The Wrong Side of Goodbye(33)

“Then it sounds like I’m due a commission on any funds you collect on this thing, Harry,” Haller said.

“Doesn’t sound like that to me,” Bosch said. “But if you hook me up with a DNA lab, there might be something in it for you down the line.”

“I’ll send you an e-mail, broheim.”

“Thanks, broheim.”

Bosch left the house at 11:30 so he would have time to grab something to eat on his way to Oxnard. Out on the street he checked in all directions for surveillance before hiking a block up to the spot where he had parked the rented Cherokee. He ate tacos at Poquito Más at the bottom of the hill and then jumped onto the 101 and followed it west across the Valley and into Ventura County.

Oxnard was the biggest city in Ventura County. Its unattractive name was that of a sugar beet farmer who built a processing plant in the settlement in the late nineteenth century. The city totally surrounded Port Hueneme, where there was a small U.S. Navy base. One of the questions Bosch planned to ask Olivia Macdonald was whether proximity to the base was what lured her brother into enlisting in the Navy.

Traffic was reasonable and Bosch got to Oxnard early. He used the time to drive around the port and then along Hollywood Beach, a strip of homes on the Pacific side of the port where the streets were named La Brea and Sunset and Los Feliz after the well-known boulevards of Tinseltown.

He pulled up in front of Olivia Macdonald’s house right on time. It was in an older, middle-class neighborhood of neatly kept California bungalows. She was waiting for Bosch in a chair on the front porch. He guessed that they were about the same age and he could see that, like her adoptive brother, it was likely she had both white and Latina origins. She had hair that was as white as snow and she was dressed in faded jeans and a white blouse.

“Hello, I’m Harry Bosch,” he said.

He reached his hand down to her and she shook it.

“Olivia,” she said. “Please have a seat.”

Bosch sat in a wicker chair across a small glass-topped table from her. There was a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the table and he accepted her offer of a glass just to be cordial. He saw a manila envelope on the table that had Do Not Bend handwritten on it and assumed it contained photos.

“So,” she said, after pouring two glasses. “You want to know about my brother. My first question is, who is it you work for?”

Bosch knew it would begin this way. He also knew that how he answered this question would determine how much cooperation and information he would get from her.

“Well, Olivia, that’s the awkward part,” he said. “I was hired by a man who wanted to find out if he had a child back in 1951. But part of the deal was that I had to agree to the strictest confidence and not reveal who my employer was to anyone until he released me from that promise. So I’m sort of caught in the middle here. It’s a catch-22 thing. I can’t tell you who hired me until I can confirm that your brother was his son. You don’t want to talk to me until I tell you who hired me.”

“Well, how will you confirm it?” she said, waving a hand helplessly. “Nicky’s been dead since 1970.”

Bosch sensed an opening.

“There are ways. This is the house where he grew up, isn’t it?”

“How do you know that?”

“The same address is on his birth certificate. The one that was filed after he was adopted. There might be something here I can use. Was his bedroom left intact?”

“What? No, that’s weird. Besides I raised three kids in this house after I moved back. We didn’t have room to turn his bedroom into a museum. Nicky’s stuff, what’s left of it, is up in the attic.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know. His war stuff. The things he sent back and then what they sent back after he got killed. My parents kept it all and after I moved in here I shoved it all up there. I wasn’t interested in it but my mother made me promise not to throw it away.”

Bosch nodded. He had to find a way to get up into the attic.

“Are your parents alive?” he asked.

“My father died twenty-five years ago. My mother’s alive but she doesn’t know what day it is or who she is anymore. She’s at a facility where they take good care of her. It’s just me here now. Divorced, kids grown and out on their own.”

Bosch had gotten her talking without her coming back to her demand to know who his employer was. He knew he had to keep that going and drive the conversation back around to the attic and what was up there.

“So you said on the phone that your brother knew he was adopted.”

“Yes, he did,” she said. “We both did.”

“Were you also born at St. Helen’s?”

She nodded.

“I came first,” she said. “My adoptive parents were white and I obviously was brown. It was very white out here back then and they thought it would be good for me to have a sibling who was the same. So they went back to St. Helen’s and got Dominick.”

“You said your brother knew his birth mother’s name. Vibiana. How did he know that? That was usually kept from everybody— at least back then.”

“You’re right, it was. I never knew my mother’s name or what the story was there. When Nicky was born he was already set to go to my parents. They were waiting for him. But he was sick and the doctors wanted him to stay with his mother for a while and have her milk. It was something like that.”