Twenty-Five
ON SUNDAY MORNING BOSCH CALLED THE NUMber Ramos had given him from a pay phone at a restaurant called Casa de Mandarin in downtown Mexicali. He gave his name and number, hung up and lit a cigarette. Two minutes later the phone rang and it was Ramos.
"Qué pasa, amigo?"
"Nothing. I want to look at the mugs you got, remember?"
"Right. Right. Tell you what. I'll pick you up on my way in. Give me a half hour."
"I checked out."
"Leaving, are you?"
"No, I just checked out. I usually do that when somebody tries to kill me."
"What?"
"Somebody with a rifle, Ramos. I'll tell you about it. Anyway, I'm in the wind at the moment. You want to pick me up, I'm at the Mandarin in downtown."
"Half hour. I want to hear about this."
They hung up and Bosch went back to his table, where Aguila was still finishing breakfast. They had both ordered scrambled eggs with salsa and chopped cilantro, fried dumplings on the side. The food was very good and Bosch had eaten quickly. He always did after a sleepless night.
The night before, after he drove laughing from EnviroBreed, they had met at Aguila's small house near the airport and the Mexican detective reported on his findings at the hotel. The desk clerk could offer little description of the man who rented 504 other than to say he had three tears tattooed on his cheek below the left eye.
Aguila had not asked where Bosch had been, seeming to know that an answer would not be given. Instead, he offered Harry the couch in his sparsely furnished house. Harry accepted but didn't sleep. He just spent the night watching the window and thinking about things until bluish gray light pushed through the thin white curtains.
Much of the time Lucius Porter had been in his thoughts. He envisioned the detective's body on the cold steel table, naked and waxy, Teresa Corazón opening him up with the shears. He thought of the pinprick-sized blood hemorrhages she would find in the corneas of his eyes, the confirmation of strangulation. And he thought of the times he had been in the suite with Porter, watching others be cut up and the gutters on the table filling with their debris. Now it was Lucius on the table, a piece of wood under his neck, propping his head back into position for the bone saw. Just before dawn Harry's thoughts became confused with fatigue and in his mind he suddenly saw it was himself on the steel table, Teresa nearby, readying her equipment for the cut.
He had sat up then and reached for his cigarettes. And he made a vow to himself that it would never be himself on that table. Not that way.
"Drug enforcement?" Aguila asked as he pushed his plate way.
"Huh?"
Aguila nodded to the pager on his belt. He had just noticed it.
"Yeah. They wanted me to wear it."
Bosch believed he had to trust this man and that he had earned that trust. He didn't care what Ramos had said. Or Corvo. All his life Bosch had lived and worked in society's institutions. But he hoped he had escaped institutional thinking, that he made his own decisions. He would tell Aguila what was happening when the time was right.
"I'm going over there this morning, look at some mugs and stuff. Let's get together later."
Aguila agreed and said he would go to the Justice Plaza to complete paperwork on the confirmation of Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa's death. Bosch wanted to tell him about the shovel with the new handle he had seen in EnviroBreed but thought better of it. He planned to tell only one person about the break-in.
Bosch drank coffee and Aguila drank tea for a while without speaking. Bosch finally asked, "Have you ever seen Zorrillo? In person?"
"At a distance, yes."
"Where was that? The bullfights?"
"Yes, at the Plaza de los Toros. El Papa often attends to see his bulls. But he has a box in the shade reserved each week for him. I have afforded only seats on the sun side of the arena. This is the reason for the distance from which I have viewed him."
"He pulls for the bulls, huh?"
"Excuse me?"
"He goes to see his bulls win? Not the fighters?"
"No. He goes to see that his bulls die honorably."
Bosch wasn't sure what that meant but let it go.
"I want to go today. Can we get in? I want to sit in a box near the pope's."
"I don't know. These are expensive. Sometimes they cannot sell them. Even so, they keep them locked . . ."
"How much?"
"You would need at least two hundred dollars American, I'm afraid. It is very expensive."
Bosch took out his wallet and counted out $210. He left a ten on the table for the breakfast and pushed the rest across the faded green tablecloth to Aguila. It occurred to him it was more money than Aguila made in a six-day week on the job. He wished he had not been so quick to make a decision that would have taken Aguila hours of careful consideration.
"Get us a box near the pope."
"You must understand, there will be many men with him. He will be—"
"I just want a look at him, is all. Just get us the box."
They left the restaurant then and Aguila said he would walk to the Justice Plaza, a couple blocks away. After he left, Harry stood in front of the restaurant waiting for Ramos. He looked at his watch and saw it was eight o'clock. He was supposed to be in Irving's office at Parker Center. He wondered if the assistant chief had initiated disciplinary action against him yet. Bosch would probably be put on a desk as soon as he got back into town.
Unless . . . unless he brought back the whole package in his back pocket. That was the only way he would have any leverage with Irving. He knew he had to come out of Mexico with everything tied together.
It dawned on him that it was stupid to be standing like a target on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. He stepped back inside and watched for Ramos through the front door. The waitress approached him and bowed effusively several times and walked away. It must've been the three-dollar tip, he thought.
It took Ramos nearly an hour to get there. Bosch decided he didn't want to be without a car so he told the agent he would follow him. They drove north on Lopez Mateos. At the circle around the statue of Juarez they went east, into a neighborhood of unmarked warehouses. They went down an alley and parked behind a building that had been tagged dozens of times with graffiti. Ramos looked furtively around after he got out of the beat-up Chevy Camaro with Mexican plates he was driving.
"Welcome to our humble federal office," he said.
Inside, it was Sunday morning quiet. No one else was there. Ramos put on the overhead lights and Bosch saw several rows of desks and file cabinets. Toward the back were two weapons-storage lockers and a two-ton Cincinnati safe for storing evidence.
"Okay, let me see what we got while you tell me about last night. You are sure somebody tried to do you, right?"
"Only way to be surer was if I got hit."
The Band-Aid Bosch had used on his neck was covered by his collar. There was another on his right palm, which also was not very noticeable.
Bosch told Ramos about the hotel shooting, leaving out no detail, including that he had recovered a shell from room 504.
"What about the slug? Recoverable?"
"I assume it's still in the headboard. I didn't hang around long enough to check."
"No, I bet you went running to warn your pal, the Mexican. Bosch, I am telling you to wise up. He may be a good guy but you don't know him. He mighta been the one that set the whole thing up."
"Actually, Ramos, I did warn him. But then I left and did what you wanted me to do."
"What're you talking about?"
"EnviroBreed. I went in last night."
"What? Are you crazy, Bosch? I didn't tell you to—"
"C'mon, man, don't f*ck with me. You told me all that shit last night so I would know what was needed to get the search okayed. Don't bullshit me. We're alone here. I know that's what you wanted and I got it. Put me down as a CI."
Ramos was pacing in front of the file cabinets. He was making a good show of it.
"Look, Bosch, I have to clear any confidential informant I use with my supe. So that's not going to fly. I can't—"
"Make it fly."
"Bosch, I—"
"Do you want to know what I found there or should we just drop it?"
That quieted the DEA agent for a few moments.
"Do you have your ninjas, the—what did you call them, the *s, in town yet?"
"CLETs, Bosch. And, yeah, they came in last night."
"Good. You're going to have to get going. I was seen."
Bosch watched the agent's face grow dark. He shook his head and dropped down into a chair.
"F*ck! How do you know?"
"There was a camera. I didn't see it until it was too late. I got out of there but some people came looking. I wasn't identifiable. I was wearing a mask. But, still, they know somebody was inside."
"Okay, Bosch, you aren't leaving me many options. What did you see?"
There it was. Ramos was acknowledging the illegal search. He was sanctioning it. Bosch would not have it come back on him now. He told the agent about the trapdoor hidden beneath the stack of bug trays in the radiation room.
"You didn't open it?"
"Didn't have time. But I wouldn't have done it anyway. I worked tunnels in Vietnam. Every trapdoor was just that, a trap. The people that came after I got out of there came by car, not through the tunnel. That tells you right there that there might be a rig in the tunnel."
He then told Ramos that his application for a search warrant or approval or whatever they called them in Mexico should include requests to seize all tools and debris from trash cans.
"Why?"
"Because the stuff you will find will help me make one of the murder cases I came down here for. There is also evidence of a conspiracy to murder a law enforcement officer—me."
Ramos nodded and didn't ask for further explanation. He wasn't interested. He got up and went to a file cabinet and pulled out two large black binders.
Bosch sat down at an empty desk and Ramos put the binders down in front of him.
"These are KOs—known operatives—associated with Humberto Zorrillo. We have some bio info on some of them. Others, it's just surveillance stuff. We might not even have a name."
Bosch opened the first binder and looked at the picture on top. It was a fuzzy eight-by-ten blow-up of a surveillance shot. Ramos said it was Zorrillo and Bosch had guessed as much. Dark hair, beard, intense stare through dark eyes. Bosch had seen the face before. Younger, no beard, a smile instead of the long, empty gaze. It was the grown-up face of the boy who had been in the pictures with Calexico Moore.
"What do you know about him?" Bosch asked Ramos. "You know anything about his family?"
"None that we know of. Not that we looked real hard. We don't give a shit where he came from, just what he's doing now and where he's going."
Bosch turned the plastic page and began looking at the mugs and surveillance shots. Ramos went back to his desk, rolled a piece of paper into a typewriter and began typing.
"I'm working up a CI statement here. I'll get it by somehow."
About two-thirds through the first book Bosch found the man with three tears. There were several photos of him—mugs and surveillance—from all angles and over several years. Bosch saw his face change as the tears were added from a smiling wiseass to a hardened con. The brief biographical data said his name was Osvaldo Arpis Rafaelillo and that he was born in 1952. They said his three stays in the penitenciaro were for murder as a juvenile, murder as an adult and drug possession. He had spent half his life in prisons. The data described him as a lifelong associate of Zorrillo's.
"Here, I got him," Bosch said.
Ramos came over. He recognized the man also.
"You're saying he was up in L.A. whacking out cops?"
"Yeah. At least one. I think he might have done the job on the first one, too. I think he also took down a courier for the competition. A Hawaiian named Jimmy Kapps. He and one of the cops were strangled the same way."
"Mexican necktie, right?"
"Right."
"And the laborer? The one you think got it at the bug house?"
"He could've done them all. I don't know."
"This guy goes way back. Arpis. Yeah, he just got out of the penta a year or so ago. He's a stone-cold killer, Bosch. One of the pope's main men. An enforcer. In fact, people 'round here call him 'Alvin Karpis,' you know, after that killer with the machinegun in the thirties? The Ma Barker gang? Arpis was put away for a couple hits but they say that doesn't do him service. He's really down for more than you can count."
Bosch stared at the photos and said, "That's all you got on him? This stuff here?"
"There's more around someplace but that's all you have to know. Most of it is just he said/she said informant stuff. The main story about Al Karpis is that when Zorrillo first made his move to the top, this guy was a one-man front line doing the heavy stuff. Every time Zorrillo had a piece of work to do, he'd turn to his buddy Arpis from the barrio. He'd get the job done. And like I said, they only bagged him a couple times. He probably paid his way out of the rest."
Bosch began writing some of the information from the bio in a notebook. Ramos kept talking.
"Those two, they came from a barrio south of here. Some—"
"Saints and Sinners."
"Yeah, Saints and Sinners. Some of the local cops, the ones I trust about as far as I can throw 'em, said Arpis had a real taste for killing. In the barrio they had a saying. Quien eres? Means who are you? It was a challenge. It meant what side are you on, you know? Are you with us or against us? Saint or Sinner? And when Zorrillo rose to power, he had Arpis taking out the people that were against them. The locals said that after they whacked somebody, they'd spread the word around the barrio. El descubrio quien era. Means—"
"He found out who he was."
"Right. It was good PR, made the natives fall in behind him. Supposedly they really got into it. Got to the point they were leaving messages with the body. You know? They'd kill a guy and write out 'He found out who he was,' or whatever and leave it pinned to his shirt."
Bosch said nothing and wrote nothing. Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place.
"Sometimes you still see it on graffiti around the barrio," Ramos said. "It's part of the folklore surrounding Zorrillo. It's part of what makes him the pope."
Harry finally closed his notebook and stood up.
"I got what I need."
"All right. Be careful out there, Bosch. Nothing that says they won't try again, especially if Arpis is on the job. You just want to hang out here today? It's safe."
"Nah, I'll be okay." He nodded and took a step toward the door. He touched the pager on his belt. "I will get a call?"
"Yeah, you're in. Corvo's coming down for the show so I gotta make sure you're there. Where you gonna be later today?"
"I don't know. I think I'm going to make like a tourist. Go to the historical society, take in a bullfight."
"Just be cool. You'll get a call."
"I better."
He walked out to the Caprice thinking only about the note that had been found in Cal Moore's back pocket.
I found out who I was.