Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

“Hello, I’m Harry Bosch,” he said.

He reached his hand down to her and she shook it.

“Olivia,” she said. “Please have a seat.”

Bosch sat in a wicker chair across a small glass-topped table from her. There was a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the table and he accepted her offer of a glass just to be cordial. He saw a manila envelope on the table that had Do Not Bend handwritten on it and assumed it contained photos.

“So,” she said, after pouring two glasses. “You want to know about my brother. My first question is, who is it you work for?”

Bosch knew it would begin this way. He also knew that how he answered this question would determine how much cooperation and information he would get from her.

“Well, Olivia, that’s the awkward part,” he said. “I was hired by a man who wanted to find out if he had a child back in 1951. But part of the deal was that I had to agree to the strictest confidence and not reveal who my employer was to anyone until he released me from that promise. So I’m sort of caught in the middle here. It’s a catch-22 thing. I can’t tell you who hired me until I can confirm that your brother was his son. You don’t want to talk to me until I tell you who hired me.”

“Well, how will you confirm it?” she said, waving a hand helplessly. “Nicky’s been dead since 1970.”

Bosch sensed an opening.

“There are ways. This is the house where he grew up, isn’t it?”

“How do you know that?”

“The same address is on his birth certificate. The one that was filed after he was adopted. There might be something here I can use. Was his bedroom left intact?”

“What? No, that’s weird. Besides I raised three kids in this house after I moved back. We didn’t have room to turn his bedroom into a museum. Nicky’s stuff, what’s left of it, is up in the attic.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know. His war stuff. The things he sent back and then what they sent back after he got killed. My parents kept it all and after I moved in here I shoved it all up there. I wasn’t interested in it but my mother made me promise not to throw it away.”

Bosch nodded. He had to find a way to get up into the attic.

“Are your parents alive?” he asked.

“My father died twenty-five years ago. My mother’s alive but she doesn’t know what day it is or who she is anymore. She’s at a facility where they take good care of her. It’s just me here now. Divorced, kids grown and out on their own.”

Bosch had gotten her talking without her coming back to her demand to know who his employer was. He knew he had to keep that going and drive the conversation back around to the attic and what was up there.

“So you said on the phone that your brother knew he was adopted.”

“Yes, he did,” she said. “We both did.”

“Were you also born at St. Helen’s?”

She nodded.

“I came first,” she said. “My adoptive parents were white and I obviously was brown. It was very white out here back then and they thought it would be good for me to have a sibling who was the same. So they went back to St. Helen’s and got Dominick.”

“You said your brother knew his birth mother’s name. Vibiana. How did he know that? That was usually kept from everybody — at least back then.”

“You’re right, it was. I never knew my mother’s name or what the story was there. When Nicky was born he was already set to go to my parents. They were waiting for him. But he was sick and the doctors wanted him to stay with his mother for a while and have her milk. It was something like that.”

“And so your parents met her.”

“Exactly. For a few days they visited and spent some time with her, I guess. Later on, when we were growing up, it was pretty obvious we didn’t look like our two Italian-American parents, so we asked questions. They told us we were adopted and the only thing they knew was that Nicky’s mother was named Vibiana, because they met her before she gave him up.”

It didn’t appear that Dominick and Olivia were told the full story about what had happened to Vibiana, whether their adoptive parents knew it or not.

“Do you know if your brother ever tried to find his mother and father when he was growing up?”

“Not that I know of. We knew what that place was, St. Helen’s. It’s where babies were born that were unwanted. I never tried to find my naturals. I didn’t care. I don’t think Nicky did either.”

Bosch noted a slight tone of bitterness in her voice. More than sixty years later she clearly harbored an animosity toward the parents who gave her up. He knew it would not serve him here to tell her he didn’t agree that all the babies were unwanted at St. Helen’s. Some mothers, maybe all of them back then, had no choice in the matter.

He decided to move the conversation in a new direction. He took a drink of iced tea, complimented her on it, and then nodded at the envelope on the table.

“Are those photos?” he asked.

“I thought you might want to see him,” she said. “There’s also a story about him from the paper.”

She opened the envelope and passed Bosch a stack of photos and a folded newspaper clipping. They had all faded and yellowed over time.

He looked at the clipping first, carefully unfolding it so it wouldn’t split along the crease. It was impossible to determine what newspaper it had come from but the contents of the story made it seem very local. The headline read, “Oxnard Athlete Killed in Vietnam” and the story confirmed much of what Bosch had already deduced. Santanello was killed when he and four Marines were returning from a mission in the Tay Ninh Province. The helicopter they were in was hit by sniper fire and crashed in a rice paddy. The story said Santanello was an all-around athlete who had played varsity football, basketball, and baseball at Oxnard High. The story quoted Santanello’s mother as saying her son had been very proud to serve his country despite the antiwar sentiment back home at the time.

Bosch refolded the clipping and handed it back to Olivia. He then took up the photos. They appeared to be in chronological order, showing Dominick as a boy growing into a teenager. There were shots of him at the beach, playing basketball, riding a bike. There was a photo of him in a baseball uniform and another of him and a girl in formal wear. A family shot included him with his sister and adoptive parents. He studied Olivia as a young girl. She was pretty and she and Dominick looked like real siblings. Their complexions, eyes, and hair color were a full match.

The last photo in the stack showed Dominick in his Navy dungarees, Dixie Cup sailor’s cap tilted back, his hair high and tight with sidewalls. He was standing with hands on hips, with a manicured green field behind him. It didn’t look like Vietnam to Bosch and the smile was the kind of careless, naive expression worn by someone who had not yet gotten his first taste of war. Bosch guessed it was from basic training.

“I love that photo,” Olivia said. “It’s so Nick.”

“Where did he go for basic?” Bosch asked.

“San Diego area. Hospital corps school at Balboa, then combat training and the field medical school at Pendleton.”

“Did you ever go down there and see him?”

“Only one time, when we went down for his graduation from hospital school. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

Bosch glanced down at the photo. He noticed something and looked closer. The shirt Santanello wore was very wrinkled from being hand-washed and wrung out, so it was difficult to read, but the name stenciled on the shirt over the pocket looked like it said Lewis, not Santanello.

“The name on the shirt is—”

“Lewis. Yeah, that’s why he’s smiling like that. He switched shirts with a friend of his named Lewis who couldn’t pass a swim test. They all wore the same thing, they all had the same haircut. The only way to tell them apart was the names stenciled on the shirts, and that’s all the training people checked off when they did testing. So Lewis didn’t know how to swim and Nicky went over to the pool wearing his shirt. He got checked in under his name and took the test for him.”