Bosch went to the trunk of his car and got out the Polaroid camera. He then went back to the body, straddled it and stooped to take photographs of the face. Three would be enough, he decided, and he placed each card that was ejected from the camera on top of the pipe while the photo developed. He couldn’t help but stare at the face, at the changes made by time. He thought of that face and the inebriated grin that creased it on the night that all of the First Infantry rats had come out of the tattoo parlor in Saigon. It had taken the burned-out Americans four hours, but they had all been made blood brothers by putting the same brand on their shoulders. Bosch remembered Meadows’s joy in the companionship and fear they all shared.
Harry stepped away from the body while Sakai and Osito unfolded a black, heavy plastic bag with a zipper running up the center. Once the body bag was unfolded and opened, the coroner’s men lifted Meadows and placed him inside.
“Looks like Rip Van-fucking-Winkle,” Edgar said as he walked up.
Sakai zipped the bag up and Bosch saw a few of Meadows’s curling gray hairs had been caught in the zipper. Meadows wouldn’t mind. He had once told Bosch that he was destined for the inside of a body bag. He said everybody was.
Edgar held a small notepad in one hand, a gold Cross pen in the other.
“William Joseph Meadows, 7-21-50. That sound like him, Harry?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Well, you were right, we have multiple contacts. But not just hype shit. We’ve got bank robbery, attempted robbery, possession of heroin. We got a loitering right here at the dam a year or so ago. And he did have a couple hype beefs. The one in Van Nuys you were talking about. What was he to you, a CI?”
“No. Get an address?”
“Lives up in the Valley. Sepulveda, up by the brewery. Tough neighborhood to sell a house in. So if he wasn’t an informant, how’d you know this guy?”
“I didn’t know him-at least recently. I knew him in a different life.”
“What does that mean? When did you know the guy?”
“Last time I saw Billy Meadows was twenty years ago, or thereabouts. He was-it was in Saigon.”
“Yeah, that’d make it about twenty years.” Edgar walked over to the Polaroids and looked down at the three faces of Billy Meadows. “You know him good?”
“Not really. About as well as anybody got to know somebody there. You learned to trust people with your life, then when it’s over you realize you didn’t really even know most of them. I never saw him once I got back here. Talked to him once on the phone last year, that’s all.”
“How’d you make him?”
“I didn’t, at first. Then I saw the tattoo on his arm. That brought the face back. I guess you remember guys like him. I do, at least.”
“I guess…”
They let the silence sit there awhile. Bosch was trying to decide what to do, but could only wonder about the coincidence of being called to a death scene to find Meadows. Edgar broke the reverie.
“So you want to tell me what you’ve got that looks hinky here? Donovan over there looks like he’s getting ready to shit his pants, all the work you’re putting him through.”
Bosch told Edgar about the problems, the absence of distinguishable tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head, the broken finger and that there was no knife.
“No knife?” his partner said.
“Needed something to cut the can in half to make a stove-if the stove was his.”
“Could’ve brought the stove with him. Could have been that somebody went in there and took the knife after the guy was dead. If there was a knife.”
“Yeah, could have been. No tracks to tell us anything.”
“Well, we know from his sheet he was a blown-out junkie. Was he like that when you knew him?”
“To a degree. A user and seller.”
“Well, there you go, longtime addict, you can’t predict what they’re going to do, when they’re going to get off the shit or on it. They’re lost people, Harry.”
“He was off it, though-at least I thought he was. He’s only got one fresh pop in his arm.”
“Harry, you said you hadn’t seen the guy since Saigon. How do you know whether he was off or on?”
“I hadn’t seen him, but I talked to him. He called me once, last year sometime. July or August, I think. He’d been pulled in on another track marks beef by the hype car up in Van Nuys. Somehow, maybe reading newspapers or something-it was about the same time as the Dollmaker thing-he knew I was a cop, and he calls me up at Robbery-Homicide. He calls me from Van Nuys jail and asks if I could help him out. He would’ve only done, what, thirty days in county, but he was bottomed out, he said. And he, uh, just said he couldn’t do the time this time, couldn’t kick alone like that…”
Bosch trailed off without finishing the story. After a long moment Edgar prompted him.
“And?… Come on, Harry, what’d you do?”
“And I believed him. I talked to the cop. I remember his name was Nuckles. Good name for a street cop, I thought. And then I called the VA up there in Sepulveda and I got him into a program. Nuckles went along with it. He’s a vet, too. He got the city attorney to ask the judge for diversion. So anyway, the VA outpatient clinic took Meadows in. I checked about six weeks later and they said he’d completed, had kicked and was doing okay. I mean, that’s what they told me. Said he was in the second level of maintenance. Talking to a shrink, group counseling… I never talked to Meadows after that first call. He never called again, and I didn’t try to look him up.”
Edgar referred to his pad. Bosch could see the page he was looking at was blank.
“Look, Harry,” Edgar said, “that was still almost a year ago. A long time for a hype, right? Who knows? He could have fallen off the wagon and kicked three times since then. That’s not our worry here. The question is, what do you want to do with what we have here? What do you want to do about today?”
“Do you believe in coincidence?” Bosch asked.
“I don’t know. I-”
“There are no coincidences.”
“Harry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But you know what I think? I don’t see anything here that’s screaming in my face. Guy crawls into the pipe, in the dark maybe he can’t see what he’s doing, he puts too much juice in his arm and croaks. That’s it. Maybe somebody else was with him and smeared the tracks going out. Took his knife, too. Could be a hundred dif-”
“Sometimes they don’t scream, Jerry. That’s the problem here. It’s Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions. Don’t you see that that’s what they are counting on?”