The Last Coyote (32 page)

Chapter Forty-four

B
ECAUSE OF THE
concussion, Bosch’s pupils were dilated unevenly and purple hemorrhages bulged below them. He had a hell of a headache and a one-hundred-degree temperature. As a precaution, the emergency room physician ordered that he be admitted and monitored, not allowed to sleep until four in the morning. He tried to pass the time by reading the newspaper and watching the talk shows but they only seemed to worsen the pain. Finally, he just stared at the walls until a nurse came in, checked on him and told him he could sleep. After that, nurses kept coming into his room and waking him at two-hour intervals. They checked his eyes and temperature and asked if he was okay. They never gave him anything for the headache. They told him to go back to sleep. If he dreamed of the coyote during the short sleep cycles, or anything else, he didn’t remember it.

Finally, at noon, he got up for good. He was unsteady on his feet at first but equilibrium quickly came back to him. He made his way into the bathroom and studied his image in the mirror. He burst out laughing at what he saw, though it was not that funny. It was just that he seemed to be about to laugh or cry or do both at any given moment.

He had a small shaved spot on his skull where there was an L-shaped seam of stitches. It hurt when he touched the wound but he laughed about that, too. He managed to comb hair over it with his hand, fairly well camouflaging the injury.

The eyes were another matter. Still dilated unevenly and now cracked with red veins, they looked like the bad end of a two-week bender. Below them, deep purple triangles pointed to the corners of the eyes. A double shiner. Bosch didn’t think he’d ever had one before.

Stepping back into the room he saw that his briefcase had been left by Irving next to the bed table. He bent to pick it up and almost lost his balance, grabbing on to the table at the last moment. He got back into bed with the briefcase and began examining its contents. He had no purpose in mind, he just wanted to be doing something.

He leafed through his notebook, finding it hard to concentrate on the words. He then re-read the five-year-old Christmas card from Meredith Roman, now Katherine Register. He realized he needed to call her, that he wanted to tell her what happened before she read about it in the paper or heard it on the news. He found her number in his notebook and dialed on the room’s phone. He got her answering machine and left a message.

“Meredith, uh, Katherine…this is Harry Bosch. I need to talk to you today when you get a minute. Some things have happened and I think you’ll, uh, feel better about things when you hear from me. So, give me a call.”

Bosch left a variety of numbers on the tape, including his mobile, the Mark Twain and the hospital room and then hung up.

He opened the accordion pocket in the lid of the briefcase and slipped out the photo Monte Kim had given him. He studied his mother’s face for a long time. The thought that eventually poked through was a question. Bosch had no doubt from what Conklin had said that he had loved her. But he wondered if she really loved Conklin back. Bosch remembered a time when she had visited him at McClaren. She had promised to get him out. At the time, the legal effort was going slowly and he knew that she had no faith in courts. When she made the promise, he knew she wasn’t thinking about the law, only ways to get around it, to manipulate it. And he believed she would have found a way to do it if her time hadn’t been taken away.

He realized, looking at the photo, that Conklin might simply have been part of the promise, part of the manipulation. Their marriage plan was her way of getting Harry out. From unwed mother with an arrest record to wife of an important man. Conklin would be able to get Harry out, to win back Marjorie Lowe’s custody of her son. Bosch considered that love may have had nothing to do with it on her part, that it was only opportunity. In all the visits to McClaren, she had never spoken of Conklin or any man in particular. If she had truly been in love, wouldn’t she have told him?

And in considering that question, Bosch realized that his mother’s effort to save him was what might ultimately have led to her death.

“Mr. Bosch, are you okay?”

The nurse moved quickly into the room and put the food tray down on the table with a rattle. Bosch didn’t answer her. He barely noticed her. She took the napkin off the tray and used it to wipe the tears off his cheeks.

“It’s okay,” she soothed. “It’s okay.”

“Is it?”

“It’s the injury. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Head injuries jumble the emotions. One minute you’re crying, the next you’re laughing. Let me open these curtains. Maybe that will cheer you up.”

“I think I just want to be left alone.”

She ignored him and opened the curtains and Bosch had a view of another building twenty yards away. It did cheer him up, though. The view was so bad it made him laugh. It also reminded him he was in Cedars. He recognized the other medical tower.

The nurse then closed his briefcase so she could roll the table over the bed. On the tray was a plate containing Salisbury steak, carrots and potatoes. There was a roll that looked as hard as the eight ball he had found in his pocket the night before and some kind of red dessert wrapped in plastic. The tray and its smell made him feel the onset of nausea.

“I’m not going to eat this. Is there any Frosted Flakes?”

“You have to eat a full meal.”

“I just woke up. You people kept me up all night. I can’t eat this. It’s making me sick.”

She quickly picked up the tray and headed to the door.

“I’ll see what I can do. About the Frosted Flakes.”

She looked back at him and smiled before heading out the door.

“Cheer up.”

“Yeah, that’s the prescription.”

Bosch didn’t know what to do with himself but wait for time to pass. He started thinking about his encounter with Mittel, about what was said and what was meant. There was something about it that bothered him.

He was interrupted by a beeping sound coming from the side panel of the bed. He looked down and found it was the phone.

“Hello?”

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Jazz. Are you okay?”

There was a long silence. Bosch didn’t know if he was ready for this yet, but now it was unavoidable.

“Harry?”

“I’m fine. How’d you find me?”

“The man who called me yesterday. Irving something. He—”

“Chief Irving.”

“Yes. He called and told me you were hurt. He gave me the number.”

That annoyed Bosch but he tried not to show it.

“Well, I’m fine, but I can’t really talk.”

“Well, what happened?”

“It’s just a long story. I don’t want to go through it now.”

Now she was quiet. It was one of those moments when both people try to read the silence, pick up each other’s meanings in what they weren’t saying.

“You know, don’t you?”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Jasmine?”

“I…”

More silence.

“Do you want me to tell you now?”

“I don’t know…”

“What did he tell you?”

“Who?”

“Irving.”

“It wasn’t from him. He doesn’t know. It was somebody else. Somebody trying to hurt me.”

“It was a long time ago, Harry. I want to tell you what happened…but not on the phone.”

He closed his eyes and thought for a minute. Just hearing her voice had renewed his sense of connection to her. But he had to question whether he wanted to get into this.

“I don’t know, Jazz. I’ve got to think about—”

“Look, what was I supposed to do? Wear a sign or something to warn you away from the start? You tell me, when was a good time for me to tell you? Was it right after that first lemonade? Should I have said, ‘Oh, by the way, six years ago I killed the man I was living with when he tried to rape me for the second time in the same night?’ Would that have been proper?”

“Jazz, don’t…”

“Don’t what? Look, the cops didn’t believe my story here, what should I expect from you?”

He could tell she was crying now, not so that he was supposed to hear. But he could tell it in her voice, full of loneliness and pain.

“You said things to me,” she said. “I thought…”

“Jazz, we spent a weekend together. You’re putting too much—”

“Don’t you dare! Don’t you tell me it didn’t mean anything.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry…Look, this isn’t the right time. I’ve got too much going on. I gotta call you back…”

She didn’t say anything.

“Okay?”

“Okay, Harry, you call me.”

“Okay, goodbye, Jazz.”

He hung up and kept his eyes closed for a while. He felt the numbness of disappointment that comes from broken hopes and wondered if he would ever talk to her again. In analyzing his thoughts he realized how much they seemed to be the same. And so his fear was not of what she had done, whatever the details were. His fear was that he would indeed call her and that he would become entwined with someone with more baggage than himself.

He opened his eyes and tried to put the thoughts aside. But he came back to her. He found himself marveling at the randomness of their meeting. A newspaper want ad. It might as well have said Single White Killer Seeks Same. He laughed out loud but it wasn’t funny.

He turned the television on as a distraction. There was a talk show on and the host was interviewing women who stole their best friend’s men. The best friends were also on and every question devolved into a verbal cat fight. Bosch turned the sound down and watched for ten minutes in silence, studying the contortions of the women’s angry faces.

After a while he turned it off and rang the nurses’ station on the intercom to inquire about his cereal. The nurse he spoke to knew nothing about his request for breakfast at lunch time. He tried Meredith Roman’s number again but hung up when he got the tape.

Just as Bosch was getting hungry enough to be tempted to call for the return of the Salisbury steak, a nurse finally came back in with another food tray. This one contained a banana, a small glass of orange juice, a plastic bowl with a little box of Frosted Flakes in it and a pint-size carton of milk. He thanked her and began eating the cereal out of the box. The other stuff he didn’t want.

He picked up the phone and dialed the main number at Parker Center and asked for Assistant Chief Irving’s office. The secretary who eventually answered said Irving was in conference with the police chief and could not be disturbed. Bosch left his number.

Next he dialed Keisha Russell’s number at the paper.

“It’s Bosch.”

“Bosch, where have you been? You turn your phone off?”

Bosch reached into his briefcase and took the phone out. He checked the battery.

“Sorry, it’s dead.”

“Great. That doesn’t help me any, does it? The two biggest names in that clip I gave you end up dead last night and you don’t even call. Some deal we made.”

“Hey, this is me on the phone, right?”

“So what’ve you got for me?”

“What’ve you got already? What are they saying about it?”

“They’re not saying jack. I’ve been waiting on you, man.”

“But what are they really saying?”

“I mean it, nothing. They’re saying both deaths are being investigated and that there is no clear connection. They’re trying to pass it off as a big coincidence.”

“What about the other man? Did they find Vaughn?”

“Who’s Vaughn?”

Bosch couldn’t figure out what was happening, why there was a cover-up. He knew he should wait to hear from Irving but the anger was growing in his throat.

“Bosch? You there? What other man?”

“What are they saying about me?”

“You? They’re not saying anything.”

“The other man’s name is Jonathan Vaughn. He was there, too. Up at Mittel’s last night.”

“How do you know?”

“I was there, too.”

“Bosch, you were there?”

Bosch closed his eyes but his mind couldn’t penetrate the shroud being thrown over the case by the department. He didn’t get it.

“Harry, we had a deal. Tell me the story.”

He noted that it was the only time she had ever used his first name. He continued to say nothing while he tried to figure out what was happening and weighed the consequences of talking to her.

“Bosch?”

Back to normal.

“All right. You got your pencil? I’m going to give you enough to get started. You’ll have to go to Irving to get the rest.”

“I’ve been calling him. He won’t even take my calls.”

“He will when he knows you have the story. He’ll have to.”

By the time he was done telling her the story he was fatigued and his head was hurting again. He was ready to go to sleep, if it would have him. He wanted to forget everything and just sleep.

“That’s an incredible story, Bosch,” she said when he was done. “I’m sorry, you know, about your mother.”

“Thanks.”

“What about Pounds?”

“What about him?”

“Is it connected? Irving was honchoing that investigation. Now he’s doing this one.”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“If I can get him on the line.”

“When you call over there, tell the adjutant to tell Irving you’re calling on behalf of Marjorie Lowe. He’ll call you back when he gets the message. I guarantee it.”

“Okay, Bosch, last thing. We didn’t talk about this at the start like we should have. Can I use your name as a source?”

Bosch thought about it but only for a few moments.

“Yeah, you can use it. I don’t know what my name’s worth anymore but you can use it.”

“Thanks. I’ll see you. You’re a pal.”

“Yeah, I’m a pal.”

He hung up and closed his eyes. He dozed off but wasn’t sure for how long. He was interrupted by the phone. It was Irving and he was angry.

“What did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just got a message from a reporter. She says she’s calling because of Marjorie Lowe. Have you talked to reporters about this?”

“I talked to one.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her enough so that you won’t be able to let this one blow away.”