The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “Then,” Petra said, graciously yielding to the inevitable, “this is your chance to own a vehicle that does not have a sophomoric name.”

  “I didn’t name the Boonemobile,” Boone said a little defensively. “Other people did.”

  The other people—Dave, Tide, Hang, Johnny, and most of the Greater San Diego surfing community—inevitably called the “new” van Boonemobile II, after its iconic predecessor. The really annoying thing for Petra was that the replacement van acquired not one, but two monikers, because Boonemobile II was too long; so the nickname got a nickname of its own: “Deuce.”

  “You know,” Johnny said, “guys who are ‘the third’ get tagged ‘Trey.’ Let’s call Boone’s second van ‘Deuce.’”

  So Deuce it was.

  She’s waiting in the parking lot when he gets there.

  “Your boy is driftwood,” Boone says.

  Washed up on the beach.

  “I can’t allow myself to think that way,” Petra answers.

  “How are you going to get around the confession?” Boone asks. Some waves you don’t get around, over, or under. They just crush you. Out.

  Petra shrugs. “Confusion? Coercion? A cop putting ideas into his head? That sort of thing does happen.”

  “Not with John Kodani,” Boone says.

  JB will definitely play hardball and he doesn’t always throw straight down the middle. No, Johnny hurls some filthy junk—curveball, slider, even the occasional knuckleball—but he’s always going to catch the edge of the plate. Banzai wouldn’t just rear back and throw a spitter at someone’s head—convince some stupid kid that he did something he didn’t.

  “The first thing we have to do,” she says, ignoring the five-hundred-pound gorilla, “is to demonstrate that the Rockpile Crew isn’t a ‘gang.’ The ‘special circumstances’ on the first-degree charge hinge on the allegation of gang activity.”

  “The Rockpile Crew is a gang,” Boone says.

  “Mere association and group self-identification do not meet the legal threshold required of a ‘gang,’” she answers. “For instance, is the Dawn Patrol a gang?”

  “Sort of.”

  “The ‘gang’ has to exist for the furtherance of criminal activity,” she says. “I don’t think that the Dawn Patrol engages in organized criminal activity.”

  Clearly, Boone thinks, she’s never seen the Dawn Patrol hit a lunch buffet. Okay, the ‘organized’ thing is a stretch.

  “Like murder?” he asks.

  “Only,” she insists, “if the murder is a direct consequence of, and/or in furtherance of, the stated criminal activity. It can’t be merely coincidental.”

  Boone wonders how Kelly’s loved ones might feel about his murder being “merely coincidental,” but keeps the thought to himself. “So we need to find out if the Rockpile Crew was involved in anything other than the violent defense of its turf—say, drug dealing or something like that.”

  “Precisely,” she says. “Although I suppose it would be prudent to find out if any of these gangs of ‘locies’—is that what you call them?—”

  “Okay.”

  “—derive any financial profit from the defense of said turf,” she says. “For instance, if they’re practicing extortion, or charging ‘taxes’ for the use of the water, that would constitute a ‘gang’ under the legal interpretation.”

  So, Boone thinks, if the Rockpile Crew says “You can’t surf here” and enforce it, they’re not a gang. If they say, “You can’t surf here unless you give us twenty bucks” and enforce that, they are. You gotta love the law.

  What about the big five-star hotel chains that are buying up the coastline, and do everything they can to keep the public from getting access to “their” beaches? Are they a gang under the law?

  Oughta be.

  Bet they’re not.

  He asks, “What does Corey say about it?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s go ask him.”

  To meet Corey is to take an instant dislike to him.

  In the interest of efficiency.

  Clad in an orange jumpsuit, he slumps in a chair in the interview room and refuses to look at either Boone or Petra. He’s thin and pale, but his shoulders and biceps are big, his head shaven, and he maintains a sullen, antisocial expression.

  “Corey,” Petra says, “this is Mr. Daniels. He’s here to help on your case.”

  Corey shrugs. “I have nothing to say.”

  Boone shrugs. Sure, now you have nothing to say. Bad timing on your part going Marcel Marceau now.

  “Since writing his statement, that’s all he’s ever said,” Petra remarks to Boone. She turns back to Corey. “There’s tremendous variation in what you could be convicted of, Corey. From involuntary manslaughter, in which case you’d be released for time served, all the way to murder with special circumstances, in which case you’re looking at life without parole.”

  Corey sighs. Like he’s bored out of his mind, like he could give a rat’s ass, like he’s so gang, so down, so tough, that killing someone is No Big Deal. “I have nothing to say.”

  “Please help us to help you,” Petra says.

  Corey shrugs again.

  “Forget it,” Boone says to her. “Let him slide.”

  A lot of people have drowned, he thinks, trying to save a drowning swimmer. And this one isn’t even worthy of saving. Let him go.

  Petra doesn’t. “Your father retained us to—”

  Which seems to spark a small flame, anyway. “Hey,” Corey says, “you want to make my dad happy so he pays your bill, knock yourselves out. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “It has everything to do with—”

  “No,” Corey says. “Trust me—it doesn’t.”

  He gets up.

  “Sit down,” Boone says.

  “You gonna make me?”

  “Maybe.”

  Corey sighs again but he sits down and stares at the floor.

  “Tell me about the Rockpile Crew,” Boone says.

  “Nothing to say,” Corey says. Except he goes ahead and says it. “We surf, we party, we brawl. S’bout it.”

  Kid sounds like a bad hip-hop lyric, Boone thinks. “You deal?”

  “Nah.”

  “What about the juice?”

  “Say again?”

  “Don’t jack me around, I’m not in the mood,” Boone says. “The steroids—you sell, or you just use?”

  “I just use,” Corey says.

  “Where do you get them?”

  “I have nothing to say.” Corey smiles. He looks up from the floor and smiles at Petra. “ ‘Life without parole?’ Do I look like some taco to you? I’ll get probation, the money my dad’s paying.”

  He gets up and the guard leads him out.

  21

  “I have nothing to say,” Boone says out in the parking lot.

  “Funny,” Petra says. “Very droll.”

  It’s freaking hot out there. The sun is doing its hammer-on-anvil routine and just pounding. Even Petra is sweating—check that—perspiring.

  “No, I can see why you’re eaten up with sympathy for the kid,” Boone says. “It’s his warmth, humility, intelligence, his sense of true remorse for what he did.”

  “Come on, Boone,” she says, “you can see through the bluster. He’s a child, he doesn’t know how to react. The vacillation between depressed fatalism and unreasonable optimism is quite telling. The arrogance is covering up fear, the seeming indifference is to mask shame.”

  “See,” Boone says, “I think that underneath all that surface arrogance is a deep arrogance, and the sham indifference masks a genuine indifference.”

  She unlocks her car and slides into the driver’s seat. “In any case, it’s our job to defend him.”

  “He made that point, yeah.”

  Because he ain’t some “taco,” a Mexican who would have to pay bust-out retail for what he did. No, Corey’s pretty sure that his white skin and his daddy’s money are going to get him a
good deal.

  It’s a reasonable assumption, but it’s wrong. This time the community is outraged and demanding action; the very privilege that Corey’s banking on is going to boomerang on him, and he just doesn’t get it yet.

  He thinks it’s business as usual, but it isn’t.

  There’s another factor here, Boone thinks, feeling old. It’s the video-game generation—they always think they can hit the reset button and get a new game. If nothing is real, if it’s all virtual, then there are no real consequences.

  “How did you know about the steroids?” Petra asks.

  “I looked at him,” Boone says. “He’s juiced—his muscles are too big for his bones, the shaved hair is thinning. I think he might have been juiced up that night.”

  “’Roid rage?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a viable defense anyway,” she says. “But it’s worth looking into. Where else do you want to take it?”

  Boone starts off with where he can’t take it. He can’t talk to Trevor Bodin or the Knowles brothers because their lawyers know that their interests conflict with Corey’s and won’t let the interviews happen. Those kids, smarter than Corey, started making their deals right in the police interview rooms. The best they can hope for is that Alan takes a chunk or two off the rest of the crew’s credibility during cross-exam, but that’s about it. So that’s no good. But he can run down more info on the Rockpile Crew and the “gang” issue, find out what they were all about.

  Boone sums all that up for Petra, and then says, “If Corey takes that attitude into a trial, Mary Lou will ride it to a max sentence.”

  “I’m sure,” Petra says. “Find out about him, Boone. Open him up for us, get us something we can use.”

  “I’m not a shrink, Pete,” Boone says. “Neither are you.”

  She just doesn’t get that Corey Blasingame is exactly what he seems to be—a rich, spoiled, uncaring piece of crap who threw an unlucky punch and is going to ride that wave all the way to the bottom because he’s too stupid and arrogant to even try to bail. No, Corey’s in the impact zone and no one’s coming in with a Jet Ski to pull him out.

  Yeah, except Kelly Kuhio is pushing Boone onto the ski.

  “Just get us the information,” she says. “We’ll figure out what to do with it.”

  “You got it.”

  Not a fun job, but then again, most of them aren’t.

  Why they call it “work.”

  And the work of this case will be not so much to find out what Corey did, but why.

  “You, uhhh, doing anything tonight?” asks Boone.

  Smooth, he thinks, very smooth.

  Barney.

  She frowns. “Getting together with some people from the office. A retirement celebration for one of the partners. Sort of optional mandatory. Sorry.”

  “No worries.” Optional mandatory?

  “Another time?”

  “Sure.”

  She blows him a kiss, closes the door, and pulls out.

  Boone gets back into the Deuce.

  She probably does have an office thing tonight, he thinks. Or she’s free, but doesn’t want you to think that you can ask her out on short notice like that. He makes a mental note to consult on this with Dave (not for nothing known as) the Love God, then remembers that Dave has asked women out—or more accurately in—with less than thirty seconds’ notice.

  The lawyer world, he decides, is very different from the surfer world.

  Different waves, different rules.

  Speaking of which, he decides to use what’s left of the afternoon by driving up to La Jolla to check out the break known as Rockpile.

  22

  Depending on who or whom you believe, the name “La Jolla” (pronounced “Luh Hoya”) comes from the Spanish and means “The Jewel,” or from Native Americans and means . . .

  “The Hole.”

  Boone goes with the latter interpretation, just to piss people off, and because it’s funny—one of the most beautiful, expensive, exclusive, and snooty neighborhoods in America getting tagged a hole. Also because the NAs owned it and should know what they called it.

  Not that they meant anything pejorative; the “hole” in question probably referred to the caves in the coastline bluffs, and the area was almost certainly a paradise back then, when the original inhabitants lived by fishing, gathering shellfish, and doing a little hunting and farming before the Spanish friars arrived and decided that the people were better off being Christian slaves than free “savages.”

  Actually, La Jolla stayed pretty quiet and bucolic for a long time as it didn’t have much to offer besides those caves, pristine beaches, and gorgeous scenery. There were no natural harbors, for instance, nowhere to dock a fishing fleet. It was just a long stretch of grassy coastline with some picturesque rock formations and red seaside cliffs with holes in them, until the real estate boom of the 1880s came along and the Sizer brothers surveyed and bought up some land for $1.25 an acre. Not a bad investment, Boone thinks as he drives up from Pacific Beach, because acre lots in that neighborhood now go for two million dollars, if you can get them.

  Then in 1890, the local newspaper heiress Ellen Browning Scripps decided that she was an artist, and that La Jolla was a good place for art, so she started an artists’ colony. Art colonists started to build artsy little beach cottages in the downtown neighborhood still known as “The Colony.” You can find galleries there today along Prospect or Girard, together with five-star hotels, expensive boutiques, restaurants, nightclubs, and office buildings, and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art occupies a prominent place on the bluff, but the art most practiced in contemporary La Jolla is the art of the deal.

  Boone also likes the “Hole” etymology because his route takes him near the infamous La Jolla sinkhole.

  A little less than a year ago, an area about the size of a football field simply sank into the earth, taking eighteen two-million-dollar homes with it. City engineers warned the residents just the day before that they shouldn’t sleep there that night, but most did. No one was seriously hurt, but a bunch of people had to be rescued.

  The papers called it a landslide, the television reporters deemed it a sinkhole, the geologists referred to it as a breakaway, and the chief city engineer, in Boone’s favorite comment, said, “This is a geologically active area.” No shit, Boone thinks as he drives near the disaster site—an entire neighborhood just fell into a hole, which is just about as active as it gets.

  Maybe, Boone thinks, the Native Americans knew something we didn’t.

  Like, don’t build over a hole.

  He takes a left and turns down toward “Rockpile,” further proof of the area’s geological hyperactivity.

  The rock pile that gives the break its name is a stack of red boulders, now splattered white from seagull guano, that clearly broke off from the cliffs sometime in the undetermined past and landed in the water. Like any formation of solid matter in the ocean, it created something for waves to break on, in this case a tasty outside left, very attractive to the spiritual descendants of Ellen Browning Scripps and to surfers.

  So you have two very different types of people who frequent Rockpile: artsy ladies in sensible shoes and big hats with their easels, canvases, oils, and watercolors, and then you have surfers. They coexist pretty well, because the painters usually stay up on the cliff and the surfers are down in the water.

  The issue is parking.

  Rockpile is in what is basically a ravine between two outlying points, so there is a narrow road down to it and a small parking lot along the actual beach. The small lot obviously has limited room for cars, which is the source of a lot of the recent trouble at Rockpile.

  The locals know each other’s rides, and if a strange car with a surf rack is parked there, that vehicle and its driver could have a problem. Cars sans racks are usually given a pass because the locies figure it’s a painter who isn’t going to try to take up valuable space out at the break. In fact, s
ome of the artists have taken to leaving cardboard signs reading “I’m an Artist” inside their windshields.

  Boone doesn’t do that. He parks the Deuce in the dirt along the side of the road, goes around to the back of the van, and pulls out his old nine-three Balty longboard and leans it against the side of the van. As he peels down to his board trunks he checks out the other cars.

  Despite the location, it seems to be a pretty working-class group. There are a couple of Beemers and one Lexus, but for the most part it’s Fords, Chevys, and Toyotas. And relatively young; lots of decals for metal bands in the windshields. Other decals are less benign: “If You Don’t Live Here, Don’t Surf Here”; “This Is Protected Territory”; “Rockpile Regulars Only.”