The Concrete Blonde Read online

  Bosch could tell Pounds was enjoying this, the stretching it out.

  “If it was addressed to me, how do you know about it?”

  “It wasn’t mailed. No envelope. It was just one page, folded over. Had your name on the fold. Somebody left it at the front desk. Somebody there read it, you can figure it from there.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Well, you’re not going to like this, Harry, the timing is god-awful, but the note says, it says basically that you got the wrong guy. That the Dollmaker is still out there. The writer says he’s the real Dollmaker and that the body count continues. Says you killed the wrong guy.”

  “It’s bullshit. The Dollmaker’s letters were carried in the paper, in Bremmer’s book on the case. Anybody could pick up the style and write a note. You—”

  “You take me for a moron, Bosch? I know anybody could’ve written this. But so did the writer know that. So to prove his point he included a little treasure map, I’d guess you’d call it. Directions to another victim’s body.”

  A long silence filled the line while Bosch thought and Pounds waited.

  “And so?” Bosch finally said.

  “And so I sent Edgar out to the location this morning. You remember Bing’s, on Western?”

  “Bing’s? Yeah, south of the Boulevard. Bing’s. A pool hall. Didn’t that place go down in the riots last year?”

  “Right,” Pounds said. “Complete burnout. They looted and torched the place. Just the slab and three walls left standing. There’s a city demolition order against it but the owner hasn’t acted yet. Anyway, that’s the spot, according to this note we got. Note says she was buried under the floor slab. Edgar went out there with a city crew, jackhammers, the works. . . .”

  Pounds was dragging it out. What a petty asshole, Bosch thought. This time he would wait longer. And when the silence grew nervously long, Pounds finally spoke.

  “He found a body. Just like the note said he would. Beneath the concrete. He found a body. That’s—”

  “How old is it?”

  “Don’t know yet. But it’s old. That’s why I’m calling. I need you to go out there during the lunch break and see what you can make of this. You know, is it legit as a Dollmaker victim or is some other wacko jerking us off? You’re the expert. You could go out there when the judge breaks for lunch. I’ll meet you there. And you’ll be back in time for openers.”

  Bosch felt numb. He already needed another cigarette. He tried to place all of what Pounds had just said into some semblance of order. The Dollmaker—Norman Church—had been dead four years now. There had been no mistake. Bosch knew that night. He still knew it in his guts today. Church was the Dollmaker.

  “So this note just appeared at the desk?”

  “Desk sergeant found it on the front counter about four hours ago. Nobody saw anybody leave it. You know, a lot of people come through the front in the mornings. Plus we had change of shift. I had Meehan go up and talk to the desk uniforms. Nobody remembers jack shit about it until they found it.”

  “Shit. Read it to me.”

  “Can’t. SID has it. Doubt there will be any lifts, but we have to go through the motions. I’ll get a copy and have it with me at the scene, okay?”

  Bosch didn’t answer.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Pounds said. “But let’s hold our horses till we see what is out there. No reason to worry yet. Might be some stunt cooked up by that lawyer, Chandler. Wouldn’t put it past her. She’s the type, she’d do anything to nail another LAPD scalp to the wall. Likes seeing her name in the paper.”

  “What about the media? They heard about this yet?”

  “We’ve gotten a few calls about a body being found. They must’ve gotten it off the coroner’s dispatch freek. We’ve been staying off the air. Anyway, nobody knows about the note or the Dollmaker tie-in. They just know there’s a body. The idea of it being found under the floor of one of the riot burnouts is sexy, I guess.

  “Anyway, we have to keep the Dollmaker part under our hat for the time being. Unless, of course, whoever wrote it also sent copies out to the media. If he did that, we’ll hear about it by the end of the day.”

  “How could he bury her under the slab of a pool hall?”

  “The whole building wasn’t a pool hall. There were storage rooms in the back. Before it was Bing’s it was a studio prop house. After Bing’s took the front, they rented out sections in the back for storage. This is all from Edgar, he got the owner out there. The killer must’ve had one of the rooms, broke through the existing slab and put this girl’s body in there. Anyway, it all got burned down in the riots. But the fire didn’t hurt the slab. This poor girl’s body has been down in there through all of that. Edgar said it looks like a mummy or something.”

  Bosch saw the door to courtroom 4 open and members of the Church family came out followed by their lawyer. They were breaking for lunch. Deborah Church and her two teenaged daughters did not look at him. But Honey Chandler, known by most cops and others in the federal courts building as Money Chandler, stared at him with killer eyes as she passed. They were as dark as burnt mahogany and set against a tanned face with a strong jawline. She was an attractive woman with smooth gold hair. Her figure was hidden in the stiff lines of her blue suit. Bosch could feel the animosity from the group wash over him like a wave.

  “Bosch, you still there?” Pounds asked.

  “Yeah. It looks like we just broke for lunch.”

  “Good. Then head over there and I’ll meet you. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I hope it’s just another wacko. For your sake, it might be best.”

  “Right.”

  As Bosch was hanging up he heard Pounds’s voice and brought the phone back to his ear.

  “One more thing. If the media shows up out there, leave them to me. However this turns out, you shouldn’t be formally involved in this new case because of the litigation stemming from the old. We are just having you out there as an expert witness, so to speak.”

  “Right.”

  “See you there.”

  2

  Bosch took Wilshire out of downtown and cut up to Third after he made it through what was left of MacArthur Park. Turning north on Western he could see up on the left the grouping of patrol cars, detective cars and the crime-scene and coroner’s vans. In the distance the HOLLYWOOD sign hung over the northern view, its letters barely legible in the smog.

  Bing’s was three blackened walls cradling a pile of charred debris. No roof, but the uniforms had hung a blue plastic tarp over the top of the rear wall and strung it to the chain-link fence that ran along the front of the property. Bosch knew it hadn’t been done because the investigators wanted shade where they worked. He leaned forward and looked up through the windshield. He saw them up there, circling. The city’s carrion birds: the media helicopters.

  As Bosch pulled to a stop at the curb he saw a couple of city workers standing next to an equipment truck. They had sick looks on their faces and dragged hard and deep on cigarettes. Their jackhammers were on the ground near the back of the truck. They were waiting—hoping—that their work here was done.

  On the other side of their truck Pounds was standing next to the coroner’s blue van. It looked as though he was composing himself, and Bosch saw that he shared the same sick expression with the civilians. Though Pounds was commander of Hollywood detectives, including the homicide table, he had never actually worked homicide himself. Like many of the department’s administrators, his climb up the ladder was based on test scores and brownnosing, not experience. It always pleased Bosch to see someone like Pounds get a dose of what real cops dealt with every day.

  Bosch looked at his watch before getting out of his Caprice. He had one hour before he had to be back in court for openers.

  “Harry,” Pounds said as he walked up. “Glad you made it.”

  “Always glad to check out another body, Lieutenant.”

  Bosch slipped off his suit coat and put it
inside his car on the seat. Then he moved to the trunk and got out a baggy blue jumpsuit and put it on over his clothes. It would be hot, but he didn’t want to come back into court covered with dirt and dust.

  “Good idea,” Pounds said. “Wish I had brought my stuff.”

  But Bosch knew he didn’t have any stuff. Pounds ventured to a crime scene only when there was a good chance TV would show up and he could give a sound bite. And it was only TV he was interested in. Not print media. You had to make sense for more than two sentences in a row with a newspaper reporter. And then your words became attached to a piece of paper and were there all the next day and possibly forever to haunt you. It wasn’t good department politics to talk to the print media. TV was a more fleeting and less dangerous thrill.

  Bosch headed toward the blue tarp. Beneath it he saw the usual gathering of investigators. They stood next to a pile of broken concrete and along the edge of a trench dug into the concrete pad that had been the building’s foundation. Bosch looked up as one of the TV helicopters made a low flyover. They wouldn’t get much usable video with the tarp hiding the scene. They were probably dispatching ground crews now.

  There was still a lot of debris in the building’s shell. Charred ceiling beams and timber, broken concrete block and other rubble. Pounds caught up with Bosch and they began carefully stepping through to the gathering beneath the tarp.

  “They’ll bulldoze this and make another parking lot,” Pounds said. “That’s all the riots gave the city. About a thousand new parking lots. You want to park in South Central these days, no problem. You want a bottle of soda or to put gas in your car, then you got a problem. They burned every place down. You drive through the South Side before Christmas? They got Christmas tree lots every block, all the open space down there. I still don’t understand why those people burned their own neighborhoods.”

  Bosch knew that the fact people like Pounds didn’t understand why “those people” did what they did was one reason they did it, and would have to do it again someday. Bosch looked at it as a cycle. Every twenty-five years or so the city had its soul torched by the fires of reality. But then it drove on. Quickly, without looking back. Like a hit-and-run.

  Suddenly Pounds went down after slipping on the loose rubble. He stopped his fall with his hands and jumped up quickly, embarrassed.

  “Damn it!” he cried out, and then, though Bosch hadn’t asked, he added, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  He quickly used his hand to carefully smooth back the strands of hair that had slipped off his balding cranium. He didn’t realize that he was smearing black char from his hand across his forehead as he did this and Bosch didn’t tell him.

  They finally picked their way to the gathering. Bosch walked toward his former partner, Jerry Edgar, who stood with a couple of investigators Harry knew and two women he didn’t. The women wore green jumpsuits, the uniform of the coroner’s body movers. Minimum-wage earners who were dispatched from death scene to death scene in the blue van, picking up the bodies and taking them to the ice box.

  “Whereyat, Harry?” Edgar said.

  “Right here.”

  Edgar had just been to New Orleans for the blues festival and had somehow come back with the greeting. He said it so often it had become annoying. Edgar was the only one in the detective bureau who didn’t realize this.

  Edgar was the standout amidst the group. He was not wearing a jumpsuit like Bosch—in fact, he never did because they wrinkled his Nordstrom suits—and somehow had managed to make his way into the crime scene area without getting so much as a trace of dust on the pants cuffs of his gray double-breasted suit. The real estate market—Edgar’s onetime lucrative outside gig—had been in the shithouse for three years but Edgar still managed to be the sharpest dresser in the division. Bosch looked at Edgar’s pale blue silk tie, knotted tightly at the black detective’s throat, and guessed that it might have cost more than his own shirt and tie combined.

  Bosch looked away and nodded to Art Donovan, the SID crime scene tech, but said nothing else to the others. He was following protocol. As at any murder scene a carefully orchestrated and incestuous caste system was in effect. The detectives did most of the talking amongst themselves or to the SID tech. The uniforms didn’t speak unless spoken to. The body movers, the lowest on the totem pole, spoke to no one except the coroner’s tech. The coroner’s tech said little to the cops. He despised them because in his view they were whiners—always needing this or that, the autopsy done, the tox tests done, all of it done by yesterday.

  Bosch looked into the trench they stood above. The jackhammer crew had broken through the slab and dug a hole about eight feet long and four feet deep. They had then excavated sideways into a large formation of concrete that extended three feet below the surface of the slab. There was a hollow in the stone. Bosch dropped to a crouch so he could look closer and saw that the concrete hollow was the outline of a woman’s body. It was as if it were a mold into which plaster could be poured to make a cast, maybe to manufacture a mannikin. But it was empty inside.

  “Where’s the body?” Bosch asked.

  “They took what was left out already,” Edgar said. “It’s in the bag in the truck. We’re trying to figure out how to get this piece of the slab outta here in one piece.”

  Bosch looked silently into the hollow for a few moments before standing back up and making his way back out from beneath the tarp. Larry Sakai, the coroner’s investigator, followed him to the coroner’s van and unlocked and opened the back door. Inside the van it was sweltering and the smell of Sakai’s breath was stronger than the odor of industrial disinfectant.

  “I figured they’d call you out here,” Sakai said.

  “Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”

  “’Cause it looks like the fuckin’ Dollmaker, man.”

  Bosch said nothing, so as not to give Sakai any indication of confirmation. Sakai had worked some of the Dollmaker cases four years earlier. Bosch suspected he was responsible for the name the media attached to the serial killer. Someone had leaked details of the killer’s repeated use of makeup on the bodies to one of the anchors at Channel 4. The anchor christened the killer the Dollmaker. After that, the killer was called that by everybody, even the cops.

  But Bosch always hated that name. It said something about the victims as well as the killer. It depersonalized them, made it easier for the Dollmaker stories that were broadcast to be entertaining instead of horrifying.

  Bosch looked around the van. There were two gurneys and two bodies. One filled the black bag completely, the unseen corpse having been heavy in life or bloated in death. He turned to the other bag, the remains inside barely filling it. He knew this was the body taken from the concrete.

  “Yeah, this one,” Sakai said. “This other’s a stabbing up on Lankershim. North Hollywood’s working it. We were coming in when we got the dispatch on this one.”

  That explained how the media caught on so quickly, Bosch knew. The coroner’s dispatch frequency played in every newsroom in the city.

  He studied the smaller body bag a moment and without waiting for Sakai to do it he yanked open the zipper on the heavy black plastic. It unleashed a sharp, musty smell that was not as bad as it could have been had they found the body sooner. Sakai pulled the bag open and Bosch looked at the remains of a human body. The skin was dark and like leather stretched taut over the bones. Bosch was not repulsed because he was used to it and had the ability to become detached from such scenes. He sometimes believed that looking at bodies was his life’s work. He had ID’d his mother’s body for the cops when he wasn’t yet twelve years old, he had seen countless dead in Vietnam, and in nearly twenty years with the cops the bodies had become too many to put a number to. It had left him, most times, as detached from what he saw as a camera. As detached, he knew, as a psychopath.

  The woman in the bag had been small, Bosch could tell. But the deterioration of tissue and shrinkage made the body seem even smaller than it had certainly been in life.
What was left of the hair was shoulder length and looked as if it had been bleached blonde. Bosch could see the powdery remains of makeup on the skin of the face. His eyes were drawn to the breasts because they were shockingly large in comparison to the rest of the shrunken corpse. They were full and rounded and the skin was stretched taut across them. It somehow seemed to be the most grotesque feature of the corpse because it was not as it should have been.

  “Implants,” Sakai said. “They don’t decompose. Could probably take ’em out and resell them to the next stupid chick that wants ’em. We could start a recycling program.”

  Bosch didn’t say anything. He was suddenly depressed at the thought of the woman—whoever she was—doing that to her body to somehow make herself more appealing, and then to end up this way. Had she only succeeded, he wondered, in making herself appealing to her killer?

  Sakai interrupted his thoughts.

  “If the Dollmaker did this, that means she’s been in the concrete at least four years, right? So if that’s the case, decomp isn’t that bad for that length of time. Still got the hair, eyes, some internal tissues. We’ll be able to work with it. Last week, I picked up a piece of work, a hiker they found out in Soledad Canyon. They figure it was a guy went missing last summer. Now he was nothing but bones. ’Course out in the open like that, you got the animals. You know they come in through the ass. It’s the softest entry and the animals—”

  “I know, Sakai. Let’s stay on this one.”

  “Anyway, with this woman, the concrete apparently slowed things down for us. Sure didn’t stop it, but slowed it down. It must’ve been like an airtight tomb in there.”

  “You people going to be able to establish just how long she’s been dead?”

  “Probably not from the body. We get her ID’d, then you people might find out when she went missing. That’ll be the way.”

  Bosch looked at the fingers. They were dark sticks almost as thin as pencils.