Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

“Like he was serving a penance or something?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Why’d he drop out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weren’t you part of the inner circle?”

“No. He didn’t have a circle. He had one man.”

“Gordon Mittel.”

“Right. You want to know why he didn’t run, ask Gordon.” Then it clicked in Kim’s brain that Bosch had introduced the name Gordon Mittel to the conversation. “Is this about Gordon Mittel?”

“Let me ask the questions first. Why do you think Conklin didn’t run? You must have some idea.”

“He wasn’t officially in the race in the first place, so he didn’t have to make any public statement about dropping out. He just didn’t run. There were a lot of rumors, though.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, lots of stuff. Like he was gay. There were others. Financial trouble. Supposedly there was a threat from the mob that if he won, they’d kill him. Just stuff like that. None of it was ever more than backroom talk amongst the town politicos.”

“He was never married?”

“Not as far as I know. But as far as him being gay, I never saw anything like that.”

Bosch noted that the top of Kim’s head was slick now with sweat. It was already warm in the room but he kept the cardigan on. Bosch made a quick change of tracks.

“Okay, tell me about the death of Johnny Fox.”

Bosch saw the quick glimmer of recognition pass behind the glasses but then it disappeared. But it was enough.

“Johnny Fox, who’s that?”

“C’mon, Monte, it’s old news. Nobody cares what you did. I just need to know the story behind the story. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re talking about when I was a reporter? I wrote a lot of stories. That was thirty-five years ago. I was a kid. I can’t remember everything.”

“But you remember Johnny Fox. He was your ticket to that brighter future. The one that didn’t happen.”

“Look, what are you doing here? You’re not a cop. Did Gordon send you? After all these years, you people think I…”

He stopped.

“I am a cop, Monte. And you’re lucky I got here before Gordon did. Something’s coming undone. The ghosts are coming back. You read in the paper today about that cop found in his trunk in Griffith Park?”

“I saw it on the news. He was a lieutenant.”

“Yeah. He was my lieutenant. He was looking into a couple old cases. Johnny Fox was one of them. Then he ended up in his trunk. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little nervous and pushy, but I need to know about Johnny Fox. And you wrote the story. You wrote the story after he got killed that made him out to be an angel. Then you end up on Conklin’s team. I don’t care what you did, I just want to know what you did.”

“Am I in danger?”

Bosch hiked his shoulders in his best who-knows-and-who-cares gesture.

“If you are, then we can protect you. You don’t help us, we can’t help you. You know how it goes.”

“Oh my God! I knew this-What other cases?”

“One of Johnny’s girls who got killed about a year before him. Her name was Marjorie Lowe.”

Kim shook his head. He didn’t recognize the name. He ran his hand over his scalp, using it like a squeegee to move the sweat into the thicker hair. Bosch could tell he had perfectly primed the fat man to answer the questions.

“So what about Fox?” Bosch asked. “I don’t have all night.”

“Look, I don’t know anything. All I did was a favor for a favor.”

“Tell me about it.”

He composed himself for a long moment before speaking.

“Look, you know who Jack Ruby was?”

“In Dallas?”

“Yeah, the guy who killed Oswald. Well, Johnny Fox was the Jack Ruby of L.A., okay? Same era, same kind of guy. Fox ran women, was a gambler, knew which cops could be greased and greased them when he needed to. It kept him out of jail. He was a classic Hollywood bottom feeder. When he ended up dead on the Hollywood Division blotter, I saw it but was going to pass. He was trash and we didn’t write about trash. Then a source I had in the cop shop told me Johnny had been on Conklin’s payroll.”

“That made it a story.”

“Yeah. So I called up Mittel, Conklin’s campaign manager, and ran it by him. I wanted a response. I don’t know how much you know about that time, but Conklin had this squeaky-clean image. He was the guy attacking every vice in the city and here he had a vice hoodlum on the payroll. It was a great story. Though Fox didn’t have a record, I don’t think, there were intel files on him and I had access to them. The story was going to do damage and Mittel knew it.”

He stopped there at the edge of the story. He knew the rest but to speak of it out loud he had to be pushed over the edge.

“Mittel knew it,” Bosch said. “So he offered you a deal. He’d make you Conklin’s flak if you cleaned up the story.”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what? What was the deal?”

“I’m sure any kind of statute has passed…”

“Don’t worry about it. Just tell me and only me, you and your dog will ever know it.”

Kim took a deep breath and continued.

“This was mid-campaign so Conklin already had a spokesman. Mittel offered me a job as deputy spokesman after the election. I’d work out of the office in the Van Nuys Courthouse, handle the Valley stuff.”

“If Conklin won.”

“Yeah, but that was a given. Unless this Fox story caused a problem. But I held out, used some leverage. I told Mittel I wanted to be the main spokesman after Arno ’s election or forget it. He got back to me later and agreed.”

“After he talked to Conklin.”

“I guess. Anyway, I wrote a story that left out the details of Fox’s past.”

“I read it.”

“That’s all I did. I got the job. It was never mentioned again.”

Bosch sized Kim up for a moment. He was weak. He didn’t see that being a reporter was a calling just the same as being a cop. You took an oath to yourself. Kim had seemingly had no difficulty breaking it. Bosch could not imagine someone like Keisha Russell acting the same way under the same circumstances. He tried to cover his distaste and move on.

“Think back now. This is important. When you first called up Mittel and told him about Fox’s background, did you get the impression that he already knew the background?”

“Yes, he knew. I don’t know if the cops had told him that day or he had known all along. But he knew Fox was dead and he knew who he was. I think he was a little surprised that I knew and he became eager to make a deal to keep it out of the paper…It was the first time I ever did anything like that. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

Kim looked down at the dog and then to the beige rug and Bosch knew it was a screen on which he saw how his life diverged sharply the moment he took the deal. It went from where it was going to where it eventually was.

“Your story didn’t name any cops,” Bosch said. “Do you remember who handled it?”

“Not really. It was so long ago. It would have been a couple guys from the Hollywood homicide table. Back then, they handled fatal accidents. Now there’s a division for that.”

“Claude Eno?”

“Eno? I remember him. It might’ve been. I think I remember that it…Yes, it was. Now I remember. He was on it alone. His partner had transferred or retired or something and he was working alone, waiting for his next partner to transfer in. So they gave him the traffic cases. They were usually pretty light, as far as any investigation went.”

“How do you remember so much of this?”

Kim pursed his lips and struggled for an answer.

“I guess…Like I said, I wish I never did what I did. So, I guess, I think about it a lot. I remember it.”