The Drop (17 page)

Bosch noted that the report did not mention the size of the bottle and for a moment he mused over the choice of the words
half empty
over
half full
and the different interpretations the descriptions might bring. But then Chu rolled his chair over and leaned against his desk.

“Harry, it sounds like you have something going.”

“Yeah, maybe. You want to take a ride?”

18

B
lack & White Taxi was located on Gower south of Sunset. It was an industrial neighborhood full of businesses that catered to the movie industry. Costume warehouses, camera houses, prop houses. B&W was in one of two side-by-side sound-stages that looked old and worn-out. The cab company operated out of one, and the other was a storage and rental facility for movie cars. Bosch had been in the car storage facility before on a case. He had taken his time walking through. It was like a museum with every car that had ever caught his eye as a teenager.

The two hangar doors of B&W were wide open. Bosch and Chu walked in. In the moment of blindness when their eyes adjusted from the transition of sunlight to shadows, they were almost hit by a taxi heading out to the street. They jumped back and let the black-and-white-checked Impala go between them.

“Asshole,” Chu said.

There were cars sitting dormant and cars up on jacks being worked on by mechanics in greasy coveralls. At the far end of the large space, two picnic tables sat next to a couple of snack and beverage machines. A handful of drivers were hanging out there, waiting for their chariots to pass muster with the mechanics.

To their right was a small office with windows that were so dirty they were opaque. But behind them Harry could see shapes and movement. He led Chu that way.

Bosch knocked once on the door and went in without waiting for a response. They stepped into an office with three desks pushed up against three of the walls and overflowing with paperwork. Two of them were occupied by men who had not turned to see who had entered. Both of them were wearing headsets. The man on the right was dispatching a car to a pickup at the Roosevelt Hotel. Bosch waited for him to finish.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Both men turned to look at the intruders. Bosch was ready with his badge out.

“I need to ask a couple questions.”

“Well, we’re running a business here and don’t—”

A phone rang and the man on the left punched a button on his desk to activate his headset.

“Black and White. . . . Yes, ma’am, that will be five to ten minutes. Would you like us to call upon arrival?”

He wrote something down on a yellow Post-it, then tore it off the pad and handed it to the dispatcher so he could send a car to the address.

“Car’s on the way, ma’am,” he said, then punched the desk button to disconnect the call.

He swiveled in his seat to face Bosch and Chu.

“You see?” he said. “We don’t have any time for your bullshit.”

“What bullshit is that?”

“I don’t know, whatever you’re spinning today. We know what you’re doing.”

Another call came in, and the info was taken and moved to the dispatcher. Bosch stepped into the space between the two desks. If the call taker wanted to pass a Post-it to the dispatcher now, he’d have to go through Bosch.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bosch said.

“Good, then neither do I,” the call taker said. “We can just never mind this whole thing. Have a good day.”

“Except I still need to ask a couple questions.”

The phone buzzed again but this time when the man reached for the desk button, Bosch was quicker. He pushed it once to connect the call, then again to disconnect it.

“What the fuck you doing, man? This is our business here.”

“It’s my business being here, too. They’ll just call somebody else. Maybe Regent Cab will get their business.”

Bosch checked him for a reaction and saw his tight-lipped response.

“Now, who is driver twenty-six?”

“We don’t give drivers numbers. We give cars numbers.”

His tone was meant to convey that he thought this was the dumbest pair of cops going.

“Then tell me who was driving car twenty-six about nine thirty Sunday night.”

The call taker leaned back so he could look around Bosch at the dispatcher and they exchanged a silent message.

“You got a warrant for that?” the dispatcher asked. “We’re not just going to give you a guy’s name so you can go out and trump up another bullshit arrest on us.”

“I don’t need a warrant,” Bosch said.

“The hell you don’t!” cried the dispatcher.

“What I need is your cooperation, and if I don’t get it, those deuces you’re worried about are going to be the least of your problems. And at the end of the day, I’m still going to get what I want. So decide right now how you want to play it.”

The two B&W men looked at each other again. Bosch looked at Chu. If the bluff didn’t work, they might have to amp up the situation. Bosch checked Chu’s face for any sign of retreat. There was none.

The dispatcher opened a binder that was to the side of his desk. From Bosch’s angle he could see it was some sort of schedule. He turned back three pages to Sunday.

“All right, Hooch Rollins had that car Sunday night. Now leave, the both of you.”

“Hooch Rollins? What’s his real name?”

“How the fuck should we know?”

It was the dispatcher. Bosch was getting pretty annoyed with him. He stepped over closer and looked down at him. The phone rang.

“Don’t answer that,” Bosch said.

“You’re killing us here, man!”

“They’ll call back.”

Bosch locked in on the dispatcher.

“Is Hooch Rollins working right now?”

“Yeah, he’s working a double today.”

“Well, dispatcher, get on the radio and call him back here.”

“Yeah, what do I say to get him to do that?”

“You tell him you need to switch out his car. Tell him you’ve got a better one for him. It just came in on the truck.”

“He won’t believe that. We got no truck coming. We’re about to go out of business thanks to you people.”

“Make him believe it.”

Bosch gave the dispatcher a hard look and the man turned to his microphone and called Hooch Rollins in.

Bosch and Chu stepped out of the office and conferred about what to do when Rollins showed up. They decided that they would wait until he was out of the car before making an approach to him.

A few minutes later a beat-up taxi that was a year past needing a wash pulled into the bay area. It was driven by a man in a straw hat. He jumped out and said to no one in particular, “Where’s my new wheels?”

Bosch and Chu approached from two sides. When they got close enough to contain Rollins, Bosch spoke.

“Mr. Rollins? We’re with the LAPD and we need to ask you some questions.”

Rollins looked confused. Then the fight-or-flight look entered his eyes.

“What?”

“I said we need to ask you a few questions.”

Bosch badged him then so he’d know that it was formal and official. There was no running from the law.

“What’d I do?”

“As far as we know, nothing, Mr. Rollins. We want to talk to you about something you may have seen.”

“You’re not going to jack me up like the other fellas, are you?”

“We don’t know anything about that. Will you please accompany us to the Hollywood police station so we can sit in a quiet room and talk?”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not now, no. We were counting on you wanting to cooperate and just answer some questions. We’ll get you back here right after.”

“Man, if I’m with you, then I ain’t making no money out there.”

Bosch was about to lose his patience.

“We won’t take long, Mr. Rollins. Please cooperate with us.”

Rollins seemed to read Bosch’s tone and realized that it didn’t matter whether he went the hard or easy way, he was going nonetheless. The street pragmatist in him made him choose the easy way.

“Okay, let’s get it over with. You don’t have to cuff me or anything, do you?”

“No cuffs,” Bosch said. “Just nice and easy.”

On the way, Chu sat in the back with the uncuffed Rollins and Bosch called ahead to the nearby Hollywood Division and reserved an interrogation room in the detective bureau. It was a five-minute ride over and soon they were walking Rollins into a nine-by-nine with a table and three chairs. Bosch made him sit on the side with only one chair.

“Can we get you something before we start?” Bosch asked.

“How about a Coke, a smoke and a poke?”

He started to laugh. The detectives didn’t.

“How about just a Coke?” Bosch said.

Bosch reached into his pocket for his change and then picked four quarters off his palm. He handed them to Chu. Since Chu was the junior partner here, he would go out to the machines in the back hallway.

“So, Hooch, why don’t we start with you telling me your real full name?”

“Richard Alvin Rollins.”

“How did you get the name Hooch?”

“I don’t know, man, I just always had it.”

“What did you mean back at the shop when you said you didn’t want to get jacked like the other fellas?”

“That wasn’t anythin’, man.”

“Sure it was. You said it. So tell me who’s getting jacked up. You tell me and it doesn’t leave this room.”

“Ah, man, you know. It just looks to us like they coming after us all a sudden with the DUIs and everything.”

“And you think those were setups?”

“Come on, man, its pol-o-tics. What do you expect? I mean, look at what they did to that Armenian bastard.”

Bosch remembered one of the drivers arrested was named Hratch Tartarian. He assumed Rollins was referring to him.

“What about him?”

“He was just sitting on the stand and they pull up and pull ’im outta the car. He refuses to blow but then they find the bottle under the seat and he’s toast. That bottle, man, is always under there. It stays in that car and nobody be driving drunk. You take a couple sips a night to make yourself right. But everybody wants to know how those officers knew about that bottle, you know?”

Bosch sat back in his chair and tried to follow and decipher what had been said. Chu came back in and put a can of Coke down in front of Rollins. He then took a seat at the corner of the table and to Bosch’s right.

“This conspiracy to set you guys up, who’s behind it? Who’s running it?”

Rollins raised his hands in a gesture meant to say
Isn’t it obvious?

“It’s the councilman and he just lets his son do the dirty work and run things. I mean, he did. Now he’s dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“I seen it in the paper. E’rybody knows that.”

“Did you ever see the son before? In person?”

Rollins didn’t speak for a long moment. His mind was probably working, dancing around the trap being set for him. He decided not to lie.

“For like ten seconds. I was on a drop Sunday at the Chateau and saw him going in. That was it.”

Bosch nodded.

“How did you know who he was?”

“Because I seen a picture of him.”

“Where? The newspaper?”

“No, somebody had a picture of him after we got the letter.”

“What letter?”

“B and W, man. We got a copy of a letter from the Irving guy telling the city people that they were coming after our ticket. They were going to shut us down. Somebody Googled the motherfucker in the office. They got his picture and showed it around. It was on the bulletin board with the letter. They wanted us drivers to know what was up and what was at stake. That this guy was leading the charge against us and we better shape up and fly straight.”

Bosch understood the strategy.

“So you recognized him when you pulled into the Chateau Marmont on Sunday night.”

“Damn right. I knew he was the asshole tryin’ to run us out of business.”

“Have some Coke.”

Bosch needed to break momentum to think about this. While Rollins opened the can and started to drink, Harry thought of the next set of questions. There were a number of things going on here that he had not seen coming.

Rollins took a long drink and put the can down.

“When did you get off shift Sunday night?” Bosch asked.

“I didn’t. I need doubles on account of my girl’s about to drop a kid without no insurance. I took a second shift just like I’m doing today and worked on through to the light a day. That would be Monday.”

“What were you wearing that night?”

“What is this shit, man? You said I’m not a suspect.”

“You’re not as long as you keep answering questions. What were you wearing, Hooch?”

“My usual thing. Tommy Bahama and my cargoes. You sit in a car sixteen hours and you want to be comfortable.”

“What color was the shirt?”

He gestured to his chest.

“This is the shirt.”

It was bright yellow with a surfboard design on it. Bosch was pretty sure of one thing. It was a Tommy Bahama knockoff, not the real thing. Either way, it seemed to him to be a stretch to consider the shirt gray. Unless Rollins had changed clothes, he wasn’t the man on the fire escape ladder.

“So who did you tell that you had seen Irving at the hotel?” Bosch asked.

“No one.”

“Are you sure about that, Hooch? You don’t want to start lying to us. That would make it tough for us to let you go.”

“Nobody, man.”

Bosch could tell by the sudden lack of eye contact that Rollins was lying.

“That’s too bad, Hooch. I figured you were smart enough to know we wouldn’t ask a question we didn’t already know the answer to.”

Bosch stood up. He reached under his jacket and pulled his handcuffs off his belt.

“I only told my shift supervisor,” Rollins said quickly. “Just like in passing. On the radio. I said, Guess who I just saw. Like that.”

“Yeah, and did he guess it was Irving?”

“No, I had to tell him. But that was it.”

“Did your shift supervisor ask where you just saw Irving?”

“No, he knew ’cause I had called in my twenty on the drop-off. He knew where I was.”