The Burning Room

8



Lucia Soto was already at Mariachi Plaza when Bosch got there. There was no obvious sign that anybody from the media was still on the scene. Bosch crossed the plaza, taking it all in. It was beginning to get crowded with musicians hoping to pick up evening gigs. The sidewalk parking spaces running along Boyle Avenue were bumper to bumper with vans brightly painted with the names and phone numbers of bands. The benches and tables in the plaza were all occupied.

Soto was talking to three men squeezed onto a single bench, their instruments in cases at their feet. They were wearing matching black half coats with gold brocade and white blouses with string ties. Bosch nodded to them as he joined his partner. Soto was holding some kind of iced-coffee drink with whipped cream at the top.

“Harry, these men were here the day Merced was shot,” Soto said excitedly.

“What do they remember?” he asked.

“They were sitting right here. They jumped up and went behind the statue when they heard the shot.”

Bosch looked behind the bench at the bronze statue of a woman, hands on her hips, wearing a shawl over a patterned dress. The statue was on a large concrete-and-wooden pedestal. The plaque on the base of the statue identified the woman as Lucha Reyes, the queen of the mariachis, who lived and performed in L.A. in the 1920s. She was from Guadalajara.

“Were they interviewed at the time?”

Soto spoke to the men in Spanish and then translated their answers to Bosch even though he understood a lot of what was said.

“Yes, they gave statements.”

Bosch nodded but he could not remember any of the statements from the murder book involving witnesses reporting that they had used the statue for cover. They had probably been left out as inconsequential.

“Ask them to show us where they hid by the statue.”

Soto asked the men, and one got up and went to the statue. He crouched down, put his hands on the pedestal, and acted like he was looking around the legs of the statue to see who was shooting. He was looking toward Boyle Avenue.

Bosch nodded again as he tried to see it the way it was that day.

“What made them think the shot came from over there?” he asked, pointing.

Soto translated and the man shrugged at first, and then one of the men still on the bench answered in a cadence too fast for Bosch to understand.

“He said he heard the shot and ran for cover. The other two men followed but weren’t sure they had heard anything. They just saw everybody running.”

“What did he see?”

Two men shook their heads and the third said, “Nada.”

“Did they know Merced?”

Again Soto translated and listened.

“Not really,” she finally told Bosch. “They knew him from the plaza, waiting for jobs.”

Bosch stepped away and walked toward the escalators that led down to the underground Metro station. The glass structure that served as its roof had a distinct Aztec motif and was designed as a giant eagle’s wing sheltering the entrance. The feathers of the wing were multicolored glass panels that threw the sun across the plaza in blends of color.

There was a wide tiled staircase between the up and down escalators. Bosch turned at the top of the stairs and looked back across the plaza. He then scanned to the left across 1st Street at the music store, where the camera had captured the Merced shooting. Bosch moved a small step to his right and figured that he was very close to where the picnic table that Merced had sat on had been located. He knew this assumption had no forensic validity. A ballistics team would deal with that later. But for now Bosch knew he was near the spot where Merced was sitting when he caught the bullet.

He looked back toward Boyle Avenue, in the direction the bullet had come from. Since Bosch had now discounted the idea that the bullet had been fired from a passing car or even from ground level, his eyes focused across the street on the structure that occupied the corner across from the plaza. In earlier years Bosch had known the Boyle Hotel well. Unofficially but better known as Hotel Mariachi, the three-story stone building of Queen Anne design was more than a hundred years old and one of the oldest standing structures in all of Los Angeles. But it had fallen into disrepair over the decades until it was little more than a cockroach-infested flophouse for traveling mariachis and transients. More than once Bosch had gone into Hotel Mariachi with a mug shot in hand, looking for a suspect he had traced from a crime scene.

But all was different now. The Boyle Hotel had gotten a multimillion-dollar makeover in concurrence with the Metro station project at Mariachi Plaza. It was no longer even a hotel. It was a mixed-use complex offering affordable apartments and commercial spaces. Its redbrick facade and signature rooftop cupola were preserved in the renovation process, but even at so-called affordable rates, the rents were too high for most of the mariachis who passed through East L.A. They had to rent elsewhere now.

Soto came over to Bosch and followed the line of his stare.

“You think the shot came from there?” she asked.

“Could have,” Bosch said. “Let’s go check it out.”

They walked back across the plaza, Bosch seeing that more and more musicians were starting to crowd around the benches and tables. It was almost five and time to look for and hope for work. Bosch noticed a small shop behind one gathering of musicians. Libros Schmibros. The sign on the door said it was a bookstore and lending library. He pointed at it without breaking stride.

“Before this was all Latino, it was Jewish,” he said. “In the twenties and thirties. By the fifties everybody was moving out to Fairfax.”

“White flight,” Soto said.

“Sort of. I think one of my grandparents lived here. Something about this place I remember. The old Hollenbeck station, coming here with my mother in the fifties…”

There was some kind of hazy, vaguely uncomfortable memory Bosch couldn’t get at. For the first eleven years of his life he lived with his mother, and at times they were as transient as the denizens of the old Hotel Mariachi. There were too many places to remember and it was all fifty years ago. He tried to change the subject.

“Where’d you grow up, Lucy?”

“All over. My mother’s side was from Orange County down by El Toro and my father’s family was from up here. His parents got pushed out of Chavez Ravine in the forties. They ended up in Westlake and I was born there. But I mostly grew up in the Valley. Pacoima.”

Bosch nodded.

“I guess that means you’re not a Dodgers fan, then,” he said.

“Never gone to a single game and never will,” she said. “My father would kill me if he ever heard I went.”

It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city’s history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

For decades Chavez Ravine was a poor enclave of Mexican immigrants who were crowded in shacks packed among the hills and tried to make their way in a place where they were needed but not necessarily wanted. The end of World War II brought new prosperity to the city and federal money to provide housing for the poor. The plan was to move everyone out of Chavez Ravine, steamroll it, and then rebuild it, creating an orchard of low-income housing towers to which the former inhabitants of the little valley would be invited to return. The development would even be given a name that reflected the grand American dream of reaching for the brass ring: Elysian Park Heights.

Some left the ravine willingly and some had to be pushed out. Houses, churches, and schools were razed. But no towers were ever built. By then the world had changed. Building towers for the poor was labeled socialism. The new mayor called it un-American spending. Instead, the city of the future decided it needed a professional sports team to secure its image and standing as more than a movie colony and hazy outpost on the western edge of the country. The Brooklyn Dodgers came west and a gleaming baseball stadium was built where those towers for the poor were supposed to be. The residents of Chavez Ravine were permanently scattered, their heirs carrying a deep-seated grudge to this day, and Elysian Park Heights was a pretty name that never made it past the blueprints.

Bosch was silent until they crossed Boyle and came to the double doors of what once was Hotel Mariachi. The door was locked and there was a keypad next to it for contacting tenants and the management. Soto looked at Bosch.

“You want to go in?”

“Might as well.”

She pushed the button next to a sticker that said “Oficina.” The lock was buzzed open without any inquiry over the intercom as to who they were. Bosch looked up to see a camera mounted overhead in the corner of the door’s trim.

Soto opened the door and they entered a vestibule. There were a building directory and a map inside glass cases attached to the wall. Bosch looked at the map first and realized that the restoration project had also been a consolidation project. Three buildings had been joined into one complex. The front building—the original Boyle Hotel, also known on nineteenth-century plat maps as Cummings Block—was now repurposed as commercial space, and the two adjoining buildings were apartment buildings. Bosch moved on to the directory and saw a variety of small office listings, most of them for Attorney/Abogado.

Bosch saw a set of stairs to the right of the doorway and started up.

“The manager’s office is down here, Harry,” Soto said.

“I know,” he said. “We can stop by after looking around.”

On the second floor Bosch saw three separate glass-doored entrances to offices, two of which were for attorneys, the signs on both doors promising Se Habla Espa?ol. The third office—room 211—appeared to be unrented and empty.

Bosch stepped back and looked around the hallway. It was clean and bright, not what he remembered from previous visits to the building. He remembered tiny apartments and at the end of the hall a communal bathroom that smelled like a sewer. He was happy the building had been saved from such disrespect and disrepair.

Harry headed up the stairs to the next level and Soto trailed behind him. On the third floor, there were more offices, half of which appeared vacant. He tried a door marked “Roof” and it was unlocked. He took the next set of stairs up to the cupola and Soto followed him up.

The cupola had a 360-degree view, including an expansive reach across the bridge back to downtown. Bosch could see the concrete river and the train tracks that wrapped around downtown like a ribbon. Turning east he looked down on the plaza. He saw the members of one band putting their instruments into their minivan—they had gotten an evening gig.

“Do you think the shot came from up here?” Soto asked.

Bosch shook his head.

“I doubt it. Too open. And the angle is probably too steep.”

He raised his arms as if sighting down the barrel of a rifle. He pointed the imaginary gun at the top of the Metro stairs. He nodded to himself. It was too steep for a bullet to go through Merced’s instrument and torso at the apparent angle.

“I also think this is restored up here. I don’t think there was anything up here ten years ago.”

Bosch noticed a man sitting by himself on a bench in the plaza. He was looking up at Bosch. The door at the bottom of the stairs to the cupola opened and a woman quickly came up to them, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. Soto moved toward her, pulling her badge to show her they were police. The woman spoke too fast for Bosch to understand, but he didn’t really need to. He knew that she was upset that they were on the roof.

Eventually Soto translated.

“This is Mrs. Blanca. She said we can’t be up here and we should have gone to the management office first. I told her we apologize.”

“Ask if she worked here before the renovation.”

Blanca shook her head and said no before the question was translated.

“You speak English?” Bosch asked.

“A little bit, yes,” Blanca said.

“Well, you answer any way you would like. This building—it’s protected, right? Historical Society?”

“Yes, it has landmark status. First built in 1889.”

“What happened to the hotel records when they came in to renovate?”

The woman looked confused and Soto translated the question and the answer.

“She said all of the old hotel books and the front desk were saved by the Historical Society. They’re in city storage now but they want to make a display here.”

Bosch nodded. He had seen nothing in the investigative logs kept by Rodriguez and Rojas about knocking on doors or interviewing anyone in Hotel Mariachi about what they had seen or heard during the shooting in the plaza.

He thought that was a mistake.