Bosch nodded. It sure didn’t seem like three years since they had worked together.
“ Irving. Or at least I think he gave me Irving.”
“Tell it.”
Bosch took her through the story Verloren had told him less than an hour before. He finished with Verloren’s description, limited as it was, of the two men with badges who came to his restaurant and threatened him in order to make him back off the racial angle.
“Sounds like Irving to me, too,” Rider said.
“And one of his poodles. Maybe it was McClellan.”
“Maybe. So you think Verloren was straight? He’s been on the Nickel a long time.”
“I think so. He claims to have been sober for three years this time. But you know, grinding over something for seventeen years, pretty soon perceptions become facts. Still, everything he said just seems to fit into the underpinnings of this. I think they pushed this case, Kiz. It was going in one direction and they pushed it the other way. Maybe they knew what was coming, that the city was going to burn. Rodney King wasn’t the gasoline. He was only the match. Things had been building and maybe the powers that be looked at this case and said for the public good, we have to go the other way. They sacrificed justice for Rebecca Verloren.”
They were crossing over the 101 Freeway on the Los Angeles Street overpass. Eight lanes of crawling traffic smoked beneath them. The sun was bright, reflecting off windshields and buildings and concrete. Bosch put on his Ray-Bans.
The traffic was loud, too, and Rider had to raise her voice.
“That’s not like you, Harry.”
“What isn’t?”
“Looking for a good reason for them to have done something so wrong. You usually look for the sinister angle.”
“Are you telling me you found the sinister angle in that PDU file?”
She nodded glumly.
“I think so,” she said.
“And they just let you waltz in there and get it?”
“I got in to see the man first thing this morning. I brought him a cup of coffee from Starbucks-he hates the cafeteria crap. That got me in. Then I told him what we had and what I wanted to do, and the bottom line is he trusts me. So he more or less let me have a look around in Special Archives.”
“The Public Disorder Unit came and went long before he was here. Did he know about it?”
“I’m sure after he took the job he was briefed. Maybe even before he took it.”
“Did you tell him specifically about Mackey and the Chatsworth Eights?”
“Not specifically. I just told him the case we caught was connected to an old PDU investigation and I needed to get into Special Archives to look for a file. He sent Lieutenant Hohman with me. We went in, found the file and I had to look through it while Hohman sat across a table from me. You know what, Harry? There are a hell of a lot of files in Special Archives.”
“Where all the bodies are buried…”
Bosch wanted to say something more but wasn’t sure how to say it. Rider looked at him and read him.
“What, Harry?”
He didn’t say anything at first but she waited him out.
“Kiz, you said the man on six trusts you. Do you trust him?”
She looked him in the eye when she answered.
“Like I trust you, Harry. Okay?”
Bosch looked at her.
“That’s good enough for me.”
Rider made a move to turn down Arcadia but Bosch pointed toward the old pueblo, the place where the City of Angels was founded. He wanted to take the long way and walk through.
“I haven’t been down here in a while. Let’s check this out.”
They cut through the circular courtyard where the padres blessed the animals every Easter and then past the Instituto Cultural Mexicano. They followed the curving arcade of cheap souvenir booths and churro stands. Recorded mariachi music came from unseen speakers, but in counterpoint was the sound of a live guitar.
They found the musician sitting on a bench in front of the Avila Adobe. They stopped and listened as the old man played a Mexican ballad Bosch thought he had heard before but could not identify.
Bosch studied the mud-walled structure behind the musician and wondered if Don Francisco Avila had any idea what he was helping to set in motion when he staked his claim to the spot in 1818. A city would grow tall and wide from this place. A city as great as any other. And just as mean. A destination city,