Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

A question that remained unanswered in Bosch’s mind was what Arno Conklin knew of all this. He had not yet been contacted by Bosch. Did he know of the man who approached Mittel? Did he order the hit on Pounds or was it solely Mittel’s reaction?

Then Bosch saw a bump in his theory that needed refining. Mittel had come face to face with him posing as Harvey Pounds at the fund-raiser. The fact that Pounds was tortured before he died indicated that Mittel was not present at the time, or he would have seen that they were brutalizing the wrong man. Bosch wondered now if they understood that they had, in fact, killed the wrong man, and if they would be looking for the right one.

He mulled over the point that Mittel could not have been there and decided that it fit. Mittel was not the type to get involved in the blood work. He’d have no problem calling the shots, he just wouldn’t want to see them fired. Bosch realized the surfer in a suit had also seen him at the party and, therefore, could not have been directly involved in the killing of Harvey Pounds, either. That left the man Bosch had seen through the French doors at the house. The man with the wide body and thick neck whom he had seen Mittel show the newspaper clip to. The man who had slipped and fallen while coming down the driveway for Bosch.

Bosch realized that he didn’t know how close he had come to being where Pounds was now. He reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and started to light one.

“Do you mind not smoking?” Toliver asked, his first words of the thirty-minute journey.

“Yeah, I do mind.”

Bosch finished lighting the smoke and put his Bic away. He lowered the window.

“There. You happy? The exhaust fumes are worse than the smoke.”

“It’s a nonsmoking vehicle.”

Toliver tapped his finger on a plastic magnet that was on the dashboard ashtray cover. It was one of the little doodads that were distributed when the city passed a widespread antismoking law that forbade the practice in all city buildings and allowed for half of the department’s fleet to be declared nonsmoking vehicles. The magnet showed a cigarette in the middle of a red circle with a slash through it. Beneath the circle it said THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. Bosch reached over, peeled the magnet off and threw it out the open window. He saw it bounce once on the pavement and stick on the door of a car one lane over.

“Now it’s not. Now it’s a smoking car.”

“Bosch, you’re really fucked, you know that?”

“Write me up, kid. Add it to the association beef your boss is working on. I don’t care.”

They were silent for a few moments and the car crept further away from Hollywood.

“He’s bluffing you, Bosch. I thought you knew that.”

“How so?”

He was surprised that Toliver was turning.

“He’s just bluffing, that’s all. He’s still hot about what you did with that table. But he knows it won’t stick. It’s an old case. Voluntary manslaughter. A domestic violence case. She walked on five years probation. All you have to do is say you didn’t know and it gets shitcanned.”

Bosch could almost guess what the case was about. She had practically told him during true confessions. She stayed too long with someone. That was what she had said. He thought of the painting he had seen in her studio. The gray portrait with the highlights red like blood. He tried to pull his mind away from it.

“Why’re you telling me this, Toliver? Why are you going against your own?”

“Because they’re not my own. Because I want to know what you meant by what you said to me in the hallway.”

Bosch couldn’t even remember what he said.

“You told me it wasn’t too late. Too late for what?”

“Too late to get out,” Bosch said, recalling the words he had thrown as a taunt. “You’re still a young guy. You better get yourself out of IAD before it’s too late. You stay too long and you’ll never get out. Is that what you want, spend your career busting cops for trading hookers dime bags?”

“Look, I want to work out of Parker and I don’t want to wait ten years like everybody else. It’s the easiest and fastest way for a white guy to get in there.”

“It’s not worth it, is what I’m telling you. Anybody stays in IAD more than two, three years, they’re there for life because nobody else wants ’em, nobody else trusts ’em. They’re lepers. You better think about it. Parker Center isn’t the only place in the world to work.”

A few moments of silence passed as Toliver tried to muster a defense.

“Somebody’s got to police the police. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that.”

“That’s right. But in this department nobody polices the police who police the police. Think about that.”

The conversation was interrupted by the sharp tone he recognized as his mobile phone. On the back seat of the car were the items the searchers had taken from his apartment. Irving had ordered it all returned. Among them was his briefcase and inside it he heard his phone. He reached back, flipped the briefcase open and grabbed the phone.

“Yeah. It’s Bosch.”

“Bosch, it’s Russell.”

“Hey, I got nothing to tell you yet, Keisha. I’m still working on it.”

“No, I have something to tell you. Where are you?”

“I’m in the soup. The 101 coming up to Barham, my exit.”

“Well, I have to talk to you, Bosch. I’m writing a story for tomorrow. You will want to comment, I think, if only in your defense.”

“My defense?”

A dull thud went through him and he felt like saying, What now? But he held himself in check.

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you read my story today?”

“No, I haven’t had the time. What-”

“It’s about the death of Harvey Pounds. Today I have a follow…It concerns you, Bosch.”

Jesus, he thought. But he tried to keep calm. He knew that if she detected any panic in his voice she would gain confidence in whatever it was she was about to write. He had to convince her she had bad information. He had to undermine that confidence. Then he realized Toliver was sitting next to him and would hear everything he said.

“I have a problem talking now. When is your deadline?”

“Now. We have to talk now.”

Bosch looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes until six.

“You can go to six, right?”

He’d worked with reporters before and knew that was the deadline for the Times’s first edition.

“No, I can’t go to six. If you want to say something, say it now.”

“I can’t. Give me fifteen minutes and then call back. I can’t talk now.”

There was a pause and then she said, “Bosch, I can’t push it far past then. You better be able to talk then.”

They were at the Barham exit now and they’d be up to his house in ten minutes.

“Don’t worry about it. In the meantime, you go warn your editor that you might be pulling the story.”

“I will not.”

“Look, Keisha, I know what you’re going to ask me about. It’s a plant and it’s wrong. You have to trust me. I’ll explain in fifteen minutes.”

“How do you know it’s a plant?”

“I know. It came from Angel Brockman.”

He flipped the phone closed and looked over at Toliver.

“See, Toliver? Is that what you want to do with your job? With your life?”

Toliver said nothing.

“When you get back, you can tell your boss that he can shove tomorrow’s Times up his ass. There isn’t going to be any story. See, even the reporters don’t trust IAD guys. All I had to do was mention Brockman. She’ll start backpedaling when I tell her I know what’s going on. Nobody trusts you guys, Jerry. Get out of it.”

“Oh, and like everybody trusts you, Bosch.”