The Wrong Side of Goodbye

14

Bosch started Thursday morning shopping online. He studied an array of GPS detectors and jammers and chose a combo device that did both. It cost him two hundred dollars with two-day shipping.

He next went to the phone to call an NCIS investigator at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. He had Gary McIntyre’s name and number on a list of contacts he took with him when he left the LAPD. McIntyre was a cooperative straight shooter that Bosch had worked with on at least three prior cases as a homicide investigator. He was now hoping to trade on that experience and mutual trust to obtain a copy of Dominick Santanello’s service package-the file containing all records of his military service, ranging from his training history to the location of every base he was ever stationed at, medals he was awarded, his leave and disciplinary history, and the summary report on his death in combat.

The military records archive was routinely on the checklist of cold case investigation because of how frequently military service played a part in people’s lives. It was a good way to fill in details on victims, suspects, and witnesses. In this case Bosch already knew the military angle regarding Santanello but he would be able to layer it with a deeper history. His investigation was essentially at an endand he was now looking to put a full report together for Whitney Vance as well as possibly find a way to make a DNA confirmation that Dominick Santanello was his son. If nothing else, Bosch prided himself on being thorough and complete in his work.

The files were made available to family members and their representatives but Bosch was not in a position to reveal he was working for Whitney Vance. He could play the law enforcement card but didn’t want that blowing back on him should McIntyre check to see if his request was part of an official investigation by the SFPD. So instead he was up front with McIntyre. He said he was calling about a case he had as a private investigator where he was trying to confirm Santanello as the son of a client whose name he could not reveal. He told McIntyre that he had a meeting later with Santanello’s adoptive sister and he might be able to swing a permission letter from her if needed.

McIntyre told Bosch not to sweat it. He appreciated the honesty and would trust him. He said he needed a day or two to track down the file in question and then make a digital copy of it. He promised to make return contact when he was ready to send and Bosch could have until then to come up with a family permission letter. Bosch thanked him and said he looked forward to his call.

Bosch’s appointment with Olivia Macdonald was not until 1 p.m., so he had the rest of the morning to review case notes and prepare. One thing he was already charged about was that the address she had given him for her home matched the address listed for the parents of Dominick Santanello on his birth certificate. This meant she was living in the home where her adopted brother had grown up. It might be a long shot but it put the chances of finding a DNA source into the realm of possibility.

Bosch then made a call to defense attorney Mickey Haller, his half brother, to ask if he had a referral for a private lab that wouldbe quick, discreet, and reliable in making a DNA comparison, should he come up with a source. Up until this point, Bosch had only worked DNA cases as a cop and had used his department’s lab and resources to get comparisons done.

“I’ve got a couple I use-both fast and reliable,” Haller said. “Let me guess, Maddie finally figured out she’s too smart to have been your kid. Now you’re scrambling to prove she is.”

“Funny,” Bosch said.

“Well, then, is it for a case? A private case?”

“Something like that. I can’t talk about it but I do have you to thank for it. The client wanted me because of that bit of business last year in West Hollywood.”

The case that Whitney Vance had referenced during the interview involved a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and a couple of corrupt LAPD cops. It had ended badly for them in West Hollywood but it had begun with Bosch working a case for Haller.

“Then it sounds like I’m due a commission on any funds you collect on this thing, Harry,” Haller said.

“Doesn’t sound like that to me,” Bosch said. “But if you hook me up with a DNA lab, there might be something in it for you down the line.”

“I’ll send you an e-mail, broheim.”

“Thanks, broheim.”

Bosch left the house at 11:30 so he would have time to grab something to eat on his way to Oxnard. Out on the street he checked in all directions for surveillance before hiking a block up to the spot where he had parked the rented Cherokee. He ate tacos at Poquito Más at the bottom of the hill and then jumped onto the 101 and followed it west across the Valley and into Ventura County.

Oxnard was the biggest city in Ventura County. Its unattractive name was that of a sugar beet farmer who built a processing plantin the settlement in the late nineteenth century. The city totally surrounded Port Hueneme, where there was a small U.S. Navy base. One of the questions Bosch planned to ask Olivia Macdonald was whether proximity to the base was what lured her brother into enlisting in the Navy.

Traffic was reasonable and Bosch got to Oxnard early. He used the time to drive around the port and then along Hollywood Beach, a strip of homes on the Pacific side of the port where the streets were named La Brea and Sunset and Los Feliz after the well-known boulevards of Tinseltown.

He pulled up in front of Olivia Macdonald’s house right on time. It was in an older, middle-class neighborhood of neatly kept California bungalows. She was waiting for Bosch in a chair on the front porch. He guessed that they were about the same age and he could see that, like her adoptive brother, it was likely she had both white and Latina origins. She had hair that was as white as snow and she was dressed in faded jeans and a white blouse.

“Hello, I’m Harry Bosch,” he said.

He reached his hand down to her and she shook it.

“Olivia,” she said. “Please have a seat.”

Bosch sat in a wicker chair across a small glass-topped table from her. There was a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the table and he accepted her offer of a glass just to be cordial. He saw a manila envelope on the table that had Do Not Bend handwritten on it and assumed it contained photos.

“So,” she said, after pouring two glasses. “You want to know about my brother. My first question is, who is it you work for?”

Bosch knew it would begin this way. He also knew that how he answered this question would determine how much cooperation and information he would get from her.

“Well, Olivia, that’s the awkward part,” he said. “I was hired bya man who wanted to find out if he had a child back in 1951. But part of the deal was that I had to agree to the strictest confidence and not reveal who my employer was to anyone until he released me from that promise. So I’m sort of caught in the middle here. It’s a catch-22 thing. I can’t tell you who hired me until I can confirm that your brother was his son. You don’t want to talk to me until I tell you who hired me.”

“Well, how will you confirm it?” she said, waving a hand helplessly. “Nicky’s been dead since 1970.”

Bosch sensed an opening.

“There are ways. This is the house where he grew up, isn’t it?”

“How do you know that?”

“The same address is on his birth certificate. The one that was filed after he was adopted. There might be something here I can use. Was his bedroom left intact?”

“What? No, that’s weird. Besides I raised three kids in this house after I moved back. We didn’t have room to turn his bedroom into a museum. Nicky’s stuff, what’s left of it, is up in the attic.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know. His war stuff. The things he sent back and then what they sent back after he got killed. My parents kept it all and after I moved in here I shoved it all up there. I wasn’t interested in it but my mother made me promise not to throw it away.”

Bosch nodded. He had to find a way to get up into the attic.

“Are your parents alive?” he asked.

“My father died twenty-five years ago. My mother’s alive but she doesn’t know what day it is or who she is anymore. She’s at a facility where they take good care of her. It’s just me here now. Divorced, kids grown and out on their own.”

Bosch had gotten her talking without her coming back to her demand to know who his employer was. He knew he had to keep thatgoing and drive the conversation back around to the attic and what was up there.

“So you said on the phone that your brother knew he was adopted.”

“Yes, he did,” she said. “We both did.”

“Were you also born at St. Helen’s?”

She nodded.

“I came first,” she said. “My adoptive parents were white and I obviously was brown. It was very white out here back then and they thought it would be good for me to have a sibling who was the same. So they went back to St. Helen’s and got Dominick.”

“You said your brother knew his birth mother’s name. Vibiana. How did he know that? That was usually kept from everybody- at least back then.”

“You’re right, it was. I never knew my mother’s name or what the story was there. When Nicky was born he was already set to go to my parents. They were waiting for him. But he was sick and the doctors wanted him to stay with his mother for a while and have her milk. It was something like that.”

“And so your parents met her.”

“Exactly. For a few days they visited and spent some time with her, I guess. Later on, when we were growing up, it was pretty obvious we didn’t look like our two Italian-American parents, so we asked questions. They told us we were adopted and the only thing they knew was that Nicky’s mother was named Vibiana, because they met her before she gave him up.”

It didn’t appear that Dominick and Olivia were told the full story about what had happened to Vibiana, whether their adoptive parents knew it or not.

“Do you know if your brother ever tried to find his mother and father when he was growing up?”

“Not that I know of. We knew what that place was, St. Helen’s. It’s where babies were born that were unwanted. I never tried to find my naturals. I didn’t care. I don’t think Nicky did either.”

Bosch noted a slight tone of bitterness in her voice. More than sixty years later she clearly harbored an animosity toward the parents who gave her up. He knew it would not serve him here to tell her he didn’t agree that all the babies were unwanted at St. Helen’s. Some mothers, maybe all of them back then, had no choice in the matter.

He decided to move the conversation in a new direction. He took a drink of iced tea, complimented her on it, and then nodded at the envelope on the table.

“Are those photos?” he asked.

“I thought you might want to see him,” she said. “There’s also a story about him from the paper.”

She opened the envelope and passed Bosch a stack of photos and a folded newspaper clipping. They had all faded and yellowed over time.

He looked at the clipping first, carefully unfolding it so it wouldn’t split along the crease. It was impossible to determine what newspaper it had come from but the contents of the story made it seem very local. The headline read, “Oxnard Athlete Killed in Vietnam” and the story confirmed much of what Bosch had already deduced. Santanello was killed when he and four Marines were returning from a mission in the Tay Ninh Province. The helicopter they were in was hit by sniper fire and crashed in a rice paddy. The story said Santanello was an all-around athlete who had played varsity football, basketball, and baseball at Oxnard High. The story quoted Santanello’s mother as saying her son had been very proud to serve his country despite the antiwar sentiment back home at the time.

Bosch refolded the clipping and handed it back to Olivia. He then took up the photos. They appeared to be in chronological order,showing Dominick as a boy growing into a teenager. There were shots of him at the beach, playing basketball, riding a bike. There was a photo of him in a baseball uniform and another of him and a girl in formal wear. A family shot included him with his sister and adoptive parents. He studied Olivia as a young girl. She was pretty and she and Dominick looked like real siblings. Their complexions, eyes, and hair color were a full match.

The last photo in the stack showed Dominick in his Navy dungarees, Dixie Cup sailor’s cap tilted back, his hair high and tight with sidewalls. He was standing with hands on hips, with a manicured green field behind him. It didn’t look like Vietnam to Bosch and the smile was the kind of careless, naive expression worn by someone who had not yet gotten his first taste of war. Bosch guessed it was from basic training.

“I love that photo,” Olivia said. “It’s so Nick.”

“Where did he go for basic?” Bosch asked.

“San Diego area. Hospital corps school at Balboa, then combat training and the field medical school at Pendleton.”

“Did you ever go down there and see him?”

“Only one time, when we went down for his graduation from hospital school. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

Bosch glanced down at the photo. He noticed something and looked closer. The shirt Santanello wore was very wrinkled from being hand-washed and wrung out, so it was difficult to read, but the name stenciled on the shirt over the pocket looked like it said Lewis, not Santanello.

“The name on the shirt is-”

“Lewis. Yeah, that’s why he’s smiling like that. He switched shirts with a friend of his named Lewis who couldn’t pass a swim test. They all wore the same thing, they all had the same haircut. The only way to tell them apart was the names stenciled on the shirts, and that’s allthe training people checked off when they did testing. So Lewis didn’t know how to swim and Nicky went over to the pool wearing his shirt. He got checked in under his name and took the test for him.”

She laughed. Bosch nodded and smiled. A typical military service story, right down to the guy in the Navy who didn’t know how to swim.

“So what made Dominick enlist?” he asked. “And why the Navy? Why did he want to be a corpsman?”

The smile left on her face from the Lewis story disappeared.

“Oh my god, he made such a mistake,” Olivia said. “He was young and dumb and he paid for it with his life.”

She explained that her brother turned eighteen in January of his senior year of high school. That made him old compared with his classmates. As was required then during the war, he presented himself to Selective Services for his pre-draft physical. Five months later when he graduated high school, he got his draft card and saw that he had been classified as 1A, meaning he was draft eligible and likely to go to Southeast Asia.

“This was before the draft lottery,” she said. “The way it worked was the older guys went first and he was one of the older guys coming out of high school. He knew he was going to get drafted- it was just a matter of time-so he joined up so he would have a choice and he went into the Navy. He’d had a summer job over by the base at Hueneme and always liked the Navy guys who came in. He thought they were cool.”

“He wasn’t going to go to college?” he asked. “It would have been a deferment and the war was winding down by ’69. Nixon was cutting back troops.”

Olivia shook her head.

“No, no college. He was very smart but he just didn’t like school. Had no patience for it. He liked movies and sports and photography.I think he also wanted to figure things out a little bit. Our father sold refrigerators. There was no money for college.”

Those last words-no money-echoed in Bosch’s mind. If Whitney Vance had owned up to his responsibility and raised and paid for his child, then there would have been money and his son wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Vietnam. He tried to break away from such thoughts and concentrate on the interview.

“He wanted to be a corpsman-a medic?” he asked.

“That’s another story,” Olivia said. “When he enlisted he got to choose which way he wanted to go. He was torn. There was something about him; he wanted to get close but not that close, you know? There was a list of the different things you could do and he told them he wanted to be a journalist/photographer or a combat medic because he thought it would get him to, you know, where the action was but he wouldn’t have to be killing people right and left.”

Bosch had known many of the same type over there. Guys who wanted to be in battle without having to be in battle. Most of the grunts were only nineteen or twenty years old. It was a time to prove who you were, what you could do.

“So they made him a corpsman and trained him for battle,” Olivia said. “His first assignment overseas was on the hospital ship, but that was just to get his feet wet. He was there for, like, three or four months and then they put him with the Marines and he was in combat…And of course, he got shot down.”

She finished the story in a matter-of-fact tone. It was almost fifty years old and she had probably told it and thought about it ten thousand times. It was family history now and the emotion had gone out of it.

“So sad,” she said then. “He only had a couple weeks left over there. He sent a letter saying he would be home by Christmas. But he didn’t make it.”

Her tone had turned somber and Bosch thought maybe he had too quickly come to the conclusion that there was no longer an emotional burden on her. He took another drink of iced tea before asking the next question.

“You mentioned that some of his stuff from over there was sent back. It’s all up in the attic?”

She nodded.

“A couple boxes. Nicky sent stuff home because he was about to get out. He was a short-timer and then the Navy sent back his footlocker too. My parents kept it all and I put it up there. I didn’t like looking at it, to tell you the truth. It was just a bad reminder.”

Despite her feelings about her brother’s war things, Bosch grew nervous with the excitement of possibility.

“Olivia,” he said. “Can I go up to the attic and look at his things?”

She made a face like he had crossed some line with the question.

“Why?”

Bosch leaned forward across the table. He knew he needed to be sincere. He needed to get up into that attic.

“Because it might help me. I’m looking for something that might connect him to the man who hired me.”

“You mean like DNA in stuff that old?”

“It’s possible. And it’s because I was over there when I was your brother’s age. As I said on the memorial site, I was even on the same hospital ship, maybe even at the same time he was. It will just help me to look at his things. Not just for the case. For me too.”

She thought a moment before answering.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m not going up in that attic. The ladder’s way too rickety and I’d be scared I’d fall off. If you want to go up, you can, but it will be by yourself.”

“That’s okay,” Bosch said. “Thank you, Olivia.”

He finished his iced tea and stood up.