Michael Connelly - Trunk Music

“Hello?” she said.

“Yes, hello, who’s this?”

She giggled.

“I don’t know, who’s this?”

“I might have the wrong number. Is this Tony’s?”

“No, it’s Dolly’s.”

“Oh, Dolly’s. Okay, uh, then where are you located?”

She giggled again.

“On Madison, where do you think? How do you think we got the name?”

“Where’s Madison?”

“We’re in North Las Vegas. Where are you coming from?”

“The Mirage.”

“Okay, just follow the boulevard out front to the north. You go all the way past downtown and past a bunch of cruddy areas and into North Las Vegas. Madison is your third light after you go under the overpass. Take a left and we’re a block down on the left. What’s your name again?”

“It’s Harry.”

“Well, Harry, I’m Rhonda. As in…”

Bosch said nothing.

“Come on, Harry, you’re supposed to say, ‘Help me, Rhonda, help, help me, Rhonda.’”

She sang the line from the old Beach Boys song.

“Actually, Rhonda, there is something you can help me with,” Bosch said. “I’m looking for a buddy of mine. Tony Aliso. He been in there lately?”

“Haven’t seen him this week. Haven’t seen him since Thursday or Friday. I was wondering how you got the dressing room number.”

“Yeah, from Tony.”

“Well, Layla isn’t here tonight, so Tony wouldn’t be coming in anyway, I don’t think. But you can come on out. He don’t have to be here for you to have a good time.”

“Okay, Rhonda, I’ll try to swing by.”

Bosch hung up. He took a notebook out of his pocket and wrote down the name of the business he had just called, the directions to it and the names Rhonda and Layla. He drew a line under the second name.

“What was that?” Rider asked.

“A lead in Vegas.”

He recounted the call and the inference made about the person named Layla. Rider agreed that it was something to pursue, then went back to the files. Bosch went back to the desk. He studied the things on top of it before going to the things in it.

“Hey, Chuckie?” he asked.

Meachum, leaning against the door with his arms folded in front of him, raised his eyebrows by way of response.

“He’s got no phone tape. What about when the receptionist isn’t out there? Do phone calls go to the operator or some kind of a phone service?”

“Uh, no, the whole lot’s on voice mail now.”

“So Aliso had voice mail? How do I get into it?”

“Well, you’ve got to have his code. It’s a three-digit code. You call the voice mail computer, punch in the code and you pick up your messages.”

“How do I get his code?”

“You don’t. He programmed it himself.”

“There’s no master code I can break in with?”

“Nope. It’s not that sophisticated a system, Bosch. I mean, what do you want, it’s phone messages.”

Bosch took out his notebook again and checked the notes for Aliso’s birthday.

“What’s the voice mail number?” he asked.

Meachum gave him the number and Bosch called the computer. After a beep he punched in 721 but the number was rejected. Bosch drummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. He tried 862, the numbers corresponding with TNA, and a computer voice told him he had four messages.

“Kiz, listen to this,” he said.

He put the phone on speaker and hung up. As the messages were played back Bosch took a few notes, but the first three messages were from men reporting on technical aspects of a planned film shoot, equipment rental and costs. Each call was followed by the electronic voice which reported when on Friday the call had come in.

The fourth message made Bosch lean forward and listen closely. The voice belonged to a young woman and it sounded like she was crying.

“Hey, Tone, it’s me. Call me as soon as you get this. I almost feel like calling your house. I need you. That bastard Lucky says I’m fired. And for no reason. He just wants to get his dick into Modesty. I’m so…I don’t want to have to work at the Palomino or any of those other places. The Garden. Forget it. I want to come out there to L.A. Be with you. Call me.”

The electronic voice said the call had come in at 4 A.M. on Sunday-long after Tony Aliso was dead. The caller had not given her name. It was therefore obviously someone Aliso would have known. Bosch wondered if it was the woman Rhonda had mentioned, Layla. He looked at Rider and she just shook her shoulders. They knew too little to judge the significance of the call.

Bosch sat in the desk chair contemplating things a few moments. He opened a drawer but didn’t start through it. His eyes traveled up the wall to the right of the desk and roamed across the photos of the smiling Tony Aliso posed with celebrities. Some of them had written notes on the photos but they were hard to read. Bosch studied the photo of his celluloid alter ego, Dan Lacey, but couldn’t read the small note scrawled across the bottom of the photo. Then he looked past the ink and realized what he was looking at. On Aliso’s desk in the photo was an Archway mug crammed with pens and pencils.

Bosch took the photo off the wall and called Meachum’s name. Meachum came over.

“Somebody was in here,” Bosch told him.

“What are you talking about?”

“When was the trash can emptied outside?”

“How the hell would I know? What are-”

“The surveillance camera out there on the roof, how long you keep the tapes?”

Meachum hesitated a second but then answered.

“We roll ’em over every week. We’d have seven days off that camera. It’s all stop action, ten frames a minute.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

Bosch didn’t get home until four. That left him only three hours to sleep before an agreed-upon breakfast meeting with Edgar and Rider at seven-thirty, but he was too strung out on coffee and adrenaline to even think about shutting his eyes.

The house had the sour tang of a fresh-paint smell and he opened the sliders onto the back deck to let in the cool night air. He checked out the Cahuenga Pass below and watched the cars on the Hollywood Freeway cutting through. He was always amazed at how there were always cars on the freeway, no matter what the hour. In L.A. they never stopped.

He thought about putting on a CD, some saxophone music, but instead just sat down on the couch in the dark and lit a cigarette. He thought about the different currents running through the case. Going by the preliminary take on the victim, Anthony Aliso had been a financially successful man. That kind of success usually brought with it a thick insulation from violence and murder. The rich were seldom murdered. But something had gone wrong for Tony Aliso.

Bosch remembered the tape and went to his briefcase, which he had left on the dining room table. Inside it there were two video cassettes, the Archway surveillance tape and the copy of Casualty of Desire. He turned on the TV and put the movie in the video player. He began watching in the dark.

After viewing the tape it was obvious to Bosch that the movie deserved the fate it had received. It was badly lit and in some frames the end of a boom microphone hovered above the players. This was particularly jarring in scenes shot in the open desert where there should have been nothing above but blue sky. It was basic filmmaking gone wrong. And added to the amateurish look of the film were the poor performances of the players. The male lead, an actor Bosch had never seen before, was woodenly ineffective in portraying a man desperate to hold on to his young wife, who used sexual frustration and taunting to coerce him into committing crimes, eventually including murder, all for her morbid satisfaction. Veronica Aliso played the wife and was not much better an actor than the male lead.