The Last Coyote

wanted. Marjorie is something else and I’ve been thinking about it but it still isn’t clear. But you can say this, most women in that situation are looking for a way out. She could have played along with Fox’s plan because she had her own plan. She was looking for a way out of the life.”
    Irving nodded and added to the hypothesis.
    “She had a boy in the youth hall and wanted to get him out. Being with Arno could only help.”
    “That’s right. The thing of it was, Arno and Marjorie did something none of the three of them expected. They fell in love. Or at least Conklin did. And he believed she did, too.”
    Irving took a chair in the corner, crossed his legs and stared thoughtfully at Bosch. He said nothing. Nothing about his demeanor indicated he was anything else but totally interested and believing in Bosch’s story. Bosch’s arm was getting tired of holding the ice pack up and he wished he could lie down. But there was only the table in the examination suite. He continued the story.
    “So they fall in love and their relationship continues and somewhere along the line she tells him. Or maybe Mittel did some checking and told him. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that at some point Conklin knew the score. And again, he surprises everybody.”
    “How?”
    “On October twenty-seven, nineteen sixty-one, he proposes marriage to Marj-”
    “He told you this? Arno told you this?”
    “He told me tonight. He wanted to marry her. She wanted to marry him. On that night back then, he finally decided to chuck it all, to risk losing everything he had to gain the one thing he wanted most.”
    Bosch reached into his jacket on the table and took out his cigarettes. Irving spoke up.
    “I don’t think this is a-nothing, never mind.”
    Bosch lit a smoke with his lighter.
    “It was the bravest act of his life. You realize that? That took balls to be willing to risk everything like that…But he made a mistake.”
    “What?”
    “He called his friend Gordon Mittel to ask him to go with them to Vegas to be best man. Mittel refused. He knew it would be the end of a promising political career for Conklin, maybe even his own career, and he wanted no part of it. But then he went further than just refusing to be best man. See, he saw Conklin as the white horse on which he would be able to ride into the castle. He had big plans for himself and Conklin and he wasn’t going to sit back and let some…some Hollywood whore ruin it. He knew from Conklin’s call that she had gone home to pack. So Mittel went there and intercepted her somehow. Maybe told her that Conklin had sent him. I don’t know.”
    “He killed her.”
    Bosch nodded and this time he didn’t go dizzy.
    “I don’t know where, maybe in his car. He made it look like a sex crime by tying the belt around her neck and tearing up her clothes. The semen…it was already there because she had been with Conklin…After she was dead, Mittel took the body to the alley near the Boulevard and put her in the trash. The whole thing stayed a secret for a lot of years after that.”
    “Until you came along.”
    Bosch didn’t answer. He was savoring his cigarette and the relief of the end of the case.
    “What about Fox?” Irving asked.
    “Like I said, Fox knew about Marjorie and Arno. And he knew they were together the night before Marjorie was found dead in that alley. That knowledge gave Fox a powerful piece of leverage over an important man, even if the man was innocent. Fox used it. In who knows how many ways. Within a year he was on Arno ’s campaign payroll. He was hooked on him like a bloodsucking leech. So Mittel, the fixer, finally stepped in. Fox died in a hit and run while supposedly handing out Conklin campaign fliers. Would’ve been easy to set up, make it look like it was an accident and the driver just fled. But that’s no surprise. The same guy who worked the Marjorie Lowe case worked the hit and run. Same result. Nobody ever arrested.”
    “McKittrick?”
    “No. Claude Eno. He’s dead now. Took his secrets with him. But Mittel was paying him off for twenty-five years.”
    “The bank statements?”
    “Yeah, in the briefcase. You look, you’ll probably find records somewhere linking Mittel to the payments. Conklin said he didn’t know about them and I believe him…You know, somebody ought to check all the elections Mittel worked on over the years. They’ll probably find out he was a rat fucker that could’ve held his own in the