The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

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 testicles 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 passed. He thought he’d get a minimum three times that in trial, so he passed.
    “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 dick 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