'I hope it does.'
'What do you want?'
'When Eno died, did you help the old lady — uh, your
sister, that is — did you help her clear out his safe deposit box?'
'How'd -'
She stopped herself but not soon enough.
'How'd I know? Because it's obvious. What I'm looking for, he would have kept in a safe place. What did you do with it?'
'We threw everything away. It was meaningless. Just some old files and bank statements. He didn't know what he was doing. He was old himself'
Bosch looked at his watch. He was running out of time if he was going to make his plane. .
'Get me the key for this desk drawer.'
She didn't move.
'Hurry up, I don't have a lot of time. You open it or I'll open it. But if I do it, that drawer isn't going to be much use to you anymore.'
She reached into the pocket of her house dress and pulled out the house keys. She reached down and unlocked the desk drawer, pulled it open and then stepped away.
'We didn't know what any of it was, or what it meant.'
'That's fine.'
Bosch moved to the drawer and looked in. There were two thin manila files and two packs of envelopes with rubber bands holding them together. The first file he looked through contained Eno's birth certificate, passport, marriage license and other personal records. He put it back in the drawer. The next file contained LAPD forms and Bosch quickly recognized them as the pages and reports that had been removed from the Marjorie Lowe murder book. He knew he had no time to read them at the moment and put the file in the beer box with the other files.
The rubber band on the first package of envelopes
snapped when he tried to remove it and he was reminded of the band that had been around the blue binder that contained the case files. Everything about this case was old and ready to snap, he thought.
The envelopes were all from a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Sherman Oaks and each one contained a statement for a savings account in the name of McCage Inc. The address of the corporation was a post office box, also in Sherman Oaks. Bosch randomly took envelopes from different spots in the pack and studied three of them. Though separated by years in the late 1960s, each statement was basically the same. A deposit of one thousand dollars was made in the account on the tenth of each month and on the fifteenth a transfer of an equal amount was made to an account with a Nevada Savings and Loan branch in Las Vegas.
Without looking further, Bosch concluded that the bank statements might be the records of some kind of payoff account Eno kept. He quickly looked through the envelopes at the postmarks looking for the most recent one. He found none more recent than the late 1980s.
'What about these envelopes? When did he stop getting them?'
'What you see is what you get. I have no idea what they mean and Olive didn't know either back when they drilled his box.'
'Drilled his box?'
'Yeah, after he died. Olive wasn't on the safe deposit box. Only him. We couldn't find his key. So we had to have it drilled.'
'There was money, too, wasn't there?'
She waited a moment, probably wondering if he was going to demand that, too.
'Some. But you're too late, it's already spent.'
'I'm not worried about that. How much was there?'
She pinched her lips and acted like she was trying to remember. It was a bad act.
'C'mon. I'm not here for the money and I'm not from the IRS.'
'It was about eighteen thousand.'
Bosch heard a horn honk from outside. The cabdriver was getting resdess. Bosch looked at his watch. He had to go. He tossed the envelope packs into the beer box.
'What about his account at Nevada Savings and Loan? How much was in it?'
It was a scam question based on his guess that the account that the money from Sherman Oaks was transferred to was Eno's. Shivone hesitated again. A delay punctuated by another horn blast.
'It was about fifty. But most of that's gone, too. Taking care of Olive, you know?'
'Yeah, I bet. Between that and the pensions, it's gotta be rough,' Bosch said with all the sarcasm he could put into it. 'I bet your accounts aren't too thin, though.'
'Look, mister, I don't know who you think you are but I'm the only one in the world that she has and who cares about her. That's worth something.'
'Too bad she doesn't get to decide what it's worth instead of you. Answer one question for me and then I'm out of here and you can go back to taking whatever you can off her ... Who are you? You're not her sister. Who are you?'
'It's none of your business.'
'That's right. But I could make it my business.'
She put on a look that showed Bosch what an affront he was to her delicate sensibilities but then seemed to gain a measure of self-esteem. Whoever she was, she was proud of it.
'You want to know who I am? I was the best woman he ever had. I was with him for a long time. She had his
wedding band but I had his heart. Near the end, when they were both old and it didn't matter, we dropped the pretension and he brought me in here. To live with them. Take care of them. So don't you dare tell me I don't deserve something out of it.'
Bosch just nodded. Somehow, as sordid as the story seemed, he found a measure of respect for her for just having told the truth. And he felt sure it was.
'When did you meet?'
'You said one question.'
'When did you meet?'
'When he was at the Flamingo. We both were. I was a dealer. Like I said, he was a bird dog.'
'He ever talk about LA, about any cases, any people from back there?'
'No, never. He always said that was a closed chapter.'
Bosch pointed to the envelope stacks in the box.
'Does the name McCage mean anything?'
'Not to me.'
'What about these account statements?'
'I never saw any of those things until the day we opened that box. Didn't know he even had an account over at Nevada Savings. Claude had secrets. He even kept secrets from me.'
At the airport Bosch paid off the cabdriver and struggled into the main terminal with his over-nighter and the beer box full of files and other things. In one of the stores along the main terminal mall he bought a cheap canvas satchel and transferred the items he had taken from Eno's office into it. It was small enough so he didn't have to check it. Printed on the side of the bag was las vegas — land of sun and fun! There was a logo depicting the sun setting behind a pair of dice.
At his gate he had a half hour before they loaded the plane, so he found a section of open seats as far away as possible from the cacophony of the rows of slot machines set in the center of the circular terminal.
He began going through the files in the satchel. The one he was most interested in was the one containing records stolen from the Marjorie Lowe murder book. He looked through the documents and found nothing unusual or unexpected.
The summary of the McKittrick-Eno interview of Johnny Fox with Arno Conklin and Gordon Mittel present was here and Bosch could sense the contained outrage at the situation in McKittrick's writing. In the last paragraph it was no longer contained.
