Bosch saw Washburn flex the muscles in his thin shoulders and hang his head down. Bosch checked his watch.
“But don’t get all anxious about that, Two Small. Because the weed is the least of my worries. It’s just something I’m going to be able to hold you with, because my guess is that a guy who doesn’t pay his child support isn’t going to have enough dough to put up a twenty-five-grand bond.”
Bosch raised the bag containing the weed again.
“This will keep you inside while I work out this other thing I’ve got on my plate.”
Washburn looked up.
“Yeah, bullshit. I’ll be out. I got people.”
“Yeah, well, people seem to disappear when it’s time to put up money.”
Bosch turned and looked at Gant.
“You ever notice that, Jordy?”
“I have. People seem to scatter, especially when they know a brother is going down. They think, why bother putting up a bond if he ain’t goin’ nowhere but the slam?”
Bosch nodded as he looked back at Washburn.
“What is this bullshit?” Washburn said. “Why you on me, man? What I do?”
Bosch drummed the fingers of one hand on the table.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Two Small. I work in downtown and I wouldn’t come all the way down here just to bust somebody’s chops on a dime bag. See, I work homicide. I work cold cases. You know what that means? I work old cases. Years old. Sometimes twenty years old.”
Bosch gauged Washburn for a reaction but didn’t register a change.
“Like the one we’re going to talk about.”
“I don’t know nothing about no homicide. You got the wrong motherfucker there.”
“Yeah? Really? That’s not what I heard. I guess some people have been talking some shit about you, then.”
“That’s right. So, take that shit outta here.”
Bosch leaned back as if maybe he was considering following Washburn’s order, but then he shook his head once.
“No, I can’t do that. I got a witness, Charles. Actually, an ear witness—you know what that is?”
Washburn looked away when he answered.
“The only thing I know is that you’re full of shit.”
“I got a witness who heard you cop to the crime, man. She said you told her. You were acting like a big man and told her how you put the white bitch against the wall and popped her. She said you were real proud of it because it was going to grease you right into the Sixties.”
Washburn tried to stand up but his bindings pulled him right back into his seat.
“White bitch? Man, what the fuck you talking? Was that Latitia you talking about? She’s full a shit. She’s just trying to cause me trouble on account I ain’t paid her in four months. Her lyin’ ass will say anything.”
Bosch leaned his elbows down on the table and moved closer to Washburn.
“Yeah, well, I don’t name informants, Charles. But I can tell you that you’ve got a big problem here, because I did some checking based on what I was told, and it turns out that in nineteen ninety-two, a white woman was murdered in the alley right behind your house. So this isn’t no made-up shit.”
Washburn’s eyes lit with recognition.
“You mean that reporter bitch during the riots? You ain’t putting that on me, man. I’m clean on that and you can tell your ear witness that she keep lyin’ and she’s going to get fucked up.”
“Charles, I am not sure you want to be threatening witnesses in front of two law enforcement officers. Now you see if something were to happen to Latitia, whether or not she was a witness, you are going to be the first person we come after, you understand?”
Washburn said nothing and Bosch pressed on.
“Actually, I have more than one witness, Charles. I’ve got another person from the neighborhood who said you had a gun back then. A Beretta, as a matter of fact, and that’s just the kind of gun used to kill the woman in the alley.”
“
There. Washburn had made an admission. But he also had given a plausible explanation. It seemed too genuine and extemporaneous to be made up. Bosch had to go with it.
“Your yard? You want me to believe you just found it in your backyard?”
“Look, man, I was sixteen years old. My moms wouldn’t even let me go outside during the riot. She had a lock on my bedroom door from the outside and bars on the window. She put me in there and locked me in, man. You go check with her on it.”
“So, when did you find this gun?”
“When it was over, man. All over. I went out back and there it was in the grass when I was mowin’ the lawn. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t even know about that killin’ till my moms told me some police came ’n’ knocked on the door.”
“Did you tell your moms about the gun?”
“No. Fuck, no, I wasn’t going to tell her about no gun. And by then I didn’t even have it no more.”
Bosch made a furtive glance over his shoulder to Gant. Harry was moving out of his zone here. Washburn’s story had the desperation and detail of truth. Whoever had shot Jespersen could’ve tossed the murder weapon over the fence to get rid of it.
Gant picked up on the glance and stood up. He pulled his chair over next to Bosch’s. He was an equal player now.
“Charles, you’ve got a serious thing here,” he said in a tone that imparted that seriousness perfectly. “You have to know that we know more about this than you ever could. You can dig yourself out of a hole here if you don’t bullshit us. If you lie, we’re going to know it.”
“Okay,” Washburn said meekly. “What I gotta say?”
“You gotta tell us what you did with that gun twenty years ago.”
“I gave it away. First I hid it, then I gave it away.”
“To who?”
“A guy I knew but he’s gone now.”
“I’m not going to ask you again. Who?”
“His name was Trumond but I never knew if that was his real name or not. On the street they called him True Story.”
“Is that a nickname? What was his last name?”
Gant was following standard interview technique in asking some questions he already knew the answers to. It helped gauge the interview subject’s veracity and sometimes provided a strategic advantage when the subject thought the interviewer knew less than he actually did.
“I don’t know, man,” Washburn said. “But he’s dead now. He got clipped a few years back.”
“Who clipped him?”
“I don’t know. He was street. Somebody jus’ took ’m down, you know? It happens.”
Gant leaned back in his chair, and this was a signal to Bosch to take the lead back if he wanted it.
He did.
“Tell me about the gun.”
“Like you said, a Beretta. It was black.”
“Where exactly did you find it in your yard?”
“I don’t know, by the swing set. It was just there in the grass, man. I didn’t see it and ran over it with the lawn mower, put a big fucking scratch on the metal.”
“Where was the scratch?”
“Right down the side of the barrel.”
Bosch knew the scratch could be an identifier if the gun was ever found. More important, the scratch would help confirm Washburn’s story.
“Did the weapon still work?”
