Michael Connelly - The Concrete Blonde

“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.’”