The Gentlemen's Hour (33 page)

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

“Not yet,” Boone says. “You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

He walks her over to Jeff's Burgers.

They've spruced the tiny place up a little bit. Its two long narrow rooms have a fresh coat of white paint and murals of the Coronado Bridge with little sailboats gliding underneath. Nicole stands at the counter and looks up at the menu printed on the board above.

“What's good?” she asks.

“At Jeff's Burgers?”

“Well, yes.”

“A Jeff's Burger,” he says.

She asks for a Jeff's with everything, fries, and a chocolate shake. Boone doubles the order, then they go sit in a booth. The food is ready in a couple of minutes, and she digs into it like it might be her last meal.

“S'good,” she says.

“Stick with me,” Boone answers. “I know all the good places.”

She keeps wolfing it down. Doesn't say a word until she's finished the whole thing and then says to him, “Okay.”

“Okay, you're done?”

“Okay, I trust you.”

“Because of a
burger
?”

She nods and tells him that's pretty much it. If he was a slime bucket on Bill's payroll he would have taken her to the nearby Marine Room, bought her an expensive meal, and plied her with wine. Only a genuine surf bum chump would be dumb enough to take her to Jeff's Burgers.

Well, Boone thinks, you work with what you got.

“He has a girlfriend,” Monkey says with a gasp. “British.”

“Name?” Jones asks.

“Pete.”

“Come again?”

“Petra, I think.”

“Surname?”

Monkey shakes his head.

“Oh, dear.”

“Hall,” Monkey says quickly.

“Good,” Jones says. He turns to the Crazy Boys. “Wrap this up and take him with you. We might have more questions to ask him later.”

They take Monkey down from the pipe.

Nicole drives Boone to a storage locker in Solana Beach and tells him to wait in the car. Comes out five minutes later with a box and puts it on his lap, then drives him back to her office parking lot and drops him off at the Deuce.

“That's quite some ride you have there,” she says. “The PI business booming?”

“Like real estate,” he says. “What are you going to do now?”

“Go home, I guess.”

“You have a friend or a relative you could stay with?” Boone asks. “Someone Bill doesn't know about?”

She has her grandmother up in Escondido, and Boone suggests she stay there for a few days. She gets it, tells him she will, and they exchange cell phone numbers.

“You did the right thing,” Boone says.

“The right thing,” she says, “won't pay my mortgage.”

Too true, Boone thinks.

They have the papers spread out all over Petra's living-room floor as they create piles of related records and documents that link one to another.

“Do you know what we have here?” Petra asks him.

Boone knows. Freaking dynamite, enough to blow the lid off the city and shake it to its foundations. Bribes to city, county, and state officials for approvals for building projects on dangerous ground; cover-ups of shoddy construction practices; real-estate development partnerships that connect
to half the big businesspeople in the county. And this is from just one developer, Bill Blasingame. He can't be the only pitcher working the corners of the plate; there must be dozens. Where would those connections lead?

Yeah, Boone knows what they have there.

“This might be more wave than we want,” he says.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

Boone explains that sometimes you get into a wave that's too big for you to handle. It isn't a matter of pride or ego or even your skill level, it's just physics—the wave is too tall, heavy, and fast for your board and your body, and it will crush you.

He has that sense here. The individuals and businesses listed in Nicole's records are connected, and the connections are connected, and it's not just linear—each line reaches out in multiple directions to other lines. It's what that old yuppie concept of “networking” is all about, and in a city as small and tight as San Diego, the network is close and dense.

Where in that network do you bring this information? he asks her. You bring it to the DA's office—where is the district attorney in that matrix? Bring it to the cops—same thing. A judge—ditto, ditto.

“Certainly we can take this to Alan,” Petra says. “I mean, we have to take it to Alan, it's potentially exculpatory evidence for a client. For you, as well.”

She sees the look on his face and says, “Good lord, Boone, you don't suspect Alan?”

He doesn't suspect that Burke is involved in any sketchy real-estate deal, but Alan is definitely woven into the San Diego power network. And Petra doesn't know the leverage that can be worked on a guy like Alan—all of a sudden the wiring in his office building is out of code, a slam-dunk motion in court goes the other way, a guy he defended five years ago claims that Alan suborned him to perjury . . .