The sun hung like a ball of copper in the driver’s-side window. He had the car radio tuned to a jazz station and Coltrane was playing “Soul Eyes.” On the seat next to him was a file containing the newspaper clippings from Bremmer. The file was weighted down by a six-pack of Henry’s. Bosch got off at Barham and then took Woodrow Wilson up into the hills above Studio City. His home was a wood-framed, one-bedroom cantilever not much bigger than a Beverly Hills garage. It hung out over the edge of the hill and was supported by three steel pylons at its midpoint. It was a scary place to be during earthquakes, daring Mother Nature to twang those beams and send the house down the hill like a sled. But the view was the trade-off. From the back porch Bosch could look northeast across Burbank and Glendale. He could see the purple-hued mountains past Pasadena and Altadena. Sometimes he could see the smoky loom-up and orange blaze of brush fires in the hills. At night the sound of the freeway below softened and the searchlights at Universal City swept the sky. Looking out on the Valley never failed to give Bosch a sense of power which he could not explain to himself. But he did know that it was one reason-the main reason-he bought the place and would never want to leave it.
Bosch had bought it eight years earlier, before the real estate boom got seriously endemic, with a down payment of $50,000. That left a mortgage of $1,400 a month, which he could easily afford because the only things he spent money on were food, booze and jazz.
The down payment money had come from a studio that gave it to him for the rights to use his name in a TV miniseries based on a string of murders of beauty shop owners in Los Angeles. Bosch and his partner during the investigation were portrayed by two midlevel TV actors. His partner took his fifty grand and his pension and moved to Ensenada. Bosch put his down on a house he wasn’t sure could survive the next earthquake but that made him feel as though he were prince of the city.
Despite Bosch’s resolve never to move, Jerry Edgar, his current partner and part-time real estate man, told him the house was now worth three times what he had paid for it. Whenever the subject of real estate came up, which was often, Edgar counseled Bosch to sell and trade up. Edgar wanted the listing. Bosch just wanted to stay where he was.
It was dark by the time he reached the hill house. He drank the first beer standing on the back porch, looking out at the blanket of lights below. He had a second bottle while sitting in his watch chair, the file closed on his lap. He hadn’t eaten all day and the beer hit him quickly. He felt lethargic and yet jumpy, his body telling him it needed food. He got up and went to the kitchen and made a pressed turkey sandwich that he brought back to the chair with another beer.
When he was finished eating he brushed the sandwich crumbs off the file and opened it up. There had been fourTimes stories on the WestLand bank caper. He read them in the order of publication. The first was just a brief that had run on page 3 of the Metro section. The information had apparently been gathered on the Tuesday the break-in was discovered. At the time, the LAPD and the FBI weren’t that interested in talking to the press or letting the public know what had happened.
AUTHORITIES PROBE BANK BREAK-IN
An undisclosed amount of property was stolen from the WestLand National Bank in downtown during the three-day holiday weekend, authorities said Tuesday. The burglary, being investigated by the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, was discovered when managers of the bank located at the corner of Hill Street and Sixth Avenue arrived Tuesday and found the safe-deposit vault had been looted, FBI Special Agent John Rourke said. Rourke said an estimate on the loss of property had not been made. But sources close to the investigation said more than $1 million worth of jewels and other valuables stored in the vault by customers of the bank was taken. Rourke also declined to say how the burglars entered the vault but did say that the alarm system was not working properly. He declined to elaborate. A spokesman for WestLand declined Tuesday to discuss the burglary. Authorities said there were no arrests or suspects.
Bosch wrote the name John Rourke in his notebook and went on to the next newspaper story, which was much longer. It had been published the day after the first and had been bannered across the top of the front page of the Metro section. It had a two-deck headline and was accompanied by a photograph of a man and woman standing in the safe-deposit vault looking down at a manhole-sized opening in the floor. Behind them was a pile of deposit boxes. Most of the small doors on the back wall were open. Bremmer’s byline was on the story.
AT LEAST $2 MILLION TAKEN IN BANK TUNNEL JOB;
BANDITS HAD HOLIDAY WEEKEND TO DIG INTO VAULT
The article expanded on the first story, filling in the detail that the perpetrators had tunneled into the bank, digging an approximately 150-yard line from a city storm main that ran under Hill Street. The story said an explosive device had been used to make the final break through the floor of the vault. According to the FBI, the burglars probably were in the vault through most of the holiday weekend, drilling open the individual safe-deposit boxes. The entry tunnel from the stormwater main to the vault was believed to have been dug during seven to eight weeks before the heist.
Bosch made a note to ask the FBI how the tunnel had been dug. If heavy equipment was used, most banks’ alarms, which measured sound as well as earth vibrations, would have picked up the ground movement and sounded. Also, he wondered, why hadn’t the explosive device set off alarms?
He looked then at the third article, published the day after the second. This one wasn’t written by Bremmer, though it still had been played on the front of Metro. It was a feature on the dozens of people lining up at the bank to see if their safe-deposit boxes were among those pried open and emptied. The FBI was escorting them into the vault and then taking their statements. Bosch scanned the story but saw the same thing over and over again: people angry or upset or both because they had lost items that they had placed in the vault because they believed it was safer than their homes. Near the bottom of the story Harriet Beecham was mentioned. She had been interviewed as she came out of the bank, and she told the reporter she had lost a lifetime’s collection of valuables bought while traveling the world with her late husband, Harry. The story said Beecham was dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief.
“I lost the rings he bought me in France, a bracelet of gold and jade from Mexico,” Beecham said. “Whoever they were that did this, they took my memories.”
Very melodramatic. Bosch wondered if the last quote had been made up by the reporter.
The fourth story in the file had been published a week later. By Bremmer, it was short and had been buried in the back of Metro, behind where they stuffed the Valley news. Bremmer reported that the WestLand investigation was being handled exclusively by the FBI. The LAPD provided initial backup, but as leads dried up, the case was left in the bureau’s hands. Special Agent Rourke was quoted again in this story. He said agents were still on the case full-time but no progress had been made or suspects identified. None of the property taken from the vault, he said, had turned up.