The Drop

by Michael Connelly

  Chu was sitting on the far side of the room at a table with his back turned to Bosch. He was with a woman who looked like she was of Latin descent. She was writing in a notebook. Bosch walked up to their table, pulled out a chair and sat down. Both Chu and the woman looked like they were being joined at the table by Charles Manson.

  “I changed my mind about the coffee,” Bosch said.

  “Harry,” Chu blurted out. “I was just—”

  “Telling Emily here about our case.”

  Bosch looked directly at Gomez-Gonzmart.

  “Isn’t that right, Emily?” he said. “Or can I call you GoGo?”

  “Look, Harry, it’s not what you think,” Chu said.

  “Really? It’s not? Because it looks to me like you’re laying out our case for the Times right here on their home court.”

  He quickly reached out and grabbed the notebook off the table.

  “Hey!” Gomez-Gonzmart cried. “That’s mine.”

  Bosch read the notes on the exposed page. The notes were in some sort of shorthand but he saw repeated notations about McQ and the phrase watch match = key. It was enough to confirm his suspicions. He handed her the notebook.

  “I’m going,” she said as she snatched the notebook out of his hands.

  “Not quite yet,” Bosch said. “Because you two are going to sit here and work out a new arrangement.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do!” she snapped.

  She pushed back her chair so hard it fell over as she stood up.

  “You’re right, I don’t,” Bosch said. “But I do have your boyfriend’s future and career in my hands here. So if any of that means anything to you, then you’ll sit down and hear me out.”

  He waited and watched her. She pulled her purse strap over her shoulder, ready to walk off.

  “Emily?” Chu said.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a story to write.”

  She walked away, leaving Chu’s face drained of blood. He stared into the distance until Bosch snapped him out of it.

  “Chu, what the fuck did you think you were doing?”

  “I thought . . .”

  “Whatever it was, you got burned. You fucked up and you better start thinking of a way to back her off. What exactly did you just tell her?”

  “I . . . I told her we brought McQuillen in and that we were going to try to turn him in the room. I told her it wouldn’t matter if he confessed or not if the watch matched the wound.”

  Bosch was so angry, he had to hold back from swinging at Chu and smacking the back of his head.

  “When did you start talking to her?”

  “The day we got the case. I knew her from before. She did a story a few years ago and we had a few dates. I always liked her.”

  “So she calls up this week and starts leading you by the dick right into my case.”

  Chu turned and looked at him for the first time.

  “Yeah, you got it, Harry. Your case. Not our case. Your case.”

  “But why, David? Why would you do this?”

  “You did this. And don’t start calling me David. I’m surprised you even know my first name.”

  “What? I did this? Are you—”

  “Yeah, you. You cut me out, Harry. You wouldn’t tell me shit and you cut me out, made me chase down the other case while you ran this one. And this wasn’t the first time. More like every time. You don’t do that to a partner. If you had treated me right, I never would have done it!”

  Bosch composed himself and calmed his voice. He sensed they had drawn the attention of people sitting at nearby tables. Newspaper people.

  “We’re not partners anymore,” Bosch said. “We finish out these two cases and then you put in for a transfer. I don’t care where you go but you’re out of OU. If you don’t do it, I’ll make it known what you did, how you sold out your own partner and your case for a piece of tail. Then you’ll be a pariah and nobody and no unit outside of IAD will take you. You’ll be outside looking in.”

  Bosch stood up and walked away. He heard Chu call his name weakly but he didn’t turn back around.

  28

  McQuillen was waiting with his arms folded on the table when Bosch reentered interview room 1. He checked his watch—apparently not realizing its importance to the coming conversation—and then looked up at Bosch.

  “Thirty-five minutes,” he said. “I thought you’d go over an hour easy.”

  Bosch sat down across from him, putting a thin green file on the table.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I had to bring a few people up-to-date on things.”

  “No problem. I called the job. They’ve got me covered for the whole night if necessary.”

  “Good. So I guess you know why you’re here. I was hoping we could have a conversation about Sunday night. I think that to protect you and to make this formal, I should let you know your rights. You’ve come here voluntarily but it’s my practice to always let people know where they stand.”

  “Are you saying I’m a murder suspect?”

  Bosch drummed his fingers on the file.

  “That’s a hard one to say. I need some answers from you and then I will make a conclusion about that.”

  Bosch opened the file and took out the top sheet. It was a rights waiver containing a printout of McQuillen’s constitutional protections, among them the right to have an attorney present during questioning. Bosch read it out loud and then asked McQuillen to sign it. He handed him a pen and the ex-cop-turned-cab-dispatcher signed without hesitation.

  “Now,” Bosch said, “are you still willing to cooperate and talk to me about Sunday evening?”

  “To a point.”

  “What point is that?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I know how this is done. It’s been a while but some things don’t change. You’re here to talk me into a jail cell. I’m only here because you have some wrong ideas and if I can help you without snagging my nuts on a rusty nail, then I will. That’s the point.”

  Bosch leaned back.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked. “Remember my name?”

  McQuillen nodded.

  “Of course. I remember everybody on the task force.”

  “Including Irvin Irving.”

  “Of course. Man at the top always gets the most attention.”

  “Well, I was the man at the bottom, so I didn’t have a lot of say. But for what it’s worth, I thought you got screwed. They needed to sacrifice somebody and it was you.”

  McQuillen clasped his hands together on the table.

  “All these years later, that doesn’t mean a thing to me, Bosch. So don’t bother trying the sympathy angle.”

  Bosch nodded and leaned forward. McQuillen wanted to play it hard. He was either smart enough or stupid enough to think he could go one-on-one without calling for a lawyer. Bosch decided to give him just want he wanted.

  “Okay, so let’s skip the foreplay, McQuillen. Why’d you throw George Irving off the hotel balcony?”

  A small smile played on McQuillen’s face.

  “Before we have this conversation I want some assurances.”

  “What assurances?”

  “No charges on the weapon. No charges on any of the small stuff I tell you about.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “You said you know how it works. Then you know I can’t make deals like that. That’s the DA. I can tell them you’ve been cooperative. I can even ask them to give you a break. But I can’t make deals and I think you know that.”

  “Look, you’re here because you want to know what happened to George Irving. I can tell you. And I will, but not without these conditions.”

  “That being the gun and the small stuff, whatever the small stuff is.”

  “That’s right, just some bullshit stuff that happened along the way.”

  It didn’t make sense to Bosch. If McQuillen was going to admit to killing George Irving, then charges like carrying a concealed firearm were strictly collatera
l and expendable. That McQuillen was concerned about them told Bosch that he wasn’t going to admit to any culpability in Irving’s death.

  That made it a question of who was playing whom and Bosch had to make sure he came out on top.

  “All I can promise is that I’ll go to bat for you,” he said. “You tell me the story about Sunday night and if it’s the truth, I’m not going to be too worried about the small stuff. That’s the best I can do right now.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to take you at your word on that, Bosch.”

  “You have my word. Can we start?”

  “We already did. And my answer is, I didn’t throw George Irving from the balcony at the Chateau Marmont. George Irving threw himself off the balcony.”

  Bosch leaned back and drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

  “Come on, McQuillen, how do you expect me to believe that? How do you expect anybody to believe that?”

  “I don’t expect anything from you. I’m just telling you, I didn’t do it. You have the whole story wrong. You have a set of preconceived ideas, probably mixed around with a little bit of circumstantial evidence and you put it all together and come up with I killed the guy. But I didn’t and you can’t prove I did.”

  “You hope I can’t prove it.”

  “No, hope’s got nothing to do with it. I know you can’t prove it because I didn’t do it.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning. You hate Irvin Irving for what he did to you twenty-five years ago. He hung you out to dry, destroyed your career, if not your life.”

  “‘Hate’ is a difficult word. Sure, I’ve hated him in the past but it’s been a long time.”

  “What about Sunday night? Did you hate him then?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about him then.”

  “That’s right. You were thinking about his son, George. The guy trying to take away your job this time. Did you hate George on Sunday night?”

  McQuillen shook his head.

  “I’m not going to answer that. I don’t have to. But no matter what I thought about him, I didn’t kill him. He killed himself.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “Because he told me he was going to.”

  Bosch was ready for just about anything he thought McQuillen could parry with. But he wasn’t ready for that.

  “He told you that.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “Sunday night. In his room. That’s what he was there for. He said he was going to jump. I got out of there before he did.”

  Bosch paused again, mindful that McQuillen had had several days to prepare for this moment. He could have concocted an elaborate story that would cover all the facts. But in the file in front of him Bosch still had the photograph of the wound on George Irving’s shoulder blade. It was a game changer. McQuillen wouldn’t be able to explain it away.

  “Why don’t you tell me your story and how you came to have this conversation with George Irving. And don’t leave anything out. I want the details.”

  McQuillen took in a big breath and then slowly exhaled.

  “You realize the risk I’m taking here? Talking to you? I don’t know what you have or think you have. I could tell you the God’s honest truth and you could twist it and use it to fuck me over. And I don’t even have a lawyer in the room.”

  “It’s your call, Mark. You want to talk, then talk. You want a lawyer, we get you a lawyer and all talk ends. Everything ends and we play it that way. You were a cop and you’re smart enough to know how this really works. You know there’s only one way for you to get out of here and get home tonight. You gotta talk your way out.”

  Bosch made a gesture with his hand, as though he was passing the choice to him. McQuillen nodded. He knew it was now or never. A lawyer would tell him to sit tight and keep quiet, let the police put up or shut up in the courtroom. Never give them something they don’t already have. And it was good advice but not always. Some things have to be said.

  “I was in that room with him,” he said. “Sunday night. Actually, Monday morning. I went up there to see him. I was angry. I wanted . . . I’m not sure what I wanted. I didn’t want to lose my life again and I wanted to . . . scare him, I guess. Confront him. But—”

  He pointed emphatically at Bosch.

  “—he was alive when I left that room.”

  Bosch realized that he now had enough on tape to arrest McQuillen and hold him on a murder charge. He had just admitted to being with the victim in the place from which Irving had been dropped. But Bosch showed no excitement. There was more to get here.

  “Let’s go back,” he said. “Tell me how you knew George Irving was even in the hotel and where.”

  McQuillen shrugged like the question was for a dummy.

  “You know that,” he said. “Hooch Rollins told me. He dropped a fare there Sunday night and happened to see Irving going in. He told me because he’d heard me going on once in the break room about the Irvings. I held a staff meeting after the DUIs and told everybody, ‘This is what they’re doing and this is the guy behind it.’ Got his photo off Google, the little shit.”

  “So Rollins told you he was going into the hotel. How’d you know he had a room and how’d you know which room it was?”

  “I called the hotel. I knew they wouldn’t tell me his room for security reasons and I couldn’t ask to be transferred to the room. What was I going to say, ‘Dude, do you mind giving me your room number?’ No, so I called up and asked for the garage. Hooch had told me he saw him valeting his car, so I called the garage and said I was Irving and wanted them to check and see if I left my phone in the car. I said, You know my room number? Can you bring it up if you find it? And the guy said yes, you’re in seventy-nine and if I find the phone I’ll send it up. So there, I had his room.”

  Bosch nodded. It was a clever plan. But it also showed some of the elements of premeditation. McQuillen was talking himself into a first-degree murder charge. All Bosch seemingly had to do was direct him with general questions and McQuillen provided the rest. It was a downhill path.

  “I waited until the end of shift at midnight and went over there,” McQuillen said. “I didn’t want to be seen by anybody or any cameras. So I went around the hotel and found a fire escape ladder that was on the side. It went all the way up to the roof. But on each landing there was a balcony and I could climb off and take a break if I needed it.”

  “Were you wearing gloves?”

  “Yeah, gloves and coveralls I keep in the trunk. In my business you never know whether you’ll be crawling under a car or something. I thought if somebody saw me, I’d look like a maintenance guy.”

  “You keep that stuff in the trunk? You’re a dispatcher.”

  “I’m a partner, man. My name isn’t on the franchise with the city because I didn’t think we’d get the franchise way back when if they knew I was part of it. But I’ve got a third of the company.”

  Which helped explain why McQuillen would go to such lengths with Irving. Another potential pothole in the case filled in by the suspect himself.

  “So you took the fire escape to the seventh floor. What time was this?”

  “I went off shift at midnight. So it was like twelve thirty or thereabouts.”

  “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.”