“Bring her in, Harry. I’d like to meet her.”
Bosch didn’t answer. His attention was drawn to his screen, where he had just received an e-mail from Valdez approving his case summary and charging affidavit. He now had to finish the evidence report and the search warrant and he would be good to go.
36
On Wednesday morning Bosch was at the District Attorney’s Office as soon as the doors opened. Because it was a high profile case he had arranged to come in for an appointment to file charges against Dockweiler. Rather than going to an intake prosecutor who would file the case and then pass it on, never to see it again, the Dockweiler prosecution was assigned from the start to a veteran trial attorney named Dante Corvalis. Bosch had never worked with Corvalis previously but knew of him by reputation— his nickname in the courthouse was “The Undefeated” because he had never lost a case.
The process of filing went smoothly, with Corvalis only rejecting Bosch’s request for charges relating to the property crimes Dockweiler had committed. The prosecutor explained that it would already be a complicated case with the testimony of multiple victims and DNA analysis to explain to the jury. There was no need to spend prep time or court time on Dockweiler’s theft of tools, concrete, and a manhole cover from the Department of Public Works. That, simply, was small-time stuff that might create jury backlash.
“It’s the effect of TV,” Corvalis said. “Every trial you see on the box lasts an hour. Juries on real cases get impatient. So you can’t overprosecute a case. And the bottom line is, we don’t need it. We’ve got enough here to put him away forever. And we will. So let’s forget about the manhole cover—except for when you testify about finding Bella. It will be a nice detail to draw out in your testimony.”
Bosch couldn’t argue the point. He was happy just to have one of the office’s major players on the case from the start. Bosch and Corvalis agreed to set a schedule of meeting every Tuesday to discuss preparations for the case.
Bosch was out of the Foltz Building by ten. Rather than go to his car, he walked down Temple and then crossed over the 101 freeway at Main Street. He walked through Paseo de la Plaza Park and then down Olvera Street through the Mexican bazaar, assuring himself that he could not be followed by car.
At the end of the long passage through the souvenir stalls he turned and looked back to see if he had a tail on foot. Satisfied after several minutes that he was alone, he continued antisurveillance measures by crossing Alameda and entering Union Station. He passed through the giant waiting room and then took a circuitous path to the roof, where he pulled a TAP card out of his wallet and got on the Metro’s Gold Line.
He studied every person on the train as it left Union Station and headed into Little Tokyo. At the first stop, he exited the train but then paused next to the sliding door. He checked every other commuter who got off, and none seemed suspicious. He stepped back onto the train to see if any of them did the same, waited until the bell warned that the doors were closing, and jumped off at the last moment.
No one followed.
He walked two blocks down Alameda and then cut in toward the river. The address he had for Vibiana Veracruz put her studio on Hewitt near Traction in the heart of the Arts District. Circling back to Hewitt, he repeatedly stopped and checked his surroundings. Along the way he passed several old commercial structures that were restored or in the process of being restored for use as loft homes.
The Arts District was more than a neighborhood. It was a movement. Beginning almost forty years earlier, artists of all disciplines started to take over millions of square feet of empty space in the abandoned factories and fruit-shipping warehouses that had thrived in the area before World War II. Paying pennies per foot for massive live-work spaces, some of the city’s most notable artists thrived here. It seemed appropriate that the movement was anchored in an area where in the early 1900s artists had vied to design the colorful images that graced the crates and boxes of fruit shipped across the country, popularizing a recognizable California style that said life was good on the West Coast. It was one of the small things that helped inspire the wave of westward movement that now made California the most populous state in the union.
The Arts District now faced many of the issues that came with success, namely the swift spread of gentrification. In the past decade the area started drawing big developers interested in big profits. The cost of a square foot of space was no longer measured in pennies but in dollars. Many of the new tenants were upscale professionals who worked in downtown or Hollywood and wouldn’t know the difference between a stippling and a stencil brush. Many of the restaurants went upscale and had celebrity chefs and valet parking that cost more than a whole meal in the old corner cafés where artists once congregated. The idea of the district being a haven for the starving artist was becoming more and more unfounded.
As a young patrol officer in the early ’70s Bosch had been assigned to Newton Division, which included what was then called the Warehouse District. He remembered the area as a barren wasteland of empty buildings, homeless encampments, and street crime. He had transferred to Hollywood Division before the arts renaissance had begun. Now as he walked through, he marveled at the changes. There was a difference between a mural and a piece of graffiti. Both were arguably works of art, but the murals in the Arts District were beautiful and showed care and vision similar to those he had seen a few days earlier down in Chicano Park.
He passed by The American, a building more than a hundred years old that originally served as a hotel for black entertainers during segregation and later was ground zero for both the arts movement and the burgeoning punk rock scene in the 1970s.
Vibiana Veracruz lived and worked across the street in a building that had once been a cardboard plant. It was where many of the waxed fruit boxes with labels that served as California’s calling cards were produced. It was four stories tall with brick cladding and steel-framed warehouse windows still intact. There was a brass plaque next to the entrance that stated its history and the year of its construction: 1908.
There was no security or lock on the entrance. Bosch entered a small tiled lobby and checked a board that listed artists and their loft numbers. Bosch found the name Veracruz next to 4-D. He also saw on a community bulletin board several notices about tenant and neighborhood meetings regarding issues like rent stabilization and protesting building-permit applications at city hall. There were sign-up lists and he saw the name Vib scrawled on all of these. There was also a flyer for a showing of a documentary film called Young Turks on Friday evening in loft 4-D. The flyer said the film was about the founding of the Arts District in the 1970s. “See this place before the greed!” the flyer trumpeted. It appeared to Bosch that Vibiana Veracruz had inherited some of the community activism that had charged her mother’s life.