He brought down the suitcase; it was empty and smelled musty. It had not been used for some time. He pulled down the boot box but could tell it was empty before he opened it. There was some tissue paper inside it.
Bosch put it back up on the shelf, remembering how he had seen Moore’s one boot standing upright on the tile in the bathroom at the Hideaway. He wondered if Moore’s killer had had difficulty pulling it off to complete the suicide scene. Or had he ordered Moore to take it off first? Probably not. The blow to the back of the head that Teresa found meant Moore probably hadn’t known what hit him. Bosch envisioned the killer, his identity cloaked in shadow, coming up from behind and swinging the stock of the shotgun against the back of Moore’s head. Moore goes down. The killer pulls off the boot, drags him into his bathroom, props him against the tub and pulls both triggers. Wipe off the triggers, press the dead man’s thumb against the stock and rub his hands on the barrels to make convincing smears. Then set the boot upright on the tile. Add the splinter from the stock and the scene was set. Suicide.
The queen-sized bed was unmade. On the night table was a couple of dollars in change and a small framed photograph of Moore and his wife. Bosch bent over and studied it without touching it. Sylvia was smiling and appeared to be sitting in a restaurant, or perhaps at a banquet table at a wedding. She was beautiful in the picture and her husband was looking at her as if he knew it.
“You fucked up, Cal,” Harry said to no one.
He moved to the bureau, which was so old and scarred by cigarettes and knife-cut initials that the Salvation Army might even reject it. In the top drawer were a comb and a cherrywood picture frame lying face down. Bosch picked up the frame and saw that it was empty. He considered this for a few moments. The frame had a floral design carved into it. It would have been expensive and obviously did not come with the apartment. Moore had brought it with him. Why was it empty? He would have liked to be able to ask Sheehan if he or anybody else had taken a photograph from the apartment as part of the investigation. But he couldn’t without revealing he had been here.
The next drawer contained underwear and socks and a stack of folded T-shirts, nothing else. There were more clothes in the third drawer, all having been neatly folded at a laundry. Beneath a stack of shirts was a skin magazine which announced on the cover that nude photos of a leading Hollywood actress were provided inside. Bosch leafed through the magazine, more out of curiosity than belief there would be a clue inside. He was sure the magazine had been pawed over by every dick and blue suit who had been in the apartment during the investigation into Moore’s disappearance.
He put the magazine back after seeing that the photos of the actress were dark, grainy shots in which it could just barely be determined that she was barebreasted. He assumed they were from an early movie, made before she had enough clout to control the exploitation of her body. He imagined the disappointment of the men who bought the magazine only to discover those shots were the payoff on the cover’s lurid promise. He imagined the actress’s anger and embarrassment. And he wondered what they did for Cal Moore. A vision of Sylvia Moore flashed in his head. He shoved the magazine under the shirts and closed the drawer.
The last drawer of the bureau contained two things, a folded pair of faded blue jeans and a white paper bag that was crumpled and soft with age and contained a thick stack of photographs. It was what he had come for. Bosch instinctively knew this when he picked the bag up. He took it out of the bedroom, hitting the switch turning off the ceiling light as he went through the door.
Sitting on the couch next to the light, he lit a cigarette and pulled the stack of photos from the bag. Immediately he recognized that most of them were faded and old. These photographs somehow seemed more private and invasive than even those in the skin mag. They were pictures that documented Cal Moore’s unhappy history.
The photos seemed to be in some kind of chronological order. Bosch could tell this because they moved from faded black and white to color. Other benchmarks, like clothing and cars, also seemed to prove this.
The first photo was a black-and-white shot of a young Latina in what looked like a white nurse’s uniform. She was dark and lovely and wore a girlish smile and a look of mild surprise as she stood next to a swimming pool, her arms behind her back. Bosch saw the edge of a round object behind her and then realized she was holding a servant tray behind her back. She had not wanted to be photographed with the tray. She wasn’t a nurse. She was a maid. A servant.
There were other photographs of her in the stack, extending over several years. Age was kind to her but it still exacted its toll. She retained an exotic beauty but worry lines formed and her eyes lost some of their warmth. In some of the photographs Bosch leafed through, she held a baby, then she posed with a little boy. Bosch looked closely and even with the print being black and white he could see that the boy with dark hair and complexion had light-colored eyes. Green eyes, Bosch thought. It was Calexico Moore and his mother.
In one of the photos the woman and the small boy stood in front of a large white house with a Spanish-tile roof. It looked like a Mediterranean villa. Rising behind the mother and boy, but unclear because of the focus, was a tower. Two darkly blurred windows, like empty eyes, were near the top. Bosch thought about what Moore had said to his wife about growing up in a castle. This was it.
In another of the photos the boy stood rigidly next to a man, an Anglo with blond hair and darkly tanned skin. They stood next to the sleek form of a late-fifties Thunderbird. The man held one hand on the hood and one on the boy’s head. They were his possessions, the photo seemed to say. The man squinted into the camera.
But Bosch could see his eyes. They were the same green eyes of his son. The man’s hair was thinning on top and by comparing photos of the boy with his mother taken at about the same time, Bosch guessed that Moore’s father had been at least fifteen years older than his mother. The photo of the father and son was worn around the edges from handling. Much more worn than any of the others in the stack.
The next grouping of photos changed the venue. They were pictures from what was probably Mexicali. There were fewer photos to document a longer period of time. The boy was growing by leaps and the backgrounds of the photos had a third-world quality to them. They were shot in the barrio. More often than not there were crowds of people in the background, all Mexicans, all having that slight look of desperation and hope Bosch had seen in the ghettos of L.A.
And now there was another boy. He was the same age or slightly older. He seemed stronger, tougher. He was in many of the same frames with Cal. A brother maybe, Bosch thought.
It was in this grouping of photos that the mother began to show clearly the advance of age. The girl who hid the servant’s tray was gone. A mother used to the harshness of life had replaced her. The photos now took on a haunting quality. It bothered Harry to study them because he believed that he understood the hold the pictures had on Moore.
The last black-and-white photo showed the two boys, shirtless and sitting back to back on a picnic table, laughing at a joke preserved forever in time. Calexico was a young teenager with a guileless smile on his face. The other boy, maybe a year or two older, looked like trouble. He had a hard, sullen look in his eyes. In the picture Cal had his right arm cocked and was making a muscle for the photographer. Bosch saw the tattoo was already there. The devil with a halo. Saints and Sinners.