Michael Connelly - The Closers

The third call was to Edgar’s cell phone. His old partner answered it promptly.

“You guys go home early in Hollywood,” Bosch said.

“Who the hell is-Harry, that you?”

“That me. How’s it hanging, Jerry?”

“I was wondering when I’d hear from you. You start again today?”

“The world’s oldest boot. And I already got a hot shot. Kiz and I are working a breaking case.”

Edgar didn’t respond and Bosch knew mentioning Rider had been a mistake. The gulf between them not only still existed but was apparently frozen over.

“Anyway, I need to tap into that big brain of yours. This is going back to Club Dev days.”

“Yeah, which day?”

“Nineteen eighty-eight. The Chatsworth Eights. You remember them?”

There was silence while Edgar thought for a moment.

“Yeah, I remember the Eights. They were a bunch of peckerwoods that thought shaved heads and tattoos made them men. They did a lot of shit, then they got stepped on. They didn’t last long.”

“You remember a guy named Roland Mackey? Would’ve been about eighteen back then.”

After a pause Edgar said he didn’t remember the name.

“Who was working the Eights?” Bosch asked.

“Not Club Dev, man. Everything with them went straight down the rabbit hole.”

“PDU?”

“You got it.”

The Public Disorder Unit. A shadowy downtown squad that gathered data and intelligence on conspiracies but made few cases. Back in 1988 the PDU would have been under the aegis of then commander Irvin Irving. The unit was not in existence anymore. When Irving rose to the level of deputy chief he promptly disbanded the PDU, with many in the department believing it was a measure taken to cover up and distance himself from its activities.

“That’s not going to help,” Bosch said.

“Sorry about that. What are you working?”

“The murder of a girl up on Oat Mountain.”

“The one taken out of her house?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember that one, too. I didn’t work it-I had just gotten to the homicide table. But I remember that one. You’re saying the Eights were in on that one?”

“No. Just that a name came up that might have a connection to the Eights. Might. So does Eights mean what I think?”

“Yeah, man, eight for H. Eighty-eight for H-H. And H-H for Heil -”

“- Hitler. Yeah, I thought so.”

Then it struck Bosch that Kiz Rider had been right when she thought the year of the crime might be significant. The murder and the rest of the crimes committed by the Chatsworth Eights had occurred in 1988. It was all part of a confluence of seemingly small things coming together. And now Irvin Irving and the PDU were mixed into the soup as well. A cold hit match of DNA to a loser who drove a tow truck for a living was blossoming into something bigger.

“Jerry, you remember a guy who worked at Devonshire named John McClellan?”

“John McClellan? No, I don’t remember. What did he work?”

“I got his name here on a burglary report.”

“No, definitely not the burglary table. I worked burglary before going over to homicide. There was no John McClellan on burglary. Who is he?”

“Like I said, just a name on a report. I’ll figure it out.”

Bosch knew that this meant McClellan was likely in the PDU at the time and the investigation of the burglary of Sam Weiss’s home was folded into the investigation of the Chatsworth Eights. He didn’t care to discuss all of this with Edgar.

“Jerry, so you were new on the homicide table back then?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you know Green and Garcia very well?”

“Not really. I just got to the table and they weren’t there that long after. Green pulled the pin and about a year after that Garcia made lieutenant.”

“From what you saw, what was your take on them?”

“How so?”

“As homicide men.”

“Well, Harry, I was pretty fresh back then. I mean, what did I know? I was still learning. But the take on them was that Green was the power. Garcia was just the housekeeper. What some people said about Garcia was that he couldn’t find shit in his own mustache with a mirror and comb.”

Bosch didn’t respond. By labeling Garcia a housekeeper Edgar was saying that Garcia rode his partner’s coattails. Green was the real homicide cop and Garcia was the guy who backed him up and kept the murder books tidy and up to date. A lot of partnerships got sanded down into such relationships. An alpha dog and his assistant.

“I guess he didn’t need to,” Edgar said.

“Didn’t need to what?”

“Find shit in his mustache. He was going places, man. He made lieutenant and was out of there. You know he’s currently second in command in the Valley, right?”

“Yeah, I know. In fact, if you see him you might not want to mention that mustache bit.”

“Yeah, probably not.”

Bosch thought some more about what this might have meant to the Verloren investigation. A small crack was moving under the surface of things.

“That it, Harry?”

“I heard Green ate his gun not too long after pulling the pin.”

“Yeah, I heard that. I don’t remember being surprised. He always looked like a guy carrying a full load of somethin’. You going to take a run at PDU, Harry? You know that was Irving ’s squad, don’t you?”

“Yeah, Jerry, I know. I doubt I’m going that way.”

“Be careful if you do, my man.”

Bosch wanted to change the subject before hanging up. Edgar had always been a department gossip. Harry didn’t want his old partner’s loose lips to spread the word that Bosch was taking a run at Irving now that he was back with a badge.

“So how’s things in Hollywood?” he asked.

“We just got back into the bureau after the earthquake retrofit. You missed all of that. We were stuck upstairs in roll call for like a year.”

“How is it?”

“It’s like an insurance office now. We have pods and sound filters between the desks. All done up in government gray. Nice but not the same.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Then they gave the D-threes double-wides-desks with two sides of drawers. The rest of us get one side.”

Bosch smiled. Little slights like that got magnified in the department and the administrators who made such decisions never learned. Like when most of Internal Affairs moved out of Parker Center and into the old Bradbury Building and the word spread through the ranks that the captain over there had a fireplace in his office.

“So what are you gonna do, Jerry?”

“Same old same old, that’s what I’m gonna do. Get off my ass and knock on doors.”

“I hear you, man.”

“Watch your six, Harry.”

“Always.”

After hanging up, Bosch sat motionless at his desk for a few moments as he thought through the conversation and the new meanings it brought to the case. If there was a connection between the case and PDU then they had a whole new ball game.

He looked down at the murder book, still open to the burglary report, and stared at the scrawled signature of John McClellan. He picked up the phone and called the Department of Operations in Parker Center and asked the duty officer for an assignment location for a detective named John McClellan. He read McClellan’s badge number off the burglary report. He was put on hold and expected that he would be told that McClellan was long retired. It had been seventeen years.

But when the duty officer came back on the line he reported that an officer named John McClellan with the badge number Bosch provided was now a lieutenant assigned to the Office of Strategic Planning. The synapse connections in Bosch’s brain started tripping. Seventeen years ago McClellan worked for Irving in the PDU. Now the assignment and rank were different but he was still working for him. And Irving just happened to run into Bosch in the Parker Center cafeteria on the day Bosch caught a case with ties to the PDU.