The Gentlemen's Hour (19 page)

Boone gets there first and hangs out around a central point. Sure enough, Donna shows up a few minutes later. He watches her go into Vertigo, an expensive spa, then goes back out to the parking lot, finds her car, and parks the Deuce on the other side, where he can still watch, and sits. Now he remembers why he hates any kind of surveillance work—it's boring as hell, especially on an August morning when it's already getting hot. He
rolls the window down on the van, sits back, and tries to grab some sleep.

Yeah, good luck with that.

He's too pissed off to sleep.

What, I'm this subterranean well of rage threatening to go off like a volcano or something? Boone asks himself. I'm this earthquake waiting to happen? Just because I think it's a shitty thing that a racist creep decides to kill someone and won't end up paying the full tab? Yeah, well, he may not in the court system, but in the Red Eddie system he's going to get the max, and there won't be twenty years of appeals and people doing candlelight vigils, either.

So chill, he tells himself. All this happy legalistic horseshit is irrelevant—“moot,” as they might say, a card game trumped by Eddie's willingness to come in and play Fifty-two Pickup. But are you happy about that? Boone asks himself. Are you a vigilante now? Then he realizes that it isn't his own voice he's hearing, it's K2's, asking those gentle questions, doing his Socratic Buddha thing.

Boone doesn't want to hear it right now, so instead he gets mad at Pete all over again. Where the hell does she get off fronting me with Rain Sweeny? And on the topic of what the hell, what the hell was Sunny doing telling her about it? Is this some sort of sistuh-chick thing, ganging up on the guy? Get him to talk about his
feelings
?

Donna's in the spa for a little over an hour and comes out looking even better, if that's possible. Some kind of new makeup look or skin treatment or something. He waits for her to pull out of the lot and then watches the screen to see where she's headed.

Downtown.

She heads south on the 163, gets off on Park Boulevard, and turns left into Balboa Park. Slowly wends her way around the narrow, curving streets and then parks in the lot just south of the Spreckels Amphitheater.

Boone hits the gas to catch up and pulls into a slot just in time to see
her walking north up the Prado, the main street in Balboa Park. Following her up past the Zen garden to the Prado restaurant, where she meets three other women and goes inside.

Ladies who lunch, Boone thinks. He buys a newspaper, finds a bench over near the Botanical Garden across the street, and waits. He's sweaty and hungry, so he breaks the monotony by walking back to a kiosk outside the Prado and buying a pretzel and a bottle of mango juice, then goes back and sits down, just another unemployed slacker killing an afternoon in Balboa Park.

Mary Lou Baker is skippy.

But then again, she always is.

The happy warrior.

Now she looks across the table at Alan Burke and says, “Oh, please, Alan. Save the cat-with-the-canary cryptic smile for some young pup who's impressed with your résumé. I have your client's confession, I have five witnesses, I have the medical examiner's report that Kelly's death was consistent with a severe blow to the head. You have . . . let me think . . . right, that would be nothing.”

Alan maintains the feline smile, if only to get her more jacked up. “Mary Lou,” he says as if addressing a first-year law student in class, “I'll get the ME to testify that the severe blow to the head could have come from striking the curb. I'll get three of your witnesses to admit that they pled to reduced charges in exchange for their testimony. As for the so-called confession, come on, ML, you might as well tear it up right now and put it into the office john, because that's about all it's good for.”

“Detective Sergeant Kodani has a sterling reputation—”

“Not when I'm done with him,” Alan says.

“Nice,” Mary Lou answers. She leans back in her chair, puts her hands behind her head, and says, “We'll drop ‘special circumstances.' ”

“The judge will drop the ‘special' before we go to motions,” Alan says.

“You're going to roll the dice on that?”

“Seven come eleven.”

Mary Lou laughs. “Okay, what do you want?”

“You go manslaughter, we have something to talk about.”

Mary Lou jumps out of the chair, throws her hands up into the air, and says, “What do I look like to you . . .
Santa Claus
?! Christmas comes in
August
now?! Look, we're wasting our time here. Let's just go to trial, let the jury hear the case and hand your client life without parole because you want to come in here and joke around.”

Alan looks wide-eyed and innocent. “We can certainly go in front of a jury, Mary Lou. It would be an honor and a pleasure to try a case with you. And no one is going to blame you for an acquittal. You were handcuffed by a shoddy investigation and a rush to judgment, what could you do? I'm sure Marcia Clark would—”

“I'd go second degree,” Mary Lou says. “My best and final offer.”

“That's fifteen to life.”

“Yeah, I've read the statute,” she says.

“Sentence recommendation?”

She sits back down. “It would have to be somewhere in the midrange, Alan. I won't push for max, but I can't go minimum, I just can't.”

Alan nods. “He serves ten on sixteen?”

“We're in the same ballpark.”

“I'll have to take it to my client,” Alan says.

“Of course.”

Alan stands up and shakes her hand. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mary Lou.”

“Always, Alan.”

The Gentlemen's Hour.

The women finally come out of the restaurant. Kisses on the cheek all around, promises to do this again “sooner,” and then Donna starts walking back toward the parking lot. Boone gives her a good head start, then catches up, passes her, and is in his van waiting when she pulls out of the lot. He gives her a lot of time, watching her progress on the screen as she drives west on Laurel Street through the park, down toward the airport, then gets on the 5 north.

She could be heading home, but she takes the exit for Solana Beach and parks on Cedros Street. Boone is just a couple of minutes behind her as she parks and then walks from store to store on this block of expensive furniture stores. Then she goes into a clothing boutique and spends forty-five minutes. And some money, apparently, because she comes out with a couple of dresses on hangers and goes back to her car.

Now she drives home and pulls into the garage.

Boone sits a block away. Ten minutes later, a car pulls into the driveway. A young man in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, bicycling shorts, and
muscles
gets out and rings the bell. Donna lets him in.

She wouldn't, Boone thinks. She wouldn't have the nerve or the bad taste to do this right in her own home. Doesn't happen. He takes his binoculars, scopes the license plate, and calls Dan.

“That's Tony,” Dan says. “Personal trainer.”

“Uhhh, Dan, I know this would be really cliché, but—”

“Tony also dances in an all-boy nude dance review in Hillcrest,” Dan says, naming San Diego's preeminent gay neighborhood. “Unless he's swapped jerseys—”

“Okay, then.”

Tony comes out an hour later. Donna, red-faced and sweating, waves good-bye and goes back in.

So it's good being Donna Nichols, Boone decides. A little spa treatment, a nice lunch, some high-end shopping, a customized workout, hopefully a quiet dinner at home. And, just as hopefully, Dan is wrong about his wife's infidelity. Just a little premature midlife insecurity on his part. Has probably happened to half the guys on the Gentlemen's Hour.

Yeah, no.

Because it's August, and August blows.

There's no surf, K2 is gone because some stupid kid has to belong to something, women reach into your insides and rip them out, and Donna Nichols comes out of her house dressed to kill.

Boone watches the little pings head toward Del Mar.

His route takes him past Torrey Pines Beach and that beautiful stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that he loves so dearly. It's just summertime dusk, with the sun setting fat and hot over the horizon, and plenty of people are still lazing on the beach.

Boone never drives this stretch without feeling this little tug at his heart. The place is just ineffably beautiful, and he feels lucky to live there. It cheers him up a bit, makes him forget for a moment that he's about to do something that he really doesn't want to do.

North on Torrey Pines Road, then up Camino Del Mar—the town of Del Mar's rechristening of the Pacific Coast Highway—then a left up the steep hill away from the ocean. Donna passes “Go,” collects two hundred dollars, and lands on the square marked 1457 Cuchara Drive.

Her car is parked in the driveway when Boone catches up to the flashing red dots on the GPS screen and slowly drives down the expensive suburban street. You have to have bucks to live in this neighborhood—not necessarily Dan Nichols's kind of bucks, but bucks. Not a lot of on-street parking here, and Boone doesn't want Donna to notice the van, so he's happy to find a spot about halfway down the block and across the street.

He can see Donna through the living room window, sitting on a sofa, having a drink. A guy sits next to her, but Boone doesn't get a good view of him. Boone slouches in his seat and points the listening cone toward the house.

Checking the monitor on the recorder to make sure he's getting sound, he sits back and waits. No point in listening in on the small talk—it will all be on the tape anyway. A few minutes later she gets up. The lights in the living room go off, then a light in what's probably the bedroom comes on.

Boone slips the headset on to make sure he's getting a clear signal.

He is.

It's horrible.

Really horrible.

Boone feels like a total, low-life, bottom-feeding mouth breather as he listens to the sounds of their lovemaking. Donna likes to talk dirty—or at least she thinks that her squeeze likes to hear her talk dirty—so her voice is all over the tape. There's no doubt it's she—and Boone is grateful that Dan isn't hearing this.

He's sorry that he has to hear it, but he does. It's a potential intermediate step to having to share the tape with Dan. He knows how that conversation goes:

“Boone, are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“They couldn't have been doing something else?”

Like knitting, watching
The Bachelor,
building cabinetry . . .

“Dan, I heard them. It's unmistakable.”

So he listens.

The guy is pretty verbal himself, uses her name over and over again, and Boone takes the headset off after there's no doubt about what they're doing. He doesn't want to be any more a part of this than he has to.

He sits back, vividly remembering why he hates matrimonial work.

His cell phone rings. It's Petra.

“Hello. What are you doing?”

“Working.” You know us deceptively laid-back surfer dudes—we're always on the job. Our anger keeps us going.

With a rare tone of uncertainty in her voice, Petra says,
“Listen, I'm really sorry about this morning. I was completely out of line, and it wasn't my place to—”

“Forget about it.”

Awkward silence, then Petra says,
“Well, if you'd like to take a break or something? We could grab a coffee or—”

“I'm kind of on a stakeout.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah. I'm pretty stuck.”

“Well, I could join you,”
Petra says.
“Bring something over to where you are.”

“That sounds really nice,” Boone says. “But Pete, there's a reason it's called
private
investigation work?”

“Oh, of course. Sorry. Stupid of me.”

“No, no. It's just that it's
that
kind of case.”

“Right.”

Quit being a dick, Boone tells himself. She said she was sorry. What more do you want? Stop being such a big relationship baby. So he says, “How about tomorrow night? I think this thing is wrapping up, I'd probably be loose.”

“Well, why don't we just see?”
Petra says.
“I'm not exactly sure what my schedule's going to be. Actually, now that I think about it, I might be committed to get together with some friends. Foodies . . . dinner in the Gaslamp, that sort of thing.”

That is, Boone thinks, not the sort of “thing”
you'd
be interested in.

SEI.

“Sure,” he says. “Why don't we play it by ear?”

“That sounds like a good idea,”
Petra says.
“Well . . . sorry to have bothered you.”

“No, you didn't. It was nice to have a break.”

“Always glad to be of service.”

That went well, Boone thinks. “Foodies.” Foodies should be lined up against a wall, read that day's specials, then machine-gunned.

At about 1:00
A.M
. Boone sets the GPS tracker to alert him if the car moves, finds his portable alarm clock in the back, sets it for six-thirty, tilts the seat back, and goes to sleep.

Donna Nichols comes out at 6:37
A.M.

An overnight bag slung over her shoulder.

A middle-aged, burly white guy with curly, sandy-colored hair and a red goatee, wearing just a silk bathrobe, stands in the doorway and kisses her good-bye. Then he bends over, picks up the newspaper, and goes back inside.

Donna opens her car door, tosses the bag into the front passenger seat, gets in, and backs out of the driveway. Boone waits for a minute, the blips on the screen telling him that she's headed home, then pulls up and checks out the name on the mailbox: “Schering.” Then he pulls ahead and finds a different parking spot.