The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “Well, I could join you,” Petra says. “Bring something over to where you are.”

  “That sounds really nice,” Boone says. “But Pete, there’s a reason it’s called private investigation work?”

  “Oh, of course. Sorry. Stupid of me.”

  “No, no. It’s just that it’s that kind of case.”

  “Right.”

  Quit being a dick, Boone tells himself. She said she was sorry. What more do you want? Stop being such a big relationship baby. So he says, “How about tomorrow night? I think this thing is wrapping up, I’d probably be loose.”

  “Well, why don’t we just see?” Petra says. “I’m not exactly sure what my schedule’s going to be. Actually, now that I think about it, I might be committed to get together with some friends. Foodies . . . dinner in the Gaslamp, that sort of thing.”

  That is, Boone thinks, not the sort of “thing” you’d be interested in.

  SEI.

  “Sure,” he says. “Why don’t we play it by ear?”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Petra says. “Well . . . sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No, you didn’t. It was nice to have a break.”

  “Always glad to be of service.”

  That went well, Boone thinks. “Foodies.” Foodies should be lined up against a wall, read that day’s specials, then machine-gunned.

  At about 1:00 a.m. Boone sets the GPS tracker to alert him if the car moves, finds his portable alarm clock in the back, sets it for six-thirty, tilts the seat back, and goes to sleep.

  Donna Nichols comes out at 6:37 a.m.

  An overnight bag slung over her shoulder.

  A middle-aged, burly white guy with curly, sandy-colored hair and a red goatee, wearing just a silk bathrobe, stands in the doorway and kisses her good-bye. Then he bends over, picks up the newspaper, and goes back inside.

  Donna opens her car door, tosses the bag into the front passenger seat, gets in, and backs out of the driveway. Boone waits for a minute, the blips on the screen telling him that she’s headed home, then pulls up and checks out the name on the mailbox: “Schering.” Then he pulls ahead and finds a different parking spot.

  At eight-twenty, Boone looks into his rearview mirror and sees Schering’s garage door open. A tan Mercedes 501 backs out and heads down the hill. Boone gives it a second, then follows. He doesn’t want to tail him too closely and get made, and he can always reverse Schering’s full identity through the address and the license plate, but it would be easier to find out where the man works and do it that way. He catches up with Schering as he takes a right onto Camino Del Mar, heading south. Schering turns onto Torrey Pines Road, and for a second Boone wonders if he’s going to Nichols’s house on a when-the-cat’s-away theory, but then Schering drives past the golf course and takes a left into a business park of small, two-story office buildings.

  The Mercedes pulls into a slot marked “Reserved.”

  Schering gets out of the car. Boone notices that he’s dressed SoCal Summer Professional—blue blazer, khaki slacks, white shirt open at the collar. Expensive brown Oxford shoes, highly shined. No wedding ring. Schering grabs his Halliburton briefcase from the passenger seat, walks to the building behind the parking spot, and climbs a set of exterior stairs to the second floor. Boone waits a minute, gets out, and walks up the same stairs. He reads on the signboard that three offices share the floor—a lawyer, a title company, and “Philip M. Schering, Geological Engineering Consultant.”

  Schering does dirt.

  65

  That is to say he’s a soils engineer.

  We always think of houses or any buildings being constructed from the foundation up, but that’s not really true. The real foundation is the earth beneath the foundation. At the end of the day, all buildings are constructed on dirt, in one form or the other. If that dirt isn’t solid, then it doesn’t matter how strong a foundation you build, in reality there is no foundation.

  But dirt isn’t just dirt. Because it’s made up of broken-down rock and decomposed vegetation, there’s an infinite variety of types of dirt—depending on the type of stone and vegetation, its moisture content or lack thereof, its compaction and stability.

  It goes deeper than that, literally. Dirt always sits on something—either water or rock—and again, depending on the depth of the soil, its humidity, the angle or slope at which it sits, it rests in various degrees of stability or, in the negative case, instability.

  Same with the rock or the water it sits on. The rock might be whole and stable, or cracked—in the most severe instance, for example, by earthquake—and resettling, shifting, moving. Any of this instability will likewise affect subterranean pools of water, which further impact surrounding rock and the soil that sits on top of it.

  So when we look at soil, it appears to be inert, but that is often anything but the truth. In reality, the subsurface soil is in a state of flux, either rapid—in the case of a landslide—or imperceptibly slow, as is the case of the world’s evolution over billions of years. The truth is that the soil is always changing.

  Which would be a gigantic so what, except that we build things on it, most notably our houses, and it’s the job of soils engineers such as Phil Schering to tell us whether the soil can sustain the building, or whether we need to do some work on it, if such work is even feasible or effective.

  Southern California has a lot of soils engineers because a lot of people want houses there, and because it’s basically a desert that happens to roll up to an ocean. Which is just fine until you start building houses and subdivisions, office buildings, hotels, streets, and roads on those bluffs, because the bluffs are made mostly of sandy soil and loose clay.

  Take, for instance, Boone’s beloved Pacific Coast Highway. The civil engineers who built it basically cut away the bottoms of bluffs, triggering huge internal landslides farther up the slopes. Drive the PCH now, and you’ll see lots of big, concrete retaining walls to keep those bluffs from becoming part of the Pacific Ocean.

  But the highway was built decades before the big housing boom in Southern California, and the bluffs could withstand and recover from the pressure of the cutaway. What happened, though, was that more and more people wanted to live on those bluffs. Houses and huge subdivisions were built, often too quickly, and the people moved in.

  People need water. To drink, cook, bathe, launder, flush. Most of that water makes it into drains and has little effect on the soil stability. But people also wanted lawns. Lawns are composed of grass, which, unlike cactus, requires water. Lots of it. So the same people who were drinking, cooking, bathing, laundering, and flushing started to water their lawns, and that water doesn’t go into drains, it seeps into the soil of loose sand and clay. Because water is a lubricant, and the most patient, pernicious, and powerful destructive force in the physical world, it further loosens the already loose subsurface soil until the housing developments sit on what is basically a toboggan run, the buildings themselves being the toboggans.

  They are going to slide.

  As they do, foundations crack, driveways crack, sidewalks crack, stucco cracks, floors buckle, ceilings sag, and roof tiles pop for no (apparent) reason. And, occasionally, houses and condos just slide off the edge, or fall into sinkholes that magically appear and swallow up houses.

  Which brings out another Southern California phenomenon.

  Litigation.

  People sue—insurance companies, contractors, architects, the city, the county, each other. And when they sue, both sides require the services of engineering consultants such as Phil Schering to testify why the soil under their houses, condos, offices, or hotels failed, and whose fault it was, i.e., somebody else’s.

  Basically, Phil Schering is a professional expert witness. You can make a very nice living charging five bills an hour as an expert witness. The time on the stand is the least of it—a consulting engineer such as Phil Schering also bills for the time he spends evaluating the case, time spent preparing his testimony, m
eetings with lawyers—the meter is running, my friend.

  Hence the house on Cuchara Lane in Del Mar.

  And social proximity to women such as Donna Nichols.

  Boone drives back to Pacific Beach.

  It’s too late for the Dawn Patrol.

  66

  Boone paddles out past the other surfers on the Gentlemen’s Hour, rips the leash off his ankle, and rolls off his board into the water, letting it cleanse the dirt and fatigue of a depressing all-night stakeout.

  The ocean is timeless and therefore a great holder of memories and they wash over Boone with the cool water as he dives.

  Sunny.

  When Boone was helping her train to bust into the professional ranks, they used to do this—free dive as deep as they could go. She was like an arrow shot into the water, a long, sleek dart of energy and strength. They’d stay down until they felt their lungs about to burst, then stay down a little longer before rising quickly to the surface for that beautiful breath of air. Then they’d do it again, challenging each other, pushing each other, Sunny so stubborn and determined that she’d never give in before Boone.

  After a few dives, they’d swim beside each other to find their boards where they’d drifted, then go on a long paddle parallel to the beach until their shoulders ached and their arm muscles burned with fatigue. Or they’d race—short, sharp dashes as if trying to beat each other into a wave, because he knew that’s what she’d need to break it on the tour: to get into that winning wave before the competition.

  So he pushed her, never gave her a break or an edge for being a “girl.” Not that she needed one—Sunny was as strong and quick as any guy, stronger and quicker than most, her long frame and wide shoulders perfect for the water. She was ripped, in killer shape from a strict vegetarian diet supplemented with some fish. The diet, the yoga, the weight lifting, the brutal workouts she put herself through, the endless hours in the water—Sunny was a dedicated animal.

  It was K2 who turned her onto yoga.

  More memories as Boone touches the bottom, then arches up and shoots for the surface. He comes up and looks back at the shore.

  All the boys laughed when Kelly brought that yoga shit to the beach. It didn’t bother K2, he just unrolled his mat on the sand and started doing those slow moves, furling, unfurling, and stretching his body into the funny, impossible shapes as he ignored the chuckles and witticisms around him.

  He just smiled and did his routines.

  Then tore it apart in the water.

  Yeah, laugh all you want, boys—call him “guru,” “swami,” do your best George Harrison imitations—he’s tearing your hearts out in the surf. He gets any wave he wants, finds the perfect line, and shreds it with a grace and pure athleticism you can only dream about, and that old man can do it to you all day long.

  Boone treads water, looks at the beach, remembers, and laughs.

  Recalls the day when Sunny joined K2 in his yoga session. She strode up, laid her mat beside his, and started to copy his moves. He didn’t say anything, just smiled and kept going through his routine, and now the boys were really watching because this babe was putting herself through these contortions and it was, uhhh, compelling. Like, no one was not going to watch that, and then one of the dudes joined in to get next to Sunny, and then a few more, and it wasn’t long before K2 had a yoga class going on the beach.

  Not for Boone—he did his workouts in the water—but Sunny was a devotee, totally aware that K2 was a father figure to her. Sunny’s own dad split when she was three, and she was totally open about the fact that she always wanted a dad.

  “Basic psychology,” she told Boone during one of their training sessions. “I want to stay aware of it so I don’t do the stereotypical thing of trying to get the love I didn’t get from my father from my boyfriend.”

  Which is a good thing, Boone thought, because he was her boyfriend at the time. So it was perfect when Sunny made her yoga hookup with K2.

  “It’s almost better than having a real father,” she told Boone.

  “How so?”

  “Because I’m choosing my father figure,” she answered, “so I can look for all the qualities I want in a father instead of having to settle for whatever my real father was.”

  “Got it.”

  So did K2.

  He was so cool about it. It didn’t freak him out, he never talked about it, never came close to doing that creepy “You can call me Daddy, daughter” thing. He just kept on being himself—kind, gentle, wise, and open.

  All the qualities you’d want in a father.

  Anyway, Sunny had her grandmother, Evelyn, and her father figure, K2, and her own package of DNA, and self-reliance, and a love for the ocean, so she never became the neurotic fucked-up SoCal broken family girl who careens around for love and ends up creating another generation of fucked-up SoCal broken family girls.

  She became a great surfer instead.

  A great lover and then a great friend.

  He remembers that night on the beach. Low tide and deep fog, and him and her under the pier, making love with the water washing over them. Her long, sleek neck tasted like salt, her hands were firm on his back, her long, strong legs pushed him deeper into her.

  After, they wrapped up in a blanket together and listened to the sound of the small waves slapping the pylons, and talked about their lives, what they wanted, what they didn’t, and they just talked bullshit and made each other laugh.

  Boone misses her.

  He swims over, gets on his board, sits up, and looks at the beach.

  No less than the water itself, the beach is a place of memories.

  Stand on it, you look out at the ocean and remember certain waves, awesome rides, bad wipeouts, hysterical conversations, great times. Sit off it and look back and you remember lying around talking, you remember volleyball games and cookouts, your memory makes it night instead of day and you remember bonfires, pulling on sweatshirts against the cold, guitars and ukuleles and quiet talks.

  Now he remembers a talk he had with K2.

  They were sitting a little away from the fire, listening to someone strum “Kuhio Bay” on the uke, when K2 said, “The secret of life . . .”

  He paused and then added, “. . . Grasshopper”—because he liked to make fun of his status as a local guru—“is to do the right things, big or small, one after the other after the other.”

  Boone had just returned to the surf and the beach after months of self-imposed isolation following the Rain Sweeny case. He’d quit the force, laid on Sunny’s sofa until she booted him out, then hid in his own place feeling sorry for himself.

  Now he was back and it was only Sunny, his now ex, who knew that he wasn’t fully back. Sunny and, it seemed, K2.

  Who just said that and left it there for Boone to pick up or not.

  But they both knew what he meant:

  You did the right thing.

  Now, will you keep doing it?

  Yeah, K, Boone thinks, watching the beach change from the night of his memory to the harsh sunlight of an August day, but what’s the right thing?

  You know.

  In your gut, you know.

  Shit, K.

  Shit indeed, Grasshopper.

  67

  Boone goes to Starbucks.

  Which doesn’t happen very often.

  It’s not like he’s some sort of antiglobalization, antifranchise freak, it’s just that he gets his coffee at The Sundowner and pretty much leaves it at that. Like, Boone could probably distinguish between Kenya AA and root beer, but that’s about it.

  Anyway, he goes, and endures the skepticism that results from his order of a “medium black coffee.”

  “You want an Americano grande,” the barista asks him.

  “A medium black coffee.”

  “Grande.”

  “Medium,” Boone says, gesturing to the cups. “The size between large and small.”

  “That’s a grande.”

  “There we go.”
/>
  “Your name?” the barista asks.

  “My name?”

  “So we can call you.”

  “For what?”

  “For when your Americano grande is ready.”

  “I thought you’d just pour it.”

  “We have to make it,” the barista says. “Then we’ll call you.”

  “Boone.”

  “Boo?”

  “Just use Daniels.”

  “Thank you, Daniel.”

  He stands there waiting for his coffee. She looks at him kind of funny, then points to her right and says, “It will be over there. They’ll call you.”