The Black Ice (hb-2)

house.”
    “Which neighbor?”
    The voice was very old.
    “The castle.”
    “Nobody lives there. Mr. Moore died some time ago.”
    “I know that, ma’am. I was wondering if I could come in and talk to you a moment. I have identification.”
    There was a delay before he heard a curt “Very well” over the speaker and the gate lock buzzed.
    The woman insisted that he hold his ID up to a small window set in the door. He saw her in there, white-haired and decrepit, straining to see it from a wheelchair. She finally opened up.
    “Why do they send a Los Angeles police officer?”
    “Ma’am, I’m working on a Los Angeles case. It involves a man who used to live in the castle. As a boy, long ago.”
    She looked up at him through squinting eyes, as if she was trying to see past a memory.
    “Are you talking about Calexico Moore?”
    “Yes. You knew him?”
    “Is he hurt?”
    Bosch hesitated, then said, “I’m afraid he’s dead.”
    “Up there in Los Angeles?”
    “Yes. He was a police officer. I think it had something to do with his life down here. That’s why I came out here. I don’t really know what to ask… He didn’t live here long. But you remember him, yes?”
    “He didn’t live here long but that doesn’t mean I never saw him again. Quite the contrary. I saw him regularly over the years. He’d ride his bicycle or he’d drive a car and come and sit out there on the road and just watch that place. One time I had Marta bring him out a sandwich and a lemonade.”
    He assumed Marta was the maid. These estates came with them.
    “He’d just watch and remember, I guess,” the old woman was saying. “Terrible thing that Cecil did to him. He’s probably paying for it now, that Cecil.”
    “What do you mean, ‘terrible’?”
    “Sending the boy and his mother away like that. I don’t think he ever spoke to that boy or the woman again after that. But I’d see the boy and I’d see him as a man, come out here to look at the place. People ’round here say that’s why Cecil put that wall up. Did that twenty years ago. They say it’s because he got tired of seeing Calexico in the street. That was Cecil’s way of doing things. You don’t like what you see out your window, you put up a wall. But I’d still see young Cal from time to time. One time I took a cold drink out to him myself. I wasn’t in this chair then. He was sitting in a car, and I asked him, ‘Why do you come out here all the time?’ and he just said, ‘Aunt Mary, I like to remember.’ That’s what he said.”
    “Aunt Mary?”
    “Yes. I thought that was why you came here. My Anderson and Cecil were brothers, God rest their souls.”
    Bosch nodded and waited a respectful five seconds before speaking.
    “The man at the museum in town said Cecil had no children.”
    “’Course he said that. Cecil kept it a secret from the public. Big secret. He didn’t want the company name blemished.”
    “Calexico’s mother was the maid?”
    “Yes, she-it sounds like you know all of this already.”
    “Just a few parts. What happened? Why did he send her and the boy away?”
    She hesitated before answering, as if to compose a story that was more than thirty years old.
    “After she became pregnant, she lived there-he made her-and she had the baby there. Afterward, four or five years, he discovered she had lied to him. One day he had some of his men follow her across when she went to Mexicali to visit her mother. There was no mother. Just a husband and another son, this one older than Calexico. That was when he sent them away. His own blood he sent away.”
    Bosch thought about this for a long moment. The woman was staring off at the past.
    “When was the last time you saw Calexico?”
    “Oh, let me see, must have been years now. He eventually stopped coming around.”
    “Do you think he knew of his father’s death?”
    “He wasn’t at the funeral, not that I blame him.”
    “I was told Cecil Moore left the property to the city.”
    “Yes, he died alone and he left everything to the city, not a thing to Calexico or any of the ex-wives and mistresses. Cecil Moore was a mean man, even in death. Of course the city couldn’t do anything with that place. Too big and expensive to keep up. Calexico isn’t a boomtown like it once was and can’t keep a place like that. There was a thought that it would be used as a historical museum. But you couldn’t fill a closet with the history of this town. Never mind the museum. The city