The Concrete Blonde

“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 onme. 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.”

Lastly, Yde reported by rover that he and Mayfield were getting the runaround from theTimes lawyers and had not yet been able to so much as approach Bremmer’s desk in the newsroom.

Rollenberger reported that Heikes and Rector were out of pocket, running down background on Bremmer. After that, he said that Irving had scheduled a five o’clock press conference to discuss the case with the media. If anything new was discovered, let Rollenberger know before then.

“That’s it,” Rollenberger said.

Bosch got up to head out.

***

The medical clinic on the high-power floor of the county jail reminded Bosch of Frankenstein’s