“I don’t know. I think I’m going to make like a tourist. Go to the historical society, take in a bullfight.”
“Just be cool. You’ll get a call.”
“I better.”
He walked out to the Caprice thinking only about the note that had been found in Cal Moore’s back pocket.
I found out who I was.
26
It took Bosch thirty minutes to get across the border. The line of cars extended nearly half a mile back from the drab brown Border Patrol port of entry. While waiting and measuring his progress in one or two car-length movements, he ran out of change and one-dollar bills as an army of peasants came to his window holding up their palms or selling cheap bric-a-brac and food. Many of them washed the windshield unbidden with their dirty rags and held up their hands for coins. Each progressive washing smeared the glass more until Bosch had to put on the wipers and use the car’s own spray. When he finally made it to the checkpoint, the BP inspector in mirrored shades just waved him through after seeing his badge. He said, “Hose up there on the right if you want to wash the shit off your windshield.”
A few minutes later he pulled into one of the parking spaces in front of the Calexico Town Hall. Bosch parked and looked out across the park while smoking a cigarette. There were no troubadours today. The park was almost empty. He got out and headed toward the door marked Calexico Historical Society, not sure what he was looking for. He had the afternoon to spend and all he knew was that he believed there was a deeper line running through Cal Moore’s death-from his decision to cross to the note in his back pocket to the photo of him with Zorrillo so many years ago. Bosch wanted to find out what happened to the house he had called a castle and the man he had posed with, the one with the hair white as a sheet.
The glass door was locked and Bosch saw that the society didn’t open until one on Sundays. He looked at his watch and saw he still had fifteen minutes to wait. He cupped his hands to the glass and looked in and saw no one inside the tiny space that included two desks, a wall of books and a couple of glass display cases.
He stepped away from the door and thought about using the time to get something to eat. He decided it was too early. Instead, he walked down to the police station and got a Coke from the machine in the minilobby. He nodded at the officer behind the glass window. It wasn’t Gruber today.
While he stood leaning against the front wall, drinking the soda and watching the park, Harry saw an old man with a latticework of thin white hair on the sides of his head unlock the door to the historical society. He was a few minutes early, but Bosch headed down the walk and followed him in.
“Open?” he said.
“Might as well be,” the old man said. “I’m here. Anything in particular I can help you with?”
Bosch walked into the center of the room and explained he was unsure what he wanted.
“I’m sort of tracing the background of a friend and I believe his father was a historical figure. In Calexico, I mean. I want to find their house if it’s still standing, find out what I can about the old man.”
“What’s this fellow’s name?”
“I don’t know. Actually, I just know his last name was Moore.”
“Hell, boy, that name don’t much narrow it down. Moore’s one of the big names around here. Big family. Brothers, cousins all over the place. Tell you what, let me-”
“You have pictures? You know, books with photos of the Moores? I’ve seen pictures of the father. I could pick-”
“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.