“Yeah. They were both at home last night. Neither went out. They’re each other’s alibi.”
“Great,” Chastain said.
“Okay, Kiz,” Bosch said. “Anybody else got something they want to bring up?”
Bosch leaned forward on the table so he could look down his side and see every face. No one said anything. He noticed everybody had finished eating their sandwiches.
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about the press conference, but the chief called in the cavalry. Tomorrow morning the bureau enters the case. We have a meet at eight in Irving’s conference room.”
“Shit,” Chastain said.
“What the hell are they going to do that we can’t?” Edgar asked.
“Probably nothing,” Bosch said. “But his announcing it at the press conference will probably go a long way toward keeping the peace. At least, for now. Anyway, let’s worry about that tomorrow when we see how things shake out. We still have the rest of today. Irving gave me an unofficial cease and desist until the agents show up but that’s bullshit. I say we keep working.”
“Yeah, we don’t want the shark to drown, do we?” Chastain said.
“That’s right, Chastain. Now, I know nobody’s had much sleep. My thinking is that some of us keep working and knock off early, some of us go home, take a nap and come back in fresh tonight. Any problem with that?”
Again no one said anything.
“All right, this is how we break it up. I’ve got three boxes of files from Elias’s office in my trunk. I want you IAD guys to take them and go back to Irving’s conference room. You take the files, pull out names of cops and anybody else to be checked out. I want a chart made up. When we get legit alibis we scratch the names off the chart and move on. I want this ready by the time the bureau arrives tomorrow. When you have it done, then you guys can knock off for the night.”
“And what are you going to be doing?” Chastain asked.
“We’re going to run down Elias’s secretary and his clerk. Then after that, I’m going home to take a nap. Hopefully. Then tonight we’re going to talk to Harris and chase down that Internet thing. I want to know what that’s all about before the bureau comes in.”
“You better be careful with Harris.”
“We will. That’s one reason we’re waiting until tonight. We play it right and the media doesn’t even find out we talked to the guy.”
Chastain nodded.
“What about these files you’re giving us, they old or new?”
“They’re old ones. Entrenkin started on the closed cases.”
“When are we going to see the Black Warrior file? That’s the one. The rest of this is bullshit.”
“Hopefully, I’ll be picking that up later today. But the rest isn’t bullshit. We have to look at every damn file in that office. Because the one we skip is likely to be the one some lawyer shoves up our ass in trial. You understand that? Don’t skip anything.”
“I got it.”
“Besides, what do you care so much about the Black Warrior file for? You cleared those guys on it, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So what are you going to find in the file other than what you already know? You think you missed something, Chastain?”
“No, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s the case of the moment. I think there’s gotta be something there.”
“Well, we’ll see. All in good time. For now stick to the old files and don’t skip anything.”
“I told you, we won’t. It’s just a pain in the ass to know you’re wasting time.”
“Welcome to homicide.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out a small brown bag. It contained several copies of the key Irving had given him that he had had made in Chinatown on his way to the restaurant. He turned the bag over on the center of the table and keys clattered onto the table.
“Everybody take a key. They’ll open the door to Irving’s conference room. Once the files are in there I want the room locked at all times.”
Everybody reached to the center of the table and took a key except Bosch. He had already put the original on his key ring. He stood up and looked at Chastain.
“Let’s go get those files out of my car.”
Chapter 16
THE interviews with the secretary and the clerk were so uneventful that Bosch wished the detectives could have spent the time in their beds sleeping. Tyla Quimby, the secretary, had been out with the flu and holed up in her home in the Crenshaw district for the last week. She had no knowledge of Howard Elias’s activities during the days before his death. Aside from exposing Bosch, Edgar and Rider to the flu, she gave the detectives very little. She explained that Elias kept his case strategies and other aspects of his work largely to himself. Her role was primarily opening mail, answering phones, handling walk-in visitors and clients, and paying the office expenses through a small operating account Elias put money into each month. As far as the phone traffic went, she said Elias had a direct private phone line in his office that over the years had become widely known among friends and associates as well as some reporters and even enemies. So she was of little use in helping them determine whether Elias had been specifically threatened in the weeks before his murder. The investigators thanked her and left her home, hoping they would not fall victim to her illness.
The clerk, John Babineux, was an equal disappointment. He was able to confirm that it had been he and Michael Harris who had worked until late Friday with Elias. But Babineux said that Harris and Elias had been behind closed doors most of the evening. Babineux, as it turned out, had graduated from the USC law school three months before and was studying for the bar exam at night while clerking for Elias by day. He did his studying in Elias’s offices at night because it allowed him access to the law books he needed for memorizing case law and penal codes. It obviously was a better study environment than the crowded apartment near USC he shared with two other law students. Shortly before eleven he had walked out with Elias and Harris because he had felt he had done enough studying for one night. He said he and Harris walked to their cars in a nearby pay lot while Elias walked up Third Street alone toward Hill Street and Angels Flight.
Like Quimby, Babineux described Elias as secretive about his cases and preparation for trial. The clerk said that his responsibility in the last week of work had largely been preparing the transcripts of the many pretrial depositions taken in the Black Warrior case. His job was to download the transcripts and related material onto a laptop computer which would then be taken to court and accessed by Elias when he needed specific references to evidence and testimony during trial.
Babineux could give the detectives no information about specific threats to Elias – at least none that the attorney was taking seriously. He described Elias as extremely upbeat in recent days. He said Elias wholeheartedly believed that he was going to win the Black Warrior case.
“He said it was a slam dunk,” Babineux told the three detectives.
As Bosch drove up Woodrow Wilson Drive toward home he thought about the two interviews and wondered why Elias had been so secretive about the case he was bringing to trial. This didn’t fit with his past history of press leaks and sometimes full-scale press conferences as a primary strategy. Elias was being uncharacteristically quiet, yet he was confident in his case, enough to call it a slam dunk.
Bosch hoped the explanation of this would be revealed when he got the Black Warrior file from Entrenkin, hopefully in a few hours. He decided to put thoughts of it aside until then.
Immediately Eleanor came to mind. He thought about the closet in the bedroom. He purposely hadn’t checked it before, not sure how he would react if he found she had taken her clothes. He decided he needed to do that now, to get it over with. It would be a good time to do it. He was too tired now to do anything other than crash
