Michael Connelly - Trunk Music

“Detective Bosch, welcome to Las Vegas. Lucky for you I decided to come in on the holiday to take care of some of this paperwork that haunts me. Otherwise, there’d be nobody here. Anyway, I hope you find your stay enjoyable and productive. If there is anything you need, don’t hesitate to call. I can promise you nothing, but if you request something that is within my power to provide, I will be more than happy to provide it. So, that out of the way, why don’t you tell me what brings you here?”

Bosch gave him a quick rundown on the case. Felton wrote down the name Tony Aliso and the last days he was known to have stayed in Las Vegas and where.

“I’m just trying to run down his activities on the days he was here.”

“You think he was followed from here and then taken off in L.A.?”

“I don’t think anything at the moment. We don’t have evidence of that.”

“And I hope you won’t find any. That’s not the kind of press we want to get in L.A. What else you got?”

Bosch pulled his briefcase onto his lap and opened it.

“I’ve got two sets of prints taken off the body. We-”

“The body?”

“He was wearing a treated leather jacket. We got the prints with the laser. Anyway, we ran them on AFIS, NCIC, California DOJ, the works, but got nothing. I thought maybe you’d run them through your own computer, see what happens.”

While the Automated Fingerprint Identification System used by the LAPD was a computer network of dozens of fingerprint databases across the country, it didn’t connect them all. And most big-city police departments had their own private databases. In Vegas they would be prints taken from people who applied for jobs for the city or the casinos. They were also prints taken from people on the sly, prints the department shouldn’t legally have because their owners had simply fallen under the suspicion of the department but had never been arrested. It was against this database that Bosch was hopeful Felton would check the sets from the Aliso case.

“Well, let me see what you have,” Felton said. “I can’t promise anything. We’ve probably gotta few that the national nets don’t, but it’s a long shot.”

Bosch handed over print cards Art Donovan had prepared for him.

“So you are starting at the Mirage?” the captain asked after he put the cards to the side of his desk.

“Yeah. I’ll show his picture around, go through the motions, see what I can come up with.”

“You’re telling me everything you know, right?”

“Right,” Bosch lied.

“Okay.” Felton opened a desk drawer and took out a business card and handed it over to Bosch. “That’s got my office and pager on it. Call me if anything comes up. I’ve got the pager with me at all times. Meantime, I’ll get back to you about the prints, one way or the other, by tomorrow morning.”

Bosch thanked him and left. In the lobby of the police station he called the SID office at LAPD and asked Donovan if he’d had time to check out the tiny pieces of glitter they had found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants.

“Yeah, but you aren’t going to like it,” Donovan said. “It’s just glitter. Tinted aluminum. You know, like they use in costuming and in celebrations. Your guy probably went to a party or something, they were throwing this stuff around, maybe popping it out of party favors or something, and some of it got on him. He could brush off what he could see, but he didn’t see the particles that fell into the cuffs of his pants. They stayed.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Uh, no. Not on the evidence at least.”

“Then on what?”

“Well, Harry, you know the guy from OCID that you were talking on the phone with last night while we were in the shed?”

“Carbone?”

“Yeah, Dominic Carbone. Well, he dropped by the lab today. He was asking questions about what we found last night.”

Bosch’s vision darkened. He said nothing and Donovan continued.

“He said he was here on something else and was just acting curious. But, Harry, I don’t know. It seemed more than just a passing interest, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. How much did you tell him?”

“Well, before I caught on and started wondering what was going on, I sort of let slip we pulled prints off the jacket. Sorry, Harry, but I was proud. It’s rare that we pull righteous prints off a dead guy’s jacket, and I guess I was sort of braggin’ about it.”

“It’s okay. You tell him we didn’t get anything with them?”

“Yeah, I said they came back clean. But then…then he asked for a copy of the set, said he might be able to do something with them, whatever that means.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you think, I gave him a set.”

“You what?”

“Just kidding, Harry. I told him to call you if he wanted a set.”

“Good. What else you tell him?”

“That’s it, Harry.”

“Okay, Art, it’s cool. I’ll check you later.”

“See you, Harry. Hey, where are you, anyway?”

“Vegas.”

“Really? Hey, put down a five for me on seven on the roulette wheel. Do it one time. I’ll pay you when you get back. Unless I win. Then you pay me.”

Bosch got back to his room forty-five minutes before his appointment with Hank Meyer. He used the time to shower, shave and change into one of his fresh shirts. He felt refreshed, ready to go back into the desert heat.

Meyer had arranged to have the sports book clerks and dealers who worked the poker pit on the previous Thursday and Friday evening shifts to be interviewed one at a time in his office. There were six men and three women. Eight were dealers and one was the clerk Aliso always placed his sports bets with. During any shift, the poker dealers rotated around the casino’s six poker tables every twenty minutes. This meant that all eight had dealt cards to Aliso during his last visit to Las Vegas, and by virtue of his regular trips to the casino, they readily recognized him and knew him.

With Meyer sitting by watching, Bosch quickly moved through the interviews with the poker dealers in an hour. He was able to establish that Aliso usually played the five-to-ten table. This meant each hand started with a five-dollar ante and each deal carried a minimum bet of five dollars and a maximum of ten. Three raises were allowed per deal. Since the game was seven card stud, that meant there were five deals per hand. Bosch quickly realized that if a table was full with eight players, each hand could easily result in several hundred dollars being at stake in the pot. Aliso was playing in a league far removed from the Friday night poker games Bosch had participated in with the dicks from the detective bureau.

According to the dealers, Aliso had played for about three hours on Thursday night and had come out about even. He played another two hours early Friday evening, and it was estimated that he left the tables a couple thousand short. None of them recalled Aliso ever being a big winner or loser during previous visits. He always came out a few thousand light or heavy. He seemed to know when to quit.

The dealers also noted that Aliso was always quick with the gratuity. His standard tip was ten dollars in chips for every win, a twenty-five chip on particularly big pots. It was that practice more than anything else that endeared him to their memories. He always played alone, drank gin and tonic and small-talked with the other players. In recent months, the dealers said, Aliso had been in the company of a young blond woman, barely into her twenties. She never played but would work the slots nearby and come back to Tony when she needed more money. Tony never introduced her to anybody and none of the dealers ever overheard her name. In his notebook, where Bosch jotted this down, he wrote “Layla?” after this entry.