The Wrong Side of Goodbye(40)

“I don’t know. That’s why I want to see her. And the baby she’s holding.”

Claudy said, “Okay. I think I can do something with this. My guys in the lab can. We’ll rewash and re-dry them. Then we’ll print. I see some fingerprints and they might be set after so long.”

Bosch considered that. His assumption was that Santanello took the shots. They were with his camera and other negatives taken by him. Why would someone send developed negatives to a soldier in Vietnam? But if it was ever questioned, the fingerprints might be useful.

“What’s your time frame?” Claudy asked.

“Yesterday,” Bosch said.

Claudy smiled.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re Hurry-Up-Harry.”

Bosch smiled back and nodded. Nobody had called him that since Claudy had left the department.

“So give me an hour,” Claudy said. “You can go to our break room and make a Nespresso.”

“I hate those things,” Bosch replied.

“Okay, then go take a walk in the cemetery. More your style anyway. One hour.”

“One hour.”

Bosch stood up.

“Give my regards to Oliver Hardy,” Claudy said. “He’s in there.”

“Will do,” Bosch said.

Bosch left Flashpoint and walked down Valhalla Drive. It was only when he entered the cemetery by a huge memorial that he remembered that in his research of Whitney Vance he had read that Vance’s father was buried here. Close to Caltech and under the jet path of Bob Hope Airport, the cemetery was the final resting place for a variety of aviation pioneers, designers, pilots, and barnstormers. They were interred or memorialized in and around a tall domed structure called the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. Bosch found Nelson Vance’s memorial plaque on the tiled floor of the shrine.



NELSON VANCE

Visionary Air Pioneer

Earliest Advocate of U.S. Air Power, Whose Prophetic Vision

and Leadership Was a Primary Factor in American

Supremacy in the Air in War and Peace

Bosch noticed that there was a space next to the memorial plaque for another interment and wondered if this was already on reserve as Whitney Vance’s final destination.

Bosch wandered out of the shrine and over to the memorial to the astronauts lost in two separate space shuttle disasters. He then looked across one of the green lawns and saw the start of a burial service near one of the big fountains. He decided not to venture further into the cemetery, a tourist amid the grief, and headed back to Flashpoint without searching for the grave of the heavier half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy.

Claudy was ready for him when Bosch returned. He was ushered into a drying room in the lab where nine 8 x 10 black-and-white prints were clipped to a plastic board. The photos were still wet with developing fluids, and a lab tech was just finishing using a squeegee to remove the excess. The exterior framing was seen on some of the prints, and some showed the fingerprints Claudy had warned about. Some of the shots were completely blown out by light exposure and others exhibited varying degrees of damage to the negative. But there were three shots that were at least 90 percent intact. And one of these was a shot of the woman and child.

The first thing Bosch realized was that he had been wrong about the woman standing in front of a mountain in Vietnam. It was no mountainside and it was not Vietnam. It was the recognizable roofline of the Hotel del Coronado down near San Diego. Once Bosch registered the location, he moved in close to study the woman and the baby. The woman was Latina and Bosch could see a ribbon in the baby’s hair. A girl, no more than a month or two old.

The woman’s mouth was open in a smile showing unbridled happiness. Bosch studied her eyes and the happy light that was in them. There was love in those eyes. For the baby. For the person behind the camera.

The other photos were full frames and fragments from a series of shots taken on the beach behind the del Coronado. Shots of the woman, shots of the baby, shots of the sparkling waves.

“Does it help?” Claudy asked.

He was standing behind Bosch, not getting in the way as Harry studied the prints.

“I think so,” Bosch said. “Yeah.”

He considered the totality of the circumstances. The photos and their subjects were important enough to Dominick Santanello for him to attempt to hide them as he sent his property home from Vietnam. The question was why. Was this his child? Did he have a secret family that his family in Oxnard knew nothing about? If so, why the secrecy? He looked closely at the woman in the photo. She seemed to be in her mid-to late twenties. Dominick would not yet have been twenty. Was the relationship with an older woman the reason he didn’t tell his parents and sister?

Another question was about the location. The photos were taken during a trip to the beach either at or near the Hotel del Coronado. When was this? And why was a strip of negatives from a photo shoot that very clearly took place in the States included in property sent home from Vietnam?

Bosch scanned the images again, looking for anything that would help place the shots in time. He saw nothing.

“For what it’s worth, the guy was good,” Claudy said. “Had a good eye.”

Bosch agreed.

“Is he dead?” Claudy asked.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “Never made it home from Vietnam.”