“I know. I messed up — I fucked up. I just wanted to see—”
“You sure did. But nothing we can do about it now. What’s next? Why are you at the motel?”
“Same reason.”
“Ghosts. Really?”
“When I investigate a murder, I want to be where that murder took place, or where it may have taken place.”
There was a pause before Haller responded.
“Then I guess I’ll leave you to it,” he said.
“Talk to you later,” Bosch said.
Bosch clicked off the call and continued to stare at the room until he finally stepped toward the bed.
Thirty minutes later he left the room with no more than he had when he entered. If anything had remained to prove Da’Quan Foster was there the night of the Lexi Parks murder, it had been swept up by the LAPD forensics team. As he walked to his car he wondered if something more than forensics had been left behind that could help Foster. James Allen was a prostitute, after all. And many prostitutes kept records. In these digital times a prostitute’s little black book would more likely be his little black cell phone. After her conversation with Ali Karim, Soto had mentioned nothing about the recovery of a cell phone either from the body or from room six.
Bosch diverted and walked back to the office window. He rang the bell again and the same man slid the window open. Bosch put the room key down on the counter.
“I’m out,” he said. “You don’t even have to make the bed.”
“Okay, very fine, thank you,” the man said.
He started to slide the window closed but Bosch blocked it with his hand.
“Hold on a second,” he said. “The man who had that room back in March got murdered, you remember that?”
“Nobody get murder here.”
“Not here. Or maybe not here. His body was found down the street in an alley. But he had room six here, and the police came to investigate. James Allen. You remember now?”
“No, not here.”
“Yes, here. Look, I’m just trying to figure out what happened to all his belongings. His property. The police took things, I know that. Did they take everything?”
“No, his friends come. They take clothes and things.”
“Friends? Did you get any names?”
“No, no names here.”
“Do they do what he did? Do they stay here?”
“Sometimes they stay.”
“Any of them here now?”
“No, not now. Nobody here.”
Bosch pulled out his notebook and wrote his name and number down. He tore the page out and handed it through the window.
“If any of his friends come back, you call me and I’ll pay you.”
“How much you pay?”
“Fifty bucks.”
“You pay now.”
“No, I’ll pay when you tell me they’re here.”
Bosch rapped his knuckles on the shelf under the window and turned back toward the parking lot. He walked around the corner of the building and got in his car. Before starting the engine, he called Haller, who answered right away.
“We need to talk.”
“That’s funny, because I called you about a half hour ago and it was pretty clear you didn’t want to talk to me.”
“That was then. We need to talk about next moves. This is your show and I don’t want to do something that hurts things down the line in court.”
“You mean like get caught sneaking into the victim’s house?”
“I told you that was a mistake. It won’t happen again. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Did you find something?”
“No, nothing. I still need to check the street, but so far nothing. I’m talking about other things. The next move — whether you make it in court or I make it out here.”
“Sounds mysterious. Where are you? I can come now.”
“On Santa Monica near Gower. I need to work the street here a little bit.”
“I’ll head that way. You in the Cherokee? The one you claim is a classic?”
“I am, and it is.”
Bosch disconnected and started the car. He drove to the motel’s parking lot exit on Santa Monica and paused there while he looked right and then left at the small businesses that lined the four-lane boulevard. They were a mixture of industrial and commercial businesses. Several of the big studios were nearby — he could see Paramount’s water tower rising behind the shops fronting Santa Monica. This meant that there were also all manner of feeder companies in the neighborhood that lived off the scraps of the behemoths — prop houses, costume shops, camera equipment renters — interspersed with a routine variety of fast-food dreck. There was a do-it-yourself car wash and across the street and down a half block was the entrance to Hollywood Forever — the onetime cemetery to the stars.
Bosch nodded. The cemetery was his best lead. He knew Rudolph Valentino was buried there as well as many other long-ago Hollywood greats and pioneers, like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cecil B. DeMille, and John Huston. Many years back Bosch had worked a suicide at Hollywood Forever. The victim was a woman who had laid herself out on top of Tyrone Power’s crypt and then cut her wrists. Before she died she managed to write her name in blood beneath his name on the memorial stone. Bosch did the math on the dead woman and determined she was not even born until five years after Power died. The case seemed to underline what many in homicide work knew; you can’t explain crazy.
Bosch knew that in any town in the country the local cemetery was a draw for a certain class of odd people. In Hollywood, that draw was amped exponentially because there were graves with famous names carved on them. That meant there would be security. And that meant cameras. The woman who killed herself on Tyrone Power’s crypt had done it under a camera. The problem was, no one was watching, and she bled out.
When the traffic momentarily cleared, Bosch turned left out of the parking lot and drove down to Hollywood Forever. The cemetery was surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall interrupted only by entrance and exit lanes. As Bosch pulled in he readily saw cameras affixed to the walls and focused on the auto lanes. Bosch couldn’t tell by his cursory glance whether they were in position to also record activities a half block down Santa Monica Boulevard. But he recognized that the cameras were placed in obviously public positions, thereby acting as a deterrent as well as a recording device. He was interested in them but he was also interested in the cameras nobody could see.
Once past the wall, he saw a parking area and a complex that included the cemetery office as well as a chapel and a casket-and-stone showroom. It was a full-service operation. Beyond this, the cemetery lay spread out and was sectioned by various driving lanes and other, smaller parking areas. Rising above the back wall Bosch could see the giant stages of Paramount Studios and the water tower. He saw cameras on the tower.
There were a number of cars parked in various sections of the cemetery and pedestrians moving among the stones. It was a busy day. Bosch could also see a Hollywood tour van moving slowly next to one of the larger monuments. It was garishly painted with the roof cut off for open-air viewing from the six rows of seats behind the driver. The van was packed with tourists. Bosch lowered his window and could hear the tour guide’s amplified voice echoing off the mausoleums and carrying across the rows of stones.
“Mickey Rooney is the latest Hollywood great to join the others here at Hollywood Forever, the resting place of the stars...”
Bosch put his window back up and got out of the car. On the way into the office he called Haller and told him where he would be.
The man in charge of security at Hollywood Forever was named Oscar Gascon. He was ex-LAPD but had retired so long ago that there was no point in trading names to see who knew whom. Bosch was just happy to make the ex-cop connection and hoped it would give him an edge. He got right to the point.