The Wrong Side of Goodbye

36

On Wednesday morning Bosch was at the District Attorney’s Office as soon as the doors opened. Because it was a high profile case he had arranged to come in for an appointment to file charges against Dockweiler. Rather than going to an intake prosecutor who would file the case and then pass it on, never to see it again, the Dockweiler prosecution was assigned from the start to a veteran trial attorney named Dante Corvalis. Bosch had never worked with Corvalis previously but knew of him by reputation- his nickname in the courthouse was “The Undefeated” because he had never lost a case.

The process of filing went smoothly, with Corvalis only rejecting Bosch’s request for charges relating to the property crimes Dockweiler had committed. The prosecutor explained that it would already be a complicated case with the testimony of multiple victims and DNA analysis to explain to the jury. There was no need to spend prep time or court time on Dockweiler’s theft of tools, concrete, and a manhole cover from the Department of Public Works. That, simply, was small-time stuff that might create jury backlash.

“It’s the effect of TV,” Corvalis said. “Every trial you see on the box lasts an hour. Juries on real cases get impatient. So you can’t overprosecute a case. And the bottom line is, we don’t need it. We’ve gotenough here to put him away forever. And we will. So let’s forget about the manhole cover-except for when you testify about finding Bella. It will be a nice detail to draw out in your testimony.”

Bosch couldn’t argue the point. He was happy just to have one of the office’s major players on the case from the start. Bosch and Corvalis agreed to set a schedule of meeting every Tuesday to discuss preparations for the case.

Bosch was out of the Foltz Building by ten. Rather than go to his car, he walked down Temple and then crossed over the 101 freeway at Main Street. He walked through Paseo de la Plaza Park and then down Olvera Street through the Mexican bazaar, assuring himself that he could not be followed by car.

At the end of the long passage through the souvenir stalls he turned and looked back to see if he had a tail on foot. Satisfied after several minutes that he was alone, he continued antisurveillance measures by crossing Alameda and entering Union Station. He passed through the giant waiting room and then took a circuitous path to the roof, where he pulled a TAP card out of his wallet and got on the Metro’s Gold Line.

He studied every person on the train as it left Union Station and headed into Little Tokyo. At the first stop, he exited the train but then paused next to the sliding door. He checked every other commuter who got off, and none seemed suspicious. He stepped back onto the train to see if any of them did the same, waited until the bell warned that the doors were closing, and jumped off at the last moment.

No one followed.

He walked two blocks down Alameda and then cut in toward the river. The address he had for Vibiana Veracruz put her studio on Hewitt near Traction in the heart of the Arts District. Circling back to Hewitt, he repeatedly stopped and checked his surroundings.Along the way he passed several old commercial structures that were restored or in the process of being restored for use as loft homes.

The Arts District was more than a neighborhood. It was a movement. Beginning almost forty years earlier, artists of all disciplines started to take over millions of square feet of empty space in the abandoned factories and fruit-shipping warehouses that had thrived in the area before World War II. Paying pennies per foot for massive live-work spaces, some of the city’s most notable artists thrived here. It seemed appropriate that the movement was anchored in an area where in the early 1900s artists had vied to design the colorful images that graced the crates and boxes of fruit shipped across the country, popularizing a recognizable California style that said life was good on the West Coast. It was one of the small things that helped inspire the wave of westward movement that now made California the most populous state in the union.

The Arts District now faced many of the issues that came with success, namely the swift spread of gentrification. In the past decade the area started drawing big developers interested in big profits. The cost of a square foot of space was no longer measured in pennies but in dollars. Many of the new tenants were upscale professionals who worked in downtown or Hollywood and wouldn’t know the difference between a stippling and a stencil brush. Many of the restaurants went upscale and had celebrity chefs and valet parking that cost more than a whole meal in the old corner cafés where artists once congregated. The idea of the district being a haven for the starving artist was becoming more and more unfounded.

As a young patrol officer in the early ’70s Bosch had been assigned to Newton Division, which included what was then called the Warehouse District. He remembered the area as a barren wastelandof empty buildings, homeless encampments, and street crime. He had transferred to Hollywood Division before the arts renaissance had begun. Now as he walked through, he marveled at the changes. There was a difference between a mural and a piece of graffiti. Both were arguably works of art, but the murals in the Arts District were beautiful and showed care and vision similar to those he had seen a few days earlier down in Chicano Park.

He passed by The American, a building more than a hundred years old that originally served as a hotel for black entertainers during segregation and later was ground zero for both the arts movement and the burgeoning punk rock scene in the 1970s.

Vibiana Veracruz lived and worked across the street in a building that had once been a cardboard plant. It was where many of the waxed fruit boxes with labels that served as California’s calling cards were produced. It was four stories tall with brick cladding and steel-framed warehouse windows still intact. There was a brass plaque next to the entrance that stated its history and the year of its construction: 1908.

There was no security or lock on the entrance. Bosch entered a small tiled lobby and checked a board that listed artists and their loft numbers. Bosch found the name Veracruz next to 4-D. He also saw on a community bulletin board several notices about tenant and neighborhood meetings regarding issues like rent stabilization and protesting building-permit applications at city hall. There were sign-up lists and he saw the name Vib scrawled on all of these. There was also a flyer for a showing of a documentary film called Young Turks on Friday evening in loft 4-D. The flyer said the film was about the founding of the Arts District in the 1970s. “See this place before the greed!” the flyer trumpeted. It appeared to Bosch that Vibiana Veracruz had inherited some of the community activism that had charged her mother’s life.

With his legs still feeling the pain of his run up the slope two nights before, Bosch didn’t want to walk up three flights of stairs. He found a freight elevator with a pull-down door and rode to the fourth floor at a turtle’s pace. The elevator was the size of his living room and he felt self-conscious about riding up alone and wasting what must have been an enormous amount of energy to move the platform. It was obviously a design element left over from the building’s early incarnation as a cardboard factory.

The top floor was quartered into four live-work lofts accessible off an industrial gray lobby. The lower half of the door to 4-D was plastered with cartoon stickers obviously placed haphazardly by a small person-Vibiana’s son, Harry assumed. Above this was a card with posted hours when Vibiana Veracruz would receive patrons and viewers of her art. On Wednesdays those hours were from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and that put Bosch fifteen minutes early. He considered just knocking on the door, since he was not there with the purpose of seeing her art. But he was also hopeful that he could somehow take a measure of the woman before he decided how to tell her she might be heir to a fortune with more zeroes attached to it than she could imagine.

While he was deciding what to do he heard someone coming up the stairs next to the elevator shaft. A woman soon appeared, carrying a frozen coffee drink in one hand and a key in the other. She wore overalls and had a breathing mask down around her neck. She looked surprised to see a man waiting at her door.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Bosch said.

“Can I help you?”

“Uh, are you Vibiana Veracruz?”

He knew it was her. There was a clear resemblance to Gabrielain the Coronado Beach photos. But he pointed at the door to 4-D as if he had to back up his presence with the posted hours.

“I am,” she said.

“Well, I’m early,” he said. “I didn’t know your hours. I was hoping to look at some of your work.”

“That’s okay. You’re close enough. I can show you around. What’s your name?”

“Harry Bosch.”

She looked like she recognized the name and Bosch wondered if her mother had found a way to contact her after promising she wouldn’t attempt to.

“That’s a famous artist’s name,” she said. “Hieronymus Bosch.”

Bosch suddenly realized his mistake.

“I know,” he said. “Fifteenth century. It’s actually my full name.” She used a key to unlock her door. She looked back at him over her shoulder.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“You had some strange parents.”

She opened the door.

“Come on in,” she said. “I only have a few pieces here at the moment. There’s a gallery over on Violet that has a couple more and then there are a couple out at Bergamot Station. How did you hear about me?”

Bosch hadn’t prepared a story, but he knew Bergamot Station was a conglomeration of galleries housed in an old rail station in Santa Monica. He had never been there but quickly adopted it as a cover.

“Uh, I saw your pieces at Bergamot,” he said. “I had some business downtown this morning and thought I would see what else you have.”

“Cool,” Veracruz said. “Well, I’m Vib.”

She reached out a hand and they shook. Her hand was rough and callused.

The loft was quiet as they entered and Bosch assumed her son was in school. There was a sharp smell of chemicals that reminded Bosch of the fingerprint lab, where they used cyanoacrylate to fume objects and raise prints.

She gestured to her right and behind Bosch. He turned and saw that the front space of the loft was used as her studio and gallery. Her sculptures were large and Bosch could see how the freight elevator and the twenty-foot ceilings here gave her freedom to go big. Three finished pieces sat on wheeled pallets so they could easily be moved. Movie night on Friday would probably be in this space after the sculptures were moved out of the way.

There was also a work area with two benches and racks of tools. A large block of what looked like foam rubber was on a pallet and it appeared that an image of a man was emerging from a sculpting process.

The finished pieces were multi-figure dioramas made of pure white acrylic. All were variations on the nuclear family: mother, father, and daughter. The interaction of the three was different in each sculpture but in each the daughter was looking away from her parents and had no clearly defined face. There were nose and brow ridges but no eyes or mouth.

One of the dioramas showed the father as a soldier with several equipment packs but no weapon. His eyes were closed. Bosch could see a resemblance to the photos he had seen of Dominick Santanello.

Bosch pointed to the diorama with the father as soldier figure.

“What is this one about?” he asked.

“What is it about?” Veracruz repeated. “It’s about war and thedestruction of families. But I don’t really think my work needs explanation. You absorb it and you feel something or you don’t. Art shouldn’t be explained.”

Bosch just nodded. He felt he had blundered with his question.

“You probably notice that this one is the companion piece to the two you saw at Bergamot,” Veracruz said.

Bosch nodded again but in a more vigorous manner as if to communicate that he knew what she was talking about. Her saying so, however, made him want to go to Bergamot and see the other two.

He kept his eyes on the sculptures and walked further into the room to see them from different angles. Bosch could tell that it was the same girl in all three pieces, but her ages were different.

“What are the ages of the girl?” he asked.

“Eleven, thirteen, and fifteen,” Veracruz said. “Very observant.”

He guessed that the incomplete face on each had to do with abandonment, not knowing one’s origin, being one of the faceless and nameless. He knew what that was like.

“Very beautiful,” he said.

He meant it sincerely.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I didn’t know my father,” he said.

It startled him when it came out. It wasn’t part of his cover. The power of the sculptures made him say it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I only met him one time,” he said. “I was twenty-one and I had just come back from Vietnam.”

He gestured toward the war sculpture.

“I tracked him down,” he said. “Knocked on his door. I was glad I did it. He died soon after.”

“I supposedly met my father one time when I was a baby. I don’t remember it. He died soon after, too. He was lost in the same war.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m happy. I have a child and I have my art. If I can keep this place from falling into greedy hands, then all will be perfect.”

“You mean the building? It’s for sale?”

“It’s sold, pending the city’s approval to change it into residential. The buyer wants to cut every loft into two, get rid of the artists, and, get this, call it the River Arts Residences.”

Bosch thought for a long moment before responding. She had given him the opening.

“What if I told you there was a way to do that?” he asked. “Keep things perfect.”

When she didn’t answer, he turned and looked at her. Then she did speak.

“Who are you?” she asked.