Echo Park

election law, you give your home and work address when you make a contribution. Dobbs and Franks have a Century City work address and, let’s see, nine, ten, eleven other people gave the same address. They each gave a thousand, too. It’s probably all the lawyers in the same firm.”
    “So thirteen thousand dollars from there. Is that it?”
    “That’s it from there, yes.”
    Bosch thought about whether to specifically ask if the name Garland was on the contributors list. He didn’t want her making phone calls or snooping around in his investigation.
    “No big corporate contributors?”
    “Nothing of major consequence. Why don’t you tell me what you are looking for, Harry? You can trust me.”
    He decided to go for it.
    “You have to hold on to it until you hear from me. No phone calls, no inquiries. You just sit on this, right?”
    “Right, until I hear from you.”
    “Garland. Thomas Rex Garland, Anthony Garland, anybody like that on there?”
    “Mmmm, no. Isn’t Anthony Garland the kid you were looking at once for Marie Gesto?”
    Bosch almost cursed out loud. He was hoping she wouldn’t make the connection. A decade earlier, when she was a hellion on the cop beat, she had come across a search warrant application he had filed in an effort to search Anthony Garland’s home. The application had been rejected for lack of probable cause but the filing was public record, and at the time, Russell, the ever industrious reporter, routinely combed through the search warrants at the courthouse. Bosch had talked her out of writing a story identifying the scion of the local oil family as a suspect in the Gesto murder but here it was a decade later and she remembered the name.
    “You can’t do anything with this, Keisha,” he responded.
    “What are you doing? Raynard Waits confessed to Gesto. Are you saying that was bullshit?”
    “I’m not saying anything. I was simply curious about something, that’s all. Now, you cannot do anything with this. We have a deal. You sit on this until you hear from me.”
    “You’re not my boss, Harry. How come you are talking to me like you’re my boss?”
    “I’m sorry. I just don’t want you running off and going crazy on this. It could hurt what I’ve got going. We have a deal, right? You just said I can trust you.”
    It was a long time before she answered.
    “Yes, we have a deal. And, yes, you can trust me. But if this is going where I think you are going with it, I want updates and reports. I’m not just going to sit around waiting to hear from you after you get the full package put together. If I don’t hear from you, Harry, I’m going to get nervous. When I get nervous I do some crazy things, make some crazy phone calls.”
    Bosch shook his head. He should never have made the call to her.
    “I understand, Keisha,” he said. “You’ll be hearing from me.”
    He closed the phone, wondering what fresh hell he might have just unleashed on earth and when it would come back to bite him. He trusted Russell but only to the limit he could trust any reporter. He finished his beer and went to the kitchen for another. As soon as he popped the top his phone buzzed.
    It was Keisha Russell again.
    “Harry, have you ever heard of GO! Industries?”
    He had. GO! Industries was the current corporate titling of a company started eighty years earlier as Garland Oil Industries. The company had a logo in which the word GO! had wheels and was slanted forward to look as if it were a speeding car.
    “What about it?” he responded.
    “Headquartered downtown in the ARCO plaza. I count twelve employees of GO! making one-thousand-dollar contributions to O’Shea. How’s that?”
    “That’s fine, Keisha. Thanks for calling back.”
    “Did O’Shea take a payoff to put Gesto on Waits? Is that it?”
    Bosch groaned into the phone.
    “No, Keisha, that’s not what happened and that’s not what I am looking at. If you make any calls in this regard you will compromise what I am doing and could be putting yourself, me, and others in danger. Now would you please drop it until I can tell you exactly what is going on and when you can run with it?”
    Once again she hesitated before answering, and it was in that space of silence that Bosch began to wonder if he could still trust her. Maybe her move from police to politics had changed something in her. Maybe, as with most who worked in the realm of politics, her sense of integrity had been sanded down by exposure to the