“This is my wife, Audrey,” Blaylock said. “Do you take your coffee black? Every cop I ever knew took it black.”
The husband and wife sat next to each other on the couch.
“Black’s fine. Did you know a lot of cops?”
“When I was in L.A. I did. I worked thirty years for the city fire department. Quit as a station commander after the ’ninety-two riots. That was enough for me. Came in right before Watts and left after ’ninety-two.”
“What is it you want to talk to us about?” Audrey asked, seemingly impatient with her husband’s small talk.
Bosch nodded. He had his coffee and the introductions were over.
“I work homicide. Out of Hollywood Division. I’m on a-”
“I worked six years out of fifty-eights,” Blaylock said, referring to the fire station that was behind the Hollywood Division station house.
Bosch nodded again.
“Don, let the man tell us why he came all the way up here,” Audrey said.
“Sorry, go ahead.”
“I’m on a case. A homicide up in Laurel Canyon. Your old neighborhood, actually, and we’re contacting people who lived on the street back in nineteen eighty.”
“Why then?”
“Because that is when the homicide took place.”
They looked at him with puzzled faces.
“Is this one of those cold cases?” Blaylock said. “Because I don’t remember anything like that happening in our neighborhood back then.”
“In a way it’s a cold case. Only the body wasn’t discovered until a couple weeks ago. It had been buried up in the woods. In the hills.”
Bosch studied their faces. No tells, just shock.
“Oh, my God,” Audrey said. “You mean all that time we were living there, somebody was dead up there? Our kids used to play up there. Who was it who was killed?”
“It was a child. A boy twelve years old. His name was Arthur Delacroix. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”
The husband and wife first searched their own memory banks and then looked at each other and confirmed the results, each shaking their head.
“No, not that name,” Don Blaylock said.
“Where did he live?” Audrey Blaylock asked. “Not in the neighborhood, I don’t think.”
“No, he lived down in the Miracle Mile area.”
“It sounds awful,” Audrey said. “How was he killed?”
“He was beaten to death. If you don’t mind-I mean, I know you’re curious about it, but I need to ask the questions starting out.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “Please go on. What else can we tell you?”
“Well, we are trying to put together a profile of the street-Wonderland Avenue-at that time. You know, so we know who was who and who was where. It’s really routine.”
Bosch smiled and knew right away it didn’t come off as sincere.
“And it’s been pretty tough so far. The neighborhood has sort of turned over a lot since then. In fact, Dr. Guyot and a man down the street named Hutter are the only residents still there since nineteen eighty.”
Audrey smiled warmly.
“Oh, Paul, he is such a nice man. We still get Christmas cards from him, even since his wife passed away.”
Bosch nodded.
“Of course, he was too expensive for us. We mostly took our kids to the clinics. But if there was ever an emergency on a weekend or when Paul was home, he never hesitated. Some doctors these days are afraid to do anything because they might get-I’m sorry, I’m going off like my husband, and that’s not what you came here to hear.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Blaylock. Um, you mentioned your kids. I heard from some of the neighbors that you two had a foster home, is that right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Don and I took in children for twenty-five years.”
“That’s a tremendous, uh, thing you did. I admire that. How many children was it?”
“It was hard to keep track of them. We had some for years, some for only weeks. A lot of it was at the whim of the juvenile courts. It used to break my heart when we were just getting started with a child, you know, making them feel comfortable and at home, and then the child would be ordered home or to the other parent or what have you. I always said that to do foster work you had to have a big heart with a big callus on it.”
She looked at her husband and nodded. He nodded back and reached over and took her hand. He looked back at Bosch.
“We counted it up once,” he said. “We had a total of thirty-eight kids at one time or another. But realistically, we say we raised seventeen of them. These were kids that were with us long enough for it to have an impact. You know, anywhere from two years to-one child was with us fourteen years.”
He turned so he could see the wall over the couch and reached up and pointed to a picture of a boy in a wheelchair. He was slightly built and had thick glasses. His wrists were bent at sharp angles. His smile was crooked.
“That’s Benny,” he said.
“Amazing,” Bosch said.
He took a notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open to a blank page. He took out a pen. Just then his cell phone started chirping.
“That’s me,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t you want to answer it?” Blaylock asked.
“They can leave a message. I didn’t even think there’d be clear service this close to the mountain.”
“Yeah, we even get TV.”
Bosch looked at him and realized he had somehow been insulting.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. I was wondering if you could tell me what children you had living in your home in nineteen eighty.”
There was a moment when everyone looked at one another and said nothing.
“Is one of our kids involved in this?” Audrey asked.
“I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t know who was living with you. Like I said, we’re trying to put together a profile of that neighborhood. We need to know exactly who was living there. And then we’ll go from there.”
“Well, I am sure the Division of Youth Services can help you.”
Bosch nodded.
“Actually, they changed the name. It’s now called the Department of Children’s Services. And they’re not going to be able to help us until Monday at the earliest, Mrs. Blaylock. This is a homicide. We need this information now.”
Again there was a pause as they all looked at one another.
“Well,” Don Blaylock finally said, “it’s going to be kind of hard to remember exactly who was with us at any given time. There are some obvious ones. Like Benny and Jodi and Frances. But every year we’d have a few kids that, like Audrey said, would be dropped in and then taken out. They’re the tough ones. Let’s see, nineteen eighty…”
He stood up and turned so he could see the breadth of the wall of photos. He pointed to one, a young black boy of about eight.
“William there. He was nineteen eighty. He-”
“No, he wasn’t,” Audrey said. “He came to us in ’eighty-four. Don’t you remember, the Olympics? You made him that torch out of foil.”
“Oh, yeah, ’eighty-four.”
Bosch leaned forward in his seat. The location near the fire was now getting too warm for him.
