The Concrete Blonde

18

Bosch drove over to Central Division and found an open parking space at the front curb. For a while, he sat in his car looking at two trustees from the lockup washing the painted enamel mural that stretched along the front wall of the bunkerlike station. It was a depiction of a nirvana where black and white and brown children played together and smiled at friendly police officers. It was a depiction of a place where the children still had hope. In angry black spray paint along the bottom of the mural someone had written, “This is a damnable lie!”

Bosch wondered whether someone from the neighborhood or a cop had done it. He smoked two cigarettes and tried to clear his mind of what had happened in the courtroom. He felt strangely at peace with the idea that some of his secrets had been revealed. But he held little hope for the outcome of the trial. He had moved into a feeling of resignation, an acceptance that the jury would find against him, that the twisted delivery of evidence in the case would convince them that he had acted, if not like the monster Chandler had described, then at least in an undesirable and reckless manner. They would never know what it was like to have to make such decisions as he had made in so fleeting a moment.

It was the same old story that every cop knew. The citizens want their police to protect them, to keep the plague from their eyes, from their doors. But those same John Q.’s are the first to stare wide-eyed and point the finger of outrage when they see close up exactly what the job they’ve given the cops entails. Bosch wasn’t a hardliner. He didn’t condone the actions taken by police in the André Galton cases and the Rodney King cases. But he understood those actions and knew that his own actions ultimately shared a common root.

Through political opportunism and ineptitude, the city had allowed the department to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization. Infected with political bacteria itself, the department was top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served. They only ventured out to deal with the dirtbags and, consequently, Bosch knew, it had created a police culture in which everybody not in blue was seen as a dirtbag and was treated as such. Everybody. You ended up with your André Galtons and your Rodney Kings. You ended up with a riot the dog soldiers couldn’t control. You ended up with a mural on a station house wall that was a damnable lie.

He badged his way past the front desk and took the stairs up to the Administrative Vice offices. At the door to the squad room he stood for a half minute and watched Ray Mora sitting at his desk on the other side of the room. It looked as if Mora was writing a report, rather than typing it. That probably meant it was a Daily Activity Report, which required little attention-just a few lines-and wasn’t worth the time it took to get up and find a working typewriter.

Bosch noticed that Mora wrote with his right hand. But he knew this did not eliminate the vice cop as possibly being the follower. The follower knew the details and would have known about pulling the ligature around his victim’s neck from the left side, thereby emulating the Dollmaker. Just as he knew about painting the white cross on the toe.

Mora looked up and saw him.

“What’re you doing over there, Harry?”

“Didn’t want to interrupt.”

Bosch walked over.

“What, interrupt a day report? Are you kidding?”

“Thought it might be something important.”

“It’s important for me to get my paycheck. That’s about it.”

Bosch dragged a chair away from an empty desk and pulled it up and sat down. He noticed the statue of the Infant of Prague had been moved. Turned, actually. Its face was no longer looking at the nakedness of the actress on the porn calendar. Bosch looked at Mora and realized he was not sure how to proceed here.

“You left a message last night.”

“Yeah, I was thinking…”

“About what?”

“Well, we know Church didn’t kill Maggie Cum Loudly because of the timing, right? He was already dead when she got her ass dropped in the concrete.”

“That’s right.”

“So, we’ve gotta copycat.”

“Right again.”

“So I was thinking: what if the copycat who did her started earlier?”

Bosch felt his throat start to tighten. He tried not to show Mora anything. Just gave him the deadpan look.

“Earlier?”

“Yeah. What if the two other porno chicks who were killed were actually done by the copycat? Who says he had to start after Church was dead?”

Bosch felt the full chill now. If Mora was the follower, was he so confident that he would risk laying the whole pattern out for Bosch? Or could his hunch-after all, that’s all it was, a guess-be completely out of line? Regardless, it felt creepy sitting with Mora, his desk covered by magazines with sex acts depicted on the covers, the calendar girl leering from the vertical file. The statue’s clay face turned away. Bosch realized that Delta Bush, the actress on the calendar Mora had displayed, was blonde-haired and buxom. She fit the pattern. Was that why Mora had put up the calendar?

“You know, Ray,” he said, after composing his voice into a monotone, “I’ve been thinking the same thing. It fits better that way, all the evidence, I mean, if the follower did all three of them… What made you think of it?”

Mora put the report he was working on away in a desk drawer and leaned onto his desk. Subconsciously he brought his left hand up and pulled the Holy Spirit medal from his open collar. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger as he leaned back in his seat again, elbows on the arm rests.

He dropped the medal and said, “Well, I remembered something is what I did. It was a tip that I got right before you nailed Church. See, I dropped it when you dropped Church.”

“You’re talking about four years ago.”

“Yeah. We all thought that was it, end of case, when you got Church.”

“Get to it, Ray, what’d you remember?”

“Yeah, right, well, I remember a couple days, maybe a week before you got Church, I was given one of the call-in tips. It was given to me ’cause I was the resident expert on porno and it was a porno chick who called it in. She used the name Gallery. That’s it, just Gallery. She was in the bottom-line stuff. Loops, live shows, peep booths, nine hundred phone call stuff. And she was just beginning to move up, get her name on some video boxes.

“Anyway, she called the task force-this was right before you nailed Church-and said there was a Tom that’d been making the rounds of the sets up in the Valley. You know, watching the action, hanging out with the producers, but he wasn’t like the other Toms.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Toms?”

“That’s short for Peeping Tom. That’s what the girls call these guys who hang out on the sets. Usually they’re friendly with the producer or they’ve kicked in part of the budget. They throw a grand to the producer and he lets the guy hang around and watch ’ em shoot. It ’s pretty common. These shoots draw a lot of people for whom seeing it on video isn’t enough. They want to be right up there and see it live.”

“All right, so what about this guy?”

“Well, Harry, look, there’s really only one reason these people hang around the sets. They’re hitting on the chicks between takes. I mean, these guys wanna get laid. Or they want to make flicks themselves. They want to break in. And that was the thing with this guy. He wasn’t hitting on anybody. He was just hanging around. She-this is Gallery-said she never saw this dude make the move on anybody. He talked to some of the girls but never left with any of them.”

“And that’s what made him weird? He didn’t want to get laid?”

Mora raised his hands and shrugged like he knew it sounded weak.

“Yeah, basically. But listen, Gallery worked shoots with both Heather Cumhither and Holly Lere, the two Dollmaker victims, and she said it was on those shoots that she saw this Tom. That’s why she called.”

Now the story had Bosch’s attention. But he didn’t know what to make of it. Mora could be simply trying to deflect attention, to send Bosch down the wrong trail.

“She didn’t have a name on the guy?”

“No, that was the problem. That was why I didn’t jump all over it. I had a backlog of tips I was assigned and she calls in with this one without a name. I would have gotten to it eventually, but a few days later you put Church’s dick in the dirt and that was that.”

“You let it go.”

“Yeah, dropped it like a bag of shit.”

Bosch waited. He knew Mora would go on. He had more to say. There had to be more.

“So the thing is, when I looked up the card on Magna Cum Loudly for you yesterday, I recognized some of her early titles. She worked with Gallery in some of her early work. That’s what made me remember the tip. So just stringing along on a hunch, I try to look Gallery up, ask around with some people in the business I know, and it turns out Gallery dropped out of the scene three years ago. Just like that. I mean, I know a top producer with the Adult Film Association and he told me she dropped out right in the middle of one of his shoots. Never said a word to anyone. And no one ever heard from her again. The producer, he remembered it pretty clearly ’cause it cost him a lot of money to reshoot the flick. There would’ve been no continuity if he just dumped in another actress to take her place.”

Bosch was surprised that continuity was even a factor in such films. He and Mora were both silent a moment, thinking about the story, before Bosch finally spoke.

“So, you’re thinking she might be in the ground somewhere? Gallery, I’m talking about. In concrete like the one we found this week.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. People in the industry-I mean, they are not your mainstream people, so there are plenty of disappearing acts. I remember this one broad, she dropped out, next thing I know I see her inPeople magazine. One of those stories about some celebrity fund-raiser and she’s on the arm of what’s his name, guy has his own TV show about the guy in charge of a kennel. Noah’s Bark. I can’t think of-”

“Ray, I don’t give-”

“Okay, okay, anyway the point is, these chicks drop in and out of the biz all the time. Not unusual. They aren’t the smartest people in the first place. They just get it in their mind to do something else. Maybe they meet a guy who they think is going to keep them in cocaine and caviar, be their sugar daddy, like that Noah’s Bark asshole, and they never show up for work again-until they find out they were wrong. As a group, they don’t look much past the next line of blow.

“Y’ask me, what they’re all looking for is Daddy. They all got knocked around when they were a kid and this is some fucked-up way of showing they’re worth something to Daddy. Least I read that somewhere. Prob’ly bullshit like everything else.”

Bosch didn’t need the psychology lesson.

“C’mon Ray, I’m in court and I’m trying to run down this case. Get to the point. What about Gallery?”

“What I’m saying is that with Gallery the situation’s unusual ’cause it’s been almost three years and she never came back. See, they always come back. Even if they’ve fucked over a producer so bad he had to do reshoots, they always come back. They start at the bottom-loops, fluffing-and work their way back up.”

“Fluffing?”

“A fluff is off-camera talent, you could say. Girls who keep the acts up and ready to perform while they’re getting cameras ready, moving lights, changing angles. Things like that, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Bosch was depressed after hearing about the business for ten minutes. He looked at Mora, who had been in Ad-Vice for as long as Bosch could remember.

“What about the survivor? You ever check with her on this tip?”

“Never got around to it. Like I said, I dropped it when you dropped Church. Thought we were done with the whole thing.”

“Yeah, so did I.”

Bosch took out a small pocket notebook and wrote down a few notes from the conversation.

“Did you save any notes from this? From back then?”

“Nope, they’re gone. The original tip sheet is probably in the main task force files. But it won’t say more than I just told you.”

Bosch nodded. Mora was probably right.

“What did this Gallery look like?”

“Blonde, nice set-definitely Beverly Hills plastic. I think I got a picture here.”

He rolled his chair to the file cabinets behind him and dug through one of the drawers, then rolled back with a file. From it he pulled an 8× 10 color publicity shot. It was a blonde woman posed at the edge of the ocean. She was nude. She had shaved her pubic area. Bosch handed the photo back to Mora and felt embarrassed, as if they were two boys in the schoolyard telling secrets about one of the girls. He thought he saw a slight smile on Mora’s face and wondered if the vice cop found humor in his discomfort or it was something else.

“Hell of a job you’ve got.”

“Yeah, well, somebody’s gotta do it.”

Bosch studied him a moment. He decided to take a chance, to try to figure out what made Mora hang on to the job.

“Yeah, but why you, Ray? You’ve been doing this a long time.”

“I guess I’m a watchdog, Bosch. The Supreme Court says this stuff is legal to a point. That makes me one of the pointmen. It’s gotta be monitored. It’s gotta be kept clean, no joke intended. That means these people’ve gotta be licensed, of legal age, and nobody’s forced to do something they don’t want to do. I spend a lot of days looking through this trash, looking for the stuff even the Supreme Court couldn’t take. Trouble is, community standards. L.A. doesn’t have any, Bosch. Hasn’t been a successful obscenity prosecution here in years. I’ve made some underage cases. But I’m still looking for my first obscenity jacket.”

He stopped a moment before saying, “Most cops do a year in Ad-Vice and then transfer out. That’s all they can take. This is my seventh year, man. I can’t tell you why. I guess because there’s no shortage of surprises.”

“Yeah, but year after year of this shit. How can you take it?”

Mora’s eyes dropped to the statue on the desk.

“I’m provided for. Don’t worry about me.” He waited another beat and said, “I’ve got no family. No wife anymore. Who’s going to complain about what I do, anyway?”

Bosch knew from their work on the task force that Mora had volunteered for the B squad, to work nights, because his wife had just left him. He had told Bosch that he found it hardest to get through the nights. Bosch now wondered if Mora’s ex-wife was blonde and, if she was, what it would mean.

“Look, Ray, I’ve been thinking the same things, about this follower. And she fits, you know? Gallery. The three vics and the survivor were all blondes. Church wasn’t choosey but the follower apparently is.”

“Hey, you’re right,” Mora said, looking at the photo of Gallery. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Anyway, this four-year-old tip is as good a place to start as any. There also might be other women, other victims. What’ve you got going?”

Mora smiled and said, “Harry, doesn’t matter what I got going. It’s dogshit compared to this. I gotta vacation next week but I don’t leave till Monday. Till then, I’m on it.”

“You mentioned the adult association. Is that-”

“Adult Film Association, yeah. It’s run out of a lawyer’s office in Sherman Oaks.”

“Yeah, you tight with anybody there?”

“I know the chief counsel. He’s interested in keeping the biz clean, so he’s a cooperative individual.”

“Can you talk to him, ask around, try to find out if anybody else dropped out like Gallery? They’d have to be blonde and built.”

“You want to know how many other victims we might have.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll get on it.”

“What about the agents and the performers guild?”

Bosch nodded at the calendar with Delta Bush on it.

“I’ll hit them, too. Two agents handle ninety percent of the casting in this business. They’d be the place to start.”

“What about outcall? Do all of the women do it?”

“Not the top ranks of performers. But the ones below that, yeah, they pretty much go the outcall route. See, the top performers, they spend ten percent of the time making movies and the rest out on the road dancing. They go from strip club to strip club, make a lot of money. They can make a hundred grand a year dancing. Most people think they’re getting a bundle to do the nasty on video. That’s wrong. It’s the dancing. Then if you go below that level, to the performers either going up or coming down, they’re the ones you find doing outcall work in addition to the movies and the dancing. A lot of money there, too. These chicks will pull down a grand a night for outcall work.”

“Do they work with pimps, what?”

“Yeah, some got management but it’s not a requirement. It’s not like the street, where a girl needs her pimp to protect her from the bad johns and other whores. In outcall, all you need is an answering service. Chick puts her ad and her picture in the X press and the calls come in. Most have rules. They won’t go to anybody’s house, strictly hotel work. They can control the class of clientele they keep by the expense of the hotel. Good way to keep the riff-raff out.”

Bosch thought about Rebecca Kaminski and how she had gone to the Hyatt on Sunset. A nice place, but the riff-raff got in.

Apparently thinking the same thing, Mora said, “It doesn’t always work, though.”

“Obviously.”

“So, I’ll see what I can come up with, okay? But off the top of my head, I don’t think there will be many. If there was a bunch of women doing the sudden and permanent disappearing act like Gallery did, I think I would’ve gotten wind of it.”

“You got my beeper number?”

Mora wrote it down and Bosch headed out of the office.

He was heading across the lobby past the front desk when the pager on his belt sounded. He checked the number and saw it was a 485 exchange. He assumed Mora had forgotten to tell him something. He took the stairs back up to the second floor and ducked back into the Ad-Vice squad room.

Mora was there, holding the photo of Gallery and staring at it in a contemplative manner. He looked up then and saw Bosch.

“Did you just beep me?”

“Me? No.”

“Oh, I just thought you were trying to catch me before I left. I’m gonna use one of the phones.”

“You’re welcome to ’em, Harry.”

Bosch walked to an empty desk and dialed the number from the pager. He saw Mora slide the photo into the file. He put the file into a briefcase that was on the floor next to his chair.

A male voice answered the call after two rings.

“Chief Irvin Irving’s office, this is Lieutenant Felder, how can I help you?”