The Gentlemen's Hour

98

So the Phil Schering as playboy theory looks shot, Boone thinks as he hands his ticket to the valet and waits for the kid to bring the Deuce around. We’re probably not looking for a jealous husband, but who else would have a capital grudge against a soils engineer?

The valet hops down from the Deuce and looks surprised when Boone hands him three dollar bills. Based on the vehicle, he was probably hoping for a quarter. But the kid looks enthused.

“Are you Boone Daniels?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude, you’re a legend.”

Great, Boone thinks as he gets behind the wheel. I’m a legend. Legends are either dead or old. He pulls out onto the PCH and moves his mind from the topic of being old back to the topic of a motive for killing Phil Schering.

Motives are like colors—there are really very few basic ones, but they have a thousand subtle shades.

Your primary motive colors are crazy, sex, and money.

Boone doesn’t linger on the first. Crazy is crazy, so there’s no line of logic you can pursue. It’s too random. Of course, there are shades of crazy: You have your basic, organic, Chuck Manson or Mark Chapman crazy. There’s also the “temporary insanity” crazy, aka “rage”—a tsunami of anger that washes away normal restraint or inhibition; a person “sees red” and just goes off. A subcategory of rage is drug or alcohol-induced rage—the booze, pills, meth, ice, steroids, whatever, make a person commit violence they otherwise would never do.

None of these applies to what facts Boone knows about the Schering murder.

Boone goes on to the next major motive, sex. Murder over sex is closely related to rage, as it’s usually provoked by jealousy. So if sex was the motive, Dan Nichols is the number-one suspect, as it doesn’t appear as if there were other jealous husbands or boyfriends. Yeah, Boone thinks, but for the moment anyway you’re looking for someone other than Dan, so move on.

On to money.

People will kill for the jack, sad but true. But what kind of money hassle could Schering have been involved in? A business deal gone south? A bad debt? Did he have a gambling jones he couldn’t keep up with? Even if he did, pop culture notwithstanding, bookies and loan sharks rarely kill their deadbeats—it’s a guarantee of never getting paid.

No, you usually kill someone so you can

get

your money.

But what kind of a payday could Schering offer? Wasn’t anything he had in the house, because Johnny never brought robbery up as a possibility. So if Schering didn’t have something, maybe he was in the way of something.

Whose payday could Schering have been cockblocking?

Boone drives to the dead man’s office.

No crime tape up. The cops haven’t sealed the scene, and why should they? Schering wasn’t killed here, plus they have a suspect they like and they’re fixated on him.

Good, Boone thinks.

For the time being, better.

Still, you can’t bust into the office in what they like to call “broad daylight,” so it will have to wait.

He occupies his mind with something else.

Dumb-ass Corey Blasingame.

Boone wonders if Alan has had the time to see him, and offer him the deal, and whether Corey will take it or not.

His phone goes off.

It’s Jill Thompson.