The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

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.’“
    She looked up.
    “She goes on but that was the part I wanted to read. She’s only a tenth-grader taking advanced classes but she seemed to grasp something so strong there.”
    He admired her lack of cynicism. Bosch’s first thought was that the kid had plagiarized-where’d she get a word like halcyon? But Sylvia saw past that. She saw the beauty in things. He saw the darkness.
    “It’s good,” he said.
    “She’s African-American. She comes up on the bus. She’s one of the smartest I have and I worry about her on the bus. She said the trip is seventy-five minutes each way and that is the time when she reads the