Michael Connelly: The Wrong Side of Goodbye

Poydras didn’t answer.

“It’s my turn,” he said instead. “Did you find an heir?”

“I did,” Bosch said. “The girl at USC had the baby — a boy — then gave him up for adoption. I traced the adoption and identified the kid. Only thing is, he went down in a helicopter in Vietnam a month before he turned twenty years old.”

“Shit. Did you tell Vance that?”

“Never got the chance. Who had access to his office on Sunday?”

“Security people mostly, a chef and a butler type. A nurse came in to give him a course of prescriptions. We’re checking them all out. He called his secretary in to write some letters for him. She’s the one who found him when she got there. Who else knew what you were hired to do?”

Bosch understood what Poydras was thinking. Vance was looking for an heir. Somebody who stood to benefit from his death if there was no apparent heir might have stepped in to hasten things along. On the other hand, an heir might also be motivated to hasten the inheritance. Lucky for Vibiana Veracruz, she was not identified as a likely inheritor until after Vance was dead. That was a pretty solid alibi in Bosch’s book.

“According to Vance, no one,” Bosch said. “We met alone and he said no one was to know what I was doing. A day after I started the job, his security guy came to my house to try to see what I was up to. He acted as though he had been sent by Vance. I shined him on.”

“David Sloan?” Poydras asked.

“I never got the first name but, yeah, Sloan. He’s with Trident.”

“No, he’s not with Trident. He was with Vance for years. When they brought in Trident he stayed on as the guy in charge of Vance’s personal security and to liaison with Trident. He personally came to your house?”

“Yeah, knocked on the door, said Vance sent him to check on my progress. But Vance told me to talk to no one except the old man himself. So I didn’t.”

Bosch next showed Poydras the card with the phone number Vance had given him. He told the detective that he had called a couple times and left messages. And how Sloan had answered when Bosch called the number after Vance was dead. Poydras just nodded, taking the information in, and fitting it with other case facts. He gave no indication if they had the secret phone and its call records. Without asking if he could keep the card, Poydras put it in his shirt pocket.

Bosch too was fitting things Poydras had given up with the facts he knew. So far Bosch felt he had gotten more than he had given. And something bothered him about the new information when it was filtered through the sieve of his existing case knowledge. Something rubbed. He could not quite place what it was but it was there and it was worrisome.

“You looking at the corporate side of this?” he asked, just to keep the conversation going while he was grinding on the rub.

“I told you, we’re looking at everybody,” Poydras said. “Some people on the board had been questioning Vance’s competence and trying to oust him for years. But he always managed to carry the votes. So there was no love lost with some of them. That group was led by a guy named Joshua Butler, who will probably become chairman now. It’s always a question of who gains and who gains the most. We’re talking to him.”

Meaning they were looking at him as a possible suspect. Not that Butler would have done anything personally, but whether he was the kind of guy who could get it done.

“Wouldn’t be the first time boardroom animosity leads to murder,” Bosch said.

“Nope,” Poydras said.

“What about the will? I heard they opened probate today.” Bosch hoped he had slid the question in casually, as a natural extension of the question regarding corporate motivation.

“They opened probate with a will filed with the corporate attorney back in ’92,” Poydras said. “It was the latest will on record. Vance apparently had his first bout with cancer then, so he had the corporate lawyer create a last will and testament to make the transition of power clear. Everything goes into the corporation. There was an amendment — I think codicil is the word — filed a year later that covers the possibility of an heir. But with no heir, it all goes to the corporation and is controlled by the board. That includes setting compensation and bonus payouts. There are now eighteen people remaining on the board and they’re going to control about six billion bucks. You know what that means, Bosch?”

“Eighteen suspects,” Bosch said.

“Correct. And all eighteen of them are well heeled and insulated. They can hide behind lawyers, behind walls, you name it.”

Bosch wanted to know exactly what the codicil regarding an heir said but thought that if he got more targeted with his questioning, Poydras would start to suspect that his search for an heir didn’t end in Vietnam. He thought Haller would at some point be able to procure a copy of the 1992 will and get the same information.

“Was Ida Forsythe at San Rafael when you went there to visit Vance?” Poydras asked.

It was a turn in direction away from the idea of corporate murder. Bosch understood that a good interviewer never follows a straight line.

“Yes,” he said. “She wasn’t in the room when we talked but she led me back to the office.”

“Interesting woman,” Poydras said. “She’d been with him longer than Sloan.”

Bosch just nodded.

“So have you talked to her since that day at San Rafael?” Poydras asked.

Bosch paused as he considered the question. Every good interviewer sets up a trapdoor. He thought of Ida Forsythe saying she was being watched and about Poydras and Franks showing up on the day he visited her at her home.

“You know the answer to that,” he said. “Either you or your people saw me at her house today.”

Poydras nodded and hid a smile. Bosch had passed the trapdoor test.

“Yeah, we saw you,” he said. “And we were wondering what that was about.”

Bosch shrugged to buy time. He knew that they might have knocked on Forsythe’s door ten minutes after he left and that she could have told them what he had said about the will. But he guessed that if that were the case, Poydras would be coming at the interview from a different angle.

“It was just about me thinking she was a nice old lady,” he said. “She lost her longtime boss and I wanted to pay my respects. I also wanted to know what she knew about what happened.”

Poydras paused as he decided whether Bosch was lying.

“You sure that’s all it was?” he pressed. “When you were standing at the door she didn’t look too happy to see you.”

“Because she thought she was being watched,” Bosch said. “And she was right.”

“Like I said, everybody’s a suspect until they’re not. She found the victim. That puts her on the list. Even though the only thing she gets out of it is being unemployed.”

Bosch nodded. He knew at that moment that he was withholding a big piece of information from Poydras — the will he had received in the mail. But things were coming together in Bosch’s mind and he wanted time to think before giving up the big reveal. He changed the subject.

“Did you read the letters?” Bosch said.

“What letters?” Poydras asked.

“You said Ida Forsythe was called in to write letters for Vance on Sunday.”

“They never actually got written. She came in and found him dead at the desk. But apparently every Sunday afternoon, when Vance was feeling up to it, she came in and wrote letters for him.”

“What kind of letters? Business? Personal?”

“I got the idea it was personal stuff. He was old-fashioned, liked to send letters instead of e-mails. Kind of nice actually. He had the stationery out on the desk, ready to go.”