Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

“Where will you be?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Will you call?”

“Yes, I’ll call.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m… I’ll be fine.”

“Eleanor, I love you. I know I never said that enough but I – ”

She made a shushing sound in the phone and he stopped.

“I love you, Harry, but I have to do this.”

After a long moment, during which he felt a deep tearing inside, he said, “Okay, Eleanor.”

The silence that followed was as dark as the inside of a coffin. His coffin.

“Good-bye, Harry,” she finally said. “I’ll see you.”

She hung up. Bosch took his hand away from his face and the phone from his ear. In his mind he saw a swimming pool, its surface as smooth as a blanket on a bed. He remembered a time long before when he had been told his mother was dead and that he was alone in the world. He ran to that pool and dove beneath the calm surface, into its warm water. At the bottom, he screamed until his air was gone and his chest ached. Until he had to choose between staying there and dying, or going up and life.

Bosch now longed for that pool and its warm water. He wanted to scream until his lungs burst inside him.

“Everything okay?”

He looked up. It was Rider and Edgar. Edgar carried a steaming cup of coffee. Rider had a look that said she was concerned or maybe even scared by the look she was seeing on Bosch’s face.

“Everything’s cool,” Bosch said. “Everything’s fine.”

THEY had ninety minutes to kill before the meeting with Pelfry. Bosch told Edgar to drive over to Hollywood Wax amp; Shine, on Sunset not far from the station. Edgar pulled to the curb and they sat there watching. Business was slow. Most of the men in orange coveralls who dried and polished the cars for minimum wage and tips were sitting around, drying rags draped over their shoulders, waiting. Most of them stared balefully at the slickback as if the police were to blame.

“I guess people aren’t that interested in having their cars washed when they might end up turned over or torched,” Edgar said.

Bosch didn’t answer.

“Bet they all wish they were in Michael Harris’s shoes,” Edgar continued, staring back at the workers. “Hell, I’d trade three days in an interview room and pencils in my ears to be a millionaire.”

“So then you believe him,” Bosch said.

Bosch hadn’t told him about Frankie Sheehan’s barroom confession. Edgar was quiet a moment and then nodded.

“Yeah, Harry, I guess I sort of do.”

Bosch wondered how he had been so blind as to not even have considered that the torturing of a suspect could be true. He wondered what it was about Edgar that made him accepting of the suspect’s story over the cops’. Was it his experience as a cop or as a black man? Bosch assumed it had to be the latter and it depressed him because it gave Edgar an edge he could never have.

“I’m gonna go in, talk to the manager,” Bosch said. “Maybe you should stay with the car.”

“Fuck that. They won’t touch it.”

They got out and locked the car.

As they walked toward the store Bosch thought about the orange coveralls and wondered if it was coincidence. He guessed that most of the men working at the car wash were ex-cons or fresh out of county lockup – institutions in which they also had to wear orange coveralls.

Inside the store Bosch bought a cup of coffee and asked for the manager. The cashier pointed down a hallway to an open door. On the way down the hall, Edgar said, “I feel like a Coke but I don’t think I can drink a Coke after what I saw last night in that bitch’s closet.”

A man was sitting at a desk in the small, windowless office with his feet up on one of the open drawers. He looked up at Bosch and Edgar and said, “Yes, Officers, what can I do for you?”

Bosch smiled at the man’s deduction. He knew he had to be part businessman, part parole officer. If the polishers were ex-cons, it was the only job they could get. That meant the manager had seen his share of cops and knew how to pick them out. Either that or he saw them pull up in the slickback.

“We’re working a case,” Bosch began. “The Howard Elias case.”

The manager whistled.

“A few weeks ago he subpoenaed some of your records. Receipts with license plate numbers on them. You know anything about that?”

The manager thought about it for a few moments.

“All I know is that I was the one who had to go through everything and get it copied for his guy.”

“His guy?” Edgar asked.

“Yeah, what do you think, a guy like Elias comes get the stuff himself? He sent somebody. I got his card here.”

He lowered his feet to the floor and opened the desk’s pencil drawer. There was a stack of business cards with a rubber band around it. He took it off and looked through the cards and chose one. He showed it to Bosch.

“Pelfry?” Edgar asked.

Bosch nodded.

“Did his guy say exactly what they were looking for in all that stuff?” he asked.

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. Or, I mean, ask Pelfry.”

“Did Pelfry come back with the stuff yet?”

“No. It was copies, anyway. I mean, he came back but not to bring back the receipts.”

“Then why’d he come back?” Edgar asked.

“He wanted to see one of Michael Harris’s old time cards. From when he worked here.”

“Which one?” Edgar asked, a tone of urgency in his voice.

“I don’t remember, man. I gave him a copy. You go talk to him and maybe he – ”

“Did he have a subpoena for the time card?” Bosch asked.

“No, he just asked for it, you know. I said sure and got it for him. But he gave me the date and you didn’t. I don’t remember it. Anyway, look, if you want to ask more about this then maybe you better call our lawyer. I’m not going to get involved in talking about stuff I don’t – ”

“Never mind that stuff,” Bosch said. “Tell me about Michael Harris.”

“What’s to tell? I never had a problem with the guy. He was okay, then they came in and said he killed that little girl. And did things to her. It didn’t seem like the guy I knew. But he hadn’t been working here that long. Maybe five months.”

“Know where he was before that?” Edgar asked.

“Yeah. Up at Corcoran.”

Corcoran was a state prison near Bakersfield. Bosch thanked the manager and they left. He took a few sips of his coffee but dumped it in a trash can before getting back to the car.

While Bosch waited at the passenger door for it to be unlocked, Edgar went around to his side. He stopped before opening the door.

“Goddammit.”

“What?”

“They wrote shit on the door.”

Bosch came around and looked. Someone had used light blue chalk – the chalk used to write washing instructions on the windshields of clients’ cars – to cross out the words To protect and serve on the driver’s side front fender. Then written in large letters were the words To murder and maim. Bosch nodded his approval.

“That’s pretty original.”

“Harry, let’s go kick some ass.”

“No, Jerry, let it go. You don’t want to start something. It might take three days to end it. Like last time. Like Florence and Normandie.”

Edgar sullenly unlocked the car and then opened Bosch’s door.

“We’re right by the station,” Bosch said after he got in. “We can go back and spray it off. Or we can use my car.”

“I’d like to use one of those assholes’ faces to clean it off.”

After they had the car cleaned up there was still time for them to drive by the lot where Stacey Kincaid’s body had been found. It was off Western and was on the way downtown, where they would go to meet Pelfry.