She stopped the playback.
“If he was dropped, Dad. Please. You sound like a palooka when you talk like that.”
“Sorry. How do you know what a ‘palooka’ is, anyway?”
“Tennessee Williams. I read. A palooka is an old fighter who’s like a lout. You don’t want to be like that.”
“You’re right. But since you know so much about words, what do you call one of those names that is spelled the same going front and back?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like Otto. Or Hannah.”
“It’s a palindrome. Is that your girlfriend’s name?”
“She’s not my girlfriend. I had a turkey sandwich with her.”
“Yeah, while your sick daughter was starving at home.”
“Come on. You had peanut butter and jelly, the best sandwich ever invented.”
He gently elbowed her side.
“I just hope being with Otto was worth it.”
He burst out laughing and reached over and pulled her into a hug.
“Don’t worry about Otto. You’ll always be my girl.”
“Well, I do like the name Hannah,” she conceded.
“Good. Can we watch now?”
She hit the play button and they watched the computer screen silently as Irving began the check-in process with the night deskman named Alberto Galvin. Soon the second guest appeared behind him, waiting to check in.
Irving wore the same clothes Bosch had seen in the closet in the suite. He slid a credit card across the desk and Galvin printed out the room contract. Irving quickly initialed and signed the document and slid it back in exchange for a key. He then left the camera’s view in the direction of the elevators and Galvin began the process all over again with the next guest in line.
The video confirmed that Irving had checked in without luggage.
“He jumped.”
Bosch looked from the screen to his daughter.
“Why do you say that?”
Manipulating the controls, she backed the video up to the point where Galvin slid the contract across the desk to Irving. She then hit play.
“Watch,” she said. “He doesn’t even look at it. He just signs where the guy tells him to sign.”
“Yeah, so?”
“This is when people check to see if they’re getting ripped off. You know, they check what they are getting charged, but he doesn’t even look. He doesn’t care because he knows he’ll never pay that bill.”
Bosch watched the video. She was right about what she saw. But it wasn’t conclusive. Still, he was proud of her read. He had noticed that her powers of observation were increasingly impressive. He often quizzed her on what she could remember from different places they had been and scenes they had encountered. She always picked up and retained more than he expected.
She had told him a year earlier that she wanted to be a cop when she grew up. A detective like him. He didn’t know if it was just a passing idea, but he rolled with it and began passing on what he knew. One of their favorite things to do was to go to a restaurant like Du-par’s and watch the other patrons and pull reads off their faces and mannerisms. Bosch was teaching her to look for tells.
“That’s a good read,” he said. “Play it again.”
They watched the video for the third time and this time Bosch picked up something new.
“You see that. He looks at his watch real quick there after he signs.”
“So?”
“It just seems a little off to me. I mean, what’s time to a dead man? If he was going to jump, why would he wonder what time it was? It just seems like more of a businessman’s move. It makes me think he was going to meet somebody. Or someone was going to call. But no one did.”
Bosch had already checked with the hotel and no call had come in or gone out of room 79 after Irving checked in. Bosch also had a report from forensics which examined Irving’s cell phone after Bosch had given the password his widow had provided. Irving had made no calls after a 5 P.M. call to his son Chad. It had lasted eight minutes. He had received three calls from his wife the following morning—after he was dead. By that time Deborah Irving was looking for him. She left messages each time telling her husband to call back.
Bosch took over the controls of the video and played the check-in sequence once again. He then continued on, using the fast-forward control to move quickly through the chunks of time during the night when there was nothing happening at the front desk. His daughter eventually got bored and turned on her side to go to sleep.
“I might need to go out,” he said to her. “You’ll be okay?”
“Going back to see Hannah?”
“No, I might go back to the hotel. You’ll be okay?”