The Concrete Blonde (48 page)

“The story was supposed to run that Saturday, that's what it was scheduled for. But some dumb-ass editor held it, ran it Monday. I had mailed the letter before I looked at the paper that Saturday. That was my only mistake. But you're the one who made the big mistake.”

“Oh, yeah? What's that?”

“Coming here alone …”

Now it was Bosch who was silent.

“Why come here alone, Bosch? Is this how you did it with the Dollmaker? You went alone so you could kill him in cold blood?”

Bosch thought a moment.

“That's a good question.”

“Well, that was your second mistake. Thinking I was as unworthy an opponent as him. He was nothing. You killed him and therefore he deserved to die. But now it is you who deserve, to die.”

“Give me the gun, Bremmer.”

He laughed as if Bosch had asked a crazy question.

“You think—”

“How many were there? How many women are buried out there?”

Bremmer's eyes lit with pride.

“Enough. Enough to fulfill my special needs.”

“How many? Where are they?”

“You'll never know, Bosch. That will be your pain, your last pain. Never knowing. And losing.”

Bremmer raised the gun so that its muzzle pointed to Bosch's heart. He pulled the trigger.

Bosch watched his eyes as the metallic click sounded. Bremmer pulled the trigger again and again. The same result, the growing terror in his eyes.

Bosch reached into his sock and pulled the extra clip, the one that was loaded with fifteen XTP bullets. He wrapped his fist around the cartridge and in one swift motion came off the couch and swung his fist into Bremmer's jaw. The impact of the blow knocked the reporter backward in his chair. His weight made the chair crash backward and he spilled to the floor. He dropped the Smith and Bosch quickly gathered it up, ejected the empty clip and put in the live ammunition.

“Get up! Get the fuck up!”

Bremmer did as he was told.

“Are you going to kill me now? Is that it, another kill for the gunslinger?”

“That's up to you, Bremmer.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about how I want to blow your head off, but for me to do that you have to make the first move, Bremmer. Just like with the Dollmaker. It was his play. Now it's yours.”

“Look, Bosch, I don't want to die. Everything I said—I was just playing a game. You're making a mistake here. I just want to get it cleared up. Please, just take me to county and it will all get cleared up. Please.”

“Did they plead like that when you had the strap around their necks? Did they? Did you make them plead for their lives, or for their deaths? What about Chandler? At the end, did she beg you to kill her?”

“Take me to county. Arrest me and take me to county.”

“Then get against that wall, you fat fuck, and put your hands behind your back.”

Bremmer obeyed. Bosch dropped his cigarette into an ashtray on the table and followed Bremmer to the wall. When he closed the handcuffs over the reporter's wrists, Bremmer's shoulders dropped as he apparently felt safe. He started squirming his arms, chafing his wrists on the cuffs.

“See that?” he said. “You see that, Bosch? I'm making marks on my wrists. You kill me now, they'll see the marks and know it was an execution. I'm not some dumb fuck like Church that you can slaughter like an animal.”

“No, that's right, you know all the angles, don't you?”

“All of them. Now take me down to county. I'll be out before you wake up tomorrow. Know what all this is, what you've got? Just the wild speculation of a rogue cop. Even a federal jury agreed you go too far, Bosch. This won't work. You've got no evidence.”

Bosch turned him away from the wall so that their faces were no more than two feet apart, their beer breath mixing.

“You did it, didn't you? And you think you're going to walk, don't you?”

Bremmer stared at him and Bosch saw the gleam of pride in his eyes again. Locke had been right about him. He was gloating. And he couldn't shut up even though he knew his life might depend on it.

“Yes,” he said in a low, strange voice. “I did it. I'm the man. And, yes, I will walk. You wait and see. And when I'm out there you'll think of me every night for the rest of your life.”

Bosch nodded.

“But I never said that, Bosch. It will be your word against mine. A rogue cop—it will never get to court. They couldn't afford to put you on the stand against me.”

Bosch leaned closer to him and smiled.

“Then I suppose it's a good thing I taped it.”

Bosch walked over to the radiator and pulled the microrecorder from between two of the iron coils. He held it up on his palm for Bremmer to see. Bremmer's eyes became enraged. He had been tricked. He had been cheated.

“Bosch, that tape is inadmissible. That's entrapment. I have not been advised. I have not been advised!”

“I'm advising you of your rights now. You weren't under arrest until now. I wasn't going to advise you until I arrested you. You know police procedure.”

Bosch was smiling at him, digging it in.

“Let's go, Bremmer,” he said when he got tired of the victory.

32

It was an irony that Bosch savored Tuesday morning when he read Bremmer's above-the-fold story on the killing of Honey Chandler. He had booked the reporter into county jail on a no-bail hold shortly before midnight and had not alerted media relations. The word had not gotten out by the last deadline and now the paper had a front-page story about a murder that was written by the murderer. Bosch liked that. He smiled as he read it.

The one person Bosch had told was Irving. He had the com center patch him through on a phone line and in a half-hour-long conversation he told the assistant chief every step he had taken and described every building block of evidence that led to the arrest. Irving said nothing congratulatory, nor did he chastise Bosch for making the arrest alone. Either or both would come later, after it was seen whether the arrest would stick. Both men knew this.

At 9
A.M.
Bosch was seated in front of a filing deputy's desk at the district attorney's office in the downtown criminal courts building. For the second time in eight hours he carefully went over the details of what happened and then played the tape of his conversation with Bremmer. The deputy DA, whose name was Chap Newell, made notations on a yellow pad while listening to the tape. He often furrowed his brow or shook his head because the sound was not good. The voices in Bremmer's living room had bounced through the iron radiator coils and had a tinny echo on the tape. Still, the words that were most important were audible.

Bosch just watched without saying a word. Newell looked as if he could be no more than three years out of law school. Because the arrest had not made a splash in the papers or on TV yet, it had not received the attention of one of the senior attorneys in the filings division. It had gone to Newell on the routine rotation.

When the tape was done, Newell made a few more notes to look as if he knew what he was doing and then looked up at Bosch.

“You haven't said anything about what was in his house.”

“I didn't find anything on the quick search I made last night. There are others there now, with a warrant, doing a more thorough job.”

“Well, I hope they find something.”

“Why, you've got the case right there.”

“And it is a good case, Bosch. Really good work.”

“Coming from you, that means a lot.”

Newell looked at him and narrowed his eyes. He wasn't sure what to make of that.

“But, uh …”

“But what?”

“Well, there's no question we can file with this. There is a lot here.”

“But what?”

“I'm looking at it from a defense lawyer's perspective. What really do we have here? A lot of coincidences. He's left-handed, he smokes, he knew details about the Dollmaker. But those things are not hard evidence. They can apply to a lot of people.”

Bosch started lighting a cigarette.

“Please don't do—”

He exhaled and blew the smoke across the desk.

“—never mind.”

“What about the note and the postmark?”

“That's good but it is complicated and difficult to grasp. A good lawyer could make a jury see it as just another coincidence. He could confuse the issue, is what I'm trying to say.”

“What about the tape, Newell? We have him confessing on tape. What more do you—”

“But during the confession he disavows the confession.”

“Not at the end.”

“Look, I'm not planning on using the tape.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I'm talking about. He confessed before you advised him. It brings up the specter of entrapment.”

“There is no entrapment. He knew I was a cop and he knew his rights whether I advised him or not. He had a fucking gun on
me
. He freely made those statements. When he was formally arrested, I advised him.”

“But he searched you for a wire. That is a clear indication of his desire not to be taped. Plus, he dropped the bomb—his most damaging statement—after you cuffed him but before you advised him. That could be dicey.”

“You're going to use the tape.”

Newell looked at him a long time. A red blotchiness appeared on his young cheeks.

“You are not in a position to tell me what I'm going to use, Bosch. Besides, if that's all we go with it will probably be up to the state court of appeals if we use it, because if Bremmer has any kind of a lawyer at all that's where he'll take it. We'll win the question here in superior because half the judges on those benches worked in the DA's office at one time or another. But when it gets up to appeals or to the state supreme court in San Francisco, it's anybody's guess. Is that what you want? To wait a couple years and have it blown out then? Or do you want to get it done correctly right from the get-go?”

Bosch leaned forward and looked angrily at the young lawyer.

“Look, we're still working other angles. We're not done. There will be more evidence accumulated. But we have to charge this guy or let him go. We've got forty-eight hours from last night to file. But if we don't file right now with no bail, he'll grab a lawyer and get a bail hearing. The judge won't honor the no-bail arrest if you haven't even filed a single charge yet. So file on him now. We'll get all the evidence you need to back it up.”

Newell nodded as if he agreed but said, “Thing is, I like to have the whole package, everything we can get, when I file a case. That way we know how we are going to work the prosecution, right from the start. We know if we are going to go with a plea bargain or go balls to the wall.”

Bosch got up and walked to the office's open door. He stepped into the hall and looked at the plastic name plate affixed to the wall outside. Then he came back in.

“Bosch, what are you doing?”

“It's funny. I thought you were a filing deputy. I didn't know you were a trial deputy, too.”

Newell dropped his pencil on his pad. His face got redder, the blotches spreading to his forehead.

“Look, I am a filing deputy. But it is part of my responsibility to make sure we have the best case possible from the get-go. Every case that comes through that door I could file on, but that's not the point. The point is to have good, credible evidence and a lot of it. Cases that don't backfire. So I push, Bosch. I—”

“How old are you?”

“What?”

“How old?”

“Twenty-six. What's that got to—”

“Listen to me, you little prick. Don't you ever call me by my last name again. I was making cases like this before you cracked your first law book and I'll be making them long after you move your convertible Saab and your self-centered white-bread show to Century City. You can call me Detective or Detective Bosch, you can even call me Harry. But don't you ever call me just Bosch again, understand?”

Newell's mouth had dropped open.

“Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“Another thing, we're going to get more evidence and we're going to get it as soon as we can. But, in the meantime, you're going to file one charge of first-degree murder on Bremmer with a no-bail hold because we are going to make sure—from the get-go, Mr. Newell—that this scumbag never sees the light of day again.

“Then, when we have more evidence, if you are still attached to this case, you will file multiple counts under theories of linkage between the deaths. At no time will you worry about the so-called package you will hand off to the trial attorney. The trial attorney will make those decisions. Because we both know that you are really just a clerk, a clerk who files what is brought to him. If you knew enough to even sit in court next to a trial attorney you would not be here. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” he said quickly.

“No, what?”

“No ques—No, Detective Bosch.”

Bosch went back to Irving's conference room and used the rest of the morning to work up an application for a search warrant to collect hair, blood and saliva specimens along with a dental mold from Bremmer.

Before taking it to the courthouse, he attended a brief meeting of the task force where they all reported on their respective assignments.

Edgar said he had been to Sybil Brand and had shown Georgia Stern, who was still being held there, a photo of Bremmer but she could not identify him as her attacker. She could not rule him out, either.

Sheehan said he and Opelt had shown the mug shot of Bremmer to the manager of the storage facility at Bing's and the man said Bremmer might have been one of the renters of the storage rooms two years earlier but he couldn't be sure. He said it was too long ago to remember well enough to send a man to the gas chamber.

“The guy's a wimp,” Sheehan said. “My feeling was he recognized Bremmer but was too scared to stick it in all the way. We're going to hit him again tomorrow.”

Rollenberger called the presidents up on the rover and they reported from Bremmer's house that there was nothing yet. No tapes, no bodies, nothing.

“I say we go for a warrant to dig up the yard, under the foundation,” Nixon, said.

“We might go to that,” Rollenberger radioed back. “Meantime, keep at it.”