The Black Ice

Nineteen
IT WAS AFTER ONE A.M. BY THE TIME BOSCH turned the Caprice onto Woodrow Wilson and began he long, winding ascent to his house. He saw the spotlights tracing eights on the low-lying clouds over Universal City. On the road he had to navigate his way around cars double-parked outside holiday parties and a discarded Christmas tree, a few strands of lonely tinsel still clinging to its branches, that had blown into his path. On the seat next to him were the lone Budweiser from Cal Moore's refrigerator and Lucius Porter's gun.
All his life he believed he was slumming toward something good. That there was meaning. In the youth shelter, the foster homes, the Army and Vietnam, and now the department, he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty. He had learned to fill that hollowness with isolation and work. Sometimes drink and the sound of the jazz saxophone. But never people. He never let anyone in all the way.
And now he thought he had seen Sylvia Moore's eyes. Her true eyes, and he had to wonder if she was the one who could fill him.
"I want to see you," he had said when they separated outside The Fountains.
"Yes" was all she said. She touched his cheek with her hand and got into her car.
Now Bosch thought about what that one word and the accompanying touch could mean. He was happy. And that was something new.
As he rounded the last curve, slowing for a car with its brights on to pass, he thought of the way she had looked at the picture frame for so long before saying she did not recognize it. Had she lied? What were the chances that Cal Moore would have bought such an expensive frame after moving into a dump like that? Not good, was the answer.
By the time he pulled the Caprice into the carport, he was full of confusing feelings. What had been in the picture? What difference did it make that she had held that back? If she did. Still sitting in the car, he opened the beer and drank it down quickly, some of it spilling onto his neck. He would sleep tonight, he knew.
Inside, he went to the kitchen, put Porter's gun in a cabinet and checked the phone machine. There were no messages. No call from Porter saying why he had run. No call from Pounds asking how it was going. No call from Irving saying he knew what Bosch was up to.
After two nights with little sleep, Bosch looked forward to his bed as he did on few other nights. It was most often this way, part of a routine he kept. Nights of fleeting rest or nightmares followed by a single night when exhaustion finally drove him down hard into a dark sleep.
As he gathered the covers and pillows about him, he noticed there was still the trace of Teresa Corazón's powdery perfume on them. He closed his eyes and thought about her for a moment. But soon her image was pushed out of his mind by Sylvia Moore's face. Not the photo from the bag or the night stand, but the real face. Weary but strong, her eyes focused on Bosch's own.
The dream was like others Harry had had. He was in the dark place. A cavernous blackness enveloped him and his breath echoed in the dark. He sensed, or rather, he knew in the way he had knowledge of place in all his dreams that the darkness ended ahead and he must go there. But this time he was not alone. That was what was different. He was with Sylvia, and they huddled in the black, their sweat stinging their eyes. Harry held her and she held him. And they did not speak.
They broke from each other's embrace and began to move through the darkness. There was dim light ahead and Harry headed that way. His left hand was extended in front of him, his Smith & Wesson in its grasp. His right hand was behind him, holding hers and leading her along. And as they came into the light Calexico Moore was waiting there with the shotgun. He was not hidden, but he stood partially silhouetted by the light that poured into the passage. His green eyes were in shadow. And he smiled. Then he raised the shotgun.
"Who f*cked up?" he said.
The roar was deafening in the blackness. Bosch saw Moore's hands fly loose from the shotgun and up away from his body like tethered birds trying to take flight. He back-stepped wildly into the darkness and was gone. Not fallen, but disappeared. Gone. Only the light at the end of the passage remained in his wake. In one hand Harry still gripped Sylvia's hand. In the other, the smoking gun.
He opened his eyes then.
Bosch sat up on the bed. He saw pale light leaking around the edges of the curtains on the windows facing east. The dream had seemed so short, but he realized because of the light he had slept until morning. He held his wrist up to the light and checked his watch. He had no alarm clock because he never needed one. It was six o'clock. He rubbed his face in his palms and tried to reconstruct the dream. This was unusual for him. A counselor at the sleep dysfunction lab at the VA had once told him to write down what he remembered from his dreams. It was an exercise, she said, to try to inform the conscious mind what the subconscious side was saying. For months he kept a notebook and pen by the bed and dutifully recorded his morning memories. But Bosch had found it did him no good. No matter how well he understood the source of his nightmares, he could not eliminate them from his sleep. He had dropped out of the sleep deprivation counseling program years ago.
Now, he could not recapture the dream. Sylvia's face disappeared in the mist. Harry realized he had been sweating heavily. He got up and pulled the bed sheets off and dumped them in a basket in the closet. He went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. He showered, shaved and dressed in blue jeans, a green corduroy shirt and a black sport coat. Driving clothes. He went back to the kitchen and filled his Thermos with black coffee.
The first thing he took out to the car was his gun. He removed the rug that lined the trunk and then lifted out the spare tire and the jack that were stowed beneath it. He placed the Smith & Wesson, which he had taken from his holster and wrapped in an oilcloth, in the wheel well and put the spare tire back on top of it. He put the rug back in place and laid the jack down along the rear of the trunk. Next he put his briefcase in and a duffel bag containing a few days' changes of clothes. It all looked passable, though he doubted anyone would even look.
He went back inside and got his other gun out of the hallway closet. It was a forty-four with grips and safety configured for a right-handed shooter. The cylinder also opened on the left side. Bosch couldn't use it because he was left-handed. But he had kept it for six years because it had been given to him as a gift by a man whose daughter had been raped and murdered. Bosch had winged the killer during a brief shootout during his capture near the Sepulveda Dam in Van Nuys. He lived and was now serving life without parole. But that hadn't been enough for the father. After the trial he gave Bosch the gun and Bosch accepted it because not to take it would have been to disavow the man's pain. His message to Harry was clear: next time do the job right. Shoot to kill. Harry took the gun. And he could have taken it to a gunsmith and had it reconfigured for left-hand use, but to do that would be to acknowledge the father had been right. Harry wasn't sure he was ready to do that.
The gun had sat on a shelf in the closet for six years. Now he took it down, checked its action to make sure it was still operable, and loaded it. He put it in his holster and was ready to go.
On his way out, he grabbed his Thermos in the kitchen and bent over the phone machine to record a new message.
"It's Bosch. I will be in Mexico for the weekend. If you want to leave a message, hang on. If it's important and you want to try to reach me, I'll be at the De Anza Hotel in Calexico."
It was still before seven as he headed down the hill. He took the Hollywood Freeway until it skirted around downtown, the office towers opaque behind the early morning mixture of fog and smog. He took the transition road to the San Bernardino Freeway and headed east, out of the city. It was 250 miles to the border town of Calexico and its sister city Mexicali, just on the other side of the fence. Harry would be there before noon. He poured himself a cup of coffee without spilling any and began to enjoy the drive.
The smog from L.A. didn't clear until Bosch was past the Yucaipa turnoff in Riverside County. After that the sky turned as blue as the oceans on the maps he had next to him on the seat. It was a windless day. As he passed the windmill farm near Palm Springs the blades of the hundreds of electric generators stood motionless in the morning desert mist. It was eerie, like a cemetery, and Harry's eyes didn't linger.
Bosch drove through the plush desert communities of Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage without stopping, passing streets named after golfing presidents and celebrities. As he passed Bob Hope Drive, Bosch recalled the time he saw the comedian in Vietnam. He had just come in from thirteen days of clearing Charlie's tunnels in the Cu Chi province and thought the evening of watching Hope was hilarious. Years later he had seen a clip of the same show on a television retrospective on the comedian. This time, the performance made him feel sad. After Rancho Mirage, he caught Route 86 and was heading directly south.
The open road always presented a quiet thrill to Bosch. The feeling of going someplace new coupled with the unknown. He believed he did some of his best thinking while driving the open road. He now reviewed his search of Moore's apartment and tried to look for hidden meanings or messages. The ragged furniture, the empty suitcase, the lonely skin mag, the empty frame. Moore left behind a puzzling presence. He thought of the bag of photos again. Sylvia had changed her mind and taken it. Bosch wished he had borrowed the photo of the two boys, and the one of the father and son.
Bosch had no photographs of his own father. He had told Sylvia that he hadn't known him, but that had been only partially true. He had grown up not knowing and not, at least outwardly, caring who he was. But when he returned from the war he came back with a sense of urgency to know about his origins. It led him to seek out his father after twenty years of not even knowing his name.
Harry had been raised in a series of youth shelters and foster homes after authorities took him from his mother's custody. In the dormitories at McClaren or San Fernando or the other halls, he was comforted by his mother's steady visits, except during the times she was in jail. She told him they couldn't send him to a foster home without her consent. She had a good lawyer, she said, trying to get him back.
On the day the housemother at McClaren told him the visits were over because his mother was dead, he took the news unlike most boys of eleven. Outwardly, he showed nothing. He nodded that he understood and then walked away. But that day during the swimming period, he dove to the bottom of the deep end and screamed so loud and long that he was sure the noise was breaking through the surface and would draw the attention of the lifeguard. After each breath on top, he would go back down. He screamed and cried until he was so exhausted he could only cling to the pool's ladder, its cold steel tubes the arms that comforted him. Somehow he wished he could have been there. That was all. He somehow wanted to have protected her.
He was termed ATA after that. Available to Adopt. He began to move through a procession of foster homes where he was made to feel as though he was on tryout. When expectations were not met, it was on to the next house and the next pair of judges. He was once sent back to McClaren because of his habit of eating with his mouth open. And once before he was sent to a home in the Valley, the Choosers, as they were called by the ATAs, took Harry and several other thirteen-year-olds out to the rec field to throw a baseball around. Harry was the one chosen. He soon realized it was not because he exhibited the sterling virtues of boyhood. It was because the man had been looking for a lefthander. His plan was to develop a pitcher and lefthanders were the premium. After two months of daily workouts, pitching lessons and oral education on pitching strategies, Harry ran away from the home. It was six weeks before the cops later picked him up on Hollywood Boulevard. He was sent back to McClaren to await the next set of Choosers. You always had to stand up straight and smile when the Choosers came through the dorm.
He began his search for his father at the county recorder's office. The 1950 birth records of Hieronymus Bosch at Queen of Angels Hospital listed his mother as Margerie Philips Lowe and his father's name as his own; Hieronymus Bosch. But Harry, of course, knew this was not the case. His mother had once told him he was the namesake of an artist whose work she admired. She said the painter's five-hundred-year-old paintings were apt portraits of present L.A., a nightmarish landscape of predators and victims. She told him she would tell him his true father's name when the time was right. She was found dead in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard before that time came.
Harry hired a lawyer to petition the presiding judge of the juvenile dependency court to allow him to examine his own custody records. The request was granted and Bosch spent several days in the county Hall of Records archive. The voluminous documents given to him chronicled the unsuccessful lengths his mother had gone to keep custody of him. Bosch found it spiritually reassuring, but nowhere in the files was the name of the father. Bosch was at a dead end but wrote down the name of the lawyer who had filed all the papers in his mother's quest. J. Michael Haller. In writing it down, Bosch realized he knew the name. Mickey Haller had been one of L.A.'s premier criminal defense attorneys. He had handled one of the Manson girls. In the late fifties he had won an acquittal for the so-called Highwayman, a highway patrol officer accused of raping seven women he had stopped for speeding on lonely stretches of the Golden State. What was J. Michael Haller doing on a child custody case?
On nothing more than a hunch, Bosch went to the Criminal Courts Building and ordered all of his mother's cases from archives. In sorting through them, he found that in addition to the custody battle Haller had represented Margerie P. Lowe on six loitering arrests between 1948 and 1961. That was well into Haller's time as a top trial lawyer.
In his gut, Harry knew then.
The receptionist in the five-name law office on the top floor of a Pershing Square tower told Bosch that Haller had retired recently because of a medical condition. The phone book didn't list his residence but the roll of registered voters did. Haller was a Democrat and he lived on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. Bosch would always remember the rosebushes that lined the walkway to his father's mansion. They were perfect roses.
The maid who answered the door said Mr. Haller was not seeing visitors. Bosch told the woman to tell Mr. Haller it was Margerie Lowe's son come to pay his respects. Ten minutes later he was led past members of the lawyer's family. All of them standing in the hallway with strange looks on their faces. The old man had told them to leave his room and send Bosch in alone. Standing at the bedside, Harry figured him for maybe ninety pounds now, and he didn't need to ask what was wrong because he could tell cancer was eating away at him from the inside out.
"I guess I know why you've come," he rasped.
"I just wanted to . . . I don't know."
He stood there in silence for quite a time, watching how it wore the man out just to keep his eyes open. There was a tube from a box on the bedside that ran under the covers. The box beeped every once in a while as it pumped painkilling morphine into the dying man's blood. The old man studied him silently.
"I don't want anything from you," Bosch finally said. "I don't know, I think I just wanted to let you know I made it by okay. I'm all right. In case you ever worried."
"You have been to the war?"
"Yes. I'm done with that."
"My son—my other son, he . . . I kept him away from that. . . . What will you do now?"
"I don't know."
After some more silence the old man seemed to nod. He said, "You are called Harry. Your mother told me that. She told me a lot about you. . . . But I could never. . . . Do you understand? Different times. And after it went by so long, I couldn't. . . . I couldn't reverse things."
Bosch just nodded. He hadn't come to cause the man any more pain. More silence passed and he heard the labored breathing.
"Harry Haller," the old man whispered then, a broken smile on the thin, peeling lips burned by chemotherapy. "That could have been you. Did you ever read Hesse?"
Bosch didn't understand but nodded again. There was a beep sound. He watched for a minute until the dosage seemed to take some effect. The old man's eyes closed and he sighed.
"I better get going," Harry said. "You take care."
He touched the man's frail, bluish hand. It gripped his fingers tightly, almost desperately, and then let go. As he stepped to the door, he heard the old man's rasp.
"I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"I said I did. I did worry about you."
There was a tear running down the side of the old man's face, into his white hair. Bosch nodded again and two weeks later he stood on a hill above the Good Shepherd section at Forest Lawn and watched them put the father he never knew in the ground. During the ceremony, he saw a grouping that he suspected was his half brother and three half sisters. The half brother, probably born a few years ahead of Bosch, was watching Harry during the ceremony. At the end, Bosch turned and walked away.
Near ten o'clock Bosch stopped at a roadside diner called El Oasis Verde and ate huevos rancheros. His table was at a window that looked out at the blue-white sheath called the Salton Sea and then farther east to the Chocolate Mountains. Bosch silently reveled in the beauty and the openness of the scene. When he was done, and the waitress had refilled his Thermos, he walked out into the dirt parking lot and leaned against the fender of the Caprice to breathe the cool, clean air and look again.
The half brother was now a top defense lawyer and Harry was a cop. There was a strange congruence to that that Bosch found acceptable. They had never spoken and probably never would.
He continued south as 86 ran along the flats between the Salton Sea and the Santa Rosa Mountains. It was agricultural land that steadily dropped below sea level. The Imperial Valley. Much of it was cut in huge squares by irrigation ditches and his drive was accompanied by the smell of fertilizer and fresh vegetables. Flatbed trucks, loaded with crates of lettuce or spinach or cilantro, occasionally pulled off the farm roads in front of him and slowed him down. But Harry didn't mind and waited patiently to pass.
Near a town called Vallecito, Bosch pulled to the side of the road to watch a squad of low-flying aircraft come screaming over a mountain that rose to the southwest. They crossed 86 and flew out over the Salton. Bosch knew nothing about identifying war aircraft in the modern era. These jets had evolved into faster and sleeker machines than those he remembered from Vietnam. But they had flown low enough for him to clearly see that beneath each craft's wings hung the hardware of war. He watched the three jets bank and come about in a tight triangle pattern and retrace their path back to the mountain. After they crossed above him, Harry looked down at his maps and found blocks marked off to the southwest as closed to the public. It was the U.S. Naval Gunnery Range at Superstition Mountain. The map said it was a live bombing area. Keep out.
Bosch felt a dull vibration rock the car slightly and then the following rumble. He looked up from the map and thought he could make out the plume of smoke beginning to rise from the base of Superstition. Then he felt and heard another bomb hit. Then another.
As the jets, the silvery skin of each reflecting a diamond of sunlight, passed overhead again to begin another run, Bosch pulled back onto the road behind a flatbed truck with two teenagers in the back. They were Mexican fieldworkers with weary eyes that seemed already knowledgeable about the long, hard life ahead of them. They were about the same age as the two boys on the picnic table in the photo that had been in the white bag. They stared at Bosch with indifference.
In a few moments it was clear to pass the slow-moving truck. Bosch heard other explosions from Superstition Mountain as he moved away. He went on to pass more farms and mom-and-pop restaurants. He passed a sugar mill where a line painted at the top of its huge silo marked sea level.
The summer after he had talked to his father Bosch had picked up the books by Hesse. He was curious about what the old man had meant. He found it in the second book he read. Harry Haller was a character in it. A disillusioned loner, a man of no real identity, Harry Haller was the steppenwolf.
That August Bosch joined the cops.
He believed he felt the land rising. The farmland gave way to brown brush and there were dust devils rising in the open land. His ears popped as he ascended. And he knew the border was nearing long before he passed the green sign that told him Calexico was twenty miles away.