Whatever made her happy made me happy – except the time she thought divorcing me would make her life happier. That didn’t do much for me.
It had been Bosch’s experience that when you looked back at a life, you used a magnifying glass. Everything was bigger, amplified.
Livingstone had said sympathy was no substitute for action. That was an essential brick in Bosch’s wall. He had built himself as a man of action and, at the moment when the integrity of his life’s work had been called into question by a man on death row, he had chosen to turn his sympathy for Elizabeth Clayton into action.
Bosch counted twenty-two names and it made him miss the old Los Angeles Times. In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo – thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long.
There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown.
In this country, there are two million people in prison. Two million. If the system gets it wrong one percent of the time, that is twenty thousand innocent people in jail. Lower it to half a percent and you’re still at ten thousand people. This is what keeps me up at night. Why I always say, the scariest client is the innocent man. Because there is so much at stake.
You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong.
Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.
The black heart does not beat alone.
The rich kept you waiting so that you could feel free to admire all that they had.
Because it’s a hot door and we have to be careful. You never open a door on a burning room.
It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city’s history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.
They need you until they don’t need you.
Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That’s all I want to do.
If we can’t be honest with ourselves, how can we ever tell the truth to the people out there?
When you find the one that you think fits, then grab on for dear life.
The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.
I didn’t have all the answers but experience told me that they would come.
Time had eroded the bond between them. They were strangers who shared the same story.
He knew evil could never be vanquished. It just moved from one place to another and waited.