Michael Connelly: The Black Echo

She stopped, but this time he waited her out.

“One day a few years ago I went to the memorial. And I thought there was some kind of mistake. There was a book there, an index of the names, and I looked and he wasn’t listed. No Michael Scarletti. I yelled at the parks people. ‘How could you just leave someone’s name out of the book?’ And so I spent the rest of the day reading the names on the wall. All of them. I was going to show them how wrong they were. But… he wasn’t there, either. I couldn’t-Do you know what it’s like to spend almost fifteen years of your life believing something, to build your beliefs around one single, shining fact, and have… to find that all that time it actually was like cancer growing inside?”

Bosch smeared the tears on her cheeks with his hand. He leaned his face close to hers.

“So what did you do, Eleanor?”

The fist against her lips squeezed tighter, her knuckles as bloodless as a corpse’s. Bosch noticed a park bench farther down the walkway and he took her by the shoulder and directed her there.

“This whole thing,” he said after they were sitting. “I don’t understand, Eleanor. This whole thing. You were the-You wanted some kind of revenge against-”

“Justice. Not revenge, not vengeance.”

“Is there a difference?”

She didn’t answer.

“Tell me what you did.”

“I confronted my parents. And they finally told me about L.A. I went through all my things from him and I found a letter, his last letter. I still had it in my things at my parents’ house but I’d forgotten it. It’s here.”

She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. Bosch could see the rubber grips and the handle of her gun in the purse. She opened her wallet and pulled out a twice-folded piece of lined notebook paper. She delicately unfolded it and held it open for him to read. He didn’t touch it.

Ellie, I’m getting so short here I can practically taste the soft-shell crabs. I should be home in two weeks or so. First I have to stop off in Los Angeles to make some money. Ha Ha! I have a plan (but don’t tell the OM). I’m supposed to drop off a “diplomatic” package in L.A. But there might be a way to do something better with it. When I get back, maybe we can go up to the Poconos again before I have to go back to work for the “war machine.” I know what you think about what I’m doing but I can’t tell the OM no. We’ll see how it goes. One thing’s for sure, I’m glad to be leaving this place. I’ve been In Country for six weeks before getting some R & R here in Saigon. I don’t want to go back, so I’m having them treat me for dysentery. (Ask the OM what that is! Ha Ha.) All I had to do was eat some of the restaurant food in this town and got the symptoms. Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m safe and I’ll be home soon. So get those crab traps out of the shed. Love, Michael

She folded the letter carefully and put it away.

“The OM?” Bosch asked.

“The Old Man.”

“Right.”

Her composure was coming back. Her face was taking on the hard look Bosch had seen the first day he met her. Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest and his arm in the blue sling.

“I’m not wired, Eleanor,” he said. “I’m here for myself. I want to know for myself.”

“That’s not what I was looking at,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t be wired. I was thinking of your arm. Harry, if there is anything that you believe about me now, that you can believe, believe me when I say no one was supposed to get hurt.

“No one… Everybody was to lose. But that was all. After that day-at the memorial, I looked and I searched and I found out what happened to my brother. I used Ernst at State, I used the Pentagon, my father, I used whatever I could and I found out about my brother.”

She searched his eyes but he tried not to reveal the thoughts behind them.

“And?”

“And it was like Ernst told us. Toward the end of the war, the three captains, the triad, were taking an active part in the transport of heroin to the States. One conduit was Rourke and his crew at the embassy, the military police. That included Meadows, Delgado and Franklin. They would find short-timers in the bars in Saigon and proposition them: a few thousand dollars to take a sealed diplomatic package through customs. Nothing to it. They could arrange for them to receive temporary courier status, put them on a plane, and somebody would be waiting for the package in L.A. My brother was one of those that accepted… But Michael had a plan. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were carrying. And so he must have thought he could get over here and make a better deal with somebody else. I don’t know how far he thought it out or had it set up. But it didn’t matter. They found him and they killed him.”

“They?”

“I don’t know who. People working for the captains. For Rourke. It was perfect. He was killed in a way that the army, his family, just about everybody, would want to keep quiet. So it was quickly tidied up and that was that.”

Bosch sat next to her as she told the rest of the story and did not interrupt until it was done, until it had come out of her like a demon.

She said the first one she found was Rourke. He was, to her astonishment, in the bureau. She called in her markers and transferred from D.C. out to his crew. She had a different last name than her brother had. Rourke didn’t know who she was. After that, Meadows, Franklin and Delgado were located easily enough in prisons. They weren’t going anywhere.

“Rourke was the key,” she said. “I went to work on him. I guess you could say I seduced him with the plan.”

Bosch felt something tear loose inside, some final feeling for her.

“I clearly insinuated that I wanted to make a score. I knew he would go for it because he’d been corrupt for years. And he was greedy. One night he told me about the diamonds, how he had helped these two guys out of Saigon with boxes full of diamonds. It was Tran and Binh. From there, it was easy to plan the whole thing. Rourke recruited the other three and pulled some strings, anonymously, to get them early releases into Charlie Company. It was a perfect plan and Rourke actually thought it was his. That’s what made it perfect. In the end, I was going to disappear with the treasure. Binh and Tran would be robbed of the fortune they had spent their lives collecting and hoarding, and the other four would taste the biggest score of their lives and have it taken away. It would be the best way of hurting them the most. But no one outside the circle of guilt was to get hurt… Things just happened.”

“Meadows took the bracelet,” Bosch said.

“Yes. Meadows took the bracelet. I saw it on the pawn lists that got sent over from LAPD. It was routine, but I panicked. Those lists go to every burglary unit in the county. I thought it would get noticed by somebody, Meadows would be pulled in and spill the story. I told Rourke. And he panicked, too. He waited until they were pretty much done with the second tunnel, and then he and the two others confronted Meadows. I wasn’t there.”

Her eyes were fixed on a point far away. There was no emotion in her voice anymore. It was just a flat line. Bosch didn’t have to prompt her. The rest just came out.

“I wasn’t there,” she said again. “Rourke called me. He told me that, you know, Meadows died without giving up the pawn ticket. He said he’d made it look like an overdose. The bastard actually said that he knew people who had done it before, a long time ago, and gotten away with it. You see? He was talking about my brother. When he said that, I knew I was doing the right thing…

“Anyway, he needed my help. They had searched Meadows’s place and couldn’t find the pawn stub. That meant Delgado and Franklin were going to break into the shop and get the bracelet back. But Rourke wanted my help with Meadows. The body. He didn’t know what to do with it.”