“Do you want any coffee? There is some in the kitchen I could make.”
She looked toward the kitchen as if its location or cleanliness had a role in her answer. Then she said no, she wasn’t planning to stay that long.
“I am going to Mexico tomorrow,” Bosch said.
“Mexicali?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the other cases?”
“Yes.”
Then he told her about them. About black ice and Jimmy Kapps and Juan Doe #67. And he told her of the ties to both her husband and Mexicali. It was there he hoped to unravel the whirlwind.
He finished the story by saying, “As you can tell, people like Irving, they want this to go by. They don’t really care who killed Cal because he had crossed. They write him off like a bad debt. They are not going to pursue it because they don’t want it to blow up in their faces. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I was a cop’s wife, remember?”
“Right. So you know. The thing about this is I care. Your husband was putting a file together for me. A file on black ice. It makes me think like maybe he was trying to do something good. He might have been trying to do the impossible. To cross back. It might’ve been what got him killed. And if it is, then I’m not letting it go by.”
They were quiet a long time after that. Her face looked pained but her eyes remained sharp and dry. She pulled the suit up higher on her lap. Bosch could hear a police helicopter circling somewhere in the distance. It wouldn’t be L.A. without police helicopters and spotlights circling at night.
“Black ice,” she said after a while in a whispery voice.
“What about it?”
“It’s funny, that’s all.” She was quiet a few moments and seemed to look around the room, realizing this was the place her husband had come to after leaving her. “Black ice. I grew up in the Bay Area-San Francisco mostly-and that was something we always were told to watch out for. But, you know, it was the other black ice we were told about.”
She looked at him then and must have read his confusion.
“In the winter, on those days when it really gets cold after a rain. When the rain freezes on the road, that’s black ice. It’s there on the road, on the black asphalt, but you can’t see it. I remember my father teaching me to drive and he was always saying, ‘Watch out for the black ice, girl. You don’t see the danger until you are in it. Then it’s too late. You’re sliding out of control.’”
She smiled at the memory and said, “Anyway, that was the black ice I knew. At least while I was growing up. Just like coke used to be a soda. The meaning of things can change on you.”
He just looked at her. He wanted to hold her again, touch the softness of her cheek with his own.
“Didn’t your father ever tell you to watch out for the black ice?” she asked.
“I didn’t know him. I sorta taught myself to drive.”
She nodded and didn’t say anything but didn’t look away.
“It took me about three cars to learn. By the time I finally got it down, nobody would dare lend me a car. Nobody ever told me about the black ice, either.”
“Well, I did.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you hung up on the past, too, Harry?”
He didn’t answer.
“I guess we all are. What’s that saying? Through studying the past we learn our future. Something like that. You seem to me to be a man still studying, maybe.”
Her eyes seemed to look into him. They were eyes with great knowledge. And he realized that for all of his desires the other night, she did not need to be held or healed of pain. In fact, she was the healer. How could Cal Moore have run from this?
He changed the subject, not knowing why, only that he must push the attention away from himself.
“There’s a picture frame in the bedroom. Carved cherrywood. But no picture. You remember it?”
“I’ll have to look.”
She stood, leaving her husband’s suit on the chair, and moved into the bedroom. She looked at the frame in the top drawer of the bureau a long time before saying she didn’t recognize it. She didn’t look at Bosch until after she said this.
They stood there next to the bed looking at each other in silence. Bosch finally raised his hand, then hesitated. She took a step closer to him and that was the sign that his touch was wanted. He caressed her cheek, the way she had done it herself when she had studied the photograph earlier and thought she was alone. Then he dropped his hand down the side of her throat and around the back of her neck.
They stared at each other. Then she came closer and brought her mouth up to his. Her hand came to his neck and pulled him to her and they kissed. She held him and pressed herself against him in a way that revealed her need. He saw her eyes were closed now and at that moment Bosch realized she was his reflection in a mirror of hunger and loneliness.
They made love on her husband’s unmade bed, neither of them paying mind to where they were or what this would mean the next day or week or year. Bosch kept his eyes closed, wanting to concentrate on other senses-her smell and taste and touch.
Afterward, he pulled himself back, so that his head lay on her chest between her freckled breasts. She had her hands in his hair and was drawing her fingers through the curls. He could hear her heart beating in rhythm with his.
19
It was after oneA.M. by the time Bosch turned the Caprice onto Woodrow Wilson and began the long, winding ascent to his house. He saw the spotlights tracing eights on the low-lying clouds over Universal City. On the road he had to navigate his way around cars double-parked outside holiday parties and a discarded Christmas tree, a few strands of lonely tinsel still clinging to its branches, that had blown into his path. On the seat next to him were the lone Budweiser from Cal Moore’s refrigerator and Lucius Porter’s gun.
All his life he believed he was slumming toward something good. That there was meaning. In the youth shelter, the foster homes, the Army and Vietnam, and now the department, he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty. He had learned to fill that hollowness with isolation and work. Sometimes drink and the sound of the jazz saxophone. But never people. He never let anyone in all the way.
And now he thought he had seen Sylvia Moore’s eyes. Her true eyes, and he had to wonder if she was the one who could fill him.
“I want to see you,” he had said when they separated outside The Fountains.
“Yes,” was all she said. She touched his cheek with her hand and got into her car.
Now Bosch thought about what that one word and the accompanying touch could mean. He was happy. And that was something new.
As he rounded the last curve, slowing for a car with its brights on to pass, he thought of the way she had looked at the picture frame for so long before saying she did not recognize it. Had she lied? What were the chances that Cal Moore would have bought such an expensive frame after moving into a dump like that? Not good, was the answer.
By the time he pulled the Caprice into the carport, he was full of confusing feelings. What had been in the picture? What difference did it make that she had held that back? If she did. Still sitting in the car, he opened the beer and drank it down quickly, some of it spilling onto his neck. He would sleep tonight, he knew.
Inside, he went to the kitchen, put Porter’s gun in a cabinet and checked the phone machine. There were no messages. No call from Porter saying why he had run. No call from Pounds asking how it was going. No call from Irving saying he knew what Bosch was up to.