Michael Connelly: Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories

The man held the instrument like it was as precious as a new baby. He slowly turned it in his hands, studying it for flaws or maybe just wanting to look at it the way he would look at a loved one long gone away. Bosch felt a constriction rising in his chest as the jazzman brought the instrument to his mouth, licked the mouthpiece and then held it between his teeth. His chest rose as he drew in a breath.

But as his fingers went to work and he blew out the riff, the wind escaped from the weak seal his lips made around the mouthpiece. Sugar Ray closed his eyes and tried again. The same result sounded from his instrument. He was too old and weak. His lungs were gone. He could no longer play.

“It’s all right,” Bosch said. “You don’t have to play. I just thought it should be back with you, that’s all.”

Sugar Ray cradled the instrument in his lap as if he were protecting it. He looked up at Bosch.

“Where did you get this, Harry Bosch?”

“I took it from a guy who stole it from a pawnshop.”

Sugar Ray nodded like he knew the story.

“Was it stolen from you?” Bosch asked.

“No. I had it pawned. A fellow here did it for me so I could get money for the box. I don’t like being in the dayroom with the others. They’re all suicides waitin’ to happen. So I needed my own box.”

He shook his head. His eyes went up to the tefy"up to tlevision on the wall over Bosch’s shoulder.

“Imagine, a man trading the love of his life for that.”

Bosch looked up at the tube and saw a commercial where a Santa Claus was drinking a cold beer after a long night of delivering presents and cheer. He looked back at Sugar Ray. He didn’t know whether to feel good or bad about what he had done. He had returned an instrument to a musician who could no longer play it.

But as this indecision gripped his heart he saw Sugar Ray pull the saxophone closer to his body. He held it there tightly, as if it were all he had in the world. He brought his eyes to Bosch’s and in them Harry saw that he had done the right thing.

“Merry Christmas, Sugar Ray.”

Sugar Ray nodded and looked down. Bosch knew it was time to leave him alone. He reached over and gripped his shoulder for a moment.

“Why?” Sugar Ray asked.

“Why what?”

“Why did you do this for me? You think you’re playing Santa Claus or something?”

Bosch smiled and squatted down next to the chair. He was now looking up into the old man’s eyes.

“I did it to try to make us even, I guess.”

The old man just looked at him, waiting.

“In December nineteen sixty-nine I was on a hospital ship in the South China Sea.”

Bosch touched his left side, just above the hip.

“I got bamboo-bladed in a tunnel four days before. You probably don’t remember this but-”

“The USS Sanctuary. Off Danang. Of course I remember. You were one of the boys in the blue bathrobes, huh?”

Sugar Ray smiled. Bosch nodded and continued.

“I remember the announcement that the show was canceled because the seas were too high and the fog too thick. The big Hueys with all the equipment couldn’t land. We had all been waiting on deck. We saw the choppers coming in through the mist and then just turning around to go back.”

Sugar Ray raised a finger.

“You know, it was Mr. Bob Hope who told our pilot to turn that son of a bitch around again and put it down on that boat.”

Bosch nodded. He had heard it was Hope. One chopper turned again and came to the Sanctuary. The small one. The one with the headliners onboard.

“I remember it was Bob Hope, Connie Stevens, you and a beautiful black girl from that TV show.”

“Teresa Graves. Laugh-In .”

“Man, you remember everything.”

“Just ’cause I’m old doesn’t mean I can’t remember. The man on the moon was there, too.”

Bosch smiled. Sugar Ray was filling in details he had forgotten.

“Neil Armstrong, yeah. But the rest of the band-the Playboy All-Stars-was on one of the other choppers and it went back to Danang. It was only you and you carried your own ax. You played for us. Solo.”

Bosch looked at the instrument in the old man’s gray hands. He remembered the day on the Sanctuary as clearly as he remembered any other moment of his life.

“You played ‘The Sweet Spot’ and then ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”

“I played the ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ too. By request of a young man in the front row. He’d lost both his legs and he asked me to play that waltz.”

Bosch nodded solemnly.

“Bob Hope told us his jokes and Connie Stevens sang ‘Promises, Promises.’ A cappella. In less than an hour it was all over and the chopper took off. Man, I can’t explain it but it meant something. It made something right in a messed-up world, you know? I was only nineteen years old and I wasn’t sure how or why I was even over there.

“Anyway, I’ve listened to a lot of saxophone since then but I haven’t heard it any better.”

Bosch nodded and stood up. His knee creaked loudly. He guessed it wouldn’t be too long before he was in one of these places. If he was lucky.

“I just wanted to tell you that,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You were in the tunnels over there, huh? I heard about them.”

Bosch nodded.

“Coulda used you going about this bin Laden character.”

He pointed up to the TV, as if that were where the terrorist was.

Bosch shook his head.

“Nah, it’s a different game. Back then they gave you a flashlight and a forty-five, said good luck and dropped you in a hole. Now it’s sound and motion detectors, heat sensors, infrared… it’s a different game.”

“Maybe. But a hunter is still a hunter.”

Bosch look lu"›Bosched at him for a moment before speaking.

“Take it easy, Sugar Ray.”

He headed toward the door and one more time Sugar Ray stopped him.

“Hey, Santa Claus.”

Bosch turned back.

“You strike me as a man who is alone in the world,” Sugar Ray said. “That true?”

Bosch nodded without hesitation.

“Most of the time.”

“You got plans for Christmas dinner?”

Bosch hesitated. He finally shook his head.

“No plans.”

“Then, come back here at three tomorrow. We have a dinner and I can bring a guest. I’ll sign you up.”

Bosch hesitated. He had been alone so often on Christmases past that he thought it might be too late, that being around anyone might be intolerable.

“Don’t worry,” Sugar Ray said. “They won’t put your turkey in the blender as long as you’ve got teeth.”

Bosch smiled.

“All right, Sugar Ray, I’ll be by.”

“Then, I’ll see you then.”

Bosch walked down the yellowed corridor and out into the night. As he headed to the car he heard Christmas music still playing from an open window somewhere. It was an instrumental, slow and heavy on the saxophone. He stopped and it took him a moment to recognize it as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” He stood there on the walkway and listened until the end of the song.

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge John Houghton for recounting and sharing the experience on the USS Sanctuary that inspired this story.

The victim’s tiny body was left alone in the emergency room enclosure. The doctors, after halting their resuscitation efforts, had solemnly retreated and pulled the plastic curtains closed around the bed. The entire construction, management and purpose of the hospital was to prevent death. When the effort failed, nobody wanted to see it.

The curtains were opaque. Harry Bosch looked like a ghost as he approached and then split them to enter. He stepped into the enclosure and stood somber and alone with the dead. The boy’s body took up less than a quarter of the big metal bed. He had worked thousands of cases but nothing ever touched Bosch liket di the sight of a young child’s lifeless body. Fifteen months old. Cases in which the child’s age was still counted in months were the most difficult of all. He knew that if he dwelled too long he would start to question everything-from the meaning of life to his mission in it.