The Wrong Side of Goodbye(35)

“He wasn’t going to go to college?” he asked. “It would have been a deferment and the war was winding down by ’69. Nixon was cutting back troops.”

Olivia shook her head.

“No, no college. He was very smart but he just didn’t like school. Had no patience for it. He liked movies and sports and photography. I think he also wanted to figure things out a little bit. Our father sold refrigerators. There was no money for college.”

Those last words—no money—echoed in Bosch’s mind. If Whitney Vance had owned up to his responsibility and raised and paid for his child, then there would have been money and his son wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Vietnam. He tried to break away from such thoughts and concentrate on the interview.

“He wanted to be a corpsman—a medic?” he asked.

“That’s another story,” Olivia said. “When he enlisted he got to choose which way he wanted to go. He was torn. There was something about him; he wanted to get close but not that close, you know? There was a list of the different things you could do and he told them he wanted to be a journalist/photographer or a combat medic because he thought it would get him to, you know, where the action was but he wouldn’t have to be killing people right and left.”

Bosch had known many of the same type over there. Guys who wanted to be in battle without having to be in battle. Most of the grunts were only nineteen or twenty years old. It was a time to prove who you were, what you could do.

“So they made him a corpsman and trained him for battle,” Olivia said. “His first assignment overseas was on the hospital ship, but that was just to get his feet wet. He was there for, like, three or four months and then they put him with the Marines and he was in combat…And of course, he got shot down.”

She finished the story in a matter-of-fact tone. It was almost fifty years old and she had probably told it and thought about it ten thousand times. It was family history now and the emotion had gone out of it.

“So sad,” she said then. “He only had a couple weeks left over there. He sent a letter saying he would be home by Christmas. But he didn’t make it.”

Her tone had turned somber and Bosch thought maybe he had too quickly come to the conclusion that there was no longer an emotional burden on her. He took another drink of iced tea before asking the next question.

“You mentioned that some of his stuff from over there was sent back. It’s all up in the attic?”

She nodded.

“A couple boxes. Nicky sent stuff home because he was about to get out. He was a short-timer and then the Navy sent back his footlocker too. My parents kept it all and I put it up there. I didn’t like looking at it, to tell you the truth. It was just a bad reminder.”

Despite her feelings about her brother’s war things, Bosch grew nervous with the excitement of possibility.

“Olivia,” he said. “Can I go up to the attic and look at his things?”

She made a face like he had crossed some line with the question.

“Why?”

Bosch leaned forward across the table. He knew he needed to be sincere. He needed to get up into that attic.

“Because it might help me. I’m looking for something that might connect him to the man who hired me.”

“You mean like DNA in stuff that old?”

“It’s possible. And it’s because I was over there when I was your brother’s age. As I said on the memorial site, I was even on the same hospital ship, maybe even at the same time he was. It will just help me to look at his things. Not just for the case. For me too.”

She thought a moment before answering.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m not going up in that attic. The ladder’s way too rickety and I’d be scared I’d fall off. If you want to go up, you can, but it will be by yourself.”

“That’s okay,” Bosch said. “Thank you, Olivia.”

He finished his iced tea and stood up.





15

Olivia had been right about the ladder. It was a fold-down job attached to the pull-down attic door in the ceiling of the second-floor landing. Bosch was by no means a heavy man. Wiry was the description that favored him his entire life. But as he climbed the wooden ladder, it creaked under his weight and he worried the hinges on the fold would give way and he would fall. Olivia stood by below and nervously watched him. Four steps up he was able to reach and grab on to the framing in the ceiling and safely redistribute some of his weight.

“There should be a pull string for the light up there,” she said.

Bosch made it to the top without the ladder collapsing and swung his hand around in the dark until he captured the pull string. Once the light was on he looked around to get his bearings. Olivia called up from below.

“I haven’t been up there in years, but I think his stuff was in the back right corner.”

Bosch turned that way. It was still dark in the recesses of the attic. Out of his back pocket he pulled the flashlight Olivia had armed him with. He pointed the light into the back right corner, where the roof sloped sharply down, and immediately saw the familiar shape of a military footlocker. He had to crouch to get to it and he banged his head on one of the rafters. At that point he lowered himself to a crawl until he reached the locker.

There was a cardboard box on top of the locker. Bosch put the light on it and saw that it was the box Olivia had mentioned her brother sent home from Da Nang. Dominick Santanello was both the sender and addressee. The return address was 1st Medical Battalion, Da Nang. The tape was yellowed and peeling but Bosch could tell the box had been opened and then later closed before being stored. He lifted it off the footlocker and put it to the side.