The Drop

done.”
    Bosch looked directly at Irving when he mentioned the taxi franchise. He saw a slight tremor in one eyelid and took it as a tell. He wasn’t saying anything the old man didn’t already know.
    “This is outrageous!” Irving bellowed. “I want this stopped! This man is using a long-held grudge to tarnish what I have worked for all my life.”
    Bosch stopped and waited. He knew this was the moment when the police chief would choose sides. It was going to be him or Irving.
    “I think we need to hear what Detective Bosch has to say,” the chief said.
    He shared his own hard stare with Irving, and Bosch knew that the chief was taking a major gamble. He was positioning himself against a powerful force in city government. He was banking on Bosch, and Harry knew he had Kiz Rider to thank for that.
    “Go ahead, Detective,” the chief said.
    Bosch leaned forward so he could look directly down the table at the chief.
    “A couple months ago George Irving parted ways with his closest friend. A cop he had known since the police academy. The friendship ended when the cop realized George and his father had been using him without his knowledge to help swing a lucrative taxi franchise toward one of George’s clients. The cop was asked directly by the councilman to start hitting the existing franchise holder with DUI spot checks, knowing that a file full of such stops or arrests would damage their efforts to retain the franchise.”
    Irving leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Bosch.
    “This is where you are way off base,” he said. “I know who you are talking about and that was a request made in response to a complaint to my office. It was a request passed on in a social setting, nothing more. In fact, it was my grandson’s graduation party.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Yes, a party that occurred two weeks after your son signed a one-hundred-thousand-dollar service contract with Regent Taxi, which would later announce plans to seek the city franchise currently being held by the company you complained about. I’m just guessing but I think a grand jury would find the coincidence of that hard to believe. I am sure your office would be able to provide the name of the citizen who made the complaint and she and her story would be vetted.”
    Bosch pointedly looked at the aide with the legal pad.
    “You might want to write that down.”
    He turned his attention back to the head of the table.
    “The officer in question learned that he was being used by the Irvings and confronted George Irving. Their friendship ended there. In the course of four weeks George lost three of the most important people in his life. His friend exposed him as a user if not a criminal, his only child left his home for college and life after, and last week his wife of twenty years told him she was leaving. She had stayed in the marriage until their son was gone, and now she, too, was finished.”
    Irving reacted as if slapped in the face. He clearly knew nothing about the implosion of the marriage.
    “George tried for a week to talk Deborah out of her decision and to hang on to the one person he had left,” Bosch continued. “To no avail. On Sunday—twelve hours before his death—he bought his son an airplane ticket to come home the next day. The plan was to tell the boy of the split. But instead, that night George checked into the Chateau Marmont with no luggage. When he was told suite seventy-nine was available he took it because that was the suite he and Deborah shared on their honeymoon.
    “He spent about five hours in that room. Our information is that he was drinking heavily—an entire twelve-ounce bottle of whiskey. He was visited by a former cop named Mark McQuillen who knew by happenstance that he was in the hotel. McQuillen had been run out of the police department in a political witch hunt headed by Deputy Chief Irving twenty-five years ago. Now he was part owner of the taxi franchise George Irving was trying to destroy. He confronted George in the room and, yes, assaulted him. But he didn’t throw him from that balcony. He was in an all-night restaurant three blocks away when George jumped. We have confirmed the alibi and I have come to no other conclusion about this case. George Irving jumped.”
    Bosch leaned back in his chair, finished with his report. There was no immediate response from anyone at the table. It took Irving a few moments to look at all the angles in the story and come up with