The Drop

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.

6

After finally clearing the scene, they took Laurel Canyon Boulevard over the hill to the San Fernando Valley. Along the way, Bosch and Chu traded reports on their efforts of the previous two hours, starting with the fact that the knocking on doors in the hotel had produced not a single guest who had heard or seen anything in regard to Irving’s death. Bosch found this surprising. He was sure that the sound of the impact of the body landing would have been loud, and yet no one in the hotel had reported hearing even that.

“A waste of time,” Chu said.

Which, of course, Bosch knew, was not the case. There was value in knowing that Irving had not shouted as he came down. This fact lent itself to the two scenarios Van Atta had mentioned; Irving had intentionally jumped or was unconscious when he was dropped.

“It’s never a waste of time,” he said. “Did any of you knock on the doors of the pool bungalows?”

“Not me. They’re all the way over on the other side of the building. I didn’t figure it was—”

“What about Crate and Barrel?”

“I don’t think so.”

Bosch pulled his phone. He called Solomon.

“What’s your location?” he asked.

“We’re on Marmont Lane, knocking on doors. Like we were told.”

“Did you get anything out of the hotel?”

“Nope, nobody heard nothing.”

“Did you hit any of the bungalows?”

There was a hesitation before Solomon answered.

“Nope, we weren’t told to hit the bungalows, remember?”

Bosch was annoyed.

“I need you to go back and talk to a guest named Thomas Rapport in bungalow two.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s supposedly some kind of famous writer. He checked in right after Irving and might’ve talked to him.”

“Let’s see, that’s about six hours or so before our guy jumped. And you want us to talk to a guy who was next in line to check in?”

“That’s right. I’d do it myself but I need to get to Irving’s wife.”

“Bungalow two, got it.”

“Today. You can e-mail me the report.”

Bosch closed the phone, annoyed with Solomon’s tone during the entire call. Chu immediately hit him with a question.

“How’d you know about this guy Rapport?”

Bosch reached into the side pocket of his suit coat and pulled free a clear plastic sleeve containing a DVD.

“There are not a lot of cameras in that hotel. But there is one over the front desk. It’s got Irving checking in and the rest of the night right up until the body’s discovered. Rapport came in right after Irving. He might’ve even ridden up in the elevator from the garage with him.”

“Did you look at the disc?”

“Just the part with him checking in. I’ll watch the rest later.”

“Anything else from the manager?”

“The hotel call logs and the combination that was entered on the room safe.”

Bosch told him the combination on the room safe was 1492 and that it was not a default number. Whoever had locked Irving’s possessions in the safe had keyed the number in either randomly or intentionally.

“Christopher Columbus,” Chu said.

“What do you mean?”

“Harry, I’m the foreigner. Don’t you know your history lessons? ‘In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue’—remember?”

“Yeah, sure. Columbus. But what’s it have to do with this?”

It seemed like a stretch to Bosch that the discovery of America was the inspiration for the combination.