“But you couldn’t find him. The chrono says you watched his place.”

“Yeah. He was our man. We had prints we had taken off the belt-the murder weapon-but we had no comparisons from him. Johnny had been pulled in a few times in the past but never booked. Never printed. So we really needed to bring him in.”

“What did it tell you, that he’d been picked up but never booked?”

McKittrick finished his beer, crunched it in his hand and walked the empty over to a large bucket in the corner of the deck and dropped it.

“To be honest, at the time it didn’t hit me. Now, of course, it’s obvious. He had an angel watching over him.”

“Who?”

“Well, on one of the days we were watching Fox’s place, waiting for him to show up, we got a message on the radio to call Arno Conklin. He wanted to talk about the case. ASAP. Now this was a holy shit kind of call. For two reasons. One, Arno was going great guns then. He was running the city’s moral commandos at the time and had a lock on the DA’s office, which was coming open in a year. The other reason was that we’d only had the case a few days and hadn’t come near the DA’s office with anything. So now all of a sudden the most powerful guy in the agency wants to see us. I’m thinking…I don’t really know what I was thinking. I just knew it-hey, you got one!”

Bosch looked at his pole and saw it bend from a violent jerk on the line. The reel started spinning as the fish pulled against the drag. Bosch grabbed the pole out of the pipe and jerked it back. The hook was set well. He started reeling but the fish had a lot of fight and was pulling out more line than he was reeling in. McKittrick came over and tightened the drag dial, which immediately put a more pronounced bend in the pole.

“Keep the pole up, keep the pole up,” McKittrick counseled.

Bosch did as he was told and spent five minutes battling the fish. His arms started to ache. He felt a strain on his lower back. McKittrick put on gloves and when the fish finally surrendered and Bosch had it alongside the boat, he bent over and hooked his fingers into the gills and brought it on board. Bosch saw a shiny blue-black fish that looked beautiful in the sunlight.

“Wahoo,” McKittrick said.

“What?”

McKittrick held the fish up horizontally.

“Wahoo. Over there in your fancy L.A. restaurants I think they call it Ono. Here, we just call it wahoo. Meat cooks up white as halibut, you wanna keep it?”

“No, put it back. It’s beautiful.”

McKittrick roughly pulled the hook from the gulping mouth of the fish and then held the catch out to Bosch.

“You want to hold it? Must be twelve, thirteen pounds.”

“Nah, I don’t need to hold it.”

Bosch stepped closer and ran his finger along the slick skin of the fish. He could almost see himself in the reflection of its scales. He nodded to McKittrick and the fish was thrown back into the water. For several seconds it remained motionless, about two feet below the surface. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, Bosch thought. Finally, the fish seemed to come out of it and darted down into the depths. Bosch put the hook through one of the eyelets on his pole and put the pole back in its pipe. He was done fishing. He got another beer out of the cooler.

“Hey, you want a sandwich, go ahead,” McKittrick said.

“No. I’m fine.”

Bosch wished the fish hadn’t interrupted them.

“You were saying that you guys got the call from Conklin.”

“Yeah, Arno. Only I had it wrong. The request for a meeting was only for Claude. Not me. Eno went alone.”

“Why only Eno?”

“I never knew and he acted like he didn’t know, either. I just assumed it was because he and Arno had a prior relationship of some kind.”

“But you don’t know what.”

“No. Claude Eno was about ten years older than me. He’d been around.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, I can’t tell you what happened. I can only tell you what my partner said happened. Understand?”

He was telling Bosch that he didn’t trust his own partner. Bosch had known that feeling himself at times and nodded that he understood.

“Go ahead.”

“He came back from the meeting saying Conklin asked him to lay off Fox because Fox was clear on this case and Fox was working as an informant on one of the commando investigations. He said Fox was important to him and he didn’t want him compromised or roughed up, especially over a crime he didn’t commit.”

“How was Conklin so sure?”

“I don’t know. But Eno told me that he told Conklin that assistant DA’s, no matter who they are, didn’t decide whether someone was clear or not for the police, and that we weren’t backing off until we talked to Fox for ourselves. Faced with that, Conklin said he could deliver Fox to be interviewed and fingerprinted. But only if we did it on Conklin’s turf.”

“Which was…?”

“His office in the old courthouse. That’s gone now. They built that big square thing right before I left. Horrible-looking thing.”

“What happened in the office? Were you there for that?”

“Yeah, I was there but nothing happened. We interviewed him. Fox was there with Conklin, so was the Nazi.”

“The Nazi?”

“Conklin’s enforcer, Gordon Mittel.”

“He was there?”

“Yup. I guess he was sort of watching out for Conklin while Conklin was watching out for Fox.”

Bosch showed no surprise.

“Okay, so what did Fox tell you?”

“Like I said, not much. At least, that’s how I remember it. He gave us an alibi and the names of the people who could verify it. I took his prints.”

“What’d he say about the victim?”

“He said pretty much what we’d already heard from her girlfriend.”

“Meredith Roman?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it. He said she went to a party, was hired as kind of a decoration to be on some guy’s arm. He said it was in Hancock Park. He didn’t have the address. He said he had nothing to do with setting it up. That didn’t make sense to us. You know, a pimp not knowing where…not knowing where one of his girls was. It was the one thing we had and when we started leaning on him about it, Conklin stepped in like a referee.”

“He didn’t want you leaning on him.”

“Craziest thing I ever saw. Here was the next DA-everybody knew he was going to run. Here he was taking this bastard’s side against us…Sorry about that bastard comment.”

“Forget it.”

“Conklin was trying to make it seem like we were out of line, while all the time this big-piece-of-shit Fox was sitting there smiling with a toothpick in the side of his mouth. It’s what, thirty-somethin’ years ago and I can still remember that toothpick. Galled the Jesus out of me. So to make a long story short, we never did get to brace him on having set up the date she went on.”

The boat rocked on a high wake and Bosch looked around and didn’t see any other boat. It was weird. He looked out across the water and for the first time realized how different it was from the Pacific. The Pacific was a cold and forbidding blue, the Gulf a warm green that invited you.

“We left,” McKittrick continued. “I figured we’d have another shot at him. So we left and started to work on his alibi. It turned out to be good. And I don’t mean it was good because his own witnesses said it was. We did the work. We found some independent people. People that didn’t know him. As I remember it, it was rock solid.”

“You remember where he was?”

“Spent part of the night in a bar over there on Ivar, place a lot of the pimps hung around. Can’t remember the name of it. Then later he drove out to Ventura, spent most of the rest of the night in a card room until he got a phone call, then he split. The other thing about this was that it didn’t smack of an alibi set up for this particular night. This was his routine. He was well known in all of these places.”

“What was the phone call?”

“We never knew. We didn’t know about it until we started checking his alibi and somebody mentioned it. We never got to ask Fox about it. But to be honest, we didn’t care too much at that point. Like I said, his alibi was solid and he didn’t get the call until later in the morning. Four, five o’clock. The vic-your mother had been dead a good long while by then. TOD was midnight. The call didn’t matter.”