“So what happened?”
“He was cruising down Ventura one night a while back and some yahoo comes up, cuts him off, and pushes him into head-on traffic. He dodges one car and then has to lay the bike down — it’s an old one, no front brakes — and he skids through an entire intersection on his hip. Luckily he was wearing leathers, so the road rash wasn’t too hideous, but he fucked up his ACL. He’s down for the count right now and they’re talking about a total knee replacement. But it doesn’t matter. My point is, Cisco’s a great defense investigator and he already took a swing at this. What I need is an experienced homicide detective. Harry, I’m not going to be able to live with it if my guy goes down for this. Innocent clients leave scars, if you know what I mean.”
Bosch stared at him blankly for a long moment.
“I’ve already got a project,” he finally said.
“What do you mean, a case?” Haller asked.
“No, a motorcycle. A restoration.”
“Ah, Jesus, you too?”
“It’s a nineteen-fifty Harley like the one Lee Marvin rode in The Wild One. I inherited it from a guy I knew in the service way back. Twenty years ago he wrote it into his will that I get the bike and then he jumped off a cliff up in Oregon. I’ve had the bike in storage since I got it.”
Haller waved a hand dismissively.
“So it’s waited all that time. It can wait longer. I’m talking about an innocent man and I don’t know what I can do. I’m desperate. Nobody’s listening and—”
“It’ll undo everything.”
“What?”
“I work a case for you — not just you, any defense lawyer — and it’ll undo everything I did with the badge.”
Haller looked incredulous.
“Come on. It’s a case. It’s not—”
“Everything. You know what they call a guy who switches sides in homicide? They call him a Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North Vietnamese. You get it? It’s crossing to the dark side.”
Haller looked off through the window into the waiting room. It was crowded with people coming down from the Metrolink tracks on the roof.
Before Haller said anything the waiter brought their food. He stared across the table at Bosch the whole time the woman was placing the plates down and refilling their glasses with iced tea. When she was gone, Bosch spoke first.
“Look, it’s nothing personal — if I did it for anybody, it would probably be you.”
It was true. They were the sons of a fabled L.A. defense attorney but had grown up miles and generations apart. They had only come to know each other in recent years. Despite the fact that Haller was across the aisle from Bosch, so to speak, Harry liked and respected him.
“I’m sorry, man,” he continued. “That’s how it is. It’s not like I haven’t thought about this. But there’s a line I can’t bring myself to cross. And you’re not the first one to ask.”
Haller nodded.
“I get that. But what I am offering is something different. I got this guy I’m convinced was somehow set up for murder and there’s DNA I can’t shake and he’s going to go down for it unless I get someone like you to help me—”
“Come on, Haller, don’t embarrass yourself. Every defense lawyer in every courthouse says the same thing every day of the week. Every client is innocent. Every client is getting railroaded, set up. I heard it for thirty years, every time I sat in a courtroom. But you know what? I don’t have a second thought about anybody I ever put in the penitentiary. And at some point or other every one of them said they didn’t do it.”
Haller didn’t respond and Bosch took the time to take his first bite of food. It was good but the conversation had soured his appetite. Haller started moving his salad around with his fork but he didn’t eat anything.
“Look, all I’m saying is look at the case, see for yourself. Go talk to him and you’ll be convinced.”
“I’m not going to talk to anybody.”
Bosch wiped his mouth with his napkin and put it down on the table next to his plate.
“You want to talk about something else here, Mick? Or should I just take this to go?”
Haller didn’t respond. He looked down at his own uneaten food. Bosch could see the fear in his eyes. Fear of failure, fear of having to live with something bad.
Haller put his fork down.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “You work the case and if you find evidence against my guy, you take it to the D.A. Anything you find, no matter how it cuts, we share with the D.A. Wide-open discovery — anything that doesn’t fall directly under attorney-client privilege.”
“Yeah, what will your client say about that?”
“He’ll sign off on it because he’s innocent.”
“Right.”
“Look, just think about it. Then let me know.”
Bosch pushed his plate away. He’d taken only one bite but lunch was over. He started wiping his hands on the cloth napkin.
“I don’t have to think about it,” he said. “And I can let you know right now. I can’t help you.”
Bosch stood up and dropped the napkin on his food. He reached into his pocket, peeled off enough cash to pay for both sides of the check, and put the money down under the salt-shaker. All this time Haller just stared out into the waiting room.
“That’s it,” Bosch said. “I’m going to go.”
4
Bosch successfully put off thinking about Haller’s offer for most of the weekend. On Saturday he and his daughter drove down to Orange County so she could visit her future school and get a feel for the surrounding town. They ate a late lunch at a restaurant on the edge of campus that served everything on waffles and later took in an Angels game in nearby Anaheim.
He reserved Sunday for working on his motorcycle restoration. The task he had waiting for him would be one of the most vital parts of the project. In the morning he dismantled the Harley’s carburetor, cleaned all the parts, and laid them out on a spread of old newspapers on the dining room table to dry. He had previously bought a rebuild kit at Glendale Harley and had all new gaskets and O-rings for the job. The Clymer rebuild manual warned that if he mis-seated a gasket, left the pilot jet dirty, or mishandled any of a dozen things during the reassembly, then the whole restoration would be for naught.
After lunch on the back deck, he returned to the table, jazz on the stereo and Phillips head screwdriver in hand. He carefully studied the pages in the Clymer manual one more time before starting the assembly by reversing the steps he had followed while taking the carburetor apart. The John Handy Quintet was on the stereo and the song was “Naima,” Handy’s 1967 ode to John Coltrane. Bosch thought it was up there with the best live saxophone performances ever captured.
With Bosch following the manual step-by-step, the carburetor quickly began to take shape. When he reached for the pilot jet, he noticed that it had been lying on top of a newspaper photo of the state’s former governor, cigar clenched in his teeth, a broad smile on his face as he threw his arm around another man, whom Bosch identified as a former state assemblyman from East L.A.
Bosch realized that the edition of the Times that he had spread out was an old one that he had wanted to keep. It had contained a classic report on politics. A few years earlier, in his last hours in office, the governor had used his authority under executive clemency to reduce the sentence of a man convicted in the killing of another. He happened to be the son of his pal the assemblyman. The son had been involved with others in a fight and fatal stabbing, had made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty, but then was unhappy when the judge handed him a sentence of fifteen to thirty years in state prison. On his way out the door at the end of his term of office, the governor knocked it down to seven years.