Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

“I understand. Where were you?”

“ Vietnam.”

“Wait a minute, let’s go back. You said that two different times before this you lived with foster parents but were then sent back. What happened? Why were you sent back?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t like me. They said it wasn’t working out. I went back into the dorms behind the fence and waited. I think getting rid of a teenage boy was about as easy as selling a car with no wheels. The fosters always wanted the younger ones.”

“Did you ever run away from the hall?”

“A couple times. I always got caught in Hollywood.”

“If placing teenagers was so difficult, how did it happen to you the third time, when you were even older, sixteen?”

Bosch laughed falsely and shook his head.

“You’ll get a kick out of this. I was chosen by this guy and his wife because I was left-handed.”

“Left-handed? I don’t follow.”

“I was a lefty and I could throw a pretty good fastball.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ah, Jesus, it was-see, Sandy Koufax was with the Dodgers then. He was a lefty and I guess they were paying him about a zillion bucks a year to pitch. This guy, the foster, his name was Earl Morse, he had played semipro baseball or something and never really made it. So, he wanted to create a left-handed major league prospect. Good left-handers were pretty rare back then, I guess. Or he thought that. Anyway, they were the hot commodity. Earl thought he’d grab some kid with some potential, slap him into shape and then be his manager or agent or something when it came to contract time. He saw it as his way back into the game. It was crazy. But I guess he’d seen his own big league dream crash and burn. So he came out to McClaren and took a bunch of us into the field for a catch. We had a team, we played other halls, sometimes the schools in the Valley let us play them. Anyway, Earl took us out to throw the ball around and it was a tryout but none of us knew it at the time. It didn’t even enter my mind what was going on until later. Anyway, he glommed on to me when he saw I was a lefty and could throw. He forgot the others like they were last season’s program.”

Bosch shook his head again at the memory.

“What happened? You went with him?”

“Yeah. I went with him. There was a wife, too. She never said much to me or him. He used to make me throw a hundred balls a day at a tire hanging in the back yard. Then every night he’d have these coaching sessions. I put up with it for about a year and then I split.”

“You ran away?”

“Sort of. I joined the Army. I had to get Earl to sign for me, though. At first he wouldn’t do it. He had major league plans for me. But then I told him I was never going to pick up another baseball as long as I lived. He signed. Then he and the wife kept cashing those DPSS checks while I was overseas. I guess the extra money helped make up for losing the prospect.”

She was quiet for a long time. It looked to Bosch like she was reading her notes but he had not seen her write anything during this session.

“You know,” he said into the silence, “about ten years later, when I was still in patrol, I pulled over a drunk driver coming off the Hollywood Freeway onto Sunset. He was all over the place. When I finally got him over and got up there to the window, I bent over to look in and it was Earl. It was a Sunday. He was coming home from the Dodgers. I saw the program on the seat.”

She looked at him but didn’t say anything. He was looking at the memory still.

“I guess he’d never found that lefty he was looking for…Anyway, he was so drunk he didn’t recognize me.”

“What did you do?”

“Took his keys and called his wife…I guess it was the only break I ever gave the guy.”

She looked back down at the pad while asking her next question.

“What about your real father?”

“What about him?”

“Did you ever know who he was? Did you have any relationship at all?”

“I met him once. I was never curious about it until I came back from overseas. Then I traced it down. Turned out he was my mother’s lawyer. He had a family and all of that. He was dying when I met him, looked like a skeleton…So I never really knew him.”

“His name was Bosch?”

“No. My name was just something she came up with. The painter, you know. She thought L.A. was a lot like his paintings. All the paranoia, the fear. Once she gave me a book that had his paintings in it.”

More silence followed as she thought about this one, too.

“These stories, Harry,” she finally said, “these stories that you tell are heartbreaking in their own way. It makes me see the boy who became the man. It makes me see the depth of the hole left by your mother’s death. You know, you would have a lot to blame her for and no one would blame you for doing it.”

He looked at her pointedly while composing a response.

“I don’t blame her for anything. I blame the man who took her from me. See, these are stories about me. Not her. You can’t get the feel for her. You can’t know her like I did. All I know is that she did all she could to get me out of there. She never stopped telling me that. She never stopped trying. She just ran out of time.”

She nodded, accepting his answer. A few moments passed.

“Did there come a time when she told you what she did…for a living?”

“Not really.”

“How did you know?”

“I can’t remember. I think I really didn’t know for sure what she did until she was gone and I was older. I was ten when they took me away. I didn’t really know why.”

“Did she have men stay with her while you were together?”

“No, that never happened.”

“But you must have had some idea about this life she was leading, that you both were leading.”

“She told me she was a waitress. She worked nights. She used to leave me with a lady who had a room at the hotel. Mrs. DeTorre. She watched four or five kids whose mothers were doing the same thing. None of us knew.”

He finished there but she didn’t say anything and he knew he was expected to continue.

“One night I snuck out when the old lady fell asleep and I walked down to the Boulevard to the coffee shop where she said she worked. She wasn’t in there. I asked and they didn’t know what I was talking about…”

“Did you ask your mother about it?”

“No…The next night I followed her. She left in her waitress uniform and I followed her. She went to her best friend’s place upstairs. Meredith Roman. When they came out, they were both wearing dresses, makeup, the whole thing. Then they both left in a cab and I couldn’t follow them.”

“But you knew.”

“I knew something. But I was like nine or something. How much could I know?”

“What about the charade she followed, dressing every night like a waitress, did that anger you?”

“No. The opposite. I thought that was…I don’t know, there was something noble about her doing that for me. She was protecting me, in a way.”

Hinojos nodded that she saw his point.

“Close your eyes.”

“Close my eyes?”

“Yes, I want you to close your eyes and think back to when you were a boy. Go ahead.”

“What is this?”

“Indulge me. Please.”

Bosch shook his head as if annoyed but did as she asked. He felt stupid.

“Okay.”

“Okay, I want you to tell me a story about your mother. Whatever image or episode with her that you have the clearest in your mind, I want you to tell it to me.”

He thought hard. Images of her passed through and disappeared. Finally, he came to one that stayed.

“Okay.”

“Okay, tell it.”

“It was at McClaren. She had come to visit and we were out at the fence at the ballfield.”