The Burning Room

17



On Saturday morning Bosch and Soto caught the first flight to Dallas, where the airline had put them on standby lists for the next three flights to L.A. They had spent little more than twelve hours in Tulsa and less than a thousand dollars of city money in all. For what they had learned from Ojeda, Bosch thought that was a pretty good deal.

They got lucky in Dallas and made it onto the first flight. They then doubled down on the luck when the plane’s captain, who had been routinely informed that two armed law enforcement officers would be on the flight, bumped them to the top of the upgrade list, and both snagged seats in first class—though in separate rows. Bosch felt embarrassed to have brought his to-go bag from Cousin’s into such luxurious surroundings, where he was informed by the flight attendant that a complimentary lunch would be served. When he saw a soldier in camo coming down the aisle and making his way to the back, he handed the bag to him and told him it was the best chopped brisket sandwich he’d ever eat. The soldier took the bag.

“We’ll see about that, sir,” he said. “I’m from Memphis.”

Bosch nodded. He had once spent a week in Memphis on a case, and a local detective took him to a different barbecue joint each day.

“Wet or dry?” he asked the soldier.

“Dry, sir.”

“The Rendezvous?”

“You got it, sir.”

Bosch nodded and the soldier moved on down the aisle. The woman behind him asked Bosch if he was giving anything else away and his face turned red.

Bosch was in the third row of the cabin and Soto the first. The pilot had made sure that they got aisle seats so they could act and move quickly in the event of a problem. This wasn’t the first time Bosch had received such treatment. Most flight crews he had encountered welcomed an armed presence near the cockpit.

While waiting out a minor delay before departure, Bosch put in his earbuds and listened to music he had downloaded from a film about Frank Morgan, the saxophonist. It was a documentary and featured a tribute concert at San Quentin, where Morgan had been incarcerated for years before making his comeback in the jazz world. The tribute band was composed of players who had worked with or revered Morgan, and the dedication came out in the strong performance. He played the Dizzy Gillespie standard “The Champ” twice in a row, his favorite part being when Delfeayo Marsalis and Mark “the Preacher man” Gross traded fours on trombone and sax.

After the plane finally took off, Bosch stopped the music and got down to work. He and Soto had divided up the murder books and he still had the files from the Bonnie Brae fire investigation. Sitting next to a woman who looked like a young Hollywood executive, Bosch was concerned about opening the binders and possibly revealing photos of victims at the scene or after autopsy. So he slipped the thickest media envelope out of one of the binders and started reading through the newspaper coverage of the deadly fire.

The packet was filled with folded and yellowed clippings that were as fragile as the gang organizational chart he had opened the day before. The creases broke apart even as he carefully and slowly unfolded them. This happened often when he reviewed old case files, and his practice was to tape the separated pieces onto butcher paper—they kept a roll in the squad room—so that the disintegration could be curtailed and the stories refolded.

As would be expected, the Bonnie Brae fire drew a tremendous amount of coverage from the Los Angeles Times. The contents of the media packet were largely split in half, with the first half containing stories about the fire and immediate aftermath and the second being reports on the investigation that seemed to have been published at semiregular intervals—six months later, one year later, five years later, and ten years later. Apparently the editors at the newspaper either missed a chance at a twenty-years-later story or deemed it un-newsworthy. The last story in the packet was the tenth-anniversary story.

After determining what he had, Bosch started at the beginning. On day one, the Times was almost wholly dedicated to the fire. He unfolded an entire front page that had three photos and the start of three stories. The photo block contained two smaller photos depicting residents charging out of the smoky apartment building and two women embracing on the street, their faces streaked with soot and tears and wearing looks of utter anguish. The larger main image to the right of these and at center was of a firefighter emerging from the building and holding a young girl in his arms, her limbs hanging it seemed lifelessly. The firefighter had not waited to get out of the building before starting CPR measures. He was blowing air into her mouth as he was coming out of the building. Bosch read the caption below the photo block but it did not identify the firefighter or the girl and did not say whether she lived. He looked again closely at the photo and then two rows up the aisle, where he could barely see the top of Soto’s head above the back of her seat. He wondered if she was the girl in the photo.

He had noticed that since he had started to work with her, there had been many small instances of luck turning his way. In the past forty-eight hours on this case alone he had felt lucky several times, from getting the cop-friendly Sherma Barthlett as the on-call judge for search warrants, to Ricky Childers’s being there when they checked into the Tulsa PD, to getting first-class upgrades on the flight home. He felt in many ways that he was on a roll and it defied the law of averages, which held that you win some and you lose some. It had him contemplating the idea of luck and whether it was something random or possibly something that could follow certain people all their lives, including being the one to survive a deadly fire and a deadly firefight outside a liquor store. Perhaps Lucky Lucy was more than a nickname. And perhaps the luck she brought was contagious.

“Wow, that’s what you call old news.”

Bosch turned. The woman next to him was looking at the yellowed and cracked front page he was holding. He smiled and nodded awkwardly.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Bosch looked at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just nosy. It looks interesting.”

“I’m just checking out something that happened a long time ago.”

“That fire.”

She pointed to the photos on the newspaper front.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “But I can’t really talk about it. It’s a private matter.”

“Can you tell me this?” the woman insisted. “Did that girl live?”

Bosch looked at the photo for a moment before answering.

“Yes, she did. She was lucky.”

“I’ll say.”

Bosch nodded and the woman went back to reading a script. Bosch focused on the stories on the front page. There was the main story at the upper-right corner that contained the basics of what happened—at least as far as what was known on the day of the fire. There was a single-column sidebar below it with a headline:





Illegal


Day Care


Rampant




Bosch assumed that the purpose of the story was to show a causal relationship between the fire and the deaths in the building’s basement day-care center. Presumably a licensed facility would have had multiple exit routes in the event of a fire, and the children would have escaped, but the tone of the story seemed to imply that the children themselves had somehow brought on their own deaths by being involved in an illegal day-care center.

The third story was an investigation of the 210-unit apartment complex’s health-and-safety inspection record, which was replete with violations over the past decade. The story also focused on the complex’s ownership by a real-estate holding company that owned several other large complexes in the area, which also carried low rents and high incidences of health-and-safety-code violations. Written before the deadly fire was known to be arson, the story seemed intended to prepare the reader for an eventual conclusion that the blaze was started because some code was violated or ignored.

The stories jumped inside, where there were more sidebars and two pages of photographs from the scene. There was also a black-bordered box that listed the names of all the reporters who worked on the newspaper’s coverage of the fire. Bosch counted twenty-two names and it made him miss the old Los Angeles Times. In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo—thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long.

It took Bosch almost an hour just to read the stories and study the photographs in the A section. Nothing he read gave him any ideas about proceeding any differently with the case. The only place where the Times coverage came close to what would eventually be the focus of the original investigation was an inside story that profiled the neighborhood and mentioned Pico-Union La Raza as the predominant gang. It quoted an unnamed police source calling Bonnie Brae Street a drive-through drug market where rock cocaine and black tar heroin from Mexico were plentiful.

Bosch noticed that Soto was getting up from her seat and holding her computer open. He quickly folded the newspaper and slipped it beneath the stack of other clips in case the photographs were something she didn’t want to see.

Soto came back to his row, carrying her open laptop. She saw the stack of yellowed newspaper clippings.

“You’re reading all of that stuff?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “You never know, sometimes you get an idea from it. You see a quote from somebody or something. I wrote down some names of people who were there that day—reporters and residents. Might be worth a phone call or something, see what they remember.”

“Okay.”

Bosch nodded to her computer.

“So what’s up?”

She put her computer down on top of the news clippings so he could see the screen.

“I’m using the Wi-Fi and I think I found Broussard.”

Bosch turned in his seat to block the possibly prying eyes of his seatmate and looked at the screen. He realized he was seeing a digital version of the Los Angeles Times. It was a story dated nine years before about the appointment of Charles “Brouss” Broussard to the Parks and Recreation Commission by newly elected mayor Armando Zeyas. It was a short story because the commission that oversaw the city’s parks was not a big news generator. The profile of Broussard described him as a local businessman who had been an important fund-raiser for local politicians for many years. The accompanying photo was a shot taken on the night of the mayor’s election and it showed Zeyas with his arm around Broussard’s shoulders. A smiling woman standing nearby was identified as Maria Broussard. She was much younger than her husband.

“Good work,” Bosch said without looking up at Soto.

He tilted the computer screen back so he could see the photo better. He studied Broussard intently. He was a heavyset man in an expensive-looking suit. Maybe forty years old at the time of the photo. He had a full beard with an odd graying pattern that made it look as though bleach had leaked from the corners of his mouth and left a trail of white hair down to his jaw.

Soto leaned down so she did not have to talk loudly.

“But Ojeda said the fund-raiser where he met Maria was not for Zeyas,” she said.

Bosch nodded. It was a discrepancy in the story.

“Either Ojeda lied or Broussard switched sides,” he said. “We need to find out which one it is.”