“Anyway, she called the task force-this was right before you nailed Church-and said there was a Tom that’d been making the rounds of the sets up in the Valley. You know, watching the action, hanging out with the producers, but he wasn’t like the other Toms.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Toms?”
“That’s short for Peeping Tom. That’s what the girls call these guys who hang out on the sets. Usually they’re friendly with the producer or they’ve kicked in part of the budget. They throw a grand to the producer and he lets the guy hang around and watch ’ em shoot. It ’s pretty common. These shoots draw a lot of people for whom seeing it on video isn’t enough. They want to be right up there and see it live.”
“All right, so what about this guy?”
“Well, Harry, look, there’s really only one reason these people hang around the sets. They’re hitting on the chicks between takes. I mean, these guys wanna get laid. Or they want to make flicks themselves. They want to break in. And that was the thing with this guy. He wasn’t hitting on anybody. He was just hanging around. She-this is Gallery-said she never saw this dude make the move on anybody. He talked to some of the girls but never left with any of them.”
“And that’s what made him weird? He didn’t want to get laid?”
Mora raised his hands and shrugged like he knew it sounded weak.
“Yeah, basically. But listen, Gallery worked shoots with both Heather Cumhither and Holly Lere, the two Dollmaker victims, and she said it was on those shoots that she saw this Tom. That’s why she called.”
Now the story had Bosch’s attention. But he didn’t know what to make of it. Mora could be simply trying to deflect attention, to send Bosch down the wrong trail.
“She didn’t have a name on the guy?”
“No, that was the problem. That was why I didn’t jump all over it. I had a backlog of tips I was assigned and she calls in with this one without a name. I would have gotten to it eventually, but a few days later you put Church’s dick in the dirt and that was that.”
“You let it go.”
“Yeah, dropped it like a bag of shit.”
Bosch waited. He knew Mora would go on. He had more to say. There had to be more.
“So the thing is, when I looked up the card on Magna Cum Loudly for you yesterday, I recognized some of her early titles. She worked with Gallery in some of her early work. That’s what made me remember the tip. So just stringing along on a hunch, I try to look Gallery up, ask around with some people in the business I know, and it turns out Gallery dropped out of the scene three years ago. Just like that. I mean, I know a top producer with the Adult Film Association and he told me she dropped out right in the middle of one of his shoots. Never said a word to anyone. And no one ever heard from her again. The producer, he remembered it pretty clearly ’cause it cost him a lot of money to reshoot the flick. There would’ve been no continuity if he just dumped in another actress to take her place.”
Bosch was surprised that continuity was even a factor in such films. He and Mora were both silent a moment, thinking about the story, before Bosch finally spoke.
“So, you’re thinking she might be in the ground somewhere? Gallery, I’m talking about. In concrete like the one we found this week.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. People in the industry-I mean, they are not your mainstream people, so there are plenty of disappearing acts. I remember this one broad, she dropped out, next thing I know I see her in
“Ray, I don’t give-”
“Okay, okay, anyway the point is, these chicks drop in and out of the biz all the time. Not unusual. They aren’t the smartest people in the first place. They just get it in their mind to do something else. Maybe they meet a guy who they think is going to keep them in cocaine and caviar, be their sugar daddy, like that Noah’s Bark asshole, and they never show up for work again-until they find out they were wrong. As a group, they don’t look much past the next line of blow.
“Y’ask me, what they’re all looking for is Daddy. They all got knocked around when they were a kid and this is some fucked-up way of showing they’re worth something to Daddy. Least I read that somewhere. Prob’ly bullshit like everything else.”
Bosch didn’t need the psychology lesson.
“C’mon Ray, I’m in court and I’m trying to run down this case. Get to the point. What about Gallery?”
“What I’m saying is that with Gallery the situation’s unusual ’cause it’s been almost three years and she never came back. See, they always come back. Even if they’ve fucked over a producer so bad he had to do reshoots, they always come back. They start at the bottom-loops, fluffing-and work their way back up.”
“Fluffing?”
“A fluff is off-camera talent, you could say. Girls who keep the acts up and ready to perform while they’re getting cameras ready, moving lights, changing angles. Things like that, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Bosch was depressed after hearing about the business for ten minutes. He looked at Mora, who had been in Ad-Vice for as long as Bosch could remember.
“What about the survivor? You ever check with her on this tip?”
“Never got around to it. Like I said, I dropped it when you dropped Church. Thought we were done with the whole thing.”
“Yeah, so did I.”
Bosch took out a small pocket notebook and wrote down a few notes from the conversation.
“Did you save any notes from this? From back then?”
“Nope, they’re gone. The original tip sheet is probably in the main task force files. But it won’t say more than I just told you.”
Bosch nodded. Mora was probably right.
“What did this Gallery look like?”
“Blonde, nice set-definitely Beverly Hills plastic. I think I got a picture here.”
He rolled his chair to the file cabinets behind him and dug through one of the drawers, then rolled back with a file. From it he pulled an 8? 10 color publicity shot. It was a blonde woman posed at the edge of the ocean. She was nude. She had shaved her pubic area. Bosch handed the photo back to Mora and felt embarrassed, as if they were two boys in the schoolyard telling secrets about one of the girls. He thought he saw a slight smile on Mora’s face and wondered if the vice cop found humor in his discomfort or it was something else.
“Hell of a job you’ve got.”
“Yeah, well, somebody’s gotta do it.”
Bosch studied him a moment. He decided to take a chance, to try to figure out what made Mora hang on to the job.
“Yeah, but why you, Ray? You’ve been doing this a long time.”
“I guess I’m a watchdog, Bosch. The Supreme Court says this stuff is legal to a point. That makes me one of the pointmen. It’s gotta be monitored. It’s gotta be kept clean, no joke intended. That means these people’ve gotta be licensed, of legal age, and nobody’s forced to do something they don’t want to do. I spend a lot of days looking through this trash, looking for the stuff even the Supreme Court couldn’t take. Trouble is, community standards. L.A. doesn’t have any, Bosch. Hasn’t been a successful obscenity prosecution here in years. I’ve made some underage cases. But I’m still looking for my first obscenity jacket.”
He stopped a moment before saying, “Most cops do a year in Ad-Vice and then transfer out. That’s all they can take. This is my seventh year, man. I can’t tell you why. I guess because there’s no shortage of surprises.”
