Trunk Music
in the night.
At Sands Boulevard he turned east and within a mile he came to the apartment complex where Eleanor Wish lived. It was a sprawling development with numbered buildings. It took him a while until he found hers and then figured out which unit was hers. He sat in his car and smoked and watched her lighted windows for a while. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or what he wanted.
Five years earlier Eleanor Wish had done the worst and the best to him. She had betrayed him, put him in danger and she had also saved his life. She had made love to him. And then it all went bad. Still, he had often thought about her, the old what-might-have-been blues. She had a hold on him through time. She had been cold to him this night but he thought for sure the hold went both ways. She was his reflection, he had always been sure of that.
He got out of the car, dropped his dead cigarette and went to her door. She answered his knock quickly, almost as if she was expecting him. Or someone.
“How’d you find me? Did you follow me?”
“No. I made a call, that’s all.”
“What happened to your lip?”
“It’s nothing. Are you going to ask me in?”
She backed up to allow him to enter. It was a small place with spare furnishings. It looked as though she was adding things over time, as she could afford them. He first noticed the print of Hopper’s Nighthawks on the wall over the couch. It was a painting that always struck a chord with him. He had once had the same print on his own wall. It had been a gift from her five years before. A good-bye gift.
He looked from the painting to her. Their eyes met and he knew everything she had said earlier had been a front. He stepped closer to her and touched her, put his hand on her neck and ran a thumb along her cheek. He looked closely at her face. It was resolute, determined.
“This time it’s been a long time for me,” she whispered.
And he remembered that he had told her the same on the night they’d first made love. That was a lifetime ago, Bosch thought. What am I doing now? Can you pick up after so long and so many changes?
He pulled her close and they held each other and kissed for a long moment and then she wordlessly led him to the bedroom, where she quickly unbuttoned her blouse and dropped her jeans to the floor. She pressed herself to him again and they kissed while she worked her hands up his shirt, opening it and pressing her skin to his. Her hair smelled of smoke from the tables, but there was an underlying scent of perfume that reminded him of a night five years before. He remembered the jacaranda trees outside her window and how they put a violet snow on the ground.
They made love with an intensity that Bosch had forgotten that he had. It was a bruising, huffing physical act devoid of love, invigorated and driven solely, it seemed, by lust and maybe a memory. When he was done she pulled him toward her, into her, in rhythmic thrusts until she, too, reached her moment and subsided. Then, with the clarity of thought that always comes after, they became embarrassed about their nakedness, about how they had coupled with the ferocity of animals and now looked at each other as human beings.
“I forgot to ask,” she said. “You’re not married now, are you?”
She giggled. He reached to the floor to where his jacket had been thrown and pulled out the cigarettes.
“No,” he said. “I’m alone.”
“I should’ve known. Harry Bosch, the loner. I should’ve known.”
She was smiling at him in the darkness. He saw it when the match flared. He lit the cigarette and then offered it to her. She shook her head no.
“How many women have there been since me? Tell me.”
“I don’t know, just a few. There was one, we were together about a year. That was the most serious one.”
“What happened to her?”
“She went to Italy.”
“For good?”
“Who knows?”
“Well, if you don’t know, then she isn’t coming back. At least to you.”
“Yeah, I know. That one’s been over a while.”
He was silent for a moment and then she asked him who else there had been.
“There was a painter I met in Florida on a case. That didn’t last long. After that, there’s you again.”
“What happened to the painter?”
Bosch shook his head as if to dismiss the inquiry. He didn’t really enjoy reviewing his ill-fated romantic record.
“Distance, I guess,” he said. “It just didn’t work. I couldn’t leave L.A., she couldn’t leave where she
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