The Concrete Blonde

23

The jury began its deliberations at 11:15 and Judge Keyes ordered the federal marshals to arrange for lunch to be sent in. He said the twelve would not be interrupted until 4:30, unless they came up with a verdict first.

After the jury had filed out, the judge ordered that all parties be able to appear for a reading of the verdict within fifteen minutes of notification by the clerk. That meant Chandler and Belk could go back to their respective offices to wait. Norman Church’s family was from Burbank so the wife and two daughters opted to go to Chandler’s office. For Bosch, the Hollywood station would have been more than a fifteen-minute commute, but Parker Center was a five-minute walk. He gave the clerk his pager number and told her he’d be there.

The last piece of business the judge brought up was the contempt order against Chandler. He set a hearing for it to be discussed for two weeks later and then banged his gavel down.

Before leaving the courtroom, Belk took Bosch aside and said, “I think we’re in pretty good shape but I’m nervous. You want to spin the dice?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I could try to low-ball Chandler one last time.”

“Offer to settle?”

“Yeah. I have carte blanche from the office for anything up to fifty. After that, I’d have to get approval. But I could throw the fifty at her and see if they’d take it to walk away now.”

“What about legal fees?”

“On a settlement, she’d have to take the cut from the fifty. Someone like her, she’s probably going forty percent. That’d be twenty grand for a week in trial and a week picking a jury. Not bad.”

“You think we’re going to lose?”

“I don’t know. I’m just thinking of all the angles. You never know what a jury will do. Fifty grand would be a cheap way out. She might take it, the way the judge came down on her there at the end. She’s the one who’s probably scared of losing now.”

Belk didn’t get it, Bosch knew. Maybe it had been too subtle for him. The whole contempt thing had been Chandler’s last scam. She had purposely committed the infraction so the jury would see her being slapped down by the judge. She was showing them the justice system at work: a bad deed met with stern enforcement and punishment. She was saying to them, do you see? This is what Bosch escaped. This is what Norman Church faced, but Bosch decided to take the judge and jury’s role instead.

It was clever, maybe too clever. The more Bosch thought about it, the more he wondered how much the judge had been a willing and knowing player in it. He looked at Belk and saw the young assistant city attorney apparently suspected none of this. Instead, he thought of it as a stroke on his side of the page. Probably in two weeks, when Keyes lets her go with a hundred-dollar fine and a lecture during the contempt hearing, he’ll get it.

“You can do whatever you want,” he told Belk. “But she isn’t going to take it. She’s in on this one until the end.”

At Parker Center Bosch went into Irving’s conference room through the door that opened directly off the hallway. Irving had decided the day before that the now-called Follower Task Force would work out of the conference room so the assistant chief could be kept up on developments to the minute. What wasn’t said about the move but was known was that keeping the group out of one of the squad rooms improved the chance that word of what was happening would remain secure-for at least a few days.

When Bosch walked in only Rollenberger and Edgar were in the room. Bosch noticed that four phones had been installed and were on the round meeting table. There were also six rovers-Motorola two-way radios-and a main communications console on the table, ready to be used as needed. When Edgar looked up and saw Bosch he immediately looked away and picked up a phone to make a call.

“Bosch,” Rollenberger said. “Welcome to our operations center. Are you free from the trial? No smoking in here, by the way.”

“I’m free until a verdict but I’ve got a fifteen-minute leash on me. Anything going on? What’s Mora doing?”

“Not much is happening. Been quiet. Mora spent the morning in the Valley. Went to an attorney’s office in Sherman Oaks and then to a couple of casting agencies, also in Sherman Oaks.”

Rollenberger was looking at a logbook in front of him on the table.

“After that he went to a couple houses in Studio City. There were vans outside of these houses and Sheehan and Opelt said they thought they might be making movies at these locations. He didn’t stay long at either place. Anyway, he’s back over at Ad-Vice now. Sheehan called in a couple minutes ago.”

“Did we get the extra people?”

“Yeah, Mayfield and Yde will take the watch at four from the first team. Then we’ve got two other teams after that.”

“Two?”

“Chief Irving changed his mind and wants an around-the-clock watch. So we’ll be on him through the night, even if he just stays at home and sleeps. Personally, I think it’s a good idea that we go ’round the clock.”

Yeah, especially since Irving decided to do it, Bosch thought but didn’t say. He looked at the radios on the table.

“What’s our freek?”

“Uh, we’re on… frequency, frequency-oh, yeah, we’re on five. Symplex five. It’s a DWP communications freek that they only use during a public emergency. Earthquake, flooding, stuff like that. Chief thought it be best to keep off our own freeks. If Mora is our man, then he might be keeping an ear to the radio.”

Bosch thought Rollenberger probably thought it was a good idea, but didn’t ask him.

“I think it’s a good idea to play it safe this way,” the lieutenant said.

“Right. Anything else I should know?” He looked at Edgar, who was still on the phone. “What’s Edgar got?”

“Still trying to locate the survivor from four years ago. He already pulled a copy of Mora’s divorce file. It was uncontested.”

Edgar hung up, finished writing something in a notebook and then stood up without looking at Bosch. He said, “I’m going down to get a cup.”

“Okay,” Rollenberger said. “We should have our own coffeemaker in here by this afternoon. I talked it over with the chief and he was going to requisition one.”

Bosch said, “Good idea. I think I’m going down with Edgar.”

Edgar walked quickly down the hallway so that he could stay ahead of Bosch. At the elevator he pushed the button but then without breaking stride walked past the elevator and into the stairwell to go down. Bosch followed and after they had gone down one floor, Edgar stopped and whipped around.

“What are you following me for?”

“Coffee.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“Did-”

“No, I didn’t talk to Pounds yet. I’ve been busy, remember?”

“Good, then don’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you haven’t talked to Pounds about it, then don’t. Forget about it.”

“Serious?”

“Yeah.”

He stood there looking at Bosch, still skeptical.

“Learn from it. So will I. I already have. Okay?”

“Thanks, Harry.”

“No, don’t ‘Thanks, Harry’ me. Just say ‘okay.’”

“Okay.”

They walked down to the next floor and to the cafeteria. Rather than sit in front of Rollenberger and talk, Bosch suggested they take their coffee to one of the tables.

“Hans Off, what a trip, man,” Edgar said. “I keep picturing this cuckoo clock, only it’s him that comes out and says, ‘Great idea, Chief! Great idea, Chief!’”

Bosch smiled and Edgar laughed. Harry could tell a great burden had been lifted off the man and so he was heartened by what he had done. He felt good about it.

“So, nothing on the survivor yet?” he said.

“She’s out there somewhere. But the four years since she escaped from the Follower have not been good to Georgia Stern.”

“What happened?”

“Well, by reading her sheet and talking to some guys in street vice, it looks like she got on the needle. After that, she probably got too skaggy-looking to make movies. I mean, who wants to watch a film like that and the girl’s got track marks up her arms or her thighs or her neck. That’s the problem with the porno business if you’re a hype. You’re naked, man, you can’t hide that shit.

“Anyway, I talked to Mora, just to make a routine contact and to tell him I was looking for her. He kinda gave me that rundown on how needle marks are the quickest way out of the business. But he had nothing else. You think that was cool, talking to him?”

Bosch considered it a few moments and then said, “Yeah, I do. Best way to keep him from being suspicious is to act like he knows as much as we do. If you hadn’t asked him and then he heard from a source or somebody else in vice that you were looking for her, then he’d probably tumble to us.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I figured it, so I called him this morning and asked a few questions and then went on. Far as he knows, you and me are the only ones working this new case. He doesn’t know anything about our task force. So far.”

“Only problem with asking him about the survivor is that if he knows you’re looking, he may go looking for her. We’ll have to be careful about that. Let the surveillance teams know.”

“Yeah, I will. Maybe Hans Off can tell ’em. You ought to hear this guy on the rovers, sounds like a fuckin’ Eagle Scout.”

Bosch smiled. He imagined Hans Off cut no slack in the use of radio code designations.

“Anyway, so that’s why she isn’t in the porno biz anymore,” Edgar said, getting back to the survivor. “In the last three years, we got check charges, a couple of possessions, a couple prostitution rousts and many, many under-the-influence beefs. She’s been in and out. Always time served, never anything serious. Two, three days at a time. Not enough to help her kick, either.”

“So where’s she work?”

“The Valley. I’ve been on the phone with Valley Vice all morning. They say she usually works the Sepulveda corridor with the other street pros.”

Bosch remembered the young women he had seen the other afternoon while tracing down Cerrone, Rebecca Kaminski’s manager/pimp. He wondered if he had seen or even talked to Georgia Stern and not known it.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I was out there the other day and was wondering if I’d seen her. You know, not knowing who she was. Did the vice guys say whether she had protection?”

“Nah, no pimp that they know of. I got the idea she’s bottom drawer stuff. Most pimps have better ponies.”

“So, is Vice up there looking for her?”

“Not yet,” Edgar said. “They have training today, but they’ll be out on Sepulveda tomorrow night.”

“Any recent photos?”

“Yeah.”

Edgar reached into his sport coat and pulled out a stack of photos. They were copies of a booking photo. Georgia Stern certainly looked used up. Her bleached-blonde hair showed at least an inch of dark roots. There were circles under her eyes so deep they looked as though they had been cut into her face with a knife. Her cheeks were gaunt and she was glassy-eyed. Lucky for her she had fixed before she was busted. It meant less time in the cage hurting, waiting and craving the next fix.

“This is three months old. Under the influence. She did two in Sybil and out.”

Sybil Brand Institute was the county’s holding jail for women. Half of it was equipped to handle narcotics addicts.

“Get this,” Edgar said. “I forgot about this. This guy Dean up in Valley Vice says he was the one who made this bust on her and when he was booking her he found a bottle of powder and was just about ready to run her ticket up to possession when he realized the bottle was a legit scrip. He said the powder was AZT. You know, for AIDS. She’s got the virus, man, and she’s out there on the street. On Sepulveda. He asked her if she makes ’em use rubbers and her answer was, ‘Not if they don’t want to.’”

Bosch just nodded. The story was not unusual. It had been Bosch’s experience that most prostitutes despised the men they waved down and serviced for money. Those who became sick got it either from their customers or from dirty needles, which also sometimes came from customers. Either way, he believed it was part of the psychology to not care about passing it on to the population that may have given it to you. It was the belief that what goes around comes around.

“Not if they don’t want to,” Edgar said again, shaking his head. “I mean, man, that’s cold.”

Bosch finished his coffee and pushed his chair back. There was no smoking in the cafeteria so he wanted to go down to the lobby and out by the fallen-officers memorial to smoke. As long as Rollenberger was camped out in the conference room, smoking there was out.

“So-”

Bosch’s pager went off and he visibly flinched. He had always subscribed to the theory that a quick verdict was a bad verdict was a stupid verdict. Hadn’t they given the evidence careful consideration? He pulled it off his belt and looked at the number on the display. He breathed easier. It was an LAPD exchange.

“I think Mora is calling me.”

“Better be careful. What were you going to say?”

“Uh, oh, yeah, I was just wondering if Stern will be any good to us if we find her. It’s been four years. She’s on the spike and sick. I wonder if she’ll even remember the Follower.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that, too. But my only alternatives are to go back to Hollywood and report to Pounds or volunteer for one of the surveillance shifts on Mora. I’m sticking on this. I’m going up there to Sepulveda tonight.”

Bosch nodded.

“Hans Off said you pulled the divorce. Nothing there?”

“Not really. She filed but then Mora didn’t contest it. File’s about ten pages, that’s it. Only one thing of note in it, and I don’t know if it means anything or not.”

“What?”

“She filed on the usual grounds. Irreconcilable differences, mental cruelty. But in the records, she also mentions the loss of consortium. You know what that is?”

“No sex.”

“Yeah. What do you think that means?”

Bosch thought for a few moments and said, “I don’t know. They split just before the Dollmaker stuff. Maybe he was into some strange stuff, building up to the killings. I can ask Locke.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Anyway, I had DMV run the wife and she’s still alive. But I was thinking we shouldn’t approach her. Too dangerous. She might tip him.”

“Yeah, don’t go near her. Did DMV fax her DL?”

“Yeah. She’s blonde. Five-foot-four, hundred and ten. It was only a face shot on the driver’s license but I’d say she fits.”

Bosch nodded and stood up.

After taking one of the rovers from the conference room, Bosch drove over to Central Division and parked in the back lot. He was still within the fifteen-minute radius of the federal courthouse. He left the rover in the car and walked out to the sidewalk and around front to the public entrance. He did this so he could see if he could spot Sheehan and Opelt. He assumed they would have to be parked within sight of the lot’s exit so they would see Mora leaving, but he did not see them or any car that looked suspicious.

A pair of headlights briefly flashed from a parking lot behind an old gas station that was now a taco stand, featuring a sign that said HOME OF THE KOSHER BURRITO-PASTRAMI! He saw two figures in the car, which was a gray Eldorado, and just looked away.

Mora was at his desk eating a burrito that looked disgusting to Bosch because he could see it was filled with pastrami. It looked unnatural.

“Harry,” he said with his mouth full.

“How is it?”

“It’s okay. I’ll go back to plain beef after this. I just tried it ’cause I saw a couple guys from RHD over across the street. One of ’em said they come all the way over from Parker to get these kosher things there. Thought I’d give it a try.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard of that place.”

“Well, you ask me, it ain’t worth coming over from Parker Center for.”

He wrapped what was left in the oil-stained paper it came in and then got up and walked out of the squad room. Bosch heard the package hit the bottom of a trash can in the hallway and then Mora was back.

“Don’t want it to stink up my trash can.”

“So, you buzzed?”

“Yeah, that was me. How’s the trial?”

“Waiting on a verdict.”

“Shit, that’s scary.”

Bosch knew from experience that if Mora wanted to tell you something, he would tell you in his own time. It would do him no good to keep asking the vice cop why he beeped him.

Back in his chair, Mora swiveled around to the filing cabinets behind him and began opening drawers. Over his shoulder, he said, “Hang on, Harry. I gotta get some stuff together for you here.”

It took him two minutes during which Bosch saw him open several different files, take out photos and create a short stack. Then he turned back around.

“Four,” he said. “I’ve come up with four more actresses that dropped out under what might be termed suspicious circumstances.”

“Only four.”

“Yeah. Actually, there were more than four chicks that people mentioned. But only four fit that profile we talked about. Blonde and built. There is also Gallery, who we already knew about, and your concrete blonde. So we’ve got six altogether. Here are the new ones.”

He handed the group of photos across the desk to Bosch. Harry slowly looked through them. They were color publicity glossies with each woman’s name printed in the white border at the bottom of the photo. Two of the women were naked and posing indoors on chairs, their legs apart. The other two were photographed at the beach and were wearing bikinis that would probably be illegal on most public beaches. To Bosch, the women in the photos almost looked interchangeable. Their bodies were similar. Their faces had the same fake pouts that were intended to show mystery and sexual abandonment at the same time. Each of the women had hair so blonde it was nearly white.

“All Snow Whites,” Mora said, an unneeded commentary that made Bosch look up from the photos to look at him. The vice cop just stared back and said, “You know, the hair. That’s what a producer calls them when he’s casting movies. He says he wants a Snow White for this part ’cause he already has a red or whatever. Snow White. It’s like the model name. These chicks are all interchangeable.”

Bosch looked back down at the photos, not trusting that his eyes would not give his suspicions away.

He realized, though, that much of what Mora had just said was true. The main physical differences between the women in the photos were the tattoos and their locations on each body. Each woman had a small tattoo of a heart or a rose or a cartoon character. Candi Cummings had a heart just to the left of her carefully trimmed triangle of pubic hair. Mood Indigo had some kind of cartoon just above her left ankle but Bosch couldn’t make it out because of the angle the photograph had been taken from. Dee Anne Dozit had a heart wrapped in a vine of barbed wire about six inches above the left nipple, which was pierced with a gold ring. And TeXXXas Rose had a red rose on the soft part of her right hand between the thumb and first finger.

Bosch realized they might all be dead now.

“No one’s heard from them?”

“No one in the biz, at least.”

“You’re right. Physically, they fit.”

“Yeah.”

“They did outcall?”

“I assume they did, but I’m not sure yet. The people I talked to dealt with them in the film biz so they didn’t know what these girls did when the cameras stopped rolling, so to speak. Or, so they said. My next step was to get some back issues of the sex rags and look for ads.”

“Any dates? You know, when they disappeared, stuff like that?”

“Just generally speaking. These people, the agents and the moviemakers, they don’t have minds for dates. We’re dealing with memories, so I’ve only got a general picture. If I find out they ran outcall ads, I’ll narrow it down pretty close to exact dates when I find out when they last ran. Anyway, let me give you what I got. You got your notebook?”

Mora told him what he had. No specific dates, just months and years. Adding in the approximate dates when Rebecca Kaminski, the concrete blonde, Constance Calvin, who became Gallery on film, and the seventh and eleventh victims originally attributed to Church had disappeared, there was a rough pattern of disappearances of the porno starlets about every six to seven months. The last disappearance was Mood Indigo, eight months earlier.

“See the pattern? He’s due. He’s out there hunting.”

Bosch nodded and looked up from his notebook at Mora and thought he saw a gleam in his dark eyes. He thought he could see through them into a black emptiness inside. In that one chilling moment Bosch thought he saw the confirmation of evil in the other man. It was as if Mora was challenging him to come farther into the dark with him.