The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Now he types away, moaning in pleasure from the cupcakes and/or professional interest at what he’s seeing on the screen, which he keeps carefully tilted away from Boone. “Ummmm . . . ohhhhh . . . unnnnnn . . . this is interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?”

  “Nothing yet, asshole,” Monkey answers. “Ummmm . . . ohhhhh . . . unnnnnn . . .” It goes on for a good ten minutes. “Are you looking up my stuff or giving yourself a happy ending?” Boone asks. Shirley, for one, believes that Monkey’s dedication to masturbation comes only behind his obsession with his records and greed for pastry items. (“If you handed him a file, a girlie magazine, and a cheese Danish, he’d have a heart attack.”)

  “If I wanted to jerk off, limp dick,” Monkey answers, “I’d think about that girlfriend of yours. The little Brit with the tight rack.”

  “Nice.” Boone and Pete had run into Monkey on the street down in the Lamp one night. It was startling—and disturbing—to see him out of his natural element. Anyway, Monkey had looked Pete up and down as if she was a stack of cupcakes he couldn’t wait to devour.

  “She’s three-Kleenex material,” Monkey says, the lips hidden in his beard twisting into a lascivious leer.

  “God, Monkey.”

  “Ummmm . . . ohhhhh . . . unnnnnn . . .”

  An interminable hour later, during which Boone has seriously considered suicide several times, Monkey swivels in his weird chair and says, “This is sort of interesting, beach bum.”

  “Okay, can I ask now what’s interesting?”

  “Money.”

  “What about money?”

  “My money, retard,” Monkey snaps.

  Boone takes two bills out of his wallet. Monkey snatches them and shoves them into the front pocket of his stained khaki trousers.

  “What’s interesting is that all your houses were built by one company. It was part of a single development owned by an LLC called Paradise Homes.” He hits a couple of buttons and hands Boone a sheaf of printouts. “Paper for the big dumb Luddite.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, Boone,” Monkey asks. “You still seeing her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the other one?” Monkey asks. “The tall, blond surfer chick?”

  “Sunny and I are pretty much done.”

  “Can I have her number?” Monkey asks.

  “She’s out of the country.”

  “God fucking dammit!” Monkey grabs the Griswald’s bag and digs around for some crumbs, which he shoves into his mouth.

  Boone sighs. “I’m going to regret this, I know, but she has a Web site.”

  Monkey’s eyes light up. “She does?”

  “Sunnydaysurf.com.”

  “Photos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Video?”

  “Enough, Monkey.”

  Monkey rolls his chair to another computer and starts banging on the keys.

  It’s nothing Boone wants to see. Neither Sunny’s site, with photos of her shredding it at Bondi or Indo, or the onanistic use that Monkey is going to make of it. He takes his records, gets back in the elevator, waves a good-bye to Shirley, and goes out to the Deuce.

  Paradise Homes, he thinks.

  Eighteen times a couple of mil each?

  Money to kill for.

  115

  “Hello, lover boy,” Becky says, grinning at Boone.

  “Hello, Becky.”

  “Who did you come to see?” she asks. “Do you have an appointment, or is this a spontaneous booty—”

  “Okay, okay. Is she in?”

  “This is your lucky day.” She buzzes Petra, who comes out to the front desk. He follows her to her office and tells what he’s learned about Paradise Homes, LLC. She says, “So Paradise Homes could be on the hook for all that money?”

  “And the next question is—who are Paradise Homes?” Boone asks. “It’s a limited partnership. Who are the partners?”

  “I can track that down from here,” she says.

  “Aren’t you busy on the Blasingame case?”

  “Nichols is our client, too,” says Petra. “Besides, there’s nothing much to do now except wait for Mary Lou to decide how she wants to go.”

  Turns out Petra’s quite a keyboard jockey. Sits with a cup of tea in one hand, the mouse in another, and rocks. It takes three hours, but she comes up with the answer. She leans back and points to the monitor.

  “To coin a phrase,” she says, “Jesus Christ.”

  It jogs Boone’s memory.

  In Blasingame’s office, when he was interviewing him about Corey.

  “That punch? First time in his life that Corey ever followed through on anything.”

  The phone buzzed and it was the pretty receptionist, Nicole: “You wanted me to remind you that you have a meeting with Phil at the site?”

  No, Boone thinks. It couldn’t be.

  Could it?

  Bill Blasingame is the chief partner in Paradise Homes.

  116

  Boone sits in the Deuce outside Blasingame’s office building.

  Nicole comes out at 6:05 p.m. and heads straight for happy hour at a bar across the street. Not surprising, given who she works for, Boone thinks. If I worked for Blasingame, which I sort of do, happy hour would be about 10:00 a.m.

  Boone waits a few minutes and then goes in.

  The bar is like a convention of local receptionists, most of them sitting at one long table, drinking, blowing off a little steam, bitching about their bosses, unwilling to go home yet to the lonely condo or the marriage that’s gotten boring sooner than hoped.

  Boone takes a seat at the bar and orders a beer. He pretty much keeps his eye on a baseball game playing on the wall-mounted television as Nicole finishes her first drink, then a second. When she’s in the middle of the third she gets up to use the ladies’ room and walks past him, but if she notices him, she doesn’t let on.

  She comes back out, finishes her drink, drops some money with her friends, and leaves the bar. Boone catches up with her in the parking lot as she digs in her purse for her car keys.

  “Nicole?”

  “Do I know you?”

  “My name’s Boone Daniels,” he says. “We met the other day in your office. You shouldn’t be driving right now.”

  “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  “I don’t want to see you get a DUI,” he says. “Hurt yourself, somebody else.”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I’d like to be your friend,” he says.

  “I bet you would.” She laughs, but it has no humor. It’s a harsh and bitter sound. Which is a real shame, Boone thinks.

  “Friends don’t let friends blah-blah-blah,” he says. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “The MADD pickup is original, anyway,” she says. She drops her keys back in her purse.

  “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

  They walk over to Bucky’s and he orders her a tall iced latte, himself an iced green tea with lemonade. She looks at his drink and laughs, “You some sort of health freak?”

  “I’m coffee’d out.”

  “Burning it at both ends, huh?”

  “You could say that.” Two murder cases—one in which I’m a suspect. Yeah, that’s both ends and more, if you could have more than two ends. Which would make a great interwave topic for the Dawn Patrol—then he remembers that he’s not on the Dawn Patrol anymore, and the guys at the Gentlemen’s Hour wouldn’t go for it. “So how is it, working for Bill?”

  “You wanna guess?”

  “Kind of a pain?”

  “More than kind of. He’s a real son of a bitch.” Then she remembers herself and adds quickly, “You’re not, like, a friend or a business partner, are you?”

  “Neither.”

  “How do you know Bill?”

  “I’m working on his kid’s case.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh,” Boone says. “What makes him a son of a bitch?”

&nb
sp; “You don’t know?”

  “I’m interested in what you think,” Boone says.

  “Well, that would make you the first,” Nicole says. “Bill, for instance, isn’t very interested in what I think. Unless I thought with my boobs.”

  “Which you don’t.”

  “No.” She looks down at her chest and asks, “Hey, what do you guys think?”

  She listens for a second and then says, “Nothin’.”

  They both laugh. Then Boone starts to push the river a little. “Hey, when I was in with Bill a few days ago, you buzzed him to say something about an appointment he had?”

  But you don’t push the river, just like you don’t get out in front of a wave. It’s usually a bad idea. It sure is this time. She looks at him and says, “You bastard.”

  “I—”

  “Yeah, you want to be my ‘friend.’ Well, fuck you, friend.”

  She slams her cup down and walks out. Boone follows her outside, where she’s steaming back toward her car. “Nicole, come on.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Boone gets ahead of her. He doesn’t grab her or even touch her, but keeps his hands up as he says, “Was it Phil Schering?”

  One look in her eyes and he knows it was. And that she knows that Schering was murdered.

  “Get out of my way.”

  “Sure.”

  Passersby on the street look at them and smile. Lovers’ spat. She has to wait for the light to turn to cross the street, and Boone stands beside her and says, “Nicole, what was Bill doing with Schering?”

  “Get away from me.”

  The light turns and she crosses the street, Boone right beside her. He stays with her until she gets to her car, and then as she takes her keys from her bag, she looks up at her office and says, “Jesus, if he sees me with you—”

  “Let’s get out of here, then.”

  She hesitates but gives him the keys. He opens the passenger door for her and she slides in. Boone gets behind the wheel and pulls out. Takes a right onto La Jolla Boulevard, heads north, and asks, “What was Bill doing with Schering?”

  “I need this job.”

  “You could get a job in any one of a hundred offices, Nicole.”

  She shakes her head. “He won’t let me leave—won’t give me a reference.”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself.” Boone turns left onto Torrey Pines.

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “He’s blackmailing me to stay.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She looks away from him, out the passenger window. “Three years ago . . . I had a drug problem. I took some money from him to buy coke—”

  “And now you pay him back or he goes to the police,” Boone says.

  Nicole nods.

  She probably hasn’t had a raise in those three years either, Boone thinks. Works overtime without compensation, and who knows what other services she performs? And he won’t call the cops—he knows they won’t give a shit about a three-year-old case—but she doesn’t know that, and if she tries to leave, he’ll hang the drug tag around her neck. In the closed world of La Jolla, that will bar every door for her.

  Nice.

  She’s crying now. In the reflection of the window glass he can see mascara running down her face.

  “Nicole,” he says, “someone killed Schering and an innocent man is getting blamed. If you know anything, you need to tell it.”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll get you started,” he says. “Phil was what you call a geo-whore. Bill used his services. They were going to meet the other day at the La Jolla sinkhole.”

  She nods.

  He plays a hunch.

  “Does Paradise Homes mean anything to you?”

  She keeps looking out the window.

  Then she nods again.

  117

  Monkey sits at his computer at home and looks at Sunny’s Web site.

  It’s a satisfying encounter, but all it does in the end is piss him off.

  Why should guys like Boone Daniels get all the hot women?

  Monkey goes through the checklist of possible answers.

  Looks.

  Okay, nothing he can do about that. Well, he could shave, get a haircut, brush his teeth, eat something other than processed sugar and pastry items, and hit the personal hygiene section at Sav-on every once in a while, but it isn’t going to make him look like Boone, so fuck it.

  Sexy job.

  A brainless PI? Forget it.

  Become a surfer.

  Involves deep, cold, moving water and physical exertion beyond the . . . never mind.

  What else attracts women?

  Money.

  But you don’t have money, he tells himself, looking around his shithole one-bedroom east of the Lamp, a building that will soon go condo, which he can’t afford.

  But you could get money, couldn’t you?

  What was Neanderthal Daniels sniffing after?

  Paradise Homes?

  Monkey wipes the keyboard off, logs into his database, and goes hunting. I may not have looks, a sexy job, a surfboard, or money (yet), but I have access to information, and information is power, and power is money and . . .

  An hour later he has his answer.

  He picks up the phone, waits for someone to answer, and says, “You don’t know me, asshole, but my name is Marvin. You have a problem, and I’m the solution.”

  Thinking . . . How do you turn Monkey into money?

  Just drop the k, baby.

  Invigorated, he goes back to Sunny’s Web site.

  118

  Boone turns on La Jolla Shores Drive, then takes a left on La Playa, then a right, and pulls into the parking lot at La Jolla Shores beach.

  Nicole looks at him funny.

  “You want to take a walk on the beach?” he asks.

  “A walk on the beach?”

  “Great time of day for it.” Well, any time is a great time for it. But early evening on a hot August day, with the sky just starting to soften into a gentle pink and the temperature starting to drop: perfection. And dusk is a great time for confession—give your sins to the setting sun and watch them go over the horizon together. Put your past in the past.

  So why don’t you do it? he asks himself.

  No answer.

  She flips down the sunshade and looks at herself in the mirror. “I’m a mess.”

  “It’s the beach, nobody cares. Come on.”

  “You’re nuts.” But she goes with him.

  They don’t say anything for a long time, just walk and watch the sky change color, and think about what she told him.

  Bill used Schering as a geo-engineer on a lot of development projects over the years. Schering would go out, do a report on the suitability of a site for construction, and Bill would use that report to take to the county for approval. Most of Schering’s reports were legitimate, but sometimes . . .

  Sometimes he would shade the report a little, maybe overlook a weakness, a flaw, a potential danger. And usually the county would accept Schering’s report, but sometimes the inspectors needed a little . . . persuasion to pass on a piece of land.

  “Phil was the bagman,” Boone said.

  “I guess so.”

  It made sense. As a geo-engineer, Schering had relationships with the county engineers. He could go to breakfast or lunch, arrive with an envelope, leave without it. A week or so later, the permits would get issued. They did it a bunch of times.

  “I was no blushing virgin either,” Nicole said. She took the bonuses, the gifts, the vacations, all the little perks that came with flowing money. Schering took the payments to the geo-engineers; she took them to the politicians.

  “What about Paradise Homes?” Boone asked.

  It was Bill’s really big shot, Nicole told him. His chance to go from Triple-A to the major leagues. He got a group of investors together, called the company “Paradise Homes,” and put everything he had into buying the land. But . . . the land was no good. Bill g
ot pretty drunk one night in the office after they’d . . . after she’d given him what he needed to relieve the stress . . . and he told her. She didn’t understand all of it—she wasn’t sure he did, either—but the land sat over some kind of geological problem. Sandy soil over rock, and there was a shifting plate or something underneath.