The Gentlemen's Hour (32 page)

“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.

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.

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 got 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.

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.

“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.

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?”