Chapter 40
They settled into a booth at Nat’s after getting bottles of Rolling Rock from the bartender with the tattoo of the barbed-wire-wrapped heart. While she pulled the bottles from the cold case and opened them, the woman hadn’t said anything about McCaleb having come in the other night asking questions about the man he had now returned with. It was early and the place was empty except for groups of hard-cores at the bar and crowded into the booth all the way to the rear. Bruce Springsteen was on the jukebox singing, “There’s a darkness on the edge of town.”
McCaleb studied Bosch. He thought he looked preoccupied by something, probably the trial. The last witness had been a wash at best. Good on direct, bad on cross. The kind of witness you don’t use – if you have the choice.
“Looked like you guys got sandbagged there with your wit.”
Bosch nodded.
“My fault. I should’ve seen it coming. I looked at her and thought she was so beautiful she couldn’t possibly… I just believed her.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Last time I trust a face.”
“You guys still look like you’re in good shape. What else you got coming?”
Bosch smirked.
“That’s it. They were going to rest today but decided to wait until the morning so Fowkkes wouldn’t have the night to get ready. But we’ve fired all the bullets in the gun. Starting tomorrow we see what they’ve got.”
McCaleb watched Bosch take down almost half the bottle in one long pull. He decided he’d better get to the real questions while Bosch was still sharp.
“So tell me about Rudy Tafero.”
Bosch shook his shoulders in a gesture of ambivalence.
“What about him?”
“I don’t know. How well do you know him? How well did you know him?”
“Well, I knew him when he was on our team. He worked Hollywood detectives about five years while I was there. Then he pulled the pin, got his twenty-year pension and moved across the street. Started working on getting people we put in the bucket out of the bucket.”
“When you were both on the same team, both in Hollywood, were you close?”
“I don’t know what close means. We weren’t friends, we weren’t drinking buddies, he worked burglaries and I worked homicides. What are you asking so much about him for? What’s he got to do with -”
He stopped and looked at McCaleb, the wheels obviously turning inside. Rod Stewart was now singing “Twisting the Night Away.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Bosch finally asked. “You’re looking at -”
“Let me just ask some questions,” McCaleb interjected. “Then you can ask yours.”
Bosch drained his bottle and held it up until the bartender noticed.
“No table service, guys,” she called over. “Sorry.”
“Fuck that,” Bosch said.
He slid out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back with four more Rocks, though McCaleb had barely begun to drink his first one.
“Ask away,” Bosch said.
“Why weren’t you two close?”
Bosch put both elbows on the table and held a fresh bottle with both hands. He looked out of the booth and then at McCaleb.
“Five, ten years ago there were two groups in the bureau. And to a large extent it was this way in the department, too. It was like the saints and the sinners – two distinct groups.”
“The born agains and the born againsts?”
“Something like that.”
McCaleb remembered. It had become well known in local law enforcement circles a decade earlier that a group within the LAPD known as the “born agains” had members in key positions and was holding sway over promotions and choice assignments. The group’s numbers – several hundred officers of all ranks – were members of a church in the San Fernando Valley where the department’s deputy chief in charge of operations was a lay preacher. Ambitious officers joined the church in droves, in hopes of impressing the deputy chief and enhancing their career prospects. How much spirituality was involved was in question. But when the deputy chief delivered his sermon every Sunday at the 11 o’clock service, the church would be packed to standing room only with off-duty cops casting their eyes fervently on the pulpit. McCaleb had once heard a story about a car alarm going off in the parking lot during an 11 o’clock service. The hapless hype rummaging through the vehicle’s glove compartment soon found himself surrounded by a hundred guns pointed by off-duty cops.
“I take it you were on the sinners’ team, Harry.”
Bosch smiled and nodded.
“Of course.”
“And Tafero was on the saints’.”
“Yeah. And so was our lieutenant at the time. A paper pusher named Harvey Pounds. He and Tafero had their little church thing going and so they were tight. I think anybody who was tight with Pounds, whether because of church or not, wasn’t somebody I was going to gravitate toward, if you know what I mean. And they weren’t going to gravitate toward me.”
McCaleb nodded. He knew more than he was letting on.
“Pounds was the guy who messed up the Gunn case,” he said. “The one you pushed through the window.”
“He’s the one.”
Bosch dropped his head and shook it in self-disgust.
“Was Tafero there that day?”
“Tafero? I don’t know, probably.”
“Well, wasn’t there an IAD investigation with witness reports?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t look at it. I mean, I pushed the guy through a window in front of the squad. I wasn’t going to deny it.”
“And later – what, a month or so? – Pounds ends up dead in the tunnel up in the hills.”
“Griffith Park, yeah.”
“And it’s still open…”
Bosch nodded.
“Technically.”
“You said that before. What does that mean?”
“It means it’s open but nobody’s working it. The LAPD has a special classification for cases like it, cases they don’t want to touch. It’s what is called closed by circumstances other than arrest.”
“And you know those circumstances?”
Bosch finished his second bottle, slid it to the side and pulled a fresh bottle in front of him.
“You’re not drinking,” he said.
“You’re doing enough for both of us. Do you know those circumstances?”
Bosch leaned forward.
“Listen, I’m going to tell you something very few people know about, okay?”
McCaleb nodded. He knew better than to ask a question now. He would just let Bosch tell it.
“Because of that window thing I went on suspension. When I got tired of walking around my house staring at the walls, I started investigating an old case. A cold case. A murder case. I went freelancing on it and I ended up following a blind trail to some very powerful people. But at the time I had no badge, no real standing. So a few times, when I made some calls, I used Pounds’s name. You know, I was trying to hide what I was doing.”
“If the department found out you were working a case while on suspension things would’ve gotten worse for you.”
“Exactly. So I used his name when I made what I thought were some routine, innocuous calls. But then one night somebody called Pounds up and told him that they had something for him, some urgent information. He went to the meet. By himself. Then they found him later in that tunnel. He’d been beaten pretty bad. Like they had tortured him. Only he couldn’t answer their questions because he was the wrong guy. I was the one who had used his name. I was the one they wanted.”
Bosch dropped his chin to his chest and was silent for a long moment.
“I got him killed,” he said without looking up. “The guy was a pure-bred asshole but my actions got him killed.”
Bosch suddenly jerked his head up and drank from his bottle. McCaleb saw his eyes were dark and shiny. They looked weary.