“I find out otherwise, Chastain, I promise I’ll take you apart.”
“Fuck you! I didn’t take the book. But I am going to take your badge for this.”
Bosch smiled but not in a way that had any warmth.
“Go ahead. Write your ticket, Chastain. Anytime you can take my badge you can have it.”
Chapter 11
THE others were inside Howard Elias’s law offices by the time Bosch and Chastain made it up to the fifth floor. The office was essentially three rooms: a reception area with a secretary’s desk, a middle room where there was a clerk’s desk and two walls of file cabinets, and then the third and largest room, Elias’s office.
As Bosch and Chastain moved through the offices the others stood silently and didn’t look at them. It was clear that they had heard the commotion in the lobby as they had taken the elevator up. Bosch didn’t care about that. He had already put the confrontation with Chastain behind him and was thinking about the search. He was hoping something would be found in the office that would give the investigation a focus, a specific path to follow. He walked through the three rooms making general observations. In the last room he noticed that through the windows behind Elias’s large polished wood desk he could see the huge face of Anthony Quinn. It was part of a mural depicting the actor with arms outstretched on the brick wall of a building across the street from the Bradbury.
Rider came into the office behind him. She looked out the window, too.
“You know every time I’m down here and see that I wonder who that is.”
“You don’t know?”
“César Chávez?”
“Anthony Quinn. You know, the actor.”
He got a nonresponse from her.
“Before your time, I guess. The mural is called the Pope of Broadway, like he’s watching over all the homeless around here.”
“Oh, I see.” She didn’t sound impressed. “How you want to do this?”
Bosch was still staring at the mural. He liked it, even though he had a hard time seeing Anthony Quinn as a Christlike figure. But the mural seemed to capture something about the man, a raw masculine and emotional power. Bosch stepped closer to the window and looked down. He saw the forms of two homeless people sleeping under blankets of newspapers in the parking lot beneath the mural. Anthony Quinn’s arms were outstretched over them. Bosch nodded. The mural was one of the little things that made him like downtown so much. Just like the Bradbury and Angels Flight. Little pieces of grace were everywhere if you looked.
He turned around. Chastain and Langwiser had entered the room behind Rider.
“I’ll work in here. Kiz and Janis, you two take the file room.”
“And what?” Chastain said. “Me and Del get the secretary’s desk?”
“Yeah. While you’re going through it, see if you can come up with her name and the name of the intern or clerk. We’ll need to talk to them today.”
Chastain nodded but Bosch could see he was annoyed about getting the weakest assignment.
“Tell you what,” Bosch added, “why don’t you go out first and see if you can find some boxes. We’re going to be taking a lot of files out of here.”
Chastain left the office without a word. Bosch glanced at Rider and saw her give him a look that told him he was acting like an asshole.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be in the file room.”
She left then, leaving just Langwiser and Bosch.
“Everything okay, Detective?”
“Everything’s fine. I’m going to get to work now. Do what I can until we hear about your special master.”
“Look, I’m sorry. But you called me out here to advise you and this is what I advise. I still think it is the right way to go.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
For most of the next hour Bosch methodically went through Elias’s desk, studying the man’s belongings, appointment calendar and paperwork. Most of his time was spent reading through a series of notebooks in which Elias had kept reminders to himself, lists of things to do, pencil drawings and general notes from phone calls. Each notebook was dated on the outside cover. It appeared that Elias filled the pages of one book every week or so with his voluminous notations and doodles. Nothing in the books jumped out at Bosch as being pertinent to the investigation. But he also knew that so little about the circumstances of Elias’s murder was known that something seeming unimportant in the notebooks at the moment might become important later.
Before starting to page through the most recent notebook, Bosch was interrupted by another call from Edgar.
“Harry, you said there was a message on the phone machine?”
“That’s right.”
“There ain’t now.”
Bosch leaned back in Elias’s chair and closed his eyes.
“Goddammit.”
“Yeah, it’s been cleared. I dicked around with it and it’s not a tape. Messages are stored on a microchip. The chip was cleared.”
“Okay,” Bosch replied, angrily. “Continue the search. When you’re done, talk to the security people about who’s been in and out of that place. See if they’ve got any video points in the lobby or parking garage. Somebody went in there after I left.”
“What about Chastain? He was with you, wasn’t he?”
“I’m not worried about Chastain.”
He flipped the phone closed and got up and went to the window. He hated the feeling growing inside – that he was being worked by the case, rather than the other way around.
He blew out his breath and went back to the desk and the last notebook that Howard Elias had kept. As he paged through, he came across repeated notes regarding someone referred to as “Parker.” Bosch did not believe this to be a person’s real name, but rather a code name for a person inside Parker Center. The notations were mostly lists of questions Elias apparently intended to ask “Parker,” as well as what looked like notes on conversations with this person. They were mostly in abbreviated form or the lawyer’s own version of shorthand and therefore difficult to decipher. But in other instances the notes were clear to Bosch. One notation clearly indicated to Bosch that Elias had a deeply connected source inside Parker Center.
PARKER:
GET ALL 51S – UNSUSTAINED
SHEEHAN
COBLENZ
ROOKER
ROOKER
STANWICK
Bosch recognized the names as belonging to four RHD detectives who were among the defendants in the Black Warrior case. Elias wanted the 51 reports – or citizen complaint files – on the four detectives. More specifically, Elias wanted the unsustained files, meaning he was interested in complaints against the four that had been investigated by the IAD but not substantiated. Such unsustained complaints were removed from officers’ personnel files as a matter of department policy and were therefore out of reach of a subpoena from a lawyer like Elias. The notation in the notebook told Bosch that Elias somehow knew that there were unsubstantiated prior complaints against the four and that he had a source in Parker Center who had access to the old files on those complaints. The first assumption was not a major leap; all cops had unsubstantiated complaints. It was part of being a cop. But someone with access to that sort of file was different. If Elias had such a source, it was a well-placed source.
One of the last references to Parker in the notebook appeared to be notes of a conversation, which Bosch assumed to have been a phone call to Elias at his desk. It appeared that Elias was losing his source.
PARKER WON’T
JEOPARDY/EXPOSURE
FORCE THE ISSUE?
Parker won’t what? Bosch wondered. Turn over the files Elias wanted? Did Parker believe that getting the files to Elias would expose him as a source? There wasn’t enough there for him to make a conclusion. There wasn’t enough for him to understand what “force the issue” meant either. He wasn’t sure what any of the notes might have to do with the killing of Howard Elias. Nevertheless, Bosch was intrigued. One of the department’s most vocal and successful critics had a mole inside Parker Center. There was a traitor inside the gate and it was important to know this.