“What about Simonson? He got shot, too. Were they trying to cut him out, too?”
“No, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Not according to Fazio. At least that was what he was saying to me before he got nailed last night. It sounded like Simonson getting shot was just dumb luck. A ricochet. If Banks comes out of his sleep with his brain intact maybe he can tell you about that. I have a feeling he’ll want to talk. He’ll want to spread the blame around.”
“Don’t worry, if he comes out of it, we’ll be there. But the early word from the hospital is that that’s a big if.”
“The thing about that ricochet is that it actually helped them. It gave Simonson a valid out from the bank. No suspicion there. Then he hid the purchase and renovation of the bars behind a settlement from the bank. The truth was he didn’t make enough off the settlement to put in a new beer cooler.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
“All right, let’s get back to the heist for a minute,” Lindell said. “So other than Simonson taking a slug in the ass, the heist goes off as planned. All the cops -”
“Not exactly,” Rider said. “Harry was there. He nailed one of the robbers.”
I nodded.
“And he apparently died in the van during the getaway. Simonson told me the others took him out on a boat or something and buried him at sea. His name was Cozy. They named one of the bars after him.”
“Okay,” Lindell said. “But when the dust settles from this thing, all the cops have is Angella Benton dead and a phony list of numbers that nobody knows is phony. Then nine months sail by and lo and behold one of those numbers scores a hit when Marty Gessler puts it into her computer.”
I nodded. Lindell knew where it was going.
“Wait a minute,” Rider said. “I’m not tracking this part.”
Lindell and I took five minutes to fill her in on Marty Gessler’s computer program that tracked currency numbers and what her discovery meant.
“Got it,” Rider said. “She came up with the first inference that something was wrong. She came up with a hit that didn’t work because the hundred-dollar bill in question was already in evidence lockup. It could not have been taken during the movie set heist.”
“Exactly,” I said. “One of the numbers Simonson made up just happened to be on a bill already accounted for. The same thing would later happen when they arrested Mousouwa Aziz at the border. One of the hundreds he was carrying matched Simonson’s phony list. That brought Milton and the Homeland Security heavies into it and it was all bullshit. The truth was, there was no connection between the two cases.”
Which meant I had spent the night in federal lockup for nothing and Milton had been killed while pursuing what amounted to nothing, a wild goose chase. I tried not to think about this and moved on with the story.
“When Marty Gessler got that hit, she called up Jack Dorsey because his name was on the list when it was circulated to other law enforcement agencies. It went from there.”
“You’re saying that Dorsey then put two and two together and came up with Simonson,” Lindell said. “Maybe he knew about the forgery or maybe he knew about something else. But he knew enough to know. He went to Simonson and cut himself in.”
I noticed that we were all nodding. The story worked.
“Dorsey had money problems,” I added. “The insurance investigator on this did routine background checks on all the cops involved. Dorsey was in debt up to his neck, had two kids in college and two still to go.”
“Everybody’s got money problems,” Rider said angrily. “It’s no excuse.”
That made us all silent for a long moment and then I took up the story again.
“There was just one problem at that point.”
“Agent Gessler,” Rider said. “She knew too much. She had to disappear.”
Rider didn’t know anything about Lindell’s relationship with Gessler, and Lindell did little to reveal it. He just sat quietly, his eyes down. I moved the story forward.
“My guess is that Simonson and his guys played Dorsey along while they took care of the Gessler problem. Dorsey knew what they did, but what could he do or say about it? He was in too deep. Then Simonson took care of him in Nat’s. Cross and the bartender were window dressing.”
Rider squinted her eyes and shook her head.
“What?” Lindell asked.
“Doesn’t work for me,” she said. “There’s a disconnect there. With Gessler, she’s gone without a trace. Very smooth. Three years later and who knows where the body is?”
I was cringing for Lindell’s sake but tried not to show it.
“But with Dorsey, it’s a shoot-out at the OK Corral. Dorsey, Cross, the bartender. Two completely different styles. One smooth as smoke, the other a blood bath.”
“Well,” I said, “with Dorsey, they wanted it to look like a robbery gone wrong. If he just disappeared, then the obvious thing to do would be to go back over the old cases. Simonson didn’t want that. So he orchestrated the big blowout so the investigators would think robbery.”
“I still don’t buy it. I think they’re different. Look, I don’t remember all the details but didn’t Marty Gessler disappear while driving home through the Sepulveda Pass?”
“That’s right. Somebody bumped her and she pulled over.”
“Okay, then here’s an armed and trained agent. Are you going to tell me Simonson and these guys got her to pull over by bumping her car and then they got the best of her? Uh-uh, guys. I say, no way. Not without a fight. Not without somebody seeing something. I think she stopped because she felt safe. She stopped for a cop.”
She pointed at me and nodded when she said the last line. Lindell brought a fist down hard on the table. Rider had convinced him. I had defended my theory but now saw the cracks in it. I started thinking Rider might be right.
I noticed Rider looking at Lindell. She was finally picking up the vibe.
“You really knew her, didn’t you?” she asked.
Lindell just nodded to the question. Then he brought his eyes up to stare angrily at me.
“And you blew it, Bosch,” he said.
“I blew it? What are you talking about?”
“With your little stunt last night. Going in there like fucking Steve McQueen. What did you think, that they’d be so spooked they’d march right down to Parker Center and turn themselves in?”
“Roy,” Rider said, “I think we -”
“You wanted to provoke them, didn’t you? You wanted them to come after you.”
“That’s crazy,” I said calmly. “Four against one? The only reason I’m alive right now and talking to you is because I saw them tailing me and because Milton distracted them long enough for me to get out of the house.”
“Yeah, that’s just it. You saw the tail. You saw it because you were looking for it and you were looking for it because you wanted it. You blew it, Bosch. If that kid in the hospital doesn’t wake up with a working brain, then we’ll never know what happened to Marty or where -”
He stopped before his voice lost it. He stopped speaking but didn’t stop staring at me.
“Guys,” Rider said quietly, “let’s take a break here. Let’s stop questioning motives and accusing. We all want the same thing here.”
Lindell slowly and emphatically shook his head.
“No, not Harry Bosch,” he said quietly, his eyes still on mine. “It’s always just what he wants. He’s always been a private investigator, even when he carried a badge.”
I looked from Lindell to Rider. She didn’t say anything but her eyes dropped away from mine, and in their movement was a tell. I saw her confirmation.
42
It was dawn by the time I got back to my house. The place was still a swarm of police and media activity and
