The Gentlemen's Hour

109

Cheerful looks up from the desk as Boone comes in.

“You’re in early.”

“Yeah, well,” Boone says, “you gotta grow up sometime.”

“You look like hell.”

“And feel worse,” Boone says. “But I do know about negligence.”

“You’ve

always

known about negligence,” Cheerful says.

“No, I know about capital N negligence,” Boone says. He runs down what he learned in the all-night session with Petra, leaving out the coitus interruptus part. Or, more accurately, he thinks, the Becky interruptus.

“We don’t know,” Cheerful says, “what Schering’s report was going to say, because he didn’t live long enough to produce it. But if he was billing for the insurance company, it probably meant that they hired him to produce a certain result, and that result would be that there was no negligence involved in the chain of events, which would get them off the hook.”

“Maybe,” Boone says, “or that there was clear negligence that they could successfully subrogate.”

“If Schering was killed over this,” Cheerful says, “somebody knew what his report was going to say, and it was dangerous enough that they killed to prevent him from testifying to it.”

But how would anyone know? Boone wondered. Did Schering talk about it? Telegraph it somehow? Write a preliminary report? Or . . .

“Was he putting himself up for auction?” Boone asks.

“His opinion for sale to the highest bidder?”

“Which could mean that the losing bidder might have decided he didn’t want to lose,” Boone says.

“Or,” Cheerful offers, “the highest bidder decided that he didn’t want to pay.”