“Eleanor.”
“Harry.”
“Everything all right?”
He slid back into his seat and Rider went back to hers.
“I’m fine… I just…”
“When did you get in?”
“A little while ago.”
“Did you win?”
“I didn’t really play. After you called me there last night… I left.”
Bosch leaned forward and put an elbow on the table, a hand against his forehead.
“Well… where’d you go?”
“A hotel… Harry, I just came back for some clothes and things. I…”
“Eleanor?”
There was a long silence on the phone. Bosch heard Edgar say he was going to get some coffee in the watch office. Rider said she’d go along, even though Bosch knew she didn’t drink coffee. She had an assortment of herbal teas she kept in the drawer of her desk.
“Harry, it’s not right,” Eleanor said.
“What are you talking about, Eleanor?”
Another long moment of silence went by before she answered.
“I was thinking about that movie we saw last year. About the Titanic.”
“I remember.”
“And the girl in that. She fell in love with that boy, that she only met right there on the boat. And it was… I mean, she loved him so much. So much that at the end she wouldn’t leave. She didn’t take the lifeboat so she would be with him.”
“I remember, Eleanor.”
He remembered her crying in the seat next to him and his smiling and not being able to understand how a film would affect her in such a way.
“You cried.”
“Yes. It’s because everybody wants that kind of love. And, Harry, you deserve that from me. I – ”
“No, Eleanor, what you give me is more than – ”
“She jumped from a lifeboat back onto the Titanic, Harry.” She laughed a little bit. But it sounded sad to Bosch. “I guess nobody can ever top that.”
“You’re right. Nobody can. That’s why it was a movie. Listen… you are all I’ve ever wanted, Eleanor. You don’t have to do anything for me.”
“Yes, I do. I do… I love you, Harry. But not enough. You deserve better.”
“Eleanor, no… please. I…”
“I’m going to go away for a while. Think about things.”
“Will you wait there? I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. We can talk about – ”
“No, no. That’s why I paged. I can’t do this in person.”
He could tell she was crying.
“Well, I’m coming up there.”
“I won’t be here,” she said urgently. “I packed the car before I paged you. I knew you’d try to come.”
Bosch put his hand over his eyes. He wanted to be in darkness.
“Where will you be?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Will you call?”
“Yes, I’ll call.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m… I’ll be fine.”
“Eleanor, I love you. I know I never said that enough but I – ”
She made a shushing sound in the phone and he stopped.
“I love you, Harry, but I have to do this.”
After a long moment, during which he felt a deep tearing inside, he said, “Okay, Eleanor.”
The silence that followed was as dark as the inside of a coffin. His coffin.
“Good-bye, Harry,” she finally said. “I’ll see you.”
She hung up. Bosch took his hand away from his face and the phone from his ear. In his mind he saw a swimming pool, its surface as smooth as a blanket on a bed. He remembered a time long before when he had been told his mother was dead and that he was alone in the world. He ran to that pool and dove beneath the calm surface, into its warm water. At the bottom, he screamed until his air was gone and his chest ached. Until he had to choose between staying there and dying, or going up and life.
Bosch now longed for that pool and its warm water. He wanted to scream until his lungs burst inside him.
“Everything okay?”
He looked up. It was Rider and Edgar. Edgar carried a steaming cup of coffee. Rider had a look that said she was concerned or maybe even scared by the look she was seeing on Bosch’s face.
“Everything’s cool,” Bosch said. “Everything’s fine.”
Chapter 23
THEY had ninety minutes to kill before the meeting with Pelfry. Bosch told Edgar to drive over to Hollywood Wax amp; Shine, on Sunset not far from the station. Edgar pulled to the curb and they sat there watching. Business was slow. Most of the men in orange coveralls who dried and polished the cars for minimum wage and tips were sitting around, drying rags draped over their shoulders, waiting. Most of them stared balefully at the slickback as if the police were to blame.
“I guess people aren’t that interested in having their cars washed when they might end up turned over or torched,” Edgar said.
Bosch didn’t answer.
“Bet they all wish they were in Michael Harris’s shoes,” Edgar continued, staring back at the workers. “Hell, I’d trade three days in an interview room and pencils in my ears to be a millionaire.”
“So then you believe him,” Bosch said.
Bosch hadn’t told him about Frankie Sheehan’s barroom confession. Edgar was quiet a moment and then nodded.
“Yeah, Harry, I guess I sort of do.”
Bosch wondered how he had been so blind as to not even have considered that the torturing of a suspect could be true. He wondered what it was about Edgar that made him accepting of the suspect’s story over the cops’. Was it his experience as a cop or as a black man? Bosch assumed it had to be the latter and it depressed him because it gave Edgar an edge he could never have.
“I’m gonna go in, talk to the manager,” Bosch said. “Maybe you should stay with the car.”
“Fuck that. They won’t touch it.”
They got out and locked the car.
As they walked toward the store Bosch thought about the orange coveralls and wondered if it was coincidence. He guessed that most of the men working at the car wash were ex-cons or fresh out of county lockup – institutions in which they also had to wear orange coveralls.
Inside the store Bosch bought a cup of coffee and asked for the manager. The cashier pointed down a hallway to an open door. On the way down the hall, Edgar said, “I feel like a Coke but I don’t think I can drink a Coke after what I saw last night in that bitch’s closet.”
A man was sitting at a desk in the small, windowless office with his feet up on one of the open drawers. He
