“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, let me set you up here with a couple things. We’ll find your Moore. I’m kinda curious now myself. What’re you doing this for your friend for, anyway?”
“Trying to trace the family tree. Put it all together for him.”
A few minutes later the old man had him sitting at the other desk with three books in front of him. They were leather-bound and smelled of dust. They were the size of yearbooks and they wove photographic and written history together on every page. Randomly opening one of the books, he looked at a black-and-white photo of the De Anza Hotel under construction.
Then he started them in order. The first was calledCalexico and Mexicali: Seventy-five Years on the Border and as he scanned the words and photos on the pages, Bosch picked up a brief history of the two towns and the men who built them. The story was the same one Aguila had told him, but from the white man’s perspective. The volume he read described the horrible poverty in Tapai, China, and told how the men facing it gladly came to Baja California to seek their fortunes. It didn’t say anything about cheap labor.
In the 1920s and 1930s Calexico was a boomtown, a company town, with the Colorado River Land Company’s managers the lords of all they surveyed. The book said many of these men built opulent homes and estates on bluffs rising on the outskirts of town. As Bosch read he repeatedly saw the names of three Moore brothers: Anderson, Cecil and Morgan. There were other Moores listed as well, but the brothers were always described in terms of importance and had high-level titles in the company.
While leafing through a chapter called “A Dirt Road Town Paves Its Streets in Gold,” Bosch saw the man he was interested in. He was Cecil Moore. There, amidst the description of the riches the cotton brought to Calexico, was a photograph of a man with prematurely white hair standing in front of a Mediterranean-style home the size of a school. It was the man in the photo Moore had kept in the crumpled white bag. And rising like a steeple on the left-hand side of the home was a tower with two arched windows side by side at its uppermost point. The tower gave the house the appearance of a Spanish castle. It was Cal Moore’s childhood home.
“This is the man and this is the place,” Bosch said, taking the book over to the old man.
“Cecil Moore,” the man said.
“Is he still around?”
“No, none of those brothers are. He was the last to go, though. Last year about this time, went in his sleep, Cecil did. I think you’re mistaken though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cecil had no children.”
Bosch nodded.
“Maybe you’re right. What about this place. That gone, too?”
“You’re not working on any family tree, are you now?”
“No. I’m a cop. I came from L.A. I’m tracing down a story somebody told me about this man. Will you help me?”
The old man looked at him and Bosch regretted not being truthful with him in the first place.
“I don’t know what it’s got to do with Los Angeles but go ahead, what else you want to know?”
“Is this place with the tower still there?”
“Yes, Castillo de los Ojos is still there. Castle of the Eyes. Gets its name from those two windows up in the tower. When they were lit at night, it was said that they were eyes that looked out on all of Calexico.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s on a road called Coyote Trail west of town. You take 98 out there past Pinto Wash to an area called Crucifixion Thorn. Turn onto Anza Road-like the hotel here in town. That’ll take you to Coyote Trail. The castle’s at the end of the road. You can’t miss it.”
“Who lives there now?”
“I don’t think anyone does. He left it to the city, you know. But the city couldn’t handle the upkeep on a place like that. They sold it-I believe the man came down from Los Angeles, matter of fact. But as far as I know he never moved in. It’s a pity. I was hoping to have maybe made a museum out of it.”
Bosch thanked him and left to head out to Crucifixion Thorn. He had no idea whether Castillo de los Ojos was anything more than a dead rich man’s estate with no bearing on his case. But he had nothing else going and his impulse was to keep moving forward.
State road 98 was a two-lane blacktop that stretched west from Calexico-town proper, running alongside the border, into farmland delineated into a huge grid by irrigation ditches. As he drove, he smelled green pepper and cilantro. And he realized after running alongside a field planted in cotton that this wide expanse was all once the Company’s huge acreage.
Ahead, the land rose into hills and he could see Calexico Moore’s boyhood home long before he was near. Castillo de los Ojos. The two arched windows were dark and hollow eyes against the peach-colored stone face of the tower rising from a promontory on the horizon.
Bosch crossed a bridge over a dry bed that he assumed was Pinto Wash, though there was no sign on the road. Glancing down into the dusty bed as he passed, Harry saw a lime-green Chevy Blazer parked below. He caught just a glimpse of a man behind the wheel with binoculars held to his eyes. Border Patrol. The driver was using the bed’s low spot as a blind from which he could watch the border for crossers.
The wash marked the end of the farmland. Almost immediately the earth began to rise into brown-brush hills. There was a turnout in the road by a stand of eucalyptus and oak trees that were still in the windless morning. This time there was a sign marking the location:
CRUCIFIXION THORN NATURAL AREA Danger Abandoned Mines
Bosch remembered seeing a reference in the books at the historical society to the turn-of-the-century gold mines that pockmarked the border zone. Fortunes had been found and lost by speculators. The hills had been heavy with bandits. Then the Company came and brought order.
He lit a cigarette and studied the tower, which was much closer now and rose from behind a walled compound. The stillness of the scene and the tower windows, like soulless eyes, somehow seemed morbid. The tower was not alone on the hill, though. He could see the barrel-tile roofs of other homes. But something about the tower rising singularly above them with its empty glass eyes seemed lonely. Dead.
Anza Road came up in another half mile. He turned north and the single-lane road curved and bumped and rose along the circumference of the hill. To his right he could look down on the farmland basin extending below. He turned left onto a road marked Coyote Trail and was soon passing large haciendas on sprawlng estates. He could see only the second floors of most of them because of the walls that surrounded almost every property.
Coyote Trail ended in a circle that went around an ancient oak tree with branches that would shade the turnaround in the summer. Castillo de los Ojos was here at the end of the road.
From the street, an eight-foot-high stone wall eclipsed all but the tower. Only through a black wrought-iron gate was there a fuller view. Bosch pulled onto the driveway and up to the gate. Heavy steel chain and lock kept it closed. He got out, looked through the bars and saw that the parking circle in front of the house was empty. The curtains inside every front window were pulled closed.
On the wall next to the gate were a mailbox and an intercom. He pushed the ringer but got no response. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if someone had answered. He opened the mailbox and found that empty too.
Bosch left his car where it was and walked back down Coyote Trail to the nearest house. This was one of the few without a wall. But there was a white picket fence and an intercom at the gate. And this time when he rang the buzzer, he got a response.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yes, ma’am, police. I was wondering if I can ask a few questions about your neighbor’s house.”