Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

When Bosch got to his house, he found no messages on the phone machine and no sign that the place had been entered. He shaved and changed clothes and then headed down the hill through Nichols Canyon and then over to Wilcox. He was at his desk, updating the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Report forms, when Eleanor came in at ten. The squad room was full and most of the detectives who were male stopped what they were doing to check her out. She had an uncomfortable smile on her face when she sat down in the steel chair next to the homicide table.

“Anything wrong?”

“I just think I would rather walk through Biscailuz,” she said, referring to the sheriff’s jail downtown.

“Oh. Yeah, these guys can leer better than most flashers. You want a glass of water?”

“No. I’m fine. Ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

They took Bosch’s new car, which was actually at least three years old and had seventy-seven thousand miles on it. The station fleet manager, a permanent desk assignee since he’d had four fingers blown off by a pipe bomb he stupidly picked up one Halloween, said it was the best he could do. Budget restraints had halted the replacement of cars, though repairing the old ones actually cost the department more. At least, Bosch learned after starting the car, the air conditioner worked reasonably well. There was a light Santa Ana condition kicking up and the forecast was for an unseasonably warm holiday weekend.

Eleanor’s research on Binh showed he had an office and business on Vermont near Wilshire. There were more Korean-run shops in the area than Vietnamese, but they coexisted. As near as Wish had been able to find out, Binh controlled a number of businesses that imported cheap clothing and electronic and video merchandise from the Orient and then moved it through Southern California and Mexico. Many of the items turistas thought they were getting on the cheap in Mexico and then bringing back to the States had already been here. It all seemed successful on paper, though it was small-time. Still, it was enough to make Bosch question if Binh even needed the diamonds. Or ever had any.

Binh owned the building his office and discount video equipment store was based in. It was a 1930s auto showroom that had been converted years before Binh had ever seen it. Unreinforced concrete block fronted with wide picture windows and guaranteed to come down in a decent shaker. But for someone who had made it out of Vietnam the way Binh had, earthquakes were probably viewed as a minor inconvenience, not a risk.

After they found an empty parking space across the street from Ben’s Electronics, Bosch told Eleanor he wanted her to handle the questioning, at least at first. Bosch said he figured that Binh might be more inclined to talk to the feds than to the locals. They decided on a plan to small-talk him and then ask about Tran. Bosch didn’t tell her that he also had a second plan in mind.

“Doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place run by a guy with a box full of diamonds in a bank vault,” Bosch said as they got out of the car.

“That is had in the bank,” she said. “And remember, he couldn’t flaunt that stuff. He had to be like every other Joe Immigrant. The appearance of living day to day. The diamonds, if there were any, were the collateral for this place, for his American success story. But it had to look like he made it from scratch.”

“Wait a second,” Bosch said as they got to the other side of the street. He told Eleanor he had forgotten to ask Jerry Edgar to fill in on a court appearance for him that afternoon. He pointed to a pay phone at a service station next to Binh’s building and trotted over. Eleanor stayed behind, looking in the windows of the store.

Bosch called Edgar but didn’t say anything about a court appearance.

“Jed, I need a favor. You won’t even have to get up.”

Edgar hesitated, as Bosch thought he would.

“What do you need?”

“You aren’t supposed to say it like that. You’re supposed to say, ‘Sure, Harry, what do you need?’”

“Come on, Harry, we both know we’re under the glass. We’ve got to be careful. Tell me what you need. I’ll tell you if I can do it.”

“All I want you to do is buzz me in ten minutes. I need to get out of a meeting. Just buzz me, and when I call in, just put the phone down for a couple minutes. And if I don’t call in, buzz me again in five minutes. That’s it.”

“That’s all you need? Just the buzz?”

“Right. Ten minutes from now.”

“Okay, Harry,” Edgar said, relief in his voice. “Hey, I heard about your thing last night. That was close. And word around here is that it wasn’t no drunk driver. You watch your ass.”

“Always. What’s going on with Sharkey?”

“Nothing. I ran down his crew like you told me. Two of ’em told me they were with him that night. I think they were rolling faggots. They said they lost sight of him after he got in a car. That was a couple hours before the desk got the call that he was in the tunnel up at the bowl. I figure whoever was in that car did him.”

“Description?”

“The car? Not very good. Dark color, American sedan. Something new. That’s about it.”

“What kind of headlights?”

“Well, I showed ’em the car book and they picked different taillights. One guy’s got round, the other says rectangle. But on the headlights. They both said they-”

“Square, side-by-side squares.”

“Right. Hey, Harry, you thinking this is the car that came down on you and the FBI woman? Jesus! We ought to get together on this.”

“Later. Maybe later. Meantime, buzz me in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes, right.”

Bosch hung up and went back to Eleanor, who was looking through the plate-glass window at the ghetto blasters on display. They entered the store, shook off two salesmen, walked around a stack of boxed camcorders on sale for $500 each and told a woman standing at a cash register station in the back that they were there to see Binh. The woman stared blankly at them until Eleanor showed her badge and federal ID card.

“You wait here,” the woman said and then disappeared through a door located behind the cash counter. There was a small mirrored window in the door that reminded Bosch of the interview room back at Wilcox. He looked at his watch. He had eight minutes.

The man who emerged from the door behind the cash register looked to be about sixty years old. He had white hair. He was short but Bosch could tell he had once been physically powerful for his size. Built wide and low to the ground, he now was softened by an easier life than he had had in his native land. He wore silver-framed glasses with a pink tint and an open-collar shirt and golf slacks. His breast pocket sagged with the weight of almost a dozen pens and a clip-on pocket flashlight. Ngo Van Binh was low key all the way.

“Mr. Binh? My name is Eleanor Wish. I am from the FBI. This is Detective Bosch, LAPD. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes,” he said, the stern expression on his face unchanging.

“It’s about the break-in at the bank where you had a safe-deposit box.”

“I reported no loss, my deposit box had sentimental occupants only.”

Diamonds ranked fairly high up there on the sentimental range, Bosch thought. “Mr. Binh, can we go back to your office and talk privately?” he said instead.

“Yes, but I suffered no loss. You look. It is in the reports.”

Eleanor held her hand out, urging Binh to lead the way. They followed him through the door with the mirror window and into a warehouselike storage room. There were hundreds of boxes of electronic appliances on steel shelves going to the ceiling. They passed through into a smaller room that was a repair or assembly shop. There was a woman sitting at a tool bench with a bowl of soup held to her mouth. She did not look up as they passed. There were two doors at the back of the shop, and the procession went through one into Binh’s office. It was here that Binh shed his peasant trappings. The office was large and plush, with a desk and two chairs to the right and a dark leather L-shaped couch to the left. The couch was at the edge of an Oriental rug that featured a three-headed dragon poised to strike. The couch faced two walls of shelves filled by books and stereo and video equipment, much finer than what Bosch had seen out front. We should have braced him at his home, Bosch thought. Seen how he lived, not how he worked.