The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(91)

“Has anybody talked to the Banks family?” Ballard asked.

“We’re going down to San Diego today to interview the brother,” Drucker said.

“Want to come?” Ferlita asked, a baiting tone in his voice.

“I’ll pass,” Ballard said. “I’m sure you two can handle it.”





BOSCH





44


Bosch spent Wednesday morning gathering files for a follow-up meeting scheduled with Clayton Manley. The attorney had called the day before and reported that the firm’s litigation committee had agreed to take on Bosch’s case on a commission basis. Bosch pulled all the records that he had kept from the missing-cesium case from a box where he stored documents from the most important cases of his career—most solved, some not.

He then picked up his phone, made a call, and left a message canceling a physical therapy session for his knee that had been scheduled for that morning. He knew his therapist would take the cancellation out on him when he arrived for the next session. He could already feel the pain from that.

When his phone buzzed two minutes later he guessed it would be his therapist saying he would be charged for the session anyway, since he had canceled on the day of. But the call turned out to be Mickey Haller.

“Your boy the clay man called like you said he would.”

“Who?”

“Clayton Manley. His e-mail is ‘clayman at Michaelson & Mitchell.’ He asked me to send the pension stuff ’cause he’s taking on your wrongful-death case. You told him you were actually dying?”

“I may have, yes. So you’re cooperating? He left me a message wanting to meet today. This must be why.”

“You told me to cooperate, I’m cooperating. You’re not going to let him file something, are you?”

“It won’t get that far. I’m just trying to get inside that place.”

“And you’re not telling me why?”

Bosch got a call-waiting beep. He checked his screen and saw it was Ballard.

“You don’t need to know yet,” he told Haller. “And I have a call coming in that I should take. I’ll check in about all of this later.”

“All right, bro—”

Bosch clicked over to the other call. It sounded like Ballard was in a car.

“Renée.”

“Harry, what do you have going today? I want to talk to you about something. Another case.”

“I have an eleven o’clock meeting downtown. After that I have time. Are you headed to the beach now?”

“Yes, but I’ll sleep a few hours and then we can meet after your thing. How about lunch?”

“Musso’s just hit a hundred years old.”

“Perfect. What time?”

“Let’s make it one-thirty in case my thing runs long. You’ll get more sleep.”

“See you there.”

She disconnected and Bosch went back to work on his own case, putting together a carefully constructed file he would give Clayton Manley. He left the house at ten and headed toward his downtown appointment, knowing from his call with Manley the day before that he was in play at Michaelson & Mitchell.

Bosch had noted four things during his earlier visit to Manley. One was that in a firm that had at least two floors of lawyers, Manley’s office, as remote as it seemed to be at the end of the hallway, was just doors away from the offices of the firm’s two founding partners. There had to be a reason for that, especially in light of the embarrassing run-in Manley had had with Judge Montgomery. That kind of public chastisement and humiliation would usually result in an order to clear out your desk and be gone by the end of the day. Instead, Manley maintained a position close to the firm’s top two seats of power.

The second thing he had noticed was that Manley apparently did not have a personal secretary or a clerk—at least not one sitting outside his office. There was no law firm staff at all in that hallway. Harry assumed that the doors he had passed to the offices of Mitchell and Michaelson led to large suites, each with its own set of clerks and secretaries guarding the entrances to the throne rooms. There had to be a reason Manley had none of that, but Bosch was more interested in how that could affect his plans for the meeting at eleven.

The last two things Bosch had noted during his first visit were that Manley’s office appeared to have neither a private bathroom nor a printer in plain view. His conclusion was that Manley most likely relied on a secretarial or law-clerk pool somewhere else in the offices, as well as a printer used by lesser members of the firm.

Not until he was on the 101 heading south did he remember he was supposed to call Mickey Haller back. He put his cell phone on speaker when he made the call. His Jeep had been manufactured about two decades before there was anything known as Bluetooth.

“Bosch, you dog.”

“Sorry about cutting you off before.”

“No problem and you didn’t have to call back. I said my piece.”

“Well, I wanted to ask you something. Did Manley ask you why you recommended him to me?”

“Matter of fact, he did.”

“And?”

“I can barely hear you, man. You need to get a car that’s quiet on the inside and has a digital sound system.”