Michael Connelly: The Wrong Side of Goodbye

Sitting across the table from the two men from Pasadena, Bosch decided it was Poydras who was the dog. He kept his eyes on him.

Bosch started with a question before they could.

“How was Vance killed?” he asked.

Poydras put an uneasy smile on his face.

“We’re not going to do it that way,” he said. “We’re here to ask you questions. Not the other way around.”

Franks held up a notebook he had taken from his pocket as if to show he was there to write information down.

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Bosch replied. “If you want answers from me, then I want answers from you. We trade.”

Bosch waved a hand back and forth between them to signal equal and free trade.

“Uh, no, we don’t trade,” Franks said. “One call to Sacramento and we lift your PI license for unprofessional conduct. That’s what we do. How would that be?”

Bosch reached down to his belt and pulled his San Fernando badge off it. He tossed it down on the table in front of Franks.

“It would be okay,” he said. “I’ve got another job.”

Franks leaned forward and looked down at the badge, then smirked.

“You’re a reserve officer,” he said. “You take that and a dollar to Starbucks and they might give you a cup of coffee.”

“I was just offered full-time today,” Bosch said. “I’ll be getting the new badge tomorrow. Not that what it says on a badge matters.”

“I’m real happy for you,” Franks said.

“Go ahead and call Sacramento,” Bosch said. “See what you can get done.”

“Look, how about we stop the pissing match right here?” Poydras said. “We know all about you, Bosch. We know about your LAPD history, we know about what happened in Santa Clarita the other night. And we also know you spent an hour with Whitney Vance last week, and we’re here to find out what that was about. The man was old and he was terminal but somebody sent him to Valhalla a little early and we’re going to figure out who and why.”

Bosch paused and looked at Poydras. He had just confirmed that he had the juice in the partnership. He called the shots.

“Am I a suspect?” Bosch asked.

Franks leaned back in frustration and shook his head.

“There he goes with the questions again,” he said.

“You know the drill, Bosch,” Poydras said. “Everybody’s a suspect until they’re not.”

“I could call my lawyer right now and that would be the end of this,” Bosch said.

“Yeah, you could,” Poydras said. “If you wanted. If you had something to hide.”

He then stared at Bosch and waited. Bosch knew Poydras was counting on his loyalty to the mission. He had spent years doing what these two were doing and he knew what they faced.

“I signed a confidentiality agreement with Vance,” Bosch said.

“Vance is dead,” Franks said. “He doesn’t care.”

Bosch purposely looked at Poydras when he next spoke.

“He hired me,” Bosch said. “He paid me ten grand to find someone for him.”

“Who?” Franks asked.

“You know I can keep that confidential,” Bosch said. “Even with Vance dead.”

“And we can throw your ass in jail for withholding information in a homicide investigation,” Franks said. “You know you’ll beat it, but how long will that take? A day or two in the clink? That what you want?”

Bosch looked from Franks to Poydras.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I only want to talk to you, Poydras. Tell your partner to go sit in the car. You do that and I’ll talk to you, answer any question. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Franks said.

“Then you’re not getting what you came here to get,” Bosch said.

“Danny,” Poydras said.

His head tilted toward the door.

“You’re shitting me,” Franks said.

“Just go have a smoke,” Poydras said. “Cool off.”

Franks got up with a huff. He made a show of flipping closed his notebook, then grabbed the binder.

“You better leave that,” Bosch said. “In case I can point out things at the crime scene.”

Franks looked at Poydras, who gave a slight nod. Franks dropped the binder on the table like it was radioactive. He then left through the front door and made sure to slam it behind him.

Bosch turned his head from the door to Poydras. “If that was all a good-cop-bad-cop act, you guys are the best I’ve ever seen,” Bosch said.

“I wish,” Poydras said. “But no act. He’s just a hothead.”

“With a six handicap, right?”

“Eighteen, actually. Which is one reason he’s pissed off all the time. But let’s stay on subject now that it’s just us two talking here. Who did Vance hire you to look for?”

Bosch paused. He knew he was on the proverbial slippery slope. Anything he told the police could get out into the world before he wanted it to. But Vance’s murder changed the landscape of things and he decided it was time to give in order to get — with limitations on the give.

“He wanted to know if he had an heir,” he finally said. “He told me he got a girl pregnant at USC back in 1950. Under family pressure he more or less abandoned her. He felt guilty all his life about it and now wanted to know if she had the baby and whether he had an heir. He told me it was time to balance the books. If it turned out that he was a father, then he said he wanted to set things right before he died.”

“And did you find an heir?”

“This is where we trade. You ask a question, I ask a question.”

He waited and Poydras did the smart thing. “Ask your question.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“It doesn’t leave this room.”

“Fine with me.”

“We think he was smothered with a pillow off his office couch. He was found slumped at his desk and it looked like a natural. Old man collapses at his desk. Seen it a hundred times before. Only Kapoor at the Coroner’s Office takes the opportunity to grandstand for the media and says there will be an autopsy. He does the cut himself and finds petechial hemorrhaging. Very slight, nothing on the face. Just conjunctival petechiae.”

Poydras pointed to the corner of his left eye to illustrate. Bosch had seen it in many cases. Cutting off oxygen explodes the capillaries. The level of the struggle and the health of the victim were variables that helped define the extent of the hemorrhaging.

“How’d you keep Kapoor from holding a press conference?” Bosch asked. “He needs every bit of positive spin he can get. Discovering a murder written off as a natural is a nice story for him. Makes him look good.”

“We made a deal,” Poydras said. “He keeps it quiet and lets us work and we cut him in on the press conference when we break it open. We make him look like the hero.”

Bosch nodded approvingly. He would have done the same thing.

“So the case gets kicked over to me and Franks,” Poydras said. “Believe it or not, we’re the A team. We go back out to the house. We don’t say anything about it being a homicide. Just that we’re quality control, doing a follow-up investigation, crossing all the t ’s and dotting the i ’s. We take a few pictures and make a few measurements to make it look good, and we check the pillows on the couch and find what looks like dried saliva on a pillow. We sample it, get a DNA match to Vance, and now we have the means of murder. Somebody took the pillow, came around behind him in his chair at the desk, and held it over his face.”

“An old guy like that, not much of a struggle,” Bosch said.

“Which explains the lack of obvious hemorrhaging. Poor guy went out like a kitten.”

Bosch almost smiled at Poydras calling Vance poor.

“Still,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like something planned in advance, does it?”