“Detective Bosch, the department administration does not recognize that aspect of the Policeman’s Bill of Rights. You are commanded to answer these questions, and if you do not you will be subject to suspension and possible dismissal. You-”
“Can you loosen these handcuffs, please?” Bosch said.
“What?” Lewis cried out, losing his calm, confident tone.
Clarke stood up and went to the tape recorder and bent over it.
“Detective Bosch is not handcuffed and there are two witnesses here who can attest to that fact,” he said.
“Just the two that cuffed me,” Bosch said. “And beat me. This is a direct violation of my civil rights. I request that a union rep and my attorney be present before we continue.”
Clarke rewound the tape and turned the recorder off. His face was almost purple with anger as he carried it back to his partner’s briefcase. It was a few moments before words came to either one of them.
Clarke said, “It’s going to be a pleasure to do you, Bosch. We’ll have the suspension papers on the chief’s desk by the end of the day. You’ll be assigned to a desk at Internal Affairs where we can keep an eye on you. We’ll start with CUBO and work our way up from there, maybe even to murder. Either way, you’re done in the department. You’re over.”
Bosch stood up and so did the two IAD detectives. Bosch took a last drag on his cigarette, dropped it on the floor in front of Clarke and stepped on it, grinding it into the polished linoleum. He knew they would clean it up rather than let Pounds know they had not controlled the interview or the interviewee. He stepped between them then, exhaled the smoke and walked out of the room without saying a word. Outside, he heard Clarke’s barely controlled voice call out.
“You stay away from the case, Bosch!”
Avoiding the eyes that followed him, Bosch walked through the squad room and dropped into his seat at the homicide table. He looked across at Edgar, who was seated at his own space.
“You did good,” Bosch said. “You should come out all right.”
“What about you?”
“I’m off the case and those two assholes are going to put paper in on me. I’ve got the afternoon and that’s about it before I get the ROD.”
“God damn.”
The deputy chief in charge of IAD had to sign off on all Relieved of Duty orders and temporary suspensions. Stiffer penalties had to be recommended to a police commission subcommittee for approval. Lewis and Clarke would go for a temporary ROD for conduct unbecoming an officer, or CUBO, as it was known. Then they’d work on something stiffer to take to the commission. If the deputy chief signed an ROD on Bosch, he would have to be notified according to union regs. That meant in person or in a tape-recorded phone conversation. Once notification was made, Bosch could be assigned to a desk at IAD in Parker Center or to his home until the conclusion of the investigation. But as they had just promised, Lewis and Clarke would go for assignment to IAD. That way they could put him on display like a trophy.
“You need anything from me on Spivey?” he asked Edgar.
“No. I’m set. I’m gonna start typing it up if I can get a machine.”
“Did you happen to check like I asked on Meadows’s job on the subway project?”
“Harry, you…” Edgar must have thought better of saying what he wanted to say. “Yeah, I checked it out. For what it’s worth, they said they haven’t had anyone named Meadows on the job. There is a Fields, but he’s black and he was at work today. And Meadows probly wasn’t working under any other name because they aren’t running a midnight shift. The project is ahead of schedule, if you can believe that shit.” Edgar then called out, “I got dibs on the Selectric.”
“No way,” called back an autos detective named Minkly. “I’m on deck with that one.”
Edgar started looking around for another candidate. Late in the day, the typewriters in the office were like gold. There were a dozen machines for thirty-two detectives: that was if you included the manual jobs and the electrics with nervous tics like moving borders or jumpy space bars.
“Okay then,” Edgar called out. “I got dibs after you, Mink.” Then Edgar lowered his voice and turned to Bosch. “Who you think he’ll put me with?”
“Pounds? I don’t know.” It was like guessing who your wife would marry after you punched the time clock for the last time. Bosch wasn’t all that interested in speculating who would be partnered with Edgar. He said, “Listen, I have to do some things.”
“Sure, Harry. You need any help, anything from me?”
Bosch shook his head and picked up the phone. He called his lawyer and left a message. It usually took three messages before the guy would call back, and Bosch made a note to call again. Then he turned his Rolodex, got a number and called the U.S. Armed Services Records Archive in St. Louis. He asked for a law enforcement clerk and got a woman named Jessie St. John. He put in a priority request for copies of all of Billy Meadows’s military records. Three days, St. John said. He hung up thinking that he would never see the records. They’d come but he wouldn’t be in this office, at this table, on this case. Next he called Donovan at SID and learned there had been no latent prints on the needle kit found in Meadows’s shirt pocket and only smears on the can of spray paint. The light-brown crystals found in the straining cotton in the kit came back as 55 percent pure heroin, Asian blend. Bosch knew that most heroin dealt on the street and shot into the vein was about 15 percent pure. Most of it was tar heroin made by Mexicans. Somebody had given Meadows a very hot shot. In Harry’s mind, that made the tox tests he was waiting for a formality. Meadows had been murdered.
Nothing else from the crime scene was of much use, except Donovan mentioned that the freshly burned match found in the pipe was not torn from the matchbook in Meadows’s kit. Bosch gave Donovan the address of Meadows’s apartment and asked him to send a team out to process it. He said to check the matches in an ashtray on the coffee table against the book in the kit. Then he hung up, wondering if Donovan would send somebody before word spread that Bosch was off the case or suspended.
The last call he made was to the coroner’s office. Sakai said he had made next-of-kin notification. Meadows’s mother was still alive and was reached in New Iberia, Louisiana. She had no money to send for him or bury him. She hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. Billy Meadows would not be going home. L.A. County would have to bury him.
“What about the VA?” Bosch asked. “He was a veteran.”
“Right. I’ll check it out,” Sakai said and hung up.
Bosch got up and took a small portable tape recorder from one of his drawers in the file cabinets. The bank of files ran along the wall behind the homicide table. He slipped the recorder into his coat pocket with the 911 tape and walked out of the squad room through the rear hallway. He went past the lockup benches and the jail, down to the CRASH office. The tiny office was more crowded than the detective bureau. Desks and files for five men and a woman were crammed into a room no bigger than a second bedroom in a Venice apartment. Down one wall of the room was a row of four-drawer file cabinets. On the opposite wall was the computer and teletype. In between were three sets of two desks pushed side by side. The back wall had the usual map of the city with black lines detailing the eighteen police divisions. Above the map were the Top 10: color eight-by-tens of the ten top assholes of the moment in Hollywood Division. Bosch noticed one was a morgue shot. The kid was dead but still made the list. Now that’s an asshole, he thought. And above the photos, black plastic letters spelled out Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.