Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

“Shit.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. Continue the search.”

Bosch flipped the phone closed and put it in his pocket. He walked back to the others. He tried to act calm, as if the call had only been a minor annoyance.

“Okay, let’s go up and do what we can up there.”

They moved to the elevator, which was an open wrought-iron cage with ornate flourishes and polished brass trim.

“Why don’t you take the ladies up first,” Bosch said to Dellacroce. “We’ll come up after. That ought to distribute the weight pretty evenly.”

He took Elias’s key ring out of his pocket and handed it to Rider.

“The office key should be on there,” he said. “And never mind about that other thing with Harris for the time being. Let’s see what we’ve got in the office first.”

“Sure, Harry.”

They got on and Dellacroce pulled the accordion gate closed. The elevator rose with a jerking motion. After it was up one floor and those on it could not see them, Bosch turned to Chastain. The anger and frustration of everything going wrong flooded him then. He dropped his briefcase and with both hands grabbed Chastain by the collar of his jacket. He roughly pushed him against the elevator cage and spoke in a low, dark voice that was full of rage.

“Goddammit, Chastain, I’m only asking this one time. Where’s the fucking phone book?”

Chastain’s face flushed crimson and his eyes grew wide in shock.

“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

He brought his hands up to Bosch’s and tried to free himself but Bosch maintained the pressure, leaning all of his weight into the other man.

“The phone book in the apartment. I know you took it and I want it back. Right the fuck now.”

Finally, Chastain tore himself loose. His jacket and shirt and tie were wrenched askew. He stepped away from Bosch as if he was scared and adjusted himself. He then pointed a finger at him.

“Stay away from me! You’re fucking nuts! I don’t have any phone book. You had it. I saw you put it in the goddamn drawer next to the bed.”

Bosch took a step toward him.

“You took it. When I was on the bal – ”

“I said stay away! I didn’t take it. If it’s not there, then somebody came in and took it after we left.”

Bosch stopped. It was an obvious explanation but it hadn’t even entered his mind. He had automatically thought of Chastain. He looked down at the tiles, embarrassed by how he’d let an old animosity cloud his judgment. He could hear the elevator gate opening on the fifth floor. He raised his eyes, fixed Chastain with a bloodless stare and pointed at his face.

“I find out otherwise, Chastain, I promise I’ll take you apart.”

“Fuck you! I didn’t take the book. But I am going to take your badge for this.”

Bosch smiled but not in a way that had any warmth.

“Go ahead. Write your ticket, Chastain. Anytime you can take my badge you can have it.”

THE others were inside Howard Elias’s law offices by the time Bosch and Chastain made it up to the fifth floor. The office was essentially three rooms: a reception area with a secretary’s desk, a middle room where there was a clerk’s desk and two walls of file cabinets, and then the third and largest room, Elias’s office.

As Bosch and Chastain moved through the offices the others stood silently and didn’t look at them. It was clear that they had heard the commotion in the lobby as they had taken the elevator up. Bosch didn’t care about that. He had already put the confrontation with Chastain behind him and was thinking about the search. He was hoping something would be found in the office that would give the investigation a focus, a specific path to follow. He walked through the three rooms making general observations. In the last room he noticed that through the windows behind Elias’s large polished wood desk he could see the huge face of Anthony Quinn. It was part of a mural depicting the actor with arms outstretched on the brick wall of a building across the street from the Bradbury.

Rider came into the office behind him. She looked out the window, too.

“You know every time I’m down here and see that I wonder who that is.”

“You don’t know?”

“César Chávez?”

“Anthony Quinn. You know, the actor.”

He got a nonresponse from her.

“Before your time, I guess. The mural is called the Pope of Broadway, like he’s watching over all the homeless around here.”

“Oh, I see.” She didn’t sound impressed. “How you want to do this?”

Bosch was still staring at the mural. He liked it, even though he had a hard time seeing Anthony Quinn as a Christlike figure. But the mural seemed to capture something about the man, a raw masculine and emotional power. Bosch stepped closer to the window and looked down. He saw the forms of two homeless people sleeping under blankets of newspapers in the parking lot beneath the mural. Anthony Quinn’s arms were outstretched over them. Bosch nodded. The mural was one of the little things that made him like downtown so much. Just like the Bradbury and Angels Flight. Little pieces of grace were everywhere if you looked.

He turned around. Chastain and Langwiser had entered the room behind Rider.

“I’ll work in here. Kiz and Janis, you two take the file room.”

“And what?” Chastain said. “Me and Del get the secretary’s desk?”

“Yeah. While you’re going through it, see if you can come up with her name and the name of the intern or clerk. We’ll need to talk to them today.”

Chastain nodded but Bosch could see he was annoyed about getting the weakest assignment.

“Tell you what,” Bosch added, “why don’t you go out first and see if you can find some boxes. We’re going to be taking a lot of files out of here.”

Chastain left the office without a word. Bosch glanced at Rider and saw her give him a look that told him he was acting like an asshole.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll be in the file room.”

She left then, leaving just Langwiser and Bosch.

“Everything okay, Detective?”

“Everything’s fine. I’m going to get to work now. Do what I can until we hear about your special master.”

“Look, I’m sorry. But you called me out here to advise you and this is what I advise. I still think it is the right way to go.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

For most of the next hour Bosch methodically went through Elias’s desk, studying the man’s belongings, appointment calendar and paperwork. Most of his time was spent reading through a series of notebooks in which Elias had kept reminders to himself, lists of things to do, pencil drawings and general notes from phone calls. Each notebook was dated on the outside cover. It appeared that Elias filled the pages of one book every week or so with his voluminous notations and doodles. Nothing in the books jumped out at Bosch as being pertinent to the investigation. But he also knew that so little about the circumstances of Elias’s murder was known that something seeming unimportant in the notebooks at the moment might become important later.

Before starting to page through the most recent notebook, Bosch was interrupted by another call from Edgar.

“Harry, you said there was a message on the phone machine?”

“That’s right.”

“There ain’t now.”

Bosch leaned back in Elias’s chair and closed his eyes.

“Goddammit.”

“Yeah, it’s been cleared. I dicked around with it and it’s not a tape. Messages are stored on a microchip. The chip was cleared.”

“Okay,” Bosch replied, angrily. “Continue the search. When you’re done, talk to the security people about who’s been in and out of that place. See if they’ve got any video points in the lobby or parking garage. Somebody went in there after I left.”