The Wrong Side of Goodbye

42

Can you be one of the richest, most powerful men on the planet and still be a cheap and petty bastard?”

Ida Forsythe said it with a distant look in her eyes. Bosch couldn’t tell if she was looking at the past or a bleak future. But it was how she began her story. She said that on the day after Bosch visited Whitney Vance the aging billionaire had told her he was dying.

“He had taken ill overnight,” she said. “He looked awful and he hadn’t even gotten dressed. He came into the office around noon in his bathrobe and said he needed me to write something. His voice was barely a whisper. He told me that he felt like things were shutting down inside, that he was dying and that he needed to write a new will.”

“Ida, I told you, I’m your lawyer,” Haller said. “There is no reason to lie to me. If you lie to me I’m out.”

“I’m not lying,” she said. “This is the truth.”

Bosch held up a hand to halt Haller from pressing her. Haller was not convinced but Bosch believed that she was telling the story truthfully-at least from her perspective-and he wanted to hear it.

“Tell it,” he said.

“We were alone in the office,” she said. “He dictated to me theterms of the will and I wrote it in his hand. He told me what to do with it. He gave me the pen and told me to send it all to you. Only…he left something out.”

“You,” Haller said.

“All the years I worked for him,” she said. “At his beck and call, keeping the facade of health intact. All those years and he wasn’t going to leave me anything.”

“So you rewrote the will,” Haller said.

“I had the pen,” she said. “I took some of the stationery home and I did what was right and deserved. I rewrote it to make it fair. It was so little compared to all there was. I thought…”

Her voice trailed off and she didn’t finish. Bosch studied her. He knew that greed was a relative term. Was it greedy, after thirty-five years of service, to scheme a ten-million-dollar payout from a six-billion-dollar fortune? Some might call it a drop in the bucket, but not if it cost a man the last months of his life. Bosch thought of the flyer for the movie that Vibiana Veracruz had put up in the lobby of her building. See this place before the greed! He wondered what Ida had been like before she decided that ten million dollars was her just reward.

“He told me that he had gotten a message from you,” she said, beginning what appeared to be a new strand of the story. “You said you had the information he was looking for. He said it meant that he’d had a child and there were heirs to his fortune. He said he would die happy. He went back to his room after that and I believed him. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.”

She rewrote the will to include herself and put the package in the mail as instructed. She said that for the next two days, she came to work at the mansion but she never saw Vance. He was sequestered in his room and only his doctor and a nurse were granted access. Things looked grave around the mansion on San Rafael.

“Everybody was sad,” she said. “It was clear that this was the end. He was dying. He was supposed to die.”

Bosch surreptitiously checked his watch. The detectives out front of the house were going to knock on the door in ten minutes. He hoped they wouldn’t jump the gun and ruin the confession.

“Then he called you Sunday,” Haller said, trying to keep the story going.

“It was Sloan who called,” Forsythe said. “Mr. Vance told him to call me in. So I got there and he was at his desk and it was like he had never even been sick. His voice was back and it was business as usual. And then I saw the pen. It was there on the desk for me to write with.”

“Where did it come from?” Bosch asked.

“I asked him,” she said. “He said it came from his great-grandfather, and I said, How can that be? I sent the pen to Detective Bosch. And he said the one on the desk was the original and what he had given me to send with the will was a copy. He said it didn’t matter because only the ink was important. The ink could be matched to the will. He said it would be provenance to help prove the will.”

She looked up from the shining surface of the coffee table and directly at Bosch.

“He told me then that he wanted me to contact you and retrieve the will,” she said. “Now that he was better, he wanted to withdraw it and have a lawyer do it formally. I knew if I brought it back to him, he would see what I had done, and it would be the end for me. I couldn’t…I don’t know what happened. Something broke inside. I picked up the pillow and came up behind him…”

She ended the story there, apparently not wanting to repeat the details of the actual murder. It was a form of denial, like a killer covering the face of the victim. Bosch couldn’t decide whether tobuy in to the confession as full and honest or to be skeptical. She could have been setting up a diminished-capacity defense. She also could have been hiding the real motive-that Vance’s plan to have a new will written by a lawyer would surely mean the ten million for her would disappear.

Vance’s dying at his desk still gave her a shot at the money.

“Why did you remove the pen after he was dead?” Bosch asked.

He knew it would be a detail that always bothered him.

“I wanted there to be only one pen,” she said. “I thought if there were two, it would open up a lot of questions about the will you turned in. So after everyone was gone I went into the office and took the pen.”

“Where is it?” Bosch asked.

“I put it in my safe deposit box,” she said.

A long silence followed and Bosch expected it to be broken by the arrival of the Pasadena detectives. It was time. But then Forsythe spoke in a tone that sounded like she was talking to herself rather than to Bosch and Haller.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said. “I had taken care of him for thirty-five years and he had taken care of me. I didn’t go there to kill him…”

Haller looked at Bosch and nodded, a signal that he would take it from here.

“Ida,” he said. “I’m a deal maker. I can make a deal with what you just told us. We go in, cooperate, work out a manslaughter plea, and then we shop for a judge sympathetic to your story and your age.”

“I can’t say I killed him,” she said.

“You just did,” Haller said. “But technically you’ll just plead nolo in court-you say ‘no contest’ to the charges. Going any other way is not going to sell.”

“But what about temporary insanity?” she asked. “I just lost itwhen I realized he would know what I had done. I completely blanked out.”

There was a calculating tone to her voice now. But Haller shook his head.

“It’s a loser,” he said bluntly. “Rewriting the will and taking the pen-these are not the steps of an insane person. To make the jump that all of a sudden you lost the capacity to know right from wrong because you feared Vance would find out what you did? In a courtroom I can sell ice to Eskimos but no jury’s going to buy that.”

He paused for a moment to see if he was getting through to her, then pressed it further.

“Look, a reality check here,” he said. “At your age we have to minimize your time inside. What I’ve outlined is the way to go. But it’s your choice. You want to go to trial on an insanity defense, that’s what we’ll do. But it’s the wrong move.”

Haller’s statement was underlined by the sound of two car doors slamming out in the street. Poydras and Franks.

“That’s the police,” Bosch said. “They’re coming to the door.”

“How do you want to play it, Ida?” Haller asked.

Forsythe slowly rose to her feet. Haller did as well.

“Please invite them in,” she said.

Twenty minutes later Bosch stood with Haller on the sidewalk on Arroyo and watched as Poydras and Franks drove away with Forsythe in the backseat of their plain wrap.

“Speaking of looking a gift horse in the mouth,” Haller said. “They actually seemed pissed off that we cleared their fucking case for them. Ungrateful bastards.”

“They’ve been behind the curve on this one since the get-go,” Bosch said. “And they aren’t going to look so good at the press conference when they have to explain that the suspect turned herself in before they even knew she was the suspect.”

“Oh, they’ll find their way around that,” Haller said. “I have no doubt.”

Bosch nodded in agreement.

“So, guess what?” Haller said.

“What?” Bosch said.

“While we were in there I got another text from Lorna.”

Bosch knew that Lorna was Haller’s case manager.

“Was it more info on California Coding?”

“No, she got the call from CellRight. There is a genetic match between Whitney Vance and Vibiana Veracruz. She’s the heir and in line for a big chunk of money-if she wants it.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll talk to her and give her the news. See what she wants to do.”

“I know what I would do,” Haller said.

Bosch smiled.

“I know what you would do too,” he said.

“Tell her we could file it as a Jane Doe,” Haller said. “Eventually we would have to reveal her to the court and opposing parties, but starting out we could keep her name out of it.”

“I’ll tell her,” Bosch said.

“Another option is to go to corporate counsel and lay out what we’ve got-the DNA, your tracing of the paternal lineage-and convince them that if we get into a fight we’ll take it all. Then we negotiate a nice settlement from the estate and we go away, leaving money and the corporation on the table.”

“That’s an idea, too. A real good idea, I think. You can sell ice to Eskimos, right? You could get this done.”

“I could. The board of directors will take that deal in a heartbeat. So you talk to her and I’ll do some more thinking on it.”

They checked both ways before crossing the street to their cars.

“So are you going to work on Ida’s defense with me?” Haller asked.

“Thanks for saying ‘with me’ and not ‘for me,’ but I don’t think so,” Bosch said. “I think I just quit being your investigator on this one. I’m taking a full-time gig with San Fernando PD.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay, my brother from another mother. Keep in touch about that other thing.”

“Will do.”

They parted ways in the middle of the street.