into the depths. Bosch put the hook through one of the eyelets on his pole and put the pole back in its pipe. He was done fishing. He got another beer out of the cooler.

“Hey, you want a sandwich, go ahead,” McKittrick said.

“No. I’m fine.”

Bosch wished the fish hadn’t interrupted them.

“You were saying that you guys got the call from Conklin.”

“Yeah, Arno. Only I had it wrong. The request for a meeting was only for Claude. Not me. Eno went alone.”

“Why only Eno?”

“I never knew and he acted like he didn’t know, either. I just assumed it was because he and Arno had a prior relationship of some kind.”

“But you don’t know what.”

“No. Claude Eno was about ten years older than me. He’d been around.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, I can’t tell you what happened. I can only tell you what my partner said happened. Understand?”

He was telling Bosch that he didn’t trust his own partner. Bosch had known that feeling himself at times and nodded that he understood.

“Go ahead.”

“He came back from the meeting saying Conklin asked him to lay off Fox because Fox was clear on this case and Fox was working as an informant on one of the commando investigations. He said Fox was important to him and he didn’t want him compromised or roughed up, especially over a crime he didn’t commit.”

“How was Conklin so sure?”

“I don’t know. But Eno told me that he told Conklin that assistant DA’s, no matter who they are, didn’t decide whether someone was clear or not for the police, and that we weren’t backing off until we talked to Fox for ourselves. Faced with that, Conklin said he could deliver Fox to be interviewed and fingerprinted. But only if we did it on Conklin’s turf.”

“Which was…?”

“His office in the old courthouse. That’s gone now. They built that big square thing right before I left. Horrible-looking thing.”

“What happened in the office? Were you there for that?”

“Yeah, I was there but nothing happened. We interviewed him. Fox was there with Conklin, so was the Nazi.”

“The Nazi?”

“Conklin’s enforcer, Gordon Mittel.”

“He was there?”

“Yup. I guess he was sort of watching out for Conklin while Conklin was watching out for Fox.”

Bosch showed no surprise.

“Okay, so what did Fox tell you?”

“Like I said, not much. At least, that’s how I remember it. He gave us an alibi and the names of the people who could verify it. I took his prints.”

“What’d he say about the victim?”

“He said pretty much what we’d already heard from her girlfriend.”

“Meredith Roman?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it. He said she went to a party, was hired as kind of a decoration to be on some guy’s arm. He said it was in Hancock Park. He didn’t have the address. He said he had nothing to do with setting it up. That didn’t make sense to us. You know, a pimp not knowing where…not knowing where one of his girls was. It was the one thing we had and when we started leaning on him about it, Conklin stepped in like a referee.”

“He didn’t want you leaning on him.”

“Craziest thing I ever saw. Here was the next DA—everybody knew he was going to run. Here he was taking this bastard’s side against us…Sorry about that bastard comment.”

“Forget it.”

“Conklin was trying to make it seem like we were out of line, while all the time this big-piece-of-shit Fox was sitting there smiling with a toothpick in the side of his mouth. It’s what, thirty-somethin’ years ago and I can still remember that toothpick. Galled the Jesus out of me. So to make a long story short, we never did get to brace him on having set up the date she went on.”

The boat rocked on a high wake and Bosch looked around and didn’t see any other boat. It was weird. He looked out across the water and for the first time realized how different it was from the Pacific. The Pacific was a cold and forbidding blue, the Gulf a warm green that invited you.

“We left,” McKittrick continued. “I figured we’d have another shot at him. So we left and started to work on his alibi. It turned out to be good. And I don’t mean it was good because his own witnesses said it was. We did the work. We found some independent people. People that didn’t know him. As I remember it, it was rock solid.”

“You remember where he was?”

“Spent part of the night in a bar over there on Ivar, place a