The Concrete Blonde

32

It was an irony that Bosch savored Tuesday morning when he read Bremmer’s above-the-fold story on the killing of Honey Chandler. He had booked the reporter into county jail on a no-bail hold shortly before midnight and had not alerted media relations. The word had not gotten out by the last deadline and now the paper had a front-page story about a murder that was written by the murderer. Bosch liked that. He smiled as he read it.

The one person Bosch had told was Irving. He had the com center patch him through on a phone line and in a half-hour-long conversation he told the assistant chief every step he had taken and described every building block of evidence that led to the arrest. Irving said nothing congratulatory, nor did he chastise Bosch for making the arrest alone. Either or both would come later, after it was seen whether the arrest would stick. Both men knew this.

At 9A.M. Bosch was seated in front of a filing deputy’s desk at the district attorney’s office in the downtown criminal courts building. For the second time in eight hours he carefully went over the details of what happened and then played the tape of his conversation with Bremmer. The deputy DA, whose name was Chap Newell, made notations on a yellow pad while listening to the tape. He often furrowed his brow or shook his head because the sound was not good. The voices in Bremmer’s living room had bounced through the iron radiator coils and had a tinny echo on the tape. Still, the words that were most important were audible.

Bosch just watched without saying a word. Newell looked as if he could be no more than three years out of law school. Because the arrest had not made a splash in the papers or on TV yet, it had not received the attention of one of the senior attorneys in the filings division. It had gone to Newell on the routine rotation.

When the tape was done, Newell made a few more notes to look as if he knew what he was doing and then looked up at Bosch.

“You haven’t said anything about what was in his house.”

“I didn’t find anything on the quick search I made last night. There are others there now, with a warrant, doing a more thorough job.”

“Well, I hope they find something.”

“Why, you’ve got the case right there.”

“And it is a good case, Bosch. Really good work.”

“Coming from you, that means a lot.”

Newell looked at him and narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“But, uh…”

“But what?”

“Well, there’s no question we can file with this. There is a lot here.”

“But what?”

“I’m looking at it from a defense lawyer’s perspective. What really do we have here? A lot of coincidences. He’s left-handed, he smokes, he knew details about the Dollmaker. But those things are not hard evidence. They can apply to a lot of people.”

Bosch started lighting a cigarette.

“Please don’t do-”

He exhaled and blew the smoke across the desk.

“-never mind.”

“What about the note and the postmark?”

“That’s good but it is complicated and difficult to grasp. A good lawyer could make a jury see it as just another coincidence. He could confuse the issue, is what I’m trying to say.”

“What about the tape, Newell? We have him confessing on tape. What more do you-”

“But during the confession he disavows the confession.”

“Not at the end.”

“Look, I’m not planning on using the tape.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. He confessed before you advised him. It brings up the specter of entrapment.”

“There is no entrapment. He knew I was a cop and he knew his rights whether I advised him or not. He had a fucking gun onme. He freely made those statements. When he was formally arrested, I advised him.”

“But he searched you for a wire. That is a clear indication of his desire not to be taped. Plus, he dropped the bomb-his most damaging statement-after you cuffed him but before you advised him. That could be dicey.”

“You’re going to use the tape.”

Newell looked at him a long time. A red blotchiness appeared on his young cheeks.

“You are not in a position to tell me what I’m going to use, Bosch. Besides, if that’s all we go with it will probably be up to the state court of appeals if we use it, because if Bremmer has any kind of a lawyer at all that’s where he’ll take it. We’ll win the question here in superior because half the judges on those benches worked in the DA’s office at one time or another. But when it gets up to appeals or to the state supreme court in San Francisco, it’s anybody’s guess. Is that what you want? To wait a couple years and have it blown out then? Or do you want to get it done correctly right from the get go?”

Bosch leaned forward and looked angrily at the young lawyer.

“Look, we’re still working other angles. We’re not done. There will be more evidence accumulated. But we have to charge this guy or let him go. We’ve got forty-eight hours from last night to file. But if we don’t file right now with no bail, he’ll grab a lawyer and get a bail hearing. The judge won’t honor the no-bail arrest if you haven’t even filed a single charge yet. So file on him now. We’ll get all the evidence you need to back it up.”

Newell nodded as if he agreed but said, “Thing is, I like to have the whole package, everything we can get, when I file a case. That way we know how we are going to work the prosecution, right from the start. We know if we are going to go with a plea bargain or go balls to the wall.”

Bosch got up and walked to the office’s open door. He stepped into the hall and looked at the plastic name plate affixed to the wall outside. Then he came back in.

“Bosch, what are you doing?”

“It’s funny. I thought you were a filing deputy. I didn’t know you were a trial deputy, too.”

Newell dropped his pencil on his pad. His face got redder, the blotches spreading to his forehead.

“Look, I am a filing deputy. But it is part of my responsibility to make sure we have the best case possible from the get go. Every case that comes through that door I could file on, but that’s not the point. The point is to have good, credible evidence and a lot of it. Cases that don’t backfire. So I push, Bosch. I-”

“How old are you?”

“What?”

“How old?”

“Twenty-six. What’s that got to-”

“Listen to me, you little prick. Don’t you ever call me by my last name again. I was making cases like this before you cracked your first law book and I’ll be making them long after you move your convertible Saab and your self-centered white-bread show to Century City. You can call me Detective or Detective Bosch, you can even call me Harry. But don’t you ever call me just Bosch again, understand?”

Newell’s mouth had dropped open.

“Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“Another thing, we’re going to get more evidence and we’re going to get it as soon as we can. But, in the meantime, you’re going to file one charge of first-degree murder on Bremmer with a no-bail hold because we are going to make sure-from the get go, Mr. Newell-that this scumbag never sees the light of day again.

“Then, when we have more evidence, if you are still attached to this case, you will file multiple counts under theories of linkage between the deaths. At no time will you worry about the so-called package you will hand off to the trial attorney. The trial attorney will make those decisions. Because we both know that you are really just a clerk, a clerk who files what is brought to him. If you knew enough to even sit in court next to a trial attorney you would not be here. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” he said quickly.

“No, what?”

“No ques-No, Detective Bosch.”

Bosch went back to Irving’s conference room and used the rest of the morning to work up an application for a search warrant to collect hair, blood and saliva specimens along with a dental mold from Bremmer.

Before taking it to the courthouse, he attended a brief meeting of the task force where they all reported on their respective assignments.

Edgar said he had been to Sybil Brand and had shown Georgia Stern, who was still being held there, a photo of Bremmer but she could not identify him as her attacker. She could not rule him out, either.

Sheehan said he and Opelt had shown the mug shot of Bremmer to the manager of the storage facility at Bing’s and the man said Bremmer might have been one of the renters of the storage rooms two years earlier but he couldn’t be sure. He said it was too long ago to remember well enough to send a man to the gas chamber.

“The guy’s a wimp,” Sheehan said. “My feeling was he recognized Bremmer but was too scared to stick it in all the way. We’re going to hit him again tomorrow.”

Rollenberger called the presidents up on the rover and they reported from Bremmer’s house that there was nothing yet. No tapes, no bodies, nothing.

“I say we go for a warrant to dig up the yard, under the foundation,” Nixon said.

“We might go to that,” Rollenberger radioed back. “Meantime, keep at it.”

Lastly, Yde reported by rover that he and Mayfield were getting the runaround from theTimes lawyers and had not yet been able to so much as approach Bremmer’s desk in the newsroom.

Rollenberger reported that Heikes and Rector were out of pocket, running down background on Bremmer. After that, he said that Irving had scheduled a five o’clock press conference to discuss the case with the media. If anything new was discovered, let Rollenberger know before then.

“That’s it,” Rollenberger said.

Bosch got up to head out.

The medical clinic on the high-power floor of the county jail reminded Bosch of Frankenstein’s laboratory. There were chains on every bed and rings bolted to the tile walls to tether patients to. The pull-down lights over each bed were caged in steel so patients couldn’t get to the light bulbs and use them as weapons. The tile was supposed to be white but over the years had surrendered to a depressing off-yellow.

Bosch and Edgar stood in the doorway to one of the bays where there were six beds and watched as Bremmer, who was lying in the sixth bed, was given a shot of sodium pentothal to make him more cooperative, more malleable. He had refused to give the court-ordered dental mold and samples of blood, saliva and hair.

After the drug began to take effect, the doctor pulled open the reporter’s mouth, put two clamps in to hold it open and pushed a little square block of clay over the front upper teeth. He then followed the same procedure with the lower front teeth. When he was done, he relaxed the clamps and Bremmer appeared to be asleep.

“If we asked him something now, he’d tell the truth, right?” Edgar asked. “That’s truth serum they’re givin’ him, right?”

“Supposedly,” Bosch said. “But it’d prob’ly get the case thrown out of court.”

The little gray blocks with teeth indentations were slid into plastic cases. The doctor closed them and handed them to Edgar. He then drew blood, wiped a cotton swab in Bremmer’s mouth and cut snippets of hair from the suspect’s head, chest and pubic area. He put these in envelopes which went into a small cardboard box like the kind chicken nuggets come in at fast-food restaurants.

Bosch took the box and they left then, Bosch going to the coroner’s office to see Amado, the analyst, and Edgar going to Cal State Northridge to see the forensic archaeologist who had helped with the concrete blonde reconstruction.

By quarter to five, everyone was back in the conference room but Edgar. They were all milling about, waiting to watch Irving’s press conference. There had been no other progress since noon.

“Where do you think he stashed everything, Harry?” Nixon asked as he was pouring coffee.

“I don’t know. Probably has a storage locker somewhere. If he has tapes, I doubt he’d part with them. He probably has a drop somewhere. We’ll find them.”

“What about the other women?”

“They’re out there somewhere, under the city. Only way they’ll come up is by luck.”

“Or if Bremmer talks,” Irving said. He had just come in.

There was a good feeling in the room. Despite the day’s slow progress, everyone to a man had no doubt they finally had the right man. And that certainty validated what they were about. So they wanted to drink coffee and hang out. Even Irving.

At five minutes before five, when Irving was going over some of the reports typed during the day for the last time before facing the media, Edgar came up on the rover. Rollenberger quickly picked up a radio and answered back.

“What do you have, Team Five?”

“Is Harry there?”

“Yes, Team Five, Team Six is present. What have you got?”

“I’ve got the package. Definite match between the suspect’s teeth and the impressions on the victim.”

“Roger that, Team Five.”

There was a whoop in the conference room and a lot of backslapping and high fives. “He is going down,” Nixon exclaimed.

Irving picked up his papers and headed for the hallway door. He wanted to be on time. At the doorway he passed close to Bosch.

“We’re gold, Bosch. Thanks.”

Bosch just nodded.

A few hours later Bosch was back at the county jail. It was after lock-down so the deputies wouldn’t bring Bremmer out to see him. Instead, he had to go into the high-power module, the deputies watching him on remote cameras. He walked along the row of cells to 6-36 and looked through the wired one-foot-square window in the single-piece steel door.

Bremmer was on “keep away” status, so he was in there alone. He didn’t notice Bosch watching. He lay on the bottom bunk on his back, his hands laced behind his head. His eyes were open and staring straight up. Bosch recognized the withdrawal state he had seen for a moment the night before. It was as if he wasn’t there. Bosch leaned his mouth to the screen.

“Bremmer, you play bridge?”

Bremmer looked over at him, only moving his eyes.

“What?”

“I said, do you play bridge? You know, the card game?”

“What the fuck do you want, Bosch?”

“I just dropped by to tell you a little while ago they added three more to the one this morning. Linkage. You just got the concrete blonde and the two from before, the ones we first gave to the Dollmaker. You also got an attempted murder on the survivor.”

“Oh, well, what’s the difference? You got one, you got ’ em all. All I need to do is beat the Chandler case and the others fall like dominoes.”

“Except that isn’t going to happen. We got your teeth, Bremmer, just as good as fingerprints. And we got the rest. I just came from the coroner’s. They matched your pubic hair to samples found on victims seven and eleven-the ones we gave the Dollmaker credit for. You ought to think about dealing, Bremmer. Tell where the others are and they’ll probably let you live. That’s why I asked about bridge.”

“What about it?”

“Well, I hear there’s some guys up at Q play a good bridge game. They’re always looking for new blood. You’ll probably like ’em, have a lot in common.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone, Bosch?”

“I will. I will. But just so you know it, man, they’re on death row. But don’t worry about that, when you get there you’ll get a lot of card playing in. What’s the average lead time? Eight, ten years before they gas somebody? That’s not bad. Unless, of course, you talk a deal.”

“There is no deal, Bosch. Get out of here.”

“I’m going. Believe me, it’s nice to be able to walk out of this place. I’ll see you then, okay? You know, in eight or ten years. I’m going to be there, Bremmer. When they strap you in. I’m going to be watching through the glass when the gas comes up. And then I’ll come out and tell the reporters how you died. I’ll tell them you went screaming, that you weren’t much of a man.”

“Fuck you, Bosch.”

“Yeah, fuck me. See you then, Bremmer.”