He put the magazine back after seeing that the photos of the actress were dark, grainy shots in which it could just barely be determined that she was barebreasted. He assumed they were from an early movie, made before she had enough clout to control the exploitation of her body. He imagined the disappointment of the men who bought the magazine only to discover those shots were the payoff on the cover’s lurid promise. He imagined the actress’s anger and embarrassment. And he wondered what they did for Cal Moore. A vision of Sylvia Moore flashed in his head. He shoved the magazine under the shirts and closed the drawer.
The last drawer of the bureau contained two things, a folded pair of faded blue jeans and a white paper bag that was crumpled and soft with age and contained a thick stack of photographs. It was what he had come for. Bosch instinctively knew this when he picked the bag up. He took it out of the bedroom, hitting the switch turning off the ceiling light as he went through the door.
Sitting on the couch next to the light, he lit a cigarette and pulled the stack of photos from the bag. Immediately he recognized that most of them were faded and old. These photographs somehow seemed more private and invasive than even those in the skin mag. They were pictures that documented Cal Moore’s unhappy history.
The photos seemed to be in some kind of chronological order. Bosch could tell this because they moved from faded black and white to color. Other benchmarks, like clothing and cars, also seemed to prove this.
The first photo was a black-and-white shot of a young Latina in what looked like a white nurse’s uniform. She was dark and lovely and wore a girlish smile and a look of mild surprise as she stood next to a swimming pool, her arms behind her back. Bosch saw the edge of a round object behind her and then realized she was holding a servant tray behind her back. She had not wanted to be photographed with the tray. She wasn’t a nurse. She was a maid. A servant.
There were other photographs of her in the stack, extending over several years. Age was kind to her but it still exacted its toll. She retained an exotic beauty but worry lines formed and her eyes lost some of their warmth. In some of the photographs Bosch leafed through, she held a baby, then she posed with a little boy. Bosch looked closely and even with the print being black and white he could see that the boy with dark hair and complexion had light-colored eyes. Green eyes, Bosch thought. It was Calexico Moore and his mother.
In one of the photos the woman and the small boy stood in front of a large white house with a Spanish-tile roof. It looked like a Mediterranean villa. Rising behind the mother and boy, but unclear because of the focus, was a tower. Two darkly blurred windows, like empty eyes, were near the top. Bosch thought about what Moore had said to his wife about growing up in a castle. This was it.
In another of the photos the boy stood rigidly next to a man, an Anglo with blond hair and darkly tanned skin. They stood next to the sleek form of a late-fifties Thunderbird. The man held one hand on the hood and one on the boy’s head. They were his possessions, the photo seemed to say. The man squinted into the camera.
But Bosch could see his eyes. They were the same green eyes of his son. The man’s hair was thinning on top and by comparing photos of the boy with his mother taken at about the same time, Bosch guessed that Moore’s father had been at least fifteen years older than his mother. The photo of the father and son was worn around the edges from handling. Much more worn than any of the others in the stack.
The next grouping of photos changed the venue. They were pictures from what was probably Mexicali. There were fewer photos to document a longer period of time. The boy was growing by leaps and the backgrounds of the photos had a third-world quality to them. They were shot in the barrio. More often than not there were crowds of people in the background, all Mexicans, all having that slight look of desperation and hope Bosch had seen in the ghettos of L.A.
And now there was another boy. He was the same age or slightly older. He seemed stronger, tougher. He was in many of the same frames with Cal. A brother maybe, Bosch thought.
It was in this grouping of photos that the mother began to show clearly the advance of age. The girl who hid the servant’s tray was gone. A mother used to the harshness of life had replaced her. The photos now took on a haunting quality. It bothered Harry to study them because he believed that he understood the hold the pictures had on Moore.
The last black-and-white photo showed the two boys, shirtless and sitting back to back on a picnic table, laughing at a joke preserved forever in time. Calexico was a young teenager with a guileless smile on his face. The other boy, maybe a year or two older, looked like trouble. He had a hard, sullen look in his eyes. In the picture Cal had his right arm cocked and was making a muscle for the photographer. Bosch saw the tattoo was already there. The devil with a halo. Saints and Sinners.
In the photos after that, the other boy never appeared again. These were color shots taken in Los Angeles. Bosch recognized City Hall shooting up in the background of one of them and the fountain in Echo Park in another. Moore and his mother had come to the United States. Whoever the other boy was, he had been left behind.
Toward the end of the stack, the mother dropped out of the photos as well. Harry wondered if that meant she was dead. The final two pictures were of Moore as an adult. The first was his graduation from the police academy. There was a shot of a class of newly sworn officers gathered on the grass outside what was later renamed the Daryl F. Gates Auditorium. They were throwing their hats into the air. Bosch picked Moore out of the crowd. He had his arm around the shoulder of another probee and there was genuine joy in his face.
And the last photo was of Moore in dress uniform pulling a young Sylvia close in a smiling cheek-to-cheek embrace. Her skin was smoother then, her eyes brighter and her hair longer and fuller. But she was still very much the same as now, still a beautiful woman.
He pushed the photographs back into the bag and put it on the couch next to him. He looked at the bag and was curious why the photos had never been mounted in an album or put on display. They were just glimpses of a lifetime kept in a bag and ready to go.
But he knew the reason. At his home he had stacks of his own pictures that he would never mount in a book, that he felt the need to hold when he looked at them. They were more than pictures of another time. They were parts of a life, a life that could not go forward without knowing and understanding what was behind.
Bosch reached up to the lamp and turned it off. He smoked another cigarette, the glow of its tip floating in the dark. He thought about Mexico and Calexico Moore.
“You fucked up,” he whispered again.
He had told himself he had to come here to get a feel for Moore. That was how he had sold it to himself. But sitting there in the dark he knew there was more to it. He knew he had come because he wanted to understand a life’s course that could not be explained. The only one with all the answers to all of the questions was Cal Moore. And he was gone.
He looked at the white neon glow on the curtains across the room and they looked like ghosts to him. It made him think of the worn photo of the father and son, fading to white. He thought of his own father, a man he never knew and did not meet until he was on his death bed. By then it had been too late for Bosch to change his own life’s course.