The other phone rang and Edgar picked it up.
“I don’t know names, man,” Bosch’s caller said. “They all use fake ones anyway.”
“What was the name of the tape?”
“Can’t remember. I was, uh, intoxicated when I saw it. Like I said, it was the only time.”
“Look, I’m not taking your confession. You got anything else?”
“No, smartass, I don’t.”
“Who is this?”
“I don’t have to say.”
“Look, we’re trying to find a killer here. What was the name of the place you rented it?”
“I’m not telling you, you might be able to get my name from them. Doesn’t matter, they have those tapes all over, every adult place.”
“How would you know if you only rented one once?”
The caller hung up.
Bosch stayed another hour. By the end they had five calls saying the painted face belonged to a porno starlet. Only one of the callers said her name was Maggie, the other four men saying they didn’t pay much attention to names. There was one call naming her Becky of Studio City, and one saying she was a stripper who had worked for a while at the Booby Trap on La Brea. One man who called said the face belonged to his missing wife, but Bosch learned through further questioning that she had been missing only two months. The concrete blonde had been dead too long. The hope and desperation in the caller’s voice seemed genuine to Bosch, and he didn’t know whether he was telling the man good news by explaining that it could not be his wife or bad news because he was left in the void again.
There were three callers who gave vague descriptions of a woman they thought might be the concrete blonde, but after a few questions into each conversation Bosch and Edgar identified the callers as cop geeks, people who got a thrill from talking to the police.
The most unusual call was from a Beverly Hills psychic who mentioned that she had placed her hand on the TV screen while it showed the face and felt the dead woman’s spirit cry out to her.
“What did it cry?” Bosch asked patiently.
“Praise.”
“Praise for what?”
“Jesus our savior, I would assume but I don’t know. That was all I received. I might receive more if I could touch the actual plaster cast of the-”
“Well, did this spirit that was giving praise identify itself? See, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re more interested in a name than cries of praise.”
“Someday you will believe but by then you will be lost.”
She hung up on him.
At seven-thirty Bosch told Edgar he was splitting.
“How ’bout you? You going to hang out for the eleven o’clock news?”
“Yeah, I’ll be here but I can handle it. If I get a lot of calls I’ll pull one of the dipshits off the desk.”
Stock that OT, Bosch thought.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Well, aside from all the calls saying it’s your mother, this porno thing seems to be the way to go.”
“Leave my blessed mother out of it. How you think I can check the porno?”
“Administrative Vice. Guy over there, a detective-three, name of Ray Mora, he works porno. He’s the best. He also was on the Dollmaker task force. Call him and see if he can come take a look at the face. He might’ve known her. Tell him we had one call saying her name was Maggie.”
“Will do. It fits with the Dollmaker, doesn’t it? The porno, I mean.”
“Yeah, it fits.” He thought about this a moment, then added, “Two of the other victims were in the business. The one that got away from him was, too.”
“The lucky one-she still in it?”
“Last I heard. But she might be dead now for all I know.”
“Still doesn’t mean anything, Harry.”
“What?”
“The porno. Still doesn’t mean it was the Dollmaker. The real one, I mean.”
Bosch just nodded. He had an idea about something to do on his way home. He went out to his Caprice and got the Polaroid camera out of the trunk. In the squad room, he took two shots of the face in the box and put them in his coat pocket after they developed.
Edgar watched this and asked, “What’re you going to do?”
“Might stop at that adult supermarket in the Valley on my way up to Sylvia’s.”
“Don’t get caught in one of those little rooms with your dick out.”
“Thanks for the tip. Let me know what Mora says.”
Bosch worked his way on surface streets up to the Hollywood Freeway. He went north and then exited on Lankershim, which took him into North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley. He had all four windows down and the air was cool as it buffeted him from all directions. He smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes into the wind. There was some techno-funk jazz on KAJZ so he turned the radio off and just drove.
The Valley was the city’s bedroom community in more ways than the obvious. It was also home to the nation’s pornography industry. The commercial-industrial districts of Van Nuys, Canoga Park, Northridge and Chatsworth housed hundreds of porno production outfits, distributors and warehouses. Modeling agencies in Sherman Oaks provided ninety percent of the women and men who performed in front of the cameras. And, consequently, the Valley was also one of the largest retail outlets for the material. It was made here, it was sold here-through video mail-order businesses also nestled in the warehouses with the production outfits, and places like X Marks the Spot on Lankershim Boulevard.
Bosch pulled into the lot in front of the huge store and appraised it for a few moments. It had formerly been a Pic N Pay supermarket, but the front plate-glass windows had been walled up. Under the red neon X Marks the Spot sign, the front wall was whitewashed and painted with black figures of naked and overly buxom female figures, like the metallic silhouettes Bosch saw all the time on the mudflaps of trucks on the freeway. The men who put those on their trucks were probably the same guys this place catered to, Bosch figured.
X Marks the Spot was owned by a man named Harold Barnes, who was a front for the Chicago Outfit. It grossed more than a million dollars a year-on the books. Probably another one under the counter. Bosch knew all of this from Mora of Ad-Vice, whom he had partnered with on some nights while they both were on the task force four years earlier.
Bosch watched a man of about twenty-five get out of his Toyota, walk quickly to the solid wood front door, and slip in like a secret agent. He followed. The front half of the former supermarket was dedicated to retail-the sale and rental of videos, magazines and other assorted adult-oriented and mostly rubber products. The rear was split between private “encounter” rooms and private video booths. The entry to this area was through a curtained doorway. Bosch could hear heavy-metal rock music coming from back there mixed with the canned- sounding cries of phony passion coming from the video booths.
To his left was a glass counter with two men behind it. One was a big man, there to keep the peace; the other was smaller, older, there to take the money. Bosch knew by the way they looked at him and the skin stretched tight around their eyes that they had made him as soon as he had come in. He walked over and put one of the Polaroids on the counter.
“I am trying to ID her. Heard she worked in video, do you recognize her?”
The small guy leaned forward and looked while the other guy didn’t move.
“Looks like a fucking cake, man,” the small guy said. “I don’t know any cakes. I eat
