Trunk Music

Authors: Michael Connelly
Narrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 12H 41m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌑
Tags: politics - detective - action

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Bosch is chasing his mother’s killers while being on leave. This time big chunk of the book he spends with psychiatrist. I would not say that I enjoyed this part much. Great twists, but i’m getting tired of those. Also great description of Las Vegas and undercover work. Great Narration by Dick Hill.

Quotes:

Most homicides are solved in the first forty-eight hours after discovery or they aren’t solved at all. Billets wanted more solved so she was going to put more detectives on each one. The part that didn’t look so good on paper, especially to the nine detectives, was that previously there had been four pairs of partners working homicide cases. The new changes meant each detective would be working every third case that came up instead of every fourth. It meant more cases, more work, more court time, more overtime, and more stress. Only the overtime was considered a positive. But Billets was tough and didn’t care much for the complaints of the detectives. And her new plan quickly won her the obvious nickname.

He knew it was down near Paramount, the sprawling studio that took up the entire north side of the fifty-five-hundred block. The big studio was surrounded by smaller production houses and ministudios. They were like sucker fish that swam around the mouth of the big shark, hoping for the scraps that didn’t get sucked in.

Zebra unit. An officer of many stripes, meaning he handled a variety of calls, usually trash calls, while cars with two officers aboard handled the hotshots — the prime, possibly dangerous, calls. Zebras worked patrol alone and often had free rein of the entire division. They were in the supervisory level between the sergeants and the grunts who were assigned to patrol geographic slices of the division known as basic car areas.

Most OCID detectives were known in Detective Services as big-footers. They swooped down to take investigations away from detectives like Bosch, but they didn’t often make cases in return. Bosch had seen many investigations disappear under their door with not many prosecutions of OC wise guys resulting. They were the only division in the department with a black budget — approved in closed session by the chief and a police commission that largely followed his lead. From there, the money disappeared into the dark, to pay for informants, investigations and high-tech equipment. Many of their cases disappeared in that netherworld as well.

Carbone repeated the name slowly, as if it were a fine wine he was tasting before deciding whether to accept the bottle or spit it out.

“It’s a wise guy saying outta Chicago. You know, when they whack some poor slob they say, ‘Oh, Tony? Don’t worry about Tony. He’s trunk music now. You won’t see him no more.’

“Harry, you want the swag on this?” … “Swag?” … “Scientific wild ass guess.”

Billets stood nearby, watching but not helping. She had risen to detective bureau commander primarily on the success of her skills as an administrator, not as an investigator. She knew when to watch and not get in the way.

Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.

He held out his badge wallet and she took it from his hand. Usually, they didn’t do that. Usually, they recoiled from it or looked at it like it was some strange and fascinating object not to be touched.

Bosch could see she had been considered very beautiful at one time but was sliding into that stage when a woman believes her beauty may be leaving — even if it isn’t. Maybe that was why she had all the makeup on, Bosch guessed.

Bosch took a few moments to write this down. He found that often silence was the best way to get people to talk and reveal themselves. He hoped Rider realized that he was leaving holes of silence in the interview on purpose.

Rider said, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, the truth shouldn’t hurt you.”. Bosch knew from long experience never to say such a thing. He knew the words were false before they were out of her mouth. Judging by the small, thin smile on Veronica Aliso’s face, she knew it as well.

She might blame her husband and harbor resentment toward him, but the bottom line was that she was like thousands of beautiful women who came to Hollywood every year. Her looks could put a pause in your heart, but she could not act to save her life.

He had long had the caffeine jitters but knew if he stopped feeding the beast now he would quickly crash.

I once heard this story about a sculptor and somebody asked him how he turned a block of granite into a beautiful statue of a woman. And he said that he just chips away everything that isn’t the woman. That’s what we have to do now. We’ve got this big block of information and evidence. We’ve got to chip away everything that doesn’t count, that doesn’t fit.”

Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left. Beneath the veneer of glitz and money and energy and sex beat a dark heart. No matter how much they tried to dress her up with neon and family entertainment, she was still a whore.

He knew that true-blue gamblers said it wasn’t the winning and losing, it was the anticipation. Whether it was the next card, the fall of the dice or the number the little ball stopped on, it was those few seconds of waiting and hoping and wishing that charged them, that addicted them.

This woman, this girl, was beautiful and yet here she was. Maybe that was the real draw for these men, he thought. Not the glimpse of a naked woman, but the knowledge of submission, the thrill of knowing another one had been broken.

They made love with an intensity that Bosch had forgotten that he had. It was a bruising, huffing physical act devoid of love, invigorated and driven solely, it seemed, by lust and maybe a memory. When he was done she pulled him toward her, into her, in rhythmic thrusts until she, too, reached her moment and subsided. Then, with the clarity of thought that always comes after, they became embarrassed about their nakedness, about how they had coupled with the ferocity of animals and now looked at each other as human beings.

Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.

It wasn’t really a question of being smart or not. Criminals followed routines, instincts. This didn’t make sense.

It was well known that one reason hitters preferred to use twenty-twos on the job was that the soft bullets often became so misshapen after bouncing around in the brain case that they were worthless for ballistic comparison.

It was unlikely the Mirage would have been mentioned in any press release anyway, but he understood the concern. Guilt by association. Meyer was mixing public relations with casino security. Or maybe they were the same thing.

He’d been operating on his faith that the truth would win out and now clearly saw how little truth would have to do with the outcome.

Bosch got to Musso and Frank’s Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard at exactly twelve-thirty and parked in the back. The restaurant was a Hollywood landmark, having been on the Boulevard since 1924. In its heyday it had been a popular destination for Hollywood’s elite. Fitzgerald and Faulkner held forth. Chaplin and Fairbanks once raced each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser having to pick up the dinner tab. The restaurant now subsisted mostly on its past glory and faded charm. Its red leather padded booths still filled every day for lunch and some of the waiters looked and moved as if they had been there long enough to have served Chaplin. The menu hadn’t changed in all the years Bosch had been eating there — this in a town where the hookers out on the Boulevard lasted longer than most restaurants.

Like a good criminal defense lawyer, he never directly asked Harry if he had planted the gun. Zane didn’t really care. He simply looked at IAD as the enemy, as a group of bad cops with the sole purpose of going after good cops. Zane was part of the old school who thought all cops were inherently good and though sometimes the job turned them bad, they should not be persecuted by their own.

There was a hysterical tinge to the voice now, and Bosch suspected he was dealing with one of the homeless wanderers who were dumped out of mental institutions during the massive cutbacks in public assistance in the 1980s. The city was teeming with them. They stood at almost every major intersection holding their signs and shaking their change cups, they slept under overpasses or burrowed like termites into the woods on the hillsides, living in makeshift camps just yards from million-dollar mansions.

Sometimes Bosch thought of his city as some kind of vast drain that pulled all bad things toward a spot where they swirled around in a deep concentration. It was a place where it seemed the good people were often outnumbered by the bad. The creeps and schemers, the rapists and killers. It was a place that could easily produce someone like Powers. Too easily.

A DP, or deployment period, was fifteen days. Suspensions were usually handed out in such increments when the offense was serious. Bosch was pretty sure the chief wouldn’t be handing out minor suspensions to them.

As far as the appeal went, disciplinary action by the police chief was rarely overturned. It would require two of the three captains on the Board of Rights to vote against their commander in chief. Overruling an IAD investigator was one thing, overruling the chief was political suicide.

It took about an hour for the next five minutes to go by

As loud as the eight seconds of shooting had been, the silence that followed the gun falling to the ground seemed even louder.

She was a bad liar, the type who got louder and indignant when she lied.