The Wrong Side of Goodbye(18)

Bosch jogged up the steps, ignoring those who came at him asking if he was applying for a fictitious business name or a marriage license. He entered and walked past the information booth and then toward the stairs. Knowing from experience that waiting for an elevator in the building could suck the will to live out of a person, he took the stairs down to the basement level where the BDM section of the Register-Recorder’s Office was located.

As he pushed through the glass door, there was a shriek from one of the desks lining the wall on the other side of the public counter where birth, death, and marriage records could be requested. A woman stood up and smiled broadly at Bosch. She was Asian and her name was Flora. She had always been most helpful to Bosch when he had carried a badge.

“Harry Bosch!” she called out.

“Flora!” he called right back.

Along the counter, there was a window for law enforcement requests, which were always given priority, and two windows for citizen requests. There was a man standing at one of the citizen windows looking at copies of records. Bosch stepped up to the other. Flora was already heading to the law enforcement window.

“No, you come down here,” she instructed.

Bosch did as instructed and then leaned over the counter for an awkward embrace.

“I knew you’d come back to us here,” Flora said.

“Sooner or later, right?” he said. “But, hey, I’m here as a citizen right now. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”

Bosch knew he could pull the San Fernando badge, but he didn’t want a move like that to possibly track back to Valdez or Trevino. That would cause problems he didn’t need. Instead, he started back to the citizen’s window, choosing to keep his private and public detective work separate.

“It no trouble,” Flora said. “Not for you.”

He ended the charade and remained at the LE window.

“Well, this one might take a while,” he said. “I don’t have all the information and I need to go way, way back.”

“Let me try it. What you want?”

Bosch always had to guard against chopping his language the way she did. His natural inclination was to start leaving out words when he spoke to her. He had caught himself doing it in the past and he tried to avoid doing it now.

He pulled out his notebook and looked at some of the dates he had written down that morning in Vance’s office.

“Looking for a birth record,” he said while reading. “Talking about 1933 or ’34. What do you have going that far back?”

“Not on database,” Flora said. “We have film here only. No hard record anymore. Let me see name.”

He knew she was talking about records transferred to microfilm in the 1970s and never updated to the computerized database. He turned his notebook around so she could see the name and spelling of Vibiana Duarte. Bosch hoped that he would catch a break with the unusualness of it. At least it wasn’t a common Latino surname like Garcia or Fernandez. There probably weren’t too many Vibianas around either.

“She old,” Flora said. “You want death too?”

“I do. But I have no idea when and if she died. Last time I have her alive for sure is June 1950.”

She made a frowning face.

“Ooh, I see, Harry.”

“Thanks, Flora. Where is Paula? She still here?”

Paula was the other clerk he remembered from his frequent forays to the basement while a detective. Locating witnesses and families of victims was a key part of cold case investigation, usually the foundation of any case. The first thing you did was alert the family that the case was back under active investigation. But murder books from old cases rarely contained updates on deaths, marriages, and the migration of people. Consequently, Bosch did some of his best detective work in the halls of records and libraries.

“Paula out today,” Flora said. “Just me. I write down now and you get coffee. This take time.”

Flora wrote down what she needed.

“Do you want a coffee, Flora?” Bosch asked.

“No, you get,” she said. “For waiting.”

“Then I think I’ll just stick around. I filled up this morning and I have stuff to do.”

He pulled his phone out and held it up by way of explanation. Flora went back into the microfilm archives to hunt. Bosch sat down on one of the plastic seats in an unused microfilm cubicle.

He was thinking about next moves. Depending on what he came up with here, his next step was to go to St. Vibiana’s to see if he could get a look at baptismal records, or to the main library downtown, where they kept phone directories going back decades.

Bosch pulled up his phone’s search app and typed in USC EVK to see what might come up. It got a hit right away. The EVK was still operating on the campus and was located in the Birnkrant Residential College on 34th Street. He pulled the address up on his maps app and was soon looking at an overview of the sprawling campus just south of downtown. Vance said Vibiana had lived only a few blocks from the EVK and walked to work. The campus ran along Figueroa Street and the Harbor Freeway corridor. This limited the number of residential streets in the area with direct access to the EVK. Bosch started writing them down along with address spans so he might be able to place the Duarte house when he checked the old phone directories at the central library.

It soon occurred to him that he was looking at a 2016 map of the campus and its surroundings and that the Harbor Freeway might not even have existed in 1950. That would give the neighborhood around USC a completely different makeup. He went back to the search app and pulled up the history of the freeway, also known as the 110, which slashed an eight-lane diagonal across the county from Pasadena down to the harbor. He soon learned that it was built in sections in the 1940s and ’50s. It was the dawn of the freeway era in L.A. and the 110 was the very first project. The section that edged the east side of the USC campus was begun in 1952 and completed two years later, both dates well after the time Whitney Vance attended the school and met Vibiana Duarte.