The Burning Room

6



Bosch could always tell a lot about detectives and how they worked their cases by the case files they kept. Full and complete summaries, legible notes, and a logical flow of reports were all hallmarks of a well-run investigation. Bosch also knew that most detective pairings had a division of labor. Often one investigator was charged with the paperwork because of his or her flair with the written word or because it simply suited his or her personality. It was as simple as dividing brains and brawn. In his own partnerships Bosch always preferred to avoid the paperwork. But it didn’t always work out that way and he always paid attention to detail when he was the writer of record.

It appeared to Bosch that Rodriguez was the keeper of the record when it came to the partnership of Rojas and Rodriguez. His signature was on almost all of the documents and this gave insight into his resentment at having the case taken away. His summaries were concise and complete. No cop-speak or Joe Friday just-the-facts-ma’am shorthand. His witness summaries managed to capture the personalities of the individuals as well as their statements, and this was very helpful to Bosch. It also made him realize that he had sized up Rodriguez and Rojas wrong during the confrontation at Hollenbeck. Rodriguez was upset because he cared about the case, whereas his partner, Rojas, didn’t share the same visceral connection to it. It meant Bosch needed to find a way to connect to Rodriguez and overcome his anger. He was the go-to guy.

The basics of the case were laid out in the first pages of a blue binder that only now would be called the murder book. The incident report from April 10, 2004, contained the who, what, when, and where and was the baseline document of the case.

Orlando Merced and his three bandmates had finished a gig early in the day, a girl’s fifteenth-birthday party that was held by her parents on the island in the middle of the lake in Echo Park. It was a Saturday—the busiest day for work—so the band drove in their van back to Mariachi Plaza in hopes of picking up a second job for the evening. The plaza was crowded with other mariachis waiting and hoping for work. The four men who made up Los Reyes Jalisco found a place to sit at a picnic table on the east side of the plaza. The four men played their instruments and followed the tradition of dueling musically with other bands in the plaza. The clash of music was so loud that very few people in the plaza heard a shot. Those who did hear it reported that it came from the west side of the triangular plaza, where it is bordered by Boyle Avenue. According to a report written by Rodriguez after sifting through witness statements, Merced was sitting on top of the precast concrete table with his feet on the bench. His bandmates did not hear the shot and did not notice he was hit until he toppled from the picnic table to the ground. One of the musicians called 911 at 4:11 p.m.

Because the shot was heard by some and not by others, the scene at the plaza was described in the reports as chaotic. Those who heard the shot or saw Merced fall over panicked and ran for cover. Those who did not know what was going on were confused. Some followed those running and some turned in circles, wondering what was going on. The investigation produced no witness who saw a gunman firing from a passing car or on foot. No one was seen by witnesses or discerned on surveillance videos as a suspect fleeing the scene, but many earwitnesses agreed that the shot had come from the Boyle Avenue side of the plaza.

North Boyle Avenue was the main drag in the Boyle Heights area and also traversed the heart of the turf controlled by a large and violent Latino street gang known as White Fence. The gang derived its name from the white picket fence that surrounded the La Purisima Church. The gang’s origins reached back to a men’s club at the church in the 1930s. The name White Fence evolved over the decades to become a symbol of the dividing line between the city’s white Anglo power elite and the Latin populace of East Los Angeles. The line between those with money and those who cleaned their houses and cut their lawns. Ethnic pride and solidarity aside, the gang became one of the most violent and feared in the city, often preying upon that same Latin populace. WF graffiti marked almost all the walls and surfaces of Mariachi Plaza. The LAPD’s Gang Intelligence Unit suspected that WF members regularly charged a “tax” on the musicians who waited for work there.

White Fence became the initial focus of Detectives Rodriguez and Rojas. Branching off from Boyle Avenue and creating the rear border of the plaza was Pleasant Avenue, where several hard-core members of White Fence were known to live. Though Orlando Merced’s bandmates told the investigators they were not embroiled in a dispute with White Fence, nor had they been approached to pay a gang tax, Rojas and Rodriguez focused on the Pleasant Avenue gangsters in the initial stages of the case. Several of the gang members were detained and questioned through the days that followed the shooting. None provided anything that implicated the gang or led to another possible motive or source for the shooting.

No shell casing was found on Boyle or Pleasant Avenue and the exact origin of the shooting was never determined. It seemed baffling to Bosch that a shooting across a plaza where more than fifty people were gathered did not produce a single credible witness. Such was the power and threat of White Fence.

Rojas and Rodriguez also conducted a background investigation into the victim to attempt to determine if Orlando Merced had been a specific target in the shooting. There was nothing in their conclusions that suggested this was the case. It appeared to them and was subsequently announced to the public that he was a random and innocent victim.

The detectives were soon reduced to chasing down call-in tips from the public. None of these panned out. No suspect list was ever formulated, but it was clear from the number of reports in the casebooks that the detectives focused much of their attention on a second-generation White Fence shot caller known as C. B. Gallardo. The initials stood for Cerco Blanca. He had been named by his father after the gang he had pledged his allegiance to.

Rojas and Rodriguez followed a routine investigative strategy with Gallardo: bring him in on a smaller charge and sweat him on the bigger one. They were convinced Gallardo knew who had fired the shot into Mariachi Plaza even if he had not ordered it himself. They knew Gallardo ran an auto body shop that was a front for a chop shop where cars stolen by gang members were dissected and sold across the U.S. and in Mexico for parts and scrap metal. In this case, they worked with auto theft detectives to raid El Puente Auto on 1st Street ten days after the shooting. Gallardo was arrested for auto theft and possession of stolen property when ID numbers on a variety of parts in the shop were tracked to cars reported stolen from the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

But the man named for the gang he was affiliated with did not crack. Despite several hours of interrogation regarding the Merced shooting, Gallardo refused to admit any involvement and eventually refused to talk to the detectives at all. In the end, he pleaded guilty to a single count of auto theft and spent six months in the Wayside Honor Rancho.

Rodriguez’s casebook summation on C. B. Gallardo was that he remained a strong suspect in the Merced shooting. The report suggested that the motive behind the shooting was to instill fear in the musicians who sought work in Mariachi Plaza and make them more amenable to paying a protection tax to White Fence. According to this theory, Merced was a random victim, the unsuspecting receiver of a bullet fired without aim into the plaza. The last time the Hollenbeck detectives had spoken to Gallardo was two years before, when he was incarcerated at the penitentiary up in San Quentin for an attempted murder conviction. As before, Gallardo told them nothing.

Bosch finished his review of the two casebooks before Soto got back from her appointment in Chinatown. He moved on to the DVDs from the evidence box, playing them on his laptop. He started with the performance videos. He watched several minutes of the band playing at a variety of indoor and outdoor events. He primarily focused on Orlando Merced, watching the man play and how he held his instrument. In all but one of the videos he was standing while playing, but there was a single video of the band on a stage at a wedding and all four of the musicians were sitting on chairs. Bosch noted that Merced did not rest his instrument on his thigh as he played. He held it up higher, leaning it against the shelf of his burgeoning stomach. This would be important to consider when they attempted to re-create the trajectory of the bullet that struck Merced. How he sat when he played and how he held the instrument would be two of the key things to understand.

One of the performance videos was dated the same day as the shooting and it was a recording from the birthday party at Echo Park where Los Reyes Jalisco had played earlier in the day. While Bosch had fast-forwarded through most of the other videos, he watched this one in its entirety, hoping to pick up on something that would give a clue as to what happened later that day. He knew, of course, that Rojas and Rodriguez had certainly done the same thing, but he was undaunted. If nothing else, Bosch was confident in himself as an investigator and believed he observed things others did not. He knew this was egotistical, but a healthy ego was a requirement of the job. You had to believe you were smarter, tougher, braver, and more resilient than the unknown person you were looking for. And working cold cases, you had to believe the same thing about the detectives who had worked the case before you. If you didn’t, you were lost. It was this sense of the mission that he hoped he could impart to Soto in the final year of his career.

The Echo Park video showed a happy family celebrating their daughter’s quincea?era. Many friends and family members were on hand, and picnic tables were covered with traditional foods and gifts. The girl at the center of attention wore a white dress and a tiara with the number fifteen on it. She had a court of honor that included six other girls. There was dancing and the band played songs that Bosch assumed were traditional to the celebration. At one point the girl’s parents carried out two cultural traditions, the mother presenting her daughter with the “last doll,” symbolizing the end of childhood, and the father changing her shoes from flat sandals to high heels, symbolizing the beginning of womanhood.

There was much love and poignancy captured on the video. It drew Bosch’s thoughts away from the case to his own daughter. He carried a constant burden of guilt when it came to her. Bosch was a single parent but mostly an absentee parent because of the hours consumed by his work. His daughter was seventeen now and she’d had no sweet sixteen party. He had never staged any kind of birthday celebration for her other than to celebrate it by themselves. Watching the party in Echo Park, he was reminded of his many failings as a father and it put a catch in his throat.

Bosch turned the video off. He had seen nothing on it that had given him pause or any clue to the shooting that would happen just a few hours later. Merced and his bandmates were professional and did not mingle with the party guests. They were rarely the focus of the camera but were seen in backdrop during several moments of the video. Bosch ejected the disc and moved on to the second stack of DVDs.

These DVDs contained film from surveillance cameras near the plaza. As such, they were not specifically focused on the plaza and only captured segments of what happened that day. To Bosch’s surprise the first video he viewed showed a grainy, long-distance image of Merced actually being shot. As far as he knew, this had never been made public. The video was taken from inside the mariachi supplies and music store located across 1st Street from the plaza. The camera was mounted in an upper corner of the store and its purpose was to document and discourage shoplifting. However, its reach was through the front plate-glass window of the store and across 1st to the plaza.

Bosch backed up and replayed the shooting portion of the video several times, watching Merced strumming his instrument until the impact of the bullet embedding in his spine knocked him backwards off the table to the ground. He then finally let the video continue and intently watched the action that followed the shooting. The images were murky because of the distance and the writing on the music shop’s window. The focus of the camera was also obviously set on the interior of the store as opposed to the activities across the street.

At the moment of the bullet’s impact, Merced was surrounded by his bandmates. He sat on the table with his feet on the bench seat. On his right side sat the accordion player, and standing to his left and a step back was the guitarist. Moving into position behind the table was the trumpet player, who was holding his instrument in two hands and bringing it up to his mouth to play.

Again, Harry watched the shot knock Merced backwards off the table. The trumpet player immediately ran to the right of the frame and out of the picture, while the guitar player started to duck under the side of the table, turning his guitar so it shielded his body. The accordion player seemed confused by what had just happened. It appeared by his body language that he did not realize at first that Merced had been shot. It was only when he saw the guitar player ducking under the table that he too slid down and moved under its shelter. After a long moment, both men moved from the table and over to Merced to help him. The trumpet player came back into the frame and also knelt down next to his fallen comrade.

Bosch continued to watch the video. Soon people came running up to the picnic table and gathered around the shooting victim. It became hard to see Merced in the middle of all the others and the activity.

Over the next thirty minutes Bosch watched as paramedics and police responded to the shooting call. Merced was initially treated while lying on the pavement and then hoisted onto a gurney and wheeled out of the frame. The picnic table and immediate area were cordoned off with yellow crime scene ribbon and officers started corralling witnesses for detectives. The video ended at that point and Bosch wondered if Rodriguez and Rojas had edited the video or if there was more that had come from the music store.

Bosch checked the two other videos but neither was as interesting or as useful to him. Both had time codes that allowed him to sync up the moment of the shooting but they provided little new information. One was from a parking lot camera at Poquito Pedro’s at least a block away. It did not actually show much of Mariachi Plaza but rather showed the intersection of Boyle and 1st. Bosch saw no apparent drive-by vehicle pass on the tape, no gang hoopty speeding through the intersection in the seconds after the shooting went down.

The third surveillance video came from the suicide camera on the 1st Street bridge. It was several blocks from the plaza and its view of the shooting was blocked by the old hotel at the corner of Boyle and 1st. Bosch watched it once, dismissed its usefulness, and ejected it from the laptop.

He thought about things for a moment. He knew he should set up an appointment with Rodriguez and Rojas to sit down and go over many details of the case rather than do it piecemeal, but he picked up the phone anyway and called the detective bureau at Hollenbeck. He asked specifically for Rodriguez even though Rojas might be more forthcoming.

“This is Detective Rodriguez.”

“This is Bosch. How are you doing?”

No answer. Bosch waited a moment and pressed on.

“I just finished a review of your case files on Merced.”

He paused. Still nothing.

“I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass by telling you how thorough you guys were. You already know that. But I have a few questions. I could have asked for Rojas because he wasn’t a prick today but I asked for you. This is your book, Rodriguez. I can tell. I figure you’re the one I need to talk to. Can you help me out?”

No answer again but this time Bosch waited. Eventually Rodriguez responded.

“What do you want to know, Bosch?”

Harry nodded. His instinct was right. The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever. At the end of the day Rodriguez was a good cop and he wanted what Bosch wanted. He could not remain angry and mute if it might cost Orlando Merced his due.