Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

“They’re all full?”

“All eight. Have at it.”

Bosch reached his hand into his pocket and took out another twenty-dollar bill. He tore it in half and gave one side to Shivone.

“Take that out to the cab driver. Tell her I’m going to be a little longer than I thought.”

She exhaled loudly, snatched the half and left the room. After she was gone Bosch went to the desk and opened each of the drawers. The first two he tried were empty. The next contained stationery and office supplies. The fourth drawer contained a checkbook that he quickly leafed through and saw it was an account covering household expenses. There was also a file containing recent receipts and other records. The last drawer in the desk was locked.

He started with the bottom file drawers and worked his way up. Nothing in the first few seemed even remotely connected with what Bosch was working on. There were files labeled with the names of different casinos and gaming organizations. The files in another drawer were labeled by people’s names. Bosch looked through a few of these and determined they were files on known casino cheats. Eno had built a library of home intelligence files. By this time, Shivone had come back from her errand and had taken the seat opposite the desk. She was watching Bosch and he threw a few idle questions at her while he looked.

“So what did Claude do for the casinos?”

“He was a bird dog.”

“What’s that?”

“Kind’ve an undercover thing. He mingled in the casinos, gambled with house chips, watched people. He was good at picking out the cheats and how they did it.”

“Guess it takes one to know one, right?”

“What’s that crack supposed to mean? He did a good job.”

“I’m sure he did. Is that how he met you?”

“I’m not answering any of your questions.”

“Okay by me.”

He had only the two top drawers left. He opened one and found it contained no files at all. Just an old, dust-covered Rolodex and other items that had probably sat on the top of the desk at one point. There was an ashtray, a clock and a pen holder made of carved wood that had Eno’s name carved on it. Bosch took the Rolodex out and put it on top of the cabinet. He blew the dust off it and then began turning it until he came to the C’s. He looked through the cards but found no listing for Arno Conklin. He met with similar failure when he tried to find a listing for Gordon Mittel.

“You’re not going to look through that whole thing, are you?” Shivone asked in exasperation.

“No, I’m just going to take it with me.”

“Oh, no you don’t. You can’t just come in here and-”

“I’m taking it. If you want to make a complaint about it, be my guest. Then I’ll make a complaint about you.”

She went quiet after that. Bosch went on to the next drawer and found it contained about twelve files on old LAPD cases from the 1950s and early 1960s. Again, he didn’t have the time to study them, but he checked all the labels and none was marked Marjorie Lowe. By randomly pulling out a few of the files it became clear to him that Eno had made copies of files on some of his cases to take with him when he left the department. Of the random selections, all were murders, including two of prostitutes. Only one of the cases was closed.

“Go get me a box or a bag or something for these files,” Bosch said over his shoulder. When he sensed the woman in the room had not moved, he barked, “Do it!”

She got up and left. Bosch stood gazing at the files and thinking. He had no idea if these were important or not. He had no idea what they meant. He only knew he should take them in case they turned out to be important. But what bothered him more than what the files that were in the drawer could mean was the feeling that something was certainly missing. This was based on his belief in McKittrick. The retired detective was sure his former partner, Eno, had some kind of hold on Conklin, or at the very least, some kind of deal with him. But there was nothing here about that. And it seemed to Bosch that if Eno was holding something on Conklin, it would still be here. If he kept old LAPD files, then he kept whatever he had on Conklin. In fact, he would have kept it in a safe place. Where?

The woman came back and dropped a cardboard box on the floor. It was the kind a case of beer had come in. Bosch put a foot-thick stack of files in it along with the Rolodex.

“You want a receipt?” he asked.

“No, I don’t want anything from you.”

“Well, there is still something I need from you.”

“This doesn’t end, does it?”

“I hope it does.”

“What do you want?”

“When Eno died, did you help the old lady-uh, your sister, that is-did you help her clear out his safe deposit box?”

“How’d-”

She stopped herself but not soon enough.

“How’d I know? Because it’s obvious. What I’m looking for, he would have kept in a safe place. What did you do with it?”

“We threw everything away. It was meaningless. Just some old files and bank statements. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was old himself.”

Bosch looked at his watch. He was running out of time if he was going to make his plane.

“Get me the key for this desk drawer.”

She didn’t move.

“Hurry up, I don’t have a lot of time. You open it or I’ll open it. But if I do it, that drawer isn’t going to be much use to you anymore.”

She reached into the pocket of her house dress and pulled out the house keys. She reached down and unlocked the desk drawer, pulled it open and then stepped away.

“We didn’t know what any of it was, or what it meant.”

“That’s fine.”

Bosch moved to the drawer and looked in. There were two thin manila files and two packs of envelopes with rubber bands holding them together. The first file he looked through contained Eno’s birth certificate, passport, marriage license and other personal records. He put it back in the drawer. The next file contained LAPD forms and Bosch quickly recognized them as the pages and reports that had been removed from the Marjorie Lowe murder book. He knew he had no time to read them at the moment and put the file in the beer box with the other files.

The rubber band on the first package of envelopes snapped when he tried to remove it and he was reminded of the band that had been around the blue binder that contained the case files. Everything about this case was old and ready to snap, he thought.

The envelopes were all from a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Sherman Oaks and each one contained a statement for a savings account in the name of McCage Inc. The address of the corporation was a post office box, also in Sherman Oaks. Bosch randomly took envelopes from different spots in the pack and studied three of them. Though separated by years in the late 1960s, each statement was basically the same. A deposit of one thousand dollars was made in the account on the tenth of each month and on the fifteenth a transfer of an equal amount was made to an account with a Nevada Savings and Loan branch in Las Vegas.

Without looking further, Bosch concluded that the bank statements might be the records of some kind of payoff account Eno kept. He quickly looked through the envelopes at the postmarks looking for the most recent one. He found none more recent than the late 1980s.

“What about these envelopes? When did he stop getting them?”

“What you see is what you get. I have no idea what they mean and Olive didn’t know either back when they drilled his box.”

“Drilled his box?”

“Yeah, after he died. Olive wasn’t on the safe deposit box. Only him. We couldn’t find his key. So we had to have it drilled.”

“There was money, too, wasn’t there?”