The Gentlemen's Hour

89

Nichols admits everything.

Except the murder.

Johnny Banzai sits and listens as Dan Nichols, closely monitored by Alan Burke, admits that his wife was having an affair with Phil Schering, admits that he hired Boone Daniels to uncover the infidelity, even admits that he shared part of the responsibility for his wife’s adultery.

“I work so many hours,” he says.

Johnny isn’t buying it. Hell, he and his wife each have full-time jobs, and kids, and they don’t play around on each other. You make time for what’s important to you. It’s the simplest way of learning what really matters to a person—just look at how he spends his time.

Besides, Johnny doesn’t give a stale tortilla

why

Donna Nichols cheated, only

that

Donna Nichols cheated, and he wouldn’t care about that either except that the guy she cheated with turned up dead. He wouldn’t really care about that either, except he turned up dead on Johnny’s shift.

So now Johnny has two high-profile cases—the Kelly Kuhio murder, with all its tourist and surf culture implications, and now a billionaire socialite adultery/murder that will have the media coming in its collective shorts and the chief buzzing around his head like an annoying but powerful fly.

And his ex-buddy Boone has managed to turn up in both cases.

“Where were you last night?” Johnny asks.

Burke nods to his client, allowing him to answer.

“Home with my wife,” Nichols says, with a trace of self-righteousness that annoys Johnny. “We talked. About everything. Our thoughts, our feelings . . .”

“That’s fine,” Burke says.

Beautiful, Johnny thinks. The cuckolded husband’s alibi is his cheating wife. You have to love the symmetry. “And did you confront her with your knowledge of her infidelity?”

“I wouldn’t call it exactly a confrontation,” Nichols says. “I just told her that I knew she was having an affair and asked her—”

“That’s enough,” says Burke.

“What did you ask her?” Johnny says.

Burke shoots his client an I-told-you-so look.

“How could she do that to me?” Nichols says.

“And what did she say?”

“Don’t answer that,” Burke snaps. “Irrelevant.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, counselor,” Johnny says.

“But it could end up in one, couldn’t it?” Burke asks. “Her response to him regarding her motivation is immaterial. What you want to know—”

“Don’t tell me what I want to know.”

“What you

should

want to know—”

“Ditto,” Johnny says, realizing that he’s falling into Burke’s game. The lawyer is distracting him, breaking up his rhythm, turning his interrogation of the witness into a skirmish between cop and lawyer. He leans across the table to focus on Nichols. “How long did the conversation last?”

“I don’t know,” Nichols says. “I didn’t look at my watch. Until we went to bed. Eleven o’clock?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“He told you he didn’t know, Detective,” Burke says, “and I’m not going to allow him to speculate.”

Of course you’re not, Johnny thinks, because it’s a critical issue.

The 911 call from the neighbor had come in at eight-seventeen; the black-and-white responding to a “shot fired” called at eight twenty-four. The responding officers kicked in the door and found Schering, in a bathrobe, already dead on his living-room floor.

Johnny got the call at eight thirty-one; logged on to the scene at eight forty-seven. He interviewed the neighbor and had Boone’s van at the scene, but the neighbor couldn’t recall if it left before or after he heard the shot, just that this van had been “lurking” around the neighborhood recently.

The ME hasn’t established time of death yet, and it would be nice to pin Nichols down to a time after which his wife’s testimony won’t help him. Personally, Johnny thinks Nichols shot his wife’s lover

before

this heart-to-heart talk ever happened, if it happened at all, but it’s possible that he slipped out afterward, and wants to leave that door open.

Burke isn’t going to let him narrow it down, so Johnny has to press the offensive a little harder. “Is this possible, Mr. Nichols? Let me run this scenario for you, and you tell me if it’s possible. Daniels calls you, tells you he has definitive proof that your wife is sleeping with Schering. You go over to confront your wife’s lover. I get it, I totally get how you’d be angry . . . hell, furious . . . the guy has been doing your wife—”

“That’s enough, Detective,” Burke says.

“And you get into an argument. I mean, who wouldn’t? I know I would, Harrington here certainly would.”

Harrington nods sympathetically. “Hell, yes.”

“Any man who calls himself a man would, and you argue and things get out of hand and maybe you pull the gun. Just to threaten him, scare him, I don’t know, mess with his head. Maybe he reaches for it and it goes off.”

“Don’t respond to this fiction,” Burke says.

Which pisses Johnny off, because he’s using the “fiction” to lure Nichols into putting himself at the scene. Once he does that, Johnny will use the gunshot forensics to jerk the “self-defense” rug out from under him.

He keeps at it.

“You’re freaked out,” Johnny says. “You never meant for anything like this to happen. You panic and drive away. You drive straight home and when you get there you’re so shook up you can’t hide it from your wife. She asks you what’s going on and you tell her. Just like you said, you tell her you know about the affair. You tell her about the terrible thing that happened when you went to Schering’s house. She says it’s going to be all right, you’ll both say you were home the whole evening, working on saving your marriage. Is that possible, Dan? Is it just possible it happened that way?”

He looks closely into Nichols’s eyes to see if he can discern the flicker of recognition. “No,” Nichols says. “It didn’t happen that way.”

“How

did

it happen?” Johnny asks. Softly. Empathetically. Like a therapist instead of a cop.

“I don’t know,” Nichols says. “I wasn’t there. I was home with my wife.”

Burke looks at Johnny and smiles.