She ignored his complaint and got down to work. She first used an eyeliner pencil to sketch out the tattoos on his body. Michael Allen Smith had what he had called a Gestapo collar tattooed on his neck. On each side of his neck was the twin lightning bolt insignia of the SS. This symbolized the emblems attached to the collar points of the uniforms worn by Hitler’s elite force. Landreth etched these onto Bosch’s skin easily and quickly. It tickled and he had a hard time holding still. Then it was time for the bicep piece.
“Which arm?” she asked.
“I think the left.”
He was thinking of the play with Mackey. He thought the chances were better that he would end up sitting on Mackey’s right as opposed to his left. That meant his left arm would be in Mackey’s line of sight.
Landreth asked him to hold the photo of Smith’s arm up next to his own so she could copy it. Tattooed on Smith’s bicep was a skull with a swastika inside a circle on the crown. While Smith had never admitted to the murders he was charged with, he had always been quite open about his racist beliefs and the origins of his many body markings. The bicep skull, he said, had been copied from a World War II propaganda poster.
Shifting the sketch work from his neck to his arm allowed Bosch to breathe easier and Landreth to engage him in conversation.
“So what’s new with you?” she asked.
“Not a lot.”
“Retirement was boring?”
“You could say that.”
“What did you do with yourself, Harry?”
“I worked a couple old cases, but mostly I spent time in Las Vegas trying to get to know my daughter.”
She leaned back away from her work and looked up at Bosch with surprise in her eyes.
“Yeah, I was surprised too when I found out,” he said.
“How old?”
“Almost six.”
“You still going to be able to see her now that you’re on the job?”
“Doesn’t matter, she’s not there.”
“Well, where is she?”
“Her mother took her to Hong Kong for a year.”
“Hong Kong? What’s in Hong Kong?”
“A job. She signed a year contract.”
“She didn’t consult you about it?”
“I don’t know if ‘consulted’ is the right word. She told me she was going. I talked to a lawyer about it and there wasn’t much I could do.”
“That’s not fair, Harry.”
“I’m all right. I talk to her once a week. As soon as I earn up some vacation I’ll go over there.”
“I’m not talking about it being unfair to you. I’m talking about her. A girl should be close to her father.”
Bosch nodded because that was all he could do. A few minutes later Landreth finished the sketch work, opened a case and took out a jar of Hollywood tattoo ink along with a penlike applicator.
“This is Bic blue,” she said. “It’s what most of them use in the jails. I won’t be perforating the skin so it should come off in a couple weeks.”
“Should?”
“Most times. There was one actor I worked with, though. I put an ace of spades on his arm. And the funny thing was that it wouldn’t come off. Not all the way. So he just ended up having a real tattoo put over my piece. He wasn’t too happy about it.”
“Just like I’m not going to be happy if I have lightning bolts on my neck for the rest of my life. Before you start putting that stuff on me, Vicki, is there -”
He stopped when he realized she was laughing at him.
“Just kidding, Bosch. It’s Hollywood magic. It comes off with a couple of good scrubs, okay?”
“Okay, then.”
“Then hold still and let’s get this done.”
She went to work applying the dark blue ink to the pencil drawing on his skin. She blotted it regularly with a cloth and repeatedly told him to stop breathing, which he told her he couldn’t do. She was finished in under a half hour. She gave him a hand mirror and he studied his neck. It looked good in that it looked real to him. It also looked strange to see such displays of hate on his own skin.
“Can I put my shirt on now?”
“Give it a few more minutes.”
She touched the scar on his shoulder once again.
“Is that from when you got shot in that tunnel downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Poor Harry.”
“More like Lucky Harry.”
She started packing up her equipment while he sat there with his shirt off and feeling awkward about it.
“So what’s the assignment tonight?” he asked, just to be saying something.
“For me? Nothing. I’m out of here.”
“You’re done?”
“Yeah, we worked a day shift today. Working girls invading the hotel by the Kodak Center. Can’t have that in the new Hollywood, can we? So we bagged four of them.”
“I’m sorry, Vicki. I didn’t know I was holding you up. I would’ve come in sooner. Hell, I was downstairs shooting the shit with Edgar before coming up. You should’ve told me you’d be waiting on me.”
“It’s all right. It was good to see you. And I wanted to tell you I’m glad you’re back on the job.”
Bosch suddenly thought of something.
“Hey, you want to hit Musso’s for dinner or are you going up to the Sportsmen’s Lodge?”
“Forget the Sportsmen’s Lodge. Those things remind me too much of wrap parties. I didn’t like them either.”
“Then what do you think?”
“I don’t know if I want to be seen in that place with such an obvious racist pig.”
This time Bosch knew she was kidding. He smiled and she smiled and she said dinner was a go.
“I’ll go on one condition,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You put your shirt back on.”
27
WITHOUT NEED OF an alarm, Bosch awoke at five-thirty the next morning. This was not unusual for him. He knew that this was what happened when you surfed into the tube on a case. Waking hours overpowered the sleeping hours. You did all you could to stay up on that board and in the pipeline. Though not scheduled to begin work for more than twelve hours, he knew this would be the pivotal day in the case. He could not sleep anymore.
In darkness and unfamiliar surroundings he got dressed and made his way to the kitchen, where he found a pad for writing down needed grocery items. He wrote a note and left it in front of the automatic coffeemaker, which he had watched Vicki Landreth set the night before to begin brewing at 7 a.m. The note said very little other than thank you for the evening and good-bye. There were no promises or see-you-laters. Bosch knew she would not be expecting any. They both knew that little had changed in the twenty years between their liaisons. They liked each other fine but that wasn’t enough to build a house on.
The streets between Vicki Landreth’s Los Feliz home and the Cahuenga Pass were misted and gray. People drove with their lights on, either because they had been driving through the night or because they thought it might
