The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Schering tried to tell him, to warn him, but Bill begged him . . . begged him . . . to write a different report. For the county, for the investors.

  “Hold on,” Boone said. “The investors didn’t know about the land problem?”

  No, because Bill knew that if they knew, they’d never put their money into it. Schering argued that it was a time bomb, but Bill argued what was time when you’re talking about earth movement? The earth is always moving. The problem could be hundreds or even thousands of years away. And they were talking millions and millions of dollars. . . .

  Schering wrote a clean report. Did what he had to do to get it through the county. A lot of envelopes went out . . . vacation homes were sold under market value. Ski places in Big Bear, weekend desert spots out in Borrego. . . .

  The site was approved.

  “How do you know all of this?” Boone said. “I know Bill talked a little when he was ‘comfortable,’ but—”

  “I dug in the files,” she says. “I kept copies of Schering’s original reports and compared them to the new ones he wrote.”

  “Why?”

  Bill was blackmailing her; she thought she’d turn it around and blackmail him. Win her freedom, maybe take a little of all that money with her on the way out.

  “But you didn’t,” Boone said.

  “Well, I haven’t,” she said.

  Maybe she just got lazy, or complacent. Maybe it was all too difficult, too hard to understand. Maybe she just didn’t have the confidence to think she could actually pull it off. And maybe . . . maybe her feelings for Bill were . . . complicated.

  Then the whole thing with Corey happened and she didn’t have the heart to “pile on,” and Bill hadn’t demanded anything of her lately, and she just kind of forgot about it. Then . . .

  Paradise Homes collapsed.

  Bill freaked out, just freaked out. He was on the phone to Phil all the time. He was calling lawyers, insurance people . . . it was horrible. Bill was a mess—first the thing with his kid, then this. He was sure he was going to lose everything. Especially if Phil got weak-kneed and couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  Or if he sold himself to the higher bidder, Boone thought. And Blasingame was right—he could lose everything. If a criminal conspiracy were even alleged, a plaintiff could walk right through his corporation and sue him personally. Take his bank account, his investments, his real property . . . his house, his cars, his clothes.

  And no wonder he’s in a hurry to get his son’s case out of the newspapers. The longer the spotlight stays on the Blasingame name, the more digging people do, the more likely someone is to connect him to Paradise Homes and the landslide disaster. He had all this shit going on. . . .

  Then Schering was killed and Nicole got scared.

  Bill said apparently it was some kind of jealousy thing—Phil was banging another guy’s wife, was the rumor—and that it had nothing to do with them, nothing to do with him, but there was no point in taking chances. He told her to dump appointment books, eighty-six phone records, bills, anything that could connect him to Schering.

  “But you didn’t,” Boone said.

  She didn’t.

  She didn’t keep them all, but she kept the really tasty ones.

  119

  “It’s beautiful,” she says, watching the sun go down. “Just beautiful. I’m usually still at work . . .”

  “It has a way of putting things in perspective,” Boone says. He lets a few seconds go by before he says, “I need those records, Nicole.”

  “They’re my safety net.”

  “Until he knows you have them. Then they’re a danger.” Rule of thumb: If you know where the bodies are buried, sooner or later you’re going to be one of them.

  “You think he killed Schering?”

  “You don’t?” Boone asks. “You of all people know what he’s capable of. Nicole, he might already be thinking about what he told you when he was drunk.”

  “I know.”

  “If I have the records, I can help you,” Boone says. “I’ll take you to a cop I know—”

  “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You won’t,” Boone assures her. “Once your story is on the record, it’s done. You’re safe. There’s no point in anyone doing you harm. But the records prove your story. Without them . . .”

  “. . . I’m just a bimbo secretary with a nose-candy problem.”

  He doesn’t say anything. There’s no response to that—she’s dead on.

  Nicole scans the view, the long, curving stretch of coastline from La Jolla Point to the south, all the way down past Scripps Pier toward Oceanside. Some of the most valuable real estate on earth, some of it built on land that never should have been built on. She says, “So I’m supposed to trust you.”

  He gets it, totally. Why should she trust him? Or some cop she doesn’t know? Why should she trust any public official? She’s seen them bribed and bought—helped to do it herself.

  A new idea, a fresh fear, hits her. “How do I know Bill didn’t send you? You work for him. How do I know he didn’t send you to find out what I know, get what I have?”

  She’s on the edge of panic. Boone has seen it before, not just on cases but with inexperienced swimmers in the deep water. They feel overwhelmed, outmatched, exhausted—then they see the next wave coming and it’s too much, too frightening. They panic, and unless someone is there to pull them out, they drown.

  “You don’t,” Boone says. “All I can tell you is, at the end of the day, you have to trust someone.”

  Because the ocean is too big to cross alone.

  120

  Bill Blasingame gets on the horn to Nicole.

  Calls her at home.

  N.A.

  Calls her on her cell.

  N.A.—the bitch has it turned off.

  He’s freaking. First Phil Schering gets shot, then Bill gets the phone call. He remembers what was said, pretty much word for word: “This can’t go any farther. You can’t let this go any farther. Do you understand?”

  Bill understands. He knows the people he’s dealing with.

  But I can contain it, he thought after the phone call. With Schering dead, the only other person who could really blow this open is Nicole. And she knows what side her bread is buttered on.

  Except what if the stupid twat doesn’t? What if she panics? Or gets greedy?

  And now she won’t answer her phone. She’s looking at caller ID and blowing me off. Where the fuck is she? he wonders. Okay, where is she usually at this time of the day? Out getting shit-faced with her buddies.

  He leaves the building, crosses the street, and goes into the bar.

  Sure enough, the nightly bitch session of the Aggrieved Secretaries’ Club is in full swing. They’re not all that happy to see him when he approaches the table. Fuck them, he thinks, and asks, “Have you seen Nicole?”

  “She’s off the clock,” one of them answers.

  Mouthy bitch.

  “I know,” Bill says. “But have you seen her?”

  The mouthy one giggles. “Have you looked between the sheets? There was this really cute guy giving her the eye and he followed her out of here, and I think girlfriend was open to a hookup.”

  Bill goes back to his office building, looks in the parking lot, and doesn’t see Nicole’s car. Calls her cell again, then her home, but she doesn’t answer. Great, he thinks, I’m dying here, and the bitch is out getting laid.

  121

  Monkey hangs by his arms from chains thrown over the steam pipe.

  The man gives him another gentle nudge in the chest, and Monkey swings back and forth. It’s hot down in the building’s boiler room, but the man wears a suit, button-down shirt, and tie, and doesn’t sweat at all.

  Monkey does. He’s dripping all over the floor, and the man is careful not to let it get on his leather shoes as he steps close, shakes his head, and says, “Marvin, Marvin, Marvin. They call you ‘Monkey,’ don’t they?”

  “How do
you know that?”

  Jones smiles and shakes his head. “Monkey, I need you to talk to me.”

  His voice is soft. Cultured and gentle, with the slightest hint of an accent.

  “I did everything you wanted,” Monkey says.

  True enough. After he arranged the meeting they came to his place—this gentleman and some Mexican gangbangers—put a gun to his head, sat him down, and had him erase all the records pertaining to Paradise Homes from the databank. Then they took him down to the basement, hung him from the steam pipe, and asked him how he came to be so interested.

  “You haven’t told me what I want to know.”

  “I did,” Monkey says. “I told you all about what Blasingame did. I told you all about Daniels.”

  “But you haven’t told me with whom Mr. Daniels is working,” Jones says. “You seemed to indicate that he is a rather stupid man, unlike yourself. He could not have put this all together the way you did.”

  “He works alone.”

  “Oh, dear, Monkey.” Jones shakes his head again, then reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls out a pair of surgical gloves, and carefully fits them on. “You are very clever with records, Monkey, and very thorough. You made one tragic error, though, in placing your faith entirely in them. You didn’t realize there are people whose names never appear in records.”

  Then he reaches inside his jacket pocket and removes a thin, metallic rod, flicks his wrist, and the telescopic baton slides out to its full, one-foot length. “I believe it’s more or less a commonplace for a person in my situation to say something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Bad luck for you, Monkey. You see, I do want to hurt you.”

  He does.

  122

  Mary Lou Baker goes off on Johnny B.

  “Did your boy Steve run the witnesses through the microwave?” she asks Johnny after summoning him to her office.

  “What—”

  “One of my star witnesses, George Poptanich, otherwise known as ‘Georgie Pop,’ came to see me,” Mary Lou says. “He says Harrington twisted his arm to identify Corey.”

  “What, he had an attack of conscience?”

  “He had an attack of terror-induced constipation!” Mary Lou yells. “It now seems he’s scared shitless about having maybe fingered the wrong guy. Yeah, he’s going to make a great witness, John—a two-time loser who goes back on his story.”

  “You still have Jill Thompson,” Johnny says.

  “Burke doesn’t think so,” Mary Lou says. “Burke says she’ll recant. Who interviewed her?”

  You or Harrington?”

  “Steve did.”

  “He gets fucking cute with me,” Mary Lou says, “he’ll take you down with him.”

  Johnny nods. About all he can do. Harrington has a reputation for taking the straightest line between two points.

  “What about you?” Mary Lou asks. “Did you tune Corey up on the confession?”

  It pisses Johnny off. Mary Lou is no fresh-faced kid, but an experienced, many-laps-around-the-pool prosecutor who knows how things work. Knows that all confessions are orchestrated to some extent or another.

  “I played nice with him,” Johnny says. “Look at the tape—there are no gaps.”

  “I didn’t ask if you hit him. I asked if you tricked him . . . led him in any way.”

  Of course I tricked him, Johnny thinks. I grabbed him by the nose and I led him. That’s what we do, Mary Lou. That’s what you pay us for. He didn’t say that, though. What he said was, “The confession will stand up, ML.”

  “He’s going back on it.”

  “Fuck him. Too late.”

  “What about your witness statements?”

  “What about them?” Just to buy a little time and pay back some of the annoyance.

  “Are they finessed?”

  I should hope so, Johnny thought. Finesse is a job requirement. But he says, “Did I show Trevor, Billy, and Dean a crystal ball of what their futures would look like if they didn’t come to Jesus? Sure. Do they have ample motive for throwing Corey under the bus to salvation? You bet. But this describes, what, eighty-five percent of our witness statements in a good year.”

  Mary Lou stares at him and taps her pencil on the desk. It’s amazingly annoying. Then she says, “I’m going to cut a deal.”

  “Oh, come on, Mary Lou!”

  “Don’t give me the hurt, indignant shit!” she yells back. She calms down and says, “It’s for your sake, too, Johnny. Alan threatened to nail you to the cross on the stand.”

  “I’m not afraid of Alan Burke.”

  “Put your dick back in your pants,” Mary Lou said. “I’m only asking, does he know something I should know?”

  “If he does, I don’t know what it would be,” Johnny said.

  “You took Blasingame straight to the house, right?” Mary Lou asked.

  Johnny heard the implied question. They both knew Steve Harrington’s reputation for tuning suspects up before they sing on tape. But this wasn’t some Mexican from Barrio Logan or a black kid from Golden Hill; this was a rich white boy from La Jolla, and Steve knew better than to mess with that potential lawsuit.

  “It was all by the book, Mary Lou.”

  She stares at him again and decides he’s telling the truth. Kodani’s reputation is straight-up. “Alan has Daniels working for him on this, doesn’t he?”

  “What I hear.”

  “Daniels was a good cop,” Mary Lou said. “What happened to him wasn’t right.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “You’re surfing buddies or something, aren’t you?”

  “Not so much anymore,” Johnny says.

  Since Boone went to the Dark Side.

  “So I don’t have to worry,” Mary Lou asked, “about leaks coming out of the detective division?”

  “I resent that, Mary Lou.”

  “Just checking, John,” she said. “Don’t get your back up. There are eyes on you, you know. The powers wouldn’t mind an Asian chief of detectives. The diversity thing. I just don’t want to see you fuck yourself up out of a misguided sense of friendship.”

  Johnny knew that a public spectacle, like Burke going Deliverance on him in court, would definitely fuck him up. Add to that the potential of a high-profile murder case involving Dan and Donna Nichols . . . the rest of Johnny’s career is on the line over the next few weeks.

  Make those cases, he thinks as he drives over toward The Sundowner and looks for a place to park, and I’m on my way to chief of division. And, admit it, that’s what I want. Do a bad public wipeout on those cases, and the old glass ceiling is going to come down on my yellow skin and slanted eyes like a bad, angry wave, and I will be Sergeant Kodani for the rest of my derailed career.

  So he isn’t all that thrilled when his cellie rings and he sees it’s Boone.

  123

  “Fuck you,” Johnny says.

  Boone’s not too surprised—he knows that Johnny’s royally pissed about the Blasingame case and probably shouldn’t even be talking to him outside the office about the Schering murder. “Johnny, I—”

  “Save it, friend,” Johnny says. “I hear you put me square into Burke’s sights for the Blasingame trial. It’s going to be about me now? Just for the record, Boone, friend, in case you guys are planning to turn me into Mark Furman, I’ve never used the word ‘cracker’ or ‘whitey’ in my life. Late.”

  “Don’t,” Boone says. “I have a break in the Schering murder.”

  “Bring it to the house.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Johnny, this will make the case for you.”

  “On Nichols?”

  “No.”

  “’Bye, Boone.”

  The line goes dead. He walks back over to Nicole.

  “Is your cop friend going to meet us?” she asks him.