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June 9 - June 11, 2019
“Everybody counts or nobody counts.”
He would have to guard against going overtime on the sessions with the police psychologist. They were scheduled for 3:30 P.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
The six-story bank building where the BSS was located was known as the “Fifty-One-Fifty” building. This was not its address. It was the police radio code number for describing a crazy person.
“Pounds finally did it.”
“Did what?” “Stuck me with somebody new.”
“Yeah, he finally did. I caught a case this morning. So he stuck one of his suckups with me. Burns.”
“Burns? From autos? He’s never worked homicide. Has he ever even worked CAPs?” Detectives usually followed one of two paths in the department. One was property crimes and the other was crimes against persons. The latter included specializing in homicide, rape, assault and robbery.
Bosch had never trusted anyone, never relied on anyone. He wasn’t going to start now.
Bosch leaned against a counter and drank his beer. He came to the conclusion that Edgar’s call had been a cleverly disguised way of telling Bosch that he was choosing sides and cutting him loose. That was okay, Bosch thought. Edgar’s first allegiance was to himself, to surviving in a place that could be treacherous. Bosch couldn’t hold that against him.
The binder contained the case file on the October 28, 1961, homicide of Marjorie Phillips Lowe. His mother.
Assistant Chief Irvin S. Irving.
Once Irving had confided to Bosch that he had known Marjorie Lowe and had been the one who found her.
The boy had been taken from a presumably unfit mother and placed in an equally unfit system of child protection. What he remembered most was the noise of the place. Always loud. Like a prison.
The surprise was in the official cause of death. It was listed as blunt-force trauma to the head.
report stated further that while semen was recovered from the vagina there were no other injuries commonly associated with rape.
But the fact that strangulation occurred
after death and that there was no convincing physical evidence of rape raised another possibility as well.
They were factors from which it could also be speculated that the victim had been murdered by someone who then attempted to disguise his involvement and m...
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Bosch could think of only one reason for such misdirection, if that had been the case. T...
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was from an interview conducted three days after the murder with a woman named Meredith Roman. She was described in the report as an associate and sometime roommate of the victim.
Bosch immediately looked through the summaries again for the report of Johnny Fox. There was none there.
There was no other mention of Fox in the record.
Bosch knew the name. Arno Conklin had been a Los Angeles district attorney in the 1960s. As Bosch remembered it, 1961 was too early for Conklin to have been DA, but he would still have been one of the office’s top prosecutors. His interest in a prostitute’s murder seemed curious to Bosch. But there was nothing in the binder that held an answer. There was no summary report of a meeting with Conklin. Nothing.
The more he read the more he believed the case had been mishandled from the start.
Preliminary suspect John Fox denied involvement in the incident and has been cleared at this time through fingerprint comparison and confirmation of alibi through witnesses.
Johnny Fox had obviously been interviewed by Eno and McKittrick. He had been cleared. The question Bosch now had was, why did they not type up a summary report, or had it been typed up and later removed from the murder book? And if so, who removed it and why?
Maybe, Bosch thought, more than just the Fox interview summary had been lifted from the binder.
“Okay, I’ve got it. According to this card, the only other time that file was ever taken out was in 1972. You’re talking way back.”
“Jake McKittrick.”
You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong.
“Mar knew some policemen. You understand?”
think those two detectives that were assigned to investigate this knew where it could lead. And they weren’t going to go that way because they knew what was good for them in the department.
“What about a couple of vice guys, Gilchrist and Stano?” She hesitated before answering. “Yes, I knew them… they were mean men.”
“I think he was. But then he was let go. His fingerprints didn’t match the killer’s.”
‘My advice to you, little lady, is to get the hell out of Dodge.’
was a man named Arno Conklin.
Loneliness had been the trash can fire he huddled around for most of his life.
He saw a coyote step out of the brush of the arroyo to the left of the roadway and take a tentative look around the intersection. There were no other cars. Only Bosch saw this.
The animal was thin and ragged, worn by the struggle to sustain itself in the urban hills.
He’d left the light on but his thoughts were of the dark, sacred night. And the blue coyote. And
Reached at the district attorney’s office, where he is in charge of the special investigation branch under retiring DA John Charles Stock, Conklin said he had not yet met Fox but regretted the death of the man working for his election. The candidate declined further comment.
“Mittel? I don’t know. First name on a big downtown law firm, friend of governors and senators and other powerful people. Last
He tried to compose the proper answer. “I’m not sure… I guess there’s not too many left in the hills in the city—least near where I live. So whenever I see one, I get this feeling that it might be the last one left out there. You know? The last coyote.
And I guess that would bother me if it ever turned out to be true, if I never saw one again.”
There is something… they’re kind of sad and threatening at the same time. You know?”
For what it’s worth, I think it’s clear you identify with the coyote. Perhaps, there are not many policemen like you left and you feel the same threat to your existence or your mission.
“Subconsciously or not, you may have been working toward this all your life. It could be the reason you are who you are. A policeman, a homicide investigator. Resolving your mother’s death could also resolve your need to be a policeman. It could take your drive, your mission, away from you. You have to be prepared for that or you should turn back.”
Conklin won every one of them. And he always asked for—and got—the death penalty.
was a meteoric rise to have taken place in only a decade.
There was one report on a press conference in which DA John Charles Stock announced he was placing Conklin in charge of the Special Investigations Unit and charging him with cleaning up the myriad vice problems that threatened the social fabric of Los Angeles County.
