She had nailed him.
“I’m not avoiding anything. I do have work to do and I already explained the wineglasses in the dishwasher.”
“But you didn’t explain about how one still had lipstick on it.”
Bosch looked at her. He had missed the lipstick.
“So who’s the detective in the house now?” he asked.
“Don’t try to deflect,” she said. “The point is, you don’t have to lie about your girlfriend with me, Dad.”
“Look, she’s not my girlfriend and she is never going to be my girlfriend. It didn’t work out. I am sorry I didn’t tell you the truth but we can drop it now. When and if I do ever have a girlfriend, I will let you know. Just like I hope you will tell me when you have a boyfriend.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”
“No, Dad.”
“Good. I mean, it’s good that you aren’t keeping a secret. Not good that you don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t want to be a father who’s like that.”
“I get it.”
“Good.”
“Then why are you so mad?”
“I’m—”
He stopped as he realized that her perception was right on the money. He was mad about one thing and it was showing in something else.
“You know what I said a minute ago about look who the detective in the house is?”
“Yes, I was sitting right here.”
“Well, on Monday night you looked at that video I had of the guy checking in and you called it right there. You said he jumped. Based on what you saw in thirty seconds of video you said he jumped.”
“So?”
“Well, I’ve been chasing my tail all week, seeing a murder where there wasn’t a murder, and you know what? I think you were right. You called it right at the start and I didn’t. I must be getting old.”
A look of true sympathy came over her face.
“Dad, you’ll get over it and you’ll get ’em next time. You’re the one who told me you can’t solve every case. Well, at least you got this one right in the long run.”
“Thanks, Mads.”
“And I don’t want to pile on but . . .”
Bosch looked at her. She was proud of something.
“All right, give it to me. But what?”
“There was no lipstick on the glass. I bluffed you.”
Bosch shook his head.
“You know something, kid? Someday you’re going to be the one they’ll want in the interview room. Your looks, your skills, they’ll be confessing to you right and left and lined up in the hall.”
She smiled and went back to her book. Bosch noticed she had left one taco uneaten on her plate and he was tempted to go for it, but instead set to work on the case, opening the murder book and spreading the loose files and reports out on the table.
“You know how a battering ram works?” he asked.
“What?” his daughter replied.
“You know what a battering ram is?”
“Of course. What are you talking about?”
“When I get stuck on a case like this, I go back to the book and all the files.”
He gestured to the murder book on the table.
“I look at it like a battering ram. You pull back and swing it forward. You hit the locked door and you smash through. That’s what going through everything again is like. You swing back and then you swing forward with all that momentum.”
She looked puzzled by his decision to share this piece of advice with her.
“Okay, Dad.”
“Sorry. Go back to your book.”
“I thought you just said he jumped. So why are you stuck?”
“Because what I think and what I can prove are two separate things. A case like this, I have to have it all nailed down. Anyway, it’s my problem. Go back to your book.”
She did. And he went back to his. He began by carefully rereading all the reports and summaries he had clipped into the binder. He let the information flow over him and he looked for new angles and colors. If George Irving jumped, then Bosch had to more than simply believe it. He had to be able to prove it not only to the powers that be but, most important, to himself. And he wasn’t quite there yet. A suicide was a premeditated killing. Bosch needed to find motive and opportunity and means. He had some of each but not enough.
The CD changer moved to the next disc and Bosch soon recognized Chet Baker’s trumpet. The song was “Night Bird” from a German import. Bosch had seen Baker perform the song in a club on O’Farrell in San Francisco in 1982, the only time he ever saw him play live. By then Baker’s cover-boy looks and West Coast cool had been sucked out of him by drugs and life, but he could still make the trumpet sound like a human voice on a dark night. In another six years he would be dead from a fall from a hotel window in Amsterdam.
Bosch looked at his daughter.
“You put this in there?”
She looked up from the book.
“Is this Chet Baker? Yeah, I wanted to hear him because of your case and the poem in the hallway.”
Bosch got up and went into the bedroom hallway, flicking the light on. Framed on the wall was a single-page poem. Almost twenty years earlier Bosch had been in a restaurant on Venice Beach and by happenstance the author of the poem, John Harvey, was giving a reading. It didn’t seem to Bosch that anybody in the place knew who Chet Baker was. But Harry did and he loved the resonance of the poem. He got up and asked Harvey if he could buy a copy. Harvey simply gave him the paper he had read from.
Bosch had probably passed by the poem a thousand times since he had last read it.
CHET BAKER
looks out from his hotel room
across the Amstel to the girl
cycling by the canal who lifts
her hand and waves and when
she smiles he is back in times
when every Hollywood producer
wanted to turn his life
into that bittersweet story
where he falls badly, but only
in love with Pier Angeli,
Carol Lynley, Natalie Wood;
that day he strolled into the studio,
fall of fifty-two, and played
those perfect lines across
the chords of My Funny Valentine—
and now when he looks up from
his window and her passing smile
into the blue of a perfect sky
he knows this is one of those
rare days when he can truly fly.
Bosch went back out to the table and sat down.
