The Black Ice

12

Bosch didn’t get back to his search for Porter until four in the morning. By then he had had two cups of coffee in the station and was holding his third. He was back in the Caprice, alone and roaming the city.

Rickard had agreed to ferry Kerwin Tyge downtown. The kid had never talked. His shell of hardened rejection, cop hate and misguided pride never cracked. At the station, it had become a mission for Rickard to break the kid. He renewed the threats, the questions, with a zeal that Bosch found disturbing. He finally told Rickard that it was over. He told the narc to book the kid and they’d try again later. After stepping out of the interview room, the two decided to meet at seven thousand at 2P.M. That would give the kid about a ten-hour taste of the big house, enough time to make a decision.

Now Bosch was cruising the bottle clubs, the after-hour joints where “members” brought their own bottles and were charged for the setups. The setups, of course, were a ripoff, and some clubs even charged a membership fee. But some people just couldn’t drink at home alone. And some people didn’t have much of a home.

At a stoplight on Sunset at Western, a blur passed the car on the right and a figure lunged over the passenger side of the hood. Bosch instinctively drew his left hand up to his belt and almost dropped his coffee but then realized the man had begun to rub a newspaper on the windshield. Half past four in the morning and a homeless man was cleaning his windshield. Badly. The man’s efforts only smudged the glass. Bosch pulled a dollar out of his pocket and handed it out the window to the man when he came around to do the driver’s side. He waved him away.

“Don’t worry about it, partner,” he said and the man silently walked away.

Bosch headed off, hitting bottle clubs in Echo Park near the police academy and then Chinatown. No sign of Porter. He crossed over the Hollywood Freeway into downtown, thinking of the kid as he passed the county lockup. He’d be on seven, the narco module, where the inhabitants were generally less hostile. He’d probably be okay.

He saw the big blue trucks pulling out of the garage on the Spring Street side of theTimes building, heading off with another morning’s cargo of news. He tried a couple of bottle clubs near Parker Center, then one near skid row. He was scratching bottom now, getting near the end of the line and running out of places to check.

The last place he stopped was Poe’s, which was centrally located on Third Avenue near skid row, theLos Angeles Times, St. Vibiana’s and the glass bank towers of the financial district, where alcoholics were manufactured wholesale. Poe’s did a good business in the morning hours before downtown came alive with hustle and greed.

Poe’s was on the first floor of a prewar brick walkup that had been tagged for demolition by the Community Redevelopment Agency. It had not been earthquake-proofed and retrofitting it would cost more than the building was worth. The CRA had bought it and was going to knock it down to put up condos that would draw live-in residents downtown. But the whole thing was on hold. Another city agency, the Office of Preservation, wanted the Poe building, as it was informally known, granted landmark status and was suing to stop the demolition. So far they had held up the plan four years. Poe’s was still open. The four floors above it were abandoned.

Inside, the place was a black hole with a long, warped bar and no tables. Poe’s wasn’t a place to sit in a booth with friends. It was a place to drink alone. A place for executive suicides who needed courage, broken cops who couldn’t cope with the loneliness they built into their lives, writers who could no longer write and priests who could no longer forgive even their own sins. It was a place to drink mean, as long as you still had the green. It cost you five bucks for a stool at the bar and a dollar for a glass of ice to go with your bottle of whiskey. A soda setup was three bucks but most of these people took their medicine straight up. It was cheaper that way and more to the point. It was said that Poe’s was not named after the writer but for the general philosophy of its clientele: Piss On Everything.

Even though it was dark outside, stepping into Poe’s was like walking into a cave. For a moment, Bosch was reminded of that first moment after dropping into a VC tunnel in Vietnam. He stood utterly still by the door until his eyes focused in the dim light and he saw the red leather padding on the bar. The place smelled worse than Porter’s trailer. The bartender, in a wrinkled white shirt and unbuttoned black vest, stood to the right, backed by the rows of liquor bottles, each with the bottle owner’s name attached on a piece of masking tape. A red stem of neon ran along the booze shelf, behind the bottles, and gave them an eerie glow.

From the darkness to Bosch’s left, he heard, “Shit, Harry, whaddaya doing? You looking for me?”

He turned and there was Porter at the other end of the bar, sitting so he could see whoever came in before they could see him. Harry walked over. He saw a shot glass in front of Porter along with a half-filled water glass and a third-filled bottle of bourbon. There was a twenty and three ones fanned out on the bar as well and a package of Camels. Bosch felt anger rising in his throat as he approached and came up on Porter’s back.

“Yeah, I’m looking for you.”

“Whassup?”

Bosch knew he had to do what he had to do before any sympathy could crack through his anger. He yanked Porter’s sport coat down over his shoulders so his arms were caught at his sides. A cigarette dropped out of his hand to the floor. Bosch reached around and pulled the gun out of his shoulder holster and put it on the bar.

“What’re you still carrying for, Lou? You pulled the pin, remember? What, you scared of something?”

“Harry, what’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

The bartender started walking down behind the bar to the aid of his club member but Bosch fixed him with a cold stare, held up his hand like a traffic cop and said, “Cool it. It’s private.”

“Damned right. It’s a private club and you ain’t a member.”

“It’s okay, Tommy,” Porter spoke up. “I know him. I’ll take care of it.”

A couple of men who had been sitting a few stools from Porter got up and moved to the other end of the bar with their bottles and drinks. A couple of other drunks were already down there watching. But nobody left, not with booze still in their jars and it not quite being six o’clock yet. There would be no place else to go. Bars wouldn’t open until seven and the hour or so until then could last a lifetime. No, they weren’t going anywhere. This crew would sit there and watch a man murdered if they had to.

“Harry, c’mon,” Porter said. “Cool it yourself. We can talk.”

“Can we? Can we? Why didn’t you talk when I called the other day? How about Moore? Did you have a talk with Cal Moore?”

“Look, Harry-”

Bosch spun him around off the stool and face first into the wood-paneled wall. He came easier than Harry had thought he would and hit the wall hard. His nose made a sound like an ice-cream cone hitting the sidewalk. Bosch leaned his back against Porter’s back, pinning him face first against the wall.

“Don’t ‘Look, Harry’ me, Porter. I stood up for you, man, ’cause I thought you were… I thought you were worth it. Now I know, Porter. I was wrong. You quit on the Juan Doe. I want to know why. I want to know what’s going on.”

Porter’s voice was muffled by the wall and his own blood. He said, “Harry, shit, I think you broke my nose. I’m bleeding.”

“Don’t worry about it. What about Moore? I know he reported the body.”

Porter made some kind of wet snorting sound but Bosch just pushed him harder. The man stunk of sour body odor, booze and cigarettes, and Bosch wondered how long he had been sitting in Poe’s, watching the door.

“I’m calling the police now,” the bartender yelled. He stood holding the phone out so Bosch would see it was a real threat, which of course it wasn’t. The bartender knew if he dialed that phone every stool in the bar would be left spinning as the drunks filed out. There would be no one left to scam on the change or to leave quarters for his cup.

Using his body to keep Porter pinned to the wall, Bosch pulled out his badge wallet and held it up. “I am the police. Mind your own fucking business.”

The bartender shook his head as if to say what is this fine business coming to, and put the phone back next to the cash register. The announcement that Bosch was a police officer resulted in about half the other customers jerking their drinks down and leaving. There were probably warrants out for everybody in the place, Bosch thought.

Porter was starting to mumble and Bosch thought he might be crying again, like on the phone Thursday morning.

“Harry, I-I didn’t think I was doing… I had-”

Bosch bounced harder against his back and heard Porter’s forehead hit the wall.

“Don’t start that shit with me, Porter. You were takin’ care of yourself. That’s what you were doing. And-”

“I’m sick. I’m gonna be sick.”

“-and right now, believe it or not, right now the only one that really cares about you is me. You fuck, you just tell me what you did. Just tell me what you did and we’re square. It goes nowhere else. You go for your stress out and I never see your face again.”

Bosch could hear his wet breathing against the wall. It was almost as if he could hear him thinking.

“You sure, Harry?”

“You don’t have a choice. You don’t start talking, you end up with no job, no pension.”

“He, uh-I just… there’s blood on my shirt. It’s roon.”

Bosch pushed harder against him.

“Okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell ya, I’ll tell… I just did him a favor, thas all, and he ended up deader’n shit. When I heard, I, uh, I couldn’t come back in, see. I didn’t know what happened. I mean, I mean, they-somebody could be looking for me. I got scared, Harry. I’m scared. I been sitting in bars since I talked to you yesterday. I stink like shit. And now all this blood. I need a napkin. I think they’re after me.”

Bosch took his weight off him but held one hand pressed against his back so he would not go anywhere. He reached back to the bar and took a handful of cocktail napkins off a stack near a bowl of matches. He held them over Porter’s shoulder and the broken cop worked his hand loose from his jacket and took them. He turned his head away from the wall to press the napkin to his swelling nose. Harry saw tears on his face and looked away.

The door to the bar opened then and dawn’s early gray light shot into the bar. A man stood there, apparently adjusting to the darkness of the bar as Bosch had done. Bosch saw he was dark complexioned with ink-black hair. Three tattooed tears dripped down his cheek from the corner of his left eye. Harry knew he was no banker or lawyer who needed a double-scotch breakfast to start the day. He was some kind of player, maybe finishing a night collecting for the Italians or Mexicans and needing something to smooth out the edges. The man’s eyes finally fell on Bosch and Porter, then to Porter’s gun, which was still on the bar. The man sized up the situation and calmly and wordlessly backed out through the door.

“Fucking great,” the bartender yelled. “Would you get the hell out of here. I’m losing customers. The both of you, get the fuck out.”

There was a sign that said Toilet and an arrow pointing down a darkened hallway to Bosch’s left. He pushed Porter that way. They turned a corner and went into the men’s room, which smelled worse than Porter. There was a mop in a bucket of gray water in the corner, but the cracked tile floor was dirtier than the water. He pushed Porter toward the sink.

“Clean yourself up,” Bosch said. “What was the favor? You said you did something for Moore. Tell me about it.”

Porter was looking at his blurred reflection in a piece of stainless steel that was probably put in when the management got tired of replacing broken mirrors.

“It won’t stop bleeding, Harry. I think it’s broke.”

“Forget your nose. Tell me what you did.”

“I, uh-look, all he did was tell me that he knew some people that would appreciate it if the stiff behind the restaurant didn’t get ID’d for a while. Just string it out, he said, for a week or two. Christ, there was no ID on the body, anyway. He said I could do the computer runs on the prints cause he knew they wouldn’t bring a match. He said just take my time with it and that these people, the ones he knew, would take care of me. He said I’d get a nice Christmas present. So, I, you know, I went through the motions last week. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with it, anyway. You know, you saw the file. No ID, no wits, no nothing. The guy’d been dead at least six hours before he got dumped there.”

“So what spooked you? What happened Christmas?”

Porter blew his nose into a bouquet of paper towels and this brought more tears to his eyes.

“Yeah, it’s broke. I’m not getting any air through. I gotta go to a clinic, get it set. Anyway… well, nothing happened Christmas. That’s the thing. I mean, Moore ’d been missing for almost a week and I was getting pretty nervous about the whole thing. On Christmas Moore didn’t come, nobody did. Then when I’m walking home from the Lucky my neighbor in the trailer next door says to me about how real sorry she was about that dead cop they found. I said thanks and went inside and put on the radio. I hear it’s Moore and that scares me shitless, Harry. It did.”

Porter soaked a handful of towels and began stroking his bloodstained shirt in a manner that Bosch thought made him look more pathetic than he was. Bosch saw his empty shoulder holder and remembered he had left the gun on the bar. He was reluctant to go back and get it while Porter was talking.

“See, I knew Moore wasn’t no suicide. I don’t care what they’re putting out at Parker. I know he didn’t do himself like that. He was into something. So, I decided, that was enough. I called the union and got a lawyer. I’m outta here, Harry. I’m gonna get cleaned up and go to Vegas, maybe get in with casino security. Millie’s out there with my boy. I wanna be close by.”

Right, Bosch thought. And always be looking over your shoulder. He said, “You’re bleeding again. Wash your face. I’m going to get some coffee. I’m taking you out of here.”

Bosch moved through the door but Porter stopped him.

“Harry, you going to take care of me on this?”

Bosch looked at his damaged face a long moment before saying, “Yeah, I’ll do what I can.”

He walked back out to the bar and signaled the bartender, who was standing all the way down at the other end smoking a cigarette. The man, about fifty, with faded blue tattoos webbing both forearms like extra veins, took his time coming over. By then Bosch had a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

“Give me a couple coffees to go. Black. Put a lot of sugar in one of them.”

“’Bout time you got outta here.” The bartender nodded at the ten-dollar bill. “And I’m taking out for the napkins, too. They’re not for cops who go round beat’n’ on people. That oughta ’bout cover it. You can just leave that on the bar.”

He poured coffee that looked like it had been sitting in the glass pot since Christmas into foam cups. Bosch went to Porter’s spot at the bar and gathered up the Smith thirty-eight and the twenty-three dollars. He moved back to his ten-dollar bill and lit a cigarette.

Not realizing Bosch was now watching, the bartender poured a gagging amount of sugar into both coffees. Bosch let it slide. After snapping plastic covers on the cups, the bartender brought them over to Bosch and tapped one of the tops, a smile that would make a woman frigid on his face.

“This is the one with no-hey, what is this shit?”

The ten Bosch had put down on the bar was now a one. Bosch blew smoke in the bartender’s face as he took the coffees and said, “That’s for the coffee. You can shove the napkins.”

“Just get the fuck out of here,” the bartender said. Then he turned and started walking down to the other end of the bar, where several of the patrons were impatiently holding their empty glasses up. They needed more ice to chill their plasma.

Bosch pushed the door to the restroom open with his foot but didn’t see Porter. He pushed the door to the only stall open and he wasn’t there either. Harry left the room and quickly pushed through the women’s restroom door. No Porter. He followed the hallway around another corner and saw a door marked Exit. He saw drops of blood on the floor. Regretting his play with the bartender and wondering if he’d be able to track Porter by calling hospitals and clinics, he hit the door’s push bar with his hip. It opened only an inch or so. There was something on the other side holding it closed.

Bosch put the coffees down on the floor and put his whole weight on the door. It slowly moved open as the blockage gave way. He squeezed through and saw a Dumpster had been shoved against the door. He was standing in an alley behind Poe’s and the morning light, flowing down the alley from the east, was blinding.

There was an abandoned Toyota, its wheels, hood and one door gone, sitting dead in the alley. There were more Dumpsters and the wind was blowing trash around in a swirl. And there was no sign of Porter.