Nine Dragons (46 page)

Chu parlayed the report on the chief’s call into a question about what really had been bothering him all morning.

“What about the lieutenant?” he said. “Were you ever going to tell me what that was about?”

Bosch played dumb.

“What what was about?”

“Don’t play dumb, Harry. When she held you back in the office, what was she saying? She wants me out of the unit, doesn’t she? I never liked her either.”

Bosch couldn’t help himself. His partner’s glass was always half empty and an opportunity to needle him about it was not to be missed.

“She said she wanted to move you laterally—keep you in homicide. She said there were some slots coming up in South Bureau and she’s talking to them about a switch.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Chu had recently moved out to Pasadena. The commute to South Bureau would be a nightmare.

“Well, what did you tell her?” he demanded. “Did you stick up for me?”

“South is a good gig, man. I told her you’d get seasoned down there in two years. It would take five anywhere else.”

“Harry!”

Bosch started laughing. It was a good release. The impending meeting with Irving was weighing on him. It was coming and he wasn’t sure yet how to play it.

“Are you shitting me?” Chu cried, fully turned in his seat now. “Are you fucking shitting me?”

“Yes, I’m fucking shitting you, Chu. So chill out. All she told me was that my DROP came through. You’re going to have to put up with me for another three years and three months, okay?”

“Oh…, well, that’s good, right?”

“Yes, that’s good.”

Chu was too young to worry about things like the DROP. Almost ten years before, Bosch had taken a full pension and retired from the department in an ill-advised decision. After two years as a citizen he came back under the department’s Deferred Retirement Option Plan, which was designed to keep experienced detectives in the department and doing the work they did best. For Bosch that was homicide. He was a retread with a seven-year contract. Not everybody in the department was happy with the program, especially divisional detectives hoping for a shot at some of the prestige slots in the downtown Robbery-Homicide Division.

Department policy allowed for one extension of the DROP of three to five years. After that, retirement was mandated. Bosch had applied for his second contract the year before and, bureaucracy being what it was in the department, waited more than a year for the news the lieutenant gave him, going well past his original DROP date. He had been anxious while waiting, knowing that he could be dismissed from the department immediately if the police commission did not decide to extend his stay. It was certainly good news to finally get but he now saw a defined limit on his time carrying a badge. So the good news was tinged with a certain melancholy. When he got the formal notification from the commission, it would have an exact date on it that would be his last day as a cop. He couldn’t help but focus on that. His future had limitations. Maybe he was a half-empty kind of guy himself.

Chu gave him a break on the questions after that and Harry tried to avoid thinking about the DROP. Instead, he thought about Irvin Irving as he drove west. The councilman had spent more than forty years in the police department but had never gotten to the top floor. After a career spent grooming and positioning himself for the chief’s job, it had been snatched from him in a political windstorm. A few years after that, he was engineered out of the department—with Bosch’s help. A man scorned, he ran for the city council, won the election, and made it his business to exact retribution on the department where he had toiled for so many decades. He had gone so far as to vote against every proposed raise in salaries for police officers and expansion of the department. He was always first to call for an independent review or investigation of any perceived impropriety or alleged transgression committed by officers. His sharpest poke, however, had come the year before when he had wholeheartedly joined the cost-cutting charge that slashed a hundred million in overtime out of the department budget. That hurt every officer up and down the ladder.

Bosch had no doubt that the current chief of police had made some sort of deal with Irving. A quid pro quo. Bosch would be delivered to take over the case in exchange for something else. While Harry had never considered himself very politically astute, he was confident he would figure things out soon enough.

Four

The Chateau Marmont sat at the east end of the Sunset Strip, an iconic structure set against the Hollywood Hills that had enticed movie stars, writers, rock and rollers and their entourages for decades. Several times during his career Bosch had been to the hotel as he had followed cases and sought witnesses and suspects. He knew its beamed lobby and hedged courtyard and the layout of its spacious suites. Other hotels offered amazing levels of comfort and personal service. The Chateau offered Old World charm and a lack of interest in your personal business. Most hotels had security cameras, hidden or not, in all public spaces. The Chateau had few. The one thing the Chateau offered that no other hotel on the strip could touch was privacy. Behind its walls and tall hedges was a world without intrusion, where those who didn’t want to be watched were not. That is, until things went wrong, or private behavior became public.

Just past Laurel Canyon Boulevard the hotel rose behind the profusion of billboards that lined Sunset. By night the hotel was marked with a simple neon-lit sign, modest by Sunset Strip standards, and even more so by day when the light was off. The hotel was technically located on Marmont Lane, which split off from Sunset and wound around the hotel and up into the hills. As they approached, Bosch saw that Marmont Lane was blocked by temporary barricades. Two patrol cars and two media trucks were parked along the hedge line at the front of the hotel. This told him that the death scene was on the west side or rear of the hotel. He pulled in behind one of the black and whites.

“The vultures are already here,” Chu said, nodding toward the media vans.

It was impossible to keep a secret in this town, especially a secret like this. A neighbor would call, a hotel guest or a patrol officer, maybe somebody down at the coroner’s office trying to impress a blond TV reporter. News traveled fast.

They got out of the car and approached the barricades. Bosch signaled one of the uniformed officers away from the two camera crews so they could speak without the media hearing.

“Where is it?” Bosch asked.

The cop looked like he had at least ten years on the job. His shirt plate said R
AMPONE.

“We have two scenes,” he said. “We’ve got the splat around back here on the side. And then the room the guy was using. That’s the top floor, room seventy-nine.”

It was the routine way of police officers to dehumanize the daily horrors that came with the job. Jumpers were called splats.

Bosch had left his rover in the car. He nodded to the mike on Rampone’s shoulder.

“Find out where Glanville and Solomon are.”

Rampone cocked his head toward his shoulder and pressed the transmit button. He quickly located the initial investigative team in room seventy-nine.

“Okay, tell them to stay put. We’re going to check out the lower scene and then head up.”

Bosch went back to his car to grab the rover out of the charging dock and then walked with Chu around the barricade and up the sidewalk.

“Harry, you want me to go up and talk to those guys?” Chu asked.

“No, it always starts with the body and goes from there. Always.”

Chu was used to working cold cases, where there was never a crime scene. Only reports. Also, he had issues with seeing dead bodies. It was the reason he’d opted for the cold case squad. No fresh kills, no murder scenes, no autopsies. This time things would be different.

Marmont Lane was a steep and narrow road. They came to the death scene at the northwestern corner of the hotel. The forensic team had put up a canopy over the scene to guard against visual intrusion from media choppers and the houses that terraced the hills behind the hotel.

Before stepping under the canopy Bosch looked up the side of the hotel. He saw a man in a suit leaning over the parapet, looking down from a balcony on the top floor. He guessed it was Glanville or Solomon.

Bosch went under the canopy and found a bustle of activities involving forensic techs, coroner’s investigators and police photographers. At the center of it all was Gabriel Van Atta, whom Bosch had known for years. Van Atta had spent twenty-five years working for the LAPD as a crime scene tech and supervisor before retiring and taking a job with the coroner. Now he got a salary and a pension and still worked crime scenes. That counted as a break for Bosch. He knew that Van Atta wouldn’t be cagey about anything. He would tell Harry exactly what he thought.

Bosch and Chu stood under the canopy but stayed on the periphery. The scene belonged to the techs at the moment. Bosch noted that the body had been turned over and that they were far along. The body would soon be removed and transported to the medical examiner’s office. This bothered him but it was the cost of coming into a case so late.

The gruesome extent of the injuries from seven floors of gravity were on full display. Bosch could almost feel his partner’s revulsion at the sight. Harry decided to give him a break.

“Tell you what, I’ll handle this and meet you upstairs.”

“Really?”

“Really. But you’re not getting out of the autopsy.”

“That’s a deal, Harry.”

The conversation had drawn Van Atta’s attention.

“Harry B,” he said. “I thought you were still working cold cases.”

“This one’s a special, Gabe. All right if I step in?”

Meaning the inner circle of the death scene. Van Atta waved him in. As Chu ducked out from under the canopy, Bosch grabbed a pair of paper booties from a dispenser and put them on over his shoes. He then worked his way as best he could around the coagulated blood on the sidewalk and squatted down next to what was left of George Thomas Irving.

Death takes everything, including one’s dignity. George’s naked and battered body was surrounded on all sides by technicians who viewed it as a piece of work. His earthly vessel had been reduced to a ripped bag of skin containing shattered bones and organs and blood vessels. His body had bled out through every natural orifice and many new ones created by his impact on the sidewalk. His skull was shattered, leaving his head and face grossly misshapen like it would be in a fun house mirror. His left eye had broken free of its orbit and hung loosely on his cheek. His chest had been crushed by the impact and several sheared bones from the ribs and clavicle protruded through the skin.

Unblinking, Bosch studied the body carefully, looking for the unusual on a canvas that was anything but usual. He searched the inside of the arms for needle tracks, the fingernails for foreign debris.

“I got here late,” he said. “Anything I should know?”

“I’m thinking the guy hit headfirst, which is very unusual, even for a suicide,” Van Atta said. “And I want to draw your attention to something here.”

He pointed to the victim’s right arm and then the left, which were spread in the blood puddle.

“Every bone in both arms is broken, Harry. Shattered, actually. But we have no compound injuries, no breaking of the skin.”

“Which tells us what?”

“It means one of two extremes. One, he was really serious about taking a high dive and didn’t even put his hands out to break the fall. If he had, we would’ve had shearing and compound fractures. We don’t.”

“And the other extreme?”

“That the reason he didn’t put his arms out to break the fall was that he wasn’t conscious when he hit the ground.”

“Meaning he was thrown.”

“Yeah, or more likely dropped. We’ll have to do some distance modeling but this looks like he came straight down. If he was pushed or thrown, as you say, I think he would have been a couple feet farther out from the structure.”

“Got it. What about time of death?”

“We took the liver temperature and did the math. This isn’t official, as you know, but we think between four and five.”

“So he was here on the sidewalk for an hour before somebody saw him.”

“It could happen. We’ll try to narrow the TOD at autopsy. Can we get him rolling now?”

“If that’s all the wisdom you have for me today, yes, you can get him out of here.”

A few minutes later Bosch headed up the entrance drive to the hotel’s garage. A black Lincoln Town Car with city plates was idling on the cobblestones. Councilman Irving’s car. As he walked past, Bosch saw a young driver behind the wheel and an older man in a suit in the front passenger seat. The back seat appeared to be empty but it was hard to determine through the smoked glass.

Bosch took the stairs up to the next level, where the front desk and lobby were located.

Most people who stayed at the Chateau were night creatures. The lobby was deserted except for Irvin Irving, who was sitting by himself on a couch with a cell phone pressed to his ear. When he saw Bosch coming, he quickly ended the call and pointed toward a couch directly opposite his. Harry had hoped to stay standing and to keep momentum but it was one of those times when he took direction. As he sat down he pulled a notebook out of his back pocket.

“Detective Bosch,” Irving said. “Thank you for coming.”

“I didn’t have the choice, Councilman.”

“I guess not.”

“First, I’d like to express my sympathy for the loss of your son. Second, I’d like to know why you want me here.”

Irving nodded and glanced out one of the lobby’s tall windows. There was an outdoor restaurant beneath palm trees and umbrellas and space heaters. It was empty, too, except for the wait staff.

“I guess nobody gets up around here till noon,” he said.

Bosch didn’t reply. He waited for the answer to his question. Irving’s signature physical trait had always been the shaved and polished scalp. He had the look going long before it was fashionable. In the department, he had been known as Mr. Clean because he had the look and he was the guy brought in to clean up the political and social messes that routinely came up in a heavily armed and political bureaucracy.