The Wrong Side of Goodbye

15

Olivia had been right about the ladder. It was a fold-down job attached to the pull-down attic door in the ceiling of the second-floor landing. Bosch was by no means a heavy man. Wiry was the description that favored him his entire life. But as he climbed the wooden ladder, it creaked under his weight and he worried the hinges on the fold would give way and he would fall. Olivia stood by below and nervously watched him. Four steps up he was able to reach and grab on to the framing in the ceiling and safely redistribute some of his weight.

“There should be a pull string for the light up there,” she said.

Bosch made it to the top without the ladder collapsing and swung his hand around in the dark until he captured the pull string. Once the light was on he looked around to get his bearings. Olivia called up from below.

“I haven’t been up there in years, but I think his stuff was in the back right corner.”

Bosch turned that way. It was still dark in the recesses of the attic. Out of his back pocket he pulled the flashlight Olivia had armed him with. He pointed the light into the back right corner, where the roof sloped sharply down, and immediately saw the familiar shape of a military footlocker. He had to crouch to get to it and he bangedhis head on one of the rafters. At that point he lowered himself to a crawl until he reached the locker.

There was a cardboard box on top of the locker. Bosch put the light on it and saw that it was the box Olivia had mentioned her brother sent home from Da Nang. Dominick Santanello was both the sender and addressee. The return address was 1st Medical Battalion, Da Nang. The tape was yellowed and peeling but Bosch could tell the box had been opened and then later closed before being stored. He lifted it off the footlocker and put it to the side.

The footlocker was a basic plywood box painted grayish green and now faded to the point that the grain of the wood was readily visible. There was faded black stenciling across the top panel.

DOMINICK SANTANELLO HM3

Bosch easily interpreted the coding. Only in the military would HM3 stand for hospital corpsman 3rd class. This meant Santanello’s actual rank was petty officer, 3rd class.

He pulled latex gloves from his pocket and put them on before handling either box. There was a single unlocked hasp on the footlocker. Bosch opened it and shone the light onto its contents. An earthy smell immediately caught in Bosch’s nose and he had a momentary flash of the tunnels he had been in over there. The wooden box smelled like Vietnam.

“Did you find it?” Olivia called from below.

Bosch collected himself for a moment before answering.

“Yeah,” he called out. “It’s all here. I might be up here awhile.”

“Okay,” she called back. “Let me know if you need anything. I’m going downstairs to the laundry for a minute.”

The footlocker was neatly packed with folded clothes on top. Bosch carefully lifted each piece out, examined it, and put it on topof the cardboard box he had set to the side. Bosch had served in the Army but he knew that across the board of military services, when the belongings of a KIA were shipped home to a grieving family, they were sanitized first, in order not to embarrass or add to the grief. All magazines and books featuring nudity were removed as well as any photos of Vietnamese or Filipino girls, any sort of drugs and paraphernalia, and any sort of personal journal that might have details of troop movements, mission tactics, or even war crimes.

What was left to return were the clothes and some of the creature comforts. Bosch removed several sets of fatigues-both camo and green-as well as underwear and socks. At the bottom of the box were a stack of paperback novels popular in the late 1960s, including a book that Bosch remembered had been in his own footlocker, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. There was a full carton of Lucky Strikes along with a Zippo lighter with a chevron on it from the Subic Bay naval base in Olongapo, Philippines.

There was a stack of letters with a rubber band that broke the moment Bosch tried to remove it. He looked through the envelopes. All the senders were family members and the return address was the same, the home Bosch was in at that moment. Most of the letters were from Olivia.

Bosch did not feel the need to intrude on these private communications. He assumed they were letters of encouragement, with his loved ones telling Dominick they were praying for his safe return from war.

There was a zippered leather toiletry kit in the box and Bosch carefully lifted it out. More than anything else, this was what he had come for. He unzipped it and spread it open, then put the light beam into it. The bag contained all the usual toiletries: razor, shaving powder, toothbrush, toothpaste, nail clippers, and a brush and comb.

Bosch took nothing out of the bag because he wanted to leave that to the DNA lab to do. The contents were so old he feared he might lose a hair follicle or some microscopic piece of skin or blood by moving it.

By holding the light at an angle, he could see hair in the bristles of the brush. Each was longer than an inch and he guessed that once Santanello had gotten out into the boonies, he had let his hair grow out like a lot of guys did.

He next put the light on an old-fashioned double-edged razor which was held in the kit by a leather strap. It looked clean but Bosch could only see one of its edges. He knew the DNA gold mine would be if there was blood on it. One slight nick with the razor could have left a microdot of blood, which would be all he’d need.

Bosch had no idea whether after almost fifty years DNA could be extracted from hair or saliva dried on a toothbrush or even whiskers in a double-edged razor, but he knew that blood would work. In the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit he had worked cases where dried blood almost as old as this had given up a solid DNA code. Maybe he’d get lucky with what he had in the kit. He would deliver it undisturbed to one of the labs suggested by Mickey Haller. As long as he could persuade Olivia to let him borrow it.

After zipping the bag closed, Bosch put it on the wood floor to his right side. There he would gather everything he intended to ask Olivia for permission to take. He went back to the seemingly empty footlocker and used the light and his fingers to check for a false bottom. He knew from experience that some soldiers would take the bottom panel out of an unused footlocker and put it inside their own box, creating a secret layer under which they could hide drugs, unauthorized weapons, and Playboy magazines.

There was no removable panel. Santanello had hidden nothing in his footlocker. Bosch thought the contents were notable for theirlack of photos and for having no letters from people other than family.

Bosch carefully repacked the footlocker and pulled the top over to close it. When he did so, the beam from the flashlight caught something. He studied the inside top of the box closely and by holding the light at an oblique angle he could see several lines of discoloration on the wood. He realized these were marks created by adhesive that had been left on the surface after tape had been removed. Santanello must have at one time taped things-most likely photographs-to the inside of his footlocker.

It was not unusual. The inside of a footlocker was often used like the inside of a high school locker. Bosch recalled many soldiers who taped photos of girlfriends, wives, and children inside their boxes. Sometimes signs, sometimes drawings sent by their kids, and sometimes centerfolds.

It was unknown whether Santanello had cleared these off or whether the Navy’s KIA unit did so while sanitizing his belongings, but it made Bosch all the more interested in what was in the box Santanello had sent home. He now opened it up and put the light on its contents.

The box apparently contained the things that mattered most to Santanello and that he wanted to make sure got to Oxnard as he drew close to completing his tour of duty. On top were two sets of folded civvies-non-uniform clothing that would have been unauthorized for Santanello to have in Vietnam. These included jeans, chinos, collared shirts, and black socks. Beneath the clothes were a pair of Converse sneakers and a pair of shiny black boots. Having civvies was unauthorized but commonplace. It was no secret that wearing uniforms while traveling home after completing a tour of duty or while on leave in foreign cities could cause confrontations with civilians because of the unpopularity of the war around the world.

But Bosch also knew that there was another purpose to having civilian clothes. In a one-year tour, a soldier was guaranteed a week’s leave at six months and a standby leave at nine-where they waited on the possibility of an open seat on a departing plane. There were five official leave destinations and none were in mainland USA because returning to the mainland was not authorized. But a soldier who had civvies could change in a hotel room in Honolulu and then go back to the airport to hop a flight to L.A. or San Francisco-as long as he avoided the MPs who were on the lookout in the airport for just such subterfuge. It was another reason to grow your hair out in the boonies, as Santanello had apparently done. A guy in civvies at the airport in Honolulu could easily be spotted by the MPs if he had clean sidewalls and a military cut. Long hair provided cover.

Bosch had done it himself twice during his time in-country, returning to L.A. to spend five days with a girlfriend in 1969 and then returning again six months later, even though there was no girlfriend anymore. Santanello had been killed more than eleven months into his tour of Vietnam. That meant he had gotten at least one leave and probably two. Maybe he had snuck back to California.

Beneath the clothing Bosch found a compact cassette tape player and a camera, both in original boxes, the tape player marked with a price tag from the PX in Da Nang. Next to these were two neat rows of cassette cases lined spine out on the bottom of the box. There was another carton of Lucky Strikes and another Zippo lighter, this one used and showing the Navy Corpsman chevron on the side. There was a well-worn copy of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and he saw several beaded necklaces and other souvenirs bought at different places where Santanello had been posted during his Navy service.

Bosch experienced a sense of déjà vu as he looked through the contents. He had also read Tolkien in Vietnam. It was a popular book among combat veterans, a rich fantasy about another world that took them away from the reality of where they were and what they were doing. Bosch studied the names of the bands and performers on the plastic cassette cases and remembered hearing the same music while in Vietnam: Hendrix, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, and others.

Along with that familiarity came his experience and knowledge of how things worked in Southeast Asia. The same Vietnamese girls who sold the necklaces at the White Elephant landing docks at Da Nang also sold pre-rolled joints in ten packs that fit perfectly into cigarette packs for easy transport into the bush. If you wanted fifty joints you bought a Coke can with a false top. Use of marijuana was widespread and open, the popular view being “What’s the worst that can happen if I get caught, they send me to Vietnam?”

Bosch opened the carton of Lucky Strikes now and pulled out a pack. As he suspected, it contained ten expertly rolled joints neatly wrapped in foil for freshness. He assumed each of the packs in the carton would be the same. Santanello had likely taken up a regular habit of getting high while in the service and wanted to make sure he had an ample supply to bridge his return home.

It was all mildly interesting to Bosch because it drew on his own memories of his time in Vietnam, but he didn’t readily see anything in the box that might lead him further toward confirming Whitney Vance’s paternity of Dominick Santanello. That was his purpose here-confirmation of paternity. If he was going to report to Vance that his bloodline had ended in a helo crash in the Tay Ninh Province, then he had to make every effort to be sure he was telling the old man the truth.

He repacked the cigarette carton and put it to the side. He liftedout the boxes containing the camera and the cassette recorder next, and just as he was wondering where the photos were that went with the camera, he saw that the bottom of the box was spread with a cache of black-and-white photos and envelopes containing strips of film negatives. The photos appeared to be well preserved because they had not been exposed to light in decades.

He removed the two rows of cassette tapes next so he would be able to access the photos. He wondered if Santanello had purposely tried to hide them from his family in case they opened the box before he arrived home. Bosch pushed them into a single stack and then brought them out of the box.

There were forty-two photos in all and they ran the gamut of Vietnam experiences. There were shots from the bush, shots of Vietnamese girls at the White Elephant, shots taken on the hospital ship Bosch recognized as the Sanctuary, and, ironically, shots taken from helicopters flying over the bush and the seemingly endless grids of rice paddies.

Bosch had pushed the stack together in an order that was neither chronological nor thematic. It was a hodgepodge of images that again felt all too familiar. But those misty feelings crystallized into a hard memory when he came across three consecutive shots of the upper deck of the Sanctuary crowded with a couple hundred wounded servicemen for a Christmas Eve show featuring Bob Hope and Connie Stevens. In the first photo the two performers stood side by side, Stevens’s mouth open in song, the faces of the soldiers in the front row in rapt attention. The second photo focused on the crowd at the point of the bow, Monkey Mountain seen in the distance across the water. The third photo showed Hope waving good-bye to a standing ovation at the end of the show.

Bosch had been there. Wounded by a bamboo spear in a tunnel, he had been treated on the Sanctuary for four weeks inDecember 1969. The wound itself had healed quickly but the infection it had brought into his body had been more resistant. He’d lost twenty pounds off his already lean frame during treatment on the hospital ship but by the last week of the month he had recovered his health enough to receive Return to Duty orders for the day after Christmas.

Hope and his troupe had been scheduled for weeks and Bosch, like everybody else on board, had been looking forward to seeing the legendary entertainer and his featured guest, Stevens, a well-known actress and singer Bosch recognized from appearances on the television shows Hawaiian Eye and 77 Sunset Strip.

But on Christmas Eve high winds and heavy seas swept across the South China Sea and were having their way with the ship. The men on board started to gather on the upper deck, when four helicopters carrying Hope, his entertainers, and the band that would back them approached the fantail. But as the choppers got close it was determined that landing on the unstable ship was too risky. The Sanctuary had been built before helicopters had even been invented. A small landing pad built on the fantail looked like a moving postage stamp from the air.

The men watched as the helicopters turned and headed back toward Da Nang. A communal groan moved through the crowd. The men slowly started moving off deck and back to their berths when someone looked back toward Da Nang and yelled, “Wait- they’re coming back!”

He was only partially right. One of the four helicopters had turned again and was coming back to the Sanctuary. Its pilot made landing after three tense attempts and out of the sliding door climbed Bob Hope, along with Connie Stevens, Neil Armstrong, and a jazz saxophonist named Quentin McKinzie.

The roar that went up from the crowd returning to the deckcould put an electric surge down Bosch’s spine when he thought about it almost fifty years later. They had no backup band and no backup singers, but Hope and company had told the pilot to turn that slick around and land it. Hell, Neil Armstrong had landed on the fucking moon five months earlier; how hard could it be to put a chopper down on a boat?

Armstrong offered words of encouragement to the troops and McKinzie laid down some solo licks on his axe. Hope told his one-liners and Stevens sang a cappella, breaking hearts with a slow rendition of the Judy Collins hit “Both Sides Now.” Bosch remembered it as one of his best days as a soldier.

Years later as an LAPD detective Bosch was called upon to provide plainclothes security at the Shubert Theatre for the West Coast premiere of a musical called Mamma Mia! A huge VIP turnout was expected, and the LAPD was asked to supplement the theater’s own security. Standing in the front lobby, his eyes moving across faces and hands, Bosch suddenly saw Connie Stevens among the VIPs. Like a stalker he moved through the crowd toward her. He took his badge off his belt and palmed it in case he needed it to cut through and get closer. But he got to her without issue and when there was a pause in her conversations he said, “Ms. Stevens?”

She looked at him and he tried to tell the story. That he was there that day on the Sanctuary when she and Bob Hope and the others had made the pilot turn that helicopter around. He wanted to tell her what it had meant then and now but something caught in his throat and words were difficult. All he could manage to say was “Christmas Eve, 1969. Hospital ship.”

She looked at him for a moment and understood, then just pulled him into a hug. She whispered into his ear, “The Sanctuary. You made it home.”

Bosch nodded and they separated. Without thinking he put hisbadge into her hand. He then moved away, back into the crowd to do his job. He caught several weeks of hell from the other detectives at Hollywood Division after he reported losing his badge. But he remembered seeing Connie Stevens at the Shubert as one of his best days as a cop.

“Still doin’ all right up there?”

Bosch came out of the memory, his eyes still on the photograph of the crowd on the Sanctuary’s upper deck.

“Yes,” he called out. “Almost done.”

He went back to studying the photo. He knew he was in the crowd somewhere but he couldn’t find his own face. He looked through all of Santanello’s photos once more, knowing that Dominick was in none of them because he had been behind the camera.

Finally, Bosch held and studied one photo that was a time-lapse shot showing the silhouette of Monkey Mountain lit from behind by white phosphorous flares during a night battle. He remembered on the Sanctuary how people would line up on deck to watch the light show when the communication hub on top of the mountain was frequently attacked.

Bosch’s conclusion was that Santanello had been a talented photographer and maybe would have had a professional career at it had he survived the war. Harry could have looked at the photos all day but he put them aside now to finish his search of the dead soldier’s belongings.

He next opened the red box containing Santanello’s camera. It was a Leica M4, a compact camera that could have fit in one of the thigh pockets of his fatigues. It had a black body to make it less reflective when he was out in the bush. Bosch checked the rest of the box and there was only an instruction manual.

Bosch knew Leicas were expensive cameras, so he assumed that Santanello was serious about his photography. Yet there weren’tmany printed photos in the box. He checked the envelopes containing the negative strips and determined that there were far more frames of developed film than there were prints. He figured Santanello must not have had the money or access to print out all of his work while in Vietnam. He probably planned to do that when he got back home to the States.

The last thing Bosch did was open the back of the camera to see if Santanello had used the interior space to smuggle more drugs. Instead he found a coil of film around the take-up spool. At first he thought he had opened the camera on unexposed film, but as he unfurled the coil, he realized that it was a strip of developed negatives that had been rolled up and then secreted in the camera.

The strip was brittle and it cracked and broke apart in his hands as he attempted to unfurl it and look at the images. He held one piece of three shots up to the flashlight beam. He saw that each shot was a photo of a woman with what looked like a mountain behind her.

And she was holding a baby.