“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 decided not 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.
4
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 RAMPONE.
“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 forensics 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.