“Detective Bosch, look, I don’t know how you know what you think you know, but I am not going to discuss the WestLand case. It is exactly as I said at the bureau. I can’t do it. I am sorry. I really am.”
Bosch said, “I guess maybe I should resent it, but I don’t. It was a logical step in the investigation. I would’ve done the same. You take anybody who fit the profile-tunnel rat-and sift them through the evidence.”
“You’re not a suspect, Bosch, okay? So drop it.”
“I know I’m not a suspect.” He gave a short, forced burst of laughter. “I was serving a suspension down in Mexico and can prove it. But you already know that. So for me, fine, I’ll drop it. But I need what you have on Meadows. You pulled his files back in September. You must have done a workup on him. Surveillance, known associates, background. Maybe… I bet you even pulled him in and talked to him. I need it all now-today, not in three, four weeks when some liaison puts a stamp on it.”
The waitress came back with the coffee and water. Wish pulled her glass close but didn’t drink.
“Detective Bosch, you are off the case. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. But you’re off. You go back to your office and you’ll find out. We made a call after you left.”
He was holding his coffee with two hands, elbows on the table. He carefully put the cup down on the saucer, in case his hands began to shake.
“What did you do?” Bosch asked.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor Wish said. “After you left, Rourke-the guy you shoved the picture in front of?-he called the number on your card and talked to a Lieutenant Pounds. He told him about your visit today and suggested there was a conflict, you investigating a friend’s death. He said some other things and-”
“What other things?”
“Look, Bosch, I know about you. I’ll admit we pulled your files, we checked you out. Hell, but to do that, all we had to do was read the newspapers back then. You and that Dollmaker thing. So I know what you have been through with the internal people, and this isn’t going to help, but it was Rourke’s decision. He-”
“What other things did he tell?”
“He told the truth. He said both your name and Meadows’s had come up in our investigation. He said you both knew each other. He asked that you be taken off the case. So all of this doesn’t matter.”
Bosch looked off, out of the booth.
“I want to hear you answer,” he said. “Am I a suspect?”
“No. At least you weren’t until you walked in this morning. Now, I don’t know. I’m trying to be honest. I mean, you have to look at this from our standpoint. One guy we looked at last year comes in and says he is investigating the murder of another guy we looked very hard at. This first guy says, ‘Let me see your files.’”
She didn’t have to tell him as much as she had. He knew this and knew she was probably going out on a limb saying anything at all. For all the shit he had just stepped in or been put in, Harry Bosch was beginning to like cold, hard Eleanor Wish.
“If you won’t tell me about Meadows, tell me one thing about myself. You said I was looked at and then dropped. How’d you clear me? You go to Mexico?”
“That and other things.” She looked at him a moment before going on. “You were cleared early on. At first we got excited. I mean, we look through the files of people with tunnel experience in Vietnam and there sitting on the top was the famous Harry Bosch, detective superstar, a couple books written about his cases. TV movie, a spinoff series. And the guy the newspapers just happened to have been filled with, the guy whose star crashed with a one-month suspension and transfer from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division to…” She hesitated.
“The sewer.” He finished it for her.
She looked down into her glass and continued.
“So, right away Rourke started figuring that maybe that’s how you spent your time, digging this tunnel into the bank. From hero to heel, this was your way to get back at society, something crazy like that. But when we backgrounded you and asked around quietly, we heard you went to Mexico for the month. We sent someone down to Ensenada and checked it out. You were clear. Around then we also had gotten your medical files from the VA up at Sepulveda-oh, that’s it, that’s who you checked with this morning, isn’t it?”
He nodded. She continued.
“Anyway, in the medical there were the psychiatrist’s reports… I’m sorry. This seems like such an invasion.”
“I want to know.”
“The therapy for PTS. I mean, you are completely functional. But you have infrequent manifestation of post-traumatic stress in forms of insomnia and other things, claustrophobia. A doctor even wrote once that you wouldn’t go into a tunnel like that, never again. Anyway, we put a profile of you through our behavioral sciences lab in Quantico. They discounted you as a suspect, said it was unlikely that you would cross the line for something like financial gain.”
She let all of that sink in for a few moments.
“Those VA files are old,” Bosch said. “The whole story is old. I’m not going to sit here and present a case for why I should be a suspect. But that VA stuff is old. I haven’t seen a shrink, VA or otherwise, in five years. And as far as that phobia shit goes, I went into a tunnel to look at Meadows yesterday. What do you think your shrinks in Quantico would write about that?”
He could feel his face turn red with embarrassment. He had said too much. But the more he tried to control and hide it, the more blood rushed into his face. The wide-hipped waitress chose that moment to come back and freshen his coffee.
“Ready to order?” she said.
“No,” Wish said without taking her eyes off Bosch. “Not yet.”
“Hon, we have a big lunch crowd come in here, and we’re going to need the table for people what want to eat. I make my living off the hungry ones. Not the ones too angry to eat.”
She walked away with Bosch thinking that waitresses were probably better observers of human behavior than most cops. Wish said, “I am sorry about all of this. You should have let me get up when I first wanted to.”
The embarrassment was gone but the anger was still there. He wasn’t looking out of the booth anymore. He was looking right at her.
“You think you know me from some papers in a file? You don’t know me. Tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know you. I know about you,” she said. She stopped a moment to gather her thoughts. “You are an institutional man, Detective Bosch. Your whole life. Youth shelters, foster homes, the army, then the police. Never leave the system. One flawed societal institution after another.”
She sipped some water and seemed to be deciding whether to go on. She did. “Hieronymus Bosch… The only thing your mother gave you was the name of a painter dead five hundred years. But I imagine the stuff you’ve seen would make the bizarre stuff of dreams he painted look like Disneyland. Your mother was alone. She had to give you up. You grew up in foster homes, youth halls. You survived that and you survived Vietnam and you survived the police department. So far, at least. But you are an outsider in an insider’s job. You made it to RHD and worked the headline cases, but you were an outsider all along. You did things your way and eventually they busted you out for it.”
She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn’t.
“It only took one mistake,” she said. “You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn’t matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn’t enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer.”