The Wrong Side of Goodbye

16

Bosch drove out to Burbank in the morning and into a commercial industrial area near the airport and the Valhalla Memorial Park. A couple blocks from the cemetery he pulled into the lot in front of Flashpoint Graphix. He had called ahead and was expected.

Flashpoint was a sprawling business that created large-scale photo-illustrations for billboards, buildings, buses, and all other advertising media. On any day its fine work could be seen across a spectrum of locations in Los Angeles and beyond. There wasn’t an angle anywhere on the Sunset Strip that didn’t include a Flashpoint creation. And it was all run by a man named Guy Claudy, who in an earlier life had been a forensic photographer for the LAPD. Bosch and Claudy had worked a number of crime scenes together in the ’80s and ’90s, before Claudy left to open his own photography and graphics business. The two had stayed in touch over the years, usually taking in a Dodgers game or two each season, and when Bosch called him that morning to ask a favor, Claudy said he should come on over.

Dressed casually in jeans and a Tommy Bahama shirt, Claudy met Bosch in a nondescript reception area-Flashpoint didn’t rely on walk-in business-and led him back to a more opulent but notover-the-top office where the walls were hung with framed photos from the Dodgers’ glory years. Bosch knew without asking that Claudy had taken the photos during a short stint as team photographer. One showed the pitcher Fernando Valenzuela exulting from the mound. The glasses he wore allowed Bosch to place the shot- toward the end of the storied pitcher’s career. He pointed at the frame.

“The no-hitter,” he said. “The Cardinals, 1990.”

“Yep,” Claudy said. “Good memory.”

“I remember I was on a surveillance in Echo Park. Up on White Knoll. It was me and Frankie Sheehan-you remember the Doll-maker case?”

“Of course. You got the guy.”

“Yeah, well, that night we were watching a different guy up on White Knoll and we could see the stadium from there and we listened to Vinny call the no-hitter. We could hear the broadcast coming out of all the open windows of the houses. I wanted to bail out on the surveillance and go over for the last inning. You know, badge our way into the stadium and watch. But we stayed put and listened to Vinny. I remember it ended on a double-play.”

“Yep, and I wasn’t expecting that-Guerrero hitting into a double. I almost didn’t get the shot because I was reloading. And, man, what are we going to do now without Vinny?”

It was a reference to the retirement of Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ venerable announcer who had called the team’s games since 1950- an incredibly long record going all the way back to when they were the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “He might’ve started in Brooklyn but he’s the voice of this city. It won’t be the same without him.”

They somberly sat down on either side of a desk and Bosch tried to change the subject.

“So this is a big place you’ve got here,” he said, thoroughly impressed by how large his friend’s business was. “I had no idea.”

“Forty thousand square feet-that’s the size of a Best Buy,” Claudy said. “And we need more room. But you know what? I still miss the crime stuff. Tell me you have some crime stuff for me to do.”

Bosch smiled.

“Well, I’ve got a mystery but I don’t think there’s any crime involved.”

“Mystery is good. I’ll take mystery. What’ve you got?”

Bosch handed him the envelope he had carried in from the car. It contained the negatives that included the shot of the woman and the baby. He had shown them to Olivia Macdonald but she had no idea who the woman or child was. Just as intrigued as Harry, she had allowed him to take the envelope along with the toiletries kit.

“I’m on a private case,” Bosch said. “And I found these negatives. They’re almost fifty years old and they’ve been in an attic without air-conditioning or heat. On top of that they’re damaged-they cracked and broke apart in my hand when I found them. I want to know what you can do with them.”

Claudy opened the envelope and poured its contents out on his desk. He leaned over and looked straight down at the broken pieces of the negative strip without touching them.

“Some of them look like they show a woman in front of a mountaintop,” Bosch said. “I’m interested in all of it, but in those the most. The woman. I think the location is someplace in Vietnam.”

“Yeah, you have some cupping here. Some cracking. It’s Fuji film.”

“Meaning what?”

“It usually holds up pretty well. Who is she?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want to see her. And the baby she’s holding.”

Claudy said, “Okay. I think I can do something with this. My guys in the lab can. We’ll rewash and re-dry them. Then we’ll print. I see some fingerprints and they might be set after so long.”

Bosch considered that. His assumption was that Santanello took the shots. They were with his camera and other negatives taken by him. Why would someone send developed negatives to a soldier in Vietnam? But if it was ever questioned, the fingerprints might be useful.

“What’s your time frame?” Claudy asked.

“Yesterday,” Bosch said.

Claudy smiled.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re Hurry-Up-Harry.”

Bosch smiled back and nodded. Nobody had called him that since Claudy had left the department.

“So give me an hour,” Claudy said. “You can go to our break room and make a Nespresso.”

“I hate those things,” Bosch replied.

“Okay, then go take a walk in the cemetery. More your style anyway. One hour.”

“One hour.”

Bosch stood up.

“Give my regards to Oliver Hardy,” Claudy said. “He’s in there.”

“Will do,” Bosch said.

Bosch left Flashpoint and walked down Valhalla Drive. It was only when he entered the cemetery by a huge memorial that he remembered that in his research of Whitney Vance he had read that Vance’s father was buried here. Close to Caltech and under the jet path of Bob Hope Airport, the cemetery was the final resting place for a variety of aviation pioneers, designers, pilots, and barnstormers. They were interred or memorialized in and around a tall domed structure called the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine toAviation. Bosch found Nelson Vance’s memorial plaque on the tiled floor of the shrine.

NELSON VANCE

Visionary Air Pioneer

Earliest Advocate of U.S. Air Power, Whose Prophetic Vision

and Leadership Was a Primary Factor in American

Supremacy in the Air in War and Peace

Bosch noticed that there was a space next to the memorial plaque for another interment and wondered if this was already on reserve as Whitney Vance’s final destination.

Bosch wandered out of the shrine and over to the memorial to the astronauts lost in two separate space shuttle disasters. He then looked across one of the green lawns and saw the start of a burial service near one of the big fountains. He decided not to venture further into the cemetery, a tourist amid the grief, and headed back to Flashpoint without searching for the grave of the heavier half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy.

Claudy was ready for him when Bosch returned. He was ushered into a drying room in the lab where nine 8 x 10 black-and-white prints were clipped to a plastic board. The photos were still wet with developing fluids, and a lab tech was just finishing using a squeegee to remove the excess. The exterior framing was seen on some of the prints, and some showed the fingerprints Claudy had warned about. Some of the shots were completely blown out by light exposure and others exhibited varying degrees of damage to the negative. But there were three shots that were at least 90 percent intact. And one of these was a shot of the woman and child.

The first thing Bosch realized was that he had been wrong aboutthe woman standing in front of a mountain in Vietnam. It was no mountainside and it was not Vietnam. It was the recognizable roofline of the Hotel del Coronado down near San Diego. Once Bosch registered the location, he moved in close to study the woman and the baby. The woman was Latina and Bosch could see a ribbon in the baby’s hair. A girl, no more than a month or two old.

The woman’s mouth was open in a smile showing unbridled happiness. Bosch studied her eyes and the happy light that was in them. There was love in those eyes. For the baby. For the person behind the camera.

The other photos were full frames and fragments from a series of shots taken on the beach behind the del Coronado. Shots of the woman, shots of the baby, shots of the sparkling waves.

“Does it help?” Claudy asked.

He was standing behind Bosch, not getting in the way as Harry studied the prints.

“I think so,” Bosch said. “Yeah.”

He considered the totality of the circumstances. The photos and their subjects were important enough to Dominick Santanello for him to attempt to hide them as he sent his property home from Vietnam. The question was why. Was this his child? Did he have a secret family that his family in Oxnard knew nothing about? If so, why the secrecy? He looked closely at the woman in the photo. She seemed to be in her mid- to late twenties. Dominick would not yet have been twenty. Was the relationship with an older woman the reason he didn’t tell his parents and sister?

Another question was about the location. The photos were taken during a trip to the beach either at or near the Hotel del Coronado. When was this? And why was a strip of negatives from a photo shoot that very clearly took place in the States included in property sent home from Vietnam?

Bosch scanned the images again, looking for anything that would help place the shots in time. He saw nothing.

“For what it’s worth, the guy was good,” Claudy said. “Had a good eye.”

Bosch agreed.

“Is he dead?” Claudy asked.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “Never made it home from Vietnam.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. I saw some of his other work. From the bush. From his missions.”

“I’d love to see it. Maybe there’s something that could be done with it.”

Bosch nodded but was concentrating on the photos in front of him.

“You can’t tell when these photos were taken, can you?” he asked.

“No, there was no time stamp on the film,” Claudy said. “Not really done back then.”

Bosch expected that to be the case.

“But what I can tell you is when the film was made,” Claudy added. “Down to a three-month period. Fuji coded their film stock by production cycle.”

Bosch turned around and looked at Claudy.

“Show me.”

Claudy came forward and went to one of the prints made from a broken negative. The negative’s frame was part of the print. Claudy pointed to a series of letters and numbers in the frame.

“They marked the film by year and three-month manufacturing run. You see here? This is it.”

He pointed to a section of the coding: 70-AJ.

“This film was made between April and June of 1970,” he said.

Bosch considered the information.

“But it could have been used any time after that, right?” he asked.

“Right,” Claudy said. “It only marks when it was made, not when it was used in a camera.”

Something didn’t add up about that. The film was manufactured as early as April of 1970 and the photographer, Dominick Santanello, was killed in December 1970. He could have easily bought and used the film sometime in the eight intervening months, then sent it home with his belongings.

“You know where that is, right?” Claudy asked.

“Yeah, the del Coronado,” Bosch said.

“Sure hasn’t changed much.”

“Yeah.”

Bosch stared at the photo of mother and child again and then he got it. He understood.

Dominick Santanello trained down in the San Diego area in 1969 but he would have been shipped overseas before the end of the year. Bosch was looking at photos taken in San Diego in April 1970 at the very earliest and that was well after Santanello was in Vietnam.

“He came back,” Bosch said.

“What?” Claudy asked.

Bosch didn’t answer. He was riding the wave. Things were cascading, coming together. The civvies in the box, the long hair in the bristles of the brush, the photos removed from the inside of the footlocker, and the hidden photos of the baby on the beach. Santanello had made an unauthorized trip back to the States. He hid the photo negatives because they were proof of his crime. He had risked court-martial and the stockade to see his girlfriend.

And his newborn daughter.

Bosch now knew. There was an heir somewhere out there. Born in 1970. Whitney Vance had a granddaughter. Bosch was sure of it.