“Third floor,” Rider said.
“Thank you.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah.”
Bosch waited until the cop left the vestibule and rounded the corner into the main lobby where the elevators were located.
“Okay. So George sells influence with the council and by extension with all the different boards the council appoints. In some cases he can do even more than that. He can tilt the game.”
“I don’t get it. How so?”
“Do you know how taxi franchises are awarded in this city?”
“Not a clue.”
“By geographic zones and on two-year contracts. You come up for review every two years.”
“All right.”
“So I don’t know if George goes to them or they come to George, but there’s a franchise holder in South L.A. called Regent Taxi and they hire George to help them get a more lucrative franchise up in Hollywood, where there are highline hotels and tourists on the streets and lots more money to be made. The current franchise holder is Black and White Taxi.”
“I think I know where this is going. But wouldn’t Councilman Irving have to be transparent on this? He’d have a conflict of interest voting for any company repped by his son.”
“Of course he would. But the first vote is with the Taxi Franchise Board, and who puts the people on that board? The council. And when it next comes before the council for ratification, sure, Irving nobly cites conflict of interest and steps out on the vote and it all looks completely aboveboard. But what about the backroom trade-offs? ‘You vote for me when I step out and next time I’ll vote for you.’ You know what goes on, Kiz. But what George offers is even more of a sure thing. He offers a fuller service, shall we say. Regent says, yes, we’ll take the full package, and a month after he’s hired by Regent, things start going sideways for the current holder of the franchise, B and W.”
“What do you mean ‘sideways’?”
“I’m trying to tell you. Less than a month after George Irving is hired by Regent, B and W drivers start getting popped on deuce raps and traffic citations and suddenly the company’s not looking so good.”
“How many arrests?”
“Three, the first coming a month after Irving signed on. And then there’s an auto accident where the B and W driver is held at fault. There are several traffic violations — all moving violations that give the appearance of reckless driving. Speeding, running traffic lights and stop signs.”
“I think the Times wrote about this. The DUIs, anyway.”
“Yeah, I have the story and I’m pretty sure George Irving’s the one who tipped them to it. It was all part of an organized plan to get the Hollywood taxi franchise.”
“So you’re saying that the son went to the father and said put some pressure on B and W? The father then in turn reached into the department?”
“I am not exactly sure how it worked yet. But both of them — father and son — still have connections in the department. The councilman has sympathizers and his son was a cop for five years. A guy who was a close friend of his works patrol in Hollywood. I have all the B and W arrest reports and the traffic citations. The same cop — George Irving’s friend — made all three DUI arrests and wrote two of the moving violations. A guy named Robert Mason. What are the chances of that? That he’d get all three deuces.”
“It could happen. You make one arrest and then you know what to look for after that.”
“Sure, Kiz, whatever you say. One of these guys wasn’t even pulled over. He was parked at a cab stand on La Brea when Mason rolled up on him.”
“Well, were these legit busts or not? Did they blow?”
“They blew and the busts were legit as far as I know. But three busts starting a month after Irving was hired. The DUIs, the moving violations and the accident report then become the centerpiece of Regent’s application to the franchise board to take Hollywood away from B and W. He had it completely greased and it just doesn’t smell right, Kiz.”
She finally nodded, a tacit agreement with Bosch’s point of view.
“Okay, even if I agree with you, there’s still the question: How does all of this get George Irving killed? And why?”
“I’m not sure why but let me move to the—”
Bosch stopped when there was a loud explosion of voices from the lobby. After a few seconds they were gone.
“Okay, let me move to the night Irving took the high dive. He arrives by car at nine-forty, gives his keys to the valet and goes upstairs to the lobby to check in. Also arriving at that time is a writer from the East Coast named Thomas Rapport. He comes by cab from the airport and pulls in right behind Irving.”
“Don’t tell me. He was in a Black and White cab.”
“You know, Lieutenant, you really ought to be a detective.”
“I tried it, but my partner was an asshole.”
“I heard about that. Anyway, yes, it was a B and W cab and the driver actually recognized Irving as he was turning his car over to the valet. His picture had been shown around the garage when the application letter to the franchise board got copied to B and W. This driver, a guy named Rollins, recognizes Irving and gets on his radio and says, ‘What do you know, I just saw public enemy number one,’ or words to that effect. And on the other end of that radio call is the shift supervisor. The night man. A guy named Mark McQuillen.”
Bosch stopped there and waited for her to recognize the name. She didn’t.
“McQuillen as in ‘McKillin,’” he said. “That ring a bell?”
It still didn’t break through. Rider shook her head.
“Before your time,” Bosch said.
“Who is he?”
“A former cop. Maybe ten years younger than me. Back in the day, he became the poster boy for the whole choke hold thing. The controversy. And he got sacrificed to the mob.”
“I don’t understand, Harry. What mob? What sacrifice?”
“I told you, I was on the task force. The task force was formed to appease the citizenry of South L.A. who claimed that the choke hold was legalized murder. Cops used it and an inordinate number of people in the south end died. The truth was, they didn’t need a task force to change policy. They could’ve just changed it. But instead they go with a task force so they could feed the media the story about how the department was serious in its effort to respond to the public outcry.”
“All right, so how does this lead to McQuillen?”
“I was just a grunt on the task force. A gatherer. I handled the autopsies. I know this, though. The statistics matched up across racial and geographic lines. Sure, there were more choke hold deaths in the south end. Far more African Americans died than other races. But the ratios were even. There were far more incidents involving use of force in the south end. The more confrontations, scuffles, fights, resisting arrests you get, the more uses of the choke hold. The more you use the choke hold, the more deaths you will have. It was simple math. But nothing is simple when racial politics are involved.”
Rider was black and had grown up in South L.A. But Bosch was speaking to her cop to cop and there was no awkwardness in his telling the story. They had been partners and had operated as a team under extreme pressures. Rider knew Bosch as well as anyone could. They were brother and sister and there was no holdback between them.
“McQuillen worked P.M. watch in Seventy-seventh,” he said. “He liked action and he got it almost every night. I don’t remember the exact number but he’d had something like sixty-plus use-of-force incidents in four years. And as you know, those are only the ones they write reports on. In those incidents, he used the choke hold a lot and he ended up killing two people in a three-year span. Of all the choke hold deaths over all the years, there was nobody involved in more than one. Only him, because he had used it more than anybody else. So when the task force came along. .”