The Wrong Side of Goodbye

7

After leaving the station Bosch got on the 5 freeway and turned back to the Whitney Vance case. Not coming up with any birth date or other information on Vibiana Duarte on the DMV database was disappointing but no more than a temporary setback. Bosch was headed south to Norwalk, where the time-travel gold mine was housed: the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the place he spent so much time as a cold case investigator in the Vital Records office that he knew exactly how the clerks liked their coffee. He felt confident he would be able to answer some questions about Vibiana Duarte there.

Bosch put a CD in the Jeep’s music slot and started listening to a young horn player named Christian Scott. The first track up, “Litany Against Fear,” had a relentless sound and drive to it and that’s what Bosch felt he needed at the moment. It took him an hour to get down to Norwalk after a slow crawl around the east edge of downtown. He pulled into the lot fronting the seven-story county building and killed the engine while Scott was in the middle of “Naima,” which Bosch thought compared favorably with John Handy’s classic version recorded fifty years earlier.

Just as he stepped out of the car his cell phone chirped and hechecked the screen. It said Unknown Caller but he took it anyway. It was John Creighton and the call was not a surprise.

“So, you saw Mr. Vance?” he asked.

“I did,” Bosch answered.

“Well, how did it go?”

“It went fine.”

Bosch was going to make Creighton dig for it. It might be considered passive-aggressive behavior on his part but he was keeping the wishes of his client in mind.

“Is there anything we can help with?”

“Uh, no, I think I can handle it. Mr. Vance wants it kept confidential, so I’ll just leave it at that.”

There was a long silence before Creighton spoke next.

“Harry,” he said, “you and I go way back to the department, and of course Mr. Vance and I go way back as well. As I said yesterday before hiring you, he’s an important client of this firm and if there is anything wrong regarding his comfort and security, then I need to know it. I was hoping as a former brother in blue you might share with me what is going on. Mr. Vance is an old man, I don’t want him taken advantage of.”

“By ‘taken advantage of,’ are you talking about me?” Bosch asked.

“Of course not, Harry. Poor choice of words. What I mean is if the old man is being extorted or otherwise facing any sort of trouble involving the need for a private detective, well, we are here and we have enormous resources at our fingertips. We need to be brought in.”

Bosch nodded. He expected this sort of play from Creighton after the demand in his office to be looped in.

“Well,” he said. “All I can tell you is that first of all, you didn’t hire me. You were the bagman. You delivered money to me. Mr. Vance hired me and that’s who I work for. Mr. Vance was very specificand even had me sign a legal document agreeing to follow his instructions. He told me not to share with anyone what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. That would include you. If you want me to break from that, I need to call him back and ask for his per-”

“That won’t be necessary,” Creighton said quickly. “If that’s how Mr. Vance wants it, that’s fine. Just know, we are here to help if needed.”

“Absolutely,” Bosch said in an upbeat but phony voice. “I’ll call you if needed, John, and thanks for checking in.”

He disconnected the call before Creighton could respond. He then headed through the parking lot toward the massive rectangular building that contained the records of all official births and deaths in L.A. County. All records of marriage and divorce were recorded here as well. The building always reminded Bosch of a giant treasure chest. The information was in there if you knew where to look-or knew somebody who did. For those who didn’t, the front steps of the building were where hawkers stood by, ready to counsel the uninitiated on how to fill out request forms-all for the price of a few dollars. Some of them already had the forms in their briefcases. It was a cottage industry built on the naïveté and fear of those who find themselves venturing into the maw of government bureaucracy.

Bosch jogged up the steps, ignoring those who came at him asking if he was applying for a fictitious business name or a marriage license. He entered and walked past the information booth and then toward the stairs. Knowing from experience that waiting for an elevator in the building could suck the will to live out of a person, he took the stairs down to the basement level where the BDM section of the Register-Recorder’s Office was located.

As he pushed through the glass door, there was a shriek from one of the desks lining the wall on the other side of the public counterwhere birth, death, and marriage records could be requested. A woman stood up and smiled broadly at Bosch. She was Asian and her name was Flora. She had always been most helpful to Bosch when he had carried a badge.

“Harry Bosch!” she called out.

“Flora!” he called right back.

Along the counter, there was a window for law enforcement requests, which were always given priority, and two windows for citizen requests. There was a man standing at one of the citizen windows looking at copies of records. Bosch stepped up to the other. Flora was already heading to the law enforcement window.

“No, you come down here,” she instructed.

Bosch did as instructed and then leaned over the counter for an awkward embrace.

“I knew you’d come back to us here,” Flora said.

“Sooner or later, right?” he said. “But, hey, I’m here as a citizen right now. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”

Bosch knew he could pull the San Fernando badge, but he didn’t want a move like that to possibly track back to Valdez or Trevino. That would cause problems he didn’t need. Instead, he started back to the citizen’s window, choosing to keep his private and public detective work separate.

“It no trouble,” Flora said. “Not for you.”

He ended the charade and remained at the LE window.

“Well, this one might take a while,” he said. “I don’t have all the information and I need to go way, way back.”

“Let me try it. What you want?”

Bosch always had to guard against chopping his language the way she did. His natural inclination was to start leaving out words when he spoke to her. He had caught himself doing it in the past and he tried to avoid doing it now.

He pulled out his notebook and looked at some of the dates he had written down that morning in Vance’s office.

“Looking for a birth record,” he said while reading. “Talking about 1933 or ’34. What do you have going that far back?”

“Not on database,” Flora said. “We have film here only. No hard record anymore. Let me see name.”

He knew she was talking about records transferred to microfilm in the 1970s and never updated to the computerized database. He turned his notebook around so she could see the name and spelling of Vibiana Duarte. Bosch hoped that he would catch a break with the unusualness of it. At least it wasn’t a common Latino surname like Garcia or Fernandez. There probably weren’t too many Vibianas around either.

“She old,” Flora said. “You want death too?”

“I do. But I have no idea when and if she died. Last time I have her alive for sure is June 1950.”

She made a frowning face.

“Ooh, I see, Harry.”

“Thanks, Flora. Where is Paula? She still here?”

Paula was the other clerk he remembered from his frequent forays to the basement while a detective. Locating witnesses and families of victims was a key part of cold case investigation, usually the foundation of any case. The first thing you did was alert the family that the case was back under active investigation. But murder books from old cases rarely contained updates on deaths, marriages, and the migration of people. Consequently, Bosch did some of his best detective work in the halls of records and libraries.

“Paula out today,” Flora said. “Just me. I write down now and you get coffee. This take time.”

Flora wrote down what she needed.

“Do you want a coffee, Flora?” Bosch asked.

“No, you get,” she said. “For waiting.”

“Then I think I’ll just stick around. I filled up this morning and I have stuff to do.”

He pulled his phone out and held it up by way of explanation. Flora went back into the microfilm archives to hunt. Bosch sat down on one of the plastic seats in an unused microfilm cubicle.

He was thinking about next moves. Depending on what he came up with here, his next step was to go to St. Vibiana’s to see if he could get a look at baptismal records, or to the main library downtown, where they kept phone directories going back decades.

Bosch pulled up his phone’s search app and typed in USC EVK to see what might come up. It got a hit right away. The EVK was still operating on the campus and was located in the Birnkrant Residential College on 34th Street. He pulled the address up on his maps app and was soon looking at an overview of the sprawling campus just south of downtown. Vance said Vibiana had lived only a few blocks from the EVK and walked to work. The campus ran along Figueroa Street and the Harbor Freeway corridor. This limited the number of residential streets in the area with direct access to the EVK. Bosch started writing them down along with address spans so he might be able to place the Duarte house when he checked the old phone directories at the central library.

It soon occurred to him that he was looking at a 2016 map of the campus and its surroundings and that the Harbor Freeway might not even have existed in 1950. That would give the neighborhood around USC a completely different makeup. He went back to the search app and pulled up the history of the freeway, also known as the 110, which slashed an eight-lane diagonal across the county from Pasadena down to the harbor. He soon learned that it was built in sections in the 1940s and ’50s. It was the dawn of the freewayera in L.A. and the 110 was the very first project. The section that edged the east side of the USC campus was begun in 1952 and completed two years later, both dates well after the time Whitney Vance attended the school and met Vibiana Duarte.

Bosch went back to his mapping and started including streets that in 1949 and 1950 still provided walking access to the northeast corner of campus, where the EVK was located. Soon he had a list of fourteen streets with a four-block range of address numbers. At the library he would first look up the name Duarte in the old directories and see if any were located on the streets and blocks on the list. Back then almost everybody was listed in the phone book-if they had a phone.

He was leaning over his phone’s small screen, checking the map for side streets he might have missed, when Flora came back from the bowels of the record center. She was carrying one spool for the microfilm machine triumphantly up in her hand and that immediately put a charge in Bosch’s bloodstream. Flora had found Vibiana.

“She not born here,” Flora said. “Mexico.”

This confused Bosch. He stood up and headed to the counter.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“It say on her death certificate,” Flora said. “Loreto.”

Flora had pronounced the name wrong but Bosch understood it. He had once traced a murder suspect to Loreto, far down the inner coast of the Baja peninsula. He guessed if he went there now he would find a St. Vibiana’s Cathedral or Church.

“You already found her death certificate?” he asked.

“Not taking long,” Flora said. “Only look to nineteen and fifty-one.”

Her words sucked the air out of Bosch. Vibiana was not only dead, but dead so long. He had heard her name for the first timeless than six hours ago but already he had found her-in a way. He wondered how Vance would react to the news.

He held his hand out for the microfilm reel. As Flora handed it to him she told him the record number he should look for: 51-459. Bosch recognized it as a low number, even for 1951. The four hundred and fifty-ninth death recorded in L.A. County that year. How far into the year could that be? A month? Two?

A fleeting thought came to him. He looked at Flora. Had she read the cause of death when she found the document?

“She died in childbirth?” he asked.

Flora looked puzzled.

“Uh, no,” she said. “But you read. Make sure.”

Bosch took the spool and turned back to the machine. He quickly threaded the film through and turned on the projection light. There was an automatic feed controlled with a button. He sped through the documents, stopping every few seconds to check the record number stamped at the top corner. He was halfway through February before he got to the four hundred and fifty-ninth death. When he found the document, he saw that the State of California certificate of death had not changed much over the decades. It might have been the oldest such document he had ever looked at but he was intimately familiar with it. His eyes dropped down to the section the coroner or attending physician filled in. The cause of death was handwritten: strangulation by ligature (clothesline) due to suicide.

Bosch stared for a long time at the line without moving or breathing. Vibiana had killed herself. No details were written beyond what he had already read. There was just a signature too scribbled to decipher, followed by the printed words Deputy Coroner.

Bosch leaned back and took in air. He felt immense sadness come over him. He didn’t know all the details. He had heard only Vance’s view of the story-an eighteen-year-old’s experiencefiltered through the frail and guilty memory of an eighty-five-year-old. But he knew enough to know that what happened to Vibiana wasn’t right. Vance had left her on the wrong side of good-bye, and what happened in June brought about what happened in February. Bosch had a gut feeling that Vibiana’s life was taken from her long before she put the rope around her neck.

The death certificate offered details that Bosch wrote down. Vibiana took her life on February 12, 1951. She was seventeen. Her next of kin was listed as her father, Victor Duarte. His address was on Hope Street, which had been one of the streets Bosch had written down after studying the map of the USC neighborhood. The street name seemed like a sad irony now.

The lone curiosity on the document was the location of death. There was only an address on North Occidental Boulevard. Bosch knew that Occidental was west of downtown near Echo Park and not at all close to Vibiana’s home neighborhood. He opened his phone and typed the address into the search app. It came back as the address of St. Helen’s Home for Unwed Mothers. The search provided several websites associated with St. Helen’s and a link to a 2008 story in the Los Angeles Times marking the one-hundredth anniversary of the facility.

Bosch quickly pulled up the link and started reading the story.

Maternity Home Marks 100th Birthday

By Scott B. Anderson, Staff Writer

St. Helen’s Home for Unwed Mothers is marking its 100th birthday this week with a celebration that honors its evolution from a place of family secrets to a center for family life.

The three-acre complex near Echo Park will be the siteof a full week of programs, including a family picnic and featuring an address from a woman who more than 50 years ago was forced by family to give up her newborn for adoption at the center.

Just as social mores have changed in the last few decades, so has St. Helen’s. Getting prematurely pregnant once resulted in the mother being hidden away, delivering a child in secret and then having that child immediately taken away for adoption…

Bosch stopped reading as he came to understand what had happened sixty-five years ago to Vibiana Duarte.

“She had the baby,” he whispered. “And they took it away from her.”