The Last Coyote

It wasn’t much but it was a little piece of verification of Katherine Register’s story. And it was enough to get Bosch’s juices going. It made him feel that at least he had a line in the water.
    “Fucking hypocrite,” he whispered to himself.
    He drew a circle around Conklin’s name in the notebook. He absentmindedly kept circling it as he tried to decide what he should do next.
    Marjorie Lowe’s last known destination was a party in Hancock Park. According to Katherine Register, she was more specifically going to meet Conklin. After she was dead, Conklin had called the detectives on the case to make an appointment but any record of the interview, if any occurred, was missing. Bosch knew it was all a general correlation of facts but it served to deepen and solidify the suspicion he had felt from the night he had first looked through the murder book. Something was not right about the case. Something didn’t fit. And the more he thought about it, the more he believed Conklin was the wrong piece.
    He reached into his jacket, which was on the chairback behind him, and took out his small phone book. He took it into the kitchen, where he dialed the home line of Deputy District Attorney Roger Goff.
    Goff was a friend who shared Bosch’s affection for the tenor saxophone. They’d spent many days in court sitting side by side during trials and many nights in jazz bars side by side on stools. Goff was an old-line prosecutor who had been with the office nearly thirty years. He had no political aspirations inside or outside of the office. He just liked his job. He was a rarity because he never tired of it. A thousand deputies had come in, burned out, and gone on to corporate America during Goff’s watch, but he stayed. He now labored in the criminal courts building with prosecutors and public defenders twenty years his junior. But he was still good at it and, more important, still had the fire in his voice when he stood before a jury and called down the outrage of God and society against those in the defendant’s chair. His mixture of tenacity and plain fairness had made him a legend in downtown legal and law enforcement circles. And he was one of the few prosecutors Bosch had unconditional respect for.
    “Roger, Harry Bosch.”
    “Hey, goddamnit, how you doing?”
    “I’m fine. What are you up to?”
    “Watching the tube like everybody else. What’re you doing?”
    “Nothing. I was just thinking, you remember Gloria Jeffries?”
    “Glo-shit, of course I do. Let’s see. She’s…yeah, she’s the one with the husband got quaded in the motorcycle accident, right?”
    Recalling the case, it sounded as if he were reading it off one of his yellow tablets.
    “She got tired of caring for him. So one morning he’s in bed and she sits on his face until she smothers him. It was about to go by as a natural but a suspicious detective named Harry Bosch wouldn’t let it go. He came up with a witness who Gloria had told everything to. The clincher, the thing that got the jury, was that she told the wit that when she smothered him, it was the first orgasm the poor devil had ever been able to give her. How is that for a memory?”
    “Damn, you’re good.”
    “So what about her?”
    “She’s raising up at Frontera. Getting ready to. I was wondering if you’d have time to write a letter.”
    “Fuck, already? What was that, three, four years ago?”
    “Almost five. I hear she’s got the book now and goes to the board next month. I’ll write a letter but it’d be good if there was one from the prosecutor, too.”
    “Don’t worry about it, I got a standard in my computer. All I do is change the name and the crime, throw in a few of the gruesome details. The basic line is that the crime was too heinous for parole to be considered at this time. It’s a good letter. I’ll send it out tomorrow. It usually works charms.”
    “Good. Thanks.”
    “You know, they gotta stop giving the book to those women. They all get religion when they’re coming up. You ever go to one of those hearings?”
    “A couple.”
    “Yeah, sit through a half a day of them if you have the time and aren’t feeling particularly suicidal sometime. They sent me out to Frontera once when one of the Manson girls was up. See, with the big ones like that they send a body out instead of a letter. So, I went out and I sat through about ten of these things waiting for my girl to come up. And let me tell you, everybody’s quoting Corinthians,