Michael Connelly (121 page)

Bosch nodded.

“What did he say? The caller, what was it he said?”

“He said, ‘I have a special need tonight.’ Both times. Just like that. He said the same thing both times. And his voice was
weird. It was like he was talking through clenched teeth or something.”

“And you sent her to that.”

“I didn’t put it together until after she didn’t come back. Look, man, I made a report. I told the cops the hotel she went
to and they never did nothing. I’m not the only one to blame. Shit, the cops said that guy was caught, that he was dead. I
thought it was safe.”

“Safe for you, or the girls you put out on the street?”

“Look, you think I would’ve sent her if I knew? I had a lot invested in her, man.”

“I’m sure you did.”

Bosch looked over at the blonde and wondered how long it would be before she looked like the one he had given the twenty to
on the street. His guess was that Cerrone’s girls all ended up used up and on the street with their thumb out, or they ended
up dead. He looked back at Cerrone.

“Did Rebecca smoke?”

“What?”

“Smoke. Did she smoke? You lived with her, you should know.”

“No, she didn’t smoke. It’s a disgusting habit.”

Cerrone looked over at the blonde and glared. Bosch dropped his cigarette on the white rug and ground it out as he stood up.
He headed toward the door but stopped after he opened it.

“Cerrone, the woman in that dump your mail goes to?”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t pay rent anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

He climbed up from the floor, regaining a measure of his pride.

“I’m talking about her not paying you rent anymore. I’m going to check on her from time to time. If she’s paying rent, your
PO gets a call and your scam gets blown. Probation gets revoked and you do your time. It’s tough to run an outcall business
from county lockup. Only two phones on each floor and the brothers control who uses them and for how long. I guess you’d have
to cut them in.”

Cerrone just stared at him, anger thumping in his temples.

“And she better still be there when I check,” Bosch said. “If I hear she went back to Mexico, I blame you and make the call.
If I hear she bought a fucking condo, I make the call. She just better be there.”

“That’s extortion,” Cerrone said.

“No, asshole, that’s justice.”

He left the door open. Out in the hallway waiting for the elevator, he once again heard Cerrone yell, “Shut the fuck up!”

The last vestiges of the evening rush hour made it a slow run up to Sylvia’s. She was sitting at the dining room table in
faded blue jeans and a Grant High T-shirt, reading book reports, when he came in. One of the eleventh-grade English classes
she taught down in the Valley at Grant was called Los Angeles in Literature. She had told him she developed the class so the
students might come to know their city better. Most of them came from other places, other countries. She had once told him
that the students in one of her classes accounted for eleven different native languages.

He put his hand on the back of her neck and bent down to kiss her. He noticed the reports were on Nathanael West’s
Day of the Locust
.

“Ever read it?” she asked.

“Long time ago. Some English teacher in high school made us read it. She was crazy.”

She elbowed him in the thigh.

“All right, wise guy. I try to rotate the tough ones with the easy ones. I assigned them
The Big Sleep
.”

“That’s probably what they thought this one should’ve been called.”

“Aren’t you the life of the party today. Something good happen?”

“Actually, no. Everything is turning to shit out there. But in here …it’s different.”

She got up and they embraced. He ran his hand up and down her back the way he knew she liked.

“What’s happening on the case?”

“Nothing. Everything. I might be going into the mud puddle. Wonder if I can get a job after this as a private eye. Like Marlowe.”

She pushed away.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure. Something. I have to work on it tonight. I’ll take the kitchen table. You can stay out here with the locusts.”

“It’s your turn to cook.”

“Then, I’m going to hire the colonel.”

“Shit.”

“Hey, that’s not a good thing for an English teacher to say. What’s the matter with the colonel?”

“He’s been dead for years. Never mind. It’s okay.”

She smiled at him. This ritual occurred often. When it was his turn to cook he usually took her out. He could see she was
disappointed by the prospect of fried chicken to go. But there was too much going on, too much to think about.

She had a face that made him want to confess everything bad he had ever done. Yet he knew he could not. She knew it, too.

“I humiliated a man today.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he humiliates women.”

“All men do that, Harry. What did you do to him?”

“Knocked him down in front of his woman.”

“He probably needed it.”

“I don’t want you to come to court tomorrow. I’m probably going to be called by Chandler to testify but I don’t want you there.
It’s going to be bad.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Why do you do this, Harry? Tell me all these things that you do but keep the rest a secret? In some ways we are so intimate
and in others …You tell me about the men you knock down but not about you. What do I know about you, your past? I want us
to get to that, Harry. We have to or we’ll end up humiliating each other. That’s how it ended for me before.”

Bosch nodded and looked down. He didn’t know what to say. He was too burdened by other thoughts to get into this now.

“You want the extra crispy?” he finally asked.

“Fine.”

She went back to her book reports and he went out to get dinner.

• • •

After they were done eating and she went back to the dining room table, he opened his briefcase on the kitchen table and took
out the blue murder books. He had a bottle of Henry Weinhard’s on the table but no cigarette. He wouldn’t smoke inside. At
least not while she was awake.

He unsnapped the first binder and laid out the sections on each of the eleven victims across the table. He stood up with the
bottle so he could look down and take them all in at once. Each section was fronted by a photograph of the victim’s remains,
as they were found. There were eleven of these photos in front of him. He did some thinking on the cases and then went into
the bedroom and checked the suit he had worn the day before. The Polaroid of the concrete blonde was still in the pocket.

He brought it back to the kitchen and laid it on the table with the others. Number twelve. It was a horrible gallery of broken,
abused bodies, their garish makeup showing false smiles below dead eyes. Their bodies were naked, exposed to the harsh light
of the police photographer.

Bosch drained the bottle and kept staring. Reading the names and the dates of the deaths. Looking at the faces. All of them
lost angels in the city of night. He didn’t notice Sylvia come in until it was too late.

“My God,” she said in a whisper as she saw the photos. She took a step backward. She was holding one of her students’ papers
in her hand. Her other hand had come up to her mouth.

“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” Bosch said. “I should’ve warned you not to come in.”

“Those are the women?”

He nodded.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not sure. Trying to make something happen, I guess. I thought if I looked at them all again I might get an idea, figure
out what’s happening.”

“But how can you look at those? You were just standing there looking.”

“Because I have to.”

She looked down at the paper in her hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. Uh, one of my students wrote something. I was going to read it to you.”

“Go ahead.”

He stepped over to the wall and turned off the light that hung over the table. The photos and Bosch became shrouded in darkness.
Sylvia stood in the light cast from the dining room through the kitchen entrance.

“Go ahead.”

She held up the paper and said, “It’s a girl. She wrote, ‘West foreshadowed the end of Los Angeles’s halcyon moment. He saw
the city of angels becoming a city of despair, a place where hopes get crushed under the weight of the mad crowd. His book
was the warning.’”

She looked up.

“She goes on but that was the part I wanted to read. She’s only a tenth-grader taking advanced classes but she seemed to grasp
something so strong there.”

He admired her lack of cynicism. Bosch’s first thought was that the kid had plagiarized — where’d she get a word like halcyon?
But Sylvia saw past that. She saw the beauty in things. He saw the darkness.

“It’s good,” he said.

“She’s African-American. She comes up on the bus. She’s one of the smartest I have and I worry about her on the bus. She said
the trip is seventy-five minutes each way and that is the time when she reads the assignments I give. But I worry about her.
She seems so sensitive. Maybe too much so.”

“Give her time and she’ll grow a callous on her heart. Everybody does.”

“No, not everybody, Harry. That’s what I worry about with her.”

She looked at him there in the darkness for a long moment.

“I’m sorry I intruded.”

“You never intrude on me, Sylvia. I am sorry I brought this home. I can leave if you want, take it to my place.”

“No, Harry, I want you here. You want me to put on some coffee?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She went back to the living room and he turned the light back on. He looked over the gallery again. Though they looked the
same in death because of the makeup applied by each one’s killer, the women fell into numerous physical categories according
to race, size, coloring, and so on.

Locke had told the task force that this meant that the killer was simply an opportunistic predator. Not concerned with body
type, only the acquisition of a victim which he could then place into his erotic program. He did not care if they were black
or white as long as he could snatch them with as little notice as possible. He was a bottom feeder. He moved on a level where
the women he encountered were victims long before he got to them. They were women who had already given up their bodies to
the unloving hands and eyes of strangers. They were out there waiting for him. The question, Bosch now knew, was whether the
Dollmaker was still out there, too.

He sat down and from the pocket of the binder he pulled a map of West L.A. Its creases cracked and split in some sections
as he unfolded it and put it down on top of the photos. The round black stickers that represented locations where bodies had
been found were still in place. The victim’s name and date of discovery were written next to each black dot. Geographically,
the task force had found no significance until after Church was dead. The bodies were found in locations stretching from Silverlake
to Malibu. The Dollmaker littered the entire Westside. Still, for the most part, the bodies were clustered in Silverlake and
Hollywood, with only one found in Malibu and one in West Hollywood.

The concrete blonde was found farther south in Hollywood than any of the previous bodies. She was also the only one that had
been buried. Locke had said location of disposal was probably a choice of convenience. After Church was dead this seemed true.
Four of the bodies had been dumped within a mile of his Silverlake apartment. Another four were in eastern Hollywood, not
a long drive, either.

The dates had done nothing for the investigation. No pattern. Initially there was a decreasing-interval pattern between discoveries
of victims, then it began to vary widely. The Dollmaker would go five weeks between strikes, then two weeks, then three. Nothing
to make of this; the detectives on the task force simply let it go.

Bosch moved on. He began reading the background packets that had been drawn up on each victim. Most of these were short —
two to three pages about their sad lives. One of the women who worked Hollywood Boulevard at night was going to beautician
school by day. Another had been sending money to Chihuahua, Mexico, where her parents believed she had a good job as a tour
guide at the famous Disneyland. There were odd matches between some of the victims, but nothing that ever amounted to anything.

Three of the Boulevard whores went to the same doctor for weekly clap shots. Members of the task force put him under surveillance
for three weeks. But one night while they were watching him, the real Dollmaker picked up a prostitute on Sunset and her body
was found in Silverlake the next morning.

Two of the other women also shared a doctor. The same Beverly Hills plastic surgeon had performed breast-implant surgery on
them. The task force had rallied on this discovery, for a plastic surgeon remakes images, similarly after a fashion to the
way the Dollmaker used makeup. The plastic man, as he was called by the cops, was also placed under surveillance. But he never
made a suspicious move and seemed to be the picture of domestic bliss with a wife whose physical features he had sculpted
to his own liking. They were still watching him when Bosch took the telephone tip that led to the shooting of Norman Church.