The Black Echo

They focused on the NCIC records of the six soldiers who were First Infantry or military police. Only the MPOs had bank robbery records. Bosch shuffled through the mug shots and pulled those two out. He stared at the faces, half expecting to get confirmation from the hardened, disinterested looks they gave the camera. “I like these two,” he said.

Their names were Art Franklin and Gene Delgado. They both had Los Angeles addresses. In Vietnam, they spent their tours in Saigon assigned to separate MP units. Not the embassy unit that Meadows was attached to. But, still, they were in the city. Both of them had been discharged in 1973. But as with Meadows, they stayed on in Vietnam as civilian military advisers. They were there until the end, April 1975. There was no question in Bosch’s mind. All three men-Meadows, Franklin and Delgado-knew each other before they met at Charlie Company in Ventura County.

Stateside after 1975, Franklin got jammed up on a series of robberies in San Francisco and went away for five years. He went down on a federal rap of bank robbery in Oakland in 1984 and was at TI at the same time as Meadows. He was paroled to Charlie Company two months before Meadows left the program. Delgado was strictly a state offender; three pops for burglaries in L.A., for which he was able to get by on county lockup time, then an attempted bank robbery in Santa Ana in 1985. He was able to plead in state court under an agreement with federal prosecutors. He went up to Soledad, getting out in 1988 and arriving at Charlie Company three months ahead of Meadows. He left Charlie Company a day after Franklin arrived.

“One day,” Wish said. “This means all three were together there at Charlie Company only one day.”

Bosch looked at their photos and the accompanying descriptions. Franklin was the larger one. Six foot, 190, dark hair. Delgado was lean, five-six and 140. Dark hair, too. Bosch stared at the photos of the big man and the small man, and was thinking about the descriptions of the men in the Jeep that had dumped Meadows’s body.

“Let’s go see Sharkey,” he said after a while.

He called Home Street Home and was told what he knew they were going to tell him: Sharkey was gone. Bosch tried the Blue Chateau and a tired old voice told him that Sharkey’s crew had moved out at noon. His mother hung up on Bosch after she determined he was not a customer. It was near seven. Bosch told Wish they would have to go back to the street to find him. She said she’d drive. They spent the next two hours in West Hollywood, mostly in the Santa Monica Boulevard corridor. But there was no sign of Sharkey or his motorbike locked to a parking meter. They flagged down a few sheriff’s cruisers and told them who they were looking for, but not even the extra eyes helped. They parked at the curb by the Oki Dog, and Bosch was thinking that maybe the boy had gone back to his mother’s house and she had hung up the phone to protect him.

“You want to take a ride up to Chatsworth?” he asked.

“As much as I’d like to see this witch you told me Sharkey has for a mother, I was thinking more along the lines of calling it a day. We can find Sharkey tomorrow. How about that dinner we didn’t have last night?”

Bosch wanted to get to Sharkey, but he also wanted to get to her. She was right, there was always tomorrow.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Where you feel like going?”

“My place.”

***

Eleanor Wish lived in a rent-controlled townhouse she subleased two blocks from the beach in Santa Monica. They parked at the curb in front, and as they went in she told Bosch that although she lived close by, if he wanted to actually see the ocean he had to walk out onto her bedroom balcony, lean over and look sharply to the right down Ocean Park Boulevard. A slice of the Pacific could then be seen between two condominium towers that guarded the shoreline. From that angle, she mentioned, he could also see into her next-door neighbor’s bedroom. The neighbor was a has-been television actor turned small-time dope dealer who had a never-ending procession of women through the bedroom. It kind of took away from the view, she said. She told Bosch to have a seat in the living room while she got dinner started. “If you like jazz, I have a CD over there I just bought but haven’t had time to listen to,” she said.