A Darkness More Than Night - Michael Connelly [117]
When she came back from her car he pointed with his chin across the street.
“I guess I owe you a box of doughnuts.”
She looked. Across Wilcox from the station was a shabby two-story building with a handful of storefront bail bond operations with phone numbers advertised in each window in cheap neon, maybe to help prospective clients memorize them from the backseat of passing patrol cars. The middle business had a painted sign above the window: Valentino Bonds.
“Which one?” Winston asked.
“Valentino. As in Rudy Valentino Tafero. That’s what they used to call him when he worked this side of the street.”
McCaleb appraised the small business again and shook his head.
“I still don’t see how a neon bondsman and David Storey ever hooked up.”
“Hollywood is just street trash with money. So what are we doing here? I don’t have a lot of time.”
“You bring your badge?”
She gave him a don’t-fuck-with-me look and he explained what he wanted to do. They went up the steps and into the station. At the front desk Winston flashed her badge and asked for the A.M. watch sergeant. A man with Zucker on his name plate and sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his uniform came out from the small office. Winston showed her badge again, introduced herself and then introduced McCaleb as her associate. Zucker knitted his healthy set of eyebrows together but didn’t ask what associate meant.
“We’re working a homicide case from New Year’s Eve. The victim spent the night before in your tank. We —”
“Edward Gunn.”
“Right. You knew him?”
“He’d been in a few times. And of course I heard he won’t be coming back.”
“We need to talk to whoever runs the tank on A.M. watch.”
“Well, that would be me, I guess. We don’t have a specific duty. It’s sort of catch as catch can around here. What do you want to know?”
McCaleb took a set of photocopies from the murder book out of his jacket pocket and spread them on the counter. He noticed Winston’s look but ignored it.
“We’re interested in how he made bail,” he said.
Zucker turned the pages around so he could read them. He put his finger on Rudy Tafero’s signature.
“Says it right here. Rudy Tafero. He’s got a place across the street. He came over and bailed him out.”
“Did someone call him?”
“Yeah, the guy did. Gunn.”
McCaleb tapped his finger on the copy of the booking slip.
“It says here that when he got his call he called this number. It’s his sister.”
“Then she must’ve called Rudy for him.”
“So nobody gets two calls.”
“Nope, ’round here we’re usually so busy they’re lucky if they get the one.”
McCaleb nodded. He folded the photocopies and was about to put them back in his pocket when Winston took them from his hand.
“I’ll hang on to those,” she said.
She slipped the folded copies into a back pocket of her black jeans.
“Sergeant Zucker,” she said. “You wouldn’t be the kind of nice guy who would call Tafero, being that he’s former LAPD, and tip him that he had a potential fish over here in the tank, would you?”
Zucker stared at her for a moment, his face a stone.
“It’s very important, Sergeant. If you don’t tell us, it could come back on you.”
The stone cracked into a humorless smile.
“No, I’m not that kind of nice guy,” Zucker said. “And I don’t have any nice guys like that on A.M. watch. And speaking of which, I just got off shift which means I don’t have to be talking to you anymore. Have a nice day.”
He started to step away from the counter.
“One last thing,” Winston said quickly.
Zucker turned back to her.
“Were you the one who called Harry Bosch and told him Gunn was in the tank?”
Zucker nodded.
“I had a standing request from him. Any and every time Gunn was brought in here, Bosch wanted to know about it. He’d come in and talk to the guy, try to get him to say something about that old case. Bosch wouldn’t give up on it.”
“It says Gunn wasn’t booked until two-thirty,” McCaleb said. “You called Bosch in the middle of the