"EchoPark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Connelly Michael)

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IN THE SHADOWS OF downtown’s spires and under the glow of lights from Dodger Stadium, Echo Park was one of L.A.’s oldest and ever-changing neighborhoods. Over the decades it had been the destination of the city’s immigrant underclass-the Italians coming first and then the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Cubans, Ukrainians and all of the others. By day a walk down the main drag of Sunset Boulevard might require skills in five or more languages to read all of the storefronts. By night it was the only place in the city where the air could be split by the sound of gang gunfire, the cheers for a home-run ball, and the baying of the hillside coyotes-all in the same hour.

These days Echo Park was also a favored destination of another class of newcomer-the young and hip. The cool. Artists, musicians and writers were moving in. Cafés and vintage clothing shops were squeezing in next to the bodegas and mariscos stands. A wave of gentrification was washing across the flats and up the hillsides below the baseball stadium. It meant the character of the place was changing. It meant real-estate prices were going up, pushing out the working class and the gangs.

Bosch had lived for a short time in Echo Park when he was a boy. And many years back, there had been a police bar on Sunset called the Short Stop. But cops were no longer welcome there. The place offered valet parking and catered to the Hollywood crowd-two things sure to keep the off-duty officer away. For Bosch the neighborhood of Echo Park had dropped off the radar. To him it wasn’t a destination. It was a drive-through neighborhood, a shortcut on his way to the Medical Examiner’s Office for work or to a Dodgers game for fun.

From downtown he took a quick jog on the 101 Freeway north to Echo Park Road and then took that north again toward the hillside neighborhood where Raynard Waits had been arrested. As he passed Echo Lake he saw the statue known as the Lady of the Lake watching over the water lilies, her hands palms up like the victim of a holdup. As a boy he had lived for almost a year with his mother in the Sir Palmer Apartments across from the lake, but it had been a bad time for her and him and the memory was all but erased. He vaguely remembered that statue but almost nothing else.

At Sunset he turned right and took it down to Beaudry. From there he drove up the hillside to Figueroa Terrace. He pulled to the curb near the intersection where Waits had been pulled over. A few old bungalow homes built in the thirties and forties were still there, but for the most part the houses were postwar concrete-block construction. They were modest with gated yards and barred windows. The cars in the driveways were not new or flashy. It was a working-class neighborhood that Bosch knew would be largely Latino and Asian now. From the back of the homes on the west side there would be nice views of the downtown towers with the DWP Building front and center. The homes on the east side would have backyards that stretched up into the rugged terrain of the hills. And at the top of those hills would be the far parking lots of the baseball stadium complex.

He thought about Waits’s window-washing van and wondered again why he had been on this street in this neighborhood. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where he would have customers. It wasn’t the kind of street where a commercial van would be expected at two in the morning, anyway. The two CRT officers had been correct in taking notice.

Bosch pulled over and put the car in park. He stepped out and looked around and then leaned against the car as he contemplated the questions. He still didn’t get it. Why had Waits chosen this place? After a few moments he opened his cell phone and called his partner.

“You run that AutoTrack yet?” he asked.

“Just did. Where are you?”

“Echo Park. Anything come up near here?”

“Uh-uh, I was just looking. The farthest east it puts him is the Montecito Apartments on Franklin.”

Bosch knew that the Montecito wasn’t near Echo Park but it was not far from the High Tower Apartments, where Marie Gesto’s car had been found.

“When was he at the Montecito?” he asked.

“After Gesto. He moved in, let’s see, in ’ninety-nine, and out the next year. A one-year stay.”

“Anything else worth mentioning?”

“No, Harry. Just the usual. The guy moved house every one or two years. Didn’t like staying put, I guess.”

“Okay, Kiz. Thanks.”

“You coming back to the office?”

“In a little while.”

He closed the phone and got back in the car. He took Figueroa Lane to Chavez Ravine Place and hit another stop sign. At one time the whole area up here was known only as Chavez Ravine. But that was before the city moved all the people out and bulldozed the bungalows and shacks they had called home. A grand housing project was supposed to rise in the ravine, with playgrounds and schools and shopping plazas that would invite back those who had been displaced. But once they cleared it all out the housing project was scratched from the city’s plans and it was a baseball stadium that went in instead. To Bosch it seemed that as far back as he could remember in L.A., the fix was always in.

Bosch had been listening lately to the Ry Cooder CD called Chávez Ravine. It wasn’t jazz but that was okay. It was its own kind of jazz. He liked the song “It’s Just Work for Me,” a dirge about a bulldozer driver who came to the ravine to knock down the poor people’s shacks and refused to feel guilty about it.

You got to go where they send you

When you’re a dozer-drivin’ man…

He took a left on Chavez Ravine and in a few moments he came to Stadium Way and the spot where Waits had first drawn the attention of the CRT patrol as he passed on his way down into Echo Park.

At the stop sign he surveyed the intersection. Stadium Way was the feeder line to the stadium’s huge parking lots. For Waits to have come into the neighborhood this way, as the arrest report stated, he would have to have come in from downtown, the stadium, or the Pasadena Freeway. This would not have been the way in from his home in West Hollywood. Bosch puzzled with this for a few moments but determined there was not enough information to draw any conclusion. Waits could have driven through Echo Park, making sure he was not followed, and then drawn the CRT tail after turning around to go back.

He realized that there was much about Waits he didn’t know and it bothered him that he would come face-to-face with the killer the next day. Bosch felt unprepared. He once again considered the idea he’d had earlier, but this time he didn’t hesitate. He opened his phone and called the FBI field office in Westwood.

“I’m looking for an agent named Rachel Walling,” he told the operator. “I’m not sure what squad she’s with.”

“Hold one.”

By “one” she had apparently meant a minute. As he waited he was honked at by a car that had come up from behind. Bosch moved through the intersection, made a U-turn and then pulled off the road into the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Finally near the two-minute mark his call was transferred and picked up and a male voice said, “Tactical.”

“Agent Walling, please.”

“Hold one.”

“Right,” Bosch said after he heard the click.

But this time the transfer was made quickly and Bosch heard Rachel Walling’s voice for the first time in a year. He hesitated and she almost hung up on him.

“Rachel, it’s Harry Bosch.”

Now she hesitated before responding.

“Harry…”

“So what’s ‘Tactical’ mean?”

“It’s just the squad designation.”

He understood. She didn’t answer because it was eyes-only stuff and the line was probably on tape somewhere.

“Why are you calling, Harry?”

“Because I need a favor. I could use your help, actually.”

“With what? I’m sort of in the middle of something here.”

“Then don’t worry about it. I thought maybe you’d… well, never mind, Rachel. It’s no big deal. I can handle it.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll let you get back to Tactical, whatever that is. You take care.”

He closed the phone and tried not to let her voice and the memory it conjured distract him from the task at hand. He looked back across the intersection and realized he was probably in the same position the CRT car had been in when Gonzalez and Fennel spotted Waits’s van. The eucalyptus tree and night shadows had provided them cover.

Bosch was hungry now, having missed lunch. He decided he would cross over the freeway into Chinatown and grab takeout to bring back to the squad room. He pulled back onto the street and was debating whether to call the office to see if anybody wanted anything from Chinese Friends when his cell rang. He checked the screen but saw the ID was blocked. He answered anyway.

“It’s me.”

“Rachel.”

“I wanted to switch to my cell.”

There was a pause. Bosch knew he had been right about the phones at Tactical.

“How have you been, Harry?”

“I’ve been fine.”

“So you did like you said you were going to do. You went back to the cops. I read about you last year with that case up in the Valley.”

“Yeah, my first case back. Everything’s been below the radar since then. Until this thing I’ve got working now.”

“And that’s why you called me?”

Bosch noted the tone in her voice. It had been more than eighteen months since they had spoken. And that was at the end of an intense week when they had crossed paths on a case, Bosch working on a private ticket before coming back to the department and Walling working on resuscitating her career with the bureau. The case led Bosch back to the blue fold and Walling to the L.A. field office. Whether Tactical, whatever that was, constituted an improvement over her previous posting in South Dakota was something Bosch didn’t know. What he did know was that before she had fallen from grace and been cast out to the reservation beat in the Dakotas, she had been a profiler in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.

“I called because I thought maybe you’d be interested in putting some of your old skills to work again,” he said.

“You mean a profile?”

“Sort of. Tomorrow I have to go head to head in a room with an admitted serial killer and I don’t know the first thing about what makes him tick. This guy wants to confess to nine murders in a deal to avoid the needle. I have to make sure he’s not playing us. I have to figure out if he’s telling the truth before we turn around and tell all the families-what families we know of-that we’ve got the right guy.”

He waited a moment for her to react. When she didn’t he pressed on.

“I’ve got crimes, a couple crime scenes and forensics. I’ve got his apartment inventory and photos. But I don’t have a handle on him. I was calling because I was wondering if I could show you some of this stuff and, you know, maybe get some ideas from you on how to handle him.”

There was another long silence before she answered.

“Where are you, Harry?” she finally asked.

“Right now? Right now I’m heading into Chinatown to pick up some shrimp fried rice. I missed lunch.”

“I’m downtown. I could meet you. I missed lunch, too.”

“You know where Chinese Friends is?”

“Of course. How about a half hour?”

“I’ll order before you get there.”

Bosch closed the phone and felt a thrill that he knew came from something other than the idea that Rachel Walling might be able to help him with the Waits case. Their last encounter had ended badly but the sting of it had eroded over time. What was left in his memory was the night they had made love in a Las Vegas motel room and he had believed he had connected with a kindred soul.

He looked at his watch. He had time to kill even if he was going to order food before she got there. In Chinatown he pulled to the curb outside the restaurant and opened up his phone again. Before he had turned the Gesto murder book over to Olivas he had written down names and numbers he might need. He now called Bakersfield and the home of Marie Gesto’s parents. The call would not be a complete shock to them. His habit had always been to call them every time he pulled the file to take another look at the case. He thought it was some measure of comfort for them to know he had not given up.

The missing woman’s mother answered the phone.

“Irene, it’s Harry Bosch.”

“Oh!”

There was always that initial note of hope and excitement when one of them answered.

“Nothing yet, Irene,” he responded quickly. “I just have a question for you and Dan, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, of course. It’s just good to hear from you.”

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too.”

It had been more than ten years since he had actually seen Irene and Dan Gesto. After two years they had stopped coming to L.A. in hopes of finding their daughter, had given up her apartment and gone home. After that, Bosch always called.

“What is your question, Harry?”

“It’s a name, actually. Do you remember Marie ever mentioning someone named Ray Waits? Maybe Raynard Waits? Raynard is an unusual name. You might remember it.”

He heard her breath catch and he immediately knew he had made a mistake. The recent arrest and court hearings involving Waits had made it into the media in Bakersfield. He should have known that Irene would have a keen eye on such things in L.A. She would know what Waits was accused of. She would know they were calling him the Echo Park Bagman.

“Irene?”

He guessed that her imagination had taken terrible flight.

“Irene, it’s not what you think. I’m just running some checks on this guy. It sounds like you’ve heard of him from the news.”

“Of course. Those poor young girls. Ending up like that. I…”

He knew what she was thinking, maybe not what she was feeling.

“Can you think back before you saw him on the news. The name. Do you remember if your daughter ever mentioned it?”

“No, I don’t remember it, thank God.”

“Is your husband there? Can you check with him?”

“He’s not here. He’s still at work.”

Dan Gesto had given everything of himself to the search for his missing daughter. After two years, when he had nothing left spiritually, physically or financially, he went home to Bakersfield and went back to work at a John Deere franchise. Selling farmers their tractors and tools kept him alive now.

“Can you ask him when he comes home and then call me back if he remembers the name?”

“I will, Harry.”

“One other thing, Irene. Marie’s apartment had that tall window in the living room. You remember that?”

“Of course. That first year we came down for Christmas instead of her coming up. We wanted her to feel like it was a two-way road. Dan put up the tree in that window and you could see its lights from up and down the block.”

“Yes. Do you know if she ever hired a window washer to keep that window clean?”

There was a long silence while Bosch waited. It was a hole in the investigation, an angle he should have followed thirteen years before but hadn’t even thought of.

“I don’t remember, Harry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Irene. It’s okay. Do you remember when you and Dan went back to Bakersfield and you took everything from the apartment?”

“Yes.”

She said it in a strangled voice. He knew that she was crying now and that the couple had felt that in some way they were abandoning their daughter as well as their hope when they had gone home after two years of searching and waiting.

“Did you keep it all? All the records and bills and all of the stuff we gave you when we were finished with it?”

He knew that if there had been a receipt for a window washer, it would have been a lead that was checked out. But he had to ask her anyway to confirm the negative, to make sure it hadn’t slipped through the cracks.

“Yes, we have it. It’s in her room. We have a room with her things in it. In case she…”

Ever came home. Bosch knew their hope would not be fully extinguished until Marie was found, one way or the other.

“I understand,” he said. “I need you to look through that box, Irene. If you can. I want you to look for a receipt from a window washer. Go through her checkbooks and see if she paid a window washer. Look for a company called ClearView Residential Glass Cleaners, or maybe an abbreviation of that. Call me if you find anything. Okay, Irene? Do you have a pen there? I think I got a new cell number since the last time I gave it to you.”

“Okay, Harry,” Irene said. “I have a pen.”

“The number is three-two-three, two-four-four, five-six-three-one. Thank you, Irene. I’m going to go now. Please give your husband my best.”

“I will. How’s your daughter, Harry?”

He paused. Over the years it seemed like he had told them everything about himself. It was a way of keeping solid the bond and his promise to find their daughter.

“She’s fine. She’s great.”

“What grade now?”

“Third, but I don’t get to see her that much. She’s living in Hong Kong with her mother at the moment. I went over last month for a week. They’ve got a Disneyland over there now.”

He didn’t know why he threw in that last line.

“It must be very special when you are with her.”

“Yes. She is also sending me e-mail now. She’s better at it than me.”

It was awkward speaking about one’s daughter to a woman who had lost her own and didn’t know where or why.

“I hope she comes back soon,” Irene Gesto said.

“Me, too. Good-bye, Irene. Call me on the cell whenever you want.”

“Good-bye, Harry. Good luck.”

She always said good luck at the end of every conversation. Bosch sat in the car and thought about the contradiction in his desire for his daughter to live here in Los Angeles with him. He feared for her safety in the far-off place where she lived now. He wanted to be close so that he could protect her. But would bringing her to a city where young girls disappeared without a trace or ended up in pieces in trash bags be a move toward safety? He knew deep down that he was being selfish and that he couldn’t really protect her no matter where she lived. Everybody had to make their own way in this world. It was Darwin’s rules out there and all he could do was hope that her path didn’t cut across the path of someone like Raynard Waits.

He gathered up the files and got out of the car.