The Drop

19

After they dropped Rollins off they headed back toward downtown and the PAB.

“So, McQuillen,” Chu said, as Bosch knew he would. “Who is he? I could tell the name meant something to you.”

“Like Hooch said, a former cop.”

“But you know him? Or knew him?”

“I knew of him. I never met him.”

“Well, what’s the story?”

“He was a cop who was sacrificed to the gods of appeasement. He lost his job for doing it just the way they taught him.”

“Stop talking in circles, Harry. What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that I have to go up to the tenth floor and talk to somebody.”

“The chief?”

“No, not the chief.”

“And this is one of those times again where you’re not going to tell your partner what’s going on until you feel like it.”

Bosch didn’t answer. He was grinding things down.

“Harry! I’m talking to you.”

“Chu, when we get back, I want you to start a moniker search.”

“Who?”

“Somebody who went by the name Chill in the North Hollywood — Burbank area about twenty-five years ago.”

“What the fuck? Are you talking about the other case now?”

“I want you to find this guy. His initials are C. H. and people called him Chill. It’s got to be a variation on his first name.”

Chu shook his head.

“That’s it, man, I’m done after this. I can’t work this way. I’ll tell the lieutenant.”

Bosch just nodded.

“‘After this’? Does that mean you’ll do the moniker search first?”

Bosch didn’t call ahead to Kiz Rider. He just took the elevator up to the tenth floor and entered the OCP suite without invitation or appointment. He was met by twin desks with twin adjutants behind them. He went to his left.

“Detective Harry Bosch. I need to see Lieutenant Rider.”

The adjutant was a young officer in a crisp uniform with the name RIVERA on his nameplate. He picked up a clipboard from the side of his desk and studied it for a moment.

“I don’t have anything here. Is the lieutenant expecting you? She’s in a meeting.”

“Yes.”

Rivera seemed surprised by the answer. He had to check the clipboard again.

“Why don’t you have a seat, Detective, and I’ll check on availability.”

“You do that.”

Rivera didn’t move. He waited for Bosch to go away. Harry walked over to some chairs arranged near a set of windows that looked out upon the civic center — the signature spire of City Hall took up most of the view. He stayed standing. When Harry was a safe distance from the desk, Rivera picked up his phone and made a call, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece when he spoke to someone on the other end. Soon he hung up but did not even glance in Bosch’s direction.

Bosch turned back to the window and looked down. He saw a television camera crew set up on the steps of City Hall, waiting for a sound bite from some politician with something to sell. Bosch wondered if it would be Irving who would come out and descend the marble steps.

“Harry?”

He turned. It was Rider.

“Walk with me.”

He wished she hadn’t said that line. But he followed when she turned and walked out the double doors to the hallway. Once they were alone she turned on him.

“What’s going on? I have people in my office.”

“We need to talk. Now.”

“So talk.”

“No, not here like this. Things are breaking. It’s going the way I warned you. The chief should know. Who’s in your office? Is it Irving?”

“No, stop being paranoid.”

“Then why are we talking out here?”

“Because the office is busy and because it was you who demanded complete confidentiality on this. Give me ten minutes and meet me by Charlie Chaplin.”

Bosch walked over and pushed the elevator button. There was only a down button.

“I’ll be there.”

It was a block’s walk to the Bradbury Building. Bosch went in the side door on Third and into the dimly lit stairwell vestibule. There was a bench there and next to it was a sculpture of Charlie Chaplin as his signature character, the Tramp. Bosch took a seat in the shadows next to Charlie and waited. The Bradbury was the oldest and most beautiful building in downtown. It housed private offices as well as LAPD offices, including the board of rights hearing rooms used by Internal Affairs. It was an odd choice for a surreptitious meeting, but it was the spot Bosch and Rider had used in the past. No discussion or direction was needed once Kiz had said meet me at Charlie Chaplin.

Rider was almost ten minutes past the first ten minutes but that was okay with Bosch. He had used the time to construct the story he would tell her. It was complicated and still emerging, even improvisational.

He had just finished walking himself through it when he felt the buzz of an incoming text on his phone. He pulled it from his pocket, half expecting the message to be a cancellation of the meeting from Rider. But it was from his daughter.

Having dinner and study hall at Ash’s. Her mom makes goooood pizza. K?

He felt a slight pang of guilt because he welcomed the message. With his daughter taken care of for the evening, he had more time to work his cases. It also meant he could see Hannah Stone again if he could come up with a viable investigative reason. He sent back his approval but told his daughter she had to be home by ten. He told her to call if she needed a ride.

Bosch was pocketing his phone when Rider came in, hesitated a moment while her eyes adjusted to the shadows and then sat down next to him.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

He waited a moment for her to settle but she wasn’t interested in wasting time.

“Well?”

“You ready?”

“Of course. I’m here. Tell me the story.”

“Well, it goes like this. George Irving has a consulting firm that is really an influence firm. He sells his influence, his connection to his father and the faction his father is part of on the city council. He—”

“Do you have documentary evidence of this?”

“Right now it’s just a story, Kiz, and it’s just you and me here. Let me tell it and then you can ask your questions when I’m done.”

“Go ahead, then.”

The door on Third opened and a uniformed officer walked in, took off his sunglasses and looked around, blindly at first and then focusing on Bosch and Rider and correctly sizing them up as cops.

“Is this where the BORs are heard?” he asked.

“Third floor,” Rider said.

“Thank you.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah.”

Bosch waited until the cop left the vestibule and rounded the corner into the main lobby where the elevators were located.

“Okay. So George sells influence with the council and by extension with all the different boards the council appoints. In some cases he can do even more than that. He can tilt the game.”

“I don’t get it. How so?”

“Do you know how taxi franchises are awarded in this city?”

“Not a clue.”

“By geographic zones and on two-year contracts. You come up for review every two years.”

“All right.”

“So I don’t know if George goes to them or they come to George, but there’s a franchise holder in South L.A. called Regent Taxi and they hire George to help them get a more lucrative franchise up in Hollywood, where there are highline hotels and tourists on the streets and lots more money to be made. The current franchise holder is Black and White Taxi.”

“I think I know where this is going. But wouldn’t Councilman Irving have to be transparent on this? He’d have a conflict of interest voting for any company repped by his son.”

“Of course he would. But the first vote is with the Taxi Franchise Board, and who puts the people on that board? The council. And when it next comes before the council for ratification, sure, Irving nobly cites conflict of interest and steps out on the vote and it all looks completely aboveboard. But what about the backroom trade-offs? ‘You vote for me when I step out and next time I’ll vote for you.’ You know what goes on, Kiz. But what George offers is even more of a sure thing. He offers a fuller service, shall we say. Regent says, yes, we’ll take the full package, and a month after he’s hired by Regent, things start going sideways for the current holder of the franchise, B and W.”

“What do you mean ‘sideways’?”

“I’m trying to tell you. Less than a month after George Irving is hired by Regent, B and W drivers start getting popped on deuce raps and traffic citations and suddenly the company’s not looking so good.”

“How many arrests?”

“Three, the first coming a month after Irving signed on. And then there’s an auto accident where the B and W driver is held at fault. There are several traffic violations — all moving violations that give the appearance of reckless driving. Speeding, running traffic lights and stop signs.”

“I think the Times wrote about this. The DUIs, anyway.”

“Yeah, I have the story and I’m pretty sure George Irving’s the one who tipped them to it. It was all part of an organized plan to get the Hollywood taxi franchise.”

“So you’re saying that the son went to the father and said put some pressure on B and W? The father then in turn reached into the department?”

“I am not exactly sure how it worked yet. But both of them — father and son — still have connections in the department. The councilman has sympathizers and his son was a cop for five years. A guy who was a close friend of his works patrol in Hollywood. I have all the B and W arrest reports and the traffic citations. The same cop — George Irving’s friend — made all three DUI arrests and wrote two of the moving violations. A guy named Robert Mason. What are the chances of that? That he’d get all three deuces.”

“It could happen. You make one arrest and then you know what to look for after that.”

“Sure, Kiz, whatever you say. One of these guys wasn’t even pulled over. He was parked at a cab stand on La Brea when Mason rolled up on him.”

“Well, were these legit busts or not? Did they blow?”

“They blew and the busts were legit as far as I know. But three busts starting a month after Irving was hired. The DUIs, the moving violations and the accident report then become the centerpiece of Regent’s application to the franchise board to take Hollywood away from B and W. He had it completely greased and it just doesn’t smell right, Kiz.”

She finally nodded, a tacit agreement with Bosch’s point of view.

“Okay, even if I agree with you, there’s still the question: How does all of this get George Irving killed? And why?”

“I’m not sure why but let me move to the—”

Bosch stopped when there was a loud explosion of voices from the lobby. After a few seconds they were gone.

“Okay, let me move to the night Irving took the high dive. He arrives by car at nine-forty, gives his keys to the valet and goes upstairs to the lobby to check in. Also arriving at that time is a writer from the East Coast named Thomas Rapport. He comes by cab from the airport and pulls in right behind Irving.”

“Don’t tell me. He was in a Black and White cab.”

“You know, Lieutenant, you really ought to be a detective.”

“I tried it, but my partner was an asshole.”

“I heard about that. Anyway, yes, it was a B and W cab and the driver actually recognized Irving as he was turning his car over to the valet. His picture had been shown around the garage when the application letter to the franchise board got copied to B and W. This driver, a guy named Rollins, recognizes Irving and gets on his radio and says, ‘What do you know, I just saw public enemy number one,’ or words to that effect. And on the other end of that radio call is the shift supervisor. The night man. A guy named Mark McQuillen.”

Bosch stopped there and waited for her to recognize the name. She didn’t.

“McQuillen as in ‘McKillin,’” he said. “That ring a bell?”

It still didn’t break through. Rider shook her head.

“Before your time,” Bosch said.

“Who is he?”

“A former cop. Maybe ten years younger than me. Back in the day, he became the poster boy for the whole choke hold thing. The controversy. And he got sacrificed to the mob.”

“I don’t understand, Harry. What mob? What sacrifice?”

“I told you, I was on the task force. The task force was formed to appease the citizenry of South L.A. who claimed that the choke hold was legalized murder. Cops used it and an inordinate number of people in the south end died. The truth was, they didn’t need a task force to change policy. They could’ve just changed it. But instead they go with a task force so they could feed the media the story about how the department was serious in its effort to respond to the public outcry.”

“All right, so how does this lead to McQuillen?”

“I was just a grunt on the task force. A gatherer. I handled the autopsies. I know this, though. The statistics matched up across racial and geographic lines. Sure, there were more choke hold deaths in the south end. Far more African Americans died than other races. But the ratios were even. There were far more incidents involving use of force in the south end. The more confrontations, scuffles, fights, resisting arrests you get, the more uses of the choke hold. The more you use the choke hold, the more deaths you will have. It was simple math. But nothing is simple when racial politics are involved.”

Rider was black and had grown up in South L.A. But Bosch was speaking to her cop to cop and there was no awkwardness in his telling the story. They had been partners and had operated as a team under extreme pressures. Rider knew Bosch as well as anyone could. They were brother and sister and there was no holdback between them.

“McQuillen worked P.M. watch in Seventy-seventh,” he said. “He liked action and he got it almost every night. I don’t remember the exact number but he’d had something like sixty-plus use-of-force incidents in four years. And as you know, those are only the ones they write reports on. In those incidents, he used the choke hold a lot and he ended up killing two people in a three-year span. Of all the choke hold deaths over all the years, there was nobody involved in more than one. Only him, because he had used it more than anybody else. So when the task force came along. .”

“He got special attention.”

“Right. Now, every one of his use-of-force incidents came back clean on review at the time of occurrence. Including the two deaths. It was determined by a review board that both times he used the hold within policy. But one time and it’s an unlucky thing. Two times and there is a pattern. Somebody leaked his name and history to the Times, which was hovering over the task force like the smog over downtown. They ran a story and McQuillen became the face of what was wrong in the department. Didn’t matter that he was never found to have acted out of policy. He was the guy. A killer cop. The head of the ministers’ coalition at the time held a press conference it seemed every other day. He started calling him McKillin and it stuck.”

Bosch got up from the bench so he could pace a little bit as he continued.

“The task force recommended that the bar hold be dropped from the use-of-force progression and it was. Funny thing is, the department then told officers to rely more on their batons — in fact, you could be disciplined if you got out of a patrol car without carrying your baton in your hand or on your belt. Added to that, Tasers were coming into use just as the choke hold went out. And what did we get? Rodney King. A video that changed the world. A video of a guy being Tased and whaled on with batons when a proper choke hold would’ve just put him to sleep.”

“Huh,” Rider said. “I never looked at it that way.”

Bosch nodded.

“Anyway, dropping the choke hold wasn’t enough. There had to be an offering to the angry mob and it was McQuillen. He was suspended on what I always thought were trumped-up, politically motivated charges. The review of the deaths determined that in the second case he had been out of policy in the escalation of the use-of-force sequence. In other words, the choke hold that killed the guy was okay but everything he did up until he used it was wrong. He was brought up on a board of rights and fired. The case was referred to the DA and the DA took a pass. At the time, I remember thinking McQuillen was lucky they didn’t ride the wave and prosecute him. He sued to get his job back but that was a nonstarter. He was done.”

Bosch ended it there for the moment to see if Rider had a response. She had folded her arms across her chest and was staring into the shadows. Bosch knew she was grinding it down. Seeing how all of this played out in the present.

“So,” she finally said. “Twenty-five years ago a task force headed by Irvin Irving results in McQuillen losing his job and career in a process that, at least in his view, was unfounded and unfair. Now we have what appears to be an attempt by Irving’s son and possibly the councilman himself to grab the franchise from the business where McQuillen now works as. . what, a night dispatcher?”

“Shift supervisor. Which I guess really means dispatcher.”

“And this adds up to him murdering George Irving. I can connect the dots but am having trouble with the motive, Harry.”

“Well, we don’t know anything about McQuillen, do we? We don’t know if he’s been carrying this grudge around like a festering wound and the opportunity simply presented itself. A driver calls in and says, ‘Guess who I just saw.’ We have the abrasion pattern on the shoulder — it’s unmistakable evidence of the choke hold. We also have a witness who saw somebody on the fire escape.”

“What witness? You didn’t tell me you had a witness.”

“I just found out today. The hillside behind the hotel was canvassed and they came up with a resident who saw a man on the fire escape ladder Sunday night. But he says it was twelve-forty A.M. and the coroner puts TOD no earlier than two and as late as four. So we have about a two-hour discrepancy. The guy on the ladder was going down at twelve-forty, not up. There is this, though. The witness described the guy on the ladder as wearing some sort of uniform. Gray top and gray pants. I was in B and W’s taxi barn today. It’s where the dispatch office is. The mechanics who work on the fleet wear gray coveralls. McQuillen could’ve put on coveralls before going up the ladder.”

Bosch flipped his hands out at his sides as if to say that was it. That was all he had. Rider was silent for a long moment before asking what Bosch knew she would ask.

“You always taught me to ask where the holes were. ‘Look at your case and find the holes. Because if you don’t find them, a defense attorney will do it for you.’ So, Harry, where are the holes?”

Bosch shrugged.

“The time discrepancy is a hole. And we don’t have anything that would put McQuillen in Irving’s room. All prints found in there and on the fire escape ladder were run through the computer. McQuillen’s would’ve come up.”

“How do you deal with the time discrepancy?”

“He was casing the place. That’s when the witness saw him. He didn’t see when McQuillen came back.”

Rider nodded.

“What about the marks on Irving’s shoulder? Can they be matched to McQuillen’s watch?”

“It’s possible but it won’t be conclusive. We might get lucky and even find DNA on the watch. But I think the big hole here is Irving. Why was he at the hotel in the first place? The McQuillen angle relies upon chance. Taxi driver sees Irving. He tells McQuillen. McQuillen’s deep-seated anger and bitterness take over. At the end of shift, he grabs a set of mechanic’s coveralls and goes to the hotel. He climbs up the side, somehow gets into Irving’s suite, and chokes him out. He strips the body and folds the clothes nice and neat but misses the button on the floor. He then drops him off the balcony and it looks like suicide. It works well enough in theory, but what was Irving doing there? Was he meeting someone? Waiting for someone? And why did he put his stuff — his wallet and phone and everything — in the room safe? If we can’t answer those questions, we’ve got a hole big enough to drive a getaway car through.”

She nodded in agreement.

“So what are you proposing we do now?”

“We do nothing. I continue to work this. But you have to know and the chief has to know that as this goes forward it’s going to get close to the councilman. If I squeeze Robert Mason to find out why he started pulling over B and W drivers, it might come back directly to Irvin Irving himself. The chief should know that.”

“He will. Is that your next move?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I want to know as much as there is to know before I take on McQuillen.”

Rider stood up. She was impatient to go.

“Are you going back now?” she asked. “You want to walk?”

“No, you go ahead,” Bosch said. “I think I’m going to make a few phone calls.”

“All right, Harry. Good luck. Be careful out there.”

“Yeah, you, too. Be careful up there.”

She looked at him. She knew he meant on the tenth floor of the PAB. She smiled and he smiled back.