Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

Bosch experienced a sense of déjà vu as he looked through the contents. He had also read Tolkien in Vietnam. It was a popular book among combat veterans, a rich fantasy about another world that took them away from the reality of where they were and what they were doing. Bosch studied the names of the bands and performers on the plastic cassette cases and remembered hearing the same music while in Vietnam: Hendrix, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, and others.

Along with that familiarity came his experience and knowledge of how things worked in Southeast Asia. The same Vietnamese girls who sold the necklaces at the White Elephant landing docks at Da Nang also sold pre-rolled joints in ten packs that fit perfectly into cigarette packs for easy transport into the bush. If you wanted fifty joints you bought a Coke can with a false top. Use of marijuana was widespread and open, the popular view being “What’s the worst that can happen if I get caught, they send me to Vietnam?”

Bosch opened the carton of Lucky Strikes now and pulled out a pack. As he suspected, it contained ten expertly rolled joints neatly wrapped in foil for freshness. He assumed each of the packs in the carton would be the same. Santanello had likely taken up a regular habit of getting high while in the service and wanted to make sure he had an ample supply to bridge his return home.

It was all mildly interesting to Bosch because it drew on his own memories of his time in Vietnam, but he didn’t readily see anything in the box that might lead him further toward confirming Whitney Vance’s paternity of Dominick Santanello. That was his purpose here — confirmation of paternity. If he was going to report to Vance that his bloodline had ended in a helo crash in the Tay Ninh Province, then he had to make every effort to be sure he was telling the old man the truth.

He repacked the cigarette carton and put it to the side. He lifted out the boxes containing the camera and the cassette recorder next, and just as he was wondering where the photos were that went with the camera, he saw that the bottom of the box was spread with a cache of black-and-white photos and envelopes containing strips of film negatives. The photos appeared to be well preserved because they had not been exposed to light in decades.

He removed the two rows of cassette tapes next so he would be able to access the photos. He wondered if Santanello had purposely tried to hide them from his family in case they opened the box before he arrived home. Bosch pushed them into a single stack and then brought them out of the box.

There were forty-two photos in all and they ran the gamut of Vietnam experiences. There were shots from the bush, shots of Vietnamese girls at the White Elephant, shots taken on the hospital ship Bosch recognized as the Sanctuary , and, ironically, shots taken from helicopters flying over the bush and the seemingly endless grids of rice paddies.

Bosch had pushed the stack together in an order that was neither chronological nor thematic. It was a hodgepodge of images that again felt all too familiar. But those misty feelings crystallized into a hard memory when he came across three consecutive shots of the upper deck of the Sanctuary crowded with a couple hundred wounded servicemen for a Christmas Eve show featuring Bob Hope and Connie Stevens. In the first photo the two performers stood side by side, Stevens’s mouth open in song, the faces of the soldiers in the front row in rapt attention. The second photo focused on the crowd at the point of the bow, Monkey Mountain seen in the distance across the water. The third photo showed Hope waving good-bye to a standing ovation at the end of the show.

Bosch had been there. Wounded by a bamboo spear in a tunnel, he had been treated on the Sanctuary for four weeks in December 1969. The wound itself had healed quickly but the infection it had brought into his body had been more resistant. He’d lost twenty pounds off his already lean frame during treatment on the hospital ship but by the last week of the month he had recovered his health enough to receive Return to Duty orders for the day after Christmas.

Hope and his troupe had been scheduled for weeks and Bosch, like everybody else on board, had been looking forward to seeing the legendary entertainer and his featured guest, Stevens, a well-known actress and singer Bosch recognized from appearances on the television shows Hawaiian Eye and 77 Sunset Strip .

But on Christmas Eve high winds and heavy seas swept across the South China Sea and were having their way with the ship. The men on board started to gather on the upper deck, when four helicopters carrying Hope, his entertainers, and the band that would back them approached the fantail. But as the choppers got close it was determined that landing on the unstable ship was too risky. The Sanctuary had been built before helicopters had even been invented. A small landing pad built on the fantail looked like a moving postage stamp from the air.

The men watched as the helicopters turned and headed back toward Da Nang. A communal groan moved through the crowd. The men slowly started moving off deck and back to their berths when someone looked back toward Da Nang and yelled, “Wait — they’re coming back!”

He was only partially right. One of the four helicopters had turned again and was coming back to the Sanctuary . Its pilot made landing after three tense attempts and out of the sliding door climbed Bob Hope, along with Connie Stevens, Neil Armstrong, and a jazz saxophonist named Quentin McKinzie.

The roar that went up from the crowd returning to the deck could put an electric surge down Bosch’s spine when he thought about it almost fifty years later. They had no backup band and no backup singers, but Hope and company had told the pilot to turn that slick around and land it. Hell, Neil Armstrong had landed on the fucking moon five months earlier; how hard could it be to put a chopper down on a boat?

Armstrong offered words of encouragement to the troops and McKinzie laid down some solo licks on his axe. Hope told his one-liners and Stevens sang a cappella, breaking hearts with a slow rendition of the Judy Collins hit “Both Sides Now.” Bosch remembered it as one of his best days as a soldier.

Years later as an LAPD detective Bosch was called upon to provide plainclothes security at the Shubert Theatre for the West Coast premiere of a musical called Mamma Mia! A huge VIP turnout was expected, and the LAPD was asked to supplement the theater’s own security. Standing in the front lobby, his eyes moving across faces and hands, Bosch suddenly saw Connie Stevens among the VIPs. Like a stalker he moved through the crowd toward her. He took his badge off his belt and palmed it in case he needed it to cut through and get closer. But he got to her without issue and when there was a pause in her conversations he said, “Ms. Stevens?”

She looked at him and he tried to tell the story. That he was there that day on the Sanctuary when she and Bob Hope and the others had made the pilot turn that helicopter around. He wanted to tell her what it had meant then and now but something caught in his throat and words were difficult. All he could manage to say was “Christmas Eve, 1969. Hospital ship.”

She looked at him for a moment and understood, then just pulled him into a hug. She whispered into his ear, “The Sanctuary . You made it home.”

Bosch nodded and they separated. Without thinking he put his badge into her hand. He then moved away, back into the crowd to do his job. He caught several weeks of hell from the other detectives at Hollywood Division after he reported losing his badge. But he remembered seeing Connie Stevens at the Shubert as one of his best days as a cop.