City Of Bones

Chapter 16

IT was well after midnight by the time Bosch got to Venice. Parking on the little streets near the canals was nonexistent. He drove around looking for ten minutes and ended up parking in the lot by the library out on Venice Boulevard and then walking back in.

Not all of the dreamers drawn to Los Angeles came to make movies. Venice was the century-old dream of a man named Abbot Kinney. Before Hollywood and the film industry barely had a pulse, Kinney came to the marshlands along the Pacific. He envisioned a place built on a network of canals with arched bridges and a town center of Italian architecture. It would be a place emphasizing cultural and artistic learning. And he would call it Venice of America.

But like most of the dreamers who come to Los Angeles his vision was not uniformly shared or realized. Most financiers and investigators were cynical and passed on the opportunity to build Venice, putting their money into projects of less grand design. Venice of America was dubbed “Kinney’s Folly.”

But a century later many of the canals and the arched bridges reflected in their waters remained while the financiers and doomsayers and their projects were long swept away by time. Bosch liked the idea of Kinney’s Folly outlasting them all.

Bosch had not been to the canals in many years, though for a short period in his life after returning from Vietnam he had lived there in a bungalow with three other men he knew from overseas. In the years since, many of the bungalows had been erased and modern two- and three-story homes costing a million dollars or more had replaced them.

Julia Brasher lived in a house at the corner of the Howland and Eastern canals. Bosch expected it to be one of the new structures. He guessed she probably used her law-firm money to buy it or even build it. But as he came to the address he saw that he was wrong. Her house was a small bungalow made of white clapboard with an open front porch overlooking the joining of the two canals.

Bosch saw lights on behind the windows of her house. It was late but not that late. If she worked the three-to-eleven shift, then it was unlikely she was used to going to bed before two.

He stepped up onto the porch but hesitated before knocking on the door. Until the doubts of the last hour had crept in, he had gotten only good feelings about Brasher and their fledgling relationship. He knew he now had to be careful. There could be nothing wrong and yet he could spoil everything if he misstepped here.

Finally, he raised his arm and knocked. Brasher answered right away.

“I was wondering if you were going to knock or stand out there all night.”

“You knew I was standing here?”

“The porch is old. It creaks. I heard it.”

“Well, I got here and then figured it was too late. I should have called first.”

“Just come in. Is anything wrong?”

Bosch came in and looked around. He didn’t answer the question.

The living room had an unmistakable beach flavor to it, right down to the bamboo-and-rattan furniture and the surfboard leaning in one corner. The only deviation was her equipment belt and holster hanging on a wall rack near the door. It was a rookie mistake leaving it out like that, but Bosch assumed she was proud of her new career choice and wanted to remind friends outside the cop world of it.

“Sit down,” she said. “I have some wine open. Would you like a glass?”

Bosch thought a moment about whether mixing wine with the beer he’d had an hour earlier would lead to a headache the next day when he knew he’d have to be focused.

“It’s red.”

“Uh, I’ll take just a little bit.”

“Got to be sharp tomorrow, huh?”

“I guess.”

She went into the kitchen while he sat down on the couch. He looked around the room and now saw a mounted fish with a long sharp point hanging over the white brick fireplace. The fish was a brilliant blue shading to black with a white and yellow underside. Mounted fish didn’t bother him the way the heads of mounted game did but he still didn’t like the eye of the fish always watching.

“You catch this thing?” he called out.

“Yeah. Off Cabo. Took me three and a half hours to bring it in.”

She then appeared with two glasses of wine.

“On fifty-pound test line,” she said. “That was a workout.”

“What is it?”

“Black marlin.”

She toasted the fish with her glass and then toasted Bosch.

“Hold fast.”

Bosch looked at her.

“That’s my new toast,” she said. “Hold fast. It seems to cover everything.”

She sat down on the chair closest to Bosch. Behind her was the surfboard. It was white with a rainbow design in a border running along the edges. It was a short board.

“So you surf the wild waves, too.”

She glanced back at the board and then at Bosch and smiled.

“I try to. Picked it up in Hawaii.”

“You know John Burrows?”

She shook her head.

“Lot of surfers in Hawaii. What beach does he surf?”

“No, I mean here. He’s a cop. He works Homicide out of Pacific Division. Lives on a walk street by the beach. Not too far from here. He surfs. On his board it says ‘To Protect and Surf.’ ”

She laughed.

“That’s cool. I like that. I’ll have to get that put on my board.”

Bosch nodded.

“John Burrows, huh? I’ll have to look him up.”

She said it with just a touch of teasing in her voice.

Bosch smiled and said, “And maybe not.”

He liked the way she kidded him like that. It all felt good to Bosch, which made him feel all the more out of sorts because of his reason for being there. He looked at his wine glass.

“I’ve been fishing all day and didn’t catch a thing,” he said. “Microfiche mostly.”

“I saw you on the news tonight,” she said. “Are you trying to put the squeeze on that guy, the child molester?”

Bosch sipped his wine to give himself time to think. She had opened the door. He now just had to step through very carefully.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, giving that reporter his criminal background. I figured you must be making some kind of play. You know, turning up the heat on him. To make him talk or something. It seems kind of risky.”

“Why?”

“Well, first of all, trusting a reporter is always risky. I know that from back when I was a lawyer and got burned. And second… and second, you never know how people are going to react when their secrets are no longer secrets.”

Bosch studied her for a moment and then shook his head.

“I didn’t give it to her,” he said. “Somebody else did.”

He studied her eyes for any kind of tell. There was nothing.

“There’s going to be trouble over it,” he added.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. Still no tell.

“Why? If you didn’t give her the information, why would there…”

She stopped and now Bosch could see her put it together. He saw the disappointment fill her eyes.

“Oh, Harry…”

He tried to back out through the door.

“What? Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”

“It wasn’t me, Harry. Is that what you’re here about? To see if I’m the leak or the source or whatever you’d call it?”

She abruptly put her wine glass down on the coffee table. Red wine lapped over the edge and onto the table. She didn’t do anything about it. Bosch knew there was no use trying to avoid the collision. He had screwed up.

“Look, only four people knew…”

“And I was one of them. So you thought you’d come here undercover and find out if it was me.”

She waited for a response. Finally, all Bosch could do was nod.

“Well, it wasn’t me. And I think you should go now.”

Bosch nodded and put down his glass. He stood up.

“Look, I’m sorry. I screwed it up. I thought the best way to not mess anything up, you know, between you and me, was to…”

He made a helpless gesture with his hands as he headed to the door.

“Was to do the undercover thing,” he continued. “I just didn’t want to mess it up, that’s all. But I had to know. I think if you were me you would’ve felt the same way about it.”

He opened the door and looked back at her.

“I’m sorry, Julia. Thanks for the wine.”

He turned to go.

“Harry.”

He turned back. She came to him and reached up and grabbed the lapels of his jacket with both hands. She slowly pulled him forward and then pushed him backward, as if roughing up a suspect in slow motion. Her eyes dropped to his chest as her mind worked and she came to a decision.

She stopped shaking him but kept her grasp on his jacket.

“I can get over it,” she said. “I think.”

She looked up to his eyes and pulled him forward. She kissed him hard on the mouth for a long time and then pushed him back. She let go.

“I hope. Call me tomorrow.”

Bosch nodded and stepped through the door. She closed it.

Bosch went down the porch to the sidewalk next to the canal. He looked at the reflection of the lights of all the houses on the water. An arched footbridge, lighted by the moon and nothing else, crossed the canal twenty yards away, its reflection perfect on the water. He turned and walked back up the steps to the porch. He hesitated at the door again and soon Brasher opened it.

“The porch creaks, remember?”

He nodded and she waited. He wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say. Finally, he just began.

“One time when I was in one of those tunnels we were talking about last night I came up head-on with some guy. He was VC. Black pajamas, greased face. We sort of looked at each other for a split second and I guess instincts took over. We both raised up and fired at the same time. Simultaneous. And then we fucking ran in opposite directions. Both of us scared shitless, screaming in the dark.”

He paused as he thought about the story, seeing it more than remembering it.

“Anyway, I thought he had to have hit me. It was almost point-blank, too close to miss. I thought my gun had backfired and jammed or something. The kick had felt wrong. When I got up top the first thing I did was check myself. No blood, no pain. I took all of my clothes off and checked myself. Nothing. He had missed. Point-blank and somehow the guy had missed.”

She stepped over the door’s threshold and leaned against the front wall beneath the porch light. She didn’t say anything and he pressed on.

“Anyway, then I checked my forty-five for a jam and I found out why he hadn’t hit me. The guy’s bullet was in the barrel of my gun. With mine. We had pointed at each other and his shot went right up the barrel of my gun. What were the chances of that? A million to one? A billion?”

As he spoke he held his empty hand out as a gun pointing at her. His hand was extended directly in front of his chest. The bullet that day in the tunnel had been meant for his heart.

“I guess I just want you to know that I know how lucky I was with you tonight.”

He nodded and then turned and went down the steps.