Angels Flight

opened it and took a pair of latex gloves out of a cardboard box. He asked Chastain if he wanted a pair but the IAD man declined.
    “I’m not going to be touching anything.”
    They separated and began moving through the apartment on a quick initial survey. The rest of the place was as neat as the living room. It was a two-bedroom and had a master suite with its own balcony facing west. It was a clear night. Bosch could see all the way to Century City. Past those towers the lights dropped off in Santa Monica to the sea. Chastain came into the bedroom behind him.
    “No home office,” he said. “The second bedroom looks like a guest room. Maybe for stashing witnesses.”
    “Okay.”
    Bosch scanned the contents of the top of the bureau. There were no photos or anything of a strong personal nature. Same with the small tables on either side of the bed. It looked like a hotel room and in a way it was – if Elias only used it for overnight stays while readying cases for court. The bed was made and this stood out to Bosch. Elias was in the middle of preparations for a major trial, working day and night, yet he had stopped to make his bed that morning when supposedly it would just be he returning at the end of the day. No way, Bosch thought. Either he made the bed because there would be someone else in the apartment or someone else made the bed.
    Bosch ruled out a maid because a maid would have picked up the strewn newspaper and the empty coffee cup in the living room. No, it was Elias who had made the bed. Or someone who was with him. It was gut instinct based on his long years of delving into human habits, but at that moment Bosch felt reasonably sure that there now was another woman in the mix.
    He opened the drawer of the bed table where a phone sat and found a personal phone book. He opened it and flipped through the pages. There were many names he recognized. Most were lawyers Bosch had heard about or even knew. He stopped when he came across one name. Carla Entrenkin. She, too, was an attorney specializing in civil rights cases – or had been until a year earlier, when the Police Commission appointed her inspector general of the Los Angeles Police Department. He noted that Elias had her office and home number listed. The home number was in darker, seemingly more recent, ink. It looked to Bosch as though the home number had been added well after the business number had been recorded in the book.
    “Whaddaya got?” Chastain said.
    “Nothing,” Bosch answered. “Just a bunch of lawyers.”
    He closed the phone book as Chastain stepped over to look. He tossed it back in the drawer and closed it.
    “Better leave it for the warrant,” he said.
    They conducted a casual search of the rest of the apartment for the next twenty minutes, looking in drawers and closets, under beds and couch cushions, but not disturbing anything they found. At one point Chastain called out from the bathroom off the master bedroom.
    “Got two toothbrushes here.”
    “Okay.”
    Bosch was in the living room, studying the books on shelves. He saw one he had read years before, Yesterday Will Make You Cry by Chester Himes. He felt Chastain’s presence and turned around. Chastain stood in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He was holding a box of condoms up for Bosch to see.
    “These were hidden in the back of a shelf under the sink.”
    Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded.
    In the kitchen there was a wall-mounted telephone with an answering machine. There was a flashing light on it and the digital display showed there was one message waiting to be played. Bosch pushed the playback button. It was a woman’s voice on the message.
    “Hey, it’s me. I thought you were going to call me. I hope you didn’t fall asleep on me.”
    That was it. After the message, the machine reported that the call had come in at 12:01 A.M. Elias was already dead by then. Chastain, who had come into the kitchen from the living room when he heard the voice, just looked at Bosch and hiked his shoulders after the message was played. Bosch played it again.
    “Doesn’t sound like the wife to me,” Bosch said.
    “Sounds white to me,” Chastain said.
    Bosch thought he was right. He played the message one more time, this time concentrating on the tone of the woman’s voice. There was a clear sense of intimacy in the voice. The time of the call and the woman’s assumption that Elias would know her voice supported this conclusion as well.
    “Condoms hidden