Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

“Fox is easy. Once Conklin went with her, Fox had a nice hook into him and he could reel him in whenever he wanted. Marjorie is something else and I’ve been thinking about it but it still isn’t clear. But you can say this, most women in that situation are looking for a way out. She could have played along with Fox’s plan because she had her own plan. She was looking for a way out of the life.”

Irving nodded and added to the hypothesis.

“She had a boy in the youth hall and wanted to get him out. Being with Arno could only help.”

“That’s right. The thing of it was, Arno and Marjorie did something none of the three of them expected. They fell in love. Or at least Conklin did. And he believed she did, too.”

Irving took a chair in the corner, crossed his legs and stared thoughtfully at Bosch. He said nothing. Nothing about his demeanor indicated he was anything else but totally interested and believing in Bosch’s story. Bosch’s arm was getting tired of holding the ice pack up and he wished he could lie down. But there was only the table in the examination suite. He continued the story.

“So they fall in love and their relationship continues and somewhere along the line she tells him. Or maybe Mittel did some checking and told him. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that at some point Conklin knew the score. And again, he surprises everybody.”

“How?”

“On October twenty-seven, nineteen sixty-one, he proposes marriage to Marj-”

“He told you this? Arno told you this?”

“He told me tonight. He wanted to marry her. She wanted to marry him. On that night back then, he finally decided to chuck it all, to risk losing everything he had to gain the one thing he wanted most.”

Bosch reached into his jacket on the table and took out his cigarettes. Irving spoke up.

“I don’t think this is a-nothing, never mind.”

Bosch lit a smoke with his lighter.

“It was the bravest act of his life. You realize that? That took balls to be willing to risk everything like that…But he made a mistake.”

“What?”

“He called his friend Gordon Mittel to ask him to go with them to Vegas to be best man. Mittel refused. He knew it would be the end of a promising political career for Conklin, maybe even his own career, and he wanted no part of it. But then he went further than just refusing to be best man. See, he saw Conklin as the white horse on which he would be able to ride into the castle. He had big plans for himself and Conklin and he wasn’t going to sit back and let some…some Hollywood whore ruin it. He knew from Conklin’s call that she had gone home to pack. So Mittel went there and intercepted her somehow. Maybe told her that Conklin had sent him. I don’t know.”

“He killed her.”

Bosch nodded and this time he didn’t go dizzy.

“I don’t know where, maybe in his car. He made it look like a sex crime by tying the belt around her neck and tearing up her clothes. The semen…it was already there because she had been with Conklin…After she was dead, Mittel took the body to the alley near the Boulevard and put her in the trash. The whole thing stayed a secret for a lot of years after that.”

“Until you came along.”

Bosch didn’t answer. He was savoring his cigarette and the relief of the end of the case.

“What about Fox?” Irving asked.

“Like I said, Fox knew about Marjorie and Arno. And he knew they were together the night before Marjorie was found dead in that alley. That knowledge gave Fox a powerful piece of leverage over an important man, even if the man was innocent. Fox used it. In who knows how many ways. Within a year he was on Arno ’s campaign payroll. He was hooked on him like a bloodsucking leech. So Mittel, the fixer, finally stepped in. Fox died in a hit and run while supposedly handing out Conklin campaign fliers. Would’ve been easy to set up, make it look like it was an accident and the driver just fled. But that’s no surprise. The same guy who worked the Marjorie Lowe case worked the hit and run. Same result. Nobody ever arrested.”

“McKittrick?”

“No. Claude Eno. He’s dead now. Took his secrets with him. But Mittel was paying him off for twenty-five years.”

“The bank statements?”

“Yeah, in the briefcase. You look, you’ll probably find records somewhere linking Mittel to the payments. Conklin said he didn’t know about them and I believe him…You know, somebody ought to check all the elections Mittel worked on over the years. They’ll probably find out he was a rat fucker that could’ve held his own in the Nixon White House.”

Bosch ground his cigarette out on the side of a trash can next to the table and dropped the butt in. He started to feel very cold and put his jacket back on. It was smudged with dirt and dried blood.

“You look like a mess in that, Harry,” Irving said. “Why don’t you-”

“I’m cold.”

“Okay.”

“You know, he didn’t even scream.”

“What?”

“Mittel. He didn’t even scream when he went down that hill. I can’t figure that out.”

“You don’t have to. It’s just one of those-”

“And I didn’t push him. He jumped me in the brush and when we rolled, he went over. He didn’t even scream.”

“I understand. No one is saying-”

“All I did was start to ask questions about her and people started dying.”

Bosch was staring at an eye chart on the far wall of the room. He could not figure out why they would have such a thing in an emergency room examination suite.

“Christ…Pounds…I-”

“Yes, I know what happened,” Irving interrupted.

Bosch looked over at him.

“You do?”

“We interviewed everyone in the squad. Edgar told me that he made a computer run for you on Fox. My only conclusion is that Pounds either overheard or somehow got wind of it. I think he was monitoring what your close associates were doing after you went on ISL. Then he must’ve taken it a step further and stumbled into Mittel and Vaughn. He ran DMV traces on the parties involved. I think it got back to Mittel. He had the connections that would have warned him.”

Bosch was silent. He wondered if Irving really believed that scenario or if he was signaling to Bosch that he knew what had really happened and was letting it go by. It didn’t matter. Whether or not Irving blamed him or took departmental action against him, Bosch’s own conscience would be the hardest thing to live with.

“Christ,” he said again. “He got killed instead of me.”

His body started shuddering then. As if saying the words out loud had started some kind of exorcism. He threw the ice pack into the trash can and wrapped his arms around himself. But the shuddering wouldn’t stop. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again, that his shaking was not a temporary affliction but a permanent part of him now. He had the warm salty taste of tears in his mouth and he realized then that he was crying. He turned his face away from Irving and tried to tell him to leave but he couldn’t say anything. His jaw was locked as tight as a fist.

“Harry?” he heard Irving say. “Harry, you okay?”

Bosch managed to nod, not understanding how Irving could not see his body shaking. He moved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and pulled it closed around him. He felt something in his left pocket and started absentmindedly pulling it out.

“Look,” Irving was saying, “the doctor said you could get emotional. This knock on the head…they do weird things to you. Don’t wor-Harry, are you sure you’re okay? You’re turning blue, son. I’m gonna-I’ll go get the doctor. I’ll-”

He stopped as Bosch managed to remove the object from his jacket. He held his palm upright. Clasped in his shaking hand was a black eight ball. Much of it was smeared with blood. Irving took it from him, having to practically pry his fingers off it.