“You ran away?”

“Sort of. I joined the Army. I had to get Earl to sign for me, though. At first he wouldn’t do it. He had major league plans for me. But then I told him I was never going to pick up another baseball as long as I lived. He signed. Then he and the wife kept cashing those DPSS checks while I was overseas. I guess the extra money helped make up for losing the prospect.”

She was quiet for a long time. It looked to Bosch like she was reading her notes but he had not seen her write anything during this session.

“You know,” he said into the silence, “about ten years later, when I was still in patrol, I pulled over a drunk driver coming off the Hollywood Freeway onto Sunset. He was all over the place. When I finally got him over and got up there to the window, I bent over to look in and it was Earl. It was a Sunday. He was coming home from the Dodgers. I saw the program on the seat.”

She looked at him but didn’t say anything. He was looking at the memory still.

“I guess he’d never found that lefty he was looking for…Anyway, he was so drunk he didn’t recognize me.”

“What did you do?”

“Took his keys and called his wife…I guess it was the only break I ever gave the guy.”

She looked back down at the pad while asking her next question.

“What about your real father?”

“What about him?”

“Did you ever know who he was? Did you have any relationship at all?”

“I met him once. I was never curious about it until I came back from overseas. Then I traced it down. Turned out he was my mother’s lawyer. He had a family and all of that. He was dying when I met him, looked like a skeleton…So I never really knew him.”

“His name was Bosch?”

“No. My name was just something she came up with. The painter, you know. She thought L.A. was a lot like his paintings. All the paranoia, the fear. Once she gave me a book that had his paintings in it.”

More silence followed as she thought about this one, too.

“These stories, Harry,” she finally said, “these stories that you tell are heartbreaking in their own way. It makes me see the boy who became the man. It makes me see the depth of the hole left by your mother’s death. You know, you would have a lot to blame her for and no one would blame you for doing it.”

He looked at her pointedly while composing a response.

“I don’t blame her for anything. I blame the man who took her from me. See, these are stories about me. Not her. You can’t get the feel for her. You can’t know her like I did. All I know is that she did all she could to get me out of there. She never stopped telling me that. She never stopped trying. She just ran out of time.”

She nodded, accepting his answer. A few moments passed.

“Did there come a time when she told you what she did…for a living?”

“Not really.”

“How did you know?”

“I can’t remember. I think I really didn’t know for sure what she did until she was gone and I was older. I was ten when they took me away. I didn’t really know why.”

“Did she have men stay with her while you were together?”

“No, that never happened.”

“But you must have had some idea about this life she was leading, that you both were leading.”

“She told me she was a waitress. She worked nights. She used to leave me with a lady who had a room at the hotel. Mrs. DeTorre. She watched four or five kids whose mothers were doing the same thing. None of us knew.”

He finished there but she didn’t say anything and he knew he was expected to continue.

“One night I snuck out when the old lady fell asleep and I walked down to the Boulevard to the coffee shop where she said she worked. She wasn’t in there. I asked and they didn’t know what I was talking about…”

“Did you ask your mother about it?”

“No…The next night I followed her. She left in her waitress uniform and I followed her. She went to her best friend’s place upstairs. Meredith Roman. When they came out, they were both wearing dresses, makeup, the whole thing. Then they both left in a cab and I couldn’t follow them.”

“But you knew.”

“I knew something. But I was like nine or something. How much could I know?”

“What about the charade she followed, dressing every night like a waitress, did that anger you?”

“No. The opposite. I thought that was…I don’t know, there was something noble about her doing that for me. She was protecting me, in a way.”

Hinojos nodded that she saw his point.

“Close your eyes.”

“Close my eyes?”

“Yes, I want you to close your eyes and think back to when you were a boy. Go ahead.”

“What is this?”

“Indulge me. Please.”

Bosch shook his head as if annoyed but did as she asked. He felt stupid.

“Okay.”

“Okay, I want you to tell me a story about your mother. Whatever image or episode with her that you have the clearest in your mind, I want you to tell it to me.”

He thought hard. Images of her passed through and disappeared. Finally, he came to one that stayed.

“Okay.”

“Okay, tell it.”

“It was at McClaren. She had come to visit and we were out at the fence at the ballfield.”

“Why do you remember this story?”

“I don’t know. Because she was there and that always made me feel good, even though we always ended up crying. You should have seen that place on visiting day. Everybody crying…And I remember it, too, because it was near the end. It wasn’t too long after that she was gone. Maybe a few months.”

“Do you remember what you talked about?”

“A lot of stuff. Baseball, she was a Dodgers fan. I remember one of the older kids had taken my new sneakers that she had given me for my birthday. She noticed I didn’t have ’em on and she got pretty mad about it.”

“Why did the older boy take your sneakers?”

“She asked the same thing.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the kid took my shoes because he could. You see, they could call that place whatever they wanted but basically it was a prison for kids and it had the same societies as a prison has. Your dominant cliques, your submissives, everything.”

“What were you?”

“I don’t know. I pretty much kept to myself. But when some older, bigger kid took my shoes, I was a submissive. It was a way of surviving.”

“Your mother was unhappy about this?”

“Well, yeah, but she didn’t know the score. She wanted to go complain or something. She didn’t know that if she did that it would only make it worse for me there. Then she suddenly did realize what the deal was. She started crying.”

Bosch was silent, picturing the scene perfectly in his mind. He remembered the dampness in the air and the smell of the orange blossoms from the nearby groves.

Hinojos cleared her throat before breaking into his memory.

“What did you do when she started crying?”

“I probably started crying, too. I usually did. I didn’t want her to feel bad but there was a comfort in knowing she knew what was happening to me. Only mothers can do that, you know? Make you feel good when you’re sad…”

Bosch still had his eyes closed and was seeing only the memory.

“What did she tell you?”

“She…she just told me she was going to get me out. She said that her lawyer was going to go to court soon to appeal the custody ruling and the unfit mother finding. She said there were other things she could do, too. The point was, she was getting me out.”

“That lawyer was your father?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know it…Anyway, what I’m saying is that the courts were wrong about her. That’s the thing that bothers me. She was good to me and they didn’t see that…anyway, I remember she promised me that she would do what she had to do, but she would get me out.”

“But she never did.”

“No. Like I said, she ran out of time.”

“I’m sorry.”

Bosch opened his eyes and looked at her.

“So am I.”