Michael Connelly - The Drop

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.”