The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  So Dan hired Boone to “follow” Donna, knowing where it would lead, knowing it would provide a motive for Schering’s murder that would point an inquiry away from Paradise Homes. Dan and Donna were so desperate, so afraid of losing their money—or worse, if Iglesias found out how they’d put him in jeopardy—that they were willing for Dan to become a murder suspect.

  “Boone—”

  “Shut up,” Boone says. “You sent your wife to lay her body out, then you tried a bribe, and when that didn’t work, you had your cartel partners kill him before he could talk.”

  “That’s outrageous!”

  “Yeah, it is,” Boone says. “And then you set me up. Used me to set a false trail so it would look like an act of jealousy. You knew you had an alibi, and you were willing to take the risk because you were that desperate. Otherwise, your partners down in TJ would do to you what they did to Bill Blasingame.”

  “Boone, we can talk about this,” Dan says. “There’s no need for this to go any further, we can settle this like gentlemen—”

  “When I told you I had Nicole’s records, you knew you were in trouble,” Boone says, “so you sent your financial backers to get them back, whatever it took. Blasingame’s life, Petra’s . . . you didn’t care.”

  “You can’t prove this,” Dan says. “I’ll destroy you in court. I’ll tell them you were having the affair with Donna, that you killed Schering out of jealousy. She’ll back me, Boone, you know she will.”

  “Probably,” Boone says.

  Dan smiles a little. “It doesn’t have to go there. How much do you want? Give me a figure, it will be in a numbered account end of business today.”

  Boone takes the tape cassette player out of his pocket and hits “Play.”

  “We came to you, didn’t we? We came to you.”

  “But what if this scandal reaches you? How long before it reaches the rest of us?”

  “It won’t. Please, por favor, please. I beg you. What can I do?”

  “It’s a copy,” Boone says. “John Kodani has the original. He’s waiting up on the boardwalk now.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Daniels.”

  “I met some of your partners,” Boone says. “I’m betting the legal process is the least of your worries. Have a good life, Dan.”

  Boone walks away.

  Passes Johnny Banzai on the way in.

  159

  Later that morning, Petra watches Alan Burke peruse the flow chart that she created on her computer.

  He’s dead silent for a good, long minute, then asks, “You have documentation of all this?”

  “Yes.”

  Alan walks over to the window and looks out at the city. “Do you have any idea how many friends, colleagues, and business associates of mine could be implicated by this?”

  “I would expect quite a few,” she says.

  She is, as usual, polite and proper, but he notices that the deferential tone that she normally adopts is missing. Its absence is simultaneously alarming and promising. “Well, you expect correctly.”

  Petra hears the gentle mockery and wonders what it means. Is its import that Alan will fire her, run for cover, and pull the lid down over his head? That would be the smart thing to do, and Alan has built his career on doing the smart thing.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “That must have been very frightening.”

  “It was.”

  Yeah, he thinks, looking at her, you were so terrified that you found the pistol in your bureau drawer and calmly gunned down a professional hit man. How can I let talent like that walk out my door? “You realize that there are going to be about eight zillion lawsuits coming out of your chart here? And that many of them will be politically difficult for me, and for the firm? Do you know the pressure that’s going to come down on us from on high?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Alan turns away and looks out at the city again. Maybe, he thinks, it needs shaking to the core, maybe it’s time to take it apart and rebuild it, and maybe there are worse things to do in the last phase of your career.

  He turns back to Petra and says, “Okay, start contacting homeowners and signing them up. Do an assets search on Paradise and its related companies with an eye to freezing them, and . . . why aren’t you already moving?”

  “I want to be made partner,” she says.

  “Or maybe I should just fire you,” Alan answers.

  “I’ll require a corner office, of course.”

  He trains his plea-bargaining, settlement-negotiating evil stare on her. She doesn’t blink.

  Alan laughs. “Okay, gunslinger. Partner. Call maintenance and make it thus. But Petra—”

  “Yes?”

  “We’d better win.”

  “Oh, we’ll win,” she says. “Alan, what about Corey Blasingame?”

  “We have a meeting with Mary Lou in thirty,” he says.

  “Did she give any hint?”

  He shakes his head.

  160

  As does Mary Lou Baker.

  At John Kodani.

  She looks up from the stack of documents that he dropped on her desk, shakes her head again, sighs, and says, “You’ve been a busy boy, sergeant. First the arrest of Dan Nichols, then a raid that nets Cruz Iglesias, then this . . . dirty bomb. Anything else you want to drop on me today?”

  “That ought to do it.”

  “Oh, it ought to “do it,” all right.”

  Johnny picked Mary Lou Baker to bring the records to because (a) she’d been busting his chops on the Blasingame case and (b) she was the one prosecutor he knew with the integrity and the stones to take this up and start filing charges.

  “You do know you’re ruining my career, don’t you?” she asks him as she looks at the papers and winces.

  “Or making it,” he says.

  “Same for you, chum,” Mary Lou says. “Romero wanted you strung up by the cojones, but he can’t do that now that you’re the hero of a shoot-out, and Iglesias and all. But did you have to save a defense attorney, John? Bad taste.”

  “She was the only lawyer in the room,” Johnny answers. “Besides, she pulled me out of the soup.”

  “We should recruit her for the good guys team,” Mary Lou says.

  “We could do worse,” Johnny says. “What about Corey Blasingame?”

  “What about him?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Her intercom buzzes. “Alan Burke and partner here for you.”

  “I’ll be right out,” Mary Lou says. Then, to Johnny, “I don’t know yet. Let’s go find out.”

  Johnny follows her into the conference room.

  161

  Boone, Petra, and Alan are already seated at the table.

  Mary Lou and Johnny sit down across from them.

  Alan smiles and opens, “I’m taking it to trial.”

  “You’ll lose,” Mary Lou says.

  “The fuck I will,” Alan answers. “Your first three witnesses are garbage, the next two have recanted, which will make clowns of your investigating officers.”

  Boone glances at Johnny. Face set in stone, but his cheeks turn red.

  Boone looks away.

  “We still have the confession,” Mary Lou says.

  “Yeah, go with that,” Alan says. “I can’t wait to feed it piece by piece to Sergeant Kodani here. How do you like your crow, detective? A little salt and pepper?”

  Johnny doesn’t say anything. Boone can’t look at him, and Petra stares at the table.

  Mary Lou stands up. “If there’s nothing else . . .”

  Johnny stands up too.

  Looks at Boone with disgust.

  “Come on, sit down, Mary Lou,” Alan says. “We don’t want it to end this way.”

  Mary Lou sits back down. “Neither Harrington’s borderline subornation of perjury nor Kodani’s assertive interview of the defendants changes the fact that your client, at least partially motivated
by racial hatred, at least participated in a beating that cost a human life.”

  “Agreed.”

  “He has to do some serious time for that, Alan.”

  “Also agreed,” Alan says. “But he didn’t throw the fatal punch, Mary Lou. That was Bodin. And he wasn’t the ringleader. That was Bodin too.”

  “There are practical reasons why I can’t go after Bodin.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should single Corey out for special punishment,” Alan responds. “There’s an issue of justice here.”

  “There’s an issue of justice for Kelly, too.”

  “I share that view,” Alan says. “My client participated in a disgusting act with a tragic result, and he should face the consequences. I’ll go vol man.

  “With max sentencing—eleven years.”

  “Minimum—three.”

  It’s kabuki theater—they both know the next step in this ritual.

  “Fine,” Mary Lou says. “Medium-range. Six.”

  “Done.”

  They shake hands—Alan and Mary Lou, Alan and Johnny, Petra and Mary Lou, Petra and Johnny, Boone and Mary Lou, not Boone and Johnny.

  They avoid each other.

  162

  Boone drives to La Jolla.

  The Hole.

  Rabbit and Echo are on duty in front of the house. Rabbit pats Boone down while Echo gets on the horn and then comes back and says it’s okay for Boone to go in. Or out.

  Red Eddie’s lying on a floatie in the pool, sipping some fruity drink with an umbrella in it. His ankle bracelet is wrapped in a plastic Baggie. Dahmer’s stretched out on a floating cushion nearby. Eddie cranes his neck up, squints into the sun, and says, “Boonie, an unexpected pleasure! You could have just sent a card.”

  Red Eddie’s pidgin Hawaiian comes in and out like the tide. It depends on his mood and intent. Today, he’s all Wharton Business.

  “Fuck you, Eddie.”

  “Not exactly the Hallmark sentiment I was expecting.” Eddie says, “but pithy, nevertheless.”

  “Stay out of my life.”

  “Even to save it, Boone?” Eddie asks. “It’s not just a past-tense question—the cartel is very upset with you, costing them all this money and trouble. They’re not so happy with me, either, wiping out two of their boys and one of their best interrogators. When things settle for them, they’ll be coming for both of us.”

  “Look out for yourself,” Boone says. “Not me.”

  Eddie paddles to the edge of the pool and sets his drink down. Then he rolls off the floatie into the water, dives down to cool himself, comes back up, and says, “This is the problem with that, Boone: I owe you. My son’s life. My life, too. How can I ever stop repaying that? I can’t. So you will just have to learn to accept my care and largesse—a little more graciously, please.”

  “I just came to tell you that Corey Blasingame didn’t kill—”

  “I already heard,” Eddie says. “Do you think that I’m without resources in the hallways of power? I am informed that it was Trevor Bodin who murdered my calabash cousin. Is that correct?”

  Boone doesn’t answer, but says, “I suppose it’s useless to ask you to refrain from doing what you’re going to do.”

  “Supposition correct.”

  “Even if Kelly wouldn’t want you to do it?”

  “I never respond to ‘even ifs,’” Eddie says. “Aloha, Boone.”

  “Drown.”

  Boone walks away.

  “Nice,” Eddie says. He dives again, comes up, and yells at Rabbit, “What, you think my drink is going to swim over here by itself, da kine?”

  Rabbit hustles for the drink.

  163

  Corey Blasingame goes before the judge that afternoon and pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter.

  The judge accepts the plea and sets sentencing for two months down the road, but as preagreed he’s going to give Corey the medium-range sentence of seventy-two months, with credit for time served.

  In the normal course of things, Corey will be out in fewer than three years.

  The judge gives him a few minutes to say good-bye to people before the sheriffs take him away, but there really isn’t anyone to say good-bye to. Both parents are dead, he has no siblings, and no real friends. Boone notes that none of the surfers from Rockpile or the fighters from Team Domination bothered to show up.

  Banzai is there, almost as if he wants to take responsibility for blowing the murder case.

  A lot of surfers show up, too, as many as the gallery can hold, more outside the courthouse, a bunch of “human rights” groups holding signs reading “Justice for Kelly,” “Stop Hate Now,” and “Racism” with that diagonal line through it. Their disgust at the plea arrangement is palpable, and, inside the courtroom, Boone can feel their eyes burning through the back of his head.

  So it’s just the defense team—Alan, Petra, and Boone—who’s there for Corey. If any of them was expecting gratitude, they’d have been disappointed. Corey just looks at them with his stupid, conflicted “I just got away with something” smile.

  Alan feels that he has to say something. “You’ll probably be out in three years, maybe less. You’ll have your whole life in front of you.”

  Sort of, Boone thinks. Corey probably hasn’t figured out yet that his father’s estate will be tied up in litigation and then sold off to pay lawsuits. So Corey will get out of the hole without a home or a dime in the bank, with a felony sheet, in a city that hates him, and not a friend in the world. Boone doesn’t bother to enlighten him to that, nor to the fact that he saved the kid from a jailhouse shanking or worse.

  Corey looks at Alan, then at Petra, then Boone, and mutters, “I have nothing to say.”

  Me neither, Boone thinks.

  Nothing at all.

  5.

  164

  He doesn’t have anything to say, either, when he walks outside the courthouse through a mob of protesting surfers.

  Some of whom shout his name and couple it with “Traitor” and “Sellout.”

  He just puts a protective arm around Petra and helps her into the waiting car that takes them back to the law office.

  165

  They lie in bed at his place that night.

  After a little while she asks, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? Because you seem sad.”

  He thinks about it. “Yeah, kind of, I am.”

  “Your friends?”

  “That’s part of it,” he says. “But only part. It’s the whole thing, you know? It’s made me question . . . who I am. I never saw the ugliness until it was too late, until it killed someone like Kelly. Maybe I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to see it. I only wanted to see . . . paradise.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “No, I’m not,” Boone says. “If you don’t see something, you don’t have to do anything about it. And I didn’t do a damn thing.”

  “You’re not responsible for the whole world.”

  “Just my piece of it.”

  Petra kisses his neck, then his shoulder and his chest, and slides down his body gently, because he’s bruised and sore and aching, but she does soft, loving things until he cries out. Much later, her head in the crook of his neck, she asks, “Have you had a chance to think about Alan’s offer?”

  Boone smiles. “He told you about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Before or after he made it?”

  “Before,” she says. “Does that matter?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “Ah. I see. I didn’t ask him, Boone. It was his idea.”

  “But he ran it by you first.”

  “I’m sure just to see if I’d be comfortable with the idea of you being around the office,” she says.