“Yeah, he did,” Bosch said. “He sold me out to the Times for a headline.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Haller said. “Are you fucking forgetting something? We won the case, man, and you had a Superior Court judge apologizing to you and demanding that the D.A.’s Office and the LAPD do the same thing. And you’re going to complain about my strategy?”
“So, you’re saying it was you,” Bosch said. “You admit it. You and Ramsey.”
“I’m saying that in order to win the day, we had to raise the stakes,” Haller said. “We needed to kick this thing out into the streets so that it would become public and it would be something that was talked about and would then draw every goddamn news channel in the city to that courtroom today. I knew if we did that, then the judge would have no choice but to give us standing and allow us to intervene.”
“And you would get, what, about a million dollars’ worth of free publicity out of it?”
“Jesus Christ, Bosch. You’re like a feral cat. You don’t trust anybody. I did it for you, not me, and look at what happened.”
Haller pointed out of the booth in the direction of the courthouse.
“The judge let us in over the objections of everybody in that courtroom,” he said. “And then we fucking won. Borders goes back up to death row for the rest of his sorry existence and every one of those bastards who tried to set you up and frame you is going to end up disbarred, fired, and probably in jail. Cronyn and Cronyn are already in jail, while you’re sitting here drinking a martini. You think the judge would have given us standing if the media wasn’t all over this?”
“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “But my daughter read that shit Sunday and has had to wonder for three days if her father is the kind of guy who would plant evidence and send an innocent man to death row. On top of that, that story almost got me killed. If that had happened, I’d be dead and Borders would be walking the earth as a free man, to kill again.”
“Look, I’m sorry about that. I truly am. I didn’t want that to happen and I didn’t know you were working undercover, because you didn’t fucking tell me. But this is one of those rare times where the end justifies the means. Okay? We got the result we wanted, your reputation came out intact, and your daughter is riding that train, knowing her dad is a hero, not a criminal.”
Bosch nodded as though in agreement. But he wasn’t.
“You should’ve told me,” he said. “I’m the client. I should have been informed and given the choice.”
“And what would your choice have been?” Haller asked.
“We’ll never know now because you didn’t give it to me.”
“I know what it would’ve been, and that’s why I didn’t. End of fucking story.”
They stared at each other for a long, hard moment. Cisco hesitantly raised his glass over the middle of the table.
“Come on, water under the bridge, fellas,” he said. “We won. Let’s toast again. I can’t wait to read the paper tomorrow.”
As if each was waiting for the other to make the first move, Haller and Bosch continued their stare-down.
Haller broke first. He grabbed his glass by the stem and raised it up, sloshing vodka over the brim and down over his fingers. Bosch finally did the same.
The three musketeers clinked glasses like swords again, but it no longer seemed much like all for one and one for all.
41
As Bosch rounded the last curve on Woodrow Wilson Drive, he saw the city ride parked in front of his house. Someone was waiting for him. He turned the sound down on Kamasi Washington’s “Change of the Guard.” It was nearly five, and his plan was to get out of the suit and shower and change into street clothes before heading up to the Valley to visit Elizabeth Clayton in the dungeon where she was taking the cure.
As he pulled into the side carport, he saw who it was. Lucia Soto was sitting on the house’s front step, looking at her phone. Bosch parked and walked around to the front rather than avoiding her and going through the side door. She stood up, put the phone away, and wiped dust from the step off the back of her pants. She was still in the dark blue suit she had worn in court that morning.
“Been waiting long?” Bosch asked by way of a greeting.
“No,” she said. “I had some e-mailing to do. You should sweep your steps every now and then, Harry. Dusty.”
“Keep forgetting. How’d they take things today down at RHD?”
“Oh, you know, in stride. They always take things, good and bad, in stride.”
“And was it a good or bad thing?”
“I think good. Whenever a former detective is cleared of wrongdoing, that’s a good thing. Even if it is Harry Bosch.”
She smiled. He frowned and unlocked the door. He pushed it open for her.
“Enter,” he said. “I’m out of beer but I have some pretty good bourbon.”
“That sounds right,” she said.
Bosch entered behind her and then moved by so he could get to the living room first and make it a little more hospitable for a visitor. The past two nights he had fallen asleep on the couch, watching television and trying to clear his mind of all things related to his cases.
He squared up the couch pillows and grabbed the shirt draped over the arm. He headed back toward the kitchen with it.
“Have a seat and I’ll get the glasses.”
“Can we go out on the deck? I like it out there and it’s been a while.”
“Sure. There’s a broomstick in the slider track.”
“That’s new.”
He put the shirt in the washer, which was located by the kitchen’s side door to the carport. He grabbed the bottle off the top of the refrigerator and took two glasses down from a shelf before joining Soto on the deck.
“Yeah, there’ve been a couple break-ins in the neighborhood lately,” he said. “Both times the guy climbed up a tree to get on the roof and then came down on the back deck, where people sometimes don’t lock their doors.”
He gestured with the bottle toward the house next door, which was cantilevered like Bosch’s. The rear deck hung out over the canyon and seemed impossible to get to other than from inside. But it was clear the roof gave access.
Soto nodded. Bosch could tell she wasn’t really interested. She wasn’t visiting as part of the Neighborhood Watch committee.
He opened the bottle and poured a healthy slug into each of the glasses. He handed one to Soto but they didn’t toast. Considering everything between them at the moment, it would not have felt right.
“So did he tell you how he did it?” Bosch asked.
“Who?” Soto said. “How who did what?”
“Come on. Spencer. How’d he rig the evidence box?”
“Spencer hasn’t told us jack shit, Harry. His lawyer won’t let him talk to us and he said he wasn’t going to testify either. Your lawyer lied to the judge during the proffer.”
“No, he didn’t lie. Not to the judge, at least. Check the record. He said Spencer was in the hallway and was ready to take the stand. That wasn’t a lie. Whether he was going to testify once he got up there or take the fifth was another matter.”
“Semantics, Harry. I never knew you to hide behind words.”
“It was a bluff and it worked. If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t know about it. But it got the truth out, didn’t it?”
“It did, and it got us a search warrant. We didn’t need Spencer to talk.”
Bosch looked sharply at her. She had solved the mystery.
“Tell me.”
“We opened his locker. He had a stack of the twenty-year-old evidence stickers they put on the boxes back then. They were supposed to be destroyed when we went to the red crackle tape. But somehow he got a leftover stack and kept it.”