“Well, no, that’s all he said.”
“Had you called the police?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t lie about that.”
“What about Mrs. Harrick? Did you ever talk to her about any of this?”
Gerard averted his eyes, looking down at his hands on the desk, and Bosch knew he was zeroing in on something.
“You talked to her,” he said.
Gerard said nothing.
“Did you tell her you thought her watch had been purchased stolen?” Bosch asked.
Gerard nodded without looking up.
“She happened to call between the time I talked to the original purchaser’s wife and when he — the doctor — called me back. Mrs. Harrick called because she wanted to know if the watch had been repaired yet. I told her that it had been received and that I had ordered the replacement crystal. I then asked her where it was purchased. She told me the name of a jewelry store in Los Angeles and said it had been part of an estate sale.”
“Nelson Grant and Sons?”
“I don’t recall the name.”
“So, what did you tell her?”
“I was honest. I told her the repair would be easy once the crystal arrived but that I was not sure I could work on the piece because there was a question about its ownership.”
“What was her reaction?”
“Well, she was a bit shocked. She said it was a legitimate purchase, that her husband had bought the watch and that he was a policeman. She said she would never buy stolen property, that she could lose her job and her reputation, and she got very upset with me for implying such a thing. I tried to calm her down. I apologized and told her that I was waiting for additional information and to please call me back in a day or two when I would know more.”
Gerard finally looked up at Bosch, his eyes filled with regret over the phone call.
“And then the doctor called you,” Bosch said.
“Yes, the doctor called and told me his story and said he had sold the watch in question.”
Gerard shook his head at the memory of the mess he had created.
“Did you call Mrs. Harrick back and tell her?” Bosch asked.
“Yes, I called her and, of course, she was very angry, but there was nothing I could do. Some people can’t be mollified. Being in retail, I know this.”
Bosch nodded. This seemed like a dead end to him. He pointed at the watch on the desk and asked his last question.
“Why do you still have the watch?”
Gerard picked it up and looked at it. When he did so, Bosch saw a scribble on a yellow Post-it note attached to the file. He could clearly read a name, though it was upside down. Dr. Schubert. There was also a phone number with a 310 area code, which Bosch knew encompassed Beverly Hills.
“She did not provide a method of payment for the repair,” Gerard said. “After the crystal came in and I installed it, I tried to contact her on the number she provided with the shipment but the number was disconnected. So I kept the watch here and waited for her to call. Then, quite frankly, I forgot about it. I had other work and I forgot. Now you tell me that she is dead, murdered.”
Bosch nodded. Parks had provided her cell with the packaging of the watch for shipment. By the time Gerard had called it, Harrick had already canceled the number following his wife’s death.
“This is very bad,” Gerard said.
“Yes, very bad,” Bosch said.
Gerard nodded and then spoke timidly as he placed the watch down on the desk.
“Is this watch the reason for her murder?”
He asked as though dreading the answer.
“I don’t think so,” Bosch said.
Gerard picked up the watch again and started to return it to its padded pouch. Bosch noticed something on the back of the watch.
“May I see the watch for a minute?”
Gerard handed it to him. Harry turned it over and looked at an inscription.
Vince and Lexi
Forever and a Day
Bosch wrapped the watch back up and put it down on the desk.
“I have one last question,” he said. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Yes, please,” Gerard said.
“Why do you think she sent it to you like that — in the padded pouch? How come she didn’t send it in its box?”
Gerard shrugged. “Was there a box?” he asked.
Bosch nodded.
“Yes, in her closet. With the receipt from where her husband bought it. It was right there but she didn’t send it to you in the box.”
Gerard shrugged again.
“The box is bulky,” he offered. “Perhaps it was easier to wrap it and send it in a FedEx box instead. I remember that was how we received it. But it’s not unusual for our customers to ship items this way.”
There could have been multiple reasons, Bosch knew. The question had no answer since the only person who really knew it was dead.
“What about the price?” he asked. “The husband got it for six thousand dollars used. Was that a good deal?”
Gerard frowned.
“Our pieces are collected around the world,” he said. “They hold value and some models even go up. Yes, that was a good deal. A very good deal. A deal to quickly initiate a sale.”
Bosch nodded.
“Thank you, Mr. Gerard.”
30
Kamasi Washington’s tenor sax was coming from the stereo, the sun-scoured desert was hurtling by on either side of the freeway, and Bosch was grinding the case down as he made his way back to L.A.
He loved these solitary moments of concentration and case thought. He always broke his thoughts into three distinct channels of logic: the things he knew, the things he could assume, and the things he wanted to know. The last channel was always the widest.
The trip to Las Vegas to run down the missing watch appeared on surface to be a bust. The watch was accounted for and the explanation of events from Bertrand Gerard was plausible. But Bosch wasn’t quite ready to drop the watch from his investigation. The call Parks made to Nelson Grant & Sons still chafed simply because Peter Nguyen had been evasive and uncooperative with Bosch. Harry decided that he would take another run at Nguyen — and his brother, if possible — and he would also talk to Dr. Schubert to measure his version of the story against Gerard’s. It was a basic elimination strategy. It was covering all the bases.
As he cleared the Las Vegas strip and got onto the open road, Bosch’s thoughts came back to the victim. Alexandra Parks was a public official. Among her duties was running West Hollywood’s consumer protection unit. It would have been highly embarrassing and even job threatening should it turn out that she wore a stolen watch. Bosch wondered what she did in the hours between when Gerard planted the suggestion that she had been doing just that, and the second call when he told her it was a false alarm. He knew she called Nelson Grant & Sons. But who else did she call? Her husband, the Sheriff’s deputy, the man who gave her the watch?
Bosch planned to take a second look at the phone records in the murder book when he got back to Los Angeles. Before he dismissed the watch from having any significance to the case, he still had work to do.
As he was cruising through Primm, the last stop for gambling before the California border, Bosch got a call. It was marked Unknown Caller on his screen but he took it because this most likely meant it was a cop.
“Harry, say it ain’t so.”
“Who is this?”
“Tim Marcia. The word around here today is that you’ve crossed over.”
Marcia had been in the Open-Unsolved Unit with Bosch. He was still fighting the good fight and if anyone deserved an explanation from Bosch it was him.
“Only temporarily,” Bosch said. “And it’s a Sheriff’s case, not LAPD.”