The Gentlemen's Hour

by Don Winslow

  So she was hurt and angry, and she remembered the guy at the restaurant, and she dug into her purse and found his card. She was only going to meet him for a drink . . . okay, maybe dinner. Meet him and apologize and tell him exactly what she was doing. She even sort of hoped he wouldn’t answer when she called, but he did.

  Of course he remembered her, he said, who wouldn’t remember her? And, yes, he had plans for that evening but he would cheerfully cancel them. They met at Jake’s because, obviously, they both knew where it was and he was a regular and could always get a table. He lived just up the hill. Phil made a point of saying that and, of course, she knew why.

  She didn’t intend to go to bed with him. Just dinner, drinks, and maybe a few laughs with a man who wanted to give her some attention. But one thing led to another, and she ended up at his place, in his bed, in his arms.

  Donna felt horrible the next morning. Horrible. But then Dan didn’t even ask her where she’d been. He was on the phone all morning, sealing some deal, and when Phil called, she answered. They’d been seeing each other ever since, for the past few months.

  She told Dan the whole story.

  They fought, they yelled, they talked, for the first real time in years. He told her how angry he was, how hurt. She told him she was sorry for what she had done, but he spent so much time with his work, his business, she felt bored and lonely.

  He apologized for neglecting her, and asked her if she loved Schering. She said she didn’t, she loved

  him.

  “We cried together, Boone,” Dan says. “We held each other and cried.”

  Yeah, that’s beautiful, Boone thinks.

  “It was beautiful, Boone.”

  There you go.

  Dan left only one thing out of the story, Boone thinks. Between drinking and brooding and coming home, he swung by Schering’s house and blew him up. The only question is, where did a citizen like Dan Nichols get a gun, and what did he do with it?

  Don’t know, don’t want to know. It’s Johnny B’s problem.

  “Get your shoes, Dan.”

  “What’s going on?”

  The woman’s voice comes from the stairs.

  85

  Boone looks up to see Donna Nichols, in a blue nightgown, her hair tousled, her eyes dull with sleep. Even so, she’s intensely beautiful, and Boone feels like a creepy voyeur, seeing her in person after he’s listened in on her having sex.

  “Honey,” Dan says, “this is Boone Daniels. The private investigator I was telling you about.”

  “Oh.” She walks across the living room and extends her hand. “I’m Donna Nichols. I don’t think we’ve met. Formally, that is. Apparently, you know a lot more about me than I know about you.”

  “I’m not here on a social call, Mrs. Nichols.”

  “Please—Donna.”

  “Donna.”

  “Why

  are

  you here, Mr. Daniels?”

  Boone looks at Dan, like,

  you

  do it, dude. Anyway, he wants to watch her reaction. Dan stands up and walks to her. Holds her hands and gently says, “Honey, Phil Schering was murdered tonight.”

  “Oh, my God.” She puts her face into his shoulder. When she lifts it up again, Boone sees that her cheeks are wet with tears. “Oh, my God. Dan, tell me you didn’t—”

  “No.”

  “The police are going to want to talk to both of you,” Boone says.

  Dan turns and looks at him. “Did you—”

  “No,” Boone says. “I kept you out of it, but it’s only a matter of time. They’ll subpoena my records, get your name, Dan, and they’ll come talk to you. It would really be better if you got ahead of the curve and talked to them first. Do you have a good lawyer?”

  “Oh, my God, Dan.” Donna sits down on the couch. She looks shaky.

  “Sure,” Dan says, “but only for business. I have squads of corporate lawyers, but . . . for something like this . . . I mean, I’ve never even had a DUI.”

  Boone digs in his wallet, comes out with Alan Burke’s card, and hands it to Dan. Why not? he thinks. Dan can afford his hourly, and this is right in Burke’s wheelhouse. Alan apparently doesn’t mind defending guilty clients, and this is just his kind of case. Are you kidding? A celebrity billionaire on trial for murder? Beautiful, socialite wife? Sordid love affair? The media will eat it up, and Alan does like to see himself on TV.

  Nichols looks at the card and says, “Oh, sure, I’ve heard of him. I mean, I know him from social events and . . . he gets out on the Gentlemen’s Hour sometimes, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Boone says. “We can call him now, he’ll meet us at the precinct.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “He owes me a solid.”

  Dan looks at the card and asks, “Can’t this wait until morning, Boone? I mean, they probably won’t get your records until then and, you know, with a little sleep—”

  “Trust me, Dan, neither of you is going to sleep,” Boone says.

  And I don’t trust you, Dan, Boone thinks. With your money, you could be on a private jet tonight, then on a beach in Croatia somewhere, buying your way out of an extradition. The cops will claim that I tipped you off so you could run, and then I am looking at an accessory rap. Even if I beat it, I lose my card.

  So, no thanks.

  “Dan,” says Donna, “let’s get this over with. The sooner we face up to this the better.”

  “But you’ll—”

  “I’ll take ownership of what I’ve done,” Donna says.

  That’s nice, Boone thinks. Somewhere in Donna Nichols’s busy days, she’s found time to DVR

  Oprah.

  “Take ownership . . .”

  Dan hands him back the card. “Could you call him, please? We’ll get dressed.”

  “Sure,” Boone says.

  Donna nods. “I think that would be good.”

  They go back upstairs to get dressed.

  86

  Petra is

  très

  pissed off.

  No man has ever stood her up before, ever, certainly never under these circumstances. Now she’s sitting on her sofa dressed in a lovely blue satin negligee ready to give herself to a man who has apparently, in the California vernacular, “spaced her off.”

  It’s humiliating.

  Completely, totally, utterly humiliating.

  She feels like the second lead in a bad romance novel, or a modern, sexually loose Jane Austen character, vainly waiting for a man to come and take her away from her mundane existence. Pity the apartment lacks a harpsichord. A hovering mother, a dotty father, an earnest sister in whom to confide her heartbreak.

  Heartbreak? she thinks.

  Over

  Boone Daniels

  ?

  Please.

  She is furious, though. I invited him here, she thinks, for what was obviously going to be our first sexual encounter, and the man

  forgets

  , doesn’t even have the common courtesy to ring and apologize? A flaw in character or a failure of nerve? she wonders. Either way it doesn’t bode well for a relationship. Do you really want a man who’s afraid to have sex with you?

  Or, she thinks, does he just not fancy you? Not in “that way,” as they say. Fair enough, but what about that kiss? That took you totally unprepared. He certainly seemed to fancy you then, didn’t he?

  A bottle of good red wine sits open on the coffee table, flanked by two long-stemmed glasses. She picks up one, pours herself a long drink, then changes her mind and goes to her liquor cabinet for some whiskey. God, she thinks, first I make myself into a slut—albeit rejected—for him, now he’s turning me into an alcoholic.

  She takes her Scotch neat, sits down, and turns on the television.

  Damn

  Boone Daniels.

  87

  Johnny Banzai is not exactly crazy about Boone either when he walks into the precinct house with Dan and Donna Nichols in tow.


  Not to mention Alan Burke.

  It’s sort of like giving with one hand and taking back with the other. Here, Johnny my bro, here’s a suspect for you. And, oh, here’s someone who won’t let the suspect talk to you.

  Thanks, Boone,

  por nada.

  “Are these the clients you were protecting?” Johnny asks Boone.

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Swell.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Don’t say anything more, Boone,” Alan Burke says. He doesn’t look his usual dapper self, in a pair of jeans and an old sweatshirt that he pulled on when he got Boone’s call. His hair is tousled and he’s unshaved.

  “Are you representing Mr. Daniels?” Johnny asks him.

  “No.”

  “Then don’t instruct him,” Johnny says.

  “Am I out of here?” Boone asks.

  “For now,” Johnny answers.

  “I never thought I’d hear myself say this,” Harrington says, “but Daniels, don’t leave town.”

  Boone nods and walks out the door. Technically, they could still jam him up on obstruction charges but it won’t go far, seeing as how he brought Dan Nichols in to be interviewed. So he’s free and clear. As for Dan and Donna, their problems are their problems. You got Dan a good lawyer, you’re out of this.

  Forget about it.

  Forget . . .

  Oh, shit.

  Petra.

  He gets on his phone.

  It rings and rings and rings.

  Clearly, she has caller ID.

  88

  Yeah, but he has one of the all-time great excuses, right?

  “Honey, I was detained on suspicion of murder.” Has

  to be good for a hall pass, doesn’t it? Has to be, Boone thinks, if I can get her to listen to it.

  He debates with himself what to do next. Part of him says to let it slide until morning—he looks at his watch, okay,

  later

  in the morning—and let her cool down. Another part of him says he should drive over there right now and ring her doorbell.

  What to do, what to do?

  He calls Dave.

  Who is, after all, the Love God.

  “Oh, this better be

  prime

  ,” Dave says when he answers the phone.

  “You busy?”

  “I was getting busy,” Dave answers. “What is it, you forgot the lyrics to

  The Jetsons

  ? For the last time, it’s ‘His boy, Elroy. Jane, his wife.’”

  Boone explains his situation, without specific reference to the Nicholses. Dave just lets it slide that Boone was picked up on suspicion of homicide and that Johnny B was the picker-upper. He gets right to the problem at hand.

  “Go over there.”

  “Really?”

  “

  Hell

  , yes,” Dave says. “Dude, do you have any idea how pissed she is? Chick sets up a booty call and you don’t get your booty over there?”

  “Uhh, murder charge?”

  “Doesn’t matter to a woman,” Dave says.

  “Has to. Come on.”

  “Hold on,” Dave says. Boone hears him talking softly to someone, then Dave gets back on and says, “No. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit indeed,” Dave says. “Listen to your Uncle Dave, who has himself been in this same doleful situation. . . . I just said that to make him feel like a little less of an idiot, babe. . . . What you do is, you go over there, ring her bell, and beg forgiveness over the intercom. She won’t let you in, but she’ll feel better that you made the effort.”

  “Then flowers . . . candy?”

  “A little cliché,” Dave says, “and knowing the woman in question, she’d be happier with a DVD of your ritual disembowelment. No, this goes to Defcon four—you might be looking at jewelry.”

  “Yikes.”

  “You fucked up, bro.”

  “I was detained for—”

  “Again . . .”

  “Doesn’t matter?”

  “The beginning of wisdom, Boone.”

  Dave hangs up.

  Boone drives over to Petra’s building.

  89

  Nichols admits everything.

  Except the murder.

  Johnny Banzai sits and listens as Dan Nichols, closely monitored by Alan Burke, admits that his wife was having an affair with Phil Schering, admits that he hired Boone Daniels to uncover the infidelity, even admits that he shared part of the responsibility for his wife’s adultery.

  “I work so many hours,” he says.

  Johnny isn’t buying it. Hell, he and his wife each have full-time jobs, and kids, and they don’t play around on each other. You make time for what’s important to you. It’s the simplest way of learning what really matters to a person—just look at how he spends his time.

  Besides, Johnny doesn’t give a stale tortilla

  why

  Donna Nichols cheated, only

  that

  Donna Nichols cheated, and he wouldn’t care about that either except that the guy she cheated with turned up dead. He wouldn’t really care about that either, except he turned up dead on Johnny’s shift.

  So now Johnny has two high-profile cases—the Kelly Kuhio murder, with all its tourist and surf culture implications, and now a billionaire socialite adultery/murder that will have the media coming in its collective shorts and the chief buzzing around his head like an annoying but powerful fly.

  And his ex-buddy Boone has managed to turn up in both cases.

  “Where were you last night?” Johnny asks.

  Burke nods to his client, allowing him to answer.

  “Home with my wife,” Nichols says, with a trace of self-righteousness that annoys Johnny. “We talked. About everything. Our thoughts, our feelings . . .”

  “That’s fine,” Burke says.

  Beautiful, Johnny thinks. The cuckolded husband’s alibi is his cheating wife. You have to love the symmetry. “And did you confront her with your knowledge of her infidelity?”

  “I wouldn’t call it exactly a confrontation,” Nichols says. “I just told her that I knew she was having an affair and asked her—”

  “That’s enough,” says Burke.

  “What did you ask her?” Johnny says.

  Burke shoots his client an I-told-you-so look.

  “How could she do that to me?” Nichols says.

  “And what did she say?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Burke snaps. “Irrelevant.”

  “This isn’t a courtroom, counselor,” Johnny says.

  “But it could end up in one, couldn’t it?” Burke asks. “Her response to him regarding her motivation is immaterial. What you want to know—”

  “Don’t tell me what I want to know.”

  “What you

  should

  want to know—”

  “Ditto,” Johnny says, realizing that he’s falling into Burke’s game. The lawyer is distracting him, breaking up his rhythm, turning his interrogation of the witness into a skirmish between cop and lawyer. He leans across the table to focus on Nichols. “How long did the conversation last?”

  “I don’t know,” Nichols says. “I didn’t look at my watch. Until we went to bed. Eleven o’clock?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “He told you he didn’t know, Detective,” Burke says, “and I’m not going to allow him to speculate.”

  Of course you’re not, Johnny thinks, because it’s a critical issue.

  The 911 call from the neighbor had come in at eight-seventeen; the black-and-white responding to a “shot fired” called at eight twenty-four. The responding officers kicked in the door and found Schering, in a bathrobe, already dead on his living-room floor.

  Johnny got the call at eight thirty-one; logged on to the scene at eight forty-seven. He interviewed the neighbor and had Boone’s van at the scene, but the neighbor couldn’t recall if it l
eft before or after he heard the shot, just that this van had been “lurking” around the neighborhood recently.

  The ME hasn’t established time of death yet, and it would be nice to pin Nichols down to a time after which his wife’s testimony won’t help him. Personally, Johnny thinks Nichols shot his wife’s lover

  before

  this heart-to-heart talk ever happened, if it happened at all, but it’s possible that he slipped out afterward, and wants to leave that door open.

  Burke isn’t going to let him narrow it down, so Johnny has to press the offensive a little harder. “Is this possible, Mr. Nichols? Let me run this scenario for you, and you tell me if it’s possible. Daniels calls you, tells you he has definitive proof that your wife is sleeping with Schering. You go over to confront your wife’s lover. I get it, I totally get how you’d be angry . . . hell, furious . . . the guy has been doing your wife—”

  “That’s enough, Detective,” Burke says.

  “And you get into an argument. I mean, who wouldn’t? I know I would, Harrington here certainly would.”

  Harrington nods sympathetically. “Hell, yes.”

  “Any man who calls himself a man would, and you argue and things get out of hand and maybe you pull the gun. Just to threaten him, scare him, I don’t know, mess with his head. Maybe he reaches for it and it goes off.”

  “Don’t respond to this fiction,” Burke says.

  Which pisses Johnny off, because he’s using the “fiction” to lure Nichols into putting himself at the scene. Once he does that, Johnny will use the gunshot forensics to jerk the “self-defense” rug out from under him.

  He keeps at it.

  “You’re freaked out,” Johnny says. “You never meant for anything like this to happen. You panic and drive away. You drive straight home and when you get there you’re so shook up you can’t hide it from your wife. She asks you what’s going on and you tell her. Just like you said, you tell her you know about the affair. You tell her about the terrible thing that happened when you went to Schering’s house. She says it’s going to be all right, you’ll both say you were home the whole evening, working on saving your marriage. Is that possible, Dan? Is it just possible it happened that way?”