Lost Light

34

On the way to the West Hollywood branch of BankLA to see Jocelyn Jones I had some time to kill so I drove west on Hollywood Boulevard. I had not been down there much since my retirement and I wanted to see the old beat. According to the newspaper it was changing and I wanted to see this for myself.

The asphalt on the boulevard still glittered in the sunlight but the storefronts and office buildings near Vine still slumbered beneath the patina of a half century of smog. No difference there. But once past Cahuenga and onto Highland I saw where the new Hollywood was springing to life. New hotels-and I’m not talking about the type with hourly rates-and theaters, people centers with popular up-style restaurant franchises anchoring them. The streets and sidewalks were crowded, the brass stars imbedded in the sidewalks were polished. It was safer and cleaner but less genuine. Still, the word that popped into my head was hope. There was a sense of hope and vigor. There was a definite vibe coming off the street and I guess I liked it. The idea, I knew, was that the vibe would spread from this core area and move down the boulevard like an earthquake wave, leaving renovation and reinvention in its wake. A few years ago I would have been first to say the plan had no chance. But maybe I was wrong.

Still feeling lucky from Vegas I decided to let the vibe ride and dropped down Fairfax to Third and pulled into the farmer’s market to grab something to eat.

The market was another remake job I had stayed away from. There was a new parking garage and open-air people center built next to the old clapboard market with its comforting combination of good, cheap food and kitsch. I think I liked it better when you could just pull into a parking space next to the newsstand but I had to admit they had done it right. It was the old and new sitting side by side and getting along. I walked through the new section, past the department stores and the biggest bookstore I had ever seen and into the old. Bob’s Donuts was still there and every other place that I remembered. It was crowded. People were happy. It was too late in the day for a doughnut so I picked up a BLT and change for a dollar at the Kokomo Café and ate the sandwich in one of the old-time phone booths that they had left in place next to the Dupar’s. I called Roy Lindell first and caught him eating at his desk.

“What do you have?”

“Tuna on rye with pickles.”

“That’s sick.”

“Yeah, what do you have?”

“BLT. Double-smoked bacon from Kokomo’s.”

“Well, that beats me all to hell. What do you want, Bosch? Last time I saw you, you wanted nothing to do with me. In fact, I thought you went to Vegas.”

“I did go but I’m back. And things are smoothing out now. You could say I’ve come to an understanding with your pals on the ninth floor. You want back in on this thing or you want to pout about it?”

“You got something?”

“Maybe. Not much more than a feeling at the moment.”

“What do you want from me?”

I shoved my sandwich wrapper off the murder book and opened it to get the information I needed.

“See what you can come up with on a guy named Linus Simonson. Thirty-one-year-old white male. He owns a club in town.”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s great. You want me to pick up your dry cleaning while I’m at it?”

“Just run the name. You’ll get a hit or you won’t.”

I gave him Simonson’s birthdate and the address listed in the murder book, although I had a feeling it was old.

“Who is he?”

I told him about Simonson’s former work at BankLA and about him being shot during the movie set heist.

“The guy was a victim. You think he set it up and told his guys to shoot him in the ass?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what’s he got to do with Marty Gessler?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. But I just want to check him out. Something doesn’t seem right to me.”

“Okay, you keep having the hunches and I’ll do the legwork, Bosch. Anything else?”

“Look, if you don’t want to do it, just say so. I’ll get somebody else to -”

“Look, I said I’ll do it, and I will. Anything else?”

I hesitated but not for too long.

“Yeah, one other thing. Can you run a plate for me?”

“Give it to me.”

I gave him the number I had gotten off the car Eleanor had been driving. It was still in my memory and I figured it would stay there until I checked it out.

“Nevada?” Lindell asked, suspicion obvious in his voice. “This have to do with your trip to Vegas or this thing over here?”

I should have known. Lindell was a lot of things but stupid wasn’t one of them. I had already opened the door. I had to step inside.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “But could you just get me the registration on it?”

If the car, as I suspected, was registered in someone other than Eleanor’s name, I could make up a story about thinking I had been followed and Lindell would never know the difference.

“All right,” the FBI agent said. “I gotta go. Call me later.”

I hung up and that was that. Guilt washed around me like the waves hitting the pylons under the pier. I might be able to fool Lindell with the request but not myself. I was running a check on my former wife. I wondered if I was capable of doing anything lower.

Trying not to dwell on it, I picked up the receiver and dumped more change into the phone. I called Janis Langwiser and realized as I waited for her to answer that I might be about to answer the question I had just posed to myself.

Langwiser’s secretary said she was on a phone call and she would have to call me back. I said I wasn’t reachable but would call back in fifteen minutes. I hung up and walked around the market, spending the most time in a small store that sold only hot sauce, hundreds of different brands of it. I wasn’t sure when I would use it because I rarely cooked at home anymore, but I bought a bottle of Gator Squeezins because I liked the place and I needed more change for the call back.

Next stop was the bakery. Not to buy, just to look. When I was a kid and my mother was still around, she used to take me to the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings. What I remember most was watching through the bakery window when the cakemaker would dress the cakes people ordered for birthdays and holidays and weddings. He would make grand designs on the top of each cake, squeezing the icing through a funnel, his thick forearms covered in flour and sugar.

My mother usually had to hold me up at the window so I could see the top of the cake being decorated. Sometimes she would think I was watching the cakemaker but I was really watching her in the reflection of the window, trying to figure out what was wrong.

When she would grow tired of holding me up she’d go grab a chair from the nearby restaurant seating area-what they now call a food court in the malls-and I would stand on that. I used to look at the cakes and imagine what parties they would go to and how many people were going to be there. It seemed like those cakes could only go to happy places. But I could tell that when the baker was icing a wedding cake, it made my mother sad.

The bakery and the cakemaker’s window were still there. I stood in front of the glass with my bag of hot sauce, but there was no baker there. I knew it was too late in the day. The cakes were made early each day so they would be ready for pickup or delivery for birthday parties and weddings and anniversaries and things like that. On the rack next to the window I looked at the selection of stainless steel funnel tips the baker could use to make various designs and flowers out of icing.

“No use waiting. He’s done for the day.”

I didn’t need to turn. In the reflection of the window, I saw an old lady walking by behind me. It made me think of my mother again.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think you are right.”

The second time I went into the phone booth and called Langwiser she was available and picked up right away.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Good, you scared me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You told Roxanne that you couldn’t be reached. I thought maybe you were in a cell or something.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t think about that. I’m just not using the cell phone still.”

“You think they are still listening?”

“I don’t know. Just precautions.”

“So is this just your daily check-in?”

“Sort of. I’ve got a question, too.”

“I’m listening.”

Maybe it was because of the way I hadn’t told Lindell the whole truth or because of the way checking out Eleanor made me feel, but I decided not to run a play on Langwiser. I decided to simply play the cards I had.

“A few years ago your firm handled a case. The attorney was James Foreman and the client was BankLA.”

“Yes, the bank’s a client. What was the case? I wasn’t here a few years ago.”

I closed the door to the phone booth even though I knew it would quickly get hot in the tiny cubicle.

“I don’t know what it was called but the other party’s name was Linus Simonson. He worked for the bank as an assistant to the vice president. He took a bullet in the shoot-out during the movie set heist.”

“Okay. I remember somebody was wounded and somebody was killed but I don’t remember the names.”

“He was the wounded. The dead guy was Ray Vaughn, chief of security for the bank. Simonson lived. In fact, he only took a round in the ass. Probably a ricochet, if I remember the way the shooting team worked it out.”

“So he then sued the bank?”

“I’m not sure if it went that far. The point is he was out on medical for a while and then decided he didn’t want to come back. He got a lawyer and started making noise about the bank being liable for putting him in a position where he was in harm’s way.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Even though he volunteered to be there. He had helped put the money together and then volunteered to baby-sit it during the movie shoot.”

“Well, it still was probably actionable. He could make a case for volunteering under duress or -”

“Yeah, I know all of that. I’m not worried about whether he had a case or not. He apparently did, because the bank settled and James Foreman handled it.”

“Okay, so where is this going? What is your question?”

I reopened the door of the booth so I could get some fresh air.

“I want to know what he settled for. How much did he get?”

“I’ll call Jim Foreman right now. You want to hold?”

“Uh, it’s not that simple. I think there was a confidentiality agreement.”

There was silence from her and I actually smiled while I waited. It had felt good to just come out with what I wanted.

“I see,” Langwiser finally said. “So you want me to violate that by finding out what he got.”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

“What other way is there to put it?”

“I’m working this thing and he’s come up. Simonson. And it would just help me a lot if I knew how big a chunk of cash the bank gave him. It would help me a lot, Janis.”

Again my words were met with a long silence.

“I’m not going to go snooping through files in my own firm,” she finally said. “I’m not going to do anything that could get me in the shit. The best thing I can do is just go to Jim and ask him and see what he says.”

“Okay.”

It was better than I thought I would get.

“The wedge I have is that BankLA remains a client. If you are saying that this guy Simonson might have been part of this heist which lost the bank two million and its chief of security, then he might be inclined.”

“Hey, that’s good.”

I had thought of that angle but wanted her to come to it. I started to get jazzed. I thought maybe she’d be able to get what I needed from Foreman.

“Don’t get excited, Harry. Not yet.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see what I can do and then I’ll call you. And don’t worry, if I have to leave a message on your home number it will be in code.”

“Okay, Janis, thanks.”

I hung up and left the booth. On the way back through the market in the direction of the parking garage I passed the cake window and was surprised to see that the baker was there. I stopped for a minute and watched. It must have been a last-minute order because it looked like the cake had been taken out of one of the inside display cabinets. It was already iced. The man behind the window was just putting on flowers and lettering.

I waited until he wrote the message. It was pink writing on a field of chocolate. It said, Happy Birthday, Callie! I hoped it was another cake going to a happy place.