“It’s all jailhouse. No real art to it. One color. I can do it. Sit down over here and take off your shirt.”
She led him to a makeup station, where he sat on a stool next to a rack of various body paints and powders. On an upper shelf there were mannequin heads with wigs and beards on them. Below these someone had taped the names of various supervisors in the division.
Bosch took off his shirt and tie. He was wearing a T-shirt underneath.
“I want these to be seen but I don’t want to be too obvious about it,” he said. “I was thinking that you could work it so if I had on a T-shirt like this you would sort of see parts of the tats sticking out. Enough to know what they are and what they mean.”
“Not a problem. Hold still.”
She used a piece of chalk to mark the lines on his skin where the shirt’s sleeve and neck reached.
“These will be the visibility lines,” she explained. “You just tell me how much you want to go above and below them.”
“Got it.”
“Now take it all off, Harry.”
She said it with undisguised sensuality in her voice. Bosch pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it over a chair with his other shirt and the tie. He turned back to her and Landreth was studying his chest and shoulders. She reached over and touched the scar on his left shoulder.
“That’s new,” she said.
“That’s old.”
“Well, it has been a long time since I saw you naked, Harry.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Back when you were a boy in blue and could talk me into anything, even joining the cops.”
“I talked you into my car, not the department. Blame yourself for that.”
Bosch felt embarrassed and felt his skin blush. Their liaison twenty years earlier had flickered out for no reason other than that neither was looking for any sort of commitment to or from anybody. They went their separate ways but always remained easy friends, especially when Bosch was transferred to the Hollywood Division homicide squad and they were working out of the same building.
“Look at you blushing,” Landreth said. “After all these years.”
“Well, you know…”
He said nothing further. Landreth rolled her stool closer to Bosch. She reached up and rubbed her thumb over the tunnel rat tattoo at the top of his right arm.
“I do remember this one,” she said. “It’s not holding up so well, is it?”
She was right. That tattoo he had gotten in Vietnam had lost its lines over time and the colors had blurred. The character of the rat with a gun emerging from a tunnel was not recognizable. That tattoo looked like a painful bruise.
“I’m not holding up so well myself, Vicki,” Bosch said.
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.”