The Concrete Blonde (14 page)

When he climbed onto the bed next to her she ran her fingers over his Vietnam tattoo and the scars a bullet had left on his right shoulder a few years earlier. She traced the surgery zipper the way she did every time they were together here.

“I love you, Harry,” she said.

He rolled onto her and kissed her deeply, letting her taste of red wine and the feel of her warm skin take him away from worry and the images of violent ends. He was in the temple of home, he thought but did not say. I love you, he thought but did not say.

9

For everything that had gone well for Bosch on Tuesday, the following morning provided a fresh undoing. The first disaster occurred in Judge Keyes's chambers, where he convened lawyers and clients after studying the note from the alleged Dollmaker in private for a half hour. His private reading had come after Belk had argued for an hour against the inclusion of the note in the trial.

“I have read the note and considered the arguments,” he said. “I cannot see how this letter, note, poem, whatever, can possibly be withheld from this jury. It is so on point to the thrust of Ms. Chandler's case that it is the point. I'm not making any judgment on whether it's for real or from some crackpot, that will be for the jury to figure out. If they can. But because the investigation is still underway is no reason to withhold this. I am granting the subpoena and, Ms. Chandler, you can introduce this at the appropriate time, provided you've put down the proper foundation. No pun intended. Mr. Belk, your exception to this ruling will be noted for the record.”

“Your Honor?” Belk tried.

“No, we'll have no more argument on it. Let's move on out to court.”

“Your Honor! We don't know who wrote this. How can you allow it into evidence when we don't have the slightest idea where it came from or who sent it?”

“I know the ruling is a disappointment, so I'm allowing you some leeway as far as not coming down on you for that showing of your apparent disrespect for the wishes of this court. I said no more argument, Mr. Belk, so I'll go over this only one time. The fact that this note of unknown origin led directly to the discovery of a body bearing all the similarities of a Dollmaker victim is in itself a verification of some authenticity. This is no prank, Mr. Belk. No joke. There is something here. And the jury is going to see it. Let's go. Everybody out.”

Court had no sooner been called into session than the next debacle occurred. Belk, perhaps dazed by his defeat in chambers, waltzed into a trap Chandler had deftly set for him.

Her first witness of the day was a man named Wieczorek, who testified that he knew Norman Church quite well and was sure he had not committed the eleven murders attributed to him. Wieczorek and Church had worked together for twelve years in the design lab, he said. Wieczorek was in his fifties, with white hair trimmed so short his pink scalp showed through.

“What makes you so confident in your belief that Norman was not a killer?” Chandler asked.

“Well, for one thing, I know for a fact he didn't kill one of those girls, the eleventh, because he was with me the whole time she was getting … whatever. He was with me. Then the police kill him and pin eleven murders on him. Well, I figure, if I know he didn't kill one of those girls, then they are probably lying about the rest. The whole thing is a cover-up for them killing—”

“Thank you, Mr. Wieczorek,” Chandler said.

“Just saying what I think.”

Belk stood and objected anyway, going to the lectern and whining that the entire answer was speculation. The judge agreed but the damage was done. Belk strode back to his chair and Bosch watched him leaf through a thick transcript of a deposition taken of Wieczorek a few months earlier.

Chandler asked a few more questions about where the witness and Church were on the night the eleventh victim was murdered and Wieczorek answered that they were at his own apartment with seven other men holding a bachelor party for a fellow employee from the lab.

“How long was Norman Church at your apartment?”

“The whole time of the party. I'd say from nine o'clock on. We finished up after two in the morning. The police said that girl, the eleventh one, went to some hotel at one and got herself killed. Norman was with me at one o'clock in the morning.”

“Could he have slipped away for an hour or so without you realizing it?”

“No way. You're in a room with eight guys and you know if one mysteriously disappears for a half hour.”

Chandler thanked him and sat down. Belk leaned to Bosch and whispered, “I wonder what he's going to do with the new asshole I'm going to tear him.”

He got up armed with the deposition transcript and lumbered to the lectern as if he were lugging an elephant rifle. Wieczorek, who wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes, watched him suspiciously.

“Mr. Wieczorek, do you remember me? Remember the deposition I took of you a few months back?”

Belk held the transcript up, as a reminder.

“I remember you,” Wieczorek said.

“Ninety-five pages, Mr. Wieczorek. Nowhere in this transcript is there any mention of any bachelor party. Why is that?”

“I guess because you didn't ask.”

“But you didn't bring it up, did you? The police are saying your best buddy murdered eleven women, you supposedly know that's a lie, but you don't say a thing, is that right?”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Care to tell us why?”

“Far as I was concerned, you were part of it. I only answered what I was asked. I wasn't volunteering shi—uh, nothing.”

“Let me ask you, did you ever tell the police this? Back then, back when Church was killed and all the headlines said he killed eleven women? Ever pick up the phone one time and tell them they got the wrong guy?”

“No. At the time I didn't know. It was only when I read a book that came out on the case a couple years ago and there were details in there about when that last girl got killed. Then I knew he was with me during that whole time. I called the police and asked for the task force and they said it was disbanded long ago. I left a message for that fellow the book said was in charge, Lloyd, I think it was, and he never called me.”

Belk exhaled into the lectern's microphone, creating a loud sigh that indicated his weariness in dealing with this moron.

“So, if I can recap, you are telling this jury that two years after the murders, when this book came out, you read it and immediately realized you had an ironclad alibi for your dead friend. Am I missing anything, Mr. Wieczorek?”

“Uh, just the part about suddenly realizing. It wasn't sudden.”

“Then what was it?”

“Well, when I read the date—September 28—it set me to thinking and I just remembered that the bachelor party was on September 28 that year and Norman was there at my house all that time. So then I verified it and called Norman's wife to tell her he wasn't what they said he was.”

“You verified it? With the others at the party?”

“No, didn't have to.”

“Then how, Mr. Wieczorek?” Belk asked in an exasperated tone.

“I looked at the video I had of that night. It had the date and time down in the corner of the frame.”

Bosch saw Belk's face turn a lighter shade of pale. The lawyer looked at the judge, then down at his pad, then back up at the judge. Bosch felt his heart sink. Belk had broken the same cardinal rule Chandler had broken the day before. He had asked a question for which he didn't already know the answer.

It didn't take a lawyer to know that since it was Belk who had drawn out mention of the videotape, Chandler was now free to explore it, to move to introduce the videotape as evidence. It had been a clever trap. Because it was new evidence from Wieczorek, not contained in his deposition, Chandler would have had to inform Belk earlier if she planned to draw it out on direct examination. Instead, she had skillfully allowed Belk to blunder in and draw it out. He now stood there defenseless, hearing it for the first time along with the jurors.

“Nothing further,” Belk said and returned to his seat with his head down. He immediately pulled one of the law books on the table onto his lap and began paging through it.

Chandler went to the lectern for redirect.

“Mr. Wieczorek, this tape you mentioned to Mr. Belk, do you still have it?”

“Sure, brought it with me.”

Chandler then moved to have the tape shown to the jury. Judge Keyes looked at Belk, who lumbered slowly to the lectern.

“Your Honor,” Belk managed to say, “can defense have a ten-minute recess to research case law?”

The judge glanced at the clock.

“It's a little early, isn't it, Mr. Belk? We just started.”

“Your Honor,” Chandler said. “The plaintiff has no objection. I'll need time to set up the video equipment.”

“Very well,” the judge said. “Ten minutes for counsel. The jury can take a fifteen-minute break and then report back to the assembly room.”

While they stood for the jury, Belk was flipping pages in the heavy law book. And when it was time to sit down, Bosch pulled his chair close to his lawyer's.

“Not now,” Belk said. “I've got ten minutes.”

“You fucked up.”

“No, we fucked up. We are a team. Remember that.”

Bosch left his teammate there while he went out to smoke a cigarette. When he got to the statue, Chandler was already there. He lit a smoke anyway and kept his distance. She looked at him and smirked. Bosch spoke.

“You tricked him, didn't you?”

“Tricked him with the truth.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She put a half-smoked cigarette in the sand of the ash can and said, “I better get back in there and get the equipment set up.”

She smirked again. Bosch wondered if she was that good or it was Belk who was that bad.

Belk lost his half-hour argument to keep the tape from being introduced. He said that since it was not brought up during deposition, it was new evidence which the plaintiff could not submit at so late a date. Judge Keyes denied his claim, pointing out what everyone knew, that it had been Belk who had brought the tape to light.

After the jury was brought back in, Chandler asked Wieczorek several questions about the tape and where it had been for the last four years. After Judge Keyes dismissed one more objection from Belk, she rolled a TV/VCR combination to a position in front of the jury box and put in the tape, which Wieczorek had retrieved from a friend sitting in the gallery. Bosch and Belk had to stand up and move into the gallery seats to get a view of the TV screen.

As he made the move, Harry saw Bremmer from the
Times
sitting in one of the back rows. He gave a small nod to Bosch. Harry wondered if he was there to cover the trial or because he was subpoenaed.

The tape was long and boring but was not continuous.

It was stopped and started during the evening of the bachelor party but the digital readout in the lower right corner kept the time and date. If it was correct, it was true that Church had an alibi for the last killing attributed to him.

It was dizzying for Bosch to watch. There was Church, no toupee, bald as a baby, drinking beer and laughing with his friends. The man Bosch had killed, toasting a friend's marriage, looking like the All-American nerd that Bosch knew he had not been.

The tape lasted ninety minutes, climaxing with a visit from a telegram stripper who sang a song to the groom-to-be, dropping lingerie on his head as she removed each piece. In the video, Church seemed embarrassed to be seeing this, his eye more on the groom than on the woman.

Bosch pulled his eyes from the screen to watch the jury and he could see the tape was devastating to his defense. He looked away.

After the tape was finished, Chandler had a few more questions for Wieczorek. They were questions Belk would have asked but she was beating him to the punch.

“How is the date and time set on the video frame?”

“Well, when you buy it, you set it. Then the battery keeps it going. Never had to fiddle with it after I bought it.”

“But if you wanted to, you could put in any date you wanted, anytime you wanted, correct?”

“I s' pose.”

“So, say you were going to take a video of a friend to be used later as an alibi, could you set the date back, say a year, and then take the video?”

“Sure.”

“Could you put a date on an already existing video?”

“No. You can't superimpose a date over an existing video. Doesn't work that way.”

“So, in this case, how could you do it? How could you make a phony alibi for Norman Church?”

Belk stood up and objected on the grounds that Wieczorek's answer would be speculation, but Judge Keyes overruled him, saying the witness had expertise with his own camera.

“Well, you couldn't do that now ’cause Norman's dead,” Wieczorek said.

“So what you are saying is that in order to make a phony tape you would have to have conspired with Mr. Church to make it before he was killed by Mr. Bosch, correct?”

“Yes. We'd have to have known that somewhere down the line he'd need this tape and he'd have to've told me what date to set it on and so on and so forth. It's all pretty farfetched, especially because you can pull the newspapers from that year and find the wedding announcement that says my friend got married September thirtieth. That'll show you that his bachelor party had to have been the twenty-eighth or thereabouts. It's not a phony.”

Judge Keyes agreed with Belk's objection to the last sentence as being nonresponsive to the question and told the jury to disregard it. Bosch knew they didn't need to have heard it. They all knew the tape wasn't a phony. He did, too. He felt clammy and sick. Something had gone wrong but he didn't know what. He wanted to get up and walk out but he knew that to do so would be an admission of guilt so loud the walls would shake as if during an earthquake.

“One last question,” Chandler said. Her face had become flushed as she rode this one to victory. “Did you ever know Norman Church to wear a hairpiece of any kind?”

“Never. I knew him a lot of years and I never saw or heard of such a thing.”

Judge Keyes turned the witness back over to Belk, who lumbered to the lectern without his yellow pad. He was apparently too flustered by this turnabout to remember to say, “Just a few questions.” Instead he got right to his meager damage-control effort.