Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

“Probably that’s the way it was,” Bosch said after a few moments. “But a couple things still bother me. I want to puzzle with it a little more until I’m sure.”

“Well, like I said, no problem with me. You’re giving me the clean end of the stick.”

“I think I’m going to look around a little more. You go ahead, and I’ll see you tomorrow when I get back in from the cut.”

“Okay, partner.”

“And Jed?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s got nothing to do with getting downtown again.”

Bosch sat alone, thinking, and scanning the room for secrets. His eyes eventually came down on the cards spread out before him on the coffee table. Solitaire. He saw that all four aces were up. He picked up the deck of remaining cards and went through it, peeling off three cards at a time. In the course of going through he came across the two and three of spades and the two of hearts. The game hadn’t stalled. It had been interrupted. And never finished.

He became restless. He looked down into the green glass ashtray and saw that all the butts were nonfiltered Camels. Was that Meadows’s brand or his killer’s? He got up and walked around the room. The faint smell of urine hit him again. He walked back into the bedroom. He opened the drawers of the bureau and stared at their contents once more. Nothing turned in his mind. He went to the window and looked out at the back end of another apartment building across an alley. There was a man with a supermarket cart in the alley. He was poking through a Dumpster with a stick. The cart was half full of aluminum cans. Bosch walked away and sat down on the bed and put his head back against the wall where the headboard should have been and the white paint was a dingy gray. The wall felt cool against his back.

“Tell me something,” he whispered to no one.

Something had interrupted the card game and Meadows had died here, he believed. Then he was taken to the pipe. But why? Why not leave him? Bosch leaned his head back to the wall and looked straight across the room. It was at that moment that he noticed a nail in the wall. The nail was about three feet above the bureau and had been painted white along with the wall at some point a long time ago. That was why he hadn’t noticed it before. He got up and went to look behind the bureau. In the three-inch space between it and the wall, he saw the edge of a fallen picture frame. With his shoulder, he pushed the heavy bureau away from the wall and picked up the frame. He stepped backward and sat on the edge of the bed studying it. The glass was cracked into an intricate spiderweb that had probably occurred when the frame fell. The damaged glass partially obscured an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. It was grainy and fading to a brownish yellow around the edges. The photo was more than twenty years old. Bosch knew this because between two cracks in the glass he saw his own, young face staring out and smiling.

Bosch turned the frame over and carefully bent back the tin prongs that kept the cardboard backing in place. As he was sliding the yellowed photo out, the glass finally gave way and the pieces dropped to the floor in shatters. He moved his feet away from the glass but didn’t get up. He studied the photograph. There were no markings on front or back to tell where or when it had been taken. But he knew it must have been sometime in late 1969 or early 1970, because some of the men in the picture were dead after that.

There were seven of them in the photo. All tunnel rats. All shirtless and proudly displaying their T-shirt tan lines and tattoos, each man’s dog tags taped together to keep them from jangling while they crawled through the tunnels. They had to have been in the Echo Sector of Cu Chi District, but Bosch could not tell or remember what village. The soldiers stood in a trench, positioned on both sides of a tunnel entrance no wider than the pipe in which Meadows would later be found dead. Bosch looked at himself and thought that his smile in the photograph was foolish. He was embarrassed by it now, in light of what was still to come after the moment was captured. Then he looked at Meadows in the photo and saw the thin smile and vacant stare. The others had always said Meadows would have a thousand-yard stare in an eight-by-eight room.

Bosch looked down at the glass between his feet and saw a pink piece of paper about the size of a baseball card. He picked it up by its edges and studied it. It was a pawn ticket from a shop downtown. The customer name on it was William Fields. It listed one item pawned: an antique bracelet, gold with jade inlay. The ticket was dated six weeks earlier. Fields had gotten $800 for the bracelet. Bosch slipped it into an evidence envelope from his pocket and stood up.

The trip downtown took an hour because of the traffic heading to Dodger Stadium. Bosch spent the time thinking about the apartment. It had been searched, but Edgar was right. It was a rush job. The pants pockets were the obvious tip. But the bureau drawers should’ve been put back in correctly, and the photo and the hidden pawn slip should not have been missed. What had been the hurry? He concluded it was because Meadows’s body was in the apartment. It had to be moved.

Bosch exited on Broadway and headed south past Times Square to the pawnshop located in the Bradbury Building. Downtown L.A. was as quiet as Forest Lawn on most weekends, and he didn’t expect to find the Happy Hocker open. He was curious and just wanted to drive by and take a look at the place before heading to the communications center. But when he drove past the storefront he saw a man outside with an aerosol can painting the wordOPEN in black on a sheet of plywood. The board stood in place of the shop’s front window. Bosch could see shards of glass on the dirty sidewalk below the plywood. He pulled to the curb. The spray painter was inside by the time he got to the door. He stepped through the beam of an electric eye, which sounded a bell from somewhere above all the musical instruments hanging from the ceiling.

“I’m not open, not Sundays,” a man called from the back. He was standing behind a chrome cash register that was atop a glass counter.

“That’s not what the sign you just painted says.”

“Yes, but that is for tomorrow. People see boards over your windows they think you’re out of business. I’m not out of business. I’m open for business, except for weekends. I just have a board out there for a few days. I paintedOPEN so people will know, you see? Starting tomorrow.”

“Do you own this business?” Bosch said as he pulled his ID case out and flipped open his badge. “This will only take a couple minutes.”

“Oh, police. Why din’t you say? I been waiting all day for you police.”

Bosch looked around, confused, then put it together.

“You mean the window? I’m not here about that.”

“What do you mean? The patrol police said to wait for detective police. I waited. I been here since fiveA.M. this morning.”

Bosch looked around the shop. It was filled with the usual array of brass musical instruments, electronic junk, jewelry and collectibles. “Look, Mr.-”

“Obinna. Oscar Obinna pawnshops of Los Angeles and Culver City.”

“Mr. Obinna, detectives don’t roll on vandalism reports on weekends. I mean, they might not even be doing that during the week anymore.”

“What vandalism? This was a breakthrough. Grand robbery.”

“You mean a break-in? What was taken?”

Obinna gestured to two glass counter cases that flanked the cash register. The top plate in each case had been smashed into a thousand pieces. Bosch walked up closer and could see small items of jewelry, cheap-looking earrings and rings, nestled among the glass. But he also saw velvet-covered jewelry pedestals, mirrored plates and wood ring pegs where pieces should have been but weren’t. He looked around and saw no other damage in the store.