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“They’re getting ready to tear this place down, Bobby. What are you going to do when they kick you out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I go down with the ship. I got nowhere else to go.”

Bosch nodded and looked around the confined space. His eyes went to the tile in the corner behind Walker’s right side. There was a dinner plate on the floor that had food on it.

“Where’d you get that?” he asked.

“Somebody gave it out their car to me at the intersection where I work,” he said. He nodded to the wall where a handwritten sign was leaning: Homeless and hungry — anything helps. His work. He’d used the back of one of the NO TRESPASSING signs for his panhandling plea. “I think it came from Tonkotsu.”

“I don’t mean the food,” Bosch said. “Where did you get that plate?”

Walker reached back and lifted the plate. Bosch could see ramen noodles partially obscuring the letters that ran along the rim of the plate: SKPH.

“The kitchen,” Walker said. “They left all that shit behind when they cleared outta here.”

“Can you show me?” Bosch asked.

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Shit’s all gone now. They took everything a few months ago when they started stripping the place. I got a plate and a fork and a spoon and that’s it.”

“Then how much you want for the plate?”

“How much you got?”

12

BOSCH WAS ESCORTED into Dr. Sears’s office carrying a bag from Vons supermarket. She was waiting behind her desk.

“What did you find?” she asked.

Bosch stayed standing. He put the bag on one of the visitor chairs, pulled out the plate, set it down in front of her, then pulled out a frozen dinner and put it down next to the plate.

“‘S-K-P-H,’” she read. “What do we have here, Mr. Bosch?”

“You wanted artifacts,” Bosch said. “You wanted a scent. The plate came from the Mac. They used the plates that were already in the kitchen when they took it over. Before that, it was the Sister Kenny Polio Hospital. The treatment record from the ER said Mr. Bishop lost two teeth and needed stitches because a kid had Frisbeed a plate at him during a food fight. It was a plate like this that hit him.”

“Are you sure?”

“I washed dishes in that place for years. That’s one of the plates. It came directly from the Mac.”

Sears nodded.

“Okay, good,” she said. “And the frozen dinner?”

“The closest I could get to a scent,” Bosch said. “You know how they have, like, taco Tuesdays in restaurants and stuff? The Mac had a fixed menu — meat-loaf Monday, turkey Tuesday, and so on. I looked up what day of the week April first, 1965, was. It was a Thursday. On Thursdays we had Salisbury steak. Like clockwork. Hamburger with mushroom gravy. It was disgusting. I can’t eat mushrooms to this day.”

“I could change that if you’d like through modification hypnotherapy.”

“No, I’m okay. I don’t need mushrooms.”

Sears picked up the box and studied the photo on the front.

“Were you also served mashed potatoes and corn like this?” she asked.

“It was always the hamburger steak with the sauce and mashed potatoes,” Bosch said. “The vegetable changed from week to week for variety. Sometimes we got corn.”