Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

She waited a beat but no one responded. She continued.

“Now the first thing I am going to need is for you and all of your people to vacate these premises.”

OUTSIDE the front doors of the Bradbury the detectives walked empty-handed to their cars. Bosch was still angry but was cooler now. He walked slowly, allowing Chastain and Dellacroce to get to their car first. As he watched them drive off on their way back up Bunker Hill to California Plaza he opened the passenger door of Kiz’s slickback but didn’t get in. He bent down and looked in at her as she pulled the seat belt across her lap.

“You go on up, Kiz. I’ll meet you up there.”

“You’re going to walk it?”

Bosch nodded and looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty.

“I’ll take Angels Flight. It should be running again. When you get up there you know what to do. Start everybody knocking on doors.”

“Okay, see you up there. You going to go back up and talk to her again?”

“Entrenkin? Yeah, I think so. Do you still have Elias’s keys?”

“Yeah.” She dug them out of her purse and handed them to Bosch. “Is there something I should know about?”

Bosch paused for a moment.

“Not yet. I’ll see you up there.”

Rider started the car. She looked over at him again before putting it into drive.

“Harry, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He nodded. “It’s just the case. First we got Chastain – asshole’s always been able to get to me. Now we’ve got Carla I’mthinkin’. It’s bad enough we knew she’d be watching the case. Now she’s a part of it. I don’t like politics, Kiz. I just like putting cases together.”

“I’m not talking about all of that. It’s like you’ve been walking on the sun since we met this morning to pick up the cars in Hollywood. You want to talk about it?”

He almost nodded.

“Maybe later, Kiz,” he said instead. “We got work to do right now.”

“Whatever, but I’m about to get worried about you, Harry. You need to be straight. If you’re distracted, then we’re distracted and we aren’t going to get anywhere on this thing. That’d be okay most days but on this one you just said it yourself, we’re under the glass.”

Bosch nodded again. Her having picked up on his personal turmoil was a testament to her skill as a detective – reading people was always more important than reading clues.

“I hear you, Kiz. I’ll straighten up.”

“I copy that.”

“I’ll see you up there.”

He slapped the roof of the car and watched her drive off, knowing this would be the time he would normally put a cigarette in his mouth. He didn’t. Instead he looked down at the keys in his hand and thought about his next move and how he had to be very careful.

Bosch went back into the Bradbury and as he rode the slow-moving elevator back up he tumbled the keys in his hand and thought about Entrenkin’s three separate entries into the case. First as a curious listing in Elias’s now missing phone book, then in her capacity as inspector general and now finally a full entrance as a player, the special master who would decide what in Elias’s files the investigators would be allowed to see.

Bosch didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t believe in them. He needed to know what Entrenkin was doing. He believed he had a good idea what that was and intended to confirm it before going any further with the case.

After being delivered to the top floor, Bosch pushed the button that would send the elevator back down to the lobby and got off. The door to Elias’s offices was locked and Bosch knocked sharply on the glazed glass, just below the lawyer’s name. In a few moments Janis Langwiser opened it. Bosch could see Carla Entrenkin standing a few feet behind her.

“Forget something, Detective Bosch?” Langwiser asked.

“No. But is that your little foreign job down there in the no-park zone? The red one? It was about to get towed. I badged the guy and told him to give me five minutes. But he’ll be back.”

“Oh, shit!” She glanced back at Entrenkin as she headed out the door. “I’ll be right back.”

As she moved by him Bosch stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. He then locked it and turned back to Entrenkin.

“Why did you lock that?” she asked. “Please leave it open.”

“I just thought it might be better if I said what I want to say without anybody interrupting us.”

Entrenkin folded her arms across her chest as if bracing for an attack. He studied her face and got the same vibe he had gotten before, when she had told them all they had to leave. There was a certain stoicism there, propping her up despite some clear pain beneath. She reminded Bosch of another woman he knew only from TV: the Oklahoma law school teacher who was brutalized in Washington by the politicians a few years before during the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.

“Look, Detective Bosch, I really don’t see any other way around this. We have to be careful. We have to think about the case as well as the community. The people have to be reassured that everything possible is being done – that this won’t be swept under in the manner they have seen so many times before. I want – ”

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You shouldn’t be on this case and we both know it.”

“That’s what is bullshit. I have the trust of this community. You think they will believe anything you say about this case? Or Irving or the police chief?”

“But you don’t have the trust of the cops. And you’ve got one big conflict of interest, don’t you, Inspector General?”

“What are you saying? I think it was rather wise of Judge Houghton to choose me to act as special master. As inspector general I already have a degree of civilian oversight on the case. This just streamlines things instead of adding another person to the mix. He called me. I didn’t call him.”

“I’m not talking about that and you know it. I’m talking about a conflict of interest. A reason you shouldn’t be anywhere near this case.”

Entrenkin shook her head in an I-don’t-understand gesture but her face clearly showed she feared what Bosch knew.

“You know what I’m saying,” Bosch said. “You and him. Elias. I was in his apartment. Must’ve been just before you got there. Too bad we missed each other. We could’ve settled all of this then.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about but I was just led to believe by Miss Langwiser that you people waited on warrants before entering his apartment and the office. Are you telling me that is not true?”

Bosch hesitated, realizing he had made a mistake. She could now turn his move away or back on him.

“We had to make sure no one was hurt or in need of help in the apartment,” he said.

“Sure. Right. Just like the cops who jumped the fence at O. J. Simpson’s house. Just wanting to make sure everybody was okay.”

She shook her head again.

“The continued arrogance of this department amazes me. From what I had heard about you, Detective Bosch, I expected more.”

“You want to talk about arrogance? You were the one who went in there and removed evidence. The inspector general of the department, the one who polices the police. Now you want to – ”

“Evidence of what? I did no such thing!”

“You cleared your message off the phone machine and you took the phone book with your name and numbers in it. I’m betting you had your own key and garage pass. You came in through the garage and nobody saw you. Right after Irving called to tell you Elias was dead. Only Irving didn’t know that you and Elias had something going on.”

“That’s a nice story. I’d like to see you try to prove any of it.”