The Concrete Blonde

13

The last vestiges of the evening rush hour made it a slow run up to Sylvia’s. She was sitting at the dining room table in faded blue jeans and a Grant High T-shirt, reading book reports, when he came in. One of the eleventh-grade English classes she taught down in the Valley at Grant was called Los Angeles in Literature. She had told him she developed the class so the students might come to know their city better. Most of them came from other places, other countries. She had once told him that the students in one of her classes accounted for eleven different native languages.

He put his hand on the back of her neck and bent down to kiss her. He noticed the reports were on Nathanael West’sDay of the Locust.

“Ever read it?” she asked.

“Long time ago. Some English teacher in high school made us read it. She was crazy.”

She elbowed him in the thigh.

“All right, wise guy. I try to rotate the tough ones with the easy ones. I assigned themThe Big Sleep.”

“That’s probably what they thought this one should’ve been called.”

“Aren’t you the life of the party today. Something good happen?”

“Actually, no. Everything is turning to shit out there. But in here… it’s different.”

She got up and they embraced. He ran his hand up and down her back the way he knew she liked.

“What’s happening on the case?”

“Nothing. Everything. I might be going into the mud puddle. Wonder if I can get a job after this as a private eye. Like Marlowe.”

She pushed away.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure. Something. I have to work on it tonight. I’ll take the kitchen table. You can stay out here with the locusts.”

“It’s your turn to cook.”

“Then, I’m going to hire the colonel.”

“Shit.”

“Hey, that’s not a good thing for an English teacher to say. What’s the matter with the colonel?”

“He’s been dead for years. Never mind. It’s okay.”

She smiled at him. This ritual occurred often. When it was his turn to cook he usually took her out. He could see she was disappointed by the prospect of fried chicken to go. But there was too much going on, too much to think about.

She had a face that made him want to confess everything bad he had ever done. Yet he knew he could not. She knew it, too.

“I humiliated a man today.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he humiliates women.”

“All men do that, Harry. What did you do to him?”

“Knocked him down in front of his woman.”

“He probably needed it.”

“I don’t want you to come to court tomorrow. I’m probably going to be called by Chandler to testify but I don’t want you there. It’s going to be bad.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Why do you do this, Harry? Tell me all these things that you do but keep the rest a secret? In some ways we are so intimate and in others… You tell me about the men you knock down but not about you. What do I know about you, your past? I want us to get to that, Harry. We have to or we’ll end up humiliating each other. That’s how it ended for me before.”

Bosch nodded and looked down. He didn’t know what to say. He was too burdened by other thoughts to get into this now.

“You want the extra crispy?” he finally asked.

“Fine.”

She went back to her book reports and he went out to get dinner.

After they were done eating and she went back to the dining room table, he opened his briefcase on the kitchen table and took out the blue murder books. He had a bottle of Henry Weinhard’s on the table but no cigarette. He wouldn’t smoke inside. At least not while she was awake.

He unsnapped the first binder and laid out the sections on each of the eleven victims across the table. He stood up with the bottle so he could look down and take them all in at once. Each section was fronted by a photograph of the victim’s remains, as they were found. There were eleven of these photos in front of him. He did some thinking on the cases and then went into the bedroom and checked the suit he had worn the day before. The Polaroid of the concrete blonde was still in the pocket.

He brought it back to the kitchen and laid it on the table with the others. Number twelve. It was a horrible gallery of broken, abused bodies, their garish makeup showing false smiles below dead eyes. Their bodies were naked, exposed to the harsh light of the police photographer.

Bosch drained the bottle and kept staring. Reading the names and the dates of the deaths. Looking at the faces. All of them lost angels in the city of night. He didn’t notice Sylvia come in until it was too late.

“My God,” she said in a whisper as she saw the photos. She took a step backward. She was holding one of her students’ papers in her hand. Her other hand had come up to her mouth.

“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” Bosch said. “I should’ve warned you not to come in.”

“Those are the women?”

He nodded.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not sure. Trying to make something happen, I guess. I thought if I looked at them all again I might get an idea, figure out what’s happening.”

“But how can you look at those? You were just standing there looking.”

“Because I have to.”

She looked down at the paper in her hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. Uh, one of my students wrote something. I was going to read it to you.”

“Go ahead.”

He stepped over to the wall and turned off the light that hung over the table. The photos and Bosch became shrouded in darkness. Sylvia stood in the light cast from the dining room through the kitchen entrance.

“Go ahead.”

She held up the paper and said, “It’s a girl. She wrote, ‘West foreshadowed the end of Los Angeles’s halcyon moment. He saw the city of angels becoming a city of despair, a place where hopes get crushed under the weight of the mad crowd. His book was the warning.’”

She looked up.

“She goes on but that was the part I wanted to read. She’s only a tenth-grader taking advanced classes but she seemed to grasp something so strong there.”

He admired her lack of cynicism. Bosch’s first thought was that the kid had plagiarized-where’d she get a word like halcyon? But Sylvia saw past that. She saw the beauty in things. He saw the darkness.

“It’s good,” he said.

“She’s African-American. She comes up on the bus. She’s one of the smartest I have and I worry about her on the bus. She said the trip is seventy-five minutes each way and that is the time when she reads the assignments I give. But I worry about her. She seems so sensitive. Maybe too much so.”

“Give her time and she’ll grow a callous on her heart. Everybody does.”

“No, not everybody, Harry. That’s what I worry about with her.”

She looked at him there in the darkness for a long moment.

“I’m sorry I intruded.”

“You never intrude on me, Sylvia. I am sorry I brought this home. I can leave if you want, take it to my place.”

“No, Harry, I want you here. You want me to put on some coffee?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She went back to the living room and he turned the light back on. He looked over the gallery again. Though they looked the same in death because of the makeup applied by each one’s killer, the women fell into numerous physical categories according to race, size, coloring, and so on.

Locke had told the task force that this meant that the killer was simply an opportunistic predator. Not concerned with body type, only the acquisition of a victim which he could then place into his erotic program. He did not care if they were black or white as long as he could snatch them with as little notice as possible. He was a bottom feeder. He moved on a level where the women he encountered were victims long before he got to them. They were women who had already given up their bodies to the unloving hands and eyes of strangers. They were out there waiting for him. The question, Bosch now knew, was whether the Dollmaker was still out there, too.

He sat down and from the pocket of the binder he pulled a map of West L.A. Its creases cracked and split in some sections as he unfolded it and put it down on top of the photos. The round black stickers that represented locations where bodies had been found were still in place. The victim’s name and date of discovery were written next to each black dot. Geographically, the task force had found no significance until after Church was dead. The bodies were found in locations stretching from Silverlake to Malibu. The Dollmaker littered the entire Westside. Still, for the most part, the bodies were clustered in Silverlake and Hollywood, with only one found in Malibu and one in West Hollywood.

The concrete blonde was found farther south in Hollywood than any of the previous bodies. She was also the only one that had been buried. Locke had said location of disposal was probably a choice of convenience. After Church was dead this seemed true. Four of the bodies had been dumped within a mile of his Silverlake apartment. Another four were in eastern Hollywood, not a long drive, either.

The dates had done nothing for the investigation. No pattern. Initially there was a decreasing-interval pattern between discoveries of victims, then it began to vary widely. The Dollmaker would go five weeks between strikes, then two weeks, then three. Nothing to make of this; the detectives on the task force simply let it go.

Bosch moved on. He began reading the background packets that had been drawn up on each victim. Most of these were short-two to three pages about their sad lives. One of the women who worked Hollywood Boulevard at night was going to beautician school by day. Another had been sending money to Chihuahua, Mexico, where her parents believed she had a good job as a tour guide at the famous Disneyland. There were odd matches between some of the victims, but nothing that ever amounted to anything.

Three of the Boulevard whores went to the same doctor for weekly clap shots. Members of the task force put him under surveillance for three weeks. But one night while they were watching him, the real Dollmaker picked up a prostitute on Sunset and her body was found in Silverlake the next morning.

Two of the other women also shared a doctor. The same Beverly Hills plastic surgeon had performed breast-implant surgery on them. The task force had rallied on this discovery, for a plastic surgeon remakes images, similarly after a fashion to the way the Dollmaker used makeup. The plastic man, as he was called by the cops, was also placed under surveillance. But he never made a suspicious move and seemed to be the picture of domestic bliss with a wife whose physical features he had sculpted to his own liking. They were still watching him when Bosch took the telephone tip that led to the shooting of Norman Church.

As far as Bosch knew, neither doctor ever knew he had been watched. In the book Bremmer wrote, they were identified by pseudonyms.

Nearly two-thirds through the background packets, as he read about Nicole Knapp, the seventh victim, Bosch saw the pattern within the pattern. He had somehow missed it before. All of them had. The task force, Locke, the media. They had put all the victims into the same classification. A whore is a whore is a whore. But there were differences. Some were streetwalkers, some were higher up the scale as escorts. Within these two groups, some were also dancers; one was a telegram stripper. And two made livings in the pornography trade-as had the latest victim, Becky Kaminski-while taking outcall hooking assignments on the side.

Bosch took the packets and photos of Nicole Knapp, the seventh victim, and Shirleen Kemp, the eleventh victim, off the table. These were the two porn actresses, known on video as Holly Lere and Heather Cumhither, respectively.

He then paged through one of the binders until he found the package on the lone survivor, the woman who had gotten away. She, too, was a porn actress who took outcall sex jobs. Her name was Georgia Stern. Her video name was Velvet Box. She had gone to the Hollywood Star Motel to meet a date arranged through the outcall service she advertised in the local sex tabloids. After she arrived, her client asked her to undress. She turned her back to do this, offering a show of modesty in case that was a turn-on for the client. She then saw the leather strap of her purse come over her head and he began choking her from behind. She fought, as probably all the victims had, but she was able to get free by driving an elbow into her attacker’s ribs, then turning and delivering a kick to his genitals.

She ran naked from the room, all thought of modesty long gone. By the time police went back in, the attacker was gone. It was three days before the reports on the incident filtered their way to the task force. By then the hotel room had been used dozens of times-the Hollywood Star offered hourly rates-and it was useless as far as gathering physical evidence went.

Reading the reports on it now, Bosch realized why the composite drawing that Georgia Stern had helped a police artist sketch was so different from the appearance of Norman Church.

It had been a different man.

An hour later, he turned one of the binders to the last page, where he had kept a listing of phone numbers and addresses of the principals involved in the investigation. He went to the wall phone and dialed the home of Dr. John Locke. He hoped the psychologist had not changed his number in four years.

Locke picked up after five rings.

“Sorry, Dr. Locke, I know it’s getting late. It’s Harry Bosch.”

“Harry, how are you? I am sorry we didn’t get to talk today. It was not the best circumstance for you, I’m sure, but I-”

“Yes, Doctor, listen, something’s come up. It’s related to the Dollmaker. I have some things I want to show you and talk about. Would it be possible for me to come there?”

There was a lengthy silence before Locke answered.

“Would that be about this new case I’ve read about in the paper?”

“Yes, that and some other things.”

“Well, let’s see, it’s nearly ten o’clock. Are you sure this can’t wait until tomorrow morning?”

“I am in court tomorrow morning, Doctor. All day. It’s important. I’d really appreciate your time. I’ll be there before eleven and be out before twelve.”

When Locke didn’t say anything, Harry wondered if the soft-spoken doctor was afraid of him or just didn’t want a killer cop in his home.

“Besides,” Bosch said into the silence, “I think you’ll find it interesting.”

“Very well,” Locke said.

After getting the address, Harry packed all the paperwork back into the two binders. Sylvia came into the kitchen after hesitating at the doorway until she was sure the photos were packed away.

“I heard you talking. Are you going to his place tonight?”

“Yeah, right now. In Laurel Canyon.”

“What’s going on?”

He stopped his hurried movement. He had both binders stacked under his right arm.

“I… well, we missed something. The task force. We messed up. I think all along there were two, but I didn’t see it until now.”

“Two killers?”

“I think so. I want to ask Locke about it.”

“Are you coming back tonight?”

“I don’t know. It will be late. I was thinking about just going to my place. Check my messages, get some fresh clothes.”

“This weekend is not looking good, is it?”

“What-oh, yeah, Lone Pine, yeah. Well, uh, I-”

“Don’t worry about it. But I may want to hang out at your place while they have the open house here.”

“Sure.”

She walked him to the door and opened it. She told him to be careful and to call her the next day. He said he would. At the threshold he hesitated. He said, “You know, you were right.”

“About what?”

“What you said about men.”