Bosch hung up. He wasn’t going to call any of them. Not yet. While sitting at Edgar’s spot he noticed a scratch pad on the table on which the name Veronica Niese was written. Sharkey’s mother. There was also a phone number. Edgar must have called her to notify her about her son’s death. Bosch thought of her answering the call, expecting it to be another one of her jerkoff customers, and instead it was Jerry Edgar calling to say her son was dead.
His thought of the boy reminded Bosch of the interview. He had not had the tape transcribed yet. He decided to listen to it, and went back to his place at the table. He pulled his tape recorder out of a drawer. The tape was gone. He remembered he had given it to Eleanor. He went to the supply closet, trying to calculate whether the interview would still be on the backup tape. The backup automatically rewound when it reached its end and then started taping over itself. Depending on how often the taping system in the interview room had been used since Tuesday’s session with Sharkey, the Q-and-A with the boy might still be intact on the backup tape.
Bosch popped the cassette out of the recorder and brought it back to his table. He put it in his own portable, put on a set of earphones and rewound the tape to its beginning. He reviewed it by playing it for a few seconds until he could tell whether it was his voice or Sharkey’s or Eleanor’s, and then fast-forwarding for about ten seconds. He repeated this process for several minutes before he finally hit the Sharkey interview in the last half of the tape.
Once he found it, he rewound the tape a bit so he could hear the interview from the start. He rewound too far and ended up listening to half a minute of another interview concluding. Then he heard Sharkey’s voice.
“What are you looking at?”
“I don’t know.” It was Eleanor. “I was wondering if you knew me. You seem familiar. I didn’t realize I was staring.”
“What? Why should I know you? I never did no federal shit, man. I don’t know-”
“Never mind. You looked familiar to me, that’s all. I was wondering if you recognized me. Why don’t we wait until Detective Bosch comes in.”
“Yeah, okay. Cool.”
There was silence on the tape then. Listening to it, Bosch was confused. Then he realized that what he had just heard had been said before he went into the interview room.
What had she been doing? The silence on the tape ended and Bosch heard his own voice.
“Sharkey, we are going to tape this because it might help us later to go over it. Like I said, you are not a suspect so you-”
Bosch stopped the tape and rewound it to the exchange between the boy and Eleanor. He listened to it again and then again. Each time it felt as if he had been punched in the heart. His hands were sweating and his fingers slipped on the buttons of the recorder. He finally pulled the earphones off and flung them onto the table.
“Damn it,” he said.
Pederson stopped typing and looked over.
PART IX
MEMORIAL DAY OBSERVED
By the time Bosch got to the veterans cemetery in Westwood, it was just after midnight.
He had checked a new car out of the Wilcox fleet garage and then driven by Eleanor Wish’s apartment. There were no lights on and he felt like a teenager checking on the girlfriend who dumped him. Even though he was alone he was embarrassed. He didn’t know what he would have done if there had been a light. He headed back east toward the cemetery, thinking about Eleanor and how she had betrayed him in love and business, all at the same time.
He started with the supposition that Eleanor had asked Sharkey if he recognized her because it was she who had been in the Jeep that delivered Meadows’s body to the reservoir. She had been looking for a sign that the boy realized this and recognized her. But he didn’t. Sharkey went on-after Bosch joined the interview-to say he had seen two people who he thought were men. He said the smaller of the two stayed in the Jeep’s passenger seat and didn’t help with the body at all. It seemed to Bosch that the boy’s mistake should have insured his life. But he knew that it had been he who had then doomed Sharkey when he suggested hypnotizing him. Eleanor had passed that on to Rourke, who knew he couldn’t risk it.
Next was the question of why. The money was the ultimate answer, but Bosch could not comfortably attribute this motive to Eleanor. There was something more. The others involved-Meadows, Franklin, Delgado and Rourke-all shared the common bond of Vietnam as well as direct knowledge of the two targets, Binh and Tran. How did Eleanor fit into this? Bosch thought about her brother, killed in Vietnam. Was he the connection? He remembered that she had said his name was Michael, but she hadn’t mentioned how or when he was killed. Bosch hadn’t let her. Now he regretted having stopped her when she apparently wanted to talk about him. She had mentioned the memorial in Washington and how it had changed her. What could she have seen that would do that? What could the wall have told her that she didn’t already know?
He drove into the cemetery off Sepulveda Boulevard and up to the great black iron gates that stood closed across the gravel entrance road. Bosch got out and walked up, but they were locked with a chain and padlock. He looked through the black bars and saw a small stone-block house about thirty yards up the gravel road. He saw the pale blue glow of TV light against a curtained window. Bosch went back to the car and flipped the siren. He let it wail until a light came on behind the curtain. The cemetery attendant came out a few moments later and walked toward the gate with a flashlight, while Bosch got his badge case out and held it open through the bars. The man wore dark pants and a light-blue shirt with a tin badge on it.
“You police?” he asked.
Bosch felt like saying no, Amway. Instead, he said, “LAPD. I wonder if you can open ’er up for me.”
The attendant put the flashlight on his badge and ID. In the light Bosch could see the white whiskers on the man’s face and smell the slight scent of bourbon and sweat.
“What’s the problem, officer?”
“Detective. I’m on a homicide investigation, Mr…?”
“Kester. Homicide? We got plenty dead people here, but these cases are closed, I guess you could say.”
“Mr. Kester, I don’t have time to go through all the details but what I need to do is take a look at the Vietnam memorial, the replica that is on display here for the holiday weekend.”
“What’s wrong with your arm, and where’s your partner? Don’t you guys travel in twos?”
“I was hurt, Mr. Kester. My partner is working on another part of the investigation. You watch too much TV in that little room of yours. That’s TV cops stuff.”
Bosch said this last part with a smile, but he was already getting tired of the old security guard. Kester turned and looked at the cemetery house and then back at Bosch.
“You seen the TV light, right? I figured that one. Uh, this is federal property and I don’t know if I can open it up without-”
“Look, Kester, I know you’re civil service and they haven’t fired anyone since maybe Truman was president. But if you give me a bad time on this, I’m going to give you a bad time. I’ll put a drinking-on-the-job beef in on you Tuesday morning. First thing. Now let’s do it. Open it up and I won’t bother you. I just need to take a look at the wall.”
Bosch rattled the chain. Kester stared dull-eyed at the lock and then fished a ring of keys off his belt and opened the gate.
“Sorry,” Bosch said.
“I still don’t think this is proper,” Kester said angrily. “What’s that black stone got to do with a homicide anyway?”
“Maybe everything,” Bosch said. He started walking back to his car but then turned around, remembering something he had read about the memorial. “There’s a book. It tells where the names are on the wall. You can look them up. Is that up there at the wall?”