The Gentlemen's Hour

116

Boone sits in the Deuce outside Blasingame’s office building.

Nicole comes out at 6:05 p.m. and heads straight for happy hour at a bar across the street. Not surprising, given who she works for, Boone thinks. If I worked for Blasingame, which I sort of do, happy hour would be about 10:00 a.m.

Boone waits a few minutes and then goes in.

The bar is like a convention of local receptionists, most of them sitting at one long table, drinking, blowing off a little steam, bitching about their bosses, unwilling to go home yet to the lonely condo or the marriage that’s gotten boring sooner than hoped.

Boone takes a seat at the bar and orders a beer. He pretty much keeps his eye on a baseball game playing on the wall-mounted television as Nicole finishes her first drink, then a second. When she’s in the middle of the third she gets up to use the ladies’ room and walks past him, but if she notices him, she doesn’t let on.

She comes back out, finishes her drink, drops some money with her friends, and leaves the bar. Boone catches up with her in the parking lot as she digs in her purse for her car keys.

“Nicole?”

“Do I know you?”

“My name’s Boone Daniels,” he says. “We met the other day in your office. You shouldn’t be driving right now.”

“I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“I don’t want to see you get a DUI,” he says. “Hurt yourself, somebody else.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“I’d like to be your friend,” he says.

“I bet you would.” She laughs, but it has no humor. It’s a harsh and bitter sound. Which is a real shame, Boone thinks.

“Friends don’t let friends blah-blah-blah,” he says. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

“The MADD pickup is original, anyway,” she says. She drops her keys back in her purse.

“There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

They walk over to Bucky’s and he orders her a tall iced latte, himself an iced green tea with lemonade. She looks at his drink and laughs, “You some sort of health freak?”

“I’m coffee’d out.”

“Burning it at both ends, huh?”

“You could say that.” Two murder cases—one in which I’m a suspect. Yeah, that’s both ends and more, if you could have more than two ends. Which would make a great interwave topic for the Dawn Patrol—then he remembers that he’s not on the Dawn Patrol anymore, and the guys at the Gentlemen’s Hour wouldn’t go for it. “So how is it, working for Bill?”

“You wanna guess?”

“Kind of a pain?”

“More than kind of. He’s a real son of a bitch.” Then she remembers herself and adds quickly, “You’re not, like, a friend or a business partner, are you?”

“Neither.”

“How do you know Bill?”

“I’m working on his kid’s case.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Boone says. “What makes him a son of a bitch?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m interested in what you think,” Boone says.

“Well, that would make you the first,” Nicole says. “Bill, for instance, isn’t very interested in what I

think.

Unless I thought with my boobs.”

“Which you don’t.”

“No.” She looks down at her chest and asks, “Hey, what do you guys think?”

She listens for a second and then says, “Nothin’.”

They both laugh. Then Boone starts to push the river a little. “Hey, when I was in with Bill a few days ago, you buzzed him to say something about an appointment he had?”

But you don’t push the river, just like you don’t get out in front of a wave. It’s usually a bad idea. It sure is this time. She looks at him and says, “You bastard.”

“I—”

“Yeah, you want to be my ‘friend.’ Well, fuck you, friend.”

She slams her cup down and walks out. Boone follows her outside, where she’s steaming back toward her car. “Nicole, come on.”

“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.