The Concrete Blonde

12

Bosch threw his cigarette into the fountain that was part of the memorial to officers killed in the line of duty and walked through the glass doors into Parker Center. He badged one of the cops behind the front desk and walked around to the elevators. There was a red line painted on the black tile floor. That was the route visitors were told to take if they were going to the Police Commission hearing room. There was also a yellow line for Internal Affairs and a blue for applicants who wanted to become cops. It was a tradition for cops standing around waiting for elevators to stand on the yellow line, thereby making any citizens who were going to IAD-usually to file complaints-walk around them. This maneuver was usually accompanied by a baleful stare from cop to citizen.

Every time Bosch waited for an elevator he remembered the prank he had been partially responsible for while still in the academy. He and another cadet had come into Parker Center at four one morning, drunk and hiding paint brushes and cans of black and yellow paint in their windbreakers. In a quick and daring operation, his partner had used the black paint to obliterate the yellow line on the tile floor while Bosch painted a new yellow line which went past the elevators, down the hall, into a men’s room and right to a urinal. The prank had given them near legendary status in their class, even among the instructors.

He got off the elevator on the third floor and walked back to the Robbery-Homicide Division. The place was empty. Most RHD cops worked a strict seven-to-three shift. That way the job didn’t get in the way of all the moonlighting gigs they had lined up. RHD dicks were the cream of the department. They got all the best gigs. Chauffeuring visiting Saudi princes, security work for studio bosses, body-guarding Vegas high rollers-LVPD did not allow its people to moonlight, so the high-paying jobs fell to LAPD.

When Bosch had first been promoted to RHD there were still a few detective-threes around who had worked bodyguard duty for Howard Hughes. They had spoken of the experience as if that was what the RHD job was all about, a means to an end, a way to get a job working for some deranged billionaire who didn’t need any bodyguards because he never went anywhere.

Bosch walked to the rear of the room and turned on one of the computers. He lit a cigarette while the tube warmed up and took the report Edgar had given him out of his coat pocket. The report was nothing. It had never been looked at, acted on, cared about.

He noticed it was a walk-in-Tom Cerrone had come into the North Hollywood Division station and made the report at the front desk. That meant it had probably been written up by a probationary rookie or a burned-out vet who didn’t give a shit. In either case, it was not taken for what it was: a cover-your-ass report.

Cerrone said he was Kaminski’s roommate. According to the brief summary, two days before the report was made she had told Cerrone she was going on a blind date, meeting an unnamed man at the Hyatt on the Sunset Strip and that she hoped the guy wasn’t a creep. She never came back. Cerrone got worried and went to the cops. The report was taken, passed through North Hollywood detectives where it didn’t make a blip on anyone’s screen and then sent to Missing Persons in downtown where four detectives are charged with finding the sixty people reported missing on average each week in the city.

In reality, the report was put in a stack of others like it and was not looked at again until Edgar and his pal, Morg, found it. None of this bothered Bosch, though anyone who spent two minutes reading the report should have known that Cerrone wasn’t what he said he was. But Bosch figured Kaminski was dead and in the concrete long before the report was made. So there was nothing anyone could have done anyway.

He punched the name Thomas Cerrone into the computer and ran a search on the California Department of Justice information network. As he expected, he got a hit. The computer file on Cerrone, who was forty years old, showed he had been popped nine times in as many years for soliciting for prostitution and twice for pandering.

He was a pimp, Bosch knew. Kaminski’s pimp. Harry noticed that Cerrone was on thirty-six months’ probation for his last conviction. He got out his black telephone book and rolled his chair over to a desk with a phone. He dialed the after-hours number for the county probation department and gave the clerk who answered Cerrone’s name and DOJ number. She gave back Cerrone’s current address. The pimp had come down in the world, from Studio City to Van Nuys, since Kaminski had gone to the Hyatt and not come back.

After hanging up, he thought of calling Sylvia and wondered if he should tell her it was likely he would be called by Chandler to testify the next day. He was unsure if he wanted her to be there, to see him cornered on the witness stand by Money Chandler. He decided not to call.

Cerrone’s home address was an apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard in an area where prostitutes were not too discreet about how they got their customers. It was still daylight and Bosch counted four young women spread apart over a two-block stretch. They wore halter tops and short shorts. They held their thumb out like hitchhikers when cars went by. But it was clear they were only interested in a ride around the corner to a parking lot where they could take care of business.

Bosch parked at the curb across from the Van-Aire Apartments, where Cerrone had told his probation officer he was living. A couple of the numbers from the address had fallen off the front wall but it was readable because the smog had left the rest of the wall a dingy beige. The place needed new paint, new screens, some plastering to fill in the cracks in the facade and probably new tenants.

Actually, it needed to be knocked down. Start over, Bosch thought as he crossed the street. Cerrone’s name was on the residents list next to the front security door but no one answered the buzzer at apartment six. Bosch lit a cigarette and decided to hang around for a while. He counted twenty-four units on the residents list. It was six o’clock. People would be coming home for dinner. Someone would come along.

He walked away from the door and back out to the curb. There was graffiti on the sidewalk, all of it in black paint. The monikers of the local home-boys. There was also a scrip painted in block letters that asked, R U THE NEX RODDY KING? He wondered how someone could misspell a name that had been heard and printed so many times.

A woman and two young children came to the steel-grated door from the other side. Bosch timed his approach so that he was at the door just as she opened it.

“Have you seen Tommy Cerrone around?” he asked as he passed her.

She was too busy with the children to answer. Bosch walked into the courtyard to get his bearings and to look for a door with a six on it-Cerrone’s apartment. There was graffiti on the concrete floor of the courtyard, a gang insignia Bosch couldn’t make out. He found number six on the first floor toward the back. There was a rusted-out hibachi grill on the ground next to the door. There was also a child’s bike with training wheels parked under the front window.

The bike didn’t fit. Bosch tried to look in but the curtains were drawn, leaving only a three-inch band of darkness he could not see beyond. He knocked on the door and as was his practice, stepped to the side. A Mexican woman with what looked like an eight-month pregnancy beneath her faded pink bathrobe answered the door. Behind the small woman Bosch could see a young boy sitting on the living room floor in front of a black-and-white TV tuned to a Spanish language channel.

“Hola,”Bosch said.“Señor Tom Cerrone aquí?”

The woman stared at him with frightened eyes. She seemed to close in on herself, as if to get smaller before him. Her arms moved up from her side and closed over her swollen belly.

“No migra,”Bosch said.“Policía. Tomás Cerrone. Aquí?”

She shook her head no and began to close the door. Bosch put his hand out to stop it. Struggling with his Spanish he asked if she knew Cerrone and where he was. She said he only came once a week to collect the mail and the rent. She moved back a step and gestured to the card table where there was a small stack of mail. Bosch could see an American Express bill on top. Gold Card.

“Teléfono? Necesidad urgente?”

She looked down from his eyes and her hesitation told him she had a number.

“Por favor?”

She told him to wait and she left the doorway. While she was gone the boy sitting ten feet inside the door turned from the TV-Bosch could see it was some kind of game show-and looked at him. Bosch felt uncomfortable. He looked away, into the courtyard. When he looked back the boy was smiling. He had his hand up and was pointing a finger at Bosch. He made a shooting sound and giggled. Then the mother was back at the door with a piece of paper. There was a local phone number on it, that was all.

Bosch copied it down in a small notebook he carried and then told her he would take the mail. The woman turned and looked at the card table as if the answer to what she should do was sitting on it with the mail. Bosch told her it would be okay and she finally lifted the stack and handed it to him. The frightened look was in her eyes again.

He stepped back and was going to walk away when he stopped and looked back at her. He asked how much the rent was and she told him it was one hundred dollars a week. Bosch nodded and walked away.

Out on the street he walked down to a pay phone that was in front of the next apartment complex. He called the downtown communications center, gave the operator the phone number he had just gotten and said he needed an address. While he waited he thought about the pregnant woman and wondered why she stayed. Could things be worse back in the Mexican town she came from? For some, he knew, the journey here was so difficult that returning was out of the question.

As he was flipping through Cerrone’s mail, one of the hitchhikers walked up to him. She wore an orange tank top over her surgically augmented breasts. Her cutoff jeans were cut so high above the thighs that the white pockets hung out below. In one of the pockets he could see the distinctive shape of a condom package. She had the gaunt, tired look of a strawberry-a woman who would do anything, anytime, anywhere to keep crack in her pipe. Factoring in her deteriorated appearance, he put her age at no more than twenty. To Bosch’s surprise, she said, “Hey, darling, looking for a date?”

He smiled and said, “You’re going to have to be more careful than that, you want to stay out of the cage.”

“Oh, shit,” she said and turned to walk away.

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Don’t I know you? Yeah, I know you. It’s… what’s your name, girl?”

“Look, man, I’m not talking to you and I’m not blowing you, so I gotta go.”

“Wait. Wait. I don’t want anything. I just thought, you know, that we’d met. Aren’t you one of Tommy Cerrone’s girls? Yeah, that’s where I met you.”

The name put a slight stutter in her step. Bosch let the phone dangle by its cord and caught up to her. She stopped.

“Look, I’m not with Tommy anymore, okay? I gotta go to work.”

She turned from him and put her thumb out as a wave of southbound traffic started by.

“Wait a minute, just tell me something. Tell me where Tommy is these days. I need to get with him on something.”

“On what? I don’t know where he is.”

“A girl. You remember Becky? Couple years ago. Blonde, liked red lipstick, had a set like yours. She mighta used the name Maggie. I want to find her and she was working for Tom. You remember her?”

“I wasn’t even around then. And I haven’t seen Tommy in four months. And you are full of shit.”

She walked off and Bosch called after her, “Twenty bucks.”

She stopped and came back.

“For what?”

“An address. I’m not bullshitting. I want to talk to him.”

“Well, give it.”

He took the money out of his wallet and gave it to her. It occurred to him that Van Nuys Vice might be watching him from somewhere around here and wondering why he was giving a hooker a twenty.

“Try the Grandview,” she said. “I don’t know the number or anything but it’s on the top floor. You can’t tell’m I sent ya. He’ll fuck me up.”

She walked away putting the money in one of the flapping pockets. He didn’t have to ask her where the Grandview was. He watched her cut in between two apartment buildings and disappear, probably going to get a rock. He wondered if she had told the truth and why he could find it in himself to give her money but not the woman in apartment six. The police operator had hung up by the time he got back to the pay phone.

Bosch redialed and asked for her and she gave him the address that went with the phone number he’d gotten. Suite P-1, the Grandview Apartments, on Sepulveda in Sherman Oaks. He had just wasted twenty bucks on crack cocaine. He hung up.

In the car, he finished looking through the mail. Half of it was junk mail, the rest credit card bills and mailers from Republican candidates. There was also a postcard invitation to an Adult Film Performers Guild awards banquet in Reseda the following week.

Bosch opened the American Express bill. The illegality of this did not concern him in the least. Cerrone was a criminal who was lying to his probation officer. There would be no complaint from him. The pimp owed American Express $1855.05 this month. The bill was two pages, and Bosch noticed two billings for airline flights to Las Vegas and three billings from Victoria’s Secret. Bosch was familiar with Victoria’s Secret, having studied the mail-order lingerie catalog at Sylvia’s on occasion. In one month, Cerrone had ordered nearly $400 in lingerie by mail. The money paid by the poor woman who rented the apartment Cerrone was using as a front for a probation address was basically subsidizing the lingerie bills of Cerrone’s whores. It angered Bosch, but it gave him an idea.

The Grandview Apartments were the ultimate California ideal. Built alongside a shopping mall, the building afforded its tenants the ability to walk directly from their apartment into the mall, thereby cutting out the heretofore required middle ground for all Southern California culture and interaction: the car. Bosch parked in the mall’s garage and entered the outer lobby through the rear entrance. It was an Italian marble affair with a grand piano in its center that was playing by itself. Bosch recognized the song as a Cab Calloway standard, “Everybody That Comes to My Place Has to Eat.”

There was a directory and a phone on the wall by the security door that led to the elevators. The name next to P-1 was Kuntz. Bosch took it to be an inside joke. He lifted the phone and pushed the button. A woman answered and he said, “UPS. Gotta package.”

“Uh,” she said. “From who?”

“Um, it says, I can’t read the writing-looks like Victor’s secretary or something.”

“Oh,” she said and he heard her giggle. “Do I have to sign?”

“Yes, ma’am, I need a signature.”

Rather than buzz him in, she said she would come down. Bosch stood at the glass door for two minutes waiting before he realized the scam wouldn’t work. He was standing there in a suit and had no package in his hand. He turned his back to the elevator just as the polished chrome doors began to part.

He took a step toward the piano and looked down as if he was fascinated by it and didn’t notice the elevator’s arrival. From behind him he heard the security door start to open and he turned around.

“Are you UPS?”

She was blonde and stunning even in her blue jeans and pale blue Oxford shirt. Their eyes met and right away Bosch knew she knew it was a scam. She immediately tried to close the door but Bosch got there in time and pushed his way through.

“What are you doing? I-”

Bosch clamped a hand over her mouth because he thought she was about to scream. Covering half her face accentuated the fright in her eyes. She didn’t seem as stunning to Bosch anymore.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to talk to Tommy. Let’s go up.”

He slowly pulled his hand back and she didn’t scream.

“Tommy’s not there,” she said in a whisper, as if to signal her cooperation.

“Then we can wait.”

He gently pushed her toward the elevator and punched the button.

She was right. Cerrone wasn’t there. But Bosch didn’t have to wait long. He had barely had time to check on the opulent furnishings of the two-bedroom, two-bath and loft apartment with private roof garden when the man arrived.

Cerrone stepped through the front door,Racing Forum in hand, just as Bosch stepped into the living room from the balcony that overlooked Sepulveda and the crowded Ventura Freeway.

Cerrone initially smiled at Bosch but then the face became blank. This often happened to Bosch with crooks. He believed it was because the crooks often thought they recognized him. And it was true they probably did. Bosch’s picture had been in the paper and on TV several times in the last few years, including once this week. Harry believed that most crooks who read the papers or watched the news looked closely at the pictures of the cops. They probably thought it gave them an added advantage, someone to look out for. But instead it bred familiarity. Cerrone had smiled as though Bosch was a long-lost friend, then he realized it was probably the enemy, a cop.

“That’s right,” Bosch said.

“Tommy, he made me bring him up,” the girl said. “He called on the-”

“Shut up,” Cerrone barked. Then, to Bosch, he said, “If you had a warrant, you wouldn’t be here alone. No warrant, get the fuck out.”

“Very observant,” Bosch said. “Sit down. I have questions.”

“Fuck you and the questions you rode in on. Get out.”

Bosch sat down on a black leather couch and took out his cigarettes.

“Tom, if I go, it’s to go see your PO and see about getting you revoked for this address scam you’re playing. The probation department frowns on cons telling them they live one place when they actually live somewhere else. Especially when one’s a dump and one’s the Grandview.”

Cerrone threw theForum across the room at the girl. “See?” he said. “See the shit you got me in?”

She seemed to know better than to say anything. Cerrone folded his arms and stood in the living room but he wasn’t going to sit down. He was a well-built guy gone to fat. Too many afternoons at Hollywood or Del Mar, sipping cocktails and watching the ponies.

“Look, what do you want?”

“I want to know about Becky Kaminski.”

Cerrone looked puzzled.

“You remember, Maggie Cum Loudly, the blonde with the tits you probably had her enlarge. You were bringing her up through the video business, doin’ some outcall work on the side, and then she disappeared on you.”

“What about her? That was a long time ago.”

“Twenty-two months and three days, I am told.”

“So what? She turned up and is saying some shit about me, it don’t matter. Take it to court, man. We’ll see-”

Bosch jumped up off the couch and slapped him hard across the face, then pushed him over a black leather chair onto the floor. Cerrone’s eyes immediately went to the girl’s, which told Bosch that he had complete control of the situation. The power of humiliation sometimes was more awesome than a gun held to the head. Cerrone’s face was a bright red all over.

Bosch’s hand stung. He bent over the fallen man and said, “She didn’t turn up and you know it. She’s dead and you knew it when you made the missing person report. You were just covering your ass. I want to know how you knew.”

“Look, man, I didn’t have any-”

“But you knew she wasn’t coming back. How?”

“I just had a hunch. She didn’t turn up for a couple days.”

“Guys like you don’t go to the police on hunches. Guys like you, they get their place broken into, they don’t even call the cops. Like I said, you were just covering your ass. You didn’t want to get blamed ’cause you knew she wasn’t coming back alive.”

“Awright, awright, it was more than a hunch. Okay? It was the guy. I never saw him but his voice and some of the things he said. It was familiar, you know? Then after I sent her and she didn’t come back, it dawned on me. I remembered him. I had sent him somebody else once and she ended up dead.”

“Who?”

“Holly Lere. I can’t remember her real name.”

Bosch could. Holly Lere was the porno name of Nicole Knapp. The seventh victim of the Dollmaker. He sat back down on the couch and put a cigarette in his mouth.

“Tommy,” the girl said, “he’s smoking.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he said to her.

“Well, you said no smoking in here except on the bal-”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Nicole Knapp,” Bosch said.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“You knew the cops said the Dollmaker got her?”

“Yeah, and I always thought that until Becky disappeared and I remembered this guy and what he said.”

“But you didn’t tell anybody. You didn’t call the cops.”

“It’s like you said, man, guys like me, we don’t call.”

Bosch nodded.

“What did he say? The caller, what was it he said?”

“He said, ‘I have a special need tonight.’ Both times. Just like that. He said the same thing both times. And his voice was weird. It was like he was talking through clenched teeth or something.”

“And you sent her to that.”

“I didn’t put it together until after she didn’t come back. Look, man, I made a report. I told the cops the hotel she went to and they never did nothing. I’m not the only one to blame. Shit, the cops said that guy was caught, that he was dead. I thought it was safe.”

“Safe for you, or the girls you put out on the street?”

“Look, you think I would’ve sent her if I knew? I had a lot invested in her, man.”

“I’m sure you did.”

Bosch looked over at the blonde and wondered how long it would be before she looked like the one he had given the twenty to on the street. His guess was that Cerrone’s girls all ended up used up and on the street with their thumb out, or they ended up dead. He looked back at Cerrone.

“Did Rebecca smoke?”

“What?”

“Smoke. Did she smoke? You lived with her, you should know.”

“No, she didn’t smoke. It’s a disgusting habit.”

Cerrone looked over at the blonde and glared. Bosch dropped his cigarette on the white rug and ground it out as he stood up. He headed toward the door but stopped after he opened it.

“Cerrone, the woman in that dump your mail goes to?”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t pay rent anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

He climbed up from the floor, regaining a measure of his pride.

“I’m talking about her not paying you rent anymore. I’m going to check on her from time to time. If she’s paying rent, your PO gets a call and your scam gets blown. Probation gets revoked and you do your time. It’s tough to run an outcall business from county lockup. Only two phones on each floor and the brothers control who uses them and for how long. I guess you’d have to cut them in.”

Cerrone just stared at him, anger thumping in his temples.

“And she better still be there when I check,” Bosch said. “If I hear she went back to Mexico, I blame you and make the call. If I hear she bought a fucking condo, I make the call. She just better be there.”

“That’s extortion,” Cerrone said.

“No, asshole, that’s justice.”

He left the door open. Out in the hallway waiting for the elevator, he once again heard Cerrone yell, “Shut the fuck up!”