The Gentlemen's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Johnny asks, “Do you have anyone who can put you here before we came?”

  Boone shakes his head, then says, “I talked with Sunny on the phone.”

  “Landline or cell?”

  “Since when do I have a landline?”

  “Yeah, I forgot,” Johnny said. So Boone’s phone would show a record of him talking to Sunny, but wouldn’t say where he was. “What time did you talk to her?”

  “I dunno. After nine.”

  So it doesn’t help him anyway, Johnny thinks. “I want that tape.”

  “Get a warrant,” Boone says, “and you can have it.”

  “I will.”

  There’s a slight lightening of the sky outside the window, the faintest touch of gold on the water.

  “Sun’s coming up, Johnny.”

  It’s time for the Dawn Patrol.

  “You take it,” Boone says. “I’m dead tired, and anyway, I don’t go to parties where I’m not welcome.”

  “You’re making your own choices, Boone,” Johnny says. “I don’t feel like I even know you anymore. Worse, I don’t think you know yourself.”

  “Knock off the pop-pyscho-babble and go surf,” Boone says.

  Words to live by.

  95

  Boone catches the Gentlemen’s Hour instead.

  To his considerable surprise, Dan is out on the line.

  “I didn’t do it,” Dan says when he paddles up next to Boone.

  “Yeah, you said that.”

  “You don’t believe me,” Dan says.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Boone says. “Look, I hooked you up with a good lawyer. I’m out of this.”

  Yeah, except I’m not, he thinks. At the very least, I’ll be giving a statement and probably testifying about my role in the whole thing. And one cop wants to make it out that you paid me to kill your wife’s lover.

  And a man is dead.

  For no good reason.

  A lot of that going around in San Diego these days.

  96

  Okay, maybe Dan didn’t do it, Boone thinks as he paddles in.

  Maybe

  Dan is telling the truth, and he had nothing to do with Schering’s murder. There’s always that possibility. But if Dan didn’t, who did?

  If Schering was fucking around with another’s guy wife, maybe Donna Nichols wasn’t the only one. Maybe there was another jealous husband or boyfriend out there. Maybe Schering was a real player, and someone else wanted him off the field.

  Doubtful, but possible.

  So worth checking out.

  For several reasons, Boone thinks as he walks to the office. If Dan goes down, he takes me with him. I’m the guy who fingered the guy he killed. Worse, the suspicion that I did it, or helped, will always be out there. And fuck the suspicion—if I had anything to do with Schering’s murder,

  I

  want to know about it.

  Hang is behind the counter.

  “Hey, Hang.”

  Hang doesn’t answer.

  “Hey, Hang. S’up?”

  Hang just looks at him. With a baleful expression.

  “What?” Boone asks. “They stop making Pop-Tarts or something?”

  “I heard something,” Hang says.

  Boone has a sneaking suspicion what he heard, but he asks, “What?”

  “That you’re helping get Corey Blasingame off.”

  “I’m working on his defense team, yes.”

  Hang looks dumbstruck. Shakes his head like he just bottom-smacked and is trying to clear the wuzzies out. Looks at Boone like Boone just shot his puppy and ate it in front of him.

  “You have something to say,” Boone says, “say it.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  No Surfbonics now. Just plain English.

  “What do you know about it?” Boone says, more sharply than he’d intended. “Seriously, Hang, the fuck you know about anything?”

  Hang turns away.

  “Cool with me,” Boone says. He feels a little bad as he goes up the stairs, but his anger washes it away. Screw it, Boone thinks, I don’t need his hero worship. It’s a drag anyway. I’m not who he thinks I am? Cool. I’m not who he thinks I am.

  Maybe I’m not what anyone thinks I am. Or what they want me to be.

  Cheerful is hunched over the adding machine as usual. He doesn’t look up but waves his hand and says, “Up bright and early, I see.”

  “I was up most of the night,” Boone says. He walks through the office and gets into the shower. He comes out, wraps a towel around his waist, and tells Cheerful all about the events of the night—the cops picking him up, Dan Nichols being a (probably worthy) murder suspect.

  “Send his check back,” Boone says.

  “I already deposited it.”

  “Then send him a refund,” Boone says. “I don’t want blood money.”

  “You’re so sure he did it?”

  “I have some doubts.”

  Cheerful gets up from his chair and stands over Boone. No, he

  looms

  over Boone, and asks, “So are you going to sit there on your ass being pissy and feeling sorry for yourself, or are you going to do something about it?”

  “I’ve already done—”

  “Bullshit,” Cheerful says. “You’re an investigator, right? You think Nichols might not be the real killer? Then go out and

  find

  the real killer.

  Investigate.

  ”

  Yup.

  Boone throws some clothes on and heads out.

  Refund, Cheerful thinks.

  No wonder he’s always broke.

  97

  Boone hops into the Deuce and drives up to Del Mar. If Schering picked up one woman at Jake’s, maybe he picked up others. Maybe it was his happy hunting ground.

  Jake’s is an icon.

  The restaurant, just across the street from the old Del Mar train station, sits on the beach. Actually

  on

  the beach. You get one of the front tables at Jake’s during high tide, you’re practically in the water. You sit there and watch kids play out in front of you, and just to the south there’s a tasty little break below the bluffs where the surfers hang. You ever get tired of living in San Diego—the traffic, the prices—you go to Jake’s for lunch and you aren’t tired of living in San Dog anymore.

  You wouldn’t live anywhere else.

  Boone doesn’t go to one of the front tables today, he goes to the bar. Orders himself a beer, sits and checks out the surf, then strikes up a conversation with the bartender. Lauren’s a pretty young woman, tanned with sun-bleached hair, who took the job because it keeps her on the beach. It takes two slow beers to get around to the subject of Phil Schering.

  “I knew him,” she says.

  “No kidding?”

  “He used to hang out here a lot,” she says. “It was sort of his place. His out-of-office office. He did a lot of business lunches here.”

  “What kind of business was he in?”

  “Some kind of engineer?”

  With that upward, Southern California inflection that turns every sentence into a question. Boone’s always thought it was a reaction to the transience of California life, like—it is . . . isn’t it?

  “He hang out at the bar a lot?”

  “Sometimes, not a lot,” Lauren says. “He wasn’t a big drinker and this isn’t exactly a pickup joint.”

  “No,” Boone says, “but was that what he was looking for?”

  “Aren’t we all?” Lauren asks. “I mean, looking for love?”

  “I guess.”

  Boone lets a good minute pass, looks past the bar out the window where the ankle-high surf curls onto the sand. He gets up, leaves the change from a twenty on the bar, and asks, “So, did he find it? Schering, I mean. Love?”

  “Not that I noticed,” Lauren says. “I mean, he wasn’t really the player type. You know what I mean?”

  “I do.”

  “You
do,” she says, scooping up the change, “because you’re not the player type either. I can always tell.”

  Off Boone’s quizzical look she adds, “I gave you a big opening and you didn’t walk through it.”

  “I’m sort of seeing someone.”

  “Tell her she has a good guy.”

  Yeah, Boone thinks—I’ll let her know.

  98

  So the Phil Schering as playboy theory looks shot, Boone thinks as he hands his ticket to the valet and waits for the kid to bring the Deuce around. We’re probably not looking for a jealous husband, but who else would have a capital grudge against a soils engineer?

  The valet hops down from the Deuce and looks surprised when Boone hands him three dollar bills. Based on the vehicle, he was probably hoping for a quarter. But the kid looks enthused.

  “Are you Boone Daniels?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dude, you’re a legend.”

  Great, Boone thinks as he gets behind the wheel. I’m a legend. Legends are either dead or old. He pulls out onto the PCH and moves his mind from the topic of being old back to the topic of a motive for killing Phil Schering.

  Motives are like colors—there are really very few basic ones, but they have a thousand subtle shades.

  Your primary motive colors are crazy, sex, and money.

  Boone doesn’t linger on the first. Crazy is crazy, so there’s no line of logic you can pursue. It’s too random. Of course, there are shades of crazy: You have your basic, organic, Chuck Manson or Mark Chapman crazy. There’s also the “temporary insanity” crazy, aka “rage”—a tsunami of anger that washes away normal restraint or inhibition; a person “sees red” and just goes off. A subcategory of rage is drug or alcohol-induced rage—the booze, pills, meth, ice, steroids, whatever, make a person commit violence they otherwise would never do.

  None of these applies to what facts Boone knows about the Schering murder.

  Boone goes on to the next major motive, sex. Murder over sex is closely related to rage, as it’s usually provoked by jealousy. So if sex was the motive, Dan Nichols is the number-one suspect, as it doesn’t appear as if there were other jealous husbands or boyfriends. Yeah, Boone thinks, but for the moment anyway you’re looking for someone other than Dan, so move on.

  On to money.

  People will kill for the jack, sad but true. But what kind of money hassle could Schering have been involved in? A business deal gone south? A bad debt? Did he have a gambling jones he couldn’t keep up with? Even if he did, pop culture notwithstanding, bookies and loan sharks rarely kill their deadbeats—it’s a guarantee of never getting paid.

  No, you usually kill someone so you can

  get

  your money.

  But what kind of a payday could Schering offer? Wasn’t anything he had in the house, because Johnny never brought robbery up as a possibility. So if Schering didn’t have something, maybe he was in the way of something.

  Whose payday could Schering have been cockblocking?

  Boone drives to the dead man’s office.

  No crime tape up. The cops haven’t sealed the scene, and why should they? Schering wasn’t killed here, plus they have a suspect they like and they’re fixated on him.

  Good, Boone thinks.

  For the time being, better.

  Still, you can’t bust into the office in what they like to call “broad daylight,” so it will have to wait.

  He occupies his mind with something else.

  Dumb-ass Corey Blasingame.

  Boone wonders if Alan has had the time to see him, and offer him the deal, and whether Corey will take it or not.

  His phone goes off.

  It’s Jill Thompson.

  99

  “Will I be in trouble?” she asks.

  She sits in the passenger seat next to Boone in the Starbucks parking lot and chews on a strand of hair in her mouth. She looks young to Boone. Awfully young.

  “For what?” he asks.

  “Lying to the police.”

  “You didn’t exactly lie,” Boone says. “I think it can be worked out.”

  She chews the hair more vigorously, then breaks it down for him. She didn’t see Corey throw that punch. She heard the punch, she thinks, looked around, and saw the man on the sidewalk. Some guys were getting in their car and driving away. She cradled the injured man in her arms and called 911.

  “I had blood all over me,” she says.

  Later, when the cop was talking to her, he asked her if she saw Corey hit Kelly—the cop told her that was the man’s name—and she said yes. She thought that’s what happened, she said, and she just wanted to help Kelly.

  “But you’ll tell the truth now?” Boone asks. “It might not be necessary, but if it is, you’ll tell the police what you told me just now?”

  She lowers her head, but she nods.

  “Thanks, Jill.”

  She opens the door. “Do you want something? A latte or something? I can get you a free latte if you want.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay.”

  He waits for her to get inside, then calls Pete and arranges for her and Alan to meet him at the jail.

  100

  One question a defense attorney will never ask his or her client:

  “Did you do it?”

  Most clients are going to answer “no,” but if the client answers “yes,” the attorney is in a bad jam. He can’t violate the attorney-client privilege, but, as an officer of the court, he can’t go into a trial and commit or suborn perjury.

  In Alan Burke’s case, though, he already has an answer in the form of Corey Blasingame’s confession. Now he spends long moments pretending to peruse it as Corey shifts around anxiously in his seat.

  Boone sits back and watches as Alan reads out loud,

  “‘We were outside the bar waiting because we were pissed that they threw us out of there earlier. So I saw the guy coming out of the bar and decided to mess him up. I walked up to him and hit him with a Superman Punch. I saw his lights go out before he hit the ground. Other than that, I have nothing to say.’”

  He looks up at Corey and raises an eyebrow.

  “What?” Corey asks.

  “What, ‘What’?” Alan answers back. “You want to say something about this?”

  “No.”

  “Jill Thompson didn’t really see you throw the punch,” Alan says. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “But the cops told you she did, right?”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “We don’t think the cabdriver saw you throw it, either,” Alan says. “But again, the cops told you that he did?”

  “I guess.”

  Alan nods.

  Corey quickly says, “But Trev and Billy and Dean all saw me hit him.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “They wouldn’t lie.”

  “They wouldn’t?” Alan asks. “They’re about to close a deal that would put them in jail for eighteen months. That bargain is based on them testifying that you threw the punch that killed Kelly.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Okay if they’re telling the truth,” Alan says. “Not so okay if they’re lying.”

  Christ, kid, Boone thinks, he’s holding the door wide open. Walk through it, Corey. Take one single step on your own behalf.

  Not happening.

  Alan Burke didn’t get where he is in life by giving up easily. So now he asks, “Is it possible, Corey, is it just possible that in all the chaos . . . remember, you’d been drinking . . . someone else threw that punch and you just got confused when you talked to the police?”

  Corey looks at the floor, looks at his shoes, the wall, his hands.

  “Is that possible?” Alan asks.

  No answer.

  “Possible or probable?” Alan asks, almost as if he were cross-examining him on the stand, nudging him toward the edge of the cliff.

  Corey won’t go.

  Inste
ad, he straightens up and announces, “I have nothing to say.”

  “White supremacist garbage you picked up from Mike Boyd?” Boone asks. “You’re just going to take the pipe because you finally found something so shitty even

  you

  could belong to it?”

  Petra warns, “Boone—”

  Boone ignores her. “You couldn’t deliver a pitch or a pizza, you couldn’t really surf, and you couldn’t really fight, but you could sign on to this filth, and when you finally thought you’d succeeded at something, you killed a ‘nigger,’ you just hold on to it because that’s all you have. A stupid, dirty slogan, ‘I have nothing to say.’”

  “For God’s sake—” Petra says.

  “I don’t think you threw that punch,” Boone says. “I think Trevor did. Except he’s too smart to take the weight, so he lays it on you. I hope you

  do

  keep your mouth shut, Corey, I hope they do give you the needle, so maybe you can finally

  be

  something. Maybe some other racist piece of shit will tattoo your name on his wrist and—”

  “I don’t know, all right?” Corey yells. “I don’t fucking remember what happened, okay!”

  He slams his fists on the table, then raises them and starts hitting his own head as he repeats, “I don’t fucking know! I don’t fucking know! I don’t—”

  The guard rushes in and grabs him in a bear hug, pinning his arms.

  “I don’t fucking know. . . . I don’t—”

  He breaks down into sobs.

  Alan turns to the guard.

  “Can you get DA Baker down here.

  Now

  ?”

  101

  Here’s the story that Corey tells, on the record.

  He started surfing with Trevor and the Knowles brothers. Something to do and it was fun, you know. At first, the older guys there didn’t really want them around, but Trevor made their bones by chasing some foreigners away. Then Mike said they should swing by his gym, check it out.

  They were all, like, why not? MMA is cool, and it was, so they started spending most of their time at the gym and at Rockpile.