“Let’s start with the cops, then,” Bosch said. “Why do you blame the cops? What did the cops do?”
“You expect me to talk to you about what you people did?”
Bosch thought carefully before responding. He felt this was the make-or-break point of the interview and he sensed that this man had something important to give up.
“We start with the fact that you loved your daughter, right?” Bosch said.
“Of course.”
“Well, Mr. Verloren, what happened to her should never have happened. I can’t do anything about it. But I can try to speak for her. That’s why I am here. What the cops did seventeen years ago is not what I am going to do. Most of them are dead now anyway. If you still love your daughter, if you love the memory of her, then you will tell me the story. You will help me speak for her. It’s your only way of making up for what you did back then.”
Verloren started nodding halfway through Bosch’s plea. Bosch knew he had him, that he would open up. It was about redemption. It didn’t matter how many years had gone by. Redemption was always the brass ring.
A single tear rolled down Verloren’s left cheek, almost imperceptible against the dark skin. A man in dirty kitchen whites came into the break area with a clipboard in hand but Bosch quickly waved him away from Verloren. Bosch waited and finally Verloren spoke.
“I chose myself over her and in the end I lost myself anyway,” he said.
“How did that happen?”
Verloren covered his mouth with his hand, as if to try to keep the secrets from being dispelled. Finally he dropped it and spoke.
“I read one day in the newspaper that my daughter had been killed with a gun that came from a burglary. Green and Garcia, they hadn’t told me that. So I asked Detective Green about it and he told me the man with the gun had it because he was afraid. He was a Jewish man and there had been threats against him. I thought…”
He stopped there and Bosch had to prompt him.
“You thought that maybe Rebecca had been targeted because of her mixed races? Because her father was black?”
Verloren nodded.
“I thought, yes, because from time to time there would be a comment or something. Not everybody saw the beauty in her. Not like we did. I wanted to live on the Westside, but Muriel, she was from up there. It was home to her.”
“What did Green tell you?”
“He told me, no, that it wasn’t there. They had looked at that and it wasn’t a possibility. It wasn’t… it didn’t seem right to me. They were ignoring this, it seemed to me. I kept calling and asking. I was pushing it. Finally I went to a customer I had at the restaurant who was a member of the police commission. I told him about this thing and he said he would check into it for me.”
Verloren nodded, more to himself than to Bosch. He was fortifying his faith in his actions as a father seeking justice for his daughter.
“And then what happened?” Bosch prompted.
“Then I got a visit from two police.”
“Not Green and Garcia?”
“No, not them. Different police. They came to my restaurant.”
“What were their names?”
Verloren shook his head.
“They never gave me their names. They just showed me their badges. They were detectives, I think. They told me I was wrong about what I was pushing Green about. They told me to back off it because I was just stirring the pot. That is what they called it, stirring the pot. Like it was about me and not my daughter.”
He shook his head tightly, that anger still sharp after all the years. Bosch asked an obvious question, obvious because he knew so well how the LAPD worked back then.
“Did they threaten you?”
Verloren snorted.
“Yes, they threatened me,” he said quietly. “They told me that they knew my daughter had been pregnant but they couldn’t find the clinic she had gone to to get it taken care of. So there was no tissue they could use to identify the father. No way to tell who it was or wasn’t. They said that all it would take was for them to ask a few questions about me and her, like with my customer on the police commission, and the rumors would start to run. They said just a few questions in the right places and pretty soon people would think it was me.”