The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Still, you can’t bust into the office in what they like to call “broad daylight,” so it will have to wait.

  He occupies his mind with something else.

  Dumb-ass Corey Blasingame.

  Boone wonders if Alan has had the time to see him, and offer him the deal, and whether Corey will take it or not.

  His phone goes off.

  It’s Jill Thompson.

  99

  “Will I be in trouble?” she asks.

  She sits in the passenger seat next to Boone in the Starbucks parking lot and chews on a strand of hair in her mouth. She looks young to Boone. Awfully young.

  “For what?” he asks.

  “Lying to the police.”

  “You didn’t exactly lie,” Boone says. “I think it can be worked out.”

  She chews the hair more vigorously, then breaks it down for him. She didn’t see Corey throw that punch. She heard the punch, she thinks, looked around, and saw the man on the sidewalk. Some guys were getting in their car and driving away. She cradled the injured man in her arms and called 911.

  “I had blood all over me,” she says.

  Later, when the cop was talking to her, he asked her if she saw Corey hit Kelly—the cop told her that was the man’s name—and she said yes. She thought that’s what happened, she said, and she just wanted to help Kelly.

  “But you’ll tell the truth now?” Boone asks. “It might not be necessary, but if it is, you’ll tell the police what you told me just now?”

  She lowers her head, but she nods.

  “Thanks, Jill.”

  She opens the door. “Do you want something? A latte or something? I can get you a free latte if you want.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay.”

  He waits for her to get inside, then calls Pete and arranges for her and Alan to meet him at the jail.

  100

  One question a defense attorney will never ask his or her client:

  “Did you do it?”

  Most clients are going to answer “no,” but if the client answers “yes,” the attorney is in a bad jam. He can’t violate the attorney-client privilege, but, as an officer of the court, he can’t go into a trial and commit or suborn perjury.

  In Alan Burke’s case, though, he already has an answer in the form of Corey Blasingame’s confession. Now he spends long moments pretending to peruse it as Corey shifts around anxiously in his seat.

  Boone sits back and watches as Alan reads out loud, “‘We were outside the bar waiting because we were pissed that they threw us out of there earlier. So I saw the guy coming out of the bar and decided to mess him up. I walked up to him and hit him with a Superman Punch. I saw his lights go out before he hit the ground. Other than that, I have nothing to say.’”

  He looks up at Corey and raises an eyebrow.

  “What?” Corey asks.

  “What, ‘What’?” Alan answers back. “You want to say something about this?”

  “No.”

  “Jill Thompson didn’t really see you throw the punch,” Alan says. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “But the cops told you she did, right?”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “We don’t think the cabdriver saw you throw it, either,” Alan says. “But again, the cops told you that he did?”

  “I guess.”

  Alan nods.

  Corey quickly says, “But Trev and Billy and Dean all saw me hit him.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “They wouldn’t lie.”

  “They wouldn’t?” Alan asks. “They’re about to close a deal that would put them in jail for eighteen months. That bargain is based on them testifying that you threw the punch that killed Kelly.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Okay if they’re telling the truth,” Alan says. “Not so okay if they’re lying.”

  Christ, kid, Boone thinks, he’s holding the door wide open. Walk through it, Corey. Take one single step on your own behalf.

  Not happening.

  Alan Burke didn’t get where he is in life by giving up easily. So now he asks, “Is it possible, Corey, is it just possible that in all the chaos . . . remember, you’d been drinking . . . someone else threw that punch and you just got confused when you talked to the police?”

  Corey looks at the floor, looks at his shoes, the wall, his hands.

  “Is that possible?” Alan asks.

  No answer.

  “Possible or probable?” Alan asks, almost as if he were cross-examining him on the stand, nudging him toward the edge of the cliff.

  Corey won’t go.

  Instead, he straightens up and announces, “I have nothing to say.”

  “White supremacist garbage you picked up from Mike Boyd?” Boone asks. “You’re just going to take the pipe because you finally found something so shitty even you could belong to it?”

  Petra warns, “Boone—”

  Boone ignores her. “You couldn’t deliver a pitch or a pizza, you couldn’t really surf, and you couldn’t really fight, but you could sign on to this filth, and when you finally thought you’d succeeded at something, you killed a ‘nigger,’ you just hold on to it because that’s all you have. A stupid, dirty slogan, ‘I have nothing to say.’”

  “For God’s sake—” Petra says.

  “I don’t think you threw that punch,” Boone says. “I think Trevor did. Except he’s too smart to take the weight, so he lays it on you. I hope you do keep your mouth shut, Corey, I hope they do give you the needle, so maybe you can finally be something. Maybe some other racist piece of shit will tattoo your name on his wrist and—”

  “I don’t know, all right?” Corey yells. “I don’t fucking remember what happened, okay!”

  He slams his fists on the table, then raises them and starts hitting his own head as he repeats, “I don’t fucking know! I don’t fucking know! I don’t—”

  The guard rushes in and grabs him in a bear hug, pinning his arms.

  “I don’t fucking know. . . . I don’t—”

  He breaks down into sobs.

  Alan turns to the guard.

  “Can you get DA Baker down here. Now?”

  101

  Here’s the story that Corey tells, on the record.

  He started surfing with Trevor and the Knowles brothers. Something to do and it was fun, you know. At first, the older guys there didn’t really want them around, but Trevor made their bones by chasing some foreigners away. Then Mike said they should swing by his gym, check it out.

  They were all, like, why not? MMA is cool, and it was, so they started spending most of their time at the gym and at Rockpile.

  So they, like, hung around the break and the gym, and they helped keep it pure at Rockpile, you know. It was their water, their turf, and they tagged themselves the Rockpile Crew, and they were hanging in the gym one night and Mike asked if they’d like to check out some Web sites and they said sure, they thought he was talking about porn or something, but then he logged on and it was all about the white race and how they had to fight to preserve it, and Mike asked what they thought and they said they thought it was cool.

  Mike said it was like the white race was their tribe and they were warriors, and warriors fight to protect their tribe, and were they willing to fight? And they said they were, and Mike said that’s what they were all about, training as warriors to protect their tribe. He told them about Alex Curtis going to prison and what Alex said and the number 5 and Corey went out after a few beers one night and got that ink and Mike said he was becoming a warrior . . .

  And a warrior fights for his people.

  “San Diego used to be white,” Mike said, “now it’s mud. They’re crowding us out. Pretty soon there won’t be room for white guys anymore on our street, at our beaches, in our own waves.”

  And Trev said, “Somebody should do something about it.”

  That night, that night, they were cruising that night, club-hoppi
ng, looking for trouble. If you wanted to be a fighter, okay, you had to fight, and you just couldn’t get enough fights in the gym, not unless you were one of the stars, which Corey wasn’t. But a lot of MMA guys had a lot of street fights, beach fights . . . man, they just kicked asses wherever they could find asses to kick.

  So they went out.

  Corey, Trevor, Billy, and Dean.

  The Rockpile Crew.

  They hit a bunch of bars but couldn’t get anything going. Then they rolled up on The Sundowner. By this time they’d had a lot of beers, and downed some speed, so they were torqued, ready to go, and that’s when that lifeguard guy came and threw them out.

  Like we didn’t belong, Corey said. There was all kinds of mud in there—tacos and slants and even niggers—and they wouldn’t let white men stay?

  That was bullshit.

  So they went riding around, high and stoked, adrenaline pumping, and Trev just wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go, just kept at it, like: “We have to take care of this, we can’t let them disrespect us like that.”

  “It ain’t right.”

  So they went back and waited outside, across the street, in the alley. They got themselves worked up, started duking with each other, really throwing down, and that’s when Trev spotted the nigger coming out of The Sundowner.

  And Trev was all, like, “Let’s go show him, let’s mess him up a little, fuck with him, sweep the mud off our street.” So they went up to the guy, and they didn’t know it was K2—he had on this hooded poncho and it was dark and there was like blood in the back of Corey’s eyes, sloshing around inside his head, boiling hot . . . all he could see was that red. And then there was yelling. The next thing he knew he was sitting in the back of the car, and they were all stoked and shit, and Trev was slapping him on the back, yelling, “You got him good, man. You took him out! Did you guys see our boy Corey hit him with that Superman?” And then Billy and Dean were saying, like, “Yeah, we saw you, Corey. We saw you do him.”

  And Corey was like . . .

  Proud.

  Like, proud that he’d defended his turf, you know? Stood up and fought like a warrior for his tribe.

  They drove around some more, and then the cops found them. Put them in cuffs and took them down to the station, and that’s when Corey confessed.

  “I hit him with a Superman Punch.”

  102

  “Come on, Mary Lou!” Alan says in her office.

  “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t see how this really changes things. Except that your client has now confessed to a hate crime.”

  Alan tries to blow right through that little problem. “He hasn’t confessed to anything. This wipes out his prior so-called confession.”

  “Not necessarily,” she says. “It’s a new story he tells now that he’s closer to the reality of prison, but the original confession has immediacy.”

  “I’ll put him on the stand,” Alan says, “and the jury will believe him.”

  Yes, they will, she tells herself. Because even you think you believe him. Face it, you like Trevor Bodin for the killing now. It’s like Alan’s living in her head because he says, “Reduce Corey to manslaughter, rip up Bodin’s deal on the basis that he lied to you, and raise the charge on him.”

  Right, she can hear the defense attorney cross-examine her already. “You originally charged Corey Blasingame with the killing, didn’t you? And you charged him because you were confident that he did it. Just as you say you’re confident now that my client did it?” She looks at Alan and says, “You know I can’t do that.”

  “I know you can’t hold this charge on a kid you know is not guilty,” Alan says softly. “Isn’t in you, Mary Lou.”

  “Don’t push it,” she snaps. “Your kid isn’t exactly a martyred innocent, is he? He went out looking for a fight, he found one, he went over in a gang, and they beat a man to death because the man wasn’t white. He has to do some time for that, Alan.”

  “I agree,” Alan says. “But not life without parole.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Hours,” Alan says. “Not days.”

  When he leaves, Mary Lou stands in the window and looks out at downtown San Diego, a city that will not react well to a reduction of the charges against Corey Blasingame. She’s already heard the refrains in reference to the other three: “Rich white kids get slapped on the wrist.” “If it had been Mexicans or Samoans who did this, they’d be under the jail.” Maybe they’re right, she thinks. And maybe Alan’s right when he implies that we’re making a scapegoat of Corey Blasingame.

  But explaining the reduction to the powers will be brutal. She has to tell them something, give them some reason, and the only one she can give is that the confession was bogus, the witness statements hinky, and the investigation botched. Rush to judgment and all that. It’s Harrington and Kodani who’ll take the fall.

  She couldn’t give a shit about Harrington, a loose cannon who has it coming, but John Kodani is a good detective, smart, ethical, hardworking. He had a suspect who confessed and he believed the confession, that’s all. Now it could cost him an otherwise brilliant career.

  It’s a shame.

  Then again, it’s all a shame, isn’t it?

  Her intercom buzzes.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a George Poptanich to see you?”

  103

  Dave the Love God climbs down from the tower.

  Another uneventful day of watching tourists not drown. And tourists not drowning, as has been amply explained to him by the Chamber of Commerce, is a very good thing. Earlier in the year, a swimmer had been killed by a great white, which is a very bad thing—obviously for the swimmer but also for business, and also explained to the lifeguards by the Chamber.

  Short of getting Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss and heading out in a boat, Dave’s not sure what he’s supposed to do about shark attacks, although he did actually foil a great white one time by kicking it in the nose. The fact is that the ocean does have sharks—and riptides and big waves—and people are going to be attacked, just as they’re going to drown; but statistically the most dangerous activity by far that people do in connection with the beach is to drive to it.

  Anyway, he decides to grab a beer at The Sundowner. Johnny B might be there on his way to the night shift, High Tide is coming off his day, and Boone . . .

  Who knows where Boone might be?

  Boone is on some kind of strange, weird trip. Maybe it’s Sunny being gone, or his infatuation with the British betty—who is definitely, unquestionably, hot—or maybe it’s just that he’s tired of surfbumdom, but the Boone he knows is 404. It’s funny because Boone, more than any of them, could always find the through line of a wave, and would hold that line like he was laser-guided. Now he’s flapping around all over the water like some newbie kook, headed for a bad wipeout.

  Sure enough, Johnny Banzai and Tide are holding the bar in place, although JB is nursing a Diet Coke.

  “S’news?” Dave asks.

  “Nuttin’,” Tide says.

  “S’up, Johnny?”

  “S’up, Dave?”

  There’s nothin’ up in August, man—not the surf, not their spirits. Only thing that’s up is the temp.

  And the tension, because Johnny B looks worked.

  “Boone is helping Alan Burke fuck me,” Johnny explains.

  “What?” Dave asks. Boone fucking over a friend? Not poss.

  “It’s true,” Tide says. He tells Dave about Boone joining the Blasingame defense team.

  “Backpaddle,” Dave says. “You’re telling me that Boone is trying to rescue the little bastard who killed K2? No freaking way.”

  Johnny shrugs, like, it’s true, go figure.

  “Whoa,” Dave says. What the crud is happening to us? he wonders. What’s happening to the Dawn Patrol?

  It’s shrinking for one thing, he thinks.

  Sunny is gone.

  And face it, Boone may be on his way out, i
f he’s not adiós already.

  What’s that old cliché about (shudder) marriages—“We just drifted apart?” Are we just drifting apart, Dave wonders, or is it more than that?

  Too bummed for a beer, Dave just heads home.