The Drop

5

The upper floors of the hotel followed an L pattern. Bosch got off the elevator on seven and took a left to go around a corner and down to room 79 at the end of the hallway. There was a uniformed officer on the door. It made Bosch think of something and he pulled his phone. He called Kiz Rider’s cell and she answered right away.

“Did you know what he did for a living?” he asked.

“Who are you talking about, Harry?” she responded.

“Who else, George Irving. Did you know he was some sort of fixer?”

“I heard that he was a lobbyist.”

“A lawyer lobbyist. Listen, I need you to flex the muscles of the chief’s office and put a cop on his office door until I can get there. Nobody in or out.”

“Not a problem. Is what he did as a lobbyist in play here?”

“You never know. I’d just feel better if there was somebody on the door.”

“You got it, Harry.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

Bosch put his phone away and approached the cop posted in front of room 79. He signed his clipboard, noting the time, and went in. He stepped into a living room with open French doors that led to the balcony and a western exposure. The wind was billowing the curtains and Bosch saw Chu out there on the balcony. He was looking down.

Standing in the room were Solomon and Glanville. Crate and Barrel. They didn’t look happy. When Jerry Solomon saw Bosch, he stretched his hands out in a what gives? gesture. Actually, Bosch realized, it was more of a what the fuck? gesture.

“What can I tell you?” Bosch said. “High jingo. We do what we’re told.”

“You aren’t going to find anything here we didn’t find. We have it right, the guy took the dive.”

“And that’s what I told the chief and the councilman, but here I am.”

Now Bosch spread his hands in a what can I do? gesture.

“So you want to stand around complaining about it or you want to tell me what you’ve got?”

Solomon nodded to Glanville, the junior of the two partners, and he pulled a notebook out of his back pocket. He flipped through a few pages and then started telling the story. Meantime, Chu came in from the balcony to listen as well.

“Last night at eight fifty the front desk gets a call from a man identifying himself as George Irving. He reserves a room for the night and says he’s on the way. He specifically asks what rooms with balconies they’ve got on the top floor. They give him a choice and he takes seventy-nine. He gives an American Express number to hold the room and it checks out to the card in his wallet, which is in the bedroom in the safe.”

Glanville pointed down a hallway to Bosch’s left. Harry saw an open doorway at the end and a bed.

“Okay, so he shows up at nine forty,” Glanville continued. “He valets his car in the garage, uses the AmEx to register and then goes up to his room. Nobody ever sees him again.”

“Until they find him on the sidewalk down below,” Solomon said.

“When?” Bosch asked.

“At five fifty one of the kitchen guys reports for work. He’s heading up the sidewalk to get to the rear entrance where the time-card rack is located. He finds the body. Patrol comes out first, then we get called when they make a tentative ID.”

Bosch nodded and looked around the room. There was a writing table next to the balcony door.

“No note?”

“Not that we’ve found in here.”

Bosch noticed a digital clock on the floor. It was plugged into a wall outlet near the desk.

“Is that how that was found? Is it supposed to be on the desk?”

“It’s where we found it,” Solomon said. “We don’t know where it is supposed to be.”

Bosch walked over and squatted down next to the clock while he put on a fresh set of gloves. He carefully picked up the clock and studied it. It had a dock for connecting an iPod or an iPhone.

“Do we know what kind of phone Irving had?”

“Yeah, iPhone,” Glanville said. “It’s in the safe in the bedroom.”

Bosch checked the alarm on the clock. It was switched off. He pushed the set button to see what time it had previously been set for. The red digits shifted. The last time the alarm was used it was set for 4 A.M.

Bosch put the clock back on the floor and stood up, his knee joints popping with the effort. He left the main room behind and stepped through the French doors onto the balcony. There was a small table and two chairs. A white terry cloth robe had been left lying across one of the chairs. Bosch looked down over the edge. The first thing he noticed was that the balustrade came up only to the top of his thighs. It seemed low to him, and while he had no idea how tall Irving had been, he immediately had to consider the possibility of an accidental fall. He wondered whether that was what he was here for. Nobody wants a suicide on the family ledger. An accidental tumble over a low balustrade was far more acceptable.

He looked directly down and saw the canopy the forensic team had put up. He also saw the body, on a gurney and covered in a blue blanket, being loaded into the coroner’s van.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Solomon said from behind him.

“Yeah, what am I thinking?”

“That he didn’t jump. That it was an accident.”

Bosch didn’t respond.

“But there are things to consider.”

“What are they?”

“The guy’s naked. The bed isn’t slept in and he didn’t check in with any luggage. He just checked into a hotel room in his own city without a suitcase. He asked for the top floor and a room with a balcony. He then goes up to his room, takes off his clothes, puts on the bathrobe they give you in a place like this and goes out on the balcony to contemplate the stars or something. He then takes off the bathrobe and falls face-fucking-first off the balcony by accident?”

“And no scream,” Glanville added. “Nobody reported a scream — that’s why they didn’t find him till this morning. You don’t accidentally fall off a freakin’ balcony and not scream your lungs out.”

“So maybe he wasn’t conscious,” Bosch suggested. “Maybe he wasn’t alone up here. Maybe it wasn’t an accident.”

“Oh, man, is that what this is about?” Solomon said. “The councilman wants a murder investigation and you’re sent out to make sure he gets it.”

Bosch gave Solomon a look that let him know he was making a mistake suggesting Harry was carrying out Irving’s bidding.

“Look, nothing personal,” Solomon said quickly. “I’m just saying we don’t see that angle at all here. Suicide note or not, this scene adds up to only one thing. A high dive.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He noticed the fire escape ladder at the other end of the balcony. It led up to the roof and down to the balcony below on the sixth floor.

“Anybody go up on the roof?”

“Not yet,” Solomon said. “We were awaiting further instructions.”

“What about the rest of the hotel? Did you knock on any doors?”

“Same thing. Further instructions.”

Solomon was being an ass but Bosch ignored it.

“How did you confirm ID on the body? The facial damage was extensive.”

“Yeah, this one’s going to be closed casket,” Glanville said. “That’s for sure.”

“We got the name off the hotel registration and the plate on the car in valet,” Solomon said. “This was before we got the room safe open and found the wallet. We figured we better be sure and we better be quick. I had patrol send over the division’s MPR and got it off the guy’s thumb.”

Each of the department’s divisions had a mobile print reader that took a digital thumbprint and instantly compared it to the Department of Motor Vehicles database. It was primarily used in the station house jails to confirm IDs, as there had been several incidents in which felons sought on warrants had given false IDs upon arrest and were able to bail out before the jailers knew they’d had a wanted individual in custody. But the department was always looking for other applications of the equipment and this had been a smart use of the new technology by Crate and Barrel.

“Good going,” Bosch said.

He turned and looked at the bathrobe.

“Anybody check that?”

Solomon and Glanville looked at each other and Bosch saw the exchange. Neither had checked, thinking the other had.

Solomon went to the robe and Bosch stepped back into the suite. As he did so he spotted a small object next to a leg of the coffee table in front of the couch. He squatted down to see what it was without touching it. It was a small black button that had blended in with the dark pattern of the carpet.

Bosch picked the button up so he could look closely at it. He guessed that it had come off a men’s dress shirt. He put the button back in the place he had found it. He could tell one of the detectives had come in from the balcony and was behind him.

“Where are his clothes?”

“Folded and hung nice and neat in the closet,” Glanville said. “What’s that?”

“A button, probably nothing. But get the photographer back up here to shoot it before we collect it. Anything in the bathrobe?”

“The room key. That’s it.”

Bosch headed down the hallway. The first room on the right was a small kitchen with a table for two against one wall. On the counter opposite was a display of alcoholic beverages and snacks available for purchase by the suite’s guest. Bosch checked the waste can in the corner. It was empty. He opened the refrigerator and found it stocked with more beverages — beer, champagne, sodas and fruit drinks. None of it looked disturbed.

Harry moved on down the hall, checking out the bathroom before finally entering the bedroom.

Solomon had been right about the bed. The spread was neat and pulled tight at the corners. No one had even sat on the bed since it had been made. There was a closet with a mirrored door. As Bosch approached it he could see Glanville in the room’s doorway behind him, watching.

In the closet, Irving’s clothes were on hangers — shirt, pants and jacket — and his underwear, socks and shoes were on a side shelf next to a room safe with a partially opened door. Inside the safe were a wallet and a wedding ring along with an iPhone and a watch.

The safe had a four-digit combination lock. Solomon had said it was found closed and locked. Bosch knew that the hotel management most likely had an electronic reader that was used to unlock the room safes. People forget combinations or check out, forgetting they’ve locked the safe. The device quickly goes through the ten thousand possible combinations until it hits the winner.

“What was the combination?”

“To the safe? I don’t know. Maybe Jerry got it from her.”

“Her?”

“The assistant manager who opened it for us. Her name’s Tamara.”

Bosch removed the phone from the safe. He had the same model himself. But when he tried to access it he found it was password protected.

“What do you want to bet that the password he keyed into the safe is the same password on the phone?”

Glanville didn’t answer. Bosch put the phone back into the safe.

“We need to get somebody up here to bag this stuff.”

“We?”

Bosch smiled, though Glanville couldn’t see it. He slid the hangers apart and checked the pockets on the clothing. They were empty. He then started looking at the buttons on the shirt. It was a dark blue dress shirt with black buttons. He checked the rest of the shirt and found that the right cuff was missing a button.

He felt Glanville come up and look over his shoulder.

“I think it’s a match to the one out there on the floor,” Bosch said.

“Yeah, what’s it mean?” Glanville said.

Bosch turned around and looked at him.

“I don’t know.”

Before leaving the room, Bosch noticed that one of the bed’s side tables was askew. One corner had been pulled away from the wall and Bosch guessed it had been done when Irving unplugged the clock.

“What do you think, that he took the clock out there to listen to music from his iPhone?” he asked without looking back at Glanville.

“Could be but there’s another dock out there under the TV for that. Maybe he just didn’t see it.”

“Maybe.”

Bosch moved back out to the suite’s living room and Glanville followed. Chu was on his phone and Bosch gave him the cut it off sign. Chu put his hand over the phone and said, “I’m getting good stuff here.”

“Yeah, well, get it later,” Bosch said. “We have things to do.”

Chu got off the phone and the four detectives stood in a circle in the middle of the room.

“Okay, this is how I want to do this,” Bosch began. “We’re going to knock on every door in this building. We ask what people heard, what they saw. We cover—”

“Jesus Christ, what a waste of time,” Solomon said, turning from the circle and looking out one of the windows.

“We can leave no stone unturned,” Bosch said. “That way, if and when we call it suicide, nobody can second-guess us. Not the councilman, not the chief, not even the press. So the three of you split up the floors and start knocking on doors.”

“People in here are all night crawlers,” Glanville said. “They’re still going to be sleeping.”

“That’s good. That means we’ll get to them before they get out of the building.”

“Okay, so we get to wake everybody up,” Solomon said. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m going down to see the manager. I want a copy of the registration and the combination used to lock the room safe. I’ll see about cameras and after that I’ll check Irving’s car in the garage. You never know, maybe he left a note in the car. You two never checked it.”

“We would’ve gotten to it,” Glanville said defensively.

“Well, I’ll get to it now,” Bosch said.

“The safe combo, Harry?” Chu asked. “What for?”

“Because it might tell us whether it was Irving who punched it in.”

Chu had a confused look on his face. Bosch decided he would explain it all later.

“Chu, I also want you to climb that ladder out there and check the roof. Do that first, before you start knocking on doors.”

“Got it.”

“Thank you.”

It was refreshing not to get a complaint. Bosch turned back to Crate and Barrel.

“Now, here’s the part you two aren’t going to like.”

“Oh, really?” Solomon said. “Imagine that.”

Bosch walked over to the balcony doors, signaling them over. They stepped back out and Bosch pointed a finger and swept it across the vista of homes that terraced the hillside. Though on the seventh floor, he was level with numerous homes with windows facing the Chateau.

“I want all of them canvassed,” he said. “Use patrol if they can spare the bodies, but I want all those doors knocked on. Somebody might have seen something.”

“Don’t you think we would’ve heard from them?” Glanville said. “You see a guy jump off a balcony and I think you’re going to call it in.”

Bosch glanced from the view to Glanville and then back out to the view.

“Maybe they saw something before the drop. Maybe they saw him out here alone. Maybe he wasn’t alone. And maybe they saw him get thrown and they’re too scared to get involved. Too many maybes to let it go, Crate. It has to be done.”

“He’s Crate. I’m Barrel.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

The disdain in Bosch’s voice was unmistakable.