Bosch didn’t know what to say. At the moment he was flush because of the lawsuit settlement, but he had put most of the money into long-term investment accounts designed to carry him comfortably into old age with a solid stake left over for his daughter. But at the moment she had two-plus years of college and then graduate school tuition ahead of her. She had some generous scholarships but he was still on the hook for the rest of it in the short term. There was no doubt in his mind that ten thousand dollars could be put to good use.
“When and where is this appointment going to be?” he finally said.
“Tomorrow morning at nine at Mr. Vance’s home in Pasadena,” Creighton said. “The address is on the check receipt. You might want to dress a little nicer than that.”
Bosch ignored the sartorial jab. From an inside jacket pocket he took out his eyeglasses. He put them on as he reached across the desk and took the check. It was made out to his full name, Hieronymus Bosch.
There was a perforated line running across the bottom of the check. Below it were the address and appointment time as well as the admonition “Don’t bring a firearm.” Bosch folded the check along the perforation and looked at Creighton as he put it into his jacket.
“I’m going to go to the bank from here,” he said. “I’ll deposit this, and if there is no problem, I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Creighton smirked.
“There will not be a problem.”
Bosch nodded.
“I guess that’s it, then,” he said.
He stood up to go.
“There is one more thing, Bosch,” Creighton said.
Bosch noted that he had dropped from first name to last name status with Creighton inside of ten minutes.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I have no idea what the old man is going to ask you, but I’m very protective of him,” Creighton said. “He is more than a client and I don’t want to see him taken for a ride at this point in his life. Whatever the task is that he wants you to perform, I need to be in the loop.”
“A ride? Unless I missed something, you called me, Creighton. If anybody’s being taken for a ride, it will be me. It doesn’t matter how much he’s paying me.”
“I can assure you that’s not the case. The only ride is the ride out to Pasadena for which you just received ten thousand dollars.”
Bosch nodded.
“Good,” he said. “I’m going to hold you to that. I’ll see the old man tomorrow and find out what this is about. But if he becomes my client, then that business, whatever it is, will be between him and me. There won’t be any loop that includes you unless Vance tells me there is. That’s how I work. No matter who the client is.”
Bosch turned toward the door. When he got there he looked back at Creighton.
“Thanks for the view.”
He left and closed the door behind him.
On the way out he stopped at the receptionist’s desk and got his parking receipt validated. He wanted to be sure Creighton ate the twenty bucks for that, as well as the car wash he agreed to when he valeted the car.
2
The Vance estate was on San Rafael near the Annandale Golf Club. It was a neighborhood of old money. Homes and estates that had been passed down through generations and guarded behind stone walls and black iron fences. It was a far cry from the Hollywood Hills, where the new money went and the rich left their trash cans out on the street all week. There were no For Sale signs here. You had to know somebody, maybe even share their blood, to buy in.
Bosch parked against the curb about a hundred yards from the gate that guarded the entrance to the Vance estate. Atop it were spikes ornately disguised as flowers. For a few moments he studied the curve of the driveway beyond the gate as it wound and rose into the cleft of two rolling green hills and then disappeared. There was no sign of any structure, not even a garage. All of that would be well back from the street, buffered by geography, iron, and security. But Bosch knew that Whitney Vance, eighty-five years old, was up there somewhere beyond those money-colored hills, waiting for him with something on his mind. Something that required a man from the other side of the spiked gate.
Bosch was twenty minutes early for the appointment and decided to use the time to review several stories he had found on the Internet and downloaded to his laptop that morning.
The general contours of Whitney Vance’s life were known to Bosch as they were most likely known to most Californians. But he still found the details fascinating and even admirable in that Vance was the rare recipient of a rich inheritance who had turned it into something even bigger. He was the fourth-generation Pasadena scion of a mining family that extended all the way back to the California gold rush. Prospecting was what drew Vance’s great-grandfather west but not what the family fortune was founded on. Frustrated by the hunt for gold, the great-grandfather established the state’s first strip-mining operation, extracting multi-tons of iron ore out of the earth in San Bernardino County. Vance’s grandfather followed up with a second strip mine farther south, in Imperial County, and his father parlayed that success into a steel mill and fabrication plant that helped support the dawning aviation industry. At the time, the face of that industry belonged to Howard Hughes, and he counted Nelson Vance as first a contractor and then a partner in many different aviation endeavors. Hughes would become godfather to Nelson Vance’s only child.
Whitney Vance was born in 1931 and as a young man apparently set out to blaze a unique path for himself. He initially went off to the University of Southern California to study filmmaking but he eventually dropped out and came back to the family fold, transferring to the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, the school “Uncle Howard” had attended. It was Hughes who urged young Whitney to study aeronautical engineering at Caltech.
As with the elders of his family, when it was his turn Vance pushed the family business in new and increasingly successful directions, always with a connection to the family’s original product: steel. He won numerous government contracts to manufacture aircraft parts and founded Advance Engineering, which held the patents on many of them. Couplings that were used for the safe fueling of aircraft were perfected in the family steel mill and were still used today at every airport in the world. Ferrite extracted from the iron ore at Vance mining operations was used in the earliest efforts to build aircraft that avoided radar detection. These processes were meticulously patented and protected by Vance and they guaranteed his company’s participation in the decades-long development of stealth technologies. Vance and his company were part of the so-called military-industrial complex, and the Vietnam War saw their value grow exponentially. Every mission in or out of that country over the entire length of the war involved equipment from Advance Engineering. Bosch remembered seeing the company logo—an A with an arrow through the middle of it—imprinted on the steel walls of every helicopter he had ever flown on in Vietnam.
Bosch was startled by a sharp rap on the window beside him. He looked up to see a uniformed Pasadena patrol officer, and in the rearview he saw the black-and-white parked behind him. He had become so engrossed in his reading that he had not even heard the cop car come up on him.
He had to turn on the Cherokee’s engine to lower the window. Bosch knew what this was about. A twenty-two-year-old vehicle in need of paint parked outside the estate of a family that helped build the state of California constituted a suspicious activity. It didn’t matter that the car was freshly cleaned or that he was wearing a crisp suit and tie rescued from a plastic storage bag. It had taken less than fifteen minutes for the police to respond to his intrusion into the neighborhood.
“I know how this looks, Officer,” he began. “But I have an appointment across the street in about five minutes and I was just—”
“That’s wonderful,” the cop said. “Do you mind stepping out of the car?”
Bosch looked at him for a moment. He saw the nameplate above his breast pocket said Cooper.
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.
“No, sir, I’m not,” Cooper said. “Please step out of the car.”
Bosch took a deep breath, opened the door, and did as he was told. He raised his hands to shoulder height and said, “I’m a police officer.”
Cooper immediately tensed, as Bosch knew he would.