Resurrection Walk

“Legal Siegel knew it. He passed it on to me. A hundred fifty years ago, this cemetery was in Chavez Ravine. Then they dug everybody up and moved them over here.”

“And now Chavez Ravine isn’t even Chavez Ravine. It’s a baseball field.”

“Nothing in this city stays the same for very long.”

“You got that right.”

We stood in respectful silence for a few moments. Then Bosch spoke.

“How was he at the end?” he asked. “You know, with the dementia.”

“Full on,” I said. “He’d moved from knowing he had it and being scared shitless to being completely gone.”

“Did he know you?”

“He thought I was my father. Same name but I could tell he thought I was him, his law partner for thirty years. He’d tell stories that at first I’d think were true but then I’d remember they were scenes from a movie. Like payoffs stuffed in shirt boxes from the laundry.”

“Not true?”

“Goodfellas — you ever see it?”

“Missed it.”

“Good movie.”

We went silent again. I wished Bosch would go back to the car so I could have a private moment. I thought about the last time I had seen Legal Siegel. I had snuck a corned-beef sandwich from Canter’s into his room at the hospice. But he didn’t remember the place or the sandwich and didn’t have the strength to eat it anyway. Two weeks later he was gone.

“You know, Canter’s was over here too,” I said. “The deli. Like a hundred years ago. Then they eventually moved out to Fairfax. Shelley versus Kraemer changed a lot of things.”

“‘Shelley versus Kraemer’?” Bosch asked.

“A case decided by the Supreme Court seventy-five years ago. It knocked down racial and ethnic covenants and restrictions on the sale of property. Jews, Blacks, Chinese — after that ruling, they could buy anywhere, live anywhere they liked. Of course, it still took a lot of courage. That same year Nat King Cole bought a house in Hancock Park and the bigots burned a cross on his lawn.”

Bosch just nodded. I stayed up on the soapbox.

“Anyway, back then the Court was moving us forward. Toward the Great Society and all that. Now it seems to want to move us back.”

After another moment of silence, Bosch pointed to the plaque.

“That saying about good things coming to an end,” he said. “That was on the locked door at Chinese Friends the last time I tried to eat there.”

I stepped up and put my hand on the wall, covering Legal’s name, and held it there for a moment. I bowed my head.

“They got that right,” I said.

We didn’t talk about the threat from Carlos Lopez until we were back in the Navigator.

“So what do you think he meant about making it right if you don’t make it right?” Bosch asked.

“No earthly idea,” I said. “Guy’s a gangster caught up in the macho-gangster ethos. Even he probably doesn’t know what he meant by that.”

“You don’t take it as a threat?”

“Not a serious one. It’s not the first time somebody thought they could make me work the law better by trying to scare me. Won’t be the last. Let’s get out of here, Harry. Take me back to my place.”

“You got it.”

Part Three Side Effects

14

Bosch could feel the isotope moving in him, coursing coldly through his veins, over the shoulder and across his chest like a broken-dam flood. He tried to concentrate on the open file in front of him. Edward Coldwell, fifty-seven, convicted of killing a business partner four years before, fresh out of appeals and asking the Lincoln Lawyer to work a miracle in his name.

Bosch was only halfway through the file he’d put together with case documents from the court archives. Coldwell had gone to trial and the jury had believed the evidence against him over his denials. Now it was up to Bosch to determine if the case was worthy of the Lincoln Lawyer’s time and efforts.

Bosch had decided to do the deep dive into Coldwell’s case solely on the basis of the letter the convicted murderer had sent to Haller. The majority of requests for Haller’s legal expertise came with repeated claims of innocence and allegations of prosecutorial abuse and evidence missed or improperly dismissed. Coldwell’s letter had its fair share of that but it also contained what seemed to be a sincere plea to reveal the real killer and stop him from killing someone else. Bosch had not seen that in the other requests he’d reviewed and it struck a chord. In his forty-plus-year career of working murder cases, he had been motivated in part by the same sentiment — that if he could catch the killer, he would save another victim and another family from destruction down the line.