The Concrete Blonde (1994)

by Michael Connelly

  “Print this after the kit and the stove,” he said. “I think it might belong to a witness.”

  “Will do,” Donovan said.

  Bosch drove down out of the hills and took the Barham Boulevard

  ramp onto the northbound Hollywood Freeway. After coming up through the Cahuenga Pass he went west on the Ventura Freeway and then north again on the San Diego Freeway. It took about twenty minutes to go the ten miles. It was Sunday and traffic was light. He exited on Roscoe and went east a couple of blocks into Meadows’s neighborhood on Langdon.

  Sepulveda, like most of the suburban communities within Los Angeles, had both good and bad neighborhoods. Bosch wasn’t expecting trimmed lawns and curbs lined with Volvos on Meadows’s street, and he wasn’t disappointed. The apartments were at least a decade past being attractive. There were bars over the windows of the bottom units and graffiti on every garage door. The sharp smell of the brewery on Roscoe wafted into the neighborhood. The place smelled like a 4 A.M. bar.

  Meadows had lived in a U-shaped apartment building that had been built in the 1950s, when the smell of hops wasn’t yet in the air, gangbangers weren’t on the street corner and there was still hope in the neighborhood. There was a pool in the center courtyard but it had long been filled in with sand and dirt. Now the courtyard consisted of a kidney-shaped plot of brown grass surrounded by dirty concrete. Meadows had lived in an upstairs corner apartment. Bosch could hear the steady drone of the freeway as he climbed the stairs and moved along the walkway that fronted the apartments. The door to 7B was unlocked and it opened into a small living room–dining room–kitchen. Edgar was leaning against a counter, writing in his notebook. He said, “Nice place, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Bosch said and looked around. “Nobody home?”

  “Nah. I checked with a neighbor next door and she hadn’t seen anybody around since the day before yesterday. Said the guy that lived here told her his name was Fields, not Meadows. Cute, huh? She said he lived all by himself. Been here about a year, kept to himself, mostly. That’s all she knew.”

  “You show her the picture?”

  “Yeah, she made him. Didn’t like looking at a picture of a dead guy, though.”

  Bosch walked into a short hallway that led to a bathroom and a bedroom. He said, “You pick the door?”

  “Nah—it was unlocked. No shit, I knock a couple times and I’m fixing to get my pouch outta the car and finesse the lock when, for the hell of it, I try the door.”

  “And it opens.”

  “It opens.”

  “You talk to the landlord?”

  “Landlady’s not around. Supposed to be, but maybe she went out to eat lunch or score some horse. I think everybody I seen around here is a spiker.”

  Bosch came back into the living room and looked around. There wasn’t much. A couch covered with green vinyl was pushed against one wall, a stuffed chair was against the opposite wall with a small color television on the carpet next to it. There was a Formica-topped table with three chairs around it in the dining room. The fourth chair was by itself against the wall. Bosch looked at an old cigarette-scarred coffee table in front of the couch. On it were an overloaded ashtray and a crossword puzzle book. Playing cards were laid out in an unfinished game of solitaire. There was a TV Guide. Bosch had no idea if Meadows smoked but knew that no cigarettes had been found on the body. He made a mental note to check on it later.

  Edgar said, “Harry, this place was turned. Not just the door being open and all, but, I mean, there are other things. The whole place has been searched. They did a halfway decent job, but you can tell. It was rushed. Go check out the bed and the closet, you’ll see what I mean. I’m gonna give the landlady another try.”

  Edgar left and Bosch walked back through the living room to the bedroom. Along the way he noted the smell of urine. In the bedroom, he found a queen-sized bed without a backboard pushed against one wall. There was a greasy discoloration on the white wall at about the level where Meadows would have leaned his head while sitting up in bed. Opposite the bed an old six-drawer dresser was against the wall. A cheap rattan night table with a lamp on it stood next to the bed. Nothing else was in the room, not even a mirror.

  Bosch studied the bed first. It was unmade, with pillows and sheets in a pile in the center. Bosch noticed that a corner of one of the sheets was folded between the mattress and the box spring, in the midsection of the left side of the bed. The bed would not have been made that way, obviously. Bosch pulled the corner out from under the mattress and let it hang loosely off the side of the bed. He lifted the mattress as if to search underneath it, then lowered it back into place. The corner of the sheet was back between the mattress and the box spring. Edgar was right.

  He next opened the six bureau drawers. What clothes there were—underwear, white and dark socks and several T-shirts—were neatly folded and seemed undisturbed. When he closed the bottom left drawer he noticed that it slid unevenly and would not close all the way. He pulled it all the way out of the bureau. Then he pulled another drawer completely out of the dresser. Then the rest. When he had all the drawers out he checked the underside of each to see if something was or had been taped to it. He found nothing. He put them back in but kept changing their order until each one slid easily into place and closed completely. When he was done the drawers were in a different order. The right order. He was satisfied that someone had pulled the drawers out to search beneath and behind them, and had then put them back in the wrong order.

  He went into the walk-in closet. He found only a quarter of the available space used. On the floor were two pairs of shoes, a pair of black Reebok running shoes that were dirty with sand and gray dust, and a pair of laced work boots that looked as though they had been recently cleaned and oiled. There was more of the gray dust from the shoes in the carpet. He crouched down and pinched some between his fingers. It seemed like concrete dust. He took a small evidence bag from his pocket and put some of the granules into it. Then he put the bag away and stood up. There were five shirts on hangers, a single white button-down oxford and four long-sleeved black pullovers, like the one Meadows had been wearing. On hangers next to the shirts were two pairs of well-faded jeans and two pairs of black pajamas or karate-style pants. The pockets on all four pairs of pants had been turned inside out. A plastic laundry basket on the floor contained dirty black pants, T-shirts, socks and a pair of boxer shorts.

  Bosch walked out of the closet and left the bedroom. He stopped in the hallway bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There was a half-used tube of toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin and a single, empty insulin syringe box. When he closed the cabinet, he looked at himself and saw weariness in his eyes. He smoothed his hair.

  Harry walked back to the living room and sat on the couch, in front of the unfinished solitaire hand. Edgar came in.

  “Meadows rented the place last July first,” he said. “The landlady’s back. It was supposed to be a month-to-month lease but he paid for eleven months up front. Four bills a month. That’s nearly five grand in cash he put down. Said she didn’t ask him for references. She just took the money. He lived—”

  “She said he paid for eleven months?” Bosch interrupted. “Was it a deal, pay for eleven, get the twelfth free?”

  “Nah, I asked her about that and she said no, it was him. That’s just the way he wanted to pay. Said he’d move out June first, this year. That’s—what—ten days from now? She said he told her he moved out here on some kind of job, she thinks from Phoenix. Said he was some kind of shift supervisor for the tunnel dig on the subway project downtown. She got the impression that’s all his job would take, eleven months, and then he’d go back to Phoenix.”

  Edgar was looking in his notebook, reviewing his conversation with the landlady.

  “That’s about it. She ID’d him off the Polaroid, too. She also knew him as Fields. Bill Fields. Said he kept odd hours, like he was on a night shift or something. Said she saw him last week coming home one morning, ge
tting dropped off from a beige or tan Jeep. No license number because she wasn’t looking. But she said he was all dirty, that’s how she knew he was coming home from work.”

  They were silent for a few moments, both thinking.

  Bosch finally said, “J. Edgar, I have a deal for you.”

  “You got a deal for me? Okay, let me hear it.”

  “You go home now or back to your open house or whatever. I’ll take this from here. I’ll go pull the tape at the com center, go back to the office and start the paper going. I’ll see if Sakai made next-of-kin notification. I think, if I remember right, that Meadows was from Louisiana. Anyway, I’ve got the autopsy skedded for tomorrow at eight. I’ll take that, too, on my way in.

  “Now, your end is tomorrow you finish up last night’s TV thing and take it over to the DA. Shouldn’t be any problems with it.”

  “So you’re taking the end that’s dipped in shit and letting me skate. The transvestite-offs-transvestite case is as cut and dried as they come. No pun intended.”

  “Yeah. There’s one thing I’d also want. On your way in from the Valley tomorrow, stop by the VA in Sepulveda and see if you can talk them into letting you see Meadows’s file. Might have some names that could help. Like I said before, he was supposedly talking to a shrink in the outpatient care unit and in one of those circle jerks. Maybe one of those guys was spiking with him, knows what happened here. It’s a long shot, I know. If they give you a hard time, give me a call and I’ll work on a search warrant.”

  “Sounds like a deal. But I’m worried about you, Harry. I mean, you and I haven’t been partners too long, and I know you probably want to work your way back downtown to Robbery-Homicide, but I don’t see the percentage in busting your balls on this one. Yeah, this place has been turned over, but that isn’t the question. The question is why. And on the face of things, nothing really stirs me. It looks to me like somebody dumped Meadows down at the reservoir after he croaked and searched his place to find his stash. If he had one.”

  “Probably that’s the way it was,” Bosch said after a few moments. “But a couple things still bother me. I want to puzzle with it a little more until I’m sure.”

  “Well, like I said, no problem with me. You’re giving me the clean end of the stick.”

  “I think I’m going to look around a little more. You go ahead, and I’ll see you tomorrow when I get back in from the cut.”

  “Okay, partner.”

  “And Jed?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with getting downtown again.”

  Bosch sat alone, thinking, and scanning the room for secrets. His eyes eventually came down on the cards spread out before him on the coffee table. Solitaire. He saw that all four aces were up. He picked up the deck of remaining cards and went through it, peeling off three cards at a time. In the course of going through he came across the two and three of spades and the two of hearts. The game hadn’t stalled. It had been interrupted. And never finished.

  He became restless. He looked down into the green glass ashtray and saw that all the butts were nonfiltered Camels. Was that Meadows’s brand or his killer’s? He got up and walked around the room. The faint smell of urine hit him again. He walked back into the bedroom. He opened the drawers of the bureau and stared at their contents once more. Nothing turned in his mind. He went to the window and looked out at the back end of another apartment building across an alley. There was a man with a supermarket cart in the alley. He was poking through a Dumpster with a stick. The cart was half full of aluminum cans. Bosch walked away and sat down on the bed and put his head back against the wall where the headboard should have been and the white paint was a dingy gray. The wall felt cool against his back.

  “Tell me something,” he whispered to no one.

  Something had interrupted the card game and Meadows had died here, he believed. Then he was taken to the pipe. But why? Why not leave him? Bosch leaned his head back to the wall and looked straight across the room. It was at that moment that he noticed a nail in the wall. The nail was about three feet above the bureau and had been painted white along with the wall at some point a long time ago. That was why he hadn’t noticed it before. He got up and went to look behind the bureau. In the three-inch space between it and the wall, he saw the edge of a fallen picture frame. With his shoulder, he pushed the heavy bureau away from the wall and picked up the frame. He stepped backward and sat on the edge of the bed studying it. The glass was cracked into an intricate spiderweb that had probably occurred when the frame fell. The damaged glass partially obscured an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. It was grainy and fading to a brownish yellow around the edges. The photo was more than twenty years old. Bosch knew this because between two cracks in the glass he saw his own, young face staring out and smiling.

  Bosch turned the frame over and carefully bent back the tin prongs that kept the cardboard backing in place. As he was sliding the yellowed photo out, the glass finally gave way and the pieces dropped to the floor in shatters. He moved his feet away from the glass but didn’t get up. He studied the photograph. There were no markings on front or back to tell where or when it had been taken. But he knew it must have been sometime in late 1969 or early 1970, because some of the men in the picture were dead after that.

  There were seven of them in the photo. All tunnel rats. All shirtless and proudly displaying their T-shirt tan lines and tattoos, each man’s dog tags taped together to keep them from jangling while they crawled through the tunnels. They had to have been in the Echo Sector of Cu Chi District, but Bosch could not tell or remember what village. The soldiers stood in a trench, positioned on both sides of a tunnel entrance no wider than the pipe in which Meadows would later be found dead. Bosch looked at himself and thought that his smile in the photograph was foolish. He was embarrassed by it now, in light of what was still to come after the moment was captured. Then he looked at Meadows in the photo and saw the thin smile and vacant stare. The others had always said Meadows would have a thousand-yard stare in an eight-by-eight room.

  Bosch looked down at the glass between his feet and saw a pink piece of paper about the size of a baseball card. He picked it up by its edges and studied it. It was a pawn ticket from a shop downtown. The customer name on it was William Fields. It listed one item pawned: an antique bracelet, gold with jade inlay. The ticket was dated six weeks earlier. Fields had gotten $800 for the bracelet. Bosch slipped it into an evidence envelope from his pocket and stood up.

  The trip downtown took an hour because of the traffic heading to Dodger Stadium. Bosch spent the time thinking about the apartment. It had been searched, but Edgar was right. It was a rush job. The pants pockets were the obvious tip. But the bureau drawers should’ve been put back in correctly, and the photo and the hidden pawn slip should not have been missed. What had been the hurry? He concluded it was because Meadows’s body was in the apartment. It had to be moved.

  Bosch exited on Broadway and headed south past Times Square to the pawnshop located in the Bradbury Building. Downtown L.A. was as quiet as Forest Lawn on most weekends, and he didn’t expect to find the Happy Hocker open. He was curious and just wanted to drive by and take a look at the place before heading to the communications center. But when he drove past the storefront he saw a man outside with an aerosol can painting the word OPEN in black on a sheet of plywood. The board stood in place of the shop’s front window. Bosch could see shards of glass on the dirty sidewalk below the plywood. He pulled to the curb. The spray painter was inside by the time he got to the door. He stepped through the beam of an electric eye, which sounded a bell from somewhere above all the musical instruments hanging from the ceiling.

  “I’m not open, not Sundays,” a man called from the back. He was standing behind a chrome cash register that was atop a glass counter.

  “That’s not what the sign you just painted says.”

  “Yes, but that is for tomorrow. People see boards over your windows they think you’r
e out of business. I’m not out of business. I’m open for business, except for weekends. I just have a board out there for a few days. I painted OPEN so people will know, you see? Starting tomorrow.”

  “Do you own this business?” Bosch said as he pulled his ID case out and flipped open his badge. “This will only take a couple minutes.”

  “Oh, police. Why din’t you say? I been waiting all day for you police.”

  Bosch looked around, confused, then put it together.

  “You mean the window? I’m not here about that.”

  “What do you mean? The patrol police said to wait for detective police. I waited. I been here since five A.M. this morning.”

  Bosch looked around the shop. It was filled with the usual array of brass musical instruments, electronic junk, jewelry and collectibles. “Look, Mr.—”

  “Obinna. Oscar Obinna pawnshops of Los Angeles and Culver City.”

  “Mr. Obinna, detectives don’t roll on vandalism reports on weekends. I mean, they might not even be doing that during the week anymore.”