The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “Got it.”

  He slides over to his left and waits behind another couple of caffeine communicants who receive their cappuccinos and macchiatos with appropriate reverence, then hears, “Daniel.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You got it.”

  He takes his coffee into the main part of the place and sits down in an overstuffed easy chair. About the only one there without a laptop computer, he feels like an old man going to the newspaper rack and taking a physical copy of the New York Times, printed on something called paper, and goes back to his chair. People look up, slightly annoyed, when he turns the page and makes a rustling noise.

  To Boone’s mild surprise, the New York paper is actually pretty good, even though it lacks a surf report. He knows there are waves on the East Coast because he’s read about it in Surfer, but apparently even the local rag doesn’t think it’s important enough to write about. Anyway, he kind of gets into the reports on world news and books and the time passes pretty quickly until Jill Thompson takes her break.

  That is, she goes out back to smoke.

  Boone slots the paper on a rack apparently put there for that purpose and walks around out back. She’s pretty—slight build, short, spiky blond hair, a little stud in her right nostril. Soft blue eyes, thin lips sucking on a thin brown cigarette.

  “Jill?”

  “Yeah?” She points at her name tag. Like she really doesn’t feel like being hit on by another customer.

  “My name is Boone Daniels. I’m a private investigator.”

  Her lips get thinner. “I already told the police what I saw.”

  “See,” Boone says, “I think the police may have told you what you saw.”

  My gut tells me, he thinks. My gut says that there’s something sketchy about this whole thing. Because it’s too neat, too wrapped up, and neither murder nor life is that clean.

  “What do you mean?” Jill asks.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He sees the slight expression of self-doubt. “I don’t think I should be talking to you.”

  “You seem like a nice person,” Boone says. “Let me tell you what I think happened. You were walking down the street, probably a little less than completely sober yourself. You saw or heard something, then you saw a man on the ground. You tried to help him but it was too late and you felt terrible about that. It’s an awful feeling, someone dying on you. You feel helpless, even guilty that there was nothing you could do.”

  Boone looks in her eyes and sees the hurt still there. “You wait quite a while for the detectives to get there. While you’re waiting, you play the thing over and over again in your mind, wondering what you could have done. Then the detective comes to question you and he suggests what you can do now—you can help put the guy who did it behind bars. You can get justice for the victim.”

  Jill’s eyes tear up.

  “See,” Boone continues, “the police had already picked up a suspect. They already thought they had their guy. So the detective who interviewed you asked his questions in a certain way, didn’t he? ‘Did you see this guy?’ ‘He was sort of thin, wiry, had a shaved head?’ ‘He was wearing a hoodie with the sleeves cut off?’ ‘He walked up and hit the victim?’

  “And by the time you get to the precinct, Jill, you believe you saw Corey Blasingame throw that punch. You really think so, because that’s what you want to think, because a man died in your arms and you couldn’t help him then, but now you could. You could walk in and identify his killer.”

  She’s tough, though, and tries to brave it out. “I saw that piece of shit kill him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He likes her, even though he doesn’t believe her. This girl wants to do the right thing. He says, “Show me.”

  “What?”

  “Show me how Corey hit him.”

  “I don’t have to do that.”

  “Absolutely you don’t,” Boone says.

  She glares at him, takes a drag of the cigarette, and snuffs it out. Then she takes a stance, cocks her right hand, and throws a pretty wicked cross.

  With her feet planted solidly on the ground.

  Boone takes a card out his shirt pocket and offers it to her.

  “Kelly Kuhio’s death was a tragedy,” he says. “A stupid, ugly, unforgivable thing that never should have happened. The only thing worse would be answering it with another stupid tragedy. Kelly would tell you the same thing.”

  She takes the card.

  68

  Boone goes into Pacific Surf, where Hang Twelve is trying to cope with a busload of German tourists who are bustling around the shop, trying on anything that isn’t chained down, asking him a zillion questions about wet suits, fins, and boogie-board hydrodynamics.

  “It doesn’t matter!” Hang is pleading. “There’s no surf anyway! No waves! Get it? No waves! Nein waves! Waves verboten! Can’t ride the Maxi-Pads. Boone. What’s German for ‘flat’?”

  “Vlat,” Boone says, making it up.

  “Vlat,” Hang is saying as Boone goes up the stairs to his office.

  Cheerful looks up from the old-fashioned adding machine, one of those dinosaurs that still has the little loop of paper coming out of it, usually stained with red ink. The old man is actually smiling. Boone has to look twice to make sure it’s not a heart attack or something, but it sure looks like a smile.

  Awkward, however, because Cheerful is way out of practice. Boone’s a little afraid he might pull a face muscle. Maybe he should warm up first, do some cheek stretches or something.

  “This is a big day in your life,” Cheerful says.

  “They’re bringing Baywatch back?” Boone asks.

  Cheerful holds up a slip of adding-machine paper. “Boone Daniels Investigation Services is in the black.”

  “Wow.”

  “I thought you’d be happier,” Cheerful says.

  “The surf sucks,” Boone says, “and I have some bad news for a friend.”

  “The Nichols thing?”

  Boone nods.

  “She cheating on him?”

  “Yup.”

  “But that’s not all that’s bugging you,” Cheerful says.

  “Nope.”

  “Spill.”

  “I think I got it wrong on the Blasingame case.”

  He walks Cheerful through it, then the old man says, “So maybe you were a little blinded by your anger. It happens. But you have to remember that the kid confessed in the station, he confessed to you, and you still have another objective eyewitness.”

  George Poptanich, Boone thinks.

  The cabdriver.

  There’s something about him skitting around the edge of Boone’s consciousness. He yells down to Hang, “Yo! Is the Kriegsmarine still down there?”

  “The what?!”

  “Never mind,” Boone says. “You got a minute to do some work for me?”

  “Dude.”

  “Run a criminal check on a George Poptanich?” He spells the name and hears Hang slapping the keyboard even before he finishes.

  The phone rings. It’s Dan Nichols. “Anything?”

  “Dan, maybe it would be better to talk about this in person,” Boone says.

  Pause. “That’s not good, huh?”

  “No,” Boone says.

  “I’ll be back this afternoon,” Dan says. “We’ll talk.”

  “Sounds good.”

  As good as that conversation can be, which is, like, not.

  Hang comes bounding up the stairs. “Dude.”

  “Dude.”

  “Yabba-dabba-doo!” He hands Boone a printout.

  Georgie has a sheet.

  69

  George Poptanich lives in PB.

  Boone rings the doorbell of his little bungalow. They must have built a thousand of these places on the PB flats back during World War II to house the aircraft workers. They mostly look alike—the living rooms are in the front, the kitchens in back on the left, two bedrooms in back on the o
ther side. They have small front yards and a small rectangular yard in the back.

  George looks like the doorbell woke him up—his gray hair is tousled, he’s wearing a wife-beater, plaid Bermuda shorts, and sandals. He’s in his midfifties—fifty-three, Boone knows from his sheet—heavy, sloped shoulders, and a potbelly.

  He looks real happy to see Boone.

  “Georgie Pop,” Boone says. “Do you remember me?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “About five years ago,” Boone says. “I arrested you.”

  “That don’t exactly make you special,” Georgie says, that tired look in his eyes that comes from a life of being hassled by cops.

  “You going to invite me in,” Boone asks, “or should we do this on the street in front of the neighbors?”

  Georgie lets him in.

  The place is a dump, which is too bad, Boone thinks, because the other people in this neighborhood took pride in keeping their places up. Georgie points to an old sofa, disappears into the kitchen, and comes out with a bottle of beer.

  One bottle of beer.

  He plops down in an easy chair and asks, “Who are you and what do you want? You don’t look like a cop.”

  “I used to be.”

  “We all used to be something.”

  “True that,” Boone says. He identifies himself and tells Poptanich that he’s working on the Corey Blasingame case. “I read your statement.”

  “So?”

  Georgie’s sheet is for B&E. He did two stretches, walked on two other charges. It’s not uncommon for burglars to moonlight as cabdrivers. What they really love are bookings to the airport. Chat with the fare: “So where are you off to?” “Long trip?” “Give me a call when you get back—I’ll pick you up.” Sometimes the fare comes back to a house that has been denuded of stereo equipment, televisions, cash, and jewelry. Or they pick up a drunk from a bar—drunks are notoriously chatty, they’ll tell you anything. Who they live with, where they work, what their hours are, all the great stuff they own . . .

  “So,” Boone says, “what do you want to bet that you don’t have a cab license?”

  Because a two-time felon isn’t going to get one. The idea is to put them in the hole for a while, let them out, and then make sure they can’t make honest livings.

  “I gotta make a living,” Georgie says. “So I moonlight for a buddy. He keeps his cab busy, I make a buck. You wanna bust my balls for that, go ahead.”

  No, Boone thinks, but I’ll bet Steve Harrington did. I’ll bet he took one look at Poptanich, one look at the photo on the taxi license, and knew that he had a live one. A major fine at least, and the buddy loses his card and his living.

  Harrington has a memory like a beefed-up Mac. He probably made Poptanich right away. And maybe . . .

  “Steve Harrington looking at you for a job?”

  “Harrington don’t do B&E.”

  “No shit,” Boone says. “But he talks to the guys who do. Maybe he mentions to them that he found Georgie Pop out on the prowl again so they might want to come around and ask you your whereabouts on certain nights, or take a look at cab bookings, unless—”

  “You fuckin’ guys are all the same,” Georgie says. “Always twisting the arm.”

  “Yeah, boo-hoo, Georgie.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “I dunno, the truth?”

  “Already told it.”

  There’s that look in his eye that Boone’s seen a thousand times from skells. That little glint of feral cunning that they just can’t help from flashing when they think they’ve done something cute.

  Boone laughs. “I get it. I had it backward. You were already in the line of fire and you saw a chance to do yourself some good. So you write down the license number because you know you can trade up on a murder beef.”

  Georgie shrugs.

  “Except Harrington drives a tough bargain,” Boone says, “especially since he knows you’re looking at three-time-loser status. You want a solid from him, you’re going to have to give him more than a license plate. You’re going to have to wrap up Corey Blasingame for him.”

  “I heard the kid confessed anyway.”

  “So what’s the harm, right?”

  Georgie shrugs again. Like, yeah, what’s the harm? A man’s dead, the kid’s going down for it anyway, someone might as well get some good out of it.

  Someone like Georgie Poptanich.

  Boone is faced with the hard truth that most career criminals are sociopaths. It’s no use appealing to their consciences because they don’t have them. You can only appeal to their self-interest.

  Or their fear.

  “Let me tell you what the harm is,” Boone says. He pauses for a little dramatic effect and then says, “Red Eddie.”

  Georgie goes white. “What’s Eddie got to do with it?”

  “Eddie is going to clip the guy who killed his calabash cousin,” Boone says. “And if he finds out that he didn’t because certain people like you deliberately misled him . . . well, that would be the harm, Georgie. And he will find out.”

  “Because you’ll tell him.”

  “Bingo.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch cocksucker!”

  Boone gets up from the chair.

  “Just tell the truth, Georgie, all I’m asking. If you saw what you said you saw, fair enough. But if you didn’t . . . I’d think about that, if I were you.”

  “Harrington told me the kid confessed.”

  “He didn’t lie,” Boone says. “The question is, did you?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Yeah, Boone thinks.

  Fuck me.

  70

  The jailer brings Corey into the room.

  The kid looks thin in the baggy orange jumpsuit, but the fact is that he probably has been losing weight on the awful jail food. He plops down in the chair across from Boone and stares down at the metal table.

  “Hi,” Boone says. “I have a few more questions for you.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  Great, Boone thinks. We’re back to that.

  “First question,” Boone says. “You didn’t throw that punch, did you?”

  Corey looks up.

  71

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I don’t think so,” Boone says.

  “I did,” Corey insists. “I told the cops I did.”

  It’s the first time Boone sees any animation, any emotion, from him. He says, “Yeah, I know—you killed him because you thought . . . blah-blah. I know what you told the cops, what you wrote. I think it’s all fucking bullshit.”

  “That girl saw me do it,” Corey says hotly. “The cabdriver saw me do it.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  Corey drops his head again. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “I think,” Boone says, “you claimed that punch before you knew that it killed Kelly, and now you’re trapped in that lie, and it’s attached to your balls. I think that you want to be a man so badly, you’d fuck up the rest of your life for it.”

  “What are you, some kind of shrink?”

  “Maybe,” Boone says, “you were just so high you don’t remember, so you swallowed whatever bullshit the cops fed you. Or maybe Trevor Bodin told you that you threw that punch, and you liked what that did for you so much you held on to it, I don’t know. But I’m telling you right now, Corey—knowing a little bit about you, looking at you, there’s no fucking way you killed that kid. You’re not Superman.”

  Corey shifts his stare from the table to the floor. He shuffles his feet a little bit, then mumbles. “Too late anyway.”

  “What is?”

  “I confessed.”

  Yeah, it’s a problem, Boone thinks. A real close-out wave, but I’ve paddled through close-outs before. This one is a matter of making my good friend Johnny Banzai eat that confession piece by piece on the stand.

  Humiliating him.

  Calling into doubt his ethics and credibility.

&n
bsp;