City Of Bones

Chapter 22

IT was a brutal drive to Venice and Bosch arrived more than a half hour late. His lateness was then compounded by his fruitless search for a parking space before he went back to the library lot in defeat. His delay was no bother to Julia Brasher, who was in the critical stage of putting things together in the kitchen. She instructed him to go to the stereo and put on some music, then pour himself a glass of wine from the bottle that was already open on the coffee table. She did not make a move to touch him or kiss him, but her manner was completely warm. He thought things seemed good, that maybe he had gotten past the gaffe of the night before.

He chose a CD of live recordings of the Bill Evans Trio at the Village Vanguard in New York. He had the CD at home and knew it would make for quiet dinner music. He poured himself a glass of red wine and casually walked around the living room, looking at the things she had on display.

The mantel of the white brick fireplace was crowded with small framed photos he hadn’t gotten a chance to look at the night before. Some were propped on stands and displayed more prominently than others. Not all were of people. Some photos were of places he assumed she had visited in her travels. There was a ground shot of a live volcano billowing smoke and spewing molten debris in the air. There was an underwater shot of the gaping mouth and jagged teeth of a shark. The killer fish appeared to be launching itself right at the camera-and whoever was behind it. At the edge of the photo Bosch could see one of the iron bars of the cage the photographer-who he assumed was Brasher-had been protected by.

There was a photo of Brasher with two Aboriginal men on either side of her standing somewhere, Bosch assumed, in the Australian outback. And there were several other photos of her with what appeared to be fellow backpackers in other locations of exotic or rugged terrain that Bosch could not readily identify. In none of the photos in which Julia was a subject was she looking at the camera. Her eyes were always staring off in the distance or at one of the other individuals posed with her.

In the last position on the mantel, as if hidden behind the other photos, was a small gold-framed shot of a much younger Julia Brasher with a slightly older man. Bosch reached behind the photos and lifted it out so he could see it better. The couple was sitting at a restaurant or perhaps a wedding reception. Julia wore a beige gown with a low-cut neckline. The man wore a tuxedo.

“You know, this man is a god in Japan,” Julia called from the kitchen.

Bosch put the framed photo back in its place and walked to the kitchen. Her hair was down and he couldn’t decide which way he liked it best.

“Bill Evans?”

“Yeah. It seems like they have whole channels of the radio dedicated to playing his music.”

“Don’t tell me, you spent some time in Japan, too.”

“About two months. It’s a fascinating place.”

It looked to Bosch like she was making a risotto with chicken and asparagus in it.

“Smells good.”

“Thank you. I hope it is.”

“So what do you think you were running from?”

She looked up at him from her work at the stove. A hand held a stirring spoon steady.

“What?”

“You know, all the travel. Leaving Daddy’s law firm to go swim with sharks and dive into volcanoes. Was it the old man or the law firm the old man ran?”

“Some people would look at it as maybe I was running toward something.”

“The guy in the tuxedo?”

“Harry, take your gun off. Leave your badge at the door. I always do.”

“Sorry.”

She went back to work at the stove and Bosch came up behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed his thumbs into the indentations of her upper spine. She offered no resistance. Soon he felt her muscles begin to relax. He noticed her empty wine glass on the counter.

“I’ll go get the wine.”

He came back with his glass and the bottle. He refilled her glass and she picked it up and clicked it off the side of his.

“Whether to something or away from something, here’s to running,” she said. “Just running.”

“What happened to ‘Hold fast’?”

“There’s that, too.”

“Here’s to forgiveness and reconciliation.”

They clicked glasses again. He came around behind her and started working her neck again.

“You know, I thought about your story all last night after you left,” she said.

“My story?”

“About the bullet and the tunnel.”

“And?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Nothing. It’s just amazing, that’s all.”

“You know, after that day, I wasn’t afraid anymore when I was down in the darkness. I just knew that I was going to make it through. I can’t explain why, I just knew. Which, of course, was stupid, because there are no guarantees of that-back then and there or anywhere else. It made me sort of reckless.”

He held his hands steady for a moment.

“It’s not good to be too reckless,” he said. “You cross the tube too often, you’ll eventually get burned.”

“Hmm. Are you lecturing me, Harry? You want to be my training officer now?”

“No. I checked my gun and my badge at the door, remember?”

“Okay, then.”

She turned around, his hands still on her neck, and kissed him. Then she pulled back away.

“You know, the great thing about this risotto is that it can keep in the oven as long as we need it to.”

Bosch smiled.

Later on, after they had made love, Bosch got up from her bed and went out to the living room.

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

When he didn’t answer she called out to him to turn the oven up. He came back into the room carrying the gold-framed photo. He got into the bed and turned on the light on the bed table. It was a low-wattage bulb beneath a heavy lamp shade. The room still was cast in shadow.

“Harry, what are you doing?” Julia said in a tone that warned he was treading close to her heart. “Did you turn the oven up?”

“Yeah, three-fifty. Tell me about this guy.”

“Why?”

“I just want to know.”

“It’s a private story.”

“I know. But you can tell me.”

She tried to take the photo away but he held it out of her reach.

“Is he the one? Did he break your heart and send you running?”

“Harry. I thought you took your badge off.”

“I did. And my clothes, everything.”

She smiled.

“Well, I’m not telling you anything.”

She was on her back, head propped on a pillow. Bosch put the picture on the bed table and then turned back and moved in next to her. Under the sheet he put his arm across her body and pulled her tightly to him.

“Look, you want to trade scars again? I got my heart broken twice by the same woman. And you know what? I kept her picture on a shelf in my living room for a long time. Then on New Year’s Day I decided it had been a long enough time. I put her picture away. Then I got called out to work and I met you.”

She looked at him, her eyes moving slightly back and forth as she seemed to be searching his face for something, maybe the slightest hint of insincerity.

“Yes,” she finally said. “He broke my heart. Okay?”

“No, not okay. Who is the creep?”

She started laughing.

“Harry, you’re my knight in tarnished armor, aren’t you?”

She pulled herself up into a sitting position, the sheet falling away from her breasts. She folded her arms across them.

“He was in the firm. I really fell for him-right down the old elevator shaft. And then… then he decided it was over. And he decided to betray me and to tell secret things to my father.”

“What things?”

She shook her head.

“Things I will never tell a man again.”

“Where was that picture taken?”

“Oh, at a firm function-probably the New Year’s banquet, I don’t remember. They have a lot of them.”

Bosch had become angled behind her. He leaned down and kissed her back, just above the tattoo.

“I couldn’t be there anymore while he was there. So I quit. I said I wanted to travel. My father thought it was a midlife crisis because I had turned thirty. I just let him think it. But then I had to do what I said I wanted to do-travel. I went to Australia first. It was the farthest place I could think of.”

Bosch pulled himself up and stacked two pillows behind his back. He then pulled her back against his chest. He kissed the top of her head and kept his nose in her hair.

“I had a lot of money from the firm,” she said. “I didn’t have to worry. I just kept traveling, going wherever I wanted, working odd jobs when I felt like it. I didn’t come home for almost four years. And when I did, that’s when I joined the academy. I was walking along the boardwalk and saw the little Venice community service office. I went in and picked up a pamphlet. It all happened pretty fast after that.”

“Your history shows impulsive and possibly reckless decision-making processes. How did that get by the screeners?”

She gently elbowed him in the side, setting off a flare of pain from his ribs. He tensed.

“Oh, Harry, sorry. I forgot.”

“Yeah, sure.”

She laughed.

“I guess all you old guys know that the department’s been pushing big time for what they term ‘mature’ women cadets the last few years. To smooth off all the hard testosterone edges of the department.”

She rocked her hips back against Bosch’s genitals to underline the point.

“And speaking of testosterone,” she said, “you never told me how it went with old bullet head himself today.”

Bosch groaned but didn’t answer.

“You know,” she said, “Irving came to address our class one day on the moral responsibilities that come with carrying the badge. And everybody sitting there knew the guy probably makes more backroom deals up there on the sixth floor than there are days in the year. The guy’s the classic fixer. You could practically cut the irony in the auditorium with a knife.”

Her use of the word “irony” made Bosch flash on what Antoine Jesper had said about coupling the bones found on the hill with the bones on the skateboard. He felt his body tensing as thoughts of the case started encroaching on what had been an oasis of respite from the investigation.

She sensed his tightness.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You got all tense all of a sudden.”

“The case, I guess.”

She was quiet a moment.

“I think it’s kind of amazing,” she then said. “Those bones being up there all of these years and then coming up out of the ground. Like a ghost or something.”

“It’s a city of bones. And all of them are waiting to come up.”

He paused.

“I don’t want to talk about Irving or the bones or the case or anything else right now.”

“Then what do you want?”

He didn’t answer. She turned to face him and started pushing him down off the pillows until he was flat on his back.

“How about a mature woman to smooth off all the hard edges again?”

It was impossible for Bosch not to smile.