Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

“Whaddaya got?” Chastain said.

“Nothing,” Bosch answered. “Just a bunch of lawyers.”

He closed the phone book as Chastain stepped over to look. He tossed it back in the drawer and closed it.

“Better leave it for the warrant,” he said.

They conducted a casual search of the rest of the apartment for the next twenty minutes, looking in drawers and closets, under beds and couch cushions, but not disturbing anything they found. At one point Chastain called out from the bathroom off the master bedroom.

“Got two toothbrushes here.”

“Okay.”

Bosch was in the living room, studying the books on shelves. He saw one he had read years before, Yesterday Will Make You Cry by Chester Himes. He felt Chastain’s presence and turned around. Chastain stood in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He was holding a box of condoms up for Bosch to see.

“These were hidden in the back of a shelf under the sink.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded.

In the kitchen there was a wall-mounted telephone with an answering machine. There was a flashing light on it and the digital display showed there was one message waiting to be played. Bosch pushed the playback button. It was a woman’s voice on the message.

“Hey, it’s me. I thought you were going to call me. I hope you didn’t fall asleep on me.”

That was it. After the message, the machine reported that the call had come in at 12:01 A.M. Elias was already dead by then. Chastain, who had come into the kitchen from the living room when he heard the voice, just looked at Bosch and hiked his shoulders after the message was played. Bosch played it again.

“Doesn’t sound like the wife to me,” Bosch said.

“Sounds white to me,” Chastain said.

Bosch thought he was right. He played the message one more time, this time concentrating on the tone of the woman’s voice. There was a clear sense of intimacy in the voice. The time of the call and the woman’s assumption that Elias would know her voice supported this conclusion as well.

“Condoms hidden in the bathroom, two toothbrushes, mystery woman on the phone,” Chastain said. “Sounds like we got a girlfriend in the works. That could make things interesting.”

“Maybe,” Bosch said. “Somebody made the bed this morning. Any female stuff in the medicine cabinet?”

“Nothing.”

Chastain went back to the living room. After Bosch was finished in the kitchen, he felt he had seen enough for the time being and slid open the glass door leading from the living room to the balcony. He leaned on the iron railing and checked his watch. It was 4:50. He then pulled the pager off his belt to make sure he hadn’t turned it off by mistake.

The pager was on, the battery not dead. Eleanor had not tried to reach him. He heard Chastain come out onto the balcony behind him. Bosch spoke without turning to look at him.

“Did you know him, Chastain?”

“Who, Elias? Yeah, sort of.”

“How?”

“I’ve worked cases he later went to court on. I got subpoenaed and deposed. Plus, the Bradbury. He’s got his office there, we’ve got offices there. I’d see him every now and then. But if you’re asking if I played golf with the guy, the answer is no. I didn’t know him like that.”

“The guy made a living suing cops. When he got into court he always seemed to have real good information. Inside stuff. Some say better stuff than he should have had access to through legal discovery. Some say he might’ve had sources inside – ”

“I wasn’t a snitch for Howard Elias, Bosch,” Chastain said, his voice tight. “And I don’t know anyone in IAD who was. We investigate cops. I investigate cops. Sometimes they deserve it and sometimes it turns out they don’t. You know as well as I do that there has to be somebody to police the police. But snitching to the likes of Howard Elias and his bunch, that’s the lowest of the low, Bosch. So fuck you very much for asking.”

Bosch looked at him now, studying the way the anger was moving into his dark eyes.

“Just asking,” he said. “Had to know who I am dealing with.”

He looked back out across the city and then down to the plaza below. He saw Kiz Rider and Loomis Baker crossing toward Angels Flight with a man Bosch assumed was Eldrige Peete, the train operator.

“All right, you asked,” Chastain said. “Can we get on with it now?”

“Sure.”

They were silent during the elevator ride down. It wasn’t until they were in the lobby that Bosch spoke.

“You go on ahead,” he said. “I’m gonna see if there’s a can around here. Tell the others I’ll be right there.”

“Sure.”

The doorman had overheard the exchange from his little lobby desk and told Bosch the rest room was around the corner behind the elevators. Bosch headed that way.

In the rest room Bosch put his briefcase on the sink counter and got his phone out. He called his house first. When the machine picked up he punched in the code to play all new messages. Only his own message played back to him. Eleanor hadn’t got it.

“Shit,” he said as he hung up.

He then called information and got the number for the Hollywood Park poker room. The last time Eleanor had not come home she had told him she was playing cards there. He called the number and asked for the security office. A man identifying himself as Mr. Jardine answered and Bosch gave his name and badge number. Jardine asked him to spell his name and give the number again. He was obviously writing it down.

“Are you in the video room?”

“Sure am. What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for somebody and there is a good chance she is at one of your tables right now. I was wondering if you could look at the tubes for me.”

“What’s she look like?”

Bosch described his wife but could not give any description on clothes because he had not checked the closets at the house. He then waited two minutes while Jardine apparently studied the video screens connected to the surveillance cameras in the poker room.

“Uh, if she’s here, I’m not seeing her,” Jardine finally said. “We don’t have very many women in here this time of night. And she doesn’t match the ones we’ve got. I mean, she could have been in here earlier, maybe one or two o’clock. But not now.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Hey, you got a number. I’ll take a walk around the place, call you back if I see anything.”

“I’ll give you my pager. But if you see her, don’t approach her. Just give me a page.”

“Will do.”

After giving the man his pager number and hanging up, Bosch thought about the card clubs in Gardena and Commerce but decided not to call. If Eleanor was going to stay local she would have gone to Hollywood Park. If she didn’t go there she’d go to Vegas or maybe the Indian place in the desert near Palm Springs. He tried not to think about that and focused his mind back on the case.

Bosch next called the district attorney’s night switchboard after getting the number out of his phone book. He asked to be connected to the on-call prosecutor and was eventually connected to a sleepy attorney named Janis Langwiser. She happened to be the same prosecutor who had filed charges in the so-called hard-boiled eggs case. She had recently moved over from the city attorney’s office and it had been the first time Bosch had worked with her. He had enjoyed her sense of humor and enthusiasm for her job.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “you’ve got a scrambled eggs case this time? Or better yet, the western omelet case.”

“Not quite. I hate to pull you out of bed but we’re going to need somebody to come out and give us a little guidance on a search we’ll be doing pretty soon.”