Michael Connelly (141 page)

“Don’t worry about it. Wait here and I’ll go.”

“Goddam whore.”

Bosch got out of the car and over the roof said, “Edgar, cool it. She’s a whore and a hype, for Chrissake. You care about
that?”

“Harry, you have no idea what it’s like. You see the way Rollenberger looks at me? I bet he counts the rovers every time I
walk out of the room. German fuck.”

“Hey, you’re right, I don’t know what it’s like.”

He took his jacket off and threw it in the car. Then he unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt and walked off toward
the street.

“Be right back. You better hide. If she sees a colored guy she might not come into the alley with me.”

• • •

They borrowed an interview room in the Van Nuys detective bureau. Bosch knew his way around the place because he had worked
on the robbery table here after first getting his detective’s badge.

What became immediately clear from the start was that the man Edgar had seen Georgia Stern go into the alley with earlier
was not a john. He was a dealer and she had probably fixed in the alley. She might have paid for the shot with sex, but that
still didn’t make the dealer a john.

Regardless of who he was and what she did, she was on the nod when Bosch and Edgar brought her in and, therefore, was almost
totally useless. Her eyes were droopy and dilated and would become fixed on objects in the distance. Even in the ten-by-ten
interview room she looked as though she was staring at something a mile away.

Her hair was rumpled and the black roots were longer than in the photo Edgar had. She had a sore on the skin below her left
ear, the kind of sore addicts get from nervously rubbing the same spot over and over. Her upper arms were as thin as the legs
of the chair she sat on. Her deteriorated state was heightened by the T-shirt, which was several sizes too big. The neckline
drooped to expose her upper chest and Bosch could see that she used the veins in her neck when she was banging heroin from
a needle. Bosch could also see that despite her emaciated condition, she still had large, full breasts. Implants, he guessed,
and for a moment a vision of the concrete blonde’s desiccated body flashed to him.

“Miss Stern?” Bosch began. “Georgia? Do you know why you’re here? Do you remember what I told you in the car?”

“I mem’er.”

“Now, do you remember the night the man tried to kill you? More than four years ago? A night like this? June seventeenth.
Remember?”

She nodded dreamily and Bosch wondered if she knew what he was talking about.

“The Dollmaker, remember?”

“He’s dead.”

“That’s right, but we need to ask you some questions about the man anyway. You helped us draw this picture, remember?”

Bosch unfolded the composite drawing he had taken from the Dollmaker files. The drawing looked like neither Church nor Mora,
but the Dollmaker was known to wear disguises so it was reasonable to believe the Follower did as well. Even so, there was
always the chance a physical feature, like maybe Mora’s penetrating eyes, would poke through the memory.

She looked at the composite for a long time.

“He was killed by the cops,” she said. “He deserved it.”

Even coming from her, it felt reassuring to Bosch to hear someone say the Dollmaker got what he deserved. But he knew what
she didn’t, that they weren’t dealing with the Dollmaker here.

“We’re going to show you some pictures. You got the six-pack, Jerry?”

She looked up abruptly and Bosch realized his mistake. She thought he was referring to beer, but a six-pack in cop terminology
was a package of six mugshots which are shown to victims and witnesses. They usually contain photos of five cops and one suspect
with the hope that the wit will point to the suspect and say that’s the one. This time the six-pack contained photos of six
cops. Mora’s was the second one.

Bosch lined them up on the table in front of her and she looked for a long time. She laughed.

“What?” Bosch asked.

She pointed to the fourth photo.

“I think I fucked him once. But I thought he was a cop.”

Bosch saw Edgar shake his head. The photo she had pointed to was of an undercover Hollywood Division narcotics officer named
Arb Danforth. If her memory was correct, then Danforth was probably venturing off his beat into the Valley to extort sex from
prostitutes. Bosch guessed that he was probably paying them with heroin stolen from evidence envelopes or suspects. What she
had just said should be forwarded in a report to Internal Affairs, but both Edgar and Bosch knew without saying a word that
neither of them would do that. It would be like committing suicide in the department. No street cop would ever trust them
again. Still, Bosch knew Danforth was married and that the prostitute carried the AIDS virus. He decided he would drop Danforth
an anonymous note telling him to get a blood test.

“What about the others, Georgia?” Bosch said. “Look at their eyes. Eyes don’t change when somebody’s in a disguise. Look at
the eyes.”

While she bent down to look closer at the pictures Bosch looked at Edgar, who shook his head. This was going nowhere, he was
saying, and Bosch nodded that he knew. After a minute or so, her head jerked as she stopped herself from nodding off.

“Okay, Georgia, nothing there, right?”

“No.”

“You don’t see him?”

“No. He’s dead.”

“Okay, he’s dead. You stay here. We’re going out into the hall to talk for a minute. We’ll be right back.”

Outside, they decided it might be worth booking her on an under-theinfluence charge into Sybil Brand and trying her again
when she came off the high. Bosch noted that Edgar was eager to do this and volunteered to drive her downtown to Sybil. Bosch
knew this was because it would make Edgar’s OT envelope thicker, not because he wanted to get the woman into the narco unit
at Sybil and get her straightened out for a while. Compassion had nothing to do with it.

Sylvia had pulled the bedroom’s heavy curtains across the blinds and the room stayed dark until well after the sun was up
on Saturday morning. When Bosch awoke alone in her bed, he pulled his watch off the nightstand and saw it was already eleven.
He had dreamed but when he woke the dream receded into the darkness and he couldn’t reach back to grasp it. He lay there for
nearly fifteen minutes trying to bring it back, but it was gone.

Every few minutes he would hear Sylvia make some kind of household noise. Sweeping the kitchen floor, emptying the dishwasher.
He could tell she was trying to be quiet but he heard it anyway. There was the back door being opened and the splashing of
water in the potted plants that lined the porch. It hadn’t rained in at least seven weeks.

At 11:20 the phone rang and Sylvia got to it after one ring. But Bosch knew it was for him. His muscles tensed as he waited
for the bedroom door to open and for her to summon him to the call. He had given Sylvia’s phone number to Edgar when they
were leaving the Van Nuys Division seven hours earlier.

But Sylvia never came and when he relaxed again he could hear parts of her conversation on the phone. It sounded like maybe
she was counseling a student. After a while it sounded like she was crying.

Bosch got up, pulled on his clothes and walked out of the bedroom while trying to smooth his hair. She was at the table in
the kitchen, holding the cordless phone to her ear. She was drawing circles on the tabletop with her finger and he had been
right, she was crying.

“What?” he whispered.

She held her hand up, signaling him not to interrupt. He didn’t. He just watched her on the phone.

“I’ll be there, Mrs. Fontenot, just call me with the time and address …yes…yes, I will. Once again, I am so very sorry. Beatrice
was such a fine young woman and student. I was very proud of her. Oh, my gosh…”

A strong gush of tears came as she hung up. Bosch came to her and put his hand on her neck.

“A student?”

“Beatrice Fontenot.”

“What happened?”

“She’s dead.”

He leaned down and held her. She cried.

“This city …,” she began but didn’t finish. “She’s the one who wrote what I read to you the other night about
Day of the Locust
.”

Bosch remembered. Sylvia had said she worried about the girl. He wanted to say something but he knew there was nothing to
say. This city. It seemed to say it all.

• • •

They spent the day around the house, doing odd jobs, cleaning up. Bosch cleared the charred logs out of the fireplace and
then joined Sylvia in the backyard, where she was working in the garden, pulling weeds and cutting flowers for a bouquet she
was going to take to Mrs. Fontenot.

They worked side by side but Sylvia spoke very little. Every now and then she would offer a sentence. She said it had been
a drive-by shooting on Normandie. She said it happened the night before and that the girl was taken to Martin Luther King,
Jr., Hospital, where she was determined to be brain-dead. They turned the machine off in the morning and harvested the organs
for donating.

“That’s weird, that they call it harvesting,” she said. “Sounds like a farm or people growing on trees or something.”

In the midafternoon she went into the kitchen and made an egg salad sandwich and a tuna fish sandwich. She cut them in half
and they each had a half of both sandwiches. He made iced tea with slices of orange in the glass. She said that after the
huge steaks they’d eaten the night before, she never wanted beef again. It was the day’s only attempt at humor, but nobody
smiled. She put the dishes in the sink afterward but didn’t bother to rinse them. She turned and leaned on the counter and
stared down at the floor.

“Mrs. Fontenot said the funeral would be sometime next week, probably Wednesday. I think I’m going to bring the class down.
Get a bus.”

“I think that’d be nice. Her family would appreciate it.”

“Her two older brothers are dealers. She told me they sell crack.”

He didn’t say anything. He knew that was probably the reason the girl was dead. Since the Bloods-Crips gang truce, the street
dealing in South Central had lost its command structure. There was a lot of infringement of turfs. A lot of drive-bys, a lot
of innocents left dead.

“I think I’ll ask her mother if I could read her book report. At the service. Or after. Maybe they’d know then what a loss
this was.”

“They probably know already.”

“Yes.”

“You want to take a nap, try to sleep?”

“Yes, I think I will. What are you going to do?”

“I have some stuff to do. Make some calls. Sylvia, I’m going to have to go out tonight. Hopefully, not for long. I’ll get
back as soon as I can.”

“I’ll be all right, Harry.”

“Good.”

• • •

Bosch looked in on her at about four and she was sleeping soundly. He could see where the pillow was wet from her crying.

He went down the hall to a bedroom that was used as a study. There was a desk with a phone on it. He closed the door so as
not to disturb her.

The first call he made was to Seventy-seventh Street Division detectives. He asked for the homicide table and got a detective
named Hanks. He didn’t give a first name and Bosch didn’t know him. Bosch identified himself and asked about the Fontenot
case.

“What’s your angle, Bosch? Hollywood, you said?”

“Yeah, Hollywood, but there’s no angle. It’s private. Mrs. Fontenot called the girl’s teacher this morning. The teacher’s
a friend of mine. She’s upset and I was, you know, just trying to find out what happened.”

“Look, I don’t have time to be holding people’s hands. I’m working a case.”

“In other words, you’ve got nothing.”

“You’ve never worked the seven-seven, have you?”

“No. This the part where you tell me how tough it is?”

“Hey, fuck you, Bosch. What I’m gonna tell you is that there is no such thing as a witness south of Pico. Only way we clear
a case is we get lucky and pull some prints, or we get luckier and the dude walks in and says, ‘I’s sorry, I did it.’ You
wanna guess how many times that happens?”

Bosch didn’t say anything.

“Look, the teacher ain’t the only one upset, okay? This is a bad one. They’re all bad but some are bad on bad. This is one
of those. Sixteen-year-old girl home reading a book, babysittin’ her younger brother.”

“Drive-by?”

“Yeah, you got it. Twelve holes in the walls. It was an AK. Twelve holes in the walls and one round in the back of her head.”

“She never knew, did she?”

“No, she never knew what hit her. She must’ve caught the first one. She never ducked.”

“It was a round meant for one of the older brothers, right?”

Hanks was quiet for a couple of seconds. Bosch could hear a radio squawking in the background of the squad room.

“How you know that, the teacher?”

“The girl told her the brothers sell crack.”

“Yeah? They were walking around MLK this morning boo-hooing like they was altar boys. I’ll check it out, Bosch. Anything else
I can do you for?”