Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

“You waiting on the meter?”

“On the meter or you. Whatever you want to do.”

She thought about it a moment and put the car in drive.

“Where are all the rental cars, anyway?”

“Big convention in town. Electronics or something.”

It was a thirty-minute ride out into the desert northwest of the strip. The neon-and-glass buildings retreated and the cab passed through residential neighborhoods until these, too, became sparse. The land was a ragged brown out here and dotted unevenly with scrub brush. Bosch knew the roots of every bush spread wide and sucked up what little moisture was in the earth. It made for a terrain that seemed dying and desolate.

The houses, too, were few and far between, each one an outpost in a no-man’s-land. The streets had been gridded and paved long ago but the boomtown of Las Vegas hadn’t quite caught up yet. It was coming, though. The city was spreading like a patch of weeds.

The road began to rise toward a mountain the color of cocoa mix. The cab shook as a procession of eighteen-wheel dump trucks thundered by with loads of sand from the excavation pits the driver had mentioned. And soon the paved roadway gave way to gravel and the cab sent up a tail of dust in its wake. Bosch was beginning to think the address the smarmy supervising clerk at City Hall had given him was a phony. But then they were there.

The address to which Claude Eno’s pension checks were mailed each month was a sprawling ranch-style house of pink stucco and dusty white tile roof. Looking past it, Bosch could see where even the gravel road ended just past it. It was the end of the line. Nobody had lived farther away than Claude Eno.

“I don’t know about this,” the driver said. “You want me to wait? This is like the goddamn moon out here.”

She had pulled into the driveway behind a late 1970s-model Olds Cutlass. There was a carport where another car was parked hidden beneath a tarp that was blue in the further recesses of the carport but bleached nearly white along the surfaces sacrificed to the sun.

Bosch took out his fold of money and paid the driver thirty-five dollars for the ride out. Then he took two twenties, ripped them in half and handed one side of each over the seat to her.

“You wait, you get the other half of those.”

“Plus the fare back to the airport.”

“Plus that.”

Bosch got out, realizing it would probably be the quickest forty bucks ever lost in Las Vegas if nobody answered the door. But he was in luck. A woman who looked to be in her late sixties opened the door before he could knock. And why not, he thought. In this house, you could see visitors coming for a mile.

Bosch felt the blast of air-conditioning escaping through the open door.

“Mrs. Eno?”

“No.”

Bosch pulled out his notebook and checked the address against the black numbers tacked on the front wall next to the door. They matched.

“Olive Eno doesn’t live here?”

“You didn’t ask that. I’m not Mrs. Eno.”

“Can I please speak with Mrs. Eno then?” Annoyed with the woman’s preciseness, Bosch showed the badge he had gotten back from McKittrick after the boat ride. “It’s police business.”

“Well, you can try. She hasn’t spoken to anybody, at least anybody outside her imagination, in three years.”

She motioned Bosch in and he stepped into the cool house.

“I’m her sister. I take care of her. She’s in the kitchen. We were in the middle of lunch when I saw the dust come up on the road and heard you arrive.”

Bosch followed her down a tiled hallway toward the kitchen. The house smelled like old age, like dust and mold and urine. In the kitchen a gnome-like woman with white hair sat in a wheelchair, barely taking up half of the space it gave for an occupant. There was a slide-on tray in front of it and the woman’s gnarled pearl-white hands were folded together on top of it. There were milky blue cataracts on both eyes and they seemed dead to the world outside the body. Bosch noticed a bowl of applesauce on the nearby table. It only took him a few seconds to size up the situation.

“She’ll be ninety in August,” said the sister. “If she makes it.”

“How long has she been like this?”

“Long time. I’ve been taking care of her for three years now.” She then bent into the gnome’s face and loudly added, “Isn’t that right, Olive?”

The loudness of the question seemed to kick a switch and Olive Eno’s jaw started working but no sound that was intelligible issued. She stopped the effort after a while and the sister straightened up.

“Don’t worry about it, Olive. I know you love me.”

She wasn’t as loud with that sentence. Maybe she feared Olive might actually muster a denial.

“What’s your name?” Bosch asked.

“Elizabeth Shivone. What’s this about? I saw that badge of yours says Los Angeles, not Las Vegas. Aren’t you off the beat here a bit?”

“Not really. It’s about her husband. One of his old cases.”

“Claude’s been dead going on five years now.”

“How did he die?”

“Just died. His pump went out. Died right there on the floor, about where you’re standing.”

They both looked down at the floor as if maybe his body was still there.

“I came to look through his things,” Bosch said.

“What things?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe he kept files from his time with the police.”

“You better tell me what you’re doing here. This doesn’t sound right to me.”

“I’m investigating a case he worked back in 1961. It’s still open. Parts of the file are missing. I thought maybe he’d taken it. I thought maybe there might be something important that he kept. I don’t know what. Anything. I just thought it was worth a try.”

He could see that her mind was working and her eyes suddenly froze for a second when her memory snagged on something.

“There is something, isn’t there?” he said.

“No. I think you should go.”

“It’s a big house. Did he have a home office?”

“Claude left the police thirty years ago. He built this house in the middle of nowhere just to be away from all of that.”

“What did he do when he moved out here?”

“He worked casino security. A few years at the Sands, then twenty at the Flamingo. He was getting two pensions and took good care of Olive.”

“Speaking of which, who’s signing those pension checks these days?”

Bosch looked at Olive Eno to make his point. The other woman was silent a long moment, then went on the offense.

“Look, I could get power of attorney. Look at her. It wouldn’t be a problem. I take care of her, mister.”

“Yeah, you feed her applesauce.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“You want somebody to make sure or do you want to let it end right here? I don’t really care what you’re doing, lady. I don’t really care if you’re even her sister or not. If I was betting, I’d say you’re not. But I don’t really care right now. I’m busy. I just want to look through Eno’s things.”

He stopped there and let her think about it. He looked at his watch.

“No warrant then, right?”

“I don’t have a warrant. I’ve got a cab waiting. You make me get a warrant and I’m going to stop being such a nice guy.”

Her eyes went up and down his body as if to measure how nice and how not nice he could be.

“The office is this way.”

She said the words as if they were bites out of wood planks. She swiftly led him down the hall again and then off to the left into a study. There was an old steel desk as the room’s centerpiece, a couple of four-drawer file cabinets, an extra chair and not much else.

“After he died, Olive and I moved everything into those file cabinets and haven’t looked at it since.”