timed his approach so that he was at the door just as she opened it.
“Have you seen Tommy Cerrone around?” he asked as he passed her.
She was too busy with the children to answer. Bosch walked into the courtyard to get his bearings and to look for a door with a six on it-Cerrone’s apartment. There was graffiti on the concrete floor of the courtyard, a gang insignia Bosch couldn’t make out. He found number six on the first floor toward the back. There was a rusted-out hibachi grill on the ground next to the door. There was also a child’s bike with training wheels parked under the front window.
The bike didn’t fit. Bosch tried to look in but the curtains were drawn, leaving only a three-inch band of darkness he could not see beyond. He knocked on the door and as was his practice, stepped to the side. A Mexican woman with what looked like an eight-month pregnancy beneath her faded pink bathrobe answered the door. Behind the small woman Bosch could see a young boy sitting on the living room floor in front of a black-and- white TV tuned to a Spanish language channel.
The woman stared at him with frightened eyes. She seemed to close in on herself, as if to get smaller before him. Her arms moved up from her side and closed over her swollen belly.
She shook her head no and began to close the door. Bosch put his hand out to stop it. Struggling with his Spanish he asked if she knew Cerrone and where he was. She said he only came once a week to collect the mail and the rent. She moved back a step and gestured to the card table where there was a small stack of mail. Bosch could see an American Express bill on top. Gold Card.
She looked down from his eyes and her hesitation told him she had a number.
She told him to wait and she left the doorway. While she was gone the boy sitting ten feet inside the door turned from the TV-Bosch could see it was some kind of game show-and looked at him. Bosch felt uncomfortable. He looked away, into the courtyard. When he looked back the boy was smiling. He had his hand up and was pointing a finger at Bosch. He made a shooting sound and giggled. Then the mother was back at the door with a piece of paper. There was a local phone number on it, that was all.
Bosch copied it down in a small notebook he carried and then told her he would take the mail. The woman turned and looked at the card table as if the answer to what she should do was sitting on it with the mail. Bosch told her it would be okay and she finally lifted the stack and handed it to him. The frightened look was in her eyes again.
He stepped back and was going to walk away when he stopped and looked back at her. He asked how much the rent was and she told him it was one hundred dollars a week. Bosch nodded and walked away.
Out on the street he walked down to a pay phone that was in front of the next apartment complex. He called the downtown communications center, gave the operator the phone number he had just gotten and said he needed an address. While he waited he thought about the pregnant woman and wondered why she stayed. Could things be worse back in the Mexican town she came from? For some, he knew, the journey here was so difficult that returning was out of the question.
As he was flipping through Cerrone’s mail, one of the hitchhikers walked up to him. She wore an orange tank top over her surgically augmented breasts. Her cutoff jeans were cut so high above the thighs that the white pockets hung out below. In one of the pockets he could see the distinctive shape of a condom package. She had the gaunt, tired look of a strawberry-a woman who would do anything, anytime, anywhere to keep crack in her pipe. Factoring in her deteriorated appearance, he put her age at no more than twenty. To Bosch’s surprise, she said, “Hey, darling, looking for a date?”
He smiled and said, “You’re going to have to be more careful than that, you want to stay out of the cage.”
“Oh, shit,” she said and turned to walk away.
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Don’t I know you? Yeah, I know you. It’s… what’s your name, girl?”
“Look, man, I’m not talking to you and I’m not blowing you, so I gotta go.”
“Wait. Wait. I don’t want anything. I just thought, you know, that we’d met. Aren’t you one of Tommy Cerrone’s girls? Yeah, that’s where I met you.”
The name put a slight stutter in her step. Bosch let the phone dangle by its cord and caught up to her. She stopped.
“Look, I’m not with Tommy anymore, okay? I gotta go to work.”
She turned from him and put her thumb out as a wave of southbound traffic started by.
“Wait a minute, just tell me something. Tell me where Tommy is these days. I need to get with him on something.”
“On what? I don’t know where he is.”
“A girl. You remember Becky? Couple years ago. Blonde, liked red lipstick, had a set like yours. She mighta used the name Maggie. I want to find her and she was working for Tom. You remember her?”
“I wasn’t even around then. And I haven’t seen Tommy in four months. And you are full of shit.”
She walked off and Bosch called after her, “Twenty bucks.”
She stopped and came back.
“For what?”
“An address. I’m not bullshitting. I want to talk to him.”
“Well, give it.”
He took the money out of his wallet and gave it to her. It occurred to him that Van Nuys Vice might be watching him from somewhere around here and wondering why he was giving a hooker a twenty.
“Try the Grandview,” she said. “I don’t know the number or anything but it’s on the top floor. You can’t tell’m I sent ya. He’ll fuck me up.”
She walked away putting the money in one of the flapping pockets. He didn’t have to ask her where the Grandview was. He watched her cut in between two apartment buildings and disappear, probably going to get a rock. He wondered if she had told the truth and why he could find it in himself to give her money but not the woman in apartment six. The police operator had hung up by the time he got back to the pay phone.
Bosch redialed and asked for her and she gave him the address that went with the phone number he’d gotten. Suite P-1, the Grandview Apartments, on Sepulveda in Sherman Oaks. He had just wasted twenty bucks on crack cocaine. He hung up.
In the car, he finished looking through the mail. Half of it was junk mail, the rest credit card bills and mailers from Republican candidates. There was also a postcard invitation to an Adult Film Performers Guild awards banquet in Reseda the following week.
Bosch opened the American Express bill. The illegality of this did not concern him in the least. Cerrone was a criminal who was lying to his probation officer. There would be no complaint from him. The pimp owed American Express $1855.05 this month. The bill was two pages, and Bosch noticed two billings for airline flights to Las Vegas and three billings from Victoria’s Secret. Bosch was familiar with Victoria’s Secret, having studied the mail-order lingerie catalog at Sylvia’s on occasion. In one month, Cerrone had ordered nearly $400 in lingerie by mail. The money paid by the poor woman who rented the apartment Cerrone was using as a front for a probation address was basically subsidizing the lingerie bills of Cerrone’s whores. It angered Bosch, but it gave him an idea.
The Grandview Apartments were the ultimate California ideal. Built alongside a shopping mall, the building afforded its tenants the ability to walk directly from their apartment into the mall, thereby cutting out
