The Wrong Side of Goodbye(64)

“I wanted to see…” Bosch began.

He turned and pointed down toward the bottom of the pillar.

“Uh, los nombres?” he said. “Under—uh, debajo la tierra?”

“I can speak English, fool. You’re fucking up my garden. What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry, I was looking for a name. An artist who was one of the originals here.”

“There was a lot of them.”

Javier walked past Bosch and squatted down where Bosch had been. He started using his own hands to carefully put the uprooted flowers back into place, handling each one far more gently than Bosch had.

“Lukas Ortiz?” he asked.

“No, the other,” Bosch said. “Gabriela Lida. Is she still around?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m a private invest—”

“No, who wants to know?”

Bosch understood.

“If you can help me, I’d like to pay for the damage I did there.”

“How much you pay?”

It was time for Bosch to reach into his pocket for his money but his hands were dirty. He looked around and saw a tiled fountain that was part of the centerpiece of the park.

“Hold on,” he said.

He walked over and dipped his hands into the fountain’s pool and rubbed the dirt off. He then shook them and reached into his pocket. He checked his money fold and chose three of the four twenties he had. He went back to Javier. He hoped he wasn’t about to spend sixty bucks to be told Gabriela Lida was dead and in the ground like her name on the pillar.

Javier shook his head when Bosch got back to him.

“Now you fucked up my fountain,” he said. “The dirt gets in the filter and I gotta clean it.”

“I’ve got sixty bucks,” Bosch said. “It covers everything. Where can I find Gabriela Lida?”

He held the money out and Javier took it with a dirty hand.

“She use to work here and was in charge of the collective,” he said. “But now she’s retired. Last I heard, she still lived in the Mercado.”

“She lives in a market?” Bosch asked.

“No, cabrón, the Mercado. It’s a housing complex, man. Over there on Newton.”

“Her last name is still Lida?”

“That’s right.”

That’s all Bosch needed. He headed back to his car. Ten minutes later he parked in front of the main entrance of a sprawling complex of nicely kept low-income apartments in a neo-adobe style. He checked a residents’ listing in the entryway and soon afterward knocked on a freshly painted green door.

Bosch was holding the cardboard folder from Flashpoint Graphix down by his side. He raised his other hand to knock again just as the door was pulled open by a statuesque woman who, by Bosch’s calculations, had to be at least seventy but looked younger. She had sharply defined cheekbones and startling dark eyes set against still-smooth brown skin. Her hair was long and silver. Polished turquoise hung from her ears.

Bosch slowly lowered his hand. He had no doubt that this was the woman from the photo, all these years later.

“Yes?” she said. “Are you lost?”

“I don’t think so,” Bosch said. “Are you Gabriela Lida?”

“Yes, I am. What is it you want?”

Haller had told Bosch it would be his call to make when the moment arose. That moment was now and Bosch felt there was no need and no time to run a game with this woman.

“My name’s Harry Bosch,” he said. “I’m an investigator down from L.A. and I’m looking for Dominick Santanello’s daughter.”

The mention of the name seemed to sharpen her eyes. Bosch saw equal parts curiosity and concern.

“My daughter doesn’t live here. How do you know she is Dominick’s daughter?”

“Because I started with him and it brought me to you. Let me show you something.”

He brought up the folder, took the elastic band off it, and opened it in front of her, holding it like a music stand so she could see the photos and page through them. He heard her breath catch in her throat as she reached forward and lifted the 8 x 10 of her holding the baby. Bosch saw tears start to show in her eyes.

“Nick took these,” she whispered. “I never saw them.”

Bosch nodded.

“They were in his camera in an attic for many years,” he said. “What is your daughter’s name?”

“We called her Vibiana,” Gabriela said. “It was the name he wanted.”

“After his mother.”

Her eyes came up off the photo to his.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“If I could come in, there is a lot I need to tell you,” Bosch said.

She hesitated for a moment, then stepped back and allowed him in.

Bosch initially explained his presence by telling Gabriela that he had been hired by someone in Dominick Santanello’s family to see if he had fathered a child before he passed. She accepted that, and over the course of the next hour they sat in her small living room and Bosch heard the story of the short-lived love affair between Gabriela and Dominick.

It was a different angle on the story that Halley Lewis from Tallahassee had told Bosch. Gabriela had met Dominick in a bar in Oceanside with the express purpose of awakening him to his cultural roots and pride. But those motives soon took a backseat to the passion that bloomed between them and they became a couple.