The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “What are you smoking?”

  “Anyway, I’m not convinced that Corey did it.”

  “Johnny’s pretty convinced,” Dave says. “He took the confession. You’re going to jam him up, B?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then don’t.” Because you don’t fuck a friend. They both know this. You just don’t do it. “How many times has JB stood up for you?”

  “A lot.”

  “So? That doesn’t mean anything?”

  “He’s wrong on this one,” Boone says.

  “And you’re right,” Dave says.

  “I think I am.”

  Dave shakes his head. “Dude, I don’t even know if I know you anymore. Maybe you should just climb into a suit and tie and become one of them.”

  “One of them?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Boone says, starting to get mad. “And yeah, maybe I should. Maybe I don’t want to be a surf bum all my life.”

  Dave nods. Looks way out toward the water and then back again at Boone. “You go ahead, bro. Us bums will try to get by without you.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sure you did,” Dave says. “At least stand by your words, leave me with some respect for you. It’s been a ride, B. Late.”

  He walks away.

  Late, Boone thinks.

  112

  Winners and losers.

  Start with the potential losers, Boone tells himself as he walks over to The Sundowner. Potential losers are more likely to kill out of desperation than potential winners are for profit. People tend to dread their losses more than they hope for their wins.

  So list the losers.

  Hefley Insurance.

  Could be a big loser. What if Schering wasn’t giving them the answer they wanted, or was holding them up for more money? But, as Cheerful says, insurance companies don’t actually, physically kill people . . . do they?

  Keep them on the list, but unlikely.

  He walks into The Sundowner, where Not Sunny is caught off-guard by his uncharacteristically early appearance. She’s leaning against the bar, catching a standing nap, when the door opening wakes her. She sees Boone and signals the cook to get his usual going on the grill. Then she walks over and pours him a cup of coffee.

  “Thank you,” Boone says.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Uhhhh, what’s your name?”

  “Not Sunny.”

  “No, I mean, what’s your real name?” Boone asks. “Not the one we glossed you with.”

  The question takes her by surprise. Having been called Not Sunny during working hours for several months now, she actually has to think about it for a second. “Jennifer.”

  “Thank you, Jennifer.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Your usual?”

  “Yeah. No,” Boone says. “It might be time to change things up a little, Not—Jennifer. I’ll have . . . the, uhhhh . . . blueberry pancakes.”

  “Blueberry pancakes?” Not Sunny Jennifer asks.

  “Are the blueberries fresh?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take them anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  She goes to piss off the cook, who already has the eggs working.

  Boone goes back to contemplating losers.

  If Schering kept faith with Hefley’s, Boone thinks, the next possible losers would be the homeowners. So you’d have to have a homeowner with a lot of bucks to lose having an uninsured house fall into the rabbit hole, or a homeowners’ association.

  Now, homeowners’ associations in SoCal are known for their brutality and utter ruthlessness in enforcing their codes, but Boone can’t quite envision one commissioning a contract murder, although he’d loved to have sat in on that meeting.

  “All in favor of snuffing Phil Schering, please indicate by saying ‘aye.’ Motion carried. There’s coffee and cookies . . .”

  He doesn’t even know if there is a homeowners’ association for the neighborhood, so decides that his first task after consuming the pancakes is to go down to the County Building and start researching ownership records. Come up with a list of the homeowners and try to see if any of them are likely candidates.

  Not Sunny Jennifer brings him the pancakes.

  And a bill.

  “Will there be anything else?” she asks as if she worked hard to memorize the line.

  Boone’s a little startled. As an unofficial bouncer and keeper of the peace at The Sundowner, he hasn’t received a bill for breakfast in years. Not Sunny Jennifer sees the surprised look on his face. Anxiety overwhelms her, and she gives it straight up. “Chuck said to next time you came in. Charge you. Like, you’re not family.”

  “Relax. It’s cool.”

  “I feel weird.”

  “Don’t,” Boone says. He gets up, digs out his wallet, and leaves enough cash to pay the bill, plus a generous tip.

  “Just tell Chuck for me that someone else can keep things cool around here from now on. I don’t go where I’m not invited.”

  Not Sunny Jennifer frowns—it’s a lot to remember.

  “Just tell him adiós,” Boone says.

  “‘Adiós,’” she repeats.

  Adiós.

  113

  Searching real-estate records at the County Administration Building is a sure antidote to any genre-inspired desire to be a private investigator.

  The (sad) truth is that a real PI does a hell of a lot more paper-chasing than sitting around the office slugging bourbon while some long-legged blonde drapes herself across his lap and begs for sexual penance for her sins and a tenor saxophone wails in the background. Most of the work is a slog through records, and Boone hasn’t heard a Coltrane riff yet.

  The County Administration Building is an enormous edifice that takes up three blocks on the east side of Harbor Drive, smack in the middle of the tourist district. Across the street, visitors come to see the old sailboats that are now maritime museums, or the decommissioned aircraft carrier, or go on harbor cruises, or grub down at Anthony’s Fish Grotto. Farther down Harbor Drive are the enormous docks where the big cruise ships come, spilling tourists out to hit the bars and clubs a few blocks away in the Gaslamp District, or to take a pedicab ride, or just stroll the long promenade that curves around the harbor, where hundreds of small, private sailboats moor.

  But the CAB is a monument of mundane bureaucracy set in the middle of all the good times, like a stern librarian with a finger to her lips.

  It’s a busy place, with people coming in to file records, take exams for various professional licenses, get married, all manner of happy crap. Boone has to take the Deuce for several orbits around the huge parking lot before he finds a spot.

  So now he sits at a computer station and sifts through real-estate transfer notices, tax records, and building permits, and cross-references them against street maps, utility plots, and newspaper accounts of the sinkhole episode. It takes him well into the afternoon, but by then he has a list of the eighteen owners whose homes were destroyed.

  Then he runs the list of names through his own mental file-card tray of local bad guys. The truth is that very few people will kill for money, even lots of it. Very few people will kill at all, even in the “heat of passion,” and fewer still will kill in the fabled “cold blood.”

  But those who will, do, and if you’re looking at San Diego—the busiest corridor for illegal substances trafficking since Satan slipped Eve the apple—you have to think about drug money and the expensive houses it can buy in a town like La Jolla. The big drug barons—most of them from Tijuana—are, of course, multimillionaires, and multimillionaires invest their multimillions in the most exclusive neighborhoods. Now, you’re talking about people who can and have killed over a nickel, so offing someone to protect a $3 million or $4 million investment is a no-brainer.

  But Boone’s mental search comes up with no matches. None of the owners listed is a drug lord, mob guy, or otherwise sketchy, although
Boone is aware that some of the homes might have ghost owners behind the recorded names. But that would be a dead-end street anyway, so he asks himself about more potential losers in the game of negligence hot potato.

  If Hefley’s were to subrogate, he reasons, who would it sue? And if a homeowner were left with a destroyed home and couldn’t collect from the insurance company, who would he sue?

  Either the builder or the county.

  The builder for some kind of negligence, or the county for issuing a permit for that builder to construct a house on unsafe ground.

  You can cross off the county—it has no budget line for contract killings—so you’re left with the builders.

  Boone leaves the CAB and drives up to Mira Mesa.

  114

  The San Diego County Building Permits office sits on a very nondescript street in a nondescript suburban neighborhood in North County, and is generally known not by its name but by its location.

  “Ruffin Road.”

  Ruffin Road is limbo. Building plans have been held up for years by the bureaucrats at Ruffin Road, or just been lost, misplaced, or misfiled, never to be seen again. Contractors will explain interminable delays by simply saying, “I’ve been at Ruffin Road,” or “It’s held up at Ruffin Road,” and those excuses will be accepted.

  San Diegans have opined that Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Holy Grail are all to be found at Ruffin Road, if only you could get a clerk to search, and the more waggish insist that Osama bin Laden is not hiding in Tora Bora or Waziristan, but is safely filed as “vin Laden, Osama” somewhere in the bowels of Ruffin Road.

  Ruffin Road makes the DMV look like the drive-through window at In-N-Out Burger. Anyone who has ever built a new home, remodeled an old one, or rebuilt after a fire or landslide pronounces “Ruffin Road” in the same hushed tone that was once used for the Bridge of Sighs, the Tower of London, the Inquisition.

  “I have to go to Ruffin Road” is a statement met with sympathy not unmixed with relief that it’s the other guy, not you.

  Burly roofing contractors—hard-drinking brawlers who work the highest buildings with a scornful laugh—stand trembling before the counter at Ruffin Road, metaphorical hat in hand, waiting hopefully, plaintively, for an inspector to give their plans, literally, the stamp of approval. Desperate homeowners on their fifth or sixth try to get that addition approved stand in tortured suspense as one of the bureaucratic Torquemadas pores over the latest version of their proposed plans.

  It is to this dire place that Boone repairs to get the names of the contractors who built the homes that now sit at the bottom of the La Jolla sinkhole. He goes up to the inaptly named “Reception Counter,” where a middle-aged woman, her hair dyed a color not found in nature, her glasses actually hanging from her neck on a beaded chain, sits on guard.

  “Shirley.”

  “Oh, God, what the cat dragged in?”

  “How’s your daughter, Shirley?”

  “Out again,” Shirley says. “Third time.”

  “Is a charm,” Boone answers.

  “Your lips, God’s ears,” Shirley says. “Anyway, thanks for what you did.”

  Elise had a meth problem and missed a court date, to boot. Shirley called Boone to try to find her before the bail bondsman or police could take her into jail. Boone did and took her to the hospital so at least she could detox in a bed instead of a cell, and the judge ended up suspending sentence and allowing her to go directly into rehab.

  “No worries. Is Monkey in?”

  “Where else would he be?”

  Nowhere, Boone thinks, it was a rhetorical question. Monkey Monroe ran the records room of Ruffin Road and rarely came out. The records were his personal treasure that he hoarded and protected like Gollum. Some people thought that Monkey was part vampire because he never came out in the light of day.

  “You think he’d see me?”

  Shirley shrugs. “He’s in one of his moods.”

  “Just ask?”

  She gets on the phone. “Marvin? Boone Daniels would like to see you. . . . I don’t know what for, he just wants to see you. . . . Act like an actual human being for a change, would you, Marvin?” She holds the receiver into her bosom and says, “He wants to know if you brought anything.”

  “Cupcakes.”

  “Cupcakes, Marvin.” She listens for a second, then says to Boone, “He wants to know if they’re the good kind or some cheap supermarket shit.”

  “The good stuff,” Boone says. “I went to Griswald’s.”

  He holds up the bag to show her.

  “He went to Griswald’s, Marvin. . . . Okay. Okay.” She smiles at Boone. “You can go down.”

  “You want a cupcake?”

  “You brought extra?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you, Boone.”

  He takes a cupcake—chocolate frosting—out of the bag and sets it on her desk. “Tell Elise I said hi.”

  “Why don’t you date her?”

  “No.”

  He gets in the elevator and goes down to the records room.

  As usual, it’s colder than a loan shark’s blood—Monkey keeps the AC cranked up because it’s better for the computers. And noisy—the air conditioners are blasting, the bank of computers humming. Monkey crouches on one of those weird, posture-improving chairs that you half-kneel on, rolls toward Boone, and reaches for the Griswald’s bag.

  “Vanilla. Did you get me vanilla?”

  “Is the pope German?”

  One look at Monkey, you know why he’s called Monkey. His arms are unnaturally long, especially next to his short-waisted, small body, and he’s quite possibly the most hirsute human being in the world: tendrils of curly hair popping up over his shirt collar and around the back, thick hair on his arms, and hairy knuckles. The scraggly hair on his head is starting to thin and show a few unkempt strands of silver, but his eyebrows are thick, and his beard, which comes up high on his cheekbones, almost to his deep-set simian eye sockets shaded by bottle-thick glasses, is black.

  He grabs at the bag like a monkey reaching through the bars and snatching popcorn from a kid at the zoo, and his hands dig greedily into it. Within seconds his mouth is full of cupcake, his lips crusted with white frosting and crumbs.

  Another reason he’s called Monkey is that he’s a true computer monkey. What Monkey’s hairy little fingers can’t do on a keyboard can’t be done. They can make his bank of computers cough up data about any part of any building ever constructed (legally, anyway) in San Diego County.

  But the real reason he’s called Monkey stems from an unfortunate incident when the director of Ruffin Road urgently needed a copy of an old building permit, couldn’t remember Marvin’s name, and asked Shirley to summon “That guy in the basement, you know, the records monkey.” Monkey has tried many times to get his nickname shortened to “Monk,” which he thinks is more distinguished and more apt, given his role as a scribe of sorts, but it ain’t gonna happen.

  “What do you want, Boone?” Monkey asks. Gratitude or expressions of simple courtesy aren’t in Monkey’s nature—he sees the world pretty much as a constant quid pro quo, so why say “Thank you” for the quo when the request for the quid is doubtless on the way?

  Boone hands him the list of properties. “I need to know who built these houses.”

  “You do. I don’t.”

  “All right, Monkey, how much?”

  “There are eighteen properties listed here,” Monkey says. “Twenty each.”

  “Dollars?”

  “No, cat turds, you moron. Yes, dollars.”

  “I’ll give you ten.”

  Monkey digs in the bag for the next cupcake and shoves it into his mouth. “Round it up to two hundred, you cheap piece of surf trash.”

  “Yeah, all right, but I need it now.”

  “You don’t ask for a lot, do you,” Monkey says, rolling back to the computer. “Bring a couple cupcakes, think you own me.”

  “Griswald’s.”
r />   “Whatever.” He starts banging keys.

  “This is on the down low, Monkey,” Boone says.

  “Who am I going to tell, idiot?”

  True, Boone thinks. Monkey rarely leaves the record room and has no known friends. No one can stand him. Actually, Boone has developed almost a fondness for Monkey, although he doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the sheer persistence of his unpleasantness, his refusal to let his standards down, or raise them, whichever.