“What happened when you got to the seventh floor?”
“I got lucky. On the seventh floor, there wasn’t an exit. No door to the hallway. Just two glass doors on the balcony to two different rooms. One to the left and one to the right. I looked in the one on the right and there he was. Irving was sitting right there on the couch.”
McQuillen stopped. It looked as if he was staring at the memory of that night, at what he had seen through the balcony door. Bosch was mindful of needing to keep the story going but with as little from himself as possible.
“So you found him.”
“Yeah, he was just sitting there, drinking Jack Black straight outta the bottle and looking like he was just waiting for something.”
“Then what happened?”
“He took the last pull out of that bottle and all of a sudden he got up and he started coming right at me. Like he knew I was on the balcony watching him.”
“What did you do?”
“I backed up against the wall next to the door. I figured he couldn’t have seen me with the reflection inside on the glass. He was just coming out on the balcony. So I backed up next to the door and he opened it and stepped out. He walked right to the wall and he threw the empty bottle out there as far as he could. Then he leaned over the wall and started looking down, like he was going to puke or something. And I knew when he finished his business and turned around I was going to be standing right in front of him. There was no place to go.”
“Did he vomit?”
“No, he never did. He just—”
A loud and unexpected knock on the door nearly made Bosch jump off his seat.
“Just hold the story right there,” he said.
He got up and used his body to shield the knob from McQuillen. He punched in the combination on the lock and opened the door. Chu was standing there and Bosch almost reached out to strangle him. But he calmly stepped out and closed the door.
“What the fuck are you doing? You know you never barge in on an interview. What are you, a rookie?”
“Look, I wanted to tell you, I killed the story. She’s not running it.”
“That’s great. You could’ve told me after the interview was over. This guy’s about to give up the whole thing and you knock on the fucking door.”
“I just didn’t know if you were making moves with him because you thought the story was going to come out. It won’t now, Harry.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
Bosch turned back to the interview room door.
“I’m going to make it up to you, Harry. I promise.”
Bosch turned back to him.
“I don’t care about your promises. You want to do something, stop knocking on the door and start working on a search warrant for this guy’s watch. When we send it to forensics I want it on a judge’s order.”
“You got it, Harry.”
“Good. Go away.”
Bosch punched in the combination, reentered the room and sat across from McQuillen.
“Something important?” McQuillen asked.
“No, just some bullshit. Why don’t you keep telling the story? You said Irving was on the balcony and—”
“Yeah, I was standing there behind him against the wall. As soon as he turned to go back in I was going to be like a sitting duck.”
“So what did you do?”
“I don’t know. Instinct took over. I made a move. I came up behind him and grabbed him. I started dragging him back into the room. All those houses on the hillside. I thought somebody might see us out there. I just wanted to get him back into the room.”
“You say you grabbed him. How exactly did you grab him?”
“Around the neck. I used the choke hold. Like old times.”
McQuillen looked directly at Bosch as he said it, as if passing on some sort of significance.
“Did he struggle? Did he put up any resistance?”
“Yeah, he was shocked as shit. He started fighting but he was sort of drunk. I backed him in through the door. He flopped around like a fucking marlin but it didn’t take long. It never did. He went to sleep.”
Bosch waited to see if he would continue but that was it.
“He was unconscious then,” he said.
“That’s right,” McQuillen said.
“What happened next?”
“He started breathing again pretty quick but he was asleep. I told you, he drank that whole bottle of Jack. He was snoring. I had to shake him and wake him up. He finally came to and he was drunk and confused and when he saw me he didn’t know me from Adam. I had to tell him who I was and why I was there. He was on the floor, sort of propped up on his elbow. And I was standing over him like God.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him he was fucking with the wrong guy and that I wasn’t going to let him do what his father had done to me. And that’s when things sort of went screwy because I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
“Wait a minute, I’m not tracking that. What do you mean by ‘things going screwy’?”
“He started laughing at me. I had just jumped the fucker and choked him out and he thinks it’s funny. I’m trying to scare the shit out of him and he’s too drunk. He’s on the floor laughing his ass off.”
Bosch thought about this a long moment. He didn’t like the way this was going because it was not in any direction he could have expected.
“Is that all he did, laugh? He didn’t say anything?”
“Yeah, eventually he got over laughing and that’s when he told me I didn’t have anything to worry about anymore.”
“What else?”
“That’s pretty much it. He said I had nothing to worry about and that I could go on home. He waved me off, like good-bye now.”
“Did you ask him how he was sure there was nothing to worry about?”
“I didn’t think I had to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just sort of got it. He was there to off himself. When he went out on the balcony looking over the wall, he was picking his spot. His plan was to jump and he was drinking the Jack to give him the courage to do it. So I left and that’s . . . that’s what he did.”
Bosch said nothing at first. McQuillen’s story was either an elaborate cover story or just strange enough to be true. There were elements of it that could be checked. The results of the blood-alcohol test were not in yet, but the mention of the bottle of Jack Daniel’s was new. There had been no sign of it on the video of Irving checking in. No witness had reported seeing him taking a bottle to his room.
“Tell me about the bottle of Jack,” he said.
“I told you, he drank it and then chucked it.”
“How big was it? Are you talking about a whole fifth?”
“No, no, smaller. It was a six-shooter.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s like a smaller flask bottle they put out. Holds a good six shots. I drink Jack myself and I recognized the bottle. We call ’em six-shooters.”
Bosch was thinking that six good-sized shots probably added up to ten or twelve ounces. It was possible Irving could have concealed a flask-shaped bottle that size while he was checking in. Harry also remembered the array of bottles and snacks lined up on the kitchenette counter in the hotel suite. It could have come from there as well.
“Okay, when he threw the bottle, what happened?”
