Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [76]
“Bosch.”
“Yeah.”
“Somebody wants to talk.”
“Who? When? I want the tapes, Carbone.”
“Cool your jets for a couple minutes. Over here in the car.”
He led Bosch to the second parking row, where there was a car with its engine running and its dark-tinted windows all the way up.
“Hop in the back,” Carbone said.
Bosch nonchalantly walked to the door, still showing no concern. He opened it and ducked in. Leon Fitzgerald was sitting in the back. He was a tall man — more than six and a half feet — and his knees were pressed hard against the back of the driver’s seat. He wore a beautiful suit of blue silk and held the stub of a cigar between his fingers. He was almost sixty and his hair was a jet-black dye job. His eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, were pale gray. His skin was pasty white. He was a night man.
“Chief,” Bosch said, nodding.
He had never met Fitzgerald before but had seen him often enough at cop funerals and on television news reports. He was the embodiment of the OCID. No one else from the secretive division ever went on camera.
“Detective Bosch,” Fitzgerald said. “I know of you. Know of your exploits. Over the years you have been suggested to me more than once as a candidate for our unit.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
Carbone had come around and gotten in the driver’s seat. He started moving the car slowly through the lot.
“Because like I said, I know of you,” Fitzgerald was saying. “And I know you would not leave homicide. Homicide is your calling. Am I correct?”
“Pretty much.”
“Which brings us to the current homicide case you are pursuing. Dom?”
With one hand, Carbone passed a shoebox over the seat. Fitzgerald took it and put it on Bosch’s lap. Bosch opened it and found it full of audiocassette tapes with dates written on tape stuck to the cases.
“From Aliso’s phone?” he asked.
“Obviously.”
“How long were you on it?”
“We’d only been listening for nine days. It hadn’t been productive, but the tapes are yours.”
“And what do you want in return, Chief?”
“What do I want?”
Fitzgerald looked out the window, down at the railroad switching yard in the valley below the parking lot.
“What do I want?” he asked again. “I want the killer, of course. But I also want you to be careful. The department’s been through a lot these past few years. No need to hang our dirty laundry in public once again.”
“You want me to bury Carbone’s extracurricular activities.”
Neither Fitzgerald nor Carbone said anything but they didn’t have to. Everybody in the car knew that Carbone did what he did on orders. Probably orders from Fitzgerald himself.
“Then you’ve got to answer some questions.”
“Of course.”
“Why was there a bug on Tony Aliso’s phone?”
“Same reason there’s a bug on anyone’s phone. We heard things about the man and set about finding out if they were true.”
“What did you hear?”
“That he was dirty, that he was a scumbag, that he was a launderer for the mob in three states. We opened a file. We had just begun when he was killed.”
“Then when I called, why did you pass on it?”
Fitzgerald took a long pull on his cigar and the car filled with its smell.
“There’s a complicated answer to that question, Detective. Suffice it to say that we thought it best if we remained uninvolved.”
“The tap was illegal, wasn’t it?”
“It is extremely difficult under state law to gather the required information needed for a wiretap. The feds, they can get it done on a whim. We can’t and we don’t want to