“You’ve been running a game on me for two days. Spinning bullshit about bribes and the FBI. You’ve been trying to manipulate me and it’s been a waste of my time. You have to go now, Detective, because I have real work to do.”
I stood up and extended a hand toward the door. Bosch stood up but didn’t turn to go.
“Don’t kid yourself, Haller. Don’t make a mistake.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
Bosch finally turned and started to leave. But then he stopped and came back to the desk, pulling something from the inside pocket of his jacket as he approached.
It was a photograph. He put it down on the desk.
“You recognize that man?” Bosch asked.
I studied the photo. It was a grainy still taken off a video. It showed a man pushing out through the front door of an office building.
“This is the front entrance of the Legal Center, isn’t it?”
“Do you recognize him?”
The shot was taken at a distance and blown up, spreading the pixels of the image and making it unclear. The man in the photograph looked to me to be of Latin origin. He had dark skin and hair and had a Poncho Villa mustache, like Cisco used to wear. He wore a panama hat and an open-collared shirt beneath what appeared to be a leather sport coat. As I looked more closely at the photograph, I realized why it was the frame they had chosen to take from the surveillance video. The man’s jacket had pulled open as he’d pushed through the glass door. I could see what looked like the top of a pistol tucked into the belt line of his pants.
“Is that a gun? Is this the killer?”
“Look, can you answer one goddamn question without another question? Do you recognize this man? That’s all I want to know.”
“No, I don’t, Detective. Happy?”
“That’s another question.”
“Sorry.”
“You sure you haven’t seen him before?”
“Not a hundred percent. But that’s not a great photo you’ve got there. Where is it from?”
“A street camera on Broadway and Second. It sweeps the street and we got this guy for only a few seconds. This is the best we can do.”
I knew that the city had been quietly installing street cameras on main arteries in the last few years. Streets like Hollywood Boulevard were completely visually wired. Broadway would have been a likely candidate. It was always crowded during the day with pedestrians and traffic. It was also the street used most often for protest marches organized by the underclasses.
“Well, then I guess it’s better than having nothing. You think the hair and the mustache are a disguise?”
“Let me ask the questions. Could this guy be one of your new clients?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t met them all. Leave me the photo and I’ll show it to Wren Williams. She’d know better than me if he’s a client.”
Bosch reached down and took the photo back.
“It’s my only copy. When will she be in?”
“In about an hour.”
“I’ll come back later. Meantime, Counselor, watch yourself.”
He pointed a finger at me like it was a gun, then turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. I sat there thinking about what he had said and staring at the door, half expecting him to come back in and drop another ominous warning on me.
But when the door opened one minute later it was Lorna who entered.
“I just saw that detective in the hallway.”
“Yeah, he was here.”
“What did he want?”
“To scare me.”
“And?”
“He did a pretty good job.”
Lorna wanted to convene another staff meeting and update me on things that had happened while I was out of the office visiting Malibu and Walter Elliot the day before. She even said I had a court hearing scheduled later on a mystery case that wasn’t on the calendar we had worked up. But I needed some time to think about what Bosch had just revealed and what it meant.
“Where’s Cisco?”
“He’s coming. He left early to meet one of his sources before he came into the office.”
“Did he have breakfast?”
“Not with me.”
“Okay, wait till he gets in and then we’ll go over to the Dining Car and have breakfast. We’ll go over everything then.”
“I already ate breakfast.”
“Then, you can do all the talking while we do all the eating.”
She put a phony frown on her face but went out into the reception office and left me alone. I got up from behind the desk and started to pace the office, hands in my pockets, trying to evaluate what the information from Bosch meant.
According to Bosch, Jerry Vincent had paid a sizable bribe to a person or persons unknown. The fact that the $100,000 came out of the Walter Elliot advance would indicate the bribe was somehow linked to the Elliot case, but this was by no means conclusive. Vincent could easily have used money from Elliot to pay a debt or a bribe relating to another case or something else entirely. It could have been a gambling debt he wanted to hide. The only fact was that Vincent had diverted the $100K from his account to an unknown destination and had wanted to hide the transaction.
