin?”

  “Good guess, but no.”

  “Just brown dust.”

  Bosch was writing in his notebook now.

  “Yeah, we put it on some slides and blew it up and as near as we can tell it’s wheat. Wheat dust. It’s—it apparently is pulverized wheat.”

  “Like cereal? He had cereal in his ears and hair?”

  A waiter in a white shirt and black tie with a brush mustache and his best dour Russian look came to the table to ask if they wanted anything else. He looked at the stack of photos next to Teresa. On top was one of Juan Doe #67 naked on a stainless steel table. Teresa quickly covered it with the file and Harry ordered two more beers. The man walked slowly away from the table.

  “You mean some kind of wheat cereal?” Bosch asked again. “Like the dust at the bottom of the box or something?”

  “Not exactly. Keep that thought, though, and let me move on. It will all tie up.”

  He waved her on.

  “On the nasal swabs and stomach content, two things came up that are very interesting. It’s kind of why I like what I do, despite other people not liking it for me.” She looked up from the file and smiled at him. “Anyway, in the stomach contents, Salazar identified coffee and masticated rice, chicken, bell pepper, various spices and pig intestine. To make a long story short, it was chorizo—Mexican sausage. The intestine used as sausage casing leads me to believe it was some kind of homemade sausage, not manufactured product. He had eaten this shortly before death. There had been almost no breakdown in the stomach yet. He may’ve even been eating when he was assaulted. I mean, the throat and mouth were clear but there was still debris in the teeth.

  “And by the way, they were all original teeth. No dental work at all—ever. You getting the picture that this man was not from around here?”

  Bosch nodded, remembering Porter’s notes said all of Juan Doe #67’s clothing was made in Mexico. He was writing in the notebook.

  She said, “There was also this in the stomach.”

  She slid a Polaroid photograph across the table. It was of a pinkish insect with one wing missing and the other broken. It looked wet, as indeed it would be, considering where it had been found. It lay on a glass culture dish next to a dime. The dime was about ten times the size of the bug.

  Harry noticed the waiter standing about ten feet away with two mugs of beer. The man held the mugs up and raised his eyebrows. Bosch signaled that it was safe to approach. The waiter put the glasses down, stole a glance at the bug photo and then moved quickly away. Harry slid the photo back to Teresa.

  “So what is it?”

  “Trypetid,” she said, and she smiled.

  “Shoot, I was about to guess that,” he said.

  She laughed at the lame joke.

  “It’s a fruit fly, Harry. Mediterranean variety. The little bug that lays big waste to the California citrus industry? Salazar came to me to send it out on referral because we had no idea what it was. I had an investigator take it over to UCLA to an entomologist Gary suggested. He identified it for us.”

  Gary, Bosch knew, was her estranged, soon to be ex-husband. He nodded at what she was telling him but was not seeing the significance of the find.

  She said, “We go on to the nasal swab
s. Okay, there was more wheat dust and then we found this.”

  She slid another photo across the table. This was also a photo of a culture dish with a dime in it. There was also a small pinkish-brown line near the dime. This was much smaller than the fly in the first photo, but Bosch could tell it was also some kind of insect.

  “And this?” he asked.

  “Same thing, my entomologist tells me. Only this is a youngun. This is a larva.”

  She folded her fingers together and pointed her elbows out. She smiled and waited.

  “You love this, don’t you?” he said. He drafted off a quarter of his beer. “Okay, you got me. What’s it all mean?”