The Gentlemen's Hour

71

“Yes, I did.”

“I don’t think so,” Boone says.

“I did,” Corey insists. “I told the cops I did.”

It’s the first time Boone sees any animation, any emotion, from him. He says, “Yeah, I know—you killed him because you thought . . . blah-blah. I know what you told the cops, what you wrote. I think it’s all fucking bullshit.”

“That girl saw me do it,” Corey says hotly. “The cabdriver saw me do it.”

“No, they didn’t.”

Corey drops his head again. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

“I think,” Boone says, “you claimed that punch before you knew that it killed Kelly, and now you’re trapped in that lie, and it’s attached to your balls. I think that you want to be a man so badly, you’d fuck up the rest of your life for it.”

“What are you, some kind of shrink?”

“Maybe,” Boone says, “you were just so high you don’t remember, so you swallowed whatever bullshit the cops fed you. Or maybe Trevor Bodin told you that you threw that punch, and you liked what that did for you so much you held on to it, I don’t know. But I’m telling you right now, Corey—knowing a little bit about you, looking at you, there’s no fucking way you killed that kid. You’re not Superman.”

Corey shifts his stare from the table to the floor. He shuffles his feet a little bit, then mumbles. “Too late anyway.”

“What is?”

“I confessed.”

Yeah, it’s a problem, Boone thinks. A real close-out wave, but I’ve paddled through close-outs before. This one is a matter of making my good friend Johnny Banzai eat that confession piece by piece on the stand.

Humiliating him.

Calling into doubt his ethics and credibility.

Shredding his career.

For this punk kid who

wants

to claim the murder.

And who Red Eddie will probably kill anyway.

“What if it isn’t?” Boone asks. “Too late.”

Corey thinks about this for a few seconds, then shakes his head. Then he gets to his feet and calls for the guard to take him out. He turns in the doorway and says to Boone, “I killed him. I killed him, all right?”

All right, Boone thinks.

All right, maybe we should just let it go down that way. Sometimes a wave just breaks bad and you get caught in the bad break and that’s the way it is.

So leave it be.

Make everybody happy.