Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [113]
She nodded.
“And that’s why I had to tell you everything. Even if it meant we…”
Bosch looked at her. She didn’t finish the line and neither did he.
Bosch took a cigarette out of his pocket and put it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He leaned across the table and picked up her plate and his own. He spoke to her as he slid off the bench.
“I don’t have any dessert, either.”
“That’s okay.”
He took the plates into the kitchen and rinsed them and put them into the dishwasher. He had never used the new appliance before and spent some time leaning over it and trying to figure out how to operate it. Once he got it going, he started cleaning the frying pan and the pot in the sink. The simple work began to relax him. Eleanor came into the kitchen with her wineglass and watched him for a few moments before speaking.
“I’m sorry, Harry.”
“It’s okay. You were in a bad situation and you did what you had to do, Eleanor. Nobody can be blamed for that. I probably would have done everything you did.”
It was a few moments before she spoke again.
“Do you want me to go?”
Bosch turned off the water and looked into the sink. He could make out his dark image reflected in the new stainless steel.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
Bosch arrived at the station at seven Friday morning with a box of glazed doughnuts from the Fairfax Farmers Market. He was the first one in. He opened the box and put it on the counter near the coffee machine. He took one of the doughnuts and put it on a napkin and left it at his spot on the homicide table while he went up to the watch office to get coffee from the urn. It was much better than what came out of the detective bureau’s machine.
Once he had his coffee, he took his doughnut and moved to the desk that was behind the bureau’s front counter. His assignment to desk duty meant that he would handle most of the walk-ins as well as the sorting and distribution of overnight reports. The phones he wouldn’t have to worry about. They were answered by an old man from the neighborhood who donated his time to the department.
Bosch was alone in the squad room for at least fifteen minutes before the other detectives started to trickle in. Six different times he was asked by a new arrival why he was at the front desk, and each time he told the detective who asked that it was too complicated to get into but that the word would be out soon enough. Nothing remained a secret for long in a police station.
At eight-thirty the lieutenant from the A.M. watch brought the morning reports in before going off shift and smiled when he saw Bosch. His name was Klein and he and Bosch had known each other in a surface way for years.
“Who’d you beat up this time, Bosch?” he kidded.
It was well known that the detective who sat at the desk where Bosch now sat was either there by fate of the bureau rotation or on a desk duty assignment while the subject of an internal investigation. More often than not it was the latter. But Klein’s sarcasm revealed that he had not yet heard that Bosch actually was under investigation. Bosch played off the question with a smile but didn’t answer. He took the two-inch-thick stack of reports from Klein and gave him a mock salute back.
The stack Klein had given him constituted nearly all crime reports filed by Hollywood Division patrol officers in the last twenty-four hours. There would be a second, smaller delivery of stragglers later in the morning, but the stack in his hands constituted the bulk of the day’s work in the bureau.
Keeping his head down and ignoring the buzz of conversations around him, it took Bosch a half hour to sort all the reports into piles according to crimes. Next he had to scan them all, using his experienced eye to possibly make connections between robberies