The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

squad room. If he ever closed either or both, the troops outside knew something was up.
    “Well, now that you mention it, I think he did have the door closed a little while. What is it?”
    “Bremmer I’m not worried about. But somebody was talking to Money Chandler. In court this morning she knew I had been called out to the scene yesterday. That wasn’t in the
Times
. Somebody told her.”
    Edgar was silent a moment before replying.
    “Yeah, but why would Pounds talk to her?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe Bremmer. He could have told her, even though it wasn’t in his story.”
    “The story says she couldn’t be reached for comment. It’s got to be somebody else. A leak. Probably the same person talked to Bremmer and Chandler. Somebody who wants to fuck me up.”
    Edgar didn’t say anything and Bosch let it go for now.
    “I better head back to court.”
    “Hey, how’d Lloyd do? I heard on KFWB he was the first wit.”
    “He did about as expected.”
    “Shit. Who’s next?”
    “I don’t know. She has Irving and Locke, the shrink, on subpoena. My guess is, it will be Irving. He’ll pick up where Lloyd left off.”
    “Well, good luck. By the way, if you’re looking for something to do. This press gig I’m holding will hit the TV news tonight. I’ll be here waiting by the phones. If you want to answer a few, I could use the help.”
    Bosch thought briefly about his plan for dinner with Sylvia. She’d understand.
    “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

    * * *

    The afternoon testimony was largely uneventful. Chandler’s strategy, it seemed to Bosch, was to build a two-part question into the jury’s eventual deliberation, giving her clients two shots at the prize. One would be the wrong-man theory, which held that Bosch had flat-out killed an innocent man. The second question would be the use of force. Even if the jury determined that Norman Church, family man, was the Dollmaker, serial killer, they would have to decide whether Bosch’s actions were appropriate.
    Chandler called her client, Deborah Church, to the witness stand right after lunch. She gave a tearful account of a wonderful life with a wonderful husband who fawned over everybody; his daughters, his wife, his mother and mother-in-law. No misogynistic aberrations here. No sign of childhood abuse. The widow held a box of Kleenex in her hand as she testified, going to a new tissue every other question.
    She wore the traditional black dress of a widow. Bosch remembered how appealing Sylvia had been when he saw her at her husband’s funeral dressed in black. Deborah Church looked downright scary. It was as if she reveled in her role here. The widow of the fallen innocent. The real victim. Chandler had coached her well.
    It was a good show, but it was too good to be true and Chandler knew it. Rather than leave the bad things to be drawn out on cross-examination, she finally got around to asking Deborah Church how, her marriage being so wonderful, her husband was in that garage apartment-which was rented under an alias-when Bosch kicked the door open.
    “We had been having some difficulty.” She stopped to dab an eye with a tissue. “Norman was going through a lot of stress-he had a lot of responsibility in the aircraft design department. He needed to expend it and so he took the apartment. He said it was to be alone. To think. I didn’t know about this woman he brought there. I think it was probably his first time doing something like that. He was a naive man. I think she saw this. She took his money and then set him up by calling the police on him and giving the crazy story that he was the Dollmaker. There was a reward, you know.”
    Bosch wrote a note on a pad he kept in front of him and slid it over to Belk, who read it and then jotted something down on his own pad.
    “What about all of the makeup found there, Mrs. Church?” Chandler asked. “Can you explain that?”
    “All I know is that I would have known if my husband was that monster. I would have known. If there was makeup found there, it was put there by somebody else. Maybe after he was already dead.”
    Bosch believed he could feel the eyes of the courtroom burning into him as the widow accused him of planting evidence after murdering her husband.
    After that, Chandler moved her questioning on to safer topics like Norman Church’s relationship with his daughters and then ended her direct examination with a weeper.
    “Did he love his daughters?”
    “Very much so,” Mrs.