The Concrete Blonde Part 21

Bosch saw the door to courtroom 4 open and the deputy marshal leaned out and signaled to him.

"I gotta go."

Back in the courtroom, Chandler was at the lectern and the judge was speaking. The jury was not in the box yet.

"What about the other subpoenas?" the judge asked.

"Your Honor, my office is in the process of notifying those people this morning, releasing them."

"Very well, then. Mr. Belk, ready to proceed?"

As Bosch came through the gate Belk pa.s.sed him on the way to the lectern without even looking at him.

"Your Honor, since this is unexpected, I would ask for a half-hour recess so I can consult with my client. We would be ready to proceed after that."

"Very well, we're going to do exactly that. Recess for a half hour. I'll see all parties back here then. And Mr. Bosch? I expect you to be in your place there, the next time I come out ready to begin. I don't like sending marshals up and down the halls when the defendant knows where he ought to be and when he ought to be there."

Bosch said nothing.

"Sorry, Your Honor," Belk said for him.

They stood as the judge left the bench and Belk said, "Let's go down the hall to one of the lawyer-client conference rooms."

"What happened?"

"Let's go down the hall."

As he was going through the courtroom door, Bremmer was coming in, holding his notebook and pen.

"Hey, what's happening?"

"I don't know," Bosch said. "Half-hour recess."

"Harry, I have to talk to you."

"Later."

"It's important."

At the end of the hall near the lavatories there were several small attorney conference rooms, all about the size of the interrogation rooms at the Hollywood station. Bosch and Belk went into one and took chairs on either side of a gray table.

"What happened?" Bosch asked.

"Your heroine rested."

"Chandler rested without calling me?"

This seemed to make no sense to Bosch.

"What's she doing?" he asked.

"She's being extremely shrewd. It's a very smart move."

"Why?"

"Look at the case. She is in very good shape. If it ended today and went to the jury, who would win? She would. See, she knows you have to get on the stand and defend what you did. Like I told you the other day, we win or lose with you. You either take the ball and ram it down her throat or you fumble it. She knows that and if she was to call you, she would ask the questions first, then I would come in with the fungoes-the easy ones that you'd hit out of the park.

"Now she's reversing that. My choice is to not call you and lose the case, or to call you and essentially give her the best shot at you. Very shrewd."

"So what are we going to do?"

"Call you."

"What about the delay?"

"What delay?"

Bosch nodded. There was no changing it. There would be no delay. He realized he had handled it badly. He had approached Belk the wrong way. He should have tried to make Belk believe it had been his own idea to go for a delay. Then it would have worked. Instead, Bosch was beginning to feel the jitters-that uneasy feeling that came with approaching the unknown. He felt the way he did before he climbed down into a VC tunnel for the first time in Vietnam. It was fear, he knew, blossoming like a black rose in the pit of his chest.

"We've got twenty-five minutes," Belk said. "Let's forget about delays and try to work out how we want your testimony to go. I am going to lead you down the path. The jury will follow. But remember, you have to take it slow or you will lose them. Okay?"

"We got twenty minutes," Bosch corrected him. "I need to go out for a smoke before I sit up there on the stand."

Belk pressed on as if he hadn't heard.

"Remember, Bosch, there could be millions of dollars at stake here. It may not be your money but it may be your career."

"What career?"

Bremmer was hanging around the door to the conference room when Bosch came out twenty minutes later.

"Get it all?" Harry asked.

He walked by him and headed toward the escalator. Bremmer followed.

"No, man, I wasn't listening. I'm just waiting for you. Listen, what's going on with the new case? Edgar won't tell me s.h.i.t. Did you get an ID or what?"

"Yeah, we ID'd her."

"Who was it?"

"Not my case, man. I can't give it out. Besides, I give it to you and you'll run to Money Chandler with it, right?"

Bremmer stopped walking beside him.

"What? What are you talking about?"

Then he scurried up to Bosch's side and whispered.

"Listen, Harry, you're one of my main sources. I wouldn't screw you like that. If she's getting inside s.h.i.t, look for somebody else."

Bosch felt bad about accusing the reporter. He'd had no evidence.

"You sure? I'm mistaken about this, right?"

"Absolutely. You're too valuable to me. I wouldn't do it."

"Okay, then."

That was as close as he'd come to an apology.

"So what can you tell me about the ID?"

"Nothing. It's still not my case. Try RHD."

"RHD has it? They took it from Edgar?"

Bosch got on the escalator and looked back at him. He nodded as he went down. Bremmer didn't follow.

Money Chandler was already on the steps smoking when Bosch came out. He lit a cigarette and looked back at her.

"Surprise, surprise," he said.

"What?"

"Resting."

"Only a surprise to Bulk," she said. "Any other lawyer would have seen it coming, I almost feel sorry for you, Bosch. Almost, but not quite. In a civil rights case, the chances of a win are always a long shot. But going up against the city attorney's office always kind of levels the playing field. These guys like Bulk, they couldn't make it on the outside... . If he had to win in order to eat, your lawyer would be a thin man. He needs that steady paycheck from the city coming in, win or lose."

What she said, of course, was correct. But it was old news. Bosch smiled. He didn't know how to act. A part of himself liked her. She was wrong about him, but somehow he liked her. Maybe it was her tenacity, because her anger-though misdirected-was so pure.

Maybe it was because she wasn't afraid to talk to him outside of court. He had seen how Belk studiously avoided coming in contact with Church's family. Before getting up during recesses, he would sit at the defendant's table until he was sure they were all safely down the hall and on the escalator. But Chandler didn't play that kind of game. She was an up-front player.

Bosch guessed that this was what it was like when two boxers touched gloves before the bell. He changed the subject.

"I talked to Tommy Faraday out here the other day. He's Tommy Faraway now. I asked him what happened but he didn't say. He just said justice happened, whatever that means."

She blew a long stream of blue smoke out but didn't say anything for a while. Bosch looked at his watch. They had three minutes.

"You remember the Galton case?" she said. "It was a civil rights case, an excessive force."

Bosch thought about it. The name was familiar but it was difficult to place in the blend of excessive force cases he had heard or known about over the years.

"It was a dog case, right?"

"Yes. Andre Galton. This was before Rodney King, back when the wide majority of people in this city did not believe that their police engaged in horrible abuses as a matter of routine. Galton was black and driving with an expired tag through the hills of Studio City when a cop decided to pull him over.

"He had done nothing wrong, wasn't wanted, just had the tag one month overdue. But he ran. Great mystery of life, he ran. He got all the way up to Mulholland and ditched the car at one of those pull-offs where people look out at the view. Then he jumped out and climbed down the incline. There was nowhere to go down there but he wouldn't come back up and the cops wouldn't go down-too dangerous, they claimed at the trial."

Bosch remembered the story now but he let her tell it. Her indignation was so pure and stripped of lawyerly pose that he just wanted to hear her tell it.

"So they sent a dog down," she said. "Galton lost both t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and had permanent nerve damage to the right leg. He could walk but he had to kind of drag it behind him... ."

"Enter Tommy Faraday," Bosch prompted.

"Yeah, he took the case. It was dead bang. Galton had done nothing wrong but to run. The response of the police certainly did not meet the offense. Any jury would see this. And the city attorney's office knew this. In fact, I think it was Bulk's case. They offered half a million to settle and Faraday pa.s.sed. He thought he'd get a minimum three times that in trial, so he pa.s.sed.

"And like I said, this was in the old days. Civil rights lawyers call it BK, that's short for Before King. A jury listened to four days of evidence and found for the cops in thirty minutes. Galton got nothing but a dead leg and a dead d.i.c.k out of the whole thing. He came out here afterward and went to that hedge right there. He had hidden a gun-wrapped it in plastic and buried it there. He came over to the statue here and put the gun in his mouth. Faraday was coming through the door just then and saw it happen. Blood all over the statue, everywhere."

Bosch didn't say anything. He remembered the case very clearly now. He looked up at the City Hall tower and watched the gulls circling above it. He always wondered what drew them there. It was miles from the ocean but there were always seabirds on top of City Hall. Chandler kept talking.

"Two things I've always been curious about," she said. "One, why did Galton run? And, two, why did he hide the gun? And I think the answers are both the same. He had no faith in justice, in the system. No hope. He had done nothing wrong but he ran because he was a black man in a white neighborhood and he had heard the stories all his life about what white cops do to black men in that position. His lawyer told him he had a dead-bang case, but he brought a gun to the courthouse because he had heard all his life about what jurors decide when it's a black man's word against the cops."

Bosch looked at his watch. It was time to go in but he did not want to walk away from her.

"So that's why Tommy said justice happened," she said. "That was justice for Andre Galton. Faraday referred all his cases to other lawyers after that. I took a few. And he never set foot in a courtroom again."

She stubbed out what was left of her cigarette.

"End of story," she said.

"I'm sure the civil rights lawyers tell that one a lot," Bosch said. "And now you put me and Church into that, is that it? I'm like the guy who sent the dog down the hill after Galton?"

"There are degrees, Detective Bosch. Even if Church was the monster you claim, he didn't have to die. If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents? You see, that's why I have to do what I'm going to do to you in there. For the innocents."

"Well, good luck," he said.

He put his own cigarette out.

"I won't need it," she said.

Bosch followed her gaze to the statue above the spot where Galton had killed himself. Chandler looked at it as if the blood were still there.

"That's justice," she said, nodding at the statue. "She doesn't hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde."

16.

The courtroom seemed as silent as a dead man's heart while Bosch walked behind the plaintiff and defendant tables and in front of the jury box to get to the witness stand. After taking the oath he gave his full name and the clerk asked him to spell it.

"H-I-E-R-O-N-Y-M-U-S B-O-S-C-H."

Then the judge turned it over to Belk.