The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Shredding his career.

  For this punk kid who wants to claim the murder.

  And who Red Eddie will probably kill anyway.

  “What if it isn’t?” Boone asks. “Too late.”

  Corey thinks about this for a few seconds, then shakes his head. Then he gets to his feet and calls for the guard to take him out. He turns in the doorway and says to Boone, “I killed him. I killed him, all right?”

  All right, Boone thinks.

  All right, maybe we should just let it go down that way. Sometimes a wave just breaks bad and you get caught in the bad break and that’s the way it is.

  So leave it be.

  Make everybody happy.

  72

  Okay, not Dan Nichols.

  He catches Boone outside Pacific Surf and they go for a walk along the boardwalk.

  “Tell,” Dan says.

  Boone tells him everything he observed with Donna and Phil Schering. Her driving straight to his house, spending the night, kissing him good-bye in the morning.

  “So, you’re sure about this?”

  “Dan, what do you need?” Boone asks. “She spent the night. No offense, but I don’t think they were baking cookies and watching chick flicks.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “I wanted to be wrong.” Dan says.

  “I know you did. I wish it broke that way.”

  “Fuck,” Dan says. “I mean, you think you’re happy, right? You think she’s happy. You give her everything . . .”

  Boone doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. He could go the whole women are greedy bitches, nothing’s ever enough route, but it’s too easy a line. All he can do is walk with the guy and let him blow off steam.

  Matrimonial sucks.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” Dan says.

  “Don’t do anything in a hurry,” Boone says. “Take your time, think about it. A lot of marriages make it through this kind of thing . . .”

  Great, Boone thinks, now I’m Dr. Phil.

  “I don’t know,” Dan says.

  “You don’t need to know right now,” Boone says. “Chill for a spell, lay out, don’t act from anger.”

  “Don’t act from anger”? I sound like K2.

  Which is another difficult conversation on the horizon.

  73

  “Take the deal,” Bill Blasingame says.

  Boone sits at the table in the main conference room at Burke, Spitz, and Culver. The door is shut, but the picture windows provide a view of the harbor where an aircraft carrier is currently docked, dominating the scene, looking impossibly large and lethal.

  “Don’t we want to ask Corey about it?” Petra asks. “It’s his life.”

  Boone sees Alan shoot her a don’t-speak-unless-spoken-to look but she stares right back at him. Good for you, Pete, Boone thinks.

  “Corey will do what I tell him to do,” Bill says. “I think we’ve seen what happens when Corey takes charge of his own life.”

  Keep your mouth shut, Boone thinks. Sit there, look at the nice harbor, and keep your stupid surf-bum mouth shut. Let this go the way everyone wants it to go.

  “Still,” Alan says, “I’m obligated to consult Corey. He’s the defendant. He has to explicitly agree to any deal.”

  “He’ll agree,” Bill says. “It’s best for him, best for everyone, to get this over with.”

  And off the front pages of the papers, Boone thinks. With real-estate prices already crashing, it’s tough enough, right, Bill? And how many players want to tee off with the murderer’s father? Sweep it under the rug, sweep Corey into the hole.

  “He’ll have to serve at least ten years,” Alan warns, “on the sixteen to twenty.”

  Bill says, “He’ll be twenty-nine when he gets out, still a young man with his whole life in front of him.”

  Right, Boone thinks. A weak unit like Corey in the state pen for ten years? What’s he going to be like when he gets out . . . if he gets out . . . if someone doesn’t pick up Red Eddie’s contract first? And suppose he does make it through. What kind of life is he going to have as a convicted killer?

  But let it slide, Boone thinks. Keep your piehole closed. Bill’s right—it’d be better for everyone. Corey gets his cheap manhood, Johnny gets to keep his rep and his career, you get to go back to the Dawn Patrol.

  Forgotten and forgiven.

  Over.

  Out.

  Alan stands up. “Okay, I guess that’s it,” he says. “I’ll go talk to Corey and we’ll get this done. Given the facts, I really don’t think it’s a bad result.”

  “Turn it down,” Boone says.

  74

  “What?!”

  Bill’s all red in the face.

  “Turn it down,” Boone repeats. “He didn’t do it; he didn’t throw that punch.”

  “How do you know?” Bill asks. “How do you know he didn’t throw it?”

  “I asked him,” Boone says. “I saw it in his eyes.”

  “You saw it in his eyes?!”

  “I think we’ll need a little more than that for a jury, Boone,” Alan says softly, although Boone notices a little flush on his cheeks.

  Boone makes his case: The testimony of Corey’s three Rockpile buddies is suspect from the get-go; Jill Thompson couldn’t demonstrate the distinctive punch that she allegedly saw; George Poptanich’s statement came fresh from Steve Harrington’s EZ Bake Oven. Add to that the fact that Corey is a crappy martial artist without the strength, mass, or coordination to throw that punch. And Boone saw it in his eyes.

  “He told you he did it,” Alan says.

  A confused kid, Boone tells them. Drunk and high. Scared. In the tank with sharks who smell blood and know how to go in for the quick kill. It happens more than you’d think.

  “If Corey didn’t do it,” Alan says, “who did?”

  “My money would be on Trevor Bodin,” Boone says. “He has the size, the athleticism, and the temperament. He’s another one of Mike Boyd’s disciples. If we do a little digging, I’ll bet we’ll find that he’s also mixed up in this white supremacist stuff.”

  “Then why does it get laid on Corey?” Petra asks.

  “Because—no offense, Mr. Blasingame—he’s the weakest unit,” Boone says. He lays out a possible scenario for them. The Rockpile Crew confronted Kelly. Let’s say it was Bodin who threw the lethal punch. They got away in the car. Corey was so blasted that maybe he even passed out. The other three made an agreement to throw Corey under the bus. It sounds just like Bodin, and the Knowles brothers would have been too afraid to have gone against him. When the cops pulled them over, they pointed the finger at Corey.

  So when Harrington interviewed Thompson and Poptanich, he already had Corey down as the killer and communicated that knowledge to the witnesses, fairly forcefully in Georgie Pop’s case. John Kodani had all those statements when he went in to work Corey. He confronted him with them and got him to confess.

  Corey probably doesn’t even know what did or didn’t happen. But he does know that he’s a hero in the idiot racist set. Add to that the probability that the Aryan Brotherhood boys in the lockup tell him to be a stand-up guy. He still thinks his dad’s money’s going to get him off, but the longer he sits in the hold, the harder it is to stick with the ‘I’ve got nothing to say’ mantra. One more tap, Boone tells them, and that wall cracks.

  Corey’s confession is the foundation of Mary Lou’s case. Once it cracks, the whole thing could come sliding down.

  “But can we crack it?” Alan asks. “How good a witness will Kodani be?”

  “Very good,” Boone admits.

  “There you go,” Bill says.

  “You can make him look bad,” says Petra.

  “Don’t stroke my ego. I don’t like it.”

  “Sorry,” Petra says. “But you could also throw reasonable doubt on the case against Corey by casting suspicion onto Bodin.”

  “As much as the j
udge will let me.”

  “You’d get it in,” Petra says.

  “Again—”

  “Sorry, but if either Thompson or Poptanich recants—”

  Bill leans across the table and stares at Boone. “Can you truthfully say that you are one hundred percent certain that my son didn’t kill that man?”

  “No.”

  “Then this is crazy,” Bill says. “We have a good deal, we should take it. I’ll make that clear to Corey, and you, Alan, will do the same. Let’s not forget here who’s paying your bill.”

  “I know who’s paying my bill,” Alan says, “but I will put the options in front of Corey, accurately and equally, and then he can decide. And Bill, if that means you stop paying my bill, fuck you, and I’ll do it pro bono.”

  When Shakespeare wrote that we should kill all the lawyers, Boone thought, he didn’t know Alan Burke.

  75

  “Boone,” Alan says after Bill slams the door behind him, “you’re giving me whiplash. One second you want the kid strung up, then you jump the case from manslaughter to a hate crime, now you’re saying he’s innocent.”

  “I didn’t say he was innocent,” Boone argues. “I said he didn’t throw the punch. If he was part of a gang that assaulted Kelly, he should do time. But he doesn’t deserve the death penalty.”

  “Who said anything about the death penalty?”

  “Red Eddie.”

  “Oh?”

  Boone tells them about Eddie’s threats against Corey.

  Alan takes this in, then says, “I will present young Mr. Blasingame with his options in an evenhanded way. And if he chooses to go to trial, God help the both of you! But you, Petra, can help both him and yourself by lining up the best causal biomechanics expert in the universe, and you, Boone, had better go back to digging like a dog on crank. It wouldn’t hurt if you found Nazi paraphernalia and KKK robes in Mr. Bodin’s closet, for instance.”

  “Right away, Alan.”

  “Got it.”

  “Thank you,” Alan says.

  He leaves the room.

  “He certainly seemed in a hurry,” Petra says.

  “He’s pissed off.”

  “Not Alan,” she says. “Blasingame. He seemed in a terrible hurry to accept a deal that would put his son in prison for ten years.”

  “He doesn’t want to roll the dice on a jury,” Boone says. “I get it.”

  He does and he doesn’t. If I were in his place, Boone thinks, and someone told me that there was a good chance my kid didn’t do it, I’d leap at that hook. Blasingame couldn’t push it away fast or hard enough.

  And on the topic of confessions . . .

  “Look,” Boone says, “about the other day—”

  “I was completely out of line,” Petra says. “I assumed an intimacy that simply doesn’t exist and—”

  “I was an immature, hypersensitive jerk.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “So you’re busy tonight?” Boone asks.

  “I have that thing,” Petra says. “But I should be free and clear by . . . tennish.”

  “Tennish.”

  “Around ten.”

  “No, I knew what you meant,” Boone says. “I just . . . yeah. Ten . . . around tennish. Should I call you?”

  “Or just come over.”

  “To your place,” Boone says.

  “Well, yes,” says Petra. “Not to the restaurant, I meant.”

  “No.”

  To her place, Boone thinks.

  To close the deal?

  76

  “Either there is a deal in place or there is not,” Cruz Iglesias snaps.

  Iglesias is in an ugly mood, cooped up in the modest house in Point Loma, on the run from Ortega’s assassination squads and the American police. He’s bored, edgy, and irritated that his business is not being conducted the way he expects.

  “It just might take a little longer than . . .”

  “No, we’re done.”

  “I really think . . .”

  “I don’t care what you think anymore,” Iglesias says. “We’ve tried your way. We’ll do it my way now.”

  Iglesias snaps the phone shut. He doesn’t want to hear any more excuses or any further pleas for more time. He’s given these gueros ample opportunity to work out their problems, he’s been more than generous. He has tried to act like a gentleman, and expected that they would do the same, but it just hasn’t happened.

  At the end of the day it’s about money. Gentlemen or no gentlemen, these yanqui buffoons are messing with his money, a lot of it, and that is something that he simply cannot tolerate.

  He yells for Santiago to come out of the kitchen. His lieutenant is whipping up his deservedly famous albondigas, and it smells wonderful, but Iglesias has more urgent business than homemade cuisine.

  “You look ridiculous in that apron,” he says when Santiago comes in.

  “This is a new shirt,” Santiago protests. “Three hundred dollars, Fashion Valley. I don’t want to get it . . .”

  “That thing we talked about,” Iglesias says. “It’s time to make it happen.”

  “Los Niños Locos?”

  “No,” Iglesias says. He doesn’t want a gruesome execution to send a message, he just wants to get it done. “Give it to that man—”

  “Jones?”

  “Yes.” After all, they’re paying his daily fee in addition to expenses; they might as well get some work out of him. “Just tell him to keep it simple.”

  The man Jones has a tendency to get flamboyant.

  But he does dress like a gentleman.

  77

  Dan Nichols feels a strange sense of relief.

  It’s odd, the calm that comes over you from just knowing.

  Knowing what’s happened, and knowing what you have to do now.

  78

  Boone tries to work out what to wear.

  To a booty call.

  Well, not exactly a booty call. You can’t really call it a booty call when you’ve been putting it off for more than three months and you have genuine, if confused, feelings for the person. And is it really a booty call? Boone wonders. Or just the continuation of a kiss? Or a conversation about the “relationship” and where it’s going? What do you wear to a conversation about a relationship? Usually body armor, although he hasn’t owned a Kevlar vest since he left the police force.

  Not that Boone has a lot from which to choose. He has a winter wedding and funeral suit and a summer wedding and funeral suit, one white and one blue dress shirt, and a single pair of khaki trousers that Cheerful ordered for him from the Land’s End catalog and have never been off the hanger. Otherwise, his wardrobe, such as it is, consists of five pairs of jeans in various states of disrepair, T-shirts, long-sleeve pullovers from O’Neill, Ripcurl, Hobie, and Pacific Surf, and a staggering collection of boardshorts. Hooded sweaties make up a large part of his wardrobe, but it’s too hot for them anyway. As for footwear, he owns the black dress shoes that go with the wedding and funeral suits, three pairs of Reef sandals, and one pair of black Skechers tennis shoes, because the Skecher store is just a block from his office.

  Boone decides on the white dress shirt and his least faded jeans and then sits there in mental paralysis over the choice of the tennis or dress shoes. Petra might infer from the tennis shoes that he’s taking this too casually—which would piss her off and which he’s certainly not—but the dress shoes might signal her that he expects that they’re going to have sex, which he sort of does, but isn’t really all that sure, and he doesn’t want her to think that he’s taking that for granted, but on the other hand, he does want her to think that . . .

  Sandals are probably out of the question, Boone thinks.

  He’s mulling this over when his cell phone rings.

  It’s Sunny.

  79

  Phil Schering opens the door.

  And says, “Oh, shit.”

  No shit, “Oh, shit.”

  80

  Johnny Banz
ai gets the call.

  Truth be told, he’s almost relieved that it’s not another gang slaying, more fallout from the Baja Cartel reorganization. On the other hand, the murder of a middle-aged white guy in a nice Del Mar neighborhood brings a lot more heat than some dead teenage Mexican gangbangers in Barrio Logan.