Michael Connelly (82 page)

Bosch drove through the plush desert communities of Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage without stopping, passing streets named
after golfing presidents and celebrities. As he passed Bob Hope Drive, Bosch recalled the time he saw the comedian in Vietnam.
He had just come in from thirteen days of clearing Charlie’s tunnels in the Cu Chi province and thought the evening of watching
Hope was hilarious. Years later he had seen a clip of the same show on a television retrospective on the comedian. This time,
the performance made him feel sad. After Rancho Mirage, he caught Route 86 and was heading directly south.

The open road always presented a quiet thrill to Bosch. The feeling of going someplace new coupled with the unknown. He believed
he did some of his best thinking while driving the open road. He now reviewed his search of Moore’s apartment and tried to
look for hidden meanings or messages. The ragged furniture, the empty suitcase, the lonely skin mag, the empty frame. Moore
left behind a puzzling presence. He thought of the bag of photos again. Sylvia had changed her mind and taken it. Bosch wished
he had borrowed the photo of the two boys, and the one of the father and son.

• • •

Bosch had no photographs of his own father. He had told Sylvia that he hadn’t known him, but that had been only partially
true. He had grown up not knowing and not, at least outwardly, caring who he was. But when he returned from the war he came
back with a sense of urgency to know about his origins. It led him to seek out his father after twenty years of not even knowing
his name.

Harry had been raised in a series of youth shelters and foster homes after authorities took him from his mother’s custody.
In the dormitories at McClaren or San Fernando or the other halls, he was comforted by his mother’s steady visits, except
during the times she was in jail. She told him they couldn’t send him to a foster home without her consent. She had a good
lawyer, she said, trying to get him back.

On the day the housemother at McClaren told him the visits were over because his mother was dead, he took the news unlike
most boys of eleven. Outwardly, he showed nothing. He nodded that he understood and then walked away. But that day during
the swimming period, he dove to the bottom of the deep end and screamed so loud and long that he was sure the noise was breaking
through the surface and would draw the attention of the lifeguard. After each breath on top, he would go back down. He screamed
and cried until he was so exhausted he could only cling to the pool’s ladder, its cold steel tubes the arms that comforted
him. Somehow he wished he could have been there. That was all. He somehow wanted to have protected her.

He was termed ATA after that. Available to Adopt. He began to move through a procession of foster homes where he was made
to feel as though he was on tryout. When expectations were not met, it was on to the next house and the next pair of judges.
He was once sent back to McClaren because of his habit of eating with his mouth open. And once before he was sent to a home
in the Valley, the Choosers, as they were called by the ATAs, took Harry and several other thirteen-year-olds out to the rec
field to throw a baseball around. Harry was the one chosen. He soon realized it was not because he exhibited the sterling
virtues of boyhood. It was because the man had been looking for a lefthander. His plan was to develop a pitcher and lefthanders
were the premium. After two months of daily workouts, pitching lessons and oral education on pitching strategies, Harry ran
away from the home. It was six weeks before the cops later picked him up on Hollywood Boulevard. He was sent back to McClaren
to await the next set of Choosers. You always had to stand up straight and smile when the Choosers came through the dorm.

He began his search for his father at the county recorder’s office. The 1950 birth records of Hieronymus Bosch at Queen of
Angels Hospital listed his mother as Margerie Philips Lowe and his father’s name as his own: Hieronymus Bosch. But Harry,
of course, knew this was not the case. His mother had once told him he was the namesake of an artist whose work she admired.
She said the painter’s five-hundred-year-old paintings were apt portraits of present L.A., a nightmarish landscape of predators
and victims. She told him she would tell him his true father’s name when the time was right. She was found dead in an alley
off Hollywood Boulevard before that time came.

Harry hired a lawyer to petition the presiding judge of the juvenile dependency court to allow him to examine his own custody
records. The request was granted and Bosch spent several days in the county Hall of Records archive. The voluminous documents
given to him chronicled the unsuccessful lengths his mother had gone to keep custody of him. Bosch found it spiritually reassuring,
but nowhere in the files was the name of the father. Bosch was at a dead end but wrote down the name of the lawyer who had
filed all the papers in his mother’s quest. J. Michael Haller. In writing it down, Bosch realized he knew the name. Mickey
Haller had been one of L.A.’s premier criminal defense attorneys. He had handled one of the Manson girls. In the late fifties
he had won an acquittal for the so-called Highwayman, a highway patrol officer accused of raping seven women he had stopped
for speeding on lonely stretches of the Golden State. What was J. Michael Haller doing on a child custody case?

On nothing more than a hunch, Bosch went to the Criminal Courts Building and ordered all of his mother’s cases from archives.
In sorting through them, he found that in addition to the custody battle Haller had represented Margerie P. Lowe on six loitering
arrests between 1948 and 1961. That was well into Haller’s time as a top trial lawyer.

In his gut, Harry knew then.

The receptionist in the five-name law office on the top floor of a Pershing Square tower told Bosch that Haller had retired
recently because of a medical condition. The phone book didn’t list his residence but the roll of registered voters did. Haller
was a Democrat and he lived on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. Bosch would always remember the rosebushes that lined the walkway
to his father’s mansion. They were perfect roses.

The maid who answered the door said Mr. Haller was not seeing visitors. Bosch told the woman to tell Mr. Haller it was Margerie
Lowe’s son come to pay his respects. Ten minutes later he was led past members of the lawyer’s family. All of them standing
in the hallway with strange looks on their faces. The old man had told them to leave his room and send Bosch in alone. Standing
at the bedside, Harry figured him for maybe ninety pounds now, and he didn’t need to ask what was wrong because he could tell
cancer was eating away at him from the inside out.

“I guess I know why you’ve come,” he rasped.

“I just wanted to …I don’t know.”

He stood there in silence for quite a time, watching how it wore the man out just to keep his eyes open. There was a tube
from a box on the bedside that ran under the covers. The box beeped every once in a while as it pumped pain-killing morphine
into the dying man’s blood. The old man studied him silently.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Bosch finally said. “I don’t know, I think I just wanted to let you know I made it by okay.
I’m all right. In case you ever worried.”

“You have been to the war?”

“Yes. I’m done with that.”

“My son — my other son, he …I kept him away from that. …What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

After some more silence the old man seemed to nod. He said, “You are called Harry. Your mother told me that. She told me a
lot about you. …But I could never….Do you understand? Different times. And after it went by so long, I couldn’t. …I couldn’t
reverse things.”

Bosch just nodded. He hadn’t come to cause the man any more pain. More silence passed and he heard the labored breathing.

“Harry Haller,” the old man whispered then, a broken smile on the thin, peeling lips burned by chemotherapy. “That could have
been you. Did you ever read Hesse?”

Bosch didn’t understand but nodded again. There was a beep sound. He watched for a minute until the dosage seemed to take
some effect. The old man’s eyes closed and he sighed.

“I better get going,” Harry said. “You take care.”

He touched the man’s frail, bluish hand. It gripped his fingers tightly, almost desperately, and then let go. As he stepped
to the door, he heard the old man’s rasp.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said I did. I did worry about you.”

There was a tear running down the side of the old man’s face, into his white hair. Bosch nodded again and two weeks later
he stood on a hill above the Good Shepherd section at Forest Lawn and watched them put the father he never knew in the ground.
During the ceremony, he saw a grouping that he suspected was his half brother and three half sisters. The half brother, probably
born a few years ahead of Bosch, was watching Harry during the ceremony. At the end, Bosch turned and walked away.

• • •

Near ten o’clock Bosch stopped at a roadside diner called El Oasis Verde and ate huevos rancheros. His table was at a window
that looked out at the blue-white sheath called the Salton Sea and then farther east to the Chocolate Mountains. Bosch silently
reveled in the beauty and the openness of the scene. When he was done, and the waitress had refilled his Thermos, he walked
out into the dirt parking lot and leaned against the fender of the Caprice to breathe the cool, clean air and look again.

The half brother was now a top defense lawyer and Harry was a cop. There was a strange congruence to that that Bosch found
acceptable. They had never spoken and probably never would.

He continued south as 86 ran along the flats between the Salton Sea and the Santa Rosa Mountains. It was agricultural land
that steadily dropped below sea level. The Imperial Valley. Much of it was cut in huge squares by irrigation ditches and his
drive was accompanied by the smell of fertilizer and fresh vegetables. Flatbed trucks, loaded with crates of lettuce or spinach
or cilantro, occasionally pulled off the farm roads in front of him and slowed him down. But Harry didn’t mind and waited
patiently to pass.

Near a town called Vallecito, Bosch pulled to the side of the road to watch a squad of low-flying aircraft come screaming
over a mountain that rose to the southwest. They crossed 86 and flew out over the Salton. Bosch knew nothing about identifying
war aircraft in the modern era. These jets had evolved into faster and sleeker machines than those he remembered from Vietnam.
But they had flown low enough for him to clearly see that beneath each craft’s wings hung the hardware of war. He watched
the three jets bank and come about in a tight triangle pattern and retrace their path back to the mountain. After they crossed
above him, Harry looked down at his maps and found blocks marked off to the southwest as closed to the public. It was the
U.S. Naval Gunnery Range at Superstition Mountain. The map said it was a live bombing area. Keep out.

Bosch felt a dull vibration rock the car slightly and then the following rumble. He looked up from the map and thought he
could make out the plume of smoke beginning to rise from the base of Superstition. Then he felt and heard another bomb hit.
Then another.

As the jets, the silvery skin of each reflecting a diamond of sunlight, passed overhead again to begin another run, Bosch
pulled back onto the road behind a flatbed truck with two teenagers in the back. They were Mexican field-workers with weary
eyes that seemed already knowledgeable about the long, hard life ahead of them. They were about the same age as the two boys
on the picnic table in the photo that had been in the white bag. They stared at Bosch with indifference.

In a few moments it was clear to pass the slow-moving truck. Bosch heard other explosions from Superstition Mountain as he
moved away. He went on to pass more farms and mom-and-pop restaurants. He passed a sugar mill where a line painted at the
top of its huge silo marked sea level.

• • •

The summer after he had talked to his father Bosch had picked up the books by Hesse. He was curious about what the old man
had meant. He found it in the second book he read. Harry Haller was a character in it. A disillusioned loner, a man of no
real identity, Harry Haller was the steppenwolf.

That August Bosch joined the cops.

• • •

He believed he felt the land rising. The farmland gave way to brown brush and there were dust devils rising in the open land.
His ears popped as he ascended. And he knew the border was nearing long before he passed the green sign that told him Calexico
was twenty miles away.

Calexico was like most border towns: dusty and built low to the ground, its main street a garish collision of neon and plastic
signage, the inevitable golden arches being the recognizable if not comforting icon amid the drive-through Mexican auto insurance
offices and souvenir shops.

In town, Route 86 connected with 111 and dropped straight down to the border crossroad. Traffic was backed up about five blocks
from the exhaust-stained concrete auto terminal manned by the Mexican
federales
. It looked like the five o’clock lineup at the Broadway entrance to the 101 in L.A. Before he got caught up in it, Bosch
turned east on Fifth Street. He passed the De Anza Hotel and drove two blocks to the police station. It was a one-story concrete-block
affair that was painted the same yellow as the tablets lawyers used. From the signs out front, Bosch learned it was also Town
Hall. It was also the town fire station. It was also the historical society. He found a parking space in front.