The Gentlemen's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Curtis went to jail back in—was it 2006?—and became kind of a cult hero-martyr for the knuckle-dragger set, and according to the story on the Web site, his words in court “I have nothing to say” became a slogan.

  Encoded in the number 5.

  Good, Corey, Boone thinks.

  Real good.

  I guess you found something you could belong to.

  57

  Regarding the next morning’s Dawn Patrol, there’s dawn . . .

  . . . but not much of a patrol.

  Boone, Dave, and Hang are out there, but Johnny and Tide are 404.

  “Johnny must have got hung on a case,” Dave observes.

  “Probably,” Boone says.

  “Yeah, but where’s Tide?” Hang asks.

  “He was at The Sundowner last night,” Dave says.

  “He say anything?” Boone asks.

  “About what?”

  “I dunno,” Boone says. “Anything.”

  Great, he thinks. Lie to the friends you have left.

  “He was quiet,” Dave says. “A big Buddha statue sitting at the bar, banging beers. I left early, had a date with a nurse from Frankfurt. The Euros are here in force, man. The beach is like the freaking UN.”

  “Weak dollar,” Boone says.

  “I guess.” Dave looks at Boone funny, like, What aren’t you telling me?

  Boone sees it and ignores it. Can’t tell you what I can’t tell you, bro, and you’ll find out about it soon enough anyway.

  58

  Corey Blasingame sits slumped across the table from Boone.

  “I have noth——”

  “Save it.”

  Corey shrugs and reaches for the plastic bottle of water by his right hand. Boone gets to it first and moves it out of reach. When Corey stretches his arm out to get the bottle, Boone grabs his wrist and holds it down on the table.

  Then he reaches over and slides Corey’s sleeve up.

  Sees the “5” tattoo.

  He lets Corey’s wrist go. The kid jerks his arm back and smirks at Boone.

  “I killed him,” Corey says, “because I thought he was a nigger.”

  59

  Corey freaking Blasingame.

  Total loser.

  Even when he tries to do something hatefully stupid and stupidly hateful, he fucks it up. Sees a dark-skinned man come out of a bar, thinks he’s African American, kills him, and then finds out his victim is Hawaiian.

  Well done, C. Good job.

  You killed one of the finest men I’ve ever known because you “thought he was a ‘nigger.’”

  Excellent.

  The rest of the scenario is easy to put together—Corey originally confessed to the crime but, realizing he’d fucked up, didn’t cop to his real motive. Then the Aryan Brotherhood boys got to him in the lockup and let him know that he could do his time in one of two ways—as a snitch or as a race hero. Even a fucking idiot like Corey figured out he’d better take door number two. So he fell back on the ‘I have nothing to say’ mantra, which made him more of a hero. But then he just couldn’t keep it inside—something forced him to make himself look as bad as possible.

  “I killed him because I thought he was a nigger.”

  Hateful

  and

  stupid.

  Boone goes down the ramp below the big office building on Broadway and Sixth, takes a ticket from the machine, and makes several orbits of the parking structure before he finds a vacant space. He locks up the Deuce, gets into the elevator, and goes up to the fourteenth floor, to the door marked “Law Offices of Burke, Spitz, and Culver,” and goes inside.

  He’s known Becky Hager for years. Middle-aged; very attractive; long, curly red hair, she’s the sentinel at Alan’s castle gate. If Becky doesn’t want you to get in to see Alan, you’re not getting in to see Alan.

  “Daniels,” she says. “Long time no.”

  “Busy, Becky.”

  “Surf up?”

  “Not lately,” Boone says.

  “You here to see Mary Poppins? Blasingame?”

  “Yup.”

  Becky gives just enough of a smirk to inform him that she knows there’s a little more between him and Petra than a purely professional relationship, then pushes a couple of buttons and says into her mouthpiece, “Petra? There’s a ‘Boone Daniels’ here for you?”

  She listens, then looks up at Boone and says, “She’ll be out in a minute. The new

  Surfer

  arrived.”

  Boone sits down and looks at the magazine. Petra comes out two minutes later, looking cool and lovely in a white lawn self-stripe blouse over a light tan skirt.

  “This is a surprise,” she says.

  “Sorry I didn’t call.”

  “That’s quite all right,” she says. “Come on back.”

  “Nice to see you, Daniels.”

  “And you, Becky.”

  Petra’s office is midway down the hall. It has a nice view of the city, dominated by the aircraft carriers docked at the navy base with Point Loma as a backdrop, but Boone knows that she covets the corner office that comes with being made partner.

  She sits behind her desk, which is as neat and tight as she is.

  “I have motive for Corey,” Boone says.

  “Do tell.”

  “He was making his bones with the white supremacist movement,” Boone says, “and went after Kelly because he thought he was black.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He told me.”

  “You

  asked

  him if he did it?”

  “Of course not,” Boone says. “He volunteered it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a fuckup, Pete,” says Boone. “A total loser. I hate him. Anyway, that’s what I was doing last night when you called, checking it out. I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, I’m sorry for the last-minute invitation. It was presumptuous of me.”

  “Look, you can presume . . . what you want to . . . presume.”

  “I don’t know

  what

  to presume about us, Boone,” she says. “Are we colleagues, or friends, or

  more

  than friends, or—”

  Before he knows what he’s doing he’s standing up, leaning over her desk, and kissing her on the mouth. Her lips flutter under his, something he’s never experienced before, and they’re fuller and softer than he would have thought. He pulls her out of her chair, and papers spill off the desk onto the floor.

  He lets her go.

  “So that would be more than friends?” she says, smoothing her skirt. “I presume?”

  What the hell are you doing? he asks himself. One second you’re ready to take her head off, the next second you’re kissing her.

  “I’d better go tell Alan the good news,” she says.

  “Right.”

  Boone has felt awkward, uncomfortable, and indecisive before, but never anything like this. Do I just leave? he wonders. Or shake her hand? Or kiss her? On the lips? Or the cheek, or . . .

  She comes around the desk, puts her hand behind his neck, closes her eyes, and kisses him, warmly.

  “I’ll go with you,” Boone says.

  “That would be nice.”

  On his way out of the office he passes by Becky who says, “Wipe the lipstick off, idiot.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Nada.”

  He goes into the lobby, turns around, and comes back. Hands Becky the parking ticket. “I forgot to get validated.”

  “I think you got plenty validated,” Becky says. Then, her eyes wide with mock surprise, she adds, “Oh, you want me to stamp the

  ticket.

  ”

  She takes the ticket from him, stamps it, and hands it back. “Cheerio, old chap.”

  Becky, Boone thinks, is the whole barrel of monkeys.

  60

  “Let me share a concept with you, Boone,” Alan Burke says, staring out of his window at S
an Diego Harbor. “I hired you to make our case better, not work it up from involuntary manslaughter to a

  hate crime

  !”

  He turns to look at Boone. His face is all red and his eyes look as if they might pop out on springs like they do in the cartoons.

  “You were never going to get ‘invol man,’” Boone says.

  “We don’t know that!”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  Petra says, “I think what Boone is trying to say—”

  “I know what Boone is trying to say!” Alan yells. “Boone is trying to say that I’d better crawl on my hands and knees into Mary Lou’s office and accept any deal she offers short of the needle. Is that what you’re trying to say, Boone?”

  “Pretty much,” Boone answers. “If I found this out, I can guarantee that John Kodani will find it out, too. And when he does—”

  “—Mary Lou refiles on the hate crime statutes and Corey gets life,” Alan says. He punches a button on his phone. “Becky, get Mary Lou Baker for me.”

  Alan looks at Petra and Boone and says, “I’d better get with Mary Lou before Boone

  helps

  us anymore and puts Corey on the Grassy Knoll. You don’t have him on the Grassy Knoll, do you? Or anywhere in the vicinity of the Lindbergh baby? You got him nailing Christ up, too, Daniels?”

  “I’m guessing Corey’s not crazy about Jews, Alan.”

  “Funny,” Alan says. “Funny stuff from a guy who just harpooned my case.”

  “I didn’t harpoon your case,” Boone says. “Your client is guilty. Deal with it. Get the little shit the best deal you can and move on to the next one. Just leave me out of it.”

  Boone walks out of the office.

  Petra follows him, grabs him by the elbow, and hauls him into the law library. “Why are you so angry?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  “Okay,” Boone says, “I’m

  angry

  because I’m helping you get this subhominid a deal he shouldn’t get. I’m

  angry

  because you’re going to do it. I’m

  angry

  because Corey

  should

  get life without parole instead of the sixteen to twenty you’re going to plead him out for. I’m

  angry

  because—”

  “Or maybe you’re just angry,” Petra says. “Maybe mister cool, laid-back surfer is seething with rage about the—”

  “Back off, Pete.”

  “—injustices in the world,” Petra continues, “that he can’t do anything about, which he masks with this ‘surf’s up, dude’ persona, when in actual fact—”

  “I said, ‘Back off.’”

  “Rain Sweeny was not your fault, Boone!”

  He looks stunned. “Who told you about that?”

  “Sunny.”

  “She shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, she did.” But Petra’s sorry she said it. He looks so hurt, so vulnerable. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry . . . I had no right—”

  Boone walks out.

  61

  It’s good being Donna Nichols.

  What Boone thinks after he drives over to the Nichols neighborhood south of La Jolla, parks a couple of blocks away from the house, and waits with a paper-wrapped breakfast burrito, a go-cup of coffee, and his laptop computer.

  Donna comes out of the house a little after ten-thirty. She’s hot, no question about it, her blond hair done in a ponytail under a white visor, and her tight frame tucked into a white sleeveless blouse and designer jeans. Boone watches her little red icon ping—he’s set it for one-second intervals—on his laptop screen and makes a correct assumption about where she’s headed: an upscale mall called Fashion Valley.

  Boone gets there first and hangs out around a central point. Sure enough, Donna shows up a few minutes later. He watches her go into Vertigo, an expensive spa, then goes back out to the parking lot, finds her car, and parks the Deuce on the other side, where he can still watch, and sits. Now he remembers why he hates any kind of surveillance work—it’s boring as hell, especially on an August morning when it’s already getting hot. He rolls the window down on the van, sits back, and tries to grab some sleep.

  Yeah, good luck with that.

  He’s too pissed off to sleep.

  What, I’m this subterranean well of rage threatening to go off like a volcano or something? Boone asks himself. I’m this earthquake waiting to happen? Just because I think it’s a shitty thing that a racist creep decides to kill someone and won’t end up paying the full tab? Yeah, well, he may not in the court system, but in the Red Eddie system he’s going to get the max, and there won’t be twenty years of appeals and people doing candlelight vigils, either.

  So chill, he tells himself. All this happy legalistic horseshit is irrelevant—“moot,” as they might say, a card game trumped by Eddie’s willingness to come in and play Fifty-two Pickup. But are you happy about that? Boone asks himself. Are you a vigilante now? Then he realizes that it isn’t his own voice he’s hearing, it’s K2’s, asking those gentle questions, doing his Socratic Buddha thing.

  Boone doesn’t want to hear it right now, so instead he gets mad at Pete all over again. Where the hell does she get off fronting me with Rain Sweeny? And on the topic of what the hell, what the hell was Sunny doing telling her about it? Is this some sort of sistuh-chick thing, ganging up on the guy? Get him to talk about his

  feelings

  ?

  Donna’s in the spa for a little over an hour and comes out looking even better, if that’s possible. Some kind of new makeup look or skin treatment or something. He waits for her to pull out of the lot and then watches the screen to see where she’s headed.

  Downtown.

  She heads south on the 163, gets off on Park Boulevard, and turns left into Balboa Park. Slowly wends her way around the narrow, curving streets and then parks in the lot just south of the Spreckels Amphitheater.

  Boone hits the gas to catch up and pulls into a slot just in time to see her walking north up the Prado, the main street in Balboa Park. Following her up past the Zen garden to the Prado restaurant, where she meets three other women and goes inside.

  Ladies who lunch, Boone thinks. He buys a newspaper, finds a bench over near the Botanical Garden across the street, and waits. He’s sweaty and hungry, so he breaks the monotony by walking back to a kiosk outside the Prado and buying a pretzel and a bottle of mango juice, then goes back and sits down, just another unemployed slacker killing an afternoon in Balboa Park.

  62

  Mary Lou Baker is skippy.

  But then again, she always is.

  The happy warrior.

  Now she looks across the table at Alan Burke and says, “Oh, please, Alan. Save the cat-with-the-canary cryptic smile for some young pup who’s impressed with your résumé. I have your client’s confession, I have five witnesses, I have the medical examiner’s report that Kelly’s death was consistent with a severe blow to the head. You have . . . let me think . . . right, that would be nothing.”

  Alan maintains the feline smile, if only to get her more jacked up. “Mary Lou,” he says as if addressing a first-year law student in class, “I’ll get the ME to testify that the severe blow to the head could have come from striking the curb. I’ll get three of your witnesses to admit that they pled to reduced charges in exchange for their testimony. As for the so-called confession, come on, ML, you might as well tear it up right now and put it into the office john, because that’s about all it’s good for.”

  “Detective Sergeant Kodani has a sterling reputation—”

  “Not when I’m done with him,” Alan says.

  “Nice,” Mary Lou answers. She leans back in her chair, puts her hands behind her head, and says, “We’ll drop ‘special circumstances.’”

  “The judge will drop the ‘special’ before we go to motions,” Alan says.

  “You’re going to roll the d
ice on that?”

  “Seven come eleven.”

  Mary Lou laughs. “Okay, what do you want?”

  “You go manslaughter, we have something to talk about.”

  Mary Lou jumps out of the chair, throws her hands up into the air, and says, “What do I look like to you . . .

  Santa Claus

  ?! Christmas comes in

  August

  now?! Look, we’re wasting our time here. Let’s just go to trial, let the jury hear the case and hand your client life without parole because you want to come in here and joke around.”

  Alan looks wide-eyed and innocent. “We can certainly go in front of a jury, Mary Lou. It would be an honor and a pleasure to try a case with you. And no one is going to blame you for an acquittal. You were handcuffed by a shoddy investigation and a rush to judgment, what could you do? I’m sure Marcia Clark would—”

  “I’d go second degree,” Mary Lou says. “My best and final offer.”

  “That’s fifteen to life.”

  “Yeah, I’ve read the statute,” she says.

  “Sentence recommendation?”

  She sits back down. “It would have to be somewhere in the midrange, Alan. I won’t push for max, but I can’t go minimum, I just can’t.”

  Alan nods. “He serves ten on sixteen?”

  “We’re in the same ballpark.”

  “I’ll have to take it to my client,” Alan says.

  “Of course.”

  Alan stands up and shakes her hand. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mary Lou.”

  “Always, Alan.”

  The Gentlemen’s Hour.

  63

  The women finally come out of the restaurant. Kisses on the cheek all around, promises to do this again “sooner,” and then Donna starts walking back toward the parking lot. Boone gives her a good head start, then catches up, passes her, and is in his van waiting when she pulls out of the lot. He gives her a lot of time, watching her progress on the screen as she drives west on Laurel Street through the park, down toward the airport, then gets on the 5 north.