Michael Connelly (112 page)

Bosch looked at the jury and he saw two of the women writing in the notebooks the marshals had given them to help them keep
track of important testimony. He wanted to buy Belk — and Amado — a beer.

It looked like a cake in a box, one of those novelty things custom-made to look like Marilyn Monroe or something. The anthropologist
had painted on a beige skin tone and red lipstick to go with blue eyes. It looked like frosting to Bosch. A wavy blonde wig
was added. He stood in the squad room looking down at the plaster image, wondering if it really looked like anybody at all.

“Five minutes till show time,” Edgar said.

He was sitting in his chair, which was turned toward the TV on the file cabinets. He was holding the channel changer. His
blue suit coat was hung neatly on a hanger, which was hooked on the coatrack at the end of the table. Bosch took his jacket
off and hung it on one of the coatrack pegs. He checked his slot in the message box and sat down at his spot at the homicide
table. There had been a call from Sylvia, nothing else important. He dialed her number as the Channel 4 news began. He knew
enough about the news priorities in this town to know the report on the concrete blonde wouldn’t be a lead story.

“Harry, we’re gonna need that line clear once they show it,” Edgar said.

“I’ll only be a minute. They won’t show it for a while. If they show it at all.”

“They’ll show it. I made secret deals with all of them. They all think they’ll be getting the exclusive if we get an ID. They
all want to get a boo-hoo story with the parents.”

“You’re playing with fire, man. You make a promise like that and then they find out you fucked them around —”

Sylvia picked up the phone.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi, where are you?”

“The office. We have to watch the phones a while. They’re putting the face of the victim from yesterday’s case on TV tonight.”

“How was court?”

“It’s the plaintiff’s case at the moment. But I think we scored a couple punches.”

“I read the
Times
today at lunch.”

“Yeah, well, they got about half of it right.”

“Are you coming out? Like you said.”

“Well, eventually. Not right now. I’ve got to help answer phones on this and then it’s depending on what we get. If we’re
skunked I’ll be out early.”

He noticed he had lowered his voice so Edgar wouldn’t hear his conversation.

“And if you get something good?”

“We’ll see.”

An indrawn breath, then silence. Harry waited. “You’ve been saying ‘we’ll see’ too much, Harry. We’ve talked about this. Sometimes
—”

“I know that.”

“— I think that you just want to be left alone. Stay in your little house on the hill and keep the whole world out. Including
me.”

“Not you. You know that.”

“Sometimes, I don’t. I don’t feel like I know it right now. You push me away just at the time when you need me — somebody
— to be close.”

He had no answer. He thought of her there on the other end. She was probably sitting on the stool in the kitchen. She had
probably already begun making a dinner for both of them. Or maybe she was getting used to his ways and had waited for the
call.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “You know how it is. What are you doing about dinner?”

“Nothing, and I’m not going to do anything, either,”

Edgar made a low, quick whistle. Harry looked up at the TV and saw it was showing the painted face of the victim. The TV was
on Channel 7 now. The camera showed a long close-up of the face. It looked all right on the tube. At least, it didn’t look
much like a cake. The screen flashed the detective bureau’s two public numbers.

“They’re showing it now,” Bosch said to Sylvia. “I need to keep this line clear. Let me call you back later, when I know something.”

“Sure,” she said coldly and hung up.

Edgar had the TV on 4 now and they were showing the face. He then flipped to 2 and caught the last few seconds of their report
on it. They had even interviewed the anthropologist.

“Slow news day,” Bosch said.

“Shit,” Edgar replied. “We’re banging on all cylinders now. All we —”

The phone rang and he grabbed it up.

“No, it just went out,” he said after listening for a few moments. “Yeah, yeah, I will. Okay.”

He hung up and shook his head.

“Pounds?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah. Thinks we’re going to have her name ten seconds after the broadcast went out. Christ, whadda nitwit.”

The next three calls were pranks, all testifying to the glaring lack of originality and the mental health of the TV viewing
audience. All three callers said “Your mother!” or words to that effect and hung up laughing. About twenty minutes later Edgar
got a call and started taking notes. The phone rang again and Bosch took it.

“This is Detective Bosch, who am I speaking with?”

“Is this being taped?”

“No, it’s not. Who is this?”

“Never mind, just thought you’d like to know the girl’s name is Maggie. Maggie something or other. It’s Latin. I seen her
on videos.”

“What videos? MTV?”

“No, Sherlock. Adult videos. She fucked on film. She was good. She could put a rubber on a prick with her mouth.”

The line went dead. Bosch wrote a couple of notes down on the pad he had in front of him. Latin? He didn’t think the way the
face had been painted gave any indication that the victim was a Latina.

Edgar hung up then and said his caller had said her name was Becky, that she had lived in Studio City a few years back.

“What’d you get?”

“I got a Maggie. No last name. Possibly a Latin last name. He said she was in porno.”

“That would fit, except she don’t look Mexican to me.”

“I know.”

The phone rang again. Edgar picked up and listened a few moments and then hung up.

“Another one that recognizes my mom.”

Bosch took the next one.

“I just wanted to tell you that the girl they were showing on TV was in porno,” the voice said.

“How do you know she was in porno?”

“I can tell by that thing they showed on TV. I rented a tape. Only once. She was in it.”

Only once, Bosch thought, but he remembered. Yeah, sure.

“You know her name?”

The other phone rang and Edgar picked it up.

“I don’t know names, man,” Bosch’s caller said. “They all use fake ones anyway.”

“What was the name of the tape?”

“Can’t remember. I was, uh, intoxicated when I saw it. Like I said, it was the only time.”

“Look, I’m not taking your confession. You got anything else?”

“No, smartass, I don’t.”

“Who is this?”

“I don’t have to say.”

“Look, we’re trying to find a killer here. What was the name of the place you rented it?”

“I’m not telling you, you might be able to get my name from them. Doesn’t matter, they have those tapes all over, every adult
place.”

“How would you know if you only rented one once?”

The caller hung up.

Bosch stayed another hour. By the end they had five calls saying the painted face belonged to a porno starlet. Only one of
the callers said her name was Maggie, the other four men saying they didn’t pay much attention to names. There was one call
naming her Becky of Studio City, and one saying she was a stripper who had worked for a while at the Booby Trap on La Brea.
One man who called said the face belonged to his missing wife, but Bosch learned through further questioning that she had
been missing only two months. The concrete blonde had been dead too long. The hope and desperation in the caller’s voice seemed
genuine to Bosch, and he didn’t know whether he was telling the man good news by explaining that it could not be his wife
or bad news because he was left in the void again.

There were three callers who gave vague descriptions of a woman they thought might be the concrete blonde, but after a few
questions into each conversation Bosch and Edgar identified the callers as cop geeks, people who got a thrill from talking
to the police.

The most unusual call was from a Beverly Hills psychic who mentioned that she had placed her hand on the TV screen while it
showed the face and felt the dead woman’s spirit cry out to her.

“What did it cry?” Bosch asked patiently.

“Praise.”

“Praise for what?”

“Jesus our savior, I would assume but I don’t know. That was all I received. I might receive more if I could touch the actual
plaster cast of the —”

“Well, did this spirit that was giving praise identify itself? See, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re more interested in
a name than cries of praise.”

“Someday you will believe but by then you will be lost.”

She hung up on him.

At seven-thirty Bosch told Edgar he was splitting.

“How ’bout you? You going to hang out for the eleven o’clock news?”

“Yeah, I’ll be here but I can handle it. If I get a lot of calls I’ll pull one of the dipshits off the desk.”

Stock that OT, Bosch thought.

“What’s next?” he asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Well, aside from all the calls saying it’s your mother, this porno thing seems to be the way to go.”

“Leave my blessed mother out of it. How you think I can check the porno?”

“Administrative Vice. Guy over there, a detective-three, name of Ray Mora, he works porno. He’s the best. He also was on the
Dollmaker task force. Call him and see if he can come take a look at the face. He might’ve known her. Tell him we had one
call saying her name was Maggie.”

“Will do. It fits with the Dollmaker, doesn’t it? The porno, I mean.”

“Yeah, it fits.” He thought about this a moment, then added, “Two of the other victims were in the business. The one that
got away from him was, too.”

“The lucky one — she still in it?”

“Last I heard. But she might be dead now for all I know.”

“Still doesn’t mean anything, Harry.”

“What?”

“The porno. Still doesn’t mean it was the Dollmaker. The real one, I mean.”

Bosch just nodded. He had an idea about something to do on his way home. He went out to his Caprice and got the Polaroid camera
out of the trunk. In the squad room, he took two shots of the face in the box and put them in his coat pocket after they developed.

Edgar watched this and asked, “What’re you going to do?”

“Might stop at that adult supermarket in the Valley on my way up to Sylvia’s.”

“Don’t get caught in one of those little rooms with your dick out.”

“Thanks for the tip. Let me know what Mora says.”

• • •

Bosch worked his way on surface streets up to the Hollywood Freeway. He went north and then exited on Lankershim, which took
him into North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley. He had all four windows down and the air was cool as it buffeted him
from all directions. He smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes into the wind. There was some techno-funk jazz on KAJZ so he
turned the radio off and just drove.

The Valley was the city’s bedroom community in more ways than the obvious. It was also home to the nation’s pornography industry.
The commercial-industrial districts of Van Nuys, Canoga Park, Northridge and Chatsworth housed hundreds of porno production
outfits, distributors and warehouses. Modeling agencies in Sherman Oaks provided ninety percent of the women and men who performed
in front of the cameras. And, consequently, the Valley was also one of the largest retail outlets for the material. It was
made here, it was sold here — through video mail-order businesses also nestled in the warehouses with the production outfits,
and places like XMarks the Spot on Lankershim Boulevard.

Bosch pulled into the lot in front of the huge store and appraised it for a few moments. It had formerly been a Pic N Pay
supermarket, but the front plate-glass windows had been walled up. Under the red neon X Marks the Spot sign, the front wall
was whitewashed and painted with black figures of naked and overly buxom female figures, like the metallic silhouettes Bosch
saw all the time on the mudflaps of trucks on the freeway. The men who put those on their trucks were probably the same guys
this place catered to, Bosch figured.

X Marks the Spot was owned by a man named Harold Barnes, who was a front for the Chicago Outfit. It grossed more than a million
dollars a year — on the books. Probably another one under the counter. Bosch knew all of this from Mora of Ad-Vice, whom he
had partnered with on some nights while they both were on the task force four years earlier.

Bosch watched a man of about twenty-five get out of his Toyota, walk quickly to the solid wood front door, and slip in like
a secret agent. He followed. The front half of the former supermarket was dedicated to retail — the sale and rental of videos,
magazines and other assorted adult-oriented and mostly rubber products. The rear was split between private “encounter” rooms
and private video booths. The entry to this area was through a curtained doorway. Bosch could hear heavy-metal rock music
coming from back there mixed with the canned-sounding cries of phony passion coming from the video booths.