Lost Light

5

I got up and went down the hall and looked through the peephole. I then quickly came back to the dining room and got a tablecloth from the cabinet against the wall. The tablecloth had never been used. It had been bought by my ex-wife and put in the cabinet for when we entertained. But we never entertained. I no longer had the wife but now the tablecloth would come in handy. There was another knock on the door. Louder this time. I quickly finished covering the photos and documents and went back to the door.

Kiz Rider had her back to me and was looking out at the street when I opened the door.

“Kiz, sorry. I was on the back deck and didn’t hear the first knock. Come on in.”

She walked past me and down the short hallway toward the living and dining room areas. She probably saw that the sliding door to the deck was closed.

“Then how did you know there was a first knock?” she asked as she went by.

“I, uh, just thought that the knock I heard was so loud it must’ve meant that whoever was out there had -”

“Okay, okay, Harry, I got it.”

I hadn’t seen her in almost eight months. Since my retirement party, which she had organized and held at Musso’s, renting out the whole bar and inviting everybody from Hollywood Division.

She moved into the dining room and I saw her eyes run over the rumpled tablecloth. It was clear that I was covering something and I immediately regretted doing it.

She was wearing a charcoal gray business suit with the skirt below the knee. The outfit took me by surprise. Ninety percent of the time we worked together as partners she wore black jeans and a blazer over a white blouse. It allowed her freedom to move, to run if necessary. In the suit she looked more like a bank vice president than a homicide detective.

Her eyes still on the table, she said, “Oh, Harry, you always set such a nice table. What’s for lunch?”

“Sorry. I didn’t know who was at the door and I just sort of threw that over some stuff I have out.”

She turned to face me.

“What stuff, Harry?”

“Just stuff. Old case stuff. So tell me, how are things down at RHD? Better than last time we talked?”

She had been promoted downtown about a year before I split the department. She’d had trouble with her new partner and others in RHD and had confided in me about it. I’d had a mentoring relationship with her that continued after she transferred to RHD. But it ended when I chose retirement over a reassignment that would have put us back together as partners in RHD. I knew it hurt her. Her organizing of the retirement party had been a nice gesture but it was also the big good-bye from her.

“RHD? RHD didn’t work out.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

I was genuinely surprised. Rider had been the most skilled and intuitive partner I had ever worked with. She was made for the mission. The department needed more like her. I had thought for sure that she would be able to adjust to life in the department’s highest-profile squad and do good work.

“I transferred out at the beginning of the summer. I’m in the chief’s office now.”

“You’re kidding. Oh, man…”

I was stunned. She had obviously chosen a career path through the department. If she was working for the chief as an adjutant or on special projects, then she was being groomed for command staff administration. There was nothing wrong with that. I knew Rider was as ambitious as the next cop. But homicide was a calling, not a career. I had always thought she understood and accepted that. She had heard the call.

“Kiz, I don’t know what to say. I wish…”

“What, that I had talked to you about it? You split the gig, Harry. Remember? What were you going to tell me, to tough it out in RHD when you bailed out yourself?”

“It was different for me, Kiz. I had built up too much resistance. I was pulling too much baggage. You were different. You were the star, Kiz.”

“Well, stars burn out. It was too petty and political on the third floor. I changed directions. I just took the lieutenant’s exam. And the chief is a good man. He wants to do good things and I want to be right there with him. It’s funny, things are less political on the sixth floor. You’d think it would be the other way around.”

It sounded as though she was trying to convince herself more than me. All I could do was nod as a sense of guilt and loss flooded me. If I had stayed and taken the RHD job, she would have stayed also. I went into the living room and dropped onto the couch. She followed me but remained standing.

I reached over to turn down the music but not too much. I liked the song. I stared out through the sliding doors and across the deck to the vista of mountains across the Valley. It was no smoggier out there than most days. But the overcast somehow seemed to fit as Pepper took up the clarinet to accompany Lee Konitz on “The Shadow of Your Smile.” There was a sad wistfulness to it that I think even gave Rider pause. She stood silently listening.

I had been given the discs by a friend named Quentin McKinzie, who was an old jazzman who knew Pepper and had played with him decades earlier at Shelly Manne’s and Donte’s and some of the other long-gone Hollywood jazz clubs spawned by the West Coast sound. McKinzie had told me to listen and study the discs. They were some of Pepper’s last recordings. After years spent in jails and prisons because of his addictions, the artist was making up for lost time. Even in his work as a sideman. That relentlessness. He never stopped it until his heart stopped. There was a kind of integrity in that and the music that my friend admired. He gave me the discs and told me never to stop making up for lost time.

Soon the song ended and Kiz turned to me.

“Who was that?”

“Art Pepper, Lee Konitz.”

“White guys?”

I nodded.

“Damn. That was good.”

I nodded again.

“So what’s under the tablecloth, Harry?”

I shrugged.

“First time you’ve come around in eight months, I suppose you know.”

She nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Let me guess. Alexander Taylor’s tight with the chief or the mayor or both and he called to check me out.”

She nodded. I had gotten it right.

“And the chief knew you and I were close at one time, so…”

At one time. She seemed to stumble while saying that part.

“Anyhow, he sent me out to tell you that you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

She sat down on the chair opposite the couch and looked out across the deck. I could tell she wasn’t interested in what was out there. She just didn’t want to look at me.

“So this is what you gave up homicide for, to run errands for the chief.”

She looked sharply at me and I saw the injury in her eyes. But I didn’t regret what I said. I was just as angry with her as she was with me.

“It’s easy for you to say that, Harry. You’ve already been through the war.”

“The war never ends, Kiz.”

I almost smiled at the coincidence of the song that was now playing while Rider was delivering her message. The piece was “High Jingo,” with Pepper still accompanying Konitz. Pepper would be dead six months after laying down the track. The coincidence was that when I was young in the department, “high jingo” was a way old-guard detectives would describe a case that had taken on unusual interest from the sixth floor or carried other unseen political or bureaucratic dangers. When a case had high jingo on it, you had to be careful. You were in murky water. You had to watch your back because nobody else was watching it for you.

I got up and went to the window. The sun was reflecting off a billion particles that hung in the air. It was orange and pink and looked beautiful. It didn’t seem like it could be poison.

“So what’s the word from the chief-lay off it, Bosch? You’re a citizen now. Leave it to the professionals?”

“More or less.”

“The case is gathering dust, Kiz. Why does he care that I’m poking around when nobody in his own department does? Is he afraid I’ll embarrass him or something by closing it?”

“Who says it’s gathering dust?”

I turned around and looked at her.

“Come on, don’t give me the due diligence dance. I know how that goes. A signature every six months on the log, ‘Uh yup, nothing new here.’ I mean, don’t you care about this, Kiz? You knew Angella Benton. Don’t you want to see this thing cleared?”

“Of course I do. Don’t think for one moment that I want anything less. But things are happening, Harry. I was sent out here as a courtesy to you. Don’t get involved. You might wander into something you shouldn’t. You might hurt rather than help.”

I sat back down and looked at her for a long moment as I tried to read between the lines. I wasn’t convinced.

“If it is actively being worked, who is working it?”

She shook her head.

“I can’t tell you that. I can only tell you to leave it alone.”

“Look, Kiz, this is me. Whatever anger you have because I pulled the pin shouldn’t stop you -”

“From what? Doing what I am supposed to do? Following orders? Harry, you no longer have a badge. People with badges are actively working on this. Actively. You understand? Leave it at that.”

Before I could speak she fired another round at me.

“And don’t trouble yourself about me, okay? I have no anger toward you anymore, Harry. You left me high and dry but that was a long time ago. Yeah, I had anger but it’s a long time gone. I didn’t even want to be the one who came here today but he made me come. He thought I could convince you.”

He being the chief, I assumed. I sat silently for a moment, waiting to see if there was more. But that was all she had. I spoke quietly then, almost as if I was putting a confession through the screen to a priest.

“And what if I can’t leave it alone? What if for reasons that have nothing to do with this case I need to work this? Reasons for myself. What happens then?”

She shook her head in annoyance.

“Then you are going to get hurt. These people, they don’t fuck around. Find some other case or some other way to work out your demons.”

“What people?”

Rider stood up.

“Kiz, what people?”

“I’ve told you enough, Harry. Message delivered. Good luck.”

She headed toward the hallway and the door. I got up and followed, my mind churning through what I knew.

“Who is working the case?” I asked. “Tell me.”

She glanced back at me but kept moving toward the door.

“Tell me, Kiz. Who?”

She stopped suddenly and turned to me. I saw anger and challenge in her eyes.

“For old time’s sake, Harry? Is that what you want to say?”

I stepped back. Her anger was a force field around her body that was pushing me back. I held my hands out wide in surrender and didn’t say anything. She waited a moment and then turned back to the door.

“Good-bye, Harry.”

She opened the door and stepped out, then pulled it closed behind her.

“Good-bye, Kiz.”

But she was already gone. For a long time I stood there thinking about what she had said and not said. There had been a message within a message but I couldn’t yet read it. The water was too murky.

“High jingo, baby,” I said to myself as I locked the door.