Michael Connelly (38 page)

Binh owned the building his office and discount video equipment store was based in. It was a 1930s auto showroom that had
been converted years before Binh had ever seen it. Unreinforced concrete block fronted with wide picture windows and guaranteed
to come down in a decent shaker. But for someone who had made it out of Vietnam the way Binh had, earthquakes were probably
viewed as a minor inconvenience, not a risk.

After they found an empty parking space across the street from Ben’s Electronics, Bosch told Eleanor he wanted her to handle
the questioning, at least at first. Bosch said he figured that Binh might be more inclined to talk to the feds than to the
locals. They decided on a plan to small-talk him and then ask about Tran. Bosch didn’t tell her that he also had a second
plan in mind.

“Doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place run by a guy with a box full of diamonds in a bank vault,” Bosch said as they
got out of the car.

“That is
had
in the bank,” she said. “And remember, he couldn’t flaunt that stuff. He had to be like every other Joe Immigrant. The appearance
of living day to day. The diamonds, if there were any, were the collateral for this place, for his American success story.
But it had to look like he made it from scratch.”

“Wait a second,” Bosch said as they got to the other side of the street. He told Eleanor he had forgotten to ask Jerry Edgar
to fill in on a court appearance for him that afternoon. He pointed to a pay phone at a service station next to Binh’s building
and trotted over. Eleanor stayed behind, looking in the windows of the store.

Bosch called Edgar but didn’t say anything about a court appearance.

“Jed, I need a favor. You won’t even have to get up.”

Edgar hesitated, as Bosch thought he would.

“What do you need?”

“You aren’t supposed to say it like that. You’re supposed to say, ‘Sure, Harry, what do you need?’”

“Come on, Harry, we both know we’re under the glass. We’ve got to be careful. Tell me what you need. I’ll tell you if I can
do it.”

“All I want you to do is buzz me in ten minutes. I need to get out of a meeting. Just buzz me, and when I call in, just put
the phone down for a couple minutes. And if I don’t call in, buzz me again in five minutes. That’s it.”

“That’s all you need? Just the buzz?”

“Right. Ten minutes from now.”

“Okay, Harry,” Edgar said, relief in his voice. “Hey, I heard about your thing last night. That was close. And word around
here is that it wasn’t no drunk driver. You watch your ass.”

“Always. What’s going on with Sharkey?”

“Nothing. I ran down his crew like you told me. Two of ’em told me they were with him that night. I think they were rolling
faggots. They said they lost sight of him after he got in a car. That was a couple hours before the desk got the call that
he was in the tunnel up at the bowl. I figure whoever was in that car did him.”

“Description?”

“The car? Not very good. Dark color, American sedan. Something new. That’s about it.”

“What kind of headlights?”

“Well, I showed ’em the car book and they picked different taillights. One guy’s got round, the other says rectangle. But
on the headlights. They both said they —”

“Square, side-by-side squares.”

“Right. Hey, Harry, you thinking this is the car that came down on you and the FBI woman? Jesus! We ought to get together
on this.”

“Later. Maybe later. Meantime, buzz me in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes, right.”

Bosch hung up and went back to Eleanor, who was looking through the plate-glass window at the ghetto blasters on display.
They entered the store, shook off two salesmen, walked around a stack of boxed camcorders on sale for $500 each and told a
woman standing at a cash register station in the back that they were there to see Binh. The woman stared blankly at them until
Eleanor showed her badge and federal ID card.

“You wait here,” the woman said and then disappeared through a door located behind the cash counter. There was a small mirrored
window in the door that reminded Bosch of the interview room back at Wilcox. He looked at his watch. He had eight minutes.

• • •

The man who emerged from the door behind the cash register looked to be about sixty years old. He had white hair. He was short
but Bosch could tell he had once been physically powerful for his size. Built wide and low to the ground, he now was softened
by an easier life than he had had in his native land. He wore silver-framed glasses with a pink tint and an open-collar shirt
and golf slacks. His breast pocket sagged with the weight of almost a dozen pens and a clip-on pocket flashlight. Ngo Van
Binh was low key all the way.

“Mr. Binh? My name is Eleanor Wish. I am from the FBI. This is Detective Bosch, LAPD. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes,” he said, the stern expression on his face unchanging.

“It’s about the break-in at the bank where you had a safe-deposit box.”

“I reported no loss, my deposit box had sentimental occupants only.”

Diamonds ranked fairly high up there on the sentimental range, Bosch thought. “Mr. Binh, can we go back to your office and
talk privately?” he said instead.

“Yes, but I suffered no loss. You look. It is in the reports.”

Eleanor held her hand out, urging Binh to lead the way. They followed him through the door with the mirror window and into
a warehouselike storage room. There were hundreds of boxes of electronic appliances on steel shelves going to the ceiling.
They passed through into a smaller room that was a repair or assembly shop. There was a woman sitting at a tool bench with
a bowl of soup held to her mouth. She did not look up as they passed. There were two doors at the back of the shop, and the
procession went through one into Binh’s office. It was here that Binh shed his peasant trappings. The office was large and
plush, with a desk and two chairs to the right and a dark leather L-shaped couch to the left. The couch was at the edge of
an Oriental rug that featured a three-headed dragon poised to strike. The couch faced two walls of shelves filled by books
and stereo and video equipment, much finer than what Bosch had seen out front. We should have braced him at his home, Bosch
thought. Seen how he lived, not how he worked.

Bosch quickly scanned the room and saw a white telephone on the desk. It would be perfect. It was an antique, the kind where
the handset was cradled above a rotary dial. Binh moved toward his desk but Bosch quickly spoke up.

“Mr. Binh? Would it be okay if we sat over here on the couch? We’d like to keep this as informal as possible. We sit at desks
all day, to tell you the truth.”

Binh shrugged his shoulders as though it made no difference to him, that they were inconveniencing him no matter where they
sat. It was a distinctly American gesture, and Bosch believed his seeming difficulty with English was a front used to better
insulate him. Binh sat down on one side of the L-shaped couch and Eleanor and Bosch took the other. “Nice office,” Bosch said
and looked around. He saw no other phone in the room.

Binh nodded. He offered no tea or coffee, no small talk. He just said, “What do you want, please?”

Bosch looked at Eleanor.

She said, “Mr. Binh, we are just retracing our steps. You reported no financial loss in the vault break-in. We —”

“That is right. No loss.”

“That is correct. What did you keep in the box?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Papers and such, no value. I told this to everyone already.”

“Yes, we know. We are sorry to bother you again. But the case remains open and we have to go back and see if we missed anything.
Could you tell me in specific detail what papers you lost? It might help us, if we make a recovery of property and can identify
who it belongs to.”

Eleanor took a small notebook and pen out of her purse. Binh looked at his two visitors as if he could not possibly see how
his information could help. Bosch said, “You’d be surprised sometimes what little things can —”

His pager tone sounded and Bosch pulled the device off his belt and looked at the number display. He stood up and looked around,
as if he was just noticing the room for the first time. He wondered if he was overdoing it.

“Mr. Binh, can I use your phone? It’ll be local.”

Binh nodded, and Bosch walked to the front of the desk, leaned over and picked up the handset. He made a show of checking
the pager number again, then dialed Edgar’s number. He remained standing with his back to Eleanor and Binh. He looked up at
the wall, as if studying the silk tapestry that hung there. He heard Binh begin to describe to Eleanor the immigration and
citizenship papers that had been taken from his safe-deposit box. Bosch put the pager in his coat pocket and came out with
the small pocketknife, the T-9 phone bug and the small battery he had disconnected from his own phone.

“This is Bosch, who paged me?” he said into the phone when Edgar picked up. After Edgar put the phone down, he said, “I’ll
hold a few minutes, but tell him I’m in the middle of an interview. What’s so important?”

With his back still to the couch and Binh still talking, Bosch turned slightly to the right and cocked his head as if he were
holding the phone to his left ear, where Binh could not see it. Bosch brought the handset down to stomach level, used the
knife to pop off the earpiece cover — clearing his throat as he did this — and then pulled out the audio receiver. With one
hand he connected the bug to its battery — he had practiced doing it earlier while waiting for the new car in the fleet yard
at Wilcox. Then he used his fingers to shove the bug and battery into the barrel of the handset. He put the receiver back
in and snapped on the cover, coughing loudly to camouflage any sound.

“Okay,” Bosch said into the phone. “Well, tell him I’ll call back when I am through here. Thanks, man.”

He put the phone back on the desk while returning the knife to his pocket. He went back to the couch, where Eleanor was writing
in a notebook. When she was finished she looked at Bosch and Bosch knew without any sign that now the interview would shift
into a new direction.

“Mr. Binh,” she said. “Are you sure that is all you had in the box?”

“Yes, sure, why do you ask me so much?”

“Mr. Binh, we know who you are and the circumstances of your coming to this country. We know you were a police officer.”

“Yes, so? What’s it mean?”

“We also know other things —”

“We know,” Bosch cut in, “you were very highly paid as a police officer in Saigon, Mr. Binh. We know that for some of your
work you were paid in diamonds.”

“What does this mean, what he says?” Binh said, looking at Eleanor and gesturing with his hand to Bosch. He was lapsing into
the defense of language barrier. He seemed to know less English as the interview went on.

“It means what he says,” she answered. “We know about the diamonds you brought here from Vietnam, Captain Binh. We know you
kept them in the safe-deposit box. We believe the diamonds were the motivation for the vault break-in.”

The news didn’t shake him, he may have already considered as much. He did not move. He said, “This not true.”

“Mr. Binh, we’ve got your package,” Bosch said. “We know all about you. We know what you were in Saigon, what you did. We
know what you took with you when you came here. I don’t know what you are into now — it all looks legit, but we don’t really
care. What we do care about is who ripped off that bank. And they ripped it off because of you. They took the collateral for
all this and everything else you’ve got. Now, I don’t think we are telling you something that you probably haven’t figured
out or thought about on your own. In fact, you might have even thought your old partner Nguyen Tran was behind it because
he knew what you had and maybe where it was. Not a bad guess, but we don’t think so. In fact, we think he is next on the list.”

Not a crack formed on the stone that was Binh’s face.

“Mr. Binh, we want to talk to Tran,” Bosch said. “Where is he?”

Binh looked down through the coffee table in front of him to the three-headed dragon on the rug beneath it. He put his hands
together on his lap, shook his head and said, “Who is this Tran?”

Eleanor glared at Bosch and tried to salvage what rapport she had had with the man before he butted in.

“Captain Binh, we’re not interested in taking any action against you. We simply want to stop another vault break-in before
it happens. Can you help us, please?”

Binh didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands.

“Look, Binh, I don’t know what you’ve got going on this,” Bosch said. “You might have people out there trying to find the
same people we are, I don’t know. But I’m telling you right now, you are out of it. So tell us where Tran is.”

“I don’t know this man.”

“We are your only hope. We have to get to Tran. The people that ripped you off, they are in the tunnels again. Right now.
If we don’t get to Tran this weekend, there won’t be anything left for you or him.”

Binh remained a stone, as Bosch expected. Eleanor stood up.

“Think about it, Mr. Binh,” she said.

“We’re running out of time, and so is your old partner,” Bosch said as they headed for the door.

• • •

After walking through the showroom door Bosch looked both ways for traffic and ran across Vermont to the car. Eleanor walked
it, anger making her strides stiff and jerky. Bosch got in and reached to the floor behind the front seat for the Nagra. He
turned it on and set the recording speed at its fastest level. He didn’t think the wait would be long. He hoped all the electronic
equipment in the store would not skew the reception. Eleanor got in the passenger side and started to complain.

“That was magnificent,” she said. “We’ll never get anything out of that guy now. He’s just going to call up Tran and — what
the hell is that?”

“Something I picked up from the shooflies. They dropped a bug in my phone. Oldest trick in the IAD book.”