The Drop

By then Baker’s cover-boy looks and West Coast cool had been sucked out of him by drugs and life, but he could still make the trumpet sound like a human voice on a dark night. In another six years he would be dead from a fall from a hotel window in Amsterdam.
    Bosch looked at his daughter.
    “You put this in there?”
    She looked up from the book.
    “Is this Chet Baker? Yeah, I wanted to hear him because of your case and the poem in the hallway.”
    Bosch got up and went into the bedroom hallway, flicking the light on. Framed on the wall was a single-page poem. Almost twenty years earlier Bosch had been in a restaurant on Venice Beach and by happenstance the author of the poem, John Harvey, was giving a reading. It didn’t seem to Bosch that anybody in the place knew who Chet Baker was. But Harry did and he loved the resonance of the poem. He got up and asked Harvey if he could buy a copy. Harvey simply gave him the paper he had read from.
    Bosch had probably passed by the poem a thousand times since he had last read it.

CHET BAKER

looks out from his hotel room
across the Amstel to the girl
cycling by the canal who lifts
her hand and waves and when
she smiles he is back in times
when every Hollywood producer
wanted to turn his life
into that bittersweet story
where he falls badly, but only
in love with Pier Angeli,
Carol Lynley, Natalie Wood;
that day he strolled into the studio,
fall of fifty-two, and played
those perfect lines across
the chords of My Funny Valentine—
and now when he looks up from
his window and her passing smile
into the blue of a perfect sky
he knows this is one of those
rare days when he can truly fly.

    Bosch went back out to the table and sat down.
    “I looked him up on Wikipedia,” Maddie said. “They never knew for sure if he jumped or just fell. Some people said drug dealers pushed him out.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Yeah, sometimes you never know.”
    He went back to work and continued his review of the accumulated reports. As he read his own summary report on the interview with Officer Robert Mason, Bosch felt he was missing something. The report was complete but he felt he had overlooked something in the conversation with Mason. It was there but he just couldn’t reach it. He closed his eyes and tried to hear Mason speaking and responding to the questions.
    He saw Mason sitting bolt upright in the chair, gesturing as he spoke, saying that he and George Irving had been close. Best man at the wedding, reserving the honeymoon suite . . .
    Harry suddenly had it. When Mason had mentioned reserving the honeymoon suite, he had gestured in the direction of the squad lieutenant’s office. He was pointing west. The same direction as the Chateau Marmont.
    He got up and quickly went out onto the deck so he could make a call without disturbing his daughter’s reading. He slid the door closed behind him and called the LAPD communications center. He asked a dispatcher to radio six-Adam-sixty-five in the field and ask him to call Bosch on his cell. He said it was urgent.
    As he was giving his number, he received a call-waiting beep. Once the dispatcher correctly read back the number, he switched over to the waiting call. It was Chu. Bosch didn’t bother with any niceties.
    “Did you go to the Standard?”
    “Yeah, McQuillen checks out. He was there all night, like he knew he needed to sit under that camera. But that’s not why I’m calling. I think I found something.”
    “What?”
    “I’ve been going through everything and I found something that doesn’t make sense. The kid was already coming down.”
    “What are you talking about? What kid?”
    “Irving’s kid. He was already coming down from San Francisco. It’s on the AmEx account. I checked it again tonight. The kid—Chad Irving—had an airplane ticket to come home before his father was dead.”
    “Hold on a second.”
    Bosch went back inside the house and over to the table. He looked through the spread of documents until he found the American Express report. It was a printout of all charges Irving had made on the card going back three years. It was twenty-two pages long and Bosch had looked at every page less than an hour earlier and seen nothing that grabbed his attention.
    “Okay, I’ve got the AmEx here. How are you looking at it?”
    “I have it online, Harry. On the search warrant I always ask for printed statements and digital account access. But what I’m looking at is not on your printout. This charge was