Michael Connelly - Trunk Music

They started the meal in silence. He waited.

“I like it a lot,” she finally said. “What do you call this?”

“I don’t know. My mother just called it Chicken Special. I think that’s what it was called in a restaurant where she first had it.”

“A family recipe.”

“The only one.”

They ate quietly for a few minutes during which Bosch surreptitiously tried to watch her to see if she really enjoyed the food. He was pretty sure she did.

“Harry,” Eleanor said after a while, “who are the agents involved in this?”

“They’re from all over; Chicago, Vegas, L.A.”

“Who from L.A.?”

“Guy named John O’Grady? You know him?”

It had been more than five years since she had worked in the bureau’s L.A. field office. FBI agents moved around a lot. He doubted she would know O’Grady and she said she didn’t.

“What about John Samuels? He’s the AUSA on it. He’s from the OC strike force.”

“Samuels I know. Or knew. He was an agent for a while. Not a particularly good one. Had the law degree and when he figured out he wasn’t much of an investigator, he decided he wanted to prosecute.”

She started laughing and shook her head.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just something they used to say about him. It’s kind of gross.”

“What?”

“Does he still have his mustache?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they used to say that he could sure put a case together for prosecution, but as far as investigating it out on the street went, he couldn’t find shit if it was in his own mustache.”

She laughed again-a little too hard, Bosch thought. He smiled back.

“Maybe that’s why he became a prosecutor,” she added.

Something occurred to Bosch then and he quickly withdrew into his thoughts. Eventually he heard Eleanor’s voice.

“What?”

“You disappeared. I asked what you were thinking. I didn’t think it was that bad a joke.”

“No, I was just thinking about what a bottomless hole I’m in. About how it doesn’t really matter whether Samuels actually believes I’m dirty on this. He needs me to be dirty.”

“How so?”

“They’ve got cases to make with their undercover guy against Joey Marks and his crew. And they’ve got to be ready and able to explain how a murder weapon got to be in their guy’s house. Because if they can’t explain it, then Joey’s lawyers are going to shove it down their throats, make it look like their guy is tainted, is a killer worse than the people he was after. That gun has reasonable doubt written all over it. So the best way to explain away the gun is to blame it on the LAPD. On me. A bad cop from a bad department who found the gun in the weeds and planted it on the guy he thought did it. The jury will go along. They’ll make me out to be this year’s Mark Fuhrman.”

He saw the humor was long gone from her face now. There was obvious concern in her eyes but he thought there was also sadness. Maybe she understood, too, how well he was boxed in.

“The alternative is to prove that Joey Marks or one of his people planted the gun because they somehow knew Luke Goshen was an agent and needed to discredit him. Though that’s the likely truth, it’s a harder road to follow. It’s easier for Samuels just to throw the mud on me.”

He looked down at his half-finished dinner and put his knife and fork on the plate. He couldn’t eat anymore. He took a long drink of wine and then kept the glass in his hand, ready.

“I think I’m in big trouble, Eleanor.”

The gravity of his situation was finally beginning to weigh on him. He’d been operating on his faith that the truth would win out and now clearly saw how little truth would have to do with the outcome. He looked up at her. Their eyes connected and he saw that she was about to cry. He tried to smile.

“Hey, I’ll think of something,” he said. “I might be riding a desk for the time being, but I’m not taking both oars out of the water. I’m going to figure this out.”

She nodded but her face still looked distraught.

“Harry, remember when you found me in the casino that first night and we went to the bar at Caesar’s and you tried to talk to me? Remember what you said about doing things differently if you had the chance to go back?”

“Yes, I remember.”

She wiped her eyes with her palms, before any tears could show.

“I have to tell you something.”

“You can tell me anything, Eleanor.”

“What I told you about me paying Quillen and the street tax and all of that…, there’s more to it.”

She looked at him with intensity now, trying to read his reaction before going further. But Bosch sat stone still and waited.

“When I first went to Vegas after getting out of Frontera, I didn’t have a place or a car and I didn’t know anyone. I just thought I’d give it a shot. You know, playing cards. And there was a girl I knew from Frontera. Her name was Patsy Quillen. She told me to look up her uncle-that was Terry Quillen-and that he’d probably stake me after he checked me out and saw me play. Patsy wrote him and gave me an introduction.”

Bosch sat silently, listening. He now had an idea where this was going but couldn’t figure out why she was telling him.

“So he staked me. I got the apartment and some money to play with. He never said anything about Joey Marks, though I should have known the money came from somewhere. It always does. Anyway, later, when he finally told me who had really staked me, he said I shouldn’t worry because the organization he worked for didn’t want me to pay the nut back. What they wanted was just the interest. Two hundred a week. The tax. I didn’t think I had a choice. I’d already taken the money. So I started paying. In the beginning it was tough. I didn’t have it a couple times and it was double the next week plus that week’s regular tax. You get behind and there’s no way out.”

She looked down at her hands and clasped them on the table.

“What did they make you do?” Bosch asked quietly, also averting his eyes.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “I was lucky…they knew about me. I mean, that I had been an agent. They figured they could use my skills, as dormant as they were. So they had me just watch people. Mostly in casinos. But there were a few times I followed them outside. Most of the time I didn’t even know exactly who they were or why they wanted the information, but I just watched, sometimes played at the same tables, and reported to Terry what the guy was winning or losing, who he was talking to, any nuances of his game…you know, things like that.”

She was just rambling now, putting off the meat of what she had to tell him, but Bosch didn’t say anything. He let her go on.

“A couple days I watched Tony Aliso for them. They wanted to know how much he was dropping at the tables and where he was going, the usual stuff. But as it turned out, he wasn’t losing. He actually was quite good at cards.”

“Where did you watch him go?”

“Oh, he’d go out to dinner, to the strip club. He’d run errands, things like that.”

“You ever see him with a girl?”

“One time. I followed him on foot from the Mirage into Caesar’s and then into the shopping arcade. He went to Spago for a late lunch. He was alone and then the girl showed up. She was young. I thought at first it was like an escort thing, but then I could tell, he knew her. After lunch they went back to his hotel room for a while and when they came out, they took his rental and he took her to get a manicure and to buy cigarettes and to a bank while she opened an account. Just errands. Then they went to the strip club in North Vegas. When he left, he was alone. I figured then she was a dancer.”