“I’m sorry if I’m distant,” he tried. “There’s a lot of things…”

He didn’t finish. There was no excuse.

“You do like living up here in this little, lonely house, with the coyote as your only friend, don’t you?”

He didn’t answer. The face of Sylvia Moore inexplicably came back into his mind. But this time he felt no guilt. He liked seeing her there.

“I have to go,” Teresa said. “Long day tomorrow.”

He watched her walk naked into the bathroom, picking her purse up off the night table as she went. He listened as the shower ran. He imagined her in there, cleaning all traces of him off and out of her and then splashing on the all-purpose perfume she always carried in her purse to cover up any smells left on her from her job.

He rolled to the side of the bed to the pile of his clothes on the floor and got out his phone book. He dialed while the water still ran. The voice that answered was dulled with sleep. It was near midnight.

“You don’t know who this is and I never talked to you.”

There was silence while Harry’s voice registered.

“Okay, okay. Got it. I understand.”

“There’s a problem on the Cal Moore autopsy.”

“Shit, I know that, man. Inconclusive. You don’t have to wake me up to-”

“No, you don’t understand. You are confusing the autopsy with the press release on the autopsy. Two different things. Understand now?”

“Yeah… I think I do. So, what’s the problem?”

“The assistant chief of police and the acting chief ME don’t agree. One says suicide, the other homicide. Can’t have both. I guess that’s what you call inconclusive in a press release.”

There was a low whistling sound in the phone.

“This is good. But why would the cops want to bury a homicide, especially one of their own? I mean, suicide makes the department look like shit as it is. Why bury a murder unless it means there’s something-”

“Right,” Bosch said and he hung up the phone.

A minute later the shower was turned off and Teresa came out, drying herself with a towel. She was totally unabashed about her nakedness with him and Harry found he missed that shyness. It had eventually left all the women he became involved with before they eventually left him.

He pulled on blue jeans and a T-shirt while she dressed. Neither spoke. She looked at him with a thin smile and then he walked her out to her car.

“So, we still have a date for New Year’s Eve?” she asked after he opened the car door for her.

“Of course,” he said, though he knew she would call with an excuse to cancel it.

She leaned up and kissed him on the lips, then slipped into the driver’s seat.

“Good-bye, Teresa,” he said, but she had already closed the door.

It was midnight when he came back inside. The place smelled of her perfume. And his own guilt. He put Frank Morgan’sMood Indigo on the CD player and stood there in the living room without moving, just listening to the phrasing on the first solo, a song called “Lullaby.” Bosch thought he knew nothing truer than the sound of a saxophone.

11

Sleep was not a possibility. Bosch knew this. He stood on the porch looking down on the carpet of lights and let the chill air harden his skin and his resolve. For the first time in months he felt invigorated. He was in the hunt again. He let everything about the cases pass through his mind and made a mental list of people he had to see and things he had to do.

On top was Lucius Porter, the broken-down detective whose pullout was too timely, too coincidental to be coincidental. Harry realized he was becoming angry just thinking about Porter. And embarrassed. Embarrassed at having stuck his neck out for him with Pounds.

He went to his notebook and then dialed Porter’s number one more time. He was not expecting an answer and he wasn’t disappointed. Porter had at least been reliable in that respect. He checked the address he had written down earlier and headed out.

Driving down out of the hills he did not pass another car until he reached Cahuenga. He headed north and got on the Hollywood Freeway at Barham. The freeway was crowded but not so that traffic was slow. The cars moved northward at a steady clip, a sleekly moving ribbon of lights. Out over Studio City, Bosch could see a police helicopter circling, a shaft of white light cast downward on a crime scene somewhere. It almost seemed as if the beam was a leash that held the circling craft from flying high and away.

He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.

There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon night. So many ways to live. And to die. You could be riding in the back of a studio’s black limo, or just as easily the back of the coroner’s blue van. The sound of applause was the same as the buzz of a bullet spinning past your ear in the dark. That randomness. That was L.A.

There was flash fire and flash flood, earthquake, mudslide. There was the drive-by shooter and the crack-stoked burglar. The drunk driver and the always curving road ahead. There were killer cops and cop killers. There was the husband of the woman you were sleeping with. And there was the woman. At any moment on any night there were people being raped, violated, maimed. Murdered and loved. There was always a baby at his mother’s breast. And, sometimes, a baby alone in a Dumpster.

Somewhere.

Harry exited on Vanowen in North Hollywood and went east toward Burbank. Then he turned north again into a neighborhood of rundown apartments. Bosch could tell by the gang graffiti it was a mostly Latino neighborhood. He knew Porter had lived here for years. It was all he could afford after paying alimony and for his booze.

He turned into the Happy Valley Trailer Park and found Porter’s double-wide at the end of Greenbriar Lane. The trailer was dark, not even a light on above the door, and there was no car under the aluminum-roofed carport. Bosch sat in his car smoking a cigarette and watching for a while. He heard mariachi music wafting into the neighborhood from one of the Mexican clubs over on Lankershim. Soon it was drowned out by a jet that lumbered by overhead on its way to Burbank Airport. He reached into the glove compartment for a leather pouch containing his flashlight and picks and got out.

After the third knock went unanswered, Harry opened the pouch. Breaking into Porter’s place did not give him pause. Porter was a player in this game, not an innocent. To Bosch’s mind, Porter had forfeited protection of his privacy when he had not been straight with him, when he hadn’t mentioned that Moore had been the one who found Juan Doe #67’s body. Now Bosch was going to find Porter and ask him about that.

He took out the miniature flashlight, turned it on and then held it in his mouth as he stooped down and worked a pick and tiny pressure wrench into the lock. It took him only a few minutes to push the pins and open the door.

A sour odor greeted Bosch when he entered. He recognized it as the smell of a drunk’s sweat. He called Porter’s name but got no answer.

He turned on the lights as he moved through the rooms. There were empty glasses on nearly every horizontal surface. The bed was unmade and the sheets were a dingy white. Amidst the glasses on the night table was an ashtray overloaded with butts. There was also a statue of a saint Bosch could not identify. In the bathroom off the bedroom, the bathtub was filthy, a toothbrush was on the floor and in the wastebasket there was an empty bottle of whiskey, a brand either so expensive or so cheap that Harry had never heard of it. But he suspected it was the latter.