The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “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 San 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 dice 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.

  She could be heading home, but she takes the exit for Solana Beach and parks on Cedros Street. Boone is just a couple of minutes behind her as she parks and then walks from store to store on this block of expensive furniture stores. Then she goes into a clothing boutique and spends forty-five minutes. And some money, apparently, because she comes out with a couple of dresses on hangers and goes back to her car.

  Now she drives home and pulls into the garage.

  Boone sits a block away. Ten minutes later, a car pulls into the driveway. A young man in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, bicycling shorts, and muscles gets out and rings the bell. Donna lets him in.

  She wouldn’t, Boone thinks. She wouldn’t have the nerve or the bad taste to do this right in her own home. Doesn’t happen. He takes his binoculars, scopes the license plate, and calls Dan.

  “That’s Tony,” Dan says. “Personal trainer.”

  “Uhhh, Dan, I know this would be really cliché, but—”

  “Tony also dances in an all-boy nude dance review in Hillcrest,” Dan says, naming San Diego’s preeminent gay neighborhood. “Unless he’s swapped jerseys—”

  “Okay, then.”

  Tony comes out an hour later. Donna, red-faced and sweating, waves good-bye and goes back in.

  So it’s good being Donna Nichols, Boone decides. A little spa treatment, a nice lunch, some high-end shopping, a customized workout, hopefully a quiet dinner at home. And, just as hopefully, Dan is wrong about his wife’s infidelity. Just a little premature midlife insecurity on his part. Has probably happened to half the guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour.

  Yeah, no.

  Because it’s August, and August blows.

  There’s no surf, K2 is gone because some stupid kid has to belong to something, women reach into your insides and rip them out, and Donna Nichols comes out of her house dressed to kill.

  64

  Boone watches the little pings head toward Del Mar.

  His route takes him past Torrey Pines Beach and that beautiful stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that he loves so dearly. It’s just summertime dusk, with the sun setting fat and hot over the horizon, and plenty of people are still lazing on the beach.

  Boone never drives this stretch without feeling this little tug at his heart. The place is just ineffably beautiful, and he feels lucky to live there. It cheers him up a bit, makes him forget for a moment that he’s about to do something that he really doesn’t want to do.

  North on Torrey Pines Road, then up Camino Del Mar—the town of Del Mar’s rechristening of the Pacific Coast Highway—then a left up the steep hill away from the ocean. Donna passes “Go,” collects two hundred dollars, and lands on the square marked 1457 Cuchara Drive.

  Her car is parked in the driveway when Boone catches up to the flashing red dots on the GPS screen and slowly drives down the expensive suburban street. You have to have bucks to live in this neighborhood—not necessarily Dan Nichols’s kind of bucks, but bucks. Not a lot of on-street parking here, and Boone doesn’t want Donna to notice the van, so he’s happy to find a spot about halfway down the block and across the street.

  He can see Donna through the living room window, sitting on a sofa, having a drink. A guy sits next to her, but Boone doesn’t get a good view of him. Boone slouches in his seat and points the listening cone toward the house.

  Checking the monitor on the recorder to make sure he’s getting sound, he sits back and waits. No point in listening in on the small talk—it will all be on the tape anyway. A few minutes later she gets up. The lights in the living room go off, then a light in what’s probably the bedroom comes on.

  Boone slips the headset on to make sure he’s getting a clear signal.

  He is.

  It’s horrible.

  Really horrible.

  Boone feels like a total, low-life, bottom-feeding mouth breather as he listens to the sounds of their lovemaking. Donna likes to talk dirty—or at least she thinks that her squeeze likes to hear her talk dirty—so her voice is all over the tape. There’s no doubt it’s she—and Boone is grateful that Dan isn’t hearing this.

  He’s sorry that he has to hear it, but he does. It’s a potential intermediate step to having to share the tape with Dan. He knows how that conversation goes:

  “Boone, are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “They couldn’t have been doing something else?”

  Like knitting, watching The Bachelor, building cabinetry . . .

  “Dan, I heard them. It’s unmistakable.”

  So he listens.

  The guy is pretty verbal himself, uses her name over and over again, and Boone takes the headset off after there’s no doubt about what they’re doing. He doesn’t want to be any more a part of this than he has to.

  He sits back, vividly remembering why he hates matrimonial work.

  His cell phone rings. It’s Petra.

  “Hello. What are you doing?”

  “Working.” You know us deceptively laid-back surfer dudes—we’re always on the job. Our anger keeps us going.

  With a rare tone of uncertainty in her voice, Petra says, “Listen, I’m re
ally sorry about this morning. I was completely out of line, and it wasn’t my place to—”

  “Forget about it.”

  Awkward silence, then Petra says, “Well, if you’d like to take a break or something? We could grab a coffee or—”

  “I’m kind of on a stakeout.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty stuck.”