Trunk Music

about any car that shouldn’t be here.”
    “Well, I mean if you weren’t here. If you were out and someone was here, you probably wouldn’t know.”
    “How could they get in past the gate?”
    “It’s a long shot, we know, Mrs. Aliso. It’s all we’ve got right now.”
    She frowned.
    “There’s nothing else? What about what you told me the other day? About this man in Las Vegas?”
    “Well, Mrs. Aliso, I hate to tell you this, but we went down the wrong path on that. We gathered a lot of information about your husband and initially it looked like that was the way to go. But it didn’t work out. We do think we’re moving in the right direction now, and we’re going to make up for the lost time.”
    She seemed genuinely stunned.
    “I don’t understand. The wrong path?”
    “Yes, well, I can explain it to you, if you want to hear it. But it involves your husband and some unsavory things.”
    “Detective, I’ve prepared myself over the last few days for anything. Tell me.”
    “Mrs. Aliso, as I think I indicated to you on our last visit, your husband was involved with some very dangerous people in Las Vegas. I think I mentioned them, Joey Marks and Luke Goshen?”
    “I don’t recall.”
    She kept the look of bewilderment on her face. She was good. Bosch had to give that to her. She might not have made it in the film business but she could act when she needed to.
    “To put it bluntly, they’re mobsters,” Bosch said. “Organized crime. And it looks like your husband had been working for them for a long time. He took mob money from Vegas and put it into his films. Laundered it through. Then he gave it back to them, after taking out a fee. It was a lot of money and that’s where we went down the wrong path. Your husband was about to get audited by the IRS. Did you know that?”
    “Audited? No. He didn’t tell me anything about an audit.”
    “Well, we found out about the audit, which likely would have revealed his illegal activities, and we thought maybe these people he did business with became aware of it, too, and had him killed so he wouldn’t be able to talk about their business. Only we don’t think that anymore.”
    “I don’t understand. Are you sure of this? It seems obvious to me that these people had some involvement.”
    She faltered a little bit there. Her voice was a little too urgent.
    “Well, like I said, we thought that, too. We haven’t fully dropped it, but so far it doesn’t check out. The man we arrested over there in Vegas, this Goshen fellow I mentioned, he looked pretty good for it, I have to say. But then his alibi turned out to be a rock we couldn’t break. It couldn’t have been him, Mrs. Aliso. It looks as though somebody went to great lengths to make it look like it was him, even planted a gun in his house, but we know it wasn’t.”
    She looked at him with dull eyes for a moment and then shook her head. Then she made her first real mistake. She should have said that if it wasn’t Goshen, then it was probably the other one Bosch had mentioned or some other mobster associate. But she said nothing and that instinctively told Bosch that she knew of the setup on Goshen. She now knew the plan hadn’t worked and her mind was probably scrambling.
    “So then what will you do?” she finally asked.
    “Oh, we already had to let him go.”
    “No, I mean about the investigation. What’s next?”
    “Well, we’re sort of starting from scratch. Looking at it like maybe it was a planned robbery.”
    “You said his watch wasn’t taken.”
    “Right. It wasn’t. But the Las Vegas angle wasn’t a total waste. We found out that your husband was carrying a lot of money with him when he landed here that night. He was taking it back here to run through his company. To clean it up. It was a lot of money. Nearly a million dollars. He was carrying it for-”
    “A million dollars?”
    That was her second mistake. To Bosch, her emphasis on million and her shock betrayed her knowledge that there had been far less than that in Tony Aliso’s briefcase. Bosch watched as her eyes stared blankly and all her movement was interior. He guessed-and hoped-she was now wondering where the rest of the money was.
    “Yes,” he said. “See, the man who gave your husband the money, the one we first thought was a suspect, is an FBI agent who infiltrated the organization your husband worked for. That is why his alibi is so solid. Anyway, he told us that your husband was carrying a