Майкл Коннелли: Two Kinds of Truth

After parking in the carport, Bosch skipped the side-door entrance to the house and walked out front so he could check his mailbox. He saw that the top of the box attached to the house was held open by a thick manila envelope. He pulled it out and held it under the porch light to see where it had come from.

There was no return address and no postage on the envelope. Even his own address was missing. The envelope had only his name written on it. Bosch unlocked the door and carried it inside. He put the envelope and the mail he had received down on the kitchen counter while he opened the refrigerator to grab a beer.

After his first draw on the amber bottle, he tore open the envelope. He slid out a one-inch-thick sheaf of documents. He recognized the top report right away. It was a copy of the initial incident report relating to Danielle Skyler’s murder in 1987. Bosch riffled through the stack of documents and quickly determined that he had a copy of the current investigative file.

Lucia Soto had come through.

Bosch was dead tired but he knew that he would not be going to sleep anytime soon. He dumped the rest of the beer down the drain, then brewed a cup of coffee on the Keurig his daughter had given him for Christmas. He grabbed the stack of documents and went to work.

After his daughter had left for college, and family dinners became a rare occurrence, Bosch turned the dining room of the small house into a workspace. The table became a desk wide enough to spread investigative reports across — reports from cases he was pulling out of the jail cell at San Fernando or that he had taken on privately. He had also installed shelving on the two walls of the alcove and these were lined with more files and books on legal procedure and the California penal code as well as stacks of CDs and a Bose player for use when his vinyl collection and phonograph didn’t cover his musical needs.

Bosch slotted a disc called Chemistry in the Bose and put the volume at midrange. It was an album of duets between Houston Person on tenor sax and Ron Carter on double bass. It was part of an ongoing musical conversation, their fifth and most recent collaboration, and Bosch had the earlier recordings on vinyl. It was perfect for midnight work. He took his usual spot at the table, with his back to the shelves and the music, and started going through the cache of documents.

Initially he divided the documents along lines of old and new. Reports from the original investigation of Danielle Skyler’s murder — many of which he had written himself thirty years before — went into one pile, while the newer reports, prepared during the current reinvestigation, went into a second stack.

While he clearly remembered the original investigation, he knew that many of the small details of the case had receded in his memory and that it was prudent for him to start with the old before reviewing the new. He was first drawn to the chronological record, which was always the starting point for reviewing a case. It was essentially a case diary — a string of brief dated and timed entries describing the investigative moves made by Bosch and his partner, Frankie Sheehan. Many of the entries would be expanded upon in summary reports but the chrono was the place to start for a step-by-step overview of the investigation.

There was not a single computer in the Robbery-Homicide Division in 1987. Reports were either handwritten or typed out on IBM Selectrics. Most of the time chronos were handwritten. They were on lined paper in section 1 of the murder book. Each investigator, including those filling in or handling ancillary case tasks, would follow their own entries in the log with their initials, even though the different handwriting styles made the identity of the author obvious in most cases.

Bosch was looking at photocopies of the original case chrono and recognized his handwriting as well as Sheehan’s. He also recognized the two different report-writing styles he and Sheehan employed. Sheehan, who was the more experienced of their team, used fewer words and often wrote in incomplete sentences. Bosch was more verbose, a characteristic of his report writing that would change over time as he learned what Sheehan already knew: less is more, meaning the less time you spent on paperwork, the more time you had to follow the leads of the case. And fewer words on the page also meant fewer words for a defense attorney to twist into his own interpretation in court.

Bosch had gotten his detective’s badge in 1977 and spent five years working in various divisions and crime units before he was promoted to homicide detective and posted first at Hollywood Division and then eventually the elite Robbery-Homicide Division working out of Parker Center, downtown. At RHD he was paired with Sheehan, and the Skyler case was one of the first murders they handled as lead investigators.

Danielle Skyler’s story was the universal story of Los Angeles, with an added irony of origin. Raised by a single mother who worked as a motel maid in Hollywood, Florida, she filled the holes in her life with applause that came with success in beauty pageants and on the high school stage. Armed with her beauty and fragile confidence, she crossed the three thousand miles from Hollywood to Hollywood at age twenty. She found, as most do, that there was one of her from every small town in America. The paying jobs were few and she was often taken advantage of by the leeches who were part of the entertainment industry. But she persevered. She waited on tables, took acting classes, and went to an endless string of auditions for parts that usually didn’t have character names or many lines.

She also built a community — young men and women engaged in the same struggle for success and fame. She saw many of them at the same auditions and casting offices. They traded tips on jobs both in entertainment and hospitality — meaning the restaurant business. By the time she was five years into the struggle, she had managed to amass a handful of movie and TV credits where she was primarily cast as eye candy. She had also given numerous showcase performances in small playhouses across the Valley and had finally transitioned out of restaurant work to a part-time job as a receptionist for a freelance casting agent.

The five years in Los Angeles were also marked by several apartment moves, several roommate changes, and several relationships with different men ranging in age from five years younger than her to twenty-two years older. When she was found raped and strangled in the empty second bedroom of her Toluca Lake apartment, Bosch and Sheehan were faced with filling out a victim history that would take several weeks to complete.

As Bosch read through the case chronology, several details about Skyler and the moves he and Sheehan had made came back to him, and the case seemed as fresh to him as the killings in La Farmacia Familia that morning. He remembered the faces of the friends and associates interviewed and listed in the chrono. He remembered how sure he and his partner were when they zeroed in on Preston Borders.

Borders was also an actor who was struggling for a foothold in Hollywood. But he wasn’t doing it without a net. Unlike Danielle Skyler and thousands of other would-be artists who roll into L.A. each year with the certainty of the tide on Venice Beach, Borders didn’t have to work in hospitality or in phone sales or anywhere else. Borders was from a suburb of Boston and was staked by his parents in his efforts to become a movie star. His rent and car were paid for and his credit-card bills were sent to Boston. This allowed him to fill his days auditioning for film and TV roles and his nights moving through a seemingly endless rotation of clubs, where there were always numerous women like Skyler hoping for someone to clear their bar tab in exchange for a smile and conversation and maybe something more intimate if the feeling was right.