“We’ll be here.”

I closed the phone and sat there unmoving for a long moment, working at the memory. It was there, just out of reach.

I reopened the phone. I didn’t have my phone book with me, and numbers I once knew by heart had washed away in the past eight months like they had been written in sand on the beach. I called information and got the number for the Times newsroom. I then was connected to Keisha Russell. She remembered me like I had never left the department. We’d had a good relationship. I fed a number of exclusives to her over the years and she returned the favor by helping me with clip searches and keeping stories in the paper when she could. The Angella Benton case had been one of the times she couldn’t.

“Harry Bosch,” she said. “How are you?”

I noticed that her Jamaican accent was now almost completely gone. I missed it. I wondered if that was intentional or just the product of living ten years in the so-called melting pot.

“I’m fine. You still on the beat?”

“Of course. Some things never change.”

She had once told me that the cop beat was an entry-level position in journalism but that she never wanted to leave it. She thought moving up to cover city hall or elections or almost anything else would be terminally boring compared with writing stories about life and death and crime and consequences. She was good and thorough and accurate. So much so she had been invited to my retirement party. It was a rarity for an outsider of any ilk, especially a journalist, to earn such an invitation.

“Unlike you, Harry Bosch. You, I thought, would always be there in Hollywood Division. Almost a year later now and I still can’t believe it. You know, I called your number out of habit on a story a few months ago and a strange voice answered and I just had to hang up.”

“Who was it?”

“Perkins. They moved him over from autos.”

I hadn’t kept up. I didn’t know who had taken my slot. Perkins was good but not good enough. But I didn’t tell Russell that.

“So what’s up with you, mon?”

Every now and then she would turn on the accent and the patter. It was her way of making a transition, getting to the point.

“Sounds like you’re busy.”

“A bit.”

“Then I won’t bother you.”

“No, no, no. No bother. What can I do for you, Harry? You’re not working a case are you? Have you gone private?”

“Nothing like that. I was just curious about something that’s all. It can wait. I’ll check you later, Keisha.”

“Harry, wait!”

“You sure?”

“I am not too busy for an old friend, you know? What are you curious about?”

“I was just wondering, remember a while back there was an FBI agent, a woman, who disappeared? I think it was in the Valley. She was last seen driving home from -”

“Martha Gessler.”

The name brought it all back. Now I remembered.

“Yeah, that’s it. Whatever happened with her, do you know?”

“As far as I know she’s still missing in action, presumed dead probably.”

“There hasn’t been anything about her lately? I mean, any stories?”

“Nope, because I would’ve written them and I haven’t written about her in, oh, two years at least.”

“Two years. Is that when it happened?”

“No, more like three. I think I did a one-year-later story. An update. That was the last time I wrote about her. But thanks for the reminder. It may be time for another look.”

“Hey, if you do that, hold off a few days, would you?”

“So you are working on something, Harry.”

“Sort of. I don’t know if it’s related to Martha Gessler or not. But give me till next week, okay?”

“No problem if you come clean and talk to me then.”

“Okay, give me a call. Meantime, could you pull the clips on her? I’d like to read what you wrote back then.”

I knew they still called it pulling clips even though it was all on computer now and actual newspaper clippings were a thing of the past.

“Sure, I can do that. You have a fax or an e-mail?”

I had neither.

“Maybe you can just mail them to me. Regular mail, I mean.”

I heard her laugh.

“Harry, you won’t make it as a modern private detective like that. I bet all you have is a trench coat.”

“I’ve got a cell phone.”

“Well, that’s a start then.”

I smiled and gave her my address. She said the clips would go out in the afternoon mail. She asked for my cell number so she could call me the following week and I gave her that, too.

Then I thanked her and closed the phone. I sat there for a moment considering things. I had taken an interest in the Martha Gessler case at the time. I didn’t know her but my former wife had. They had worked together in the bureau’s bank robbery unit many years before. Her disappearance had held in the news for several days, then the reports were more sporadic and then they just dropped off completely. I had forgotten about her until now.

I felt a burning in my chest and I knew it wasn’t the midday martini backing up. I felt like I was closing in on something. Like when a child can’t see something in the dark but is sure it is there just the same.

I got the instrument case out of the back of the Benz and carried it up the sidewalk to the double doors of the retirement home. I nodded to the woman behind the counter and walked by. She didn’t stop me. She knew me by now. I went down the hallway to the right and opened the door to the music room. There was a piano and an organ at the front of the room and a small grouping of chairs lined up for watching performances, but I knew that those were few. Quentin McKinzie was sitting on a seat in the front row. He was slouched and his chin was down, his eyes closed. I gently nudged his shoulder and immediately his face and eyes came up.

“Sorry, I’m late, Sugar Ray.”

I think he liked that I called him by his stage name. He had been known professionally as Sugar Ray McK because when he played he would dodge and weave on the stage like Sugar Ray Robinson in the ring.

I pulled a chair out of the front row and brought it around so it faced him. I sat down and put the case on the ground. I flipped up the snaps and opened it, revealing the shining instrument held snug in its maroon velvet lining.

“This has got to be short today,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment at four in Westwood.”

“Retired guys don’t have appointments,” Sugar Ray said, his voice sounding like he grew up just down the street from Louis Armstrong. “Retired guys have all the time in the world.”

“Well, I’ve got something working and I might… well, I’m going to try to keep our schedule but the next couple weeks might be tough. I’ll call the desk and get a message to you if I can’t make the next lesson.”

We had been meeting two afternoons a week for six months. I had first seen Sugar Ray play on a hospital ship in the South China Sea. He had been part of the Bob Hope entourage that came to entertain the wounded during Christmastime 1969. Many years later, in fact one of my last cases as a cop, I was working a homicide and came across a stolen saxophone with his name engraved inside the mouth. I tracked him to Splendid Age and returned it. But he was too old to play it anymore. His lungs no longer had the push.

Still, I had done the right thing. It was like returning a lost child to a parent. He invited me to Christmas dinner. We stayed in touch and after I pulled the pin I came back to him with a plan that would save his instrument from gathering dust.

Sugar Ray was a good teacher because he didn’t know how to teach. He told me stories and told me how to love the instrument, how to draw from it the sounds of life. Any note I could sound could bring out a memory and a story. I knew I was never going to be any good at playing the sax but I came twice a week to spend an hour with him and hear his stories about jazz and feel the passion he still carried for his deathless art. Somehow it got inside me and came out in my own breath when I held the instrument to my mouth.