The Drop

24

At 10:30 P.M. Bosch walked Hannah Stone out to her car. She had followed him up the hill from the restaurant earlier. She had told him she could not spend the night and he was okay about that. At the car, they held each other in a long embrace. Bosch felt good. The time with her in his bedroom had been wonderful. He had waited a long time for someone like Hannah.

“Call me when you get home, okay?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I know but call me anyway. I want to know you’re home safe.”

“Okay.”

They looked at each other for a long moment.

“I had a nice time, Harry. I hope you did, too.”

“You know it.”

“Good. I want to do it again.”

He smiled.

“Yeah, me, too.”

She broke away and opened the door to her car.

“Soon,” she said as she got in.

He nodded. They smiled. She started the car and drove off. Harry watched her taillights disappear around a bend in the road and then he went to his own car.

Bosch pulled into the rear lot of Hollywood Division and parked in the first slot he found open. He hoped he was not too late. He got out and walked toward the back door of the station. His phone buzzed and he pulled it from his pocket. It was Hannah.

“You’re home?”

“Made it. Where are you?”

“Hollywood Division. I need to see somebody on P.M. watch.”

“So that’s why you pushed me out the door.”

“Uh, actually, I think you were the one who said you needed to go.”

“Oh. Well, then, okay. Have fun.”

“It’s work. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Bosch walked through the double doors and down the hall to the watch office. There were two custodies cuffed to the bench that ran down the middle of the hall. They were waiting to be processed into the jail. They looked like a couple of Hollywood hustlers who came up short on the hustle.

“Hey, man, you help me out?” one of them asked as Bosch went by.

“Not tonight,” Bosch replied.

Bosch ducked his head into the watch office. There were two sergeants standing side by side, looking at the deployment chart for A.M. watch. No lieutenant. This told Bosch that the next shift was still upstairs in roll call and he hadn’t missed the shift change. He knocked on the glass window next to the door. Both sergeants turned to him.

“Bosch, RHD. Can you call Adam-sixty-five in? I need ten minutes with him.”

“He’s already on the way. He’s first in.”

They staggered the shift change — one car at a time — so the division would not be left with no one on patrol. Usually the first in was the car containing the most senior officer or the patrol team that had had the toughest night.

“You think you can send him over to detectives? I’ll wait over there.”

“You got it.”

Bosch walked back past the custodies and then took a left down the back hallway, past the kit room and into the detective squad room. He had worked in Hollywood Division for many years before his RHD assignment and knew the station well. As expected, the D bureau was deserted. At most Bosch thought he might find a patrol officer writing up his reports but there wasn’t anyone in the room at all.

There were wooden signs hanging from the ceiling above the pods for the different crime units. Bosch went over to the homicide pod and looked for his old partner Jerry Edgar’s desk. He identified it because of a photo taped to the back of the cubicle of Edgar with Tommy Lasorda, the former manager of the Dodgers. Bosch sat down and tried the pen drawer but found it locked. This gave him an idea and he quickly stood back up and scanned all the desks and counters in the squad room until he saw a stack of newspapers on a break table near the front of the room. He walked over and looked through the stack until he found the sports section. He then leafed through it until he found one of the ubiquitous advertisements for pharmaceutical treatment of erectile dysfunction. He tore the ad out and then went back to Edgar’s desk.

Bosch had just finished slipping the ad through the crack above Edgar’s locked desk drawer when a voice surprised him from behind.

“RHD?”

Bosch swiveled around on Edgar’s chair. A uniformed cop was standing by the entrance from the back hallway. He had gray close-cropped hair and a muscular build. He was in his midforties but looked younger, even with the gray hair.

“Yeah, that’s me. Robert Mason?”

“That’s me. What is—”

“Come on over here so we can talk, Officer Mason.”

Mason came over. Bosch noticed that his short sleeves were tight on his biceps. He was the breed of cop who wanted any potential challengers to see the guns and know what they would be up against.

“Have a seat,” Bosch said.

“No, thanks,” Mason said. “What’s going on? I’m EOW and I want to get out of here.”

“Three deuces.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Three deuces.”

Bosch was watching his eyes, looking for any sort of tell.

“Okay, three deuces. You got me. What does it mean?”

“It means there are no coincidences, Mason. And you writing up three deuces last summer on three different B and W taxi drivers, all in Adam-sixty-five, stretches the limits of possible coincidence. My name isn’t RHD. It’s Bosch and I’m investigating the murder of your buddy George Irving.”

Now he saw the tell. But it came and went. Mason was about to make a bad choice. But when he did, Bosch was still surprised.

“George Irving was a suicide.”

Bosch looked at him for a moment.

“Really? You know that?”

“I know it’s the only way it could’ve happened. Him going there, to that hotel. He killed himself and it had nothing to do with Black and White. You’re barking up the wrong tree, dog.”

Bosch started to get annoyed with this arrogant asshole.

“Let’s cut the bullshit, Mason. You’ve got a choice here. You can take a seat and tell me what you did and who told you to do it and maybe you’ll get out of this okay. Or you can stand there and keep spinning bullshit and then I won’t really care what happens to you.”

Mason folded his arms across his thick chest. He was going to turn this into a mano a mano battle of who backs down first, and it wasn’t a game where big biceps gave you the edge. He was ultimately going to lose.

“I don’t want to sit down. I have no involvement in this case other than that I knew the guy who jumped. That’s it.”

“Then tell me about the three deuces.”

“I don’t have to tell you shit.”

Bosch nodded.

“You’re right. You don’t.”

He stood up and glanced back at Edgar’s desk to make sure he hadn’t left anything out of place. He then took a step toward Mason and pointed at his chest.

“Remember this moment. Because this was the moment you blew it, dog. This was the moment you could have saved your job but instead you gave it away. You’re not EOW. You just put the P in front of it — permanent end of watch.”

Bosch headed toward the back hallway. He knew he was a walking contradiction. A guy who on Monday morning said he wouldn’t investigate cops, and now here he was. He was going to burn this cop in order to get to the truth of George Irving.

“Hey, wait.”

Bosch stopped and turned back. Mason lowered his arms and Bosch read it as a dropping of his guard.

“I did nothing wrong. I responded to a direct request from a member of the city council. It was not a request involving specific action. It was no more than an alert and we get them passed on to us in roll call every day, every shift. Requests from council — RFCs, we call them. I did nothing wrong and if you burn me, you are burning the wrong guy.”

Bosch waited without moving but that was it. He moved back toward Mason. He pointed to a chair.

“Sit down.”

This time Mason did take a seat, pulling one away from the Robbery module. Bosch returned to Edgar’s chair and they sat facing each other in the aisle between Robbery and Homicide.

“So tell me about this request from council.”

“I knew George Irving a long time. The academy, we were rookies together. Even after he left for law school we stayed close. I was best man at his wedding. Hell, I was the one who rented the honeymoon suite for them.”

He reached out and gestured behind him in the direction of the squad lieutenant’s office, as if that were the honeymoon suite.

“We did birthdays, Fourth of Julys. . and I knew his father through him and saw him at a lot of these things over the years.”

“Okay.”

“So last summer in June — I forget the exact date — I went to a party for George’s kid. He—”

“Chad.”

“Yeah, Chad. Chad had just graduated from high school and was valedictorian and was going on a full ride up to USF, so they had a party for him and I went with Sandy, my wife. The councilman was there and we talked, mostly bullshit about the department and him trying to justify to me why the council fucked us on OT and things like that. Then at the end he told me sort of oh-by-the-way that he got a complaint from a constituent who said she got in a cab outside a restaurant in Hollywood and the driver was drunk. She said the car stank like a brewery and he was clearly impaired. He said that after a few blocks the lady had to tell the guy to pull over and she got out. She said it was a Black and White taxi and so he told me to keep an eye on the taxi drivers, that there could be a problem. He knew I worked P.M. watch and I might see something. And that was it. No conspiracy, no bullshit. I reacted to that when I was on patrol and there was nothing wrong with it at that time. And every case I made on those drivers was righteous.”

Bosch nodded. If it was a true story, Mason had done nothing wrong. But his story brought Irvin Irving solidly back into the picture. The question for the district attorney or even a grand jury would be about the councilman. Was he subtly using his influence to help benefit his son’s client, or was he motivated by concerns for public safety? There was a fine line and Bosch doubted the question would ever get so far as a grand jury. Irving was too smart. Still, Bosch was intrigued by what Mason had tagged to the end of his story. There was nothing wrong with the chain of events “at that time.”

“Did the councilman tell you when this complaint came in or how exactly it got to him?”

“No, he did not.”

“Did this sort of alert ever come up in a roll call over the summer?”

“Not that I remember but I probably wouldn’t know, to tell you the truth. I’ve been around. I’ve got years and I’m allowed certain indulgences, I guess you might call it. I usually roll in first on shift change. I get priority vacation dibs, shit like that. I miss a lot of roll calls. I’ve been to too many and I can’t stand sitting up there in that little room and listening to the same thing night after night. But my partner, who’s a rookie, never misses and he tells me what I need to know. So this RFC could’ve come up. I just wasn’t there.”

“But your partner never told you it came up, right?”

“No, but we were already on it, so he wouldn’t have to. First deployment after that party, I started pulling over taxis. So he wouldn’t have to tell me if it came up in roll call. See what I mean?”

“I do.”

Bosch pulled out his notebook and flipped it open. There was nothing written on the pages concerning Mason but he wanted time to collect his thoughts and consider what to ask next. He started flipping through his pages of notes.

“Nice,” Mason said. “That your number on the badge?”

He pointed to the notebook.

“Yeah.”

“Where do you get something like that?”

“Hong Kong. Did you know that your friend George Irving was repping a taxi company that was hoping to take the franchise away from Black and White? Did you know that the DUIs you put on the company’s record were going to help George succeed?”

“Like I said, not at the time. Not last summer.”

Mason rubbed his palms up and down his thighs. They were now moving toward something that was uncomfortable for him.

“So at some point you did come to know this?”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“When?” Bosch prompted.

“Uh, that would have been about six weeks ago.”

“Tell me.”

“One night I pulled over a taxi. Saw the guy roll a stop sign and pulled him over. It was a Black and White, and right away the guy starts giving me shit about collusion and all this and I’m thinking, Yeah, yeah, yeah, just touch your nose with your forefinger, asshole. But then he says, ‘You and Irving Junior are doing this to us’ and I’m like, What the hell? So I get in his face and tell him to tell me exactly what he means by that. And that’s when I found out my friend Georgie was repping another cab company putting the move on Black and White.”

Bosch leaned forward, closer to Mason, and put his elbows on his knees. They were getting to the center of it now.

“What did you do?”

“I confronted him. I went to George and gave him every way out, but at the end of the day, there was no way out. I felt he and his father had used me and I told him that. I told him we weren’t friends anymore and that was the last time I saw him.”

Bosch nodded.

“And this is why you think he killed himself.”

Mason scoffed.

“No, man. If he used me like that, then I wasn’t really that important in his life. I think he killed himself for other reasons. I think Chad leaving was a big thing. . and maybe there were other things. The family had secrets, you know what I mean?”

Mason didn’t know about McQuillen or the marks on George Irving’s back. Bosch decided that this wasn’t the time for him to find out.

“Okay, Mason, you have anything else for me?”

Mason shook his head.

“You didn’t confront the councilman about all of this, did you?”

“Not yet.”

Bosch thought about that.

“You going to the funeral tomorrow?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Tomorrow morning, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll guess I’ll decide then. We were friends a long time. Things just sort of went wrong at the end.”

“Well, maybe I’ll see you there. You can go now. I appreciate you telling the story.”

“Yeah.”

Mason stood up and headed toward the back hallway, his head down. Bosch watched him go and wondered about the vagaries of relationships and investigations. He had come to the division expecting to confront a cop who was bent, who had crossed the line. Instead, he now viewed Mason as another victim of Irvin Irving.

And at the top of the list of Irving’s victims was his own son. Mason might not have to worry about confronting the councilman. Bosch might get there first.