“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.”
30
It was eight thirty by the time Bosch pulled up in front of the home where George Irving had lived. The lights were still on inside but the garage doors were closed and there were no cars in the driveway. Bosch watched for a few minutes and saw no activity behind any of the lighted windows. If Deborah Irving and her son were inside, they weren’t showing it.
Bosch pulled his phone and, as agreed, texted his daughter. He had left her at home alone, telling her he would not be gone more than two hours and that he would check on her upon arrival at and departure from his destination.
She responded quickly.
All good. Finished homework, watching Castle downloads.
Bosch pocketed the phone and got out of the car. He had to knock twice, and when the door opened, it was Deborah Irving by herself.
“Detective Bosch?”
“Sorry to intrude so late, Mrs. Irving. I need to speak with you.”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am.”
“Of course. Come in.”
She opened up and led him into the room and to the couch where he had sat before at the start of the case.
“I saw you at the funeral today,” she said. “Chad said he spoke to you also.”
“Yes. Is Chad still here?”
“He’s staying through the weekend but he’s not home right now. He went to see an old girlfriend. It’s a very difficult time for him, as you can imagine.”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Can I get you a coffee? We have a Nespresso.”
Bosch didn’t know what that meant but shook his head.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Irving.”
“Please call me Deborah.”
“Deborah.”
“Are you here to tell me you will be making an arrest in the case soon?”
“Uh, no, I’m not. I’m here to tell you there’s not going to be an arrest.”
She looked surprised.
“Dad—uh, Councilman Irving—told me there was a suspect. That it had to do with one of the competitors George was dealing with.”
“No, that was how it was looking because I went down the wrong path.”
He checked her reaction. No giveaways. She still looked genuinely surprised.
“You sent me down the wrong path,” he said. “You and the councilman and even Chad held back on me. I didn’t have what I needed and I went stumbling off after a murderer when there never was a murderer.”
Now she was beginning to look indignant.
“What do you mean? Dad told me there was evidence of assault and that George was choked. He said it was most likely a cop. Don’t tell me you are covering up for the cop who did this.”
“That’s not the case, Deborah, and I think you know it. That day I came here, the councilman told you what to say, what to leave in and what to leave out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like that the room your husband rented was the room you two shared on the night you got married. Like that your son was already scheduled to come home Monday—before your husband even went out that night.”
He let that sink in for a long moment, letting her come to realize what he had and what he knew.
“Chad was coming home because you two had something to tell him, right?”
“This is ridiculous!”
“Is it? Maybe I should talk to Chad first, ask him what he was told when he was sent the airline ticket Sunday afternoon.”
“You leave Chad alone. He’s going through a lot.”
“Then talk to me, Deborah. Why’d you hide it? Can’t be money. We checked the insurance policies. They’re all mature, no suicide clauses. You get the money whether he jumped or not.”
“He didn’t jump! I’m going to call Irvin. I’m going to tell him what you’re saying.”
She started to stand up.
“Did you tell George you were leaving him? Is that it? Is that why he put your anniversary date into the combination on the room safe? Is that why he jumped? His son was gone and now you were going, too. He had already lost his friend Bobby Mason and all he had left was a job working as a bagman for his father.”
She tried what Bosch always viewed as the last best defense of a woman. She started crying.
“You bastard! You’ll destroy a good man’s reputation. Is that what you want? Will that make you happy?”
Bosch didn’t answer for a long time.
“No, Mrs. Irving, not really.”
Bosch nodded but made no move to get up.
“I’ll leave when you give me the story.”
“I don’t have the story!”
“Then Chad does. I’ll wait for him.”
“All right, look, Chad doesn’t know a thing. He’s nineteen years old. He’s a boy. If you talk to him you’ll destroy him.”
Bosch realized that it was all about the son, about protecting him from knowing that his father had killed himself.
“Then you have to talk to me first. Last chance, Mrs. Irving.”
She gripped her chair’s armrests and bowed her head.
“I told him our marriage was over.”
“And how did he take it?”
“Not well. He didn’t see it coming because he didn’t see what he had become. An opportunist, a taker, a bagman, like you said. Chad had gotten away and I decided I would, too. There was no one else. There was just no reason to stay. I wasn’t running to something. I was just running away from him.”
Bosch leaned forward, elbows on his knees, making the conversation more intimate.
“When did this conversation take place?” he asked.
“A week before. We talked about it for a week but I wasn’t changing my mind. I told him to bring Chad down or I would go up there to tell him. He made the arrangements Sunday.”
Bosch nodded. All the details were fitting together.
“What about the councilman? Was he told?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t tell him and it never came up after—when he was here that day and told me that George was dead. He didn’t mention anything about it then and he didn’t at the funeral today either.”
Bosch knew that this didn’t mean anything. Irving could have been keeping his knowledge to himself as he waited to see which way the investigation would go. In the long run it didn’t matter what Irving knew or when he knew it.
“On Sunday night, when George went out, what did he say to you?”
“As I told you before, he said he was going out for a drive. That’s all. He didn’t tell me where.”
“Did he threaten to kill himself during any of your discussions in the week prior to his death?”
“No, he didn’t.”
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