Angels Flight

Chapter 16

THE interviews with the secretary and the clerk were so uneventful that Bosch wished the detectives could have spent the time in their beds sleeping. Tyla Quimby, the secretary, had been out with the flu and holed up in her home in the Crenshaw district for the last week. She had no knowledge of Howard Elias’s activities during the days before his death. Aside from exposing Bosch, Edgar and Rider to the flu, she gave the detectives very little. She explained that Elias kept his case strategies and other aspects of his work largely to himself. Her role was primarily opening mail, answering phones, handling walk-in visitors and clients, and paying the office expenses through a small operating account Elias put money into each month. As far as the phone traffic went, she said Elias had a direct private phone line in his office that over the years had become widely known among friends and associates as well as some reporters and even enemies. So she was of little use in helping them determine whether Elias had been specifically threatened in the weeks before his murder. The investigators thanked her and left her home, hoping they would not fall victim to her illness.

The clerk, John Babineux, was an equal disappointment. He was able to confirm that it had been he and Michael Harris who had worked until late Friday with Elias. But Babineux said that Harris and Elias had been behind closed doors most of the evening. Babineux, as it turned out, had graduated from the USC law school three months before and was studying for the bar exam at night while clerking for Elias by day. He did his studying in Elias’s offices at night because it allowed him access to the law books he needed for memorizing case law and penal codes. It obviously was a better study environment than the crowded apartment near USC he shared with two other law students. Shortly before eleven he had walked out with Elias and Harris because he had felt he had done enough studying for one night. He said he and Harris walked to their cars in a nearby pay lot while Elias walked up Third Street alone toward Hill Street and Angels Flight.

Like Quimby, Babineux described Elias as secretive about his cases and preparation for trial. The clerk said that his responsibility in the last week of work had largely been preparing the transcripts of the many pretrial depositions taken in the Black Warrior case. His job was to download the transcripts and related material onto a laptop computer which would then be taken to court and accessed by Elias when he needed specific references to evidence and testimony during trial.

Babineux could give the detectives no information about specific threats to Elias – at least none that the attorney was taking seriously. He described Elias as extremely upbeat in recent days. He said Elias wholeheartedly believed that he was going to win the Black Warrior case.

“He said it was a slam dunk,” Babineux told the three detectives.

As Bosch drove up Woodrow Wilson Drive toward home he thought about the two interviews and wondered why Elias had been so secretive about the case he was bringing to trial. This didn’t fit with his past history of press leaks and sometimes full-scale press conferences as a primary strategy. Elias was being uncharacteristically quiet, yet he was confident in his case, enough to call it a slam dunk.

Bosch hoped the explanation of this would be revealed when he got the Black Warrior file from Entrenkin, hopefully in a few hours. He decided to put thoughts of it aside until then.

Immediately Eleanor came to mind. He thought about the closet in the bedroom. He purposely hadn’t checked it before, not sure how he would react if he found she had taken her clothes. He decided he needed to do that now, to get it over with. It would be a good time to do it. He was too tired now to do anything other than crash down onto his bed, regardless of what he found.

But as he came around the last curve he saw Eleanor’s car, the beat-up Taurus, parked at the curb in front of their house. She had left the carport open for him. He felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders begin to relax. The tightness in his chest began to ease. She was home.

The house was quiet when he entered. He put his briefcase down on one of the dining room chairs and started stripping off his tie as he moved into the living room. He then moved down the short hallway and looked into the bedroom. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark except for the outline of exterior light around the window. He saw Eleanor’s still form under the covers on the bed. Her brown hair was splayed over the pillow.

He moved into the bedroom and quietly took off his clothes, draping them over a chair. He then went back down the hallway to the guest bathroom to take a shower without waking her up. Ten minutes later he slid into the bed next to her. He was on his back, looking through the darkness to the ceiling. He listened to her breathing. He didn’t hear the slow, measured breaths of her sleeping that he was used to.

“You awake?” he whispered.

“Mmm-hmm.”

He waited a long moment.

“Where were you, Eleanor?”

“Hollywood Park.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to accuse her of lying. Maybe Jardine, the security guy, had simply missed her during his survey of the video screens. He stared at the ceiling, wondering what to say next.

“I know that you called there looking for me,” Eleanor said. “I knew Tom Jardine in Las Vegas. He used to work at the Flamingo. He lied when you called. He came to me first.”

Bosch closed his eyes and remained silent.

“I’m sorry, Harry, I just didn’t want to have to deal with you then.”

“Deal with me?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Not really, Eleanor. How come you didn’t answer my message when you got home?”

“What message?”

Bosch realized he had played the message back himself earlier. There wouldn’t have been a flashing light on the machine. She would not have heard the message.

“Never mind. When did you get home?”

She lifted her head off the pillow to look at the glowing numbers on the bedside clock.

“Couple hours ago.”

“How’d you do?”

He didn’t really care. He just wanted her to keep talking to him.

“All right. Came out a little ahead but I messed up. I missed a big one.”

“What happened?”

“I went with a long shot when I should’ve stuck with a sure thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was dealt a pair of aces but I also had four clubs – ace, three, four, five. So on the draw I broke the pair of aces. I discarded the ace of hearts and went for the deuce, the two of clubs to make the straight flush. They keep a progressive bonus pot going for a straight flush. It was up to about three thousand dollars. That’s what I was going for.”

“So what happened?”

“I didn’t get the deuce. I didn’t even get a club to make a flush. What I got was the ace of spades.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, I threw down an ace only to get an ace. I stayed in with that but didn’t come close. Three tens won it – the pot was about three hundred. So if I had kept the ace of hearts I would have ended up with three aces and been the winner. I blew it. That’s when I left.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He thought about the story and wondered if she was trying to say something else. Tossing the ace of hearts, aiming for the bigger pot, failing.

After a few minutes of silence, Eleanor spoke again.

“Were you out on a case? You hadn’t been in the bed. I could tell.”

“Yeah, I got a call out.”

“I thought you weren’t up on rotation.”

“It’s a long story and I don’t feel like talking about it. I want to talk about us. Tell me what’s going on, Eleanor. We can’t… this isn’t right. Some nights I don’t even know where you are or if you are all right. Something’s wrong or missing and I don’t know what it is.”

She turned and moved under the covers until she was next to him. She put her head down on his chest and brought her hand up to caress the scar on his shoulder.

“Harry…”

He waited but she didn’t say anything. She moved over on top of him then and started a gentle rocking motion with her hips.

“Eleanor, we need to talk about this.”

He felt her finger glide across his lips, telling him not to speak.

They made love slowly, Bosch’s mind a jumble of conflicting thoughts. He loved her, more than he had ever loved anyone. He knew she loved him in some way. Having her in his life had made him feel whole. But at some point he could tell that Eleanor had realized she did not have that feeling. For her there was something missing and the realization that they were on separate planes brought Bosch down as low as he had ever felt.

The feeling of doom had fallen upon the marriage then. During the summer he had caught a series of time-consuming investigations, including a case requiring him to make a week-long trip to New York. While he was gone she went to the poker room at Hollywood Park for the first time. It was out of the boredom of being left alone and the frustration at her lack of success in finding an acceptable job in Los Angeles. She had returned to the cards, doing what she had done when Bosch had found her, and it was at those blue felt tables that she found the thing that was missing.

“Eleanor,” he said when they were finished making love, his arms wrapped around her neck. “I love you. I don’t want to lose you.”

She smothered his mouth with a long kiss and then whispered, “Go to sleep, darling. Go to sleep.”

“Stay with me,” he said. “Don’t move away until I’m asleep.”

“I won’t.”

She held him tighter and he tried for the moment to let everything go. Just for a while, he decided. He would take it all up later. But for now he would sleep.

In a few minutes he was gone, deep into a dream in which he was riding Angels Flight up the tracks to the top of the hill. As the other car came down and passed, he looked in through the windows and saw Eleanor sitting alone. She wasn’t looking back at him.

Bosch awoke in a little over an hour. The room was darker, as the light from outside was no longer directly on the windows. He looked around and saw Eleanor was gone from the bed. He sat up and called her name, his voice reminding him of how he had answered the phone that morning.

“I’m here,” she called from the living room.

Bosch pulled on his clothes and left the bedroom. Eleanor was sitting on the couch, wearing the bathrobe he had bought for her at the hotel in Hawaii where they had gone after getting married in Las Vegas.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought… I don’t know.”

“You were talking in your sleep. I came out here.”

“What did I say?”

“My name, a few other things that didn’t make sense. Something about a fight. Angels fighting.”

He smiled and nodded and sat down in the chair on the other side of the coffee table.

“Flight, not fight. You ever been on Angels Flight in downtown?”

“No.”

“It’s two train cars. When one goes up the hill, the other goes down. They pass in the middle. I dreamed I was going up and you were in the car going down. We passed in the middle but you wouldn’t look at me… What do you think it means, that we’re going different ways?”

She smiled sadly.

“I guess it means you’re the angel. You were going up.”

He didn’t smile.

“I have to go back in,” he said. “This one’s going to take up my life for a while. I think.”

“You want to talk about it? Why were you called out?”

He ran the case down for her in about ten minutes. He always liked telling her about his cases. He knew it was a form of ego gratification, but sometimes she made a suggestion that helped or a comment that let him see something he had missed. It was many years since she had been an FBI agent. It was a part of her life that was a distant memory. But he still respected her investigative logic and skills.

“Oh, Harry,” she said when he was done telling the story. “Why is it always you?”

“It’s not always me.”

“Seems like it is. What are you going to do?”

“Same as I always do. I’m going to work the case. All of us are. There’s a lot there to work with – they just have to give us the time with it. It’s not going to be a quick turn.”

“I know you, they’ll throw every roadblock they can think of in front of you. It does no one any good to hook somebody up and bring them in on this. But you’ll be the one to do it. You’ll bring somebody in no matter if it makes every cop in every division despise you.”

“Every case counts, Eleanor. Every person. I despise people like Elias. He was a suckerfish – making his life off bullshit cases against cops just trying to do their jobs. For the most part, at least. Every now and then he had a legitimate case, I guess. But the point is nobody should get away with what they did. Even if it’s a cop who did it. It’s not right.”

“I know, Harry.”

She looked away from him, out through the glass doors and past the deck. The sky was turning red. The lights of the city were coming on.

“What’s your cigarette count?” he asked just to be saying something.

“I had a couple. You?”

“Still at zero.”

He had smelled the smoke in her hair earlier. He was glad she hadn’t lied.

“What happened over at Stocks and Bonds?”

He’d been hesitant about asking. He knew that whatever had happened during the interview had been what sent her to the poker room.

“Same as the others. They’ll call if something comes up.”

“I’ll go over and talk to Charlie next time I’m at the station.”

Stocks and Bonds was a storefront bail bond agency across from the Hollywood station on Wilcox. Bosch had heard they were looking for a skip tracer, preferably female because a good portion of the bail jumpers out of Hollywood station were prostitutes and a female tracer stood a better chance of running them down. He had gone over and talked to the owner, Charlie Scott, about it and he had agreed to consider Eleanor for the job. Bosch was honest about her background, both good and bad. Former FBI agent on the plus side, convicted felon being the minus. Scott said he didn’t believe the criminal record would be a problem – the position did not require a state private investigator’s license, which Eleanor could not qualify for with a record. The problem was that he liked his tracers to be armed – especially a woman – when they went looking for bail jumpers. Bosch didn’t share the concern. He knew that most skip tracers were unlicensed to carry weapons but did so anyway. The true art of the craft, though, was never to get close enough to your quarry to make having or not having a weapon a question. The best tracers located their quarry from a safe distance and then called the cops in to make the pickup.

“Don’t talk to him, Harry. I think he was just trying to do you a favor but reality hit him between when he told you to send me in and when I arrived. Just let it go.”

“But you’d be good at that.”

“That’s beside the point.”

Bosch stood up.

“I’ve got to get ready.”

He went into the bedroom and stripped off his clothes, took another shower and then dressed in a fresh suit. Eleanor was in the same position on the couch when he came back out to the living room.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he said, not looking at her. “We’ve got a lot to do. Plus the bureau’s coming in tomorrow.”

“The bureau?”

“Civil rights. The chief made the call.”

“He thinks it will keep things calm down south.”

“He hopes.”

“Do you have a name of who is coming over?”

“Not really. There was an assistant SAC at the press conference today.”

“What was his name?”

“Gilbert Spencer. But I doubt he’ll be involved anymore.”

Eleanor shook her head.

“He’s after my time. He probably just came for the show.”

“Yeah. He’s supposed to send a team over tomorrow morning.”

“Good luck.”

He looked at her and nodded.

“I don’t have the number yet. If you need me just use the pager.”

“Okay, Harry.”

He stood there for a few moments before finally asking her what he wanted to ask all along.

“Are you going to go back?”

She looked back out through the doors.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Eleanor…”

“Harry, you have your addiction. I have mine.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know that feeling you get when you pull up on a new case? That little thrill you get when you’re back in the hunt? You know what I’m talking about. Well, I don’t have that anymore. And the closest thing I’ve found to it is when I pick those five cards up off the felt and see what I’ve got. It is hard to explain and even harder to understand, but I feel like I’m alive again then, Harry. We’re all junkies. It’s just different drugs. I wish I had yours, but I don’t.”

Bosch just stared at her a moment. He wasn’t sure he could say anything without his voice betraying him. He moved to the door, looking back at her once he had it open. He moved through it but then stepped back.

“You break my heart, Eleanor. I always hoped that I could make you feel alive again.”

Eleanor closed her eyes. She looked as though she might cry.

“I’m so sorry, Harry,” she whispered. “I should never have said that.”

Bosch stepped silently through the door and closed it behind him.