of people who are just trying to get something done in the world?”
“I have to be careful about who I give information to. You understand that.”
“Yeah, I understand that. I also understand why law enforcement works about as well as the freeways in this town.”
“Hey, Bosch, don’t go away mad. Just go away.”
I shook my head in frustration. I didn’t know if I had blown it or if I was never going to get anything from him in the first place.
“So that’s your little dance, huh? You call me on my act but you were acting the whole time, too. You never were going to give me the name, were you?”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s just a name, Nunez. No harm no foul.”
Still nothing from the agent.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. You’ve got my name and number. And I think you know what agent I am talking about. So go to her and let her decide. Give her my name and number. I don’t care what you think about me, Nunez. You owe it to your fellow agent to give it to her. Just like Edgar. He was obligated. So are you.”
That was it. That was my pitch. I waited in the silence, this time deciding not to speak again until Nunez did.
“Look, Bosch, I would tell her you were calling for her. I would have told her before I even talked to Edgar. But obligations only go so far. The agent you were asking about? She’s not around anymore.”
“What do you mean not around? Where is she?”
Nunez said nothing. I sat up straight, my elbow hitting the wheel, drawing a blast from the horn. Something was in my memory, something about a female agent in the news. I couldn’t quite get to it.
“Nunez, is she dead?”
“Bosch, I don’t like this. This talking on the phone with somebody I’ve never met. Why don’t you come in and maybe we can talk about this.”
“Maybe?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll talk. When can you come in?”
The dashboard clock said it was five after three. I looked at the front door of the retirement home.
“Four o’clock.”
“We’ll be here.”
I closed the phone and sat there unmoving for a long moment, working at the memory. It was there, just out of reach.
I reopened the phone. I didn’t have my phone book with me, and numbers I once knew by heart had washed away in the past eight months like they had been written in sand on the beach. I called information and got the number for the Times newsroom. I then was connected to Keisha Russell. She remembered me like I had never left the department. We’d had a good relationship. I fed a number of exclusives to her over the years and she returned the favor by helping me with clip searches and keeping stories in the paper when she could. The Angella Benton case had been one of the times she couldn’t.
“Harry Bosch,” she said. “How are you?”
I noticed that her Jamaican accent was now almost completely gone. I missed it. I wondered if that was intentional or just the product of living ten years in the so-called melting pot.
“I’m fine. You still on the beat?”
“Of course. Some things never change.”
She had once told me that the cop beat was an entry-level position in journalism but that she never wanted to leave it. She thought moving up to cover city hall or elections or almost anything else would be terminally boring compared with writing stories about life and death and crime and consequences. She was good and thorough and accurate. So much so she had been invited to my retirement party. It was a rarity for an outsider of any ilk, especially a journalist, to earn such an invitation.
“Unlike you, Harry Bosch. You, I thought, would always be there in Hollywood Division. Almost a year later now and I still can’t believe it. You know, I called your number out of habit on a story a few months ago and a strange voice answered and I just had to hang up.”
“Who was it?”
“Perkins. They moved him over from autos.”
I hadn’t kept up. I didn’t know who had taken my slot. Perkins was good but not good enough. But I didn’t tell Russell that.
“So what’s up with you, mon?”
Every now and then she would turn on the accent and the patter. It was her way of making a transition, getting to the point.