The Gentlemen's Hour

35

First of all, Bill keeps him waiting for thirty-seven minutes.

Boone isn’t all that big on watches, but he keeps time as he leafs through magazines in Bill’s lobby because it

says

something, doesn’t it? Your son is in the hole looking at a possible death penalty, and you’re too busy to sit down with someone working for the guy you hired to get him off?

A little disconnect there?

The receptionist is actually embarrassed, keeps looking up from her desk at Boone with this look of like what, are we kidding here? But she’s not about to say anything to nudge Bill along.

Nicole knows what she’s there for. Long, shiny black hair, blouse cut just low enough to show the promise of the big boobs, heavy lip gloss—her presence says that Bill is a player and for the right kind of money you too can enter the fun world of prime real estate/money/sex. So she keeps reading

Vogue

and glancing up every few minutes to see if Boone is going to wait it out.

He is.

For one thing, he’s on the meter, and Bill is ultimately picking up the tab. So if the man wants to waste his own money being a dick, it’s cool with Boone. Usually there isn’t a fine for that.

Second, patience is the single most necessary quality in a surfer and an investigator. Waves are going to come (or not, as the case may be) when they’re going to come (ditto), just like developments in a file. The trick is to still be there when they do, and that requires lots of patient hanging in and/or around.

Third, Boone really wants to see if he can figure out Corey Blasingame via his dad.

When Bill finally comes out of his inner sanctum, he looks at Boone and says, “I called Alan’s office. You check out.”

“Lucky me.”

Bill doesn’t like that. His chin—which is just starting to turn double—comes up a little and he gives Boone one of those “Who do you think you are?” looks, which Boone doesn’t respond to. So Bill says, “Come on in, Lucky You.”

And glares at Nicole as if to say, “Who are you letting bug me like this?”

Nicole looks at her nails.

Not a bad idea, Boone thinks—they’re nice nails.

“Shut the door behind you,” Bill says.

Boone kicks it shut with the back of his foot. Bill notices. “You have an attitude, Daniels.”

“You’re the second person today to tell me that,” Boone says, thinking, okay, maybe the third or fourth. The view from Bill’s office is terrific, showing La Jolla Cove in all its glory, from the kiddie beach where the seals come to rest, all the way north to the curving stretch of La Jolla Shores, the home of Jeff’s Burgers. Boone dismissed the thought of a burger and got down to business. “I’m here to talk about Corey.”

“You have news to tell me?” Bill asks. He sits behind his desk and motions Boone to a chair.

“No. I was hoping you had something to tell

me.

”

“I already talked to Alan and his girl,” Bill says. “I can’t think of her name—the attractive Brit—”

“Petra Hall.”

“That’s it,” Bill says. “So I don’t know what more I can tell you that I didn’t already tell them. Or what the hell difference it makes. Corey hit that man, he killed that man. Now we’re just shopping for the best deal, isn’t that right?”

“The Rockpile Crew—”

“Look,” Bill says, “I didn’t know that even existed, okay, until I read it in the papers. I don’t know, I guess the Bodin kid used to hang around the house a little, and the two brothers—”

“Do you know when—”

Bill just kooks out.

“No,” he says. “I don’t know when, I don’t know why, I don’t know shit. I’m a bad father, okay? Isn’t that what you want to hear me say? Fine, I said it. I’m a bad father. ‘I gave the kid everything he needed except what he needed most—love.’ Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say now? I was too busy with my work, I didn’t give him time or attention, I showered him with material things because I felt guilty, right? Okay? Are we done now? You can drop your attitude?”

“You made all his baseball games,” Boone says.

“Oh, they told you about that,” Bill says. “Maybe I was a little overintense. But Corey needed pushing, he wasn’t exactly a self-starter. The kid lacked motivation, the kid was

lazy

. . . . Maybe I took it too far, so it’s my fault, okay? I yelled at the kid at a baseball game and that made him go out and kill someone. My bad.”

“Okay.”

“You have kids, Daniels?”

Boone shakes his head.

“So you don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

Bill tells him.

He was a single dad. Corey’s mom was killed in a car accident when the kid wasn’t quite two years old. Some drunk careens off the Ardath exit into her lane and Corey gets to grow up without a mother. It wasn’t easy trying to raise a kid and build a business at the same time, and, okay, maybe Bill should have scaled things back, become a nine-to-five wage slave and been home to bake cookies or whatever, but he just wasn’t built that way and he wanted to give Corey every advantage, and that meant making money. A house in La Jolla is expensive, day care is expensive, private schools are expensive. The green fees at Torrey Pines are fairway robbery, but if you want to be making the kind of deals he wanted to be making, you’d better tee off there, and buy a few rounds in the clubhouse to boot.

If you don’t have a kid you don’t know how it is, but you blink and they’re six, blink again and they’re ten, then twelve, then fourteen, and then you have this stranger in the house and he’s way past wanting to hang out with you anymore, he has friends of his own, and then you don’t see him at all, you just see signs of him. Empty Coke cans, a magazine left on the couch, towels on the bathroom floor. You go into the kid’s room and it’s a disaster area—clothes everywhere, food, shoes—anything and everything but the kid himself. You inhabit the same space, but it’s like you’re in different dimensions, you don’t see each other.

So when Corey decided he wanted to play baseball, Bill thought this was a chance to connect. He was thrilled, because Corey had never shown an interest in wanting to do anything but hang out, watch TV, and play video games. The kid had no initiative, no competitive drive, none, so baseball was a good thing, something they might even possibly share. And he got thinking, maybe this is the kid’s route, his shot at being good at something, his way of finding his manhood.

Except it wasn’t.

The kid just gave up on himself, in every area. Dropped out of baseball, let his grades slip to the point where he couldn’t get into a good college. The plan was that Corey would attend a community college for the first two years, do his general ed stuff, get his GPA up, find something he wanted to do . . . but Corey couldn’t even cut it at East Loser Juco, or whatever it was. Bill found out that he was cutting classes to go surfing with Bodin and those other kids. Bill had busted his ass to surround Corey with the elite, the crème de la crème, but Corey sought out the lowest common denominator, three other spoiled, lazy, rich bums who didn’t have a clue.

The Rockpile Crew. Hooded sweatshirts and tattoos, talking like rappers . . . like they didn’t have the best education that money could buy. It was ridiculous is what it was. Fucking ridiculous. They see this shit on MTV and they think they’re what they see.

Bill told him, “You’re not going to go to class, get a job.” Maybe he’d learn what it was like in the minimum-wage world; it might inspire a little ambition. What kind of job did the kid get? Pizza delivery boy, so he could spend his days at the beach or in that dumb-ass gym, pumping iron and working on his six-pack.

Yeah, okay, maybe it wasn’t such a dip into the real world—the kid was taking in eight bucks per plus tips, but going home to a three-mil house with a stocked fridge and a cleaning lady. Maybe Bill should have thrown Corey out, tough love and all that crap, and he thought about it, but, like he said, you blink and . . .

Your kid gets in a scrap. A stupid, drunken case of testosterone gone crazy. He throws a punch that kills someone and wrecks his own life. Because, let’s be honest here, Corey’s life is over. What do you think prison—even a few years of it, if Alan pulls the rabbit out of the hat—is going to do to Corey? You think he can hack that? The kid isn’t tough, he isn’t hard, he’s just going to become . . .

Bill stops there and stares out the window. A lot of window gazing, Boone thinks, when you’re talking about Corey. Then Bill chuckles bitterly and says, “That punch? First time in his life that Corey ever followed through on anything.”

His phone buzzes and Bill hits a button. Over the speaker, Boone hears Nicole say,

“You wanted me to remind you that you have a meeting with Phil at the site?”

“Got it,” Bill says. “I have to go.”

“What gym?” Boone asks.

“Huh?”

“You mentioned a gym,” Boone says. “What gym?”