The Black Echo

Eleanor. “I was wondering if you knew me. You seem familiar. I didn’t realize I was staring.”
    “What? Why should I know you? I never did no federal shit, man. I don’t know-”
    “Never mind. You looked familiar to me, that’s all. I was wondering if you recognized me. Why don’t we wait until Detective Bosch comes in.”
    “Yeah, okay. Cool.”
    There was silence on the tape then. Listening to it, Bosch was confused. Then he realized that what he had just heard had been said before he went into the interview room.
    What had she been doing? The silence on the tape ended and Bosch heard his own voice.
    “Sharkey, we are going to tape this because it might help us later to go over it. Like I said, you are not a suspect so you-”
    Bosch stopped the tape and rewound it to the exchange between the boy and Eleanor. He listened to it again and then again. Each time it felt as if he had been punched in the heart. His hands were sweating and his fingers slipped on the buttons of the recorder. He finally pulled the earphones off and flung them onto the table.
    “Damn it,” he said.
    Pederson stopped typing and looked over.

PART IX
    MONDAY, MAY 28

    MEMORIAL DAY OBSERVED

    By the time Bosch got to the veterans cemetery in Westwood, it was just after midnight.
    He had checked a new car out of the Wilcox fleet garage and then driven by Eleanor Wish’s apartment. There were no lights on and he felt like a teenager checking on the girlfriend who dumped him. Even though he was alone he was embarrassed. He didn’t know what he would have done if there had been a light. He headed back east toward the cemetery, thinking about Eleanor and how she had betrayed him in love and business, all at the same time.
    He started with the supposition that Eleanor had asked Sharkey if he recognized her because it was she who had been in the Jeep that delivered Meadows’s body to the reservoir. She had been looking for a sign that the boy realized this and recognized her. But he didn’t. Sharkey went on-after Bosch joined the interview-to say he had seen two people who he thought were men. He said the smaller of the two stayed in the Jeep’s passenger seat and didn’t help with the body at all. It seemed to Bosch that the boy’s mistake should have insured his life. But he knew that it had been he who had then doomed Sharkey when he suggested hypnotizing him. Eleanor had passed that on to Rourke, who knew he couldn’t risk it.
    Next was the question of why. The money was the ultimate answer, but Bosch could not comfortably attribute this motive to Eleanor. There was something more. The others involved-Meadows, Franklin, Delgado and Rourke-all shared the common bond of Vietnam as well as direct knowledge of the two targets, Binh and Tran. How did Eleanor fit into this? Bosch thought about her brother, killed in Vietnam. Was he the connection? He remembered that she had said his name was Michael, but she hadn’t mentioned how or when he was killed. Bosch hadn’t let her. Now he regretted having stopped her when she apparently wanted to talk about him. She had mentioned the memorial in Washington and how it had changed her. What could she have seen that would do that? What could the wall have told her that she didn’t already know?
    He drove into the cemetery off Sepulveda Boulevard and up to the great black iron gates that stood closed across the gravel entrance road. Bosch got out and walked up, but they were locked with a chain and padlock. He looked through the black bars and saw a small stone-block house about thirty yards up the gravel road. He saw the pale blue glow of TV light against a curtained window. Bosch went back to the car and flipped the siren. He let it wail until a light came on behind the curtain. The cemetery attendant came out a few moments later and walked toward the gate with a flashlight, while Bosch got his badge case out and held it open through the bars. The man wore dark pants and a light-blue shirt with a tin badge on it.
    “You police?” he asked.
    Bosch felt like saying no, Amway. Instead, he said, “LAPD. I wonder if you can open ’er up for me.”
    The attendant put the flashlight on his badge and ID. In the light Bosch could see the white whiskers on the man’s face and smell the slight scent of bourbon and sweat.
    “What’s the problem, officer?”
    “Detective. I’m on a homicide investigation, Mr…?”
    “Kester. Homicide? We got plenty dead people here, but these cases are