Darla looked away again while making her protest. Ballard knew she was hiding something. She thought about how to pull it free and considered what Darla would be self-conscious about discussing. Then she hit on what it probably was.
“Come on, Darla, tell us.”
“I already told you. I don’t know.”
“You did see Bonner, didn’t you?”
“I told you, no.”
“You followed him. Humberto. You followed him because you thought he was going to see a girl, but it was Bonner. You saw them together.”
Darla rocked back on the couch as though shocked by Ballard’s jump.
“Where’d they meet?” Ballard pressed. “It’s important, Darla.”
Darla flipped a hand in the air as if to say Why not? You’ve gotten everything else.
“They went up to that place on Franklin where the chicken’s so good.”
Ballard glanced at Bosch.
“Birds?” she asked.
The place that gave cops a discount.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Darla said. “I saw them and then I turned around and left.”
“What did Bonner look like?” Ballard asked.
“I don’t know, white. He was a white guy.”
“What color hair?”
“He had a shaved head. Fucker thought he was Vin Diesel.”
Ballard thought about the description Gabriel Raffa had given of the man in the hoodie.
“Was Bonner in uniform?” she asked.
Darla laughed.
“Yeah, OG Berto Viera having lunch with a cop in uniform.”
“Okay, no uniform. What else do you remember, Darla?”
“That’s it. No more.”
“You sure. That’s the only time you ever saw them?”
“Only time.”
Ballard nodded. She had enough for the time being. And she knew where she could find Darla if she needed to. She looked at Bosch and he nodded. He was finished as well. To punctuate the finality of the interview, Gene knocked on the glass from the deck and held his hands wide.
He was cold and wanted to come in.
Ballard waved him in and then looked at Darla.
“Thank you... Darla,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“You going to pay me?” Darla said. “The gang guys always did.”
“We do that and we have to open a new snitch jacket on you. I don’t think you want that.”
Darla looked at Gene as he came through the glass doors, the booming sound of a crashing wave coming in with him.
“No, I guess not,” Darla said.
Ballard thanked the happy couple and exited with Bosch. There was no traffic and they crossed PCH at a steady walk.
“That was a nice jump you made with her,” Bosch said. “About her following him to check if he was seeing a girl.”
“Thanks,” Ballard said. “It just suddenly hit me.”
They stood between their cars.
“Now what?” Bosch asked.
“I’m going to run down Bonner,” Ballard said. “See where it goes from there. Her description matches the one the victim’s son gave me of a white guy at the New Year’s party. A bald guy in a hoodie.”
“There’s something that doesn’t fit in her story.”
“What?”
“If the banker — Bonner — was a cop, why didn’t Humberto use that to deal his way out of a life sentence?”
Ballard nodded. It was a good point.
“Maybe he tried to and there were no takers,” she said. “Or maybe this Bonner is so ‘serious’ that he was afraid to. Maybe he thought Bonner being a cop meant he could get to him in County.”
“A lot of maybes.”
“There always are.”
“Let me know what you get. I’ll be around if you need me.”
“Thanks, Harry. And thanks for being there tonight. We wouldn’t be to this point if you hadn’t thought Davenport was bent in some way.”
“Then I guess we both made good jumps tonight.”
“What a team. High five.”
Ballard put up her hand.
“We’re not supposed to be doing that during Covid,” Bosch said.
“Come on, Harry,” Ballard urged. “You can do it.”
Bosch reached up and half-heartedly slapped her hand.
“We’ll have to work on that,” Ballard said.
25
After checking in at the watch office with Lieutenant Rivera, Ballard went to the detective bureau to attempt to identify Bonner. The department’s active roster was easily accessible through their internal website. There were two Bonners currently on the job but one was a female, Anne-Marie, and the male, Horatio Jr., had not been in the department at the time Javier Raffa bought his way out of the Las Palmas 13. At best, these two could be legacies of the Bonner she was looking for. But asking them was not an option. Their loyalties would be with their father or uncle or whoever it was. They’d alert the Bonner that Ballard was looking for before she could get to him.
Every division had what was called a pension book. It was a binder updated annually with the roster of retired officers receiving pensions — meaning they were still alive. Dead officers were the hardest of all to trace. The listings in the pension book included the ex-officer’s contact details as well as badge number, serial number, beginning- and end-of-watch dates, and final division assignment before retirement. The book was used to reach out to former officers in the course of investigations that touched on their activities while on the job. It was particularly handy in cold cases.
Hollywood Division’s copy of the pension book was kept in the detective lieutenant’s office, which was locked at the moment because Robinson-Reynolds was off on a Sunday night. Undaunted, Ballard used a set of lockpicks she kept in her file cabinet to work the simple knob lock open. The white binder she was looking for was on a shelf with an assortment of department manuals behind the lieutenant’s desk. Knowing she was trespassing, she made it an in-and-out operation. She opened the book on the lieutenant’s desk and quickly looked through the alphabetical listings for a Bonner.
She found two: Horatio Bonner, who retired in 2002, so could not be the one Ballard was looking for but presumably was the father of at least one of the Bonners currently employed by the department; and a Christopher Bonner, who had retired seven years earlier after twenty years on the job. His rank and last assignment were listed as detective first grade in Hollywood detectives. This was curious to Ballard. She had never heard of Christopher Bonner. She had arrived in the division two years after he had left but, still, she could not recall ever seeing or hearing about a case that had his name attached to it. What added to the puzzle was that Bosch had not reacted to the name, and it seemed as though their time working in Hollywood might have overlapped, though she was not sure what year Bosch left Hollywood Division for the Open-Unsolved Unit downtown.
After laying the binder open on the desk, she pulled out her phone and took a photo of the entry for Christopher Bonner. As she did so, she noticed a yellow Post-it pad to the side of the desk’s center work area. Robinson-Reynolds had written “Ballard” on the top sheet and nothing else. It was obviously a note written to remind him to tell Ballard something or get something from her. Or possibly to talk to someone else about her. Ballard could not think of what that might be, since the last time Robinson-Reynolds was in his office to write the note was during the day shift on New Year’s Eve. Nothing she was involved in now had even occurred by then, except for the ongoing investigation of the first two Midnight Men assaults.
She pushed the question aside for the moment, put her phone in her pocket, and then returned the pension book to its spot on the shelf. She left the office as she had found it and locked the door behind her.