He walked over to the stereo, which was stacked on shelves next to a set of bookcases, and picked up the new disk. It was Rollins’sFalling in Love with Jazz, and inside Harry smiled because he had it at home. It was a warm connection. He opened the case, put the music on and began to look around the living room. There were pastel throw rugs and light-colored coverings on the furniture. Architectural books and home magazines were spread on a glass-topped coffee table in front of a light-blue couch. The place was very neat. A framed cross-stitch canvas on the wall next to the front door said Welcome To This Home. Small letters stitched in its corner said EDS 1970, and Bosch wondered about the last letter.
He made another one of those psychic connections with Eleanor Wish when he turned around and looked at the wall above the couch. Framed in black wood was a print of Edward Hopper’sNighthawks. Bosch didn’t have the print at home but he was familiar with the painting and from time to time even thought about it when he was deep on a case or on a surveillance. He had seen the original in Chicago once and had stood in front of it studying it for nearly an hour. A quiet, shadowy man sits alone at the counter of a street-front diner. He looks across at another customer much like himself, but only the second man is with a woman. Somehow, Bosch identified with it, with that first man. I am the loner, he thought. I am the nighthawk. The print, with its stark dark hues and shadows, did not fit in this apartment, Bosch realized. Its darkness clashed with the pastels. Why did Eleanor have it? What did she see there?
He looked around the rest of the room. There was no TV. There was just the music on the stereo and the magazines on the table and the books on the lawyer’s shelves against the wall across from the couch. He stepped over and looked through the glass panes and browsed the collection. The top two shelves were mostly high-brow book-of-the-month offerings descending into crime fiction by writers like Crumley and Willeford and others. He had read some of them. He opened the glass door and pulled out a book calledThe Locked Door. He’d heard of the book but had never seen it to buy. He opened the cover to see how old it was and he solved the mystery of the last letter on the needlework. On the first page, printed in ink, it said Eleanor D. Scarletti-1979. She must have kept her husband’s name after the divorce, Bosch thought. He put the book back and closed the case.
The books on the bottom two rows of the bookcase ranged from true crime to historical studies of the Vietnam War to FBI manuals. There was even an LAPD homicide investigation textbook. Many of these books Bosch had read. One of them he was even in. It was a book theTimes reporter Bremmer had written about the so-called Beauty Shop Slasher. A guy named Harvard Kendal, the slasher killed seven women in one year in the San Fernando Valley. They were all beauty shop owners or employees. He cased the shops, followed the victims home and killed them by cutting their throats with a sharpened nail file. Bosch and his partner at the time connected Kendal through a license plate number the seventh victim had written on a pad in the salon the night before she was murdered. They never figured out why she had done it, but the detectives suspected she had seen Kendal watching the shop from his van. She wrote the tag number down as a precaution but then didn’t take the precaution of not going home alone. Bosch and his partner traced the tag to Kendal and found out he had spent five years in Folsom for a series of beauty shop arsons near Oakland in the 1960s. They later discovered his mother had worked as a manicurist in a beauty shop when he was a boy. She had practiced her craft on young Kendal’s nails, and the shrinks figured he never got over it. Bremmer had gotten a best-seller out of it. And when Universal made a movie of the week out of it, the studio paid Bosch and his partner for the use of their names and technical assistance. The money doubled when a cop series spun off the movie. His partner quit the department and moved to Ensenada. Bosch stayed on, investing his stake in the stilt house on the hill that looked down on the studio that paid him the money. Bosch always found an unexplainable symbiosis in that.
“I read that book before your name ever came up in this. It wasn’t part of the research.”
Eleanor had come out of the kitchen with two glasses of red wine. Harry smiled.
“I wasn’t going to accuse you of anything,” he said. “Besides, it isn’t about me. It’s about Kendal. The whole thing was luck, anyway. But they still made a book and TV show about it. Whatever it is in there, it smells good.”
“You like pasta?”
“I like spaghetti.”
“That’s what we’re having. I made a big pot of sauce Sunday. I love to spend an entire day in the kitchen, not thinking about anything else. I find it’s good therapy for stress. And it lasts and lasts. All I have to do is warm it up and boil some noodles.”
Bosch sipped his wine and looked around some more. He still hadn’t sat down but was feeling very comfortable with her. A smile played across his face. He gestured toward the Hopper print. “I like it. But why something so dark?”
She looked at the print and crinkled her brow as if this were the first time she had considered it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve always liked that painting. Something there grabs me. The woman is with a man. So that isn’t me. So I guess if it’s anyone, it would be the man sitting with his coffee. All alone, kind of watching the two that are together.”
“I saw it in Chicago once,” Bosch said. “The original. I was out there on an extradition and had about an hour to kill until I could pick up the body. So I went into the Art Institute and it was there. I spent the whole hour looking at it. There’s something about it-like you said. I can’t remember the case or who I was bringing back here. But I remember that painting.”
They sat at the table talking for nearly an hour after the food was gone. She told him more about her brother and her difficulty getting over the anger and loss. Eighteen years later she was still working it out, she said. Bosch told her that he was still working things out, too. He still dreamed of the tunnels from time to time, but more often he battled insomnia instead. He told her how mixed up he was when he got back, how thin the line was, the choice, between what he had done afterward and what Meadows did. It could have been different, he said, and she nodded, seeming to know that was true.
Later, she asked about the Dollmaker case and his fall from Robbery-Homicide. It was more than curiosity. He sensed that something important rode on what he told her. She was making a decision about him.
“I guess you know the basics,” he began. “Somebody was strangling women, mostly prostitutes, then painting over their faces with makeup. Pancake, red lipstick, heavy rouge on the cheeks, sharp black eyeliner. The same thing every time. The bodies were bathed, too. But we never said it looked like he was making them into dolls. Some asshole-I think it was a guy named Sakai over at the coroner’s-leaked that the makeup was the common denominator. Then this Dollmaker stuff started playing in the press. I think Channel 4 was the first to come up with that name. It took off from there. To me, it looked more like a mortician’s work. But the truth is we weren’t doing too good. We didn’t have a handle on the guy until he was into double figures.