The Black Echo

Bosch told Edgar about the problems, the absence of distinguishable tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head, the broken finger and that there was no knife.

“No knife?” his partner said.

“Needed something to cut the can in half to make a stove-if the stove was his.”

“Could’ve brought the stove with him. Could have been that somebody went in there and took the knife after the guy was dead. If there was a knife.”

“Yeah, could have been. No tracks to tell us anything.”

“Well, we know from his sheet he was a blown-out junkie. Was he like that when you knew him?”

“To a degree. A user and seller.”

“Well, there you go, longtime addict, you can’t predict what they’re going to do, when they’re going to get off the shit or on it. They’re lost people, Harry.”

“He was off it, though-at least I thought he was. He’s only got one fresh pop in his arm.”

“Harry, you said you hadn’t seen the guy since Saigon. How do you know whether he was off or on?”

“I hadn’t seen him, but I talked to him. He called me once, last year sometime. July or August, I think. He’d been pulled in on another track marks beef by the hype car up in Van Nuys. Somehow, maybe reading newspapers or something-it was about the same time as the Dollmaker thing-he knew I was a cop, and he calls me up at Robbery-Homicide. He calls me from Van Nuys jail and asks if I could help him out. He would’ve only done, what, thirty days in county, but he was bottomed out, he said. And he, uh, just said he couldn’t do the time this time, couldn’t kick alone like that…”

Bosch trailed off without finishing the story. After a long moment Edgar prompted him.

“And?… Come on, Harry, what’d you do?”

“And I believed him. I talked to the cop. I remember his name was Nuckles. Good name for a street cop, I thought. And then I called the VA up there in Sepulveda and I got him into a program. Nuckles went along with it. He’s a vet, too. He got the city attorney to ask the judge for diversion. So anyway, the VA outpatient clinic took Meadows in. I checked about six weeks later and they said he’d completed, had kicked and was doing okay. I mean, that’s what they told me. Said he was in the second level of maintenance. Talking to a shrink, group counseling… I never talked to Meadows after that first call. He never called again, and I didn’t try to look him up.”

Edgar referred to his pad. Bosch could see the page he was looking at was blank.

“Look, Harry,” Edgar said, “that was still almost a year ago. A long time for a hype, right? Who knows? He could have fallen off the wagon and kicked three times since then. That’s not our worry here. The question is, what do you want to do with what we have here? What do you want to do about today?”

“Do you believe in coincidence?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t know. I-”

“There are no coincidences.”

“Harry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But you know what I think? I don’t see anything here that’s screaming in my face. Guy crawls into the pipe, in the dark maybe he can’t see what he’s doing, he puts too much juice in his arm and croaks. That’s it. Maybe somebody else was with him and smeared the tracks going out. Took his knife, too. Could be a hundred dif-”

“Sometimes they don’t scream, Jerry. That’s the problem here. It’s Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions. Don’t you see that that’s what they are counting on?”

“Who is ‘they, ’ Harry?”

“Whoever did this.”

He shut up for a minute. He was convincing no one, and that almost included himself. Playing to Edgar’s sense of dedication was wrong. He’d be off the job as soon as he put in twenty. He’d then put a business card-sized ad in the union newsletter-“LAPD retired, will cut commission for brother officers”-and make a quarter million a year selling houses to cops or for cops in the San Fernando Valley or the Santa Clarita Valley or the Antelope Valley or whatever valley the bulldozers aimed at next.

“Why go in the pipe?” Bosch said then. “You said he lived up in the Valley. Sepulveda. Why come down here?”

“Harry, who knows? The guy was a junkie. Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he croaked himself up there and his friends dragged his dead ass down here because they didn’t want to be bothered with explaining it.”

“That’s still a crime.”

“Yeah, that’s a crime, but let me know when you find a DA that’ll file it for you.”

“His kit looked clean. New. The other tracks on his arm look old. I don’t think he was slamming again. Not regularly. Something isn’t right.”

“Well, I don’t know… You know, AIDS and everything, they’re supposed to keep a clean kit.”

Bosch looked at his partner as if he didn’t know him.