Angels Flight

the lines at the counter to order.
    “How’d it go?” Rider asked as he stepped over the bench and sat next to her.
    “Well, I think I definitely was a little too pale for Irving’s liking.”
    “Well, fuck him,” Edgar said. “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”
    “Me, too,” Rider said.
    “What are you talking about?” Chastain asked.
    “Race relations,” Rider said. “Typical you can’t figure that out.”
    “Hey, I – ”
    “Never mind,” Bosch interjected. “Let’s talk about the case, okay? You first, Chastain. Did you finish the apartment building?”
    “Yeah, we finished. Nothing.”
    “Except we found out about the woman,” Fuentes said.
    “Oh, yeah, right.”
    “What woman?”
    “The other victim. Catalina Perez. Hold a second.”
    Chastain reached down to the bench next to him and came up with a legal tablet. He flipped to the second page and looked at the notes.
    “Apartment nine-oh-nine. Perez was the cleaning woman. Came every Friday night. So that’s where she was coming from.”
    “But she was going up,” Bosch said. “She didn’t work till eleven?”
    “No, this is the deal. She works six to ten-thirty, then takes Angels Flight down to the bus stop, catches the bus and goes home. Only on the way down she must’ve looked in her purse and noticed her notebook, where she keeps her schedule and phone numbers, is missing. She took it out in the apartment last night because her employer, a Mr. D. H. Reilly, changed his phone number and gave her the new one. Only she left the notebook on his kitchen table. She had to go back for it so she’d know her schedule. This lady…”
    He reached to the bench again and pulled up the notebook. It was in a plastic evidence bag.
    “… I mean, I looked at the schedule. She worked her tail off. She’s got gigs every day and a lot of nights. This Reilly guy said Friday nights was the only regular night he could get her for. She did a good job…”
    “So she was going back up to get her book when she got popped,” Edgar said.
    “Looks that way.”
    “The old I-O-I-A,” Rider said in a singsong way that was not mirthful in any way.
    “What’s that?” Chastain asked.
    “Nothing.”
    They were all silent for a long moment. Bosch was thinking about how leaving that notebook behind had cost Catalina Perez her life. He knew that what Rider had said referred to the inequities of it all – the phrase she began using after a year on the homicide squad to sum up the bad breaks, coincidences and twists of fate that often left people dead.
    “Okay, good,” Bosch finally said. “We now know what everybody was doing on that train. The rest of the building was clean?”
    “Nobody heard a thing, nobody saw a thing,” Chastain said.
    “You get everybody?”
    “No response at four apartments. But they were all on the other side, away from Angels Flight.”
    “All right, let those go for now. Kiz, you talk to the wife and son again?”
    Rider was chewing her last bite of French dip sandwich and held her finger up until she swallowed.
    “Yeah, separately and together. Nothing pulled my trigger. They’re both pretty much convinced a cop did it. I didn’t – ”
    “Of course they are,” Chastain interjected.
    “Let her talk,” Bosch said.
    “I didn’t pick up any feel that they knew much about his cases or possible threats. He didn’t even keep a home office. I touched on Elias’s fidelity and Millie said she believed he was faithful. She said it like that. She ‘believed.’ Something about it sounds wrong. I think if there was no doubt, she would say he ‘was’ faithful, not that she ‘believed’ he was faithful, know what I mean?”
    “So you think she knew?”
    “Maybe. But I also think that if she knew then she was the type that would put up with it. There was a lot of social standing in being Howard Elias’s wife. Lot of wives in that position make choices. They look the other way on some things to keep the image intact, to keep the life they have intact.”
    “What about the son?”
    “I think he believed his father was a god. He’s hurting.”
    Bosch nodded. He respected Rider’s interviewing skills. He had seen her in action and knew she was empathic. He also knew he had used her in a way not so dissimilar to the way Irving had wanted to use her during the press conference. He had sent her to do the follow-up interviews because he knew she would be good at it. But also because she was black.
    “You ask