Michael Connelly (32 page)

“What’s he doing?” Clarke asked. “Let me see.”

“You’re driving. I’m watching. He’s not doing anything anyway. Just leaning there.”

“He’s got to be doing something.”

“He’s thinking. Okay? …There. He’s lighting a cigarette. Happy? He’s doing something…. Wait a minute.”

“What?”

“Shit. We should’ve had the camera ready.”

“What’s this ‘we’ shit? That’s your job today. I’m driving. What’s he doing?”

“He dropped something. Into the water.”

Through the field glasses Lewis saw Bosch’s body leaning limply on the railing. He was looking down into the water below.
There was no one else on the pier as far as Lewis could see.

“What did he drop? Can you see?”

“How the fuck do I know what he dropped? I can’t see the surface from here. Do you want for me to go out there and get one
of the surfer boys to paddle over and see for us? I don’t know what he dropped.”

“Cool your jets. I was just asking. Now, can you remember the color of this object he dropped?”

“It looked white, like a ball. But it sort of floated.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t see the surface.”

“I meant it floated down. I think it was a tissue or some kind of paper.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Just standing there at the railing. He’s looking down into the water.”

“Crisis of conscience time. Maybe he’ll jump and we can forget this whole damned thing.”

Clarke giggled at his feeble joke. Lewis didn’t.

“Yeah, right. I’m sure that’s going to happen.”

“Give me the glasses and go call in. See what Irving wants to do.”

Lewis handed over the binoculars and got out. First, he went to the trunk, opened it and got out the Nikon. He attached a
long lens and then took it around to the driver’s window and handed it to Clarke.

“Get a picture of him out there, so we’ll have something to show Irving.”

Then Lewis trotted over to the restaurant to find a phone. He was back in less than three minutes. Bosch was still leaning
on the rail at the end of the pier.

“Chief says under no circumstances are we to break off the tail,” Lewis said. “He also said our reports sucked ass. He wants
more detail, and more pictures. Did you get him?”

Clarke was too busy watching through the camera to answer. Lewis picked up the binoculars and looked. Bosch remained unmoving.
Lewis couldn’t figure it. What is he doing? Thinking? Why come all the way out here to think?

“Fucking Irving, that figures,” Clarke suddenly said, dropping the camera into his lap to look at his partner. “And yeah,
I got a few pictures of him. Enough to make Irving happy. But he’s not doing anything. Just leaning there.”

“Not anymore,” Lewis said, still looking through the binoculars. “Start her up. It’s showtime.”

• • •

Bosch walked off the pier after dropping the crumpled hypnotism memo into the water. Like a flower cast on a spoiled sea,
it held its own on the surface for a few brief moments and then sank out of sight. His resolve to find Meadows’s killer was
now stronger: now he sought justice for Sharkey as well. As he made his way on the old planking of the pier he saw the Plymouth
that had been following him pull out of the restaurant lot. It’s them, he thought. But no matter. He didn’t care what they
had seen, or thought they had seen. There were new rules now, and Bosch had plans for Lewis and Clarke.

He drove east on the 10 into downtown. He never bothered to check his mirror for the black car because he knew it would be
there. He wanted it to be there.

When he got to Los Angeles Street, he parked in a no-parking zone in front of the U.S. Administration Building. On the third
floor Bosch walked through one of the crowded waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The place smelled
like a jail — sweat, fear and desperation. A bored woman was sitting behind a sliding glass window working on the
Times
crossword. The window was closed. On the sill was a plastic paper-ticket dispenser like they use at a meat-market counter.
After a few moments she looked up at Bosch. He was holding his badge up.

“Do you know a six-letter word for a man of constant sorrow and loneliness?” she asked after sliding the window open and then
checking her nail for damage.

“Bosch.”

“What?”

“Detective Harry Bosch. Buzz me in. I want to see Hector V.”

“Have to check first,” she said in a pouty way. She whispered something into the phone, then reached to Bosch’s badge case
and put her finger on the name on the ID card. Then she hung up.

“He says go on back.” She buzzed the lock on the door next to the window. “He says you know the way.”

Bosch shook Hector Villabona’s hand in a cramped squad room much smaller than Bosch’s own.

“I need a favor. I need some computer time.”

“Let’s do it.”

That’s what Bosch liked about Hector V. He never asked what or why before deciding. He was a let’s-do-it type of guy. He didn’t
play bullshit games that Bosch had come to believe everybody in his profession played. Hector rolled his chair over to an
IBM on a desk against the wall and entered his password. “You want to run names, right? How many?”

Bosch wasn’t going to bullshit him, either. He showed him the list of thirty-four names. Hector whistled lowly and said, “Okay,
we’ll run them through, but these are Vietnamese. If their cases were not worked out of this office their files won’t be here.
I’ll only have what’s on the computer. Dates of entry, documentation, citizenship, whatever is on the computer. You know how
it is, Harry.”

Bosch did. But he also knew that Southern California was where most of the Vietnamese refugees made their homes after making
the trip. Hector started typing in the names with two fingers, and twenty minutes later Bosch was looking at a printout from
the computer.

“What are we looking for, Harry?” Hector said as he studied the list with him.

“I don’t know. What do you see that is unusual?”

A few moments passed and Bosch thought Hector would say nothing was unusual. A dead end. But Bosch was wrong.

“Okay, on this one I think you will find he was connected.”

The name was Ngo Van Binh. It meant nothing to Bosch other than it had come from the B list; Binh had reported nothing stolen
from his safe-deposit box.

“Connected?”

“He had some kind of pull,” Hector said. “Connected politically, I guess you would call it. See, his case number has the prefix
GL. Those are files handled by our special cases bureau in D.C. Usually, SCB doesn’t deal with people from the masses. Very
political. Handles people like the shah and the Marcoses, Russian defectors if they are scientists or ballerinas. Stuff like
that. Stuff I never see.”

He nodded his head and put his finger on the printout.

“Okay, then we have the dates, they are too close. It happened too fast, which tells me this case was greased. I don’t know
this guy from Adam, but I know this guy knew people. Look at the date of entry, May 4, 1975. That’s just four days after the
guy left Vietnam. You figure the first day is getting to Manila and the last day is getting to the States. That leaves only
two days in between in Manila for him to get approval and get his ticket punched for the mainland. And at that time, I mean,
man, they were coming in by the boatload to Manila. No way in two days unless it was greased. So what that means is this guy,
this Binh, already had approval. He was connected. It’s not that unusual, because a lot of people were. We got a lot of people
out of there when the shit hit the fan. A lot of them were the elite. A lot of them just had money to pay to make them elite.”

Bosch looked at the date Binh had left Vietnam. April 30, 1975. The same day Meadows left Vietnam for the last time. The day
Saigon fell to the North Army.

“And this DOD?” Villabona said, pointing at another date. “Very short time to receive documentation. May 14. That’s ten days
after arrival this guy gets a visa. That’s too fast for the average Joe. Or in this case, the average Ngo.”

“So what do you think?”

“Hard to say. He could have been an operative. He could’ve just had enough money to get him on a helicopter. Lotta rumors
still floating around from that time. People getting rich. Seats on military transports going for ten grand. No question visas
going for more. Nothing ever confirmed.”

“Can you pull the file on this guy?”

“Yeah. If I was in D.C.”

Bosch just looked at him, and Hector finally said, “All GLs are there, Harry. That’s where the people that people are connected
to are. Get it?”

Bosch didn’t say anything.

“Don’t get mad, Harry. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll make a couple calls. You going to be around later?”

Bosch gave him the FBI’s number but didn’t say it was the FBI. Then they shook hands again and Bosch left. In the first-floor
lobby he watched through the smoked-glass doors, looking for Lewis and Clarke. When he finally saw the black Plymouth turn
the corner as the two IAD detectives finished another circuit of the block, Bosch walked through the doors and down the steps
to his car. In his peripheral vision he saw the IAD car slow and turn into the curb while they waited for him to get in his
car and drive off.

Bosch did as they wanted. Because it was what he wanted.

• • •

Woodrow Wilson Drive winds counterclockwise around and up the side of the Hollywood Hills, the cracked, patchwork asphalt
never wide enough at any point for two cars to pass without a cautious slowing. Going up, the homes on the left crawl vertically
up the hillside. They are the old money, solid and secure. Spanish tile and stucco. To the right, the newer houses fearlessly
swing their wood frame rooms out over the brown brush arroyos and daisies in the canyon. They are balanced on stilts and hope
and cling as tenuously to the edge of the hill as their owners do to their positions at the studios down below. Bosch’s home
was fourth from the end on the right side.

As he drove around the final bend, the house came into sight. He looked at the dark wood, the shoebox design, seeking a sign
that it had somehow changed — as if the exterior of the house could tell him if something was wrong with the interior. He
checked the rearview then and caught the front end of the black Plymouth nosing around the curve. Bosch pulled into the carport
next to his house and got out. He went inside without looking back at the tail car.

He had gone to the pier to think about what Rourke had said. And in doing so he thought about the hang-up call that was on
his phone tape. Now, he went to the kitchen and played back his messages. First there was the hang-up call, which had come
in Tuesday, and then a message from Jerry Edgar in the predawn hours today, when Edgar had called looking for Bosch to get
him out to the Hollywood Bowl. Bosch rewound the tape and listened to the hang-up call again, silently chastising himself
for not having picked up on its significance the first time he heard it. Someone had called, listened to his taped message
and then hung up after the first message beep. The hang-up was on the tape. Most people, if they didn’t want to leave a message,
would simply hang up as soon as they heard Bosch’s tape-recorded voice saying he wasn’t in. Or, if they thought he was home,
would have called out his name after the beep. But this caller had listened to the tape and then didn’t hang up until after
the beep. Why? Bosch had missed it at first, but now thought the call had been a transmitter test.

He went to the closet by the door and took out a pair of binoculars. He went to the living room window and looked through
a crack in the curtain for the black Plymouth. It was a half-block farther up the hill. Lewis and Clarke had driven by the
house, turned around and parked at the curb, facing downhill and ready to continue the tail if Bosch came out. Through the
binoculars Bosch could see Lewis behind the wheel, watching the house. Clarke had his head back on the passenger seat and
his eyes closed. Neither of them appeared to be wearing earphones. Still, Harry had to be sure. Without taking his eyes from
the binoculars, he reached over to the front door and opened it a few inches and closed it. The men in the IAD car showed
no reaction, no alert. Clarke’s eyes remained closed. Lewis continued picking his teeth with a business card.

Bosch decided that if they had dropped a bug on him, it was transmitting to a remote. It was safer that way. Probably a sound-activated
minireel hidden on the exterior of the house. They’d wait until he drove away and then one of them would jump out of the car
and quickly collect the reel, replacing it with a fresh one. They could then catch up the tail on him before he got down the
hill to the freeway. He walked away from the window and made a quick survey of the living room and kitchen. He studied the
under-side of tables and electric fixtures but he didn’t find the bug and didn’t expect to. The smart place, he knew, was
the phone, which he was saving for last. It had a ready power source, and placement there would provide sound intake of the
immediate interior of the house as well as any conversations that came in through the phone.

Bosch picked up the phone and with a small penknife that was attached to his key chain he popped the cover off the mouthpiece.
There was nothing there that shouldn’t be. Then he took the cover off the earpiece. It was there. Using the knife he carefully
lifted out the speaker. Attached behind it by a small magnet was a small, flat, round transmitter about the size of a quarter.
There were two wires attached to the device, which, he knew, was sound activated and called a T-9. One wire was wrapped around
one of the phone’s receiver wires, piggybacking power for the bug. The other wire went into the barrel of the handset. Bosch
gingerly pulled it, and out came the backup energy source: a small, thin power pack containing a single AA battery. The bug
ran off the phone’s juice, but if the phone was disconnected from the wall, the battery could provide power for maybe another
eight hours. Bosch disconnected the device from the phone and placed it on the table. It was now running off the battery.
He just stared at it, thinking about what he was going to do. It was a standard police department wire. Pickup range, fifteen
to twenty feet, designed to take in everything said in the room. The transmission range was minimal, maybe twenty-five yards
at most, depending on how much metal was in the building.