The Gentlemen's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Nerburn thinks it over for a few seconds and then says, “I’ll give you a pass for an hour, Boone. That’s it.”

  “I don’t want to cause you any aggro.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I get that.”

  Nerburn writes on a piece of paper and hands it to Boone. “I’m going to assume you’re not carrying.”

  “I’m not,” Boone says. Then he asks, “Hey, Ken didn’t go here, did he?”

  Nerburn shakes his head. “I could have sent him here—they have a program for long-term employees’ kids—but I didn’t.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “I didn’t want him thinking he was someone he wasn’t.”

  “Got it.”

  And so much, Boone thinks as he winds down the window, for my condescending, full-of-shit theory about loyal dogs guarding the gates.

  Boone maneuvers the Deuce along the narrow, winding driveway, past pink stucco buildings and broad green soccer, football, baseball, and lacrosse fields. Some boys are out playing lacrosse, and Boone is tempted to sit and watch, but he has work to do.

  He parks in a slot marked “Visitor” and finds the admin building.

  33

  The head of school is real happy to see him.

  The name Corey Blasingame is an automatic smile-killer.

  “Come into my office,” Dr. Hancock says. She’s a tall woman, gray hair cut short. Khaki suit jacket over a matching skirt, white blouse with a rounded collar. Boone follows her into her office and takes the offered chair across from her desk.

  Framed diplomas decorate the walls.

  Harvard.

  Princeton.

  Oxford.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Daniels?” she asks. Right down to business.

  “I’m just trying to get a sense of the kid.”

  “Why?” Hancock asks. “How is your getting a ‘a sense of the kid’ going to help him?”

  Fair enough, Boone thinks. He says, “Because you can’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what may or may not be useful until you find it out.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance,” Boone says, “was Corey in a lot of fights in school? That’s something the prosecution is going to ask, so we’d like to know it first. Was he popular, unpopular, maybe picked on? Did he have friends . . . a girlfriend, maybe? Or was he a loner? Did he do well in school? How were his grades? Why didn’t he go to college, for instance?”

  “Ninety-seven percent of our graduates go on to a four-year institution,” Hancock says.

  Boone is tempted to say that Corey is also going on to an institution, probably for a lot longer than four years, but he keeps his mouth shut. She senses it anyway.

  “You have an attitude, Mr. Daniels.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she insists, “you do. You may or may not be aware of it—I suspect you are—but let me tell you what it is, just in case. You look down on these kids.”

  “Hard to do from where I stand, Dr. Hancock.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” she says. “You’re a reverse snob. You believe that kids in a school like this shouldn’t have any problems because they have money. And when they do have a problem, you sneer at them as spoiled and weak. How am I doing?”

  Pretty damn well, Boone thinks. Why is every woman I sit down with lately using me like a dartboard and hitting bull’s-eyes?

  “You’re doing great, Dr. Hancock, but I’m here to talk about Corey Blasingame.”

  “You can call me Lee.” She leans back in her chair and looks out the window at the immaculately groomed sports fields, where girls are out for soccer practice. “The problem with my giving you a sense of Corey is that, sadly, I never had one. I consider him one of my failures, in that I never really got to know him myself.”

  Getting a grasp of Corey Blasingame was like grabbing Jell-O, she told Boone. No teenager’s personality is solidly formed by that age, but Corey’s was unusually amorphous. He deflected attention, was particularly adept at finding cracks and slipping through them. He was neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad. He got Cs, not As or Fs, which might have called attention to him. He never ran for student office, joined any clubs, associated with cliques. But neither was he your classic loner—he always sat with people in the lunchroom, for instance, and seemed to join in their conversations.

  No, he was not shunned or picked on, certainly not bullied. Girlfriends? He had dates to dances and such, but there was no particular girl, certainly not one of those conspicuous high school romances. But he was never a homecoming king, or on the court, or anything like that.

  He did play baseball in his sophomore year.

  “And now you are wondering,” Lee says, “why I don’t know more. Yes you are, and don’t bother to deny it. I know because I’ve asked myself a few thousand times why I didn’t know more, and the hard truth that I’ve had to tell myself is that I really didn’t notice him. He wasn’t a kid you

  noticed.

  He just wasn’t, and I have spent many a sleepless night trying to convince myself that I didn’t fail him by not noticing, that I didn’t fail the man he killed as well. You just never imagine that . . .”

  She trailed off and gazed out the window.

  “No, you don’t,” Boone says. He wants to say something to take her off the hook but he can’t think of anything that’s not just stupid, and he also knows from experience that no one else can take you off the hook you made yourself.

  Boone’s in the parking lot when a guy trots up behind him.

  “You were just in the office asking about Corey Blasingame?” the guy asks. He’s pretty young, maybe in his late twenties, and has that look of a teacher who’s still excited about being a teacher.

  “My name’s Daniels,” Boone says. “I’m working for Corey’s lawyer. Do you remember him?”

  “Ray Pedersen. I was the jayvee baseball coach.”

  “I wondered about that one year,” Boone says. “Was he any good?”

  “No,” Pedersen says. “He thought he was a pitcher on his way to the bigs. He had a decent slider, but his fastball never broke out of the seventies. A lot of his pitches went deep the other way.”

  “Did he get cut or did he quit?”

  “He quit,” Pedersen says.

  “Because . . .”

  “Have you met the dad?” Pedersen asks.

  Boone shook his head.

  “Meet the dad,” Pedersen says. “It explains everything.”

  34

  The dad, Boone learned from Pedersen, used to stand behind the backstop and scream at his son.

  Not an uncommon type in SoCal schoolboy baseball, which does send some kids to the big leagues, but Corey’s dad was a stereotype gone crazy.

  “Way over the top,” Pedersen says.

  Every pitch, Bill Blasingame would yell his critique at the top of his lungs. Even while the kid was in his warm-up, Blasingame would shout instructions. It went beyond encouragement—Bill would berate his son about the inadequacies of the last pitch, question his nerve, his courage, his skill.

  And harass the umpire. “It caught the corner! It caught the freaking corner! Come on, ump. Wake up!”

  It got to the point where Pedersen talked to him about it, asked him to dial it down a little, sit in the stands where he wasn’t such a distraction to the boy. Blasingame didn’t take it well, said he was a taxpayer, had a right to stand where he wanted—as a parent, he had a right to talk to his own kid, and nobody was going to tell him different.

  Yeah, except Pedersen did.

  Pedersen banned him from the ball field.

  It happened after one particularly brutal incident.

  Pedersen had put Corey on the mound in the top half of the eighth with what looked to be a safe four-run lead. It was garbage time, really, but it was a chance to get Corey some playing time, and Pedersen was out of pitchers anyway.

  The kid blew up.

&
nbsp; First pitch was a fat fastball that got cracked for a double.

  Bill went off. “Have you been watching the game?! The kid can’t hit a changeup! Why are you throwing him a fastball? Wake up! Wake up!”

  Next batter, Corey opened up with two balls, his dad started pawing around behind the backstop like an enraged bull, and Corey followed with a slider that got hit clean into left field, brought in the runner, and put the batter on first.

  “You’re throwing stupid! That was stupid!”

  Pedersen got out of the dugout, walked over, and said, “Take it easy. It’s a game.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you’re losers, right there.”

  “You’re not helping. Take it easy.”

  Corey’s next pitch was a hanging curve that ended up over the right-field fence. Now the lead was down to one, with no outs, and Bill Blasingame started playing to the crowd. “Get him out of there! He sucks! He’s my kid, for chrissakes, and I want him out of there.”

  Pedersen remembered that people just sat there in embarrassed silence, it was that awful.

  It got worse.

  Corey hit the next kid with a pitch and put him on base. His next twelve pitches were balls as his father screamed, ranted, threw his hands in the air, made a show of covering his eyes with his forearm. “Suck it up! Be a man, for chrissakes! Get it together! Man up!”

  When the go-ahead run came across the plate, Bill totally lost it. “You dickless wonder! You worthless little piece of crap! I always wanted a daughter and I guess I got one!”

  Pedersen trotted over. “That’s it. You’re gone. I want you out of here.”

  “You think I wanna be here?” Bill yelled. “Happy to go, my friend. Happy to go!”

  But it was too late. Pedersen acknowledged that he should have had him gone weeks earlier. The damage was already done. Corey stood on the mound, fighting back tears. People in the stands looked at their feet. His own teammates couldn’t figure out anything to say to him. Pedersen went out to the mound.

  “He’s something, your dad.”

  Corey just nodded.

  “I don’t think you have it today,” Pedersen said. “Is your arm hurting?”

  “Yeah, it’s hurting.”

  “Let’s call it a day.”

  Pedersen brought the second baseman in to pitch. Corey sat out the rest of the game in the dugout and never played again.

  So Boone is prepared to hate Bill Blasingame when he meets him.

  Bill doesn’t disappoint.

  35

  First of all, Bill keeps him waiting for thirty-seven minutes.

  Boone isn’t all that big on watches, but he keeps time as he leafs through magazines in Bill’s lobby because it

  says

  something, doesn’t it? Your son is in the hole looking at a possible death penalty, and you’re too busy to sit down with someone working for the guy you hired to get him off?

  A little disconnect there?

  The receptionist is actually embarrassed, keeps looking up from her desk at Boone with this look of like what, are we kidding here? But she’s not about to say anything to nudge Bill along.

  Nicole knows what she’s there for. Long, shiny black hair, blouse cut just low enough to show the promise of the big boobs, heavy lip gloss—her presence says that Bill is a player and for the right kind of money you too can enter the fun world of prime real estate/money/sex. So she keeps reading

  Vogue

  and glancing up every few minutes to see if Boone is going to wait it out.

  He is.

  For one thing, he’s on the meter, and Bill is ultimately picking up the tab. So if the man wants to waste his own money being a dick, it’s cool with Boone. Usually there isn’t a fine for that.

  Second, patience is the single most necessary quality in a surfer and an investigator. Waves are going to come (or not, as the case may be) when they’re going to come (ditto), just like developments in a file. The trick is to still be there when they do, and that requires lots of patient hanging in and/or around.

  Third, Boone really wants to see if he can figure out Corey Blasingame via his dad.

  When Bill finally comes out of his inner sanctum, he looks at Boone and says, “I called Alan’s office. You check out.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Bill doesn’t like that. His chin—which is just starting to turn double—comes up a little and he gives Boone one of those “Who do you think you are?” looks, which Boone doesn’t respond to. So Bill says, “Come on in, Lucky You.”

  And glares at Nicole as if to say, “Who are you letting bug me like this?”

  Nicole looks at her nails.

  Not a bad idea, Boone thinks—they’re nice nails.

  “Shut the door behind you,” Bill says.

  Boone kicks it shut with the back of his foot. Bill notices. “You have an attitude, Daniels.”

  “You’re the second person today to tell me that,” Boone says, thinking, okay, maybe the third or fourth. The view from Bill’s office is terrific, showing La Jolla Cove in all its glory, from the kiddie beach where the seals come to rest, all the way north to the curving stretch of La Jolla Shores, the home of Jeff’s Burgers. Boone dismissed the thought of a burger and got down to business. “I’m here to talk about Corey.”

  “You have news to tell me?” Bill asks. He sits behind his desk and motions Boone to a chair.

  “No. I was hoping you had something to tell

  me.

  ”

  “I already talked to Alan and his girl,” Bill says. “I can’t think of her name—the attractive Brit—”

  “Petra Hall.”

  “That’s it,” Bill says. “So I don’t know what more I can tell you that I didn’t already tell them. Or what the hell difference it makes. Corey hit that man, he killed that man. Now we’re just shopping for the best deal, isn’t that right?”

  “The Rockpile Crew—”

  “Look,” Bill says, “I didn’t know that even existed, okay, until I read it in the papers. I don’t know, I guess the Bodin kid used to hang around the house a little, and the two brothers—”

  “Do you know when—”

  Bill just kooks out.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t know when, I don’t know why, I don’t know shit. I’m a bad father, okay? Isn’t that what you want to hear me say? Fine, I said it. I’m a bad father. ‘I gave the kid everything he needed except what he needed most—love.’ Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say now? I was too busy with my work, I didn’t give him time or attention, I showered him with material things because I felt guilty, right? Okay? Are we done now? You can drop your attitude?”

  “You made all his baseball games,” Boone says.

  “Oh, they told you about that,” Bill says. “Maybe I was a little overintense. But Corey needed pushing, he wasn’t exactly a self-starter. The kid lacked motivation, the kid was

  lazy

  . . . . Maybe I took it too far, so it’s my fault, okay? I yelled at the kid at a baseball game and that made him go out and kill someone. My bad.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have kids, Daniels?”

  Boone shakes his head.

  “So you don’t know.”

  “Tell me.”

  Bill tells him.

  He was a single dad. Corey’s mom was killed in a car accident when the kid wasn’t quite two years old. Some drunk careens off the Ardath exit into her lane and Corey gets to grow up without a mother. It wasn’t easy trying to raise a kid and build a business at the same time, and, okay, maybe Bill should have scaled things back, become a nine-to-five wage slave and been home to bake cookies or whatever, but he just wasn’t built that way and he wanted to give Corey every advantage, and that meant making money. A house in La Jolla is expensive, day care is expensive, private schools are expensive. The green fees at Torrey Pines are fairway robbery, but if you want to be making the kind of deals he wanted to be making, you’d better tee off there, and buy a few ro
unds in the clubhouse to boot.

  If you don’t have a kid you don’t know how it is, but you blink and they’re six, blink again and they’re ten, then twelve, then fourteen, and then you have this stranger in the house and he’s way past wanting to hang out with you anymore, he has friends of his own, and then you don’t see him at all, you just see signs of him. Empty Coke cans, a magazine left on the couch, towels on the bathroom floor. You go into the kid’s room and it’s a disaster area—clothes everywhere, food, shoes—anything and everything but the kid himself. You inhabit the same space, but it’s like you’re in different dimensions, you don’t see each other.

  So when Corey decided he wanted to play baseball, Bill thought this was a chance to connect. He was thrilled, because Corey had never shown an interest in wanting to do anything but hang out, watch TV, and play video games. The kid had no initiative, no competitive drive, none, so baseball was a good thing, something they might even possibly share. And he got thinking, maybe this is the kid’s route, his shot at being good at something, his way of finding his manhood.

  Except it wasn’t.

  The kid just gave up on himself, in every area. Dropped out of baseball, let his grades slip to the point where he couldn’t get into a good college. The plan was that Corey would attend a community college for the first two years, do his general ed stuff, get his GPA up, find something he wanted to do . . . but Corey couldn’t even cut it at East Loser Juco, or whatever it was. Bill found out that he was cutting classes to go surfing with Bodin and those other kids. Bill had busted his ass to surround Corey with the elite, the crème de la crème, but Corey sought out the lowest common denominator, three other spoiled, lazy, rich bums who didn’t have a clue.

  The Rockpile Crew. Hooded sweatshirts and tattoos, talking like rappers . . . like they didn’t have the best education that money could buy. It was ridiculous is what it was. Fucking ridiculous. They see this shit on MTV and they think they’re what they see.

  Bill told him, “You’re not going to go to class, get a job.” Maybe he’d learn what it was like in the minimum-wage world; it might inspire a little ambition. What kind of job did the kid get? Pizza delivery boy, so he could spend his days at the beach or in that dumb-ass gym, pumping iron and working on his six-pack.