Bosch found Eleanor sitting by herself in an interview room next to his. Her eyes were closed and she had her head propped on her hands, her elbows up on the scarred wooden table. Her eyes opened as he walked in. She smiled and he immediately felt healed of fatigue, frustration and anger. It was a smile a child gives another when they’ve gotten away with something on the adults.

“All done?” she said.

“Yeah. You?”

“Been done more than an hour. You are the one they wanted to grill.”

“As usual. Rourke has left?”

“Yeah, he split. Said he wants me to check in with him every other hour tomorrow. After what happened tonight, he thinks he hasn’t kept a tight enough rein on this.”

“Or you.”

“Yeah. It looks like there is some of that, too. He wanted to know what we were doing at my place. I told him you were just walking me to my door.”

Bosch sat down wearily at the other side of the table and dug a finger into a cigarette pack in search of the last one. He put it in his mouth but didn’t light it.

“Besides being titillated or jealous of what we might have been doing, who does Rourke think tried to take us out?” he asked. “A drunk driver, like my people seem to think?”

“He did mention the drunk driver theory. He also asked whether I have a jealous ex-boyfriend. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a great amount of concern that it might have something to do with our case.”

“I hadn’t thought of the ex-boyfriend angle. What did you tell him?”

“You’re as conniving as he is,” she said, flashing her brilliant smile. “I told him it wasn’t any of his business.”

“Good going. Is it mine?”

“The answer is no.” She let him hang over the cliff a few seconds, then added, “That is, no jealous ex-boyfriends. So, can we leave now and get to where we were”-she looked at her watch-“about four hours ago?”

Bosch was awake in Eleanor Wish’s bed long before dawn light crept around the curtain drawn across the sliding glass door. Unable to defeat insomnia, he finally got up and took a shower in the downstairs bathroom. After, he looked through her kitchen cabinets and refrigerator and began to put together a breakfast of coffee, eggs and cinnamon raisin bagels. He couldn’t find any bacon.

When he heard the shower upstairs go off, he carried a glass of orange juice up and found her in front of the bathroom mirror. She was naked and braiding her hair, which she’d divided into three thick hanks. He was entranced by her and watched as she expertly maneuvered her hair into a French braid. She then accepted the juice and a long kiss from Bosch. She put on her short robe and they went downstairs to eat.

After, Harry opened the kitchen door and stood just outside it while he smoked a cigarette.

“You know,” he said, “I’m just happy nothing happened.”

“You mean last night on the street?”

“Yeah. To you. I don’t know how I’d’ve handled it. I know we just met and all, but… uh, I care. You know?”

“Me too.”

Bosch had taken a shower, but his clothes were as fresh as the ashtray in a used car. After a while he said he had to leave, to go by his house and change. Eleanor said she would go into the bureau and check for fallout from last night’s activities and get whatever was on file about Binh. They agreed to meet at Hollywood Station, on Wilcox, because it was closest to Binh’s business, and Bosch needed to turn in his damaged car, anyway. She walked him to the door and they kissed as if she were seeing him off to a day at the office at the accounting firm.

When Bosch got to his house, he found no messages on the phone machine and no sign that the place had been entered. He shaved and changed clothes and then headed down the hill through Nichols Canyon and then over to Wilcox. He was at his desk, updating the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Report forms, when Eleanor came in at ten. The squad room was full and most of the detectives who were male stopped what they were doing to check her out. She had an uncomfortable smile on her face when she sat down in the steel chair next to the homicide table.

“Anything wrong?”

“I just think I would rather walk through Biscailuz,” she said, referring to the sheriff’s jail downtown.

“Oh. Yeah, these guys can leer better than most flashers. You want a glass of water?”

“No. I’m fine. Ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

They took Bosch’s new car, which was actually at least three years old and had seventy-seven thousand miles on it. The station fleet manager, a permanent desk assignee since he’d had four fingers blown off by a pipe bomb he stupidly picked up one Halloween, said it was the best he could do. Budget restraints had halted the replacement of cars, though repairing the old ones actually cost the department more. At least, Bosch learned after starting the car, the air conditioner worked reasonably well. There was a light Santa Ana condition kicking up and the forecast was for an unseasonably warm holiday weekend.

Eleanor’s research on Binh showed he had an office and business on Vermont near Wilshire. There were more Korean-run shops in the area than Vietnamese, but they coexisted. As near as Wish had been able to find out, Binh controlled a number of businesses that imported cheap clothing and electronic and video merchandise from the Orient and then moved it through Southern California and Mexico. Many of the items turistas thought they were getting on the cheap in Mexico and then bringing back to the States had already been here. It all seemed successful on paper, though it was small-time. Still, it was enough to make Bosch question if Binh even needed the diamonds. Or ever had any.

Binh owned the building his office and discount video equipment store was based in. It was a 1930s auto showroom that had been converted years before Binh had ever seen it. Unreinforced concrete block fronted with wide picture windows and guaranteed to come down in a decent shaker. But for someone who had made it out of Vietnam the way Binh had, earthquakes were probably viewed as a minor inconvenience, not a risk.

After they found an empty parking space across the street from Ben’s Electronics, Bosch told Eleanor he wanted her to handle the questioning, at least at first. Bosch said he figured that Binh might be more inclined to talk to the feds than to the locals. They decided on a plan to small-talk him and then ask about Tran. Bosch didn’t tell her that he also had a second plan in mind.

“Doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place run by a guy with a box full of diamonds in a bank vault,” Bosch said as they got out of the car.

“That ishad in the bank,” she said. “And remember, he couldn’t flaunt that stuff. He had to be like every other Joe Immigrant. The appearance of living day to day. The diamonds, if there were any, were the collateral for this place, for his American success story. But it had to look like he made it from scratch.”

“Wait a second,” Bosch said as they got to the other side of the street. He told Eleanor he had forgotten to ask Jerry Edgar to fill in on a court appearance for him that afternoon. He pointed to a pay phone at a service station next to Binh’s building and trotted over. Eleanor stayed behind, looking in the windows of the store.

Bosch called Edgar but didn’t say anything about a court appearance.

“Jed, I need a favor. You won’t even have to get up.”

Edgar hesitated, as Bosch thought he would.

“What do you need?”

“You aren’t supposed to say it like that. You’re supposed to say, ‘Sure, Harry, what do you need?’”

“Come on, Harry, we both know we’re under the glass. We’ve got to be careful. Tell me what you need. I’ll tell you if I can do it.”

“All I want you to do is buzz me in ten minutes. I need to get out of a meeting. Just buzz me, and when I call in, just put the phone down for a couple minutes. And if I don’t call in, buzz me again in five minutes. That’s it.”