The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

making change because you will be sending a clear signal, a message to every police officer in this city. From the chief and the administrators inside Parker Center two blocks from here to every rookie patrol officer on the street, the message will be that we do not want you to act this way. We will not accept it. Now, if you return such a verdict you must also set monetary damages. This is not a complicated task. The complicated part is the first part, deciding whether Detective Bosch was right or wrong. The damages can be anything, from one dollar to one million dollars or more. It doesn’t matter. What is important is the message. For with the message, you will bring justice for Norman Church. You will bring justice to his family.”
    Bosch looked around behind himself and saw Bremmer in the gallery with the other reporters. Bremmer smiled slyly and Bosch turned back around. The reporter had been right on the money about Money.
    Chandler walked back to the plaintiff’s table, picked up a book and took it back to the lectern. It was old and without a dust jacket, its green cloth binding cracking. Bosch thought he could see a mark, probably a library stamp, on the top edge of its pages.
    “In closing now,” she said, “I would like to address a concern you might have. I know it is one I might have if I were in your place. And that is, how is it that we have come to have men like Detective Bosch as our police? Well, I don’t think we can hope to answer that and it is not at point in this case. But if you recall, I quoted to you the philosopher Nietzsche at the beginning of the week. I read his words about the black place he called the abyss. To paraphrase him, he said we must take care that whoever fights monsters for us does not also become a monster. In today’s society it is not hard to accept that there are monsters out there, many of them. And so it is not hard, then, to believe that a police officer could become a monster himself.
    “After we finished here yesterday, I spent the evening at the library.”
    She glanced over at Bosch as she said this, flaunting the lie. He stared back at her and refused the impulse to look away.
    “And I’d like to finish by reading something I found that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the same subject we are dealing with today. That chasm of darkness where it can be easy for a person to cross over to the wrong side. In his book
The Marble Faun,
Hawthorne wrote, ‘The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us... everywhere.’
    “Ladies and gentlemen, be careful in your deliberations and be true to yourselves. Thank you.”
    It was so quiet that Bosch could hear her heels on the rug as she walked back to her seat.
    “Folks,” Judge Keyes said, “we’re gonna take a fifteen minute break and then Mr. Belk gets his turn.”
    As they were standing for the jury, Belk whispered, “I can’t believe she used the word orifice in her closing argument.”
    Bosch looked at him. Belk seemed gleeful but Bosch recognized that he was just latching on to something, anything, so that he could pump himself up and get ready for his own turn behind the lectern. For Bosch knew that whatever words Chandler had used, she had been awfully good. Appraising the sweating fat man next to him, he felt not one bit of confidence.
    Bosch went out to the justice statue and smoked two cigarettes during the break but Honey Chandler never came out. Tommy Faraway swung by, however, and clicked his tongue approvingly when he found the nearly whole cigarette she had put in the ash can before. He moved on without saying anything else. It occurred to Bosch that he had never seen Tommy Faraway smoke one of the stubs he culled from the sand.

    * * *

    Belk surprised Bosch with his closing. It wasn’t half bad. It was just that he wasn’t in the same league as Chandler. His closing was more a reaction to Chandler’s than a stand-alone treatise on Bosch’s innocence and the unfairness of the accusations against him. He said things like, “In all of Ms. Chandler’s talk about the two possible findings you can come up with, she completely forgot about a third, that being that Detective Bosch acted properly and wisely. Correctly.”
    It scored points for the defense but it was also a backhanded confirmation by the defense that there were two possible findings for the plaintiff. Belk did not see this but Bosch did. The assistant city attorney was giving the jury