Echo Park

alongside the stairway of the house next to 710. He went over, turned it on and then bent over as he ran the water through his hair, on his face and down his neck. It pretty much soaked his clothes but he didn’t care. It washed away a good deal of the dirt and sweat and stench and he knew the clothes were trash now anyway.
    The task force top was a sergeant named Bob McDonald who had been pulled in from Hollywood Division. Luckily, Bosch knew him from past days in the division and that set the stage for a cordial debriefing. Bosch realized it was just a warmup. He would have to submit to a formal interview with Randolph and the OIS before the end of the day.
    “Where’s the FBI agent?” Bosch asked. “Where’s Rachel Walling?”
    “She’s being interviewed,” McDonald said. “We’re using a neighbor’s house for her.”
    “And the old lady upstairs in the house?”
    McDonald nodded.
    “She’s fine,” McDonald said. “She’s blind and in a wheelchair. They’re still talking to her but it turns out Waits lived here when he was a kid. It was a foster home and his real name is Robert Foxworth. She can’t get around by herself anymore, so she pretty much stays up there. County assistance brings in her food. Foxworth helped her out financially by renting the garage. He kept supplies for window washing in there. And an old van. It’s got a wheelchair lift in it.”
    Bosch nodded. He guessed that Janet Saxon had no idea what else her former foster son used her garage for.
    McDonald told Bosch it was time to tell his story, and so he did, giving the step-by-step playback of the moves he had made after discovering the connection between Waits and the pawnbroker Fitzpatrick.
    There were no questions. Not yet. Nobody asked why he never called the task force or Randolph or Pratt or anybody else. They listened and simply locked in his story. Bosch was not too concerned. He and Rachel had saved the girl and he had killed the bad guy. He was sure that these two accomplishments would allow him to rise above all transgressions upon protocol and regulations and save his job.
    It took him twenty minutes to tell the story, and then McDonald said they should take a break. As the group around him splintered, Bosch saw his boss waiting to get to him. Bosch knew this conversation would not be easy.
    Pratt finally saw an opening and walked up. He looked anxious.
    “Well, Harry, what did he tell you in there?”
    Bosch was surprised Pratt wasn’t jumping all over him for acting on his own, without authority. But he wasn’t going to complain about it. In abbreviated form he outlined what he had learned from Waits about the setup in Beachwood Canyon.
    “He told me it was all orchestrated through Swann,” he said. “Swann was the go-between. He took the deal from Olivas and O’Shea to Waits. Waits didn’t kill Gesto but agreed to take the fall for her. It was part of the deal for avoiding the death penalty.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s enough, isn’t it?”
    “Why would Olivas and O’Shea do this?”
    “The oldest reasons in the book. Money and power. And the Garland family has plenty of both.”
    “Anthony Garland was the person of interest on Gesto, right? The guy who got the court orders keeping you away.”
    “Yeah, until Olivas and O’Shea used Waits to convince me otherwise.”
    “You got anything besides what Waits said in there?”
    Bosch shook his head.
    “Not much. I traced twenty-five thousand in contributions to O’Shea’s campaign back to T. Rex Garland’s lawyers and oil company. But it was all done legally. It proves a connection, nothing else.”
    “Twenty-five seems cheap to me.”
    “It is. But the twenty-five is all we know about. We do some digging and there’ll probably be more.”
    “You tell all of this to McDonald and his crew?”
    “Only what Waits told me in there. I didn’t tell them about the contributions. Only what Waits said.”
    “You think they’ll go after Maury Swann for this?”
    Bosch thought a moment before answering.
    “Not a chance. Whatever was said between them was privileged information. Besides that, nobody would go after him based on the word of a dead madman like Waits.”
    Pratt kicked the ground. He had nothing else to say or ask.
    “Look, Top, I’m sorry about this,” Bosch said. “About not being up-front with you on what I was doing, the home duty and everything.”
    Pratt waved it off.
    “It’s okay, man. You got lucky. You ended up