The Drop

29

Chu was just hanging up the phone as Bosch got back to the cubicle.

“What did you get?” Harry asked.

Chu looked down at the scratch pad on his desk as he answered.

“Yes, the hotel stocks Jack Daniel’s in the suites. A flask bottle containing twelve ounces. And yes, the bottle is missing from suite seventy-nine.”

Bosch nodded. It was a further confirmation of McQuillen’s story.

“What about the blood-alcohol?”

Chu shook his head.

“Not done yet. The M.E.’s office said next week.”

Bosch shook his head, annoyed that he hadn’t used Kiz Rider and the chief’s office to push the M.E. on the blood testing. He went to his desk and started stacking reports on top of the murder book. He spoke to Chu with his back to him.

“How’d you kill the story?”

“I called her. I told her if she ran the story, I would go to her boss and say that she was trading sex for information. I figure even over there that’s gotta be an ethical violation. She might not lose her job but she’d be tainted. She knows they’d start looking at her differently.”

“You handled it like a real gentleman, Chu. Where are the credit-card records?”

“Here. What’s going on?”

Chu handed over the file containing the purchase records he had received from the credit-card companies.

“I’m taking all of this home.”

“What about McQuillen? Are we booking him?”

“No. He’s gone.”

“You kicked him?”

“That’s right.”

“What about the warrant on the watch? I’m about to print it out.”

“We won’t need it. He admitted he choked Irving out.”

“He admitted it and you cut him loose? Are you—”

“Listen, Chu, I don’t have time to walk you through it. Go watch the tape if you have an issue with what I’m doing. No, better yet, I want you to go out to the Standard on the Sunset Strip. You know where that is?”

“Yeah, but why am I going there?”

“Go to their twenty-four-hour restaurant and get their disc from the camera over the counter for Sunday night into Monday morning.”

“Okay, what’s on it?”

“Should be McQuillen’s alibi. Call me when you confirm it.”

Bosch put all the loose reports in his briefcase and then carried the murder book separately because the binder was too thick for the case. He started to walk out of the cubicle.

“What are you going to do?” Chu called after him.

Bosch turned and looked back at him.

“Start over.”

He resumed his movement toward the squad room exit. He stopped at the lieutenant’s status board and put his magnet in the out slot. When he turned to the door, Chu was standing there.

“You’re not going to do this to me,” he said.

“You did it to yourself. You made a choice. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

“I made a mistake. And I told you — no, I promised you — that I would make up for it.”

Bosch reached out and gently moved him by the arm to the side so he could open the door. He went out into the hallway without another word to Chu.

On his way home Bosch drove into East Hollywood and stopped behind the El Matador truck on Western. He remembered Chu’s comment about the incongruity of Western Avenue being in East Hollywood. Only in L.A., he thought as he got out.

There was no one in line at the truck because it was still early. The taquero was just setting up for the night. Bosch had him put enough carne asada for four tacos into a to-go cup and asked him to roll the flour tortillas up in foil. He added sides of guacamole, rice and salsa and the man put it all in a bag for transport. While Bosch was waiting he sent a text to his daughter telling her he was coming home with dinner because he would be too busy working to cook something. She answered that that was okay because she was starved.

Twenty minutes later he walked through the front door of his home to find his daughter reading a book and playing music in the living room. He stood there frozen in the entranceway, taco bag in one hand, briefcase in the other, murder book under his arm.

“What?” she said.

“You’re listening to Art Pepper?”

“Yeah. I think it’s good music to read by.”

He smiled and went into the kitchen.

“What do you want to drink?”

“I have water already.”

Bosch made a plate of tacos for her with all the sides and took it out to her. He came back into the kitchen and ate his tacos, fully loaded, while leaning over the sink. When he was finished, he bent down to the faucet and chased it with water right out of the pipe. Wiping his face with a paper towel, he went out to work at the dining room table.

“How was school?” he asked while opening his briefcase. “Did you skip lunch again?”

“School was a drag like always. I skipped lunch to study for the algebra quiz.”

“How’d you do?”

“I probably flunked.”

He knew she was exaggerating. She was a good student. She hated algebra because she could not perceive a life where it would become useful. Especially when at the moment she wanted to be a cop — or so she said.

“I’m sure you did fine. Are you reading that for IR? What is it?”

She held the book up so he could see it. It was The Stand by Stephen King.

“It’s my optional choice.”

“Pretty thick for a school read.”

“It’s really good. Are you trying to avoid the subject of the two wineglasses by not eating with me and then asking all of these questions?”

She had nailed him.

“I’m not avoiding anything. I do have work to do and I already explained the wineglasses in the dishwasher.”

“But you didn’t explain about how one still had lipstick on it.”

Bosch looked at her. He had missed the lipstick.

“So who’s the detective in the house now?” he asked.

“Don’t try to deflect,” she said. “The point is, you don’t have to lie about your girlfriend with me, Dad.”

“Look, she’s not my girlfriend and she is never going to be my girlfriend. It didn’t work out. I am sorry I didn’t tell you the truth but we can drop it now. When and if I do ever have a girlfriend, I will let you know. Just like I hope you will tell me when you have a boyfriend.”

“Fine.”

“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

“No, Dad.”

“Good. I mean, it’s good that you aren’t keeping a secret. Not good that you don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t want to be a father who’s like that.”

“I get it.”

“Good.”

“Then why are you so mad?”

“I’m—”

He stopped as he realized that her perception was right on the money. He was mad about one thing and it was showing in something else.

“You know what I said a minute ago about look who the detective in the house is?”

“Yes, I was sitting right here.”

“Well, on Monday night you looked at that video I had of the guy checking in and you called it right there. You said he jumped. Based on what you saw in thirty seconds of video you said he jumped.”

“So?”

“Well, I’ve been chasing my tail all week, seeing a murder where there wasn’t a murder, and you know what? I think you were right. You called it right at the start and I didn’t. I must be getting old.”

A look of true sympathy came over her face.

“Dad, you’ll get over it and you’ll get ’em next time. You’re the one who told me you can’t solve every case. Well, at least you got this one right in the long run.”

“Thanks, Mads.”

“And I don’t want to pile on but. .”

Bosch looked at her. She was proud of something.

“All right, give it to me. But what?”

“There was no lipstick on the glass. I bluffed you.”

Bosch shook his head.

“You know something, kid? Someday you’re going to be the one they’ll want in the interview room. Your looks, your skills, they’ll be confessing to you right and left and lined up in the hall.”

She smiled and went back to her book. Bosch noticed she had left one taco uneaten on her plate and he was tempted to go for it, but instead set to work on the case, opening the murder book and spreading the loose files and reports out on the table.

“You know how a battering ram works?” he asked.

“What?” his daughter replied.

“You know what a battering ram is?”

“Of course. What are you talking about?”

“When I get stuck on a case like this, I go back to the book and all the files.”

He gestured to the murder book on the table.

“I look at it like a battering ram. You pull back and swing it forward. You hit the locked door and you smash through. That’s what going through everything again is like. You swing back and then you swing forward with all that momentum.”

She looked puzzled by his decision to share this piece of advice with her.

“Okay, Dad.”

“Sorry. Go back to your book.”

“I thought you just said he jumped. So why are you stuck?”

“Because what I think and what I can prove are two separate things. A case like this, I have to have it all nailed down. Anyway, it’s my problem. Go back to your book.”

She did. And he went back to his. He began by carefully rereading all the reports and summaries he had clipped into the binder. He let the information flow over him and he looked for new angles and colors. If George Irving jumped, then Bosch had to more than simply believe it. He had to be able to prove it not only to the powers that be but, most important, to himself. And he wasn’t quite there yet. A suicide was a premeditated killing. Bosch needed to find motive and opportunity and means. He had some of each but not enough.

The CD changer moved to the next disc and Bosch soon recognized Chet Baker’s trumpet. The song was “Night Bird” from a German import. Bosch had seen Baker perform the song in a club on O’Farrell in San Francisco in 1982, the only time he ever saw him play live. By then Baker’s cover-boy looks and West Coast cool had been sucked out of him by drugs and life, but he could still make the trumpet sound like a human voice on a dark night. In another six years he would be dead from a fall from a hotel window in Amsterdam.

Bosch looked at his daughter.

“You put this in there?”

She looked up from the book.

“Is this Chet Baker? Yeah, I wanted to hear him because of your case and the poem in the hallway.”

Bosch got up and went into the bedroom hallway, flicking the light on. Framed on the wall was a single-page poem. Almost twenty years earlier Bosch had been in a restaurant on Venice Beach and by happenstance the author of the poem, John Harvey, was giving a reading. It didn’t seem to Bosch that anybody in the place knew who Chet Baker was. But Harry did and he loved the resonance of the poem. He got up and asked Harvey if he could buy a copy. Harvey simply gave him the paper he had read from.

Bosch had probably passed by the poem a thousand times since he had last read it.

CHET BAKER

looks out from his hotel room

across the Amstel to the girl

cycling by the canal who lifts

her hand and waves and when

she smiles he is back in times

when every Hollywood producer

wanted to turn his life

into that bittersweet story

where he falls badly, but only

in love with Pier Angeli,

Carol Lynley, Natalie Wood;

that day he strolled into the studio,

fall of fifty-two, and played

those perfect lines across

the chords of My Funny Valentine—

and now when he looks up from

his window and her passing smile

into the blue of a perfect sky

he knows this is one of those

rare days when he can truly fly.

Bosch went back out to the table and sat down.

“I looked him up on Wikipedia,” Maddie said. “They never knew for sure if he jumped or just fell. Some people said drug dealers pushed him out.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, sometimes you never know.”

He went back to work and continued his review of the accumulated reports. As he read his own summary report on the interview with Officer Robert Mason, Bosch felt he was missing something. The report was complete but he felt he had overlooked something in the conversation with Mason. It was there but he just couldn’t reach it. He closed his eyes and tried to hear Mason speaking and responding to the questions.

He saw Mason sitting bolt upright in the chair, gesturing as he spoke, saying that he and George Irving had been close. Best man at the wedding, reserving the honeymoon suite. .

Harry suddenly had it. When Mason had mentioned reserving the honeymoon suite, he had gestured in the direction of the squad lieutenant’s office. He was pointing west. The same direction as the Chateau Marmont.

He got up and quickly went out onto the deck so he could make a call without disturbing his daughter’s reading. He slid the door closed behind him and called the LAPD communications center. He asked a dispatcher to radio six-Adam-sixty-five in the field and ask him to call Bosch on his cell. He said it was urgent.

As he was giving his number, he received a call-waiting beep. Once the dispatcher correctly read back the number, he switched over to the waiting call. It was Chu. Bosch didn’t bother with any niceties.

“Did you go to the Standard?”

“Yeah, McQuillen checks out. He was there all night, like he knew he needed to sit under that camera. But that’s not why I’m calling. I think I found something.”

“What?”

“I’ve been going through everything and I found something that doesn’t make sense. The kid was already coming down.”

“What are you talking about? What kid?”

“Irving’s kid. He was already coming down from San Francisco. It’s on the AmEx account. I checked it again tonight. The kid — Chad Irving — had an airplane ticket to come home before his father was dead.”

“Hold on a second.”

Bosch went back inside the house and over to the table. He looked through the spread of documents until he found the American Express report. It was a printout of all charges Irving had made on the card going back three years. It was twenty-two pages long and Bosch had looked at every page less than an hour earlier and seen nothing that grabbed his attention.

“Okay, I’ve got the AmEx here. How are you looking at it?”

“I have it online, Harry. On the search warrant I always ask for printed statements and digital account access. But what I’m looking at is not on your printout. This charge was posted to the account yesterday and by then the printout was already in the mail to us.”

“You have the live account online.”

“Right. The last charge you have on the printout is the hotel room at the Chateau, right?”

“Yeah, right here.”

“Okay, well, American Airlines posted a charge yesterday for three hundred nine dollars.”

“Okay.”

“So I was going back and looking at everything again and I went online to look at AmEx again. I still have digital access. I saw that a new billing had come through yesterday from American.”

“So Chad’s using his father’s card? Maybe he was given a duplicate card.”

“No, I thought maybe that was the case at first but it’s not. I called AmEx security to follow up on the warrant. AmEx just took three days to post the charge on his record but George Irving made the purchase online Sunday afternoon — about twelve hours before he took the high dive. I got the record locator from AmEx and went on American’s website. It was a round-trip ticket, SFO to LAX and back. Fly down Monday afternoon at four. Back today at two, except that return got changed to next Sunday.”

It was good work but Bosch wasn’t going to compliment Chu just yet.

“But don’t they send out e-mail confirmations for online purchases? We looked at Irving’s e-mail. There was nothing from American.”

“I fly American and I buy the tickets online. You only get the e-mail confirmation if you click the box. You can also have it sent to someone else. Irving could have had the confirmation and itinerary sent directly to his son since he was the one flying.”

Bosch had to think about this. It was a significant new piece of information. Irving had bought his son a ticket to L.A. before his death. It could have been a simple plan to bring his son home for a visit but it also could have meant Irving knew what he was going to do and wanted to insure that his kid could get home to be with family. It was another piece that fit with McQuillen’s story. And with Robert Mason’s.

“I think it means he killed himself,” Chu said. “He knew that he was going to jump that night and he bought his kid a ticket so he could come down to be with his mother. It also explains the call. He called the kid that evening to tell him about the ticket.”

Bosch didn’t respond. His phone started beeping. Mason’s call was coming in.

“I did good, didn’t I, Harry?” Chu said. “I told you I’d make it up to you.”

“It was good work, but it doesn’t make up for anything,” Bosch said.

Bosch noticed his daughter look up from her book. She had heard what he’d said.

“Look, Harry, I like my job,” Chu said. “I don’t want—”

Bosch cut him off.

“I’ve got another call coming in. I’ve got to take it.”

He disconnected and switched to the other call. It was Mason responding to the dispatch from the com center.

“The honeymoon suite you rented for the Irvings. It was at the Chateau Marmont, wasn’t it?”

Mason was quiet for a long moment before he responded.

“So I guess Deborah and the councilman didn’t mention that, did they?”

“No, they didn’t. That’s why you knew he jumped. The suite. That was the suite.”

“Yeah. I figured things sort of all went wrong for him and he went up there.”

Bosch nodded. More to himself than to Mason.

“Okay, Mason, thanks for the call.”

Bosch hung up. He put the phone down on the table and looked at his daughter on the couch, reading. She seemed to feel his gaze and looked up at him from the words of Stephen King.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Not really.”