Trunk Music

Hollywood’s elite. Fitzgerald and Faulkner held forth. Chaplin and Fairbanks once raced each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser having to pick up the dinner tab. The restaurant now subsisted mostly on its past glory and faded charm. Its red leather padded booths still filled every day for lunch and some of the waiters looked and moved as if they had been there long enough to have served Chaplin. The menu hadn’t changed in all the years Bosch had been eating there-this in a town where the hookers out on the Boulevard lasted longer than most restaurants.
    Edgar and Rider were waiting in one of the prized round booths, and Bosch slid in after they were pointed out by the maître d’-he was apparently too old and tired to walk Bosch over himself. They were both drinking iced tea and Bosch decided to go along with that, though privately he lamented that they were in the place that made the best martini in the city. Only Rider was looking at the menu. She was new in the division and hadn’t been to Musso’s enough times to know what the best thing was to order for lunch.
    “So what are we doing?” Edgar asked while she looked.
    “We’ve got to start over,” Bosch said. “The Vegas stuff was all misdirection.”
    Rider glanced over the top of the menu at Bosch.
    “Kiz, put that down,” he said. “If you don’t get the chicken pot pie you’re making a mistake.”
    She hesitated, nodded and put the menu aside.
    “What do you mean, misdirection?” she asked.
    “I mean whoever killed Tony wanted us to go that way. And they planted the gun out there to make sure we stayed out there. But they screwed up. They didn’t know the guy they planted the gun on was a fed who would have a bunch of other feds as an alibi. That was the screwup. Now, once I learned that our suspect was an agent, I thought Joey Marks and his people must have figured out he was a fed and set the whole thing up to taint him.”
    “I still think that sounds good,” Edgar said.
    “It does, or it did until last night,” Bosch said as an ancient waiter in a red coat came to the table.
    “Three chicken pot pies,” Bosch said.
    “Do you want something to drink?” the waiter asked.
    Hell with it, Bosch decided.
    “Yeah, I’ll have a martini, three olives. You can bring them some more iced tea. That’s it.”
    The waiter nodded and slowly glided away without writing anything on his pad.
    “Last night,” Bosch continued, “I learned from a source that Joey Marks did not know the man he thought was named Luke Goshen was a plant. He had no idea he was an informant, let alone an agent. In fact, once we picked Goshen up, Joey was engaged in a plan to try to find out whether Goshen was going to stand up or talk. This was because he had to decide whether to put a contract on him in the Metro jail.”
    He waited a moment to let them think about this.
    “So, you can see with that information in the mix now, the second theory no longer works.”
    “Well, who’s the source?” Edgar asked.
    “I can’t tell you that, guys. But it’s solid. It’s the truth.”
    He watched their eyes float down to the table. He knew they trusted him, but they also knew how informants were often the most skilled liars in the game. It was a tough call to base everything from here on out on an informant.
    “Okay,” Bosch said. “The source was Eleanor Wish. Jerry, have you told Kiz about all of that?”
    Edgar hesitated, then nodded.
    “Okay, then you know who she is. She overheard all of what I told you while they had her in that house. Before we got there, both Joey and the lawyer, Torrino, were there. She overheard them and from what she heard, they didn’t know about Goshen. See, that whole abduction was part of the test. They knew the only way I could find out where the safe house was would be to get it from Goshen. That was the test, to see if he was talking or not.”
    They sat in silence for a few minutes while Edgar and Rider digested this.
    “Okay,” Edgar finally said. “I see what you’re saying. But if Vegas was one big fucking red herring, how does the gun get over there in the agent’s house?”
    “That’s what we have to figure out. What if there was someone outside of Tony’s mob connections but close enough to him to know he was washing money and the reason why he made all the trips to Vegas? Someone who either had personal knowledge or maybe followed Tony to Vegas and watched how he worked, how he picked up