The Gentlemen's Hour

64

Boone watches the little pings head toward Del Mar.

His route takes him past Torrey Pines Beach and that beautiful stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that he loves so dearly. It’s just summertime dusk, with the sun setting fat and hot over the horizon, and plenty of people are still lazing on the beach.

Boone never drives this stretch without feeling this little tug at his heart. The place is just ineffably beautiful, and he feels lucky to live there. It cheers him up a bit, makes him forget for a moment that he’s about to do something that he really doesn’t want to do.

North on Torrey Pines Road, then up Camino Del Mar—the town of Del Mar’s rechristening of the Pacific Coast Highway—then a left up the steep hill away from the ocean. Donna passes “Go,” collects two hundred dollars, and lands on the square marked 1457 Cuchara Drive.

Her car is parked in the driveway when Boone catches up to the flashing red dots on the GPS screen and slowly drives down the expensive suburban street. You have to have bucks to live in this neighborhood—not necessarily Dan Nichols’s kind of bucks, but bucks. Not a lot of on-street parking here, and Boone doesn’t want Donna to notice the van, so he’s happy to find a spot about halfway down the block and across the street.

He can see Donna through the living room window, sitting on a sofa, having a drink. A guy sits next to her, but Boone doesn’t get a good view of him. Boone slouches in his seat and points the listening cone toward the house.

Checking the monitor on the recorder to make sure he’s getting sound, he sits back and waits. No point in listening in on the small talk—it will all be on the tape anyway. A few minutes later she gets up. The lights in the living room go off, then a light in what’s probably the bedroom comes on.

Boone slips the headset on to make sure he’s getting a clear signal.

He is.

It’s horrible.

Really horrible.

Boone feels like a total, low-life, bottom-feeding mouth breather as he listens to the sounds of their lovemaking. Donna likes to talk dirty—or at least she thinks that her squeeze likes to hear her talk dirty—so her voice is all over the tape. There’s no doubt it’s she—and Boone is grateful that Dan isn’t hearing this.

He’s sorry that he has to hear it, but he does. It’s a potential intermediate step to having to share the tape with Dan. He knows how that conversation goes:

“Boone, are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“They couldn’t have been doing something else?”

Like knitting, watching

The Bachelor,

building cabinetry . . .

“Dan, I heard them. It’s unmistakable.”

So he listens.

The guy is pretty verbal himself, uses her name over and over again, and Boone takes the headset off after there’s no doubt about what they’re doing. He doesn’t want to be any more a part of this than he has to.

He sits back, vividly remembering why he hates matrimonial work.

His cell phone rings. It’s Petra.

“Hello. What are you doing?”

“Working.” You know us deceptively laid-back surfer dudes—we’re always on the job. Our anger keeps us going.

With a rare tone of uncertainty in her voice, Petra says,

“Listen, I’m really sorry about this morning. I was completely out of line, and it wasn’t my place to—”

“Forget about it.”

Awkward silence, then Petra says,

“Well, if you’d like to take a break or something? We could grab a coffee or—”

“I’m kind of on a stakeout.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah. I’m pretty stuck.”

“Well, I could join you,”

Petra says.

“Bring something over to where you are.”

“That sounds really nice,” Boone says. “But Pete, there’s a reason it’s called

private

investigation work?”

“Oh, of course. Sorry. Stupid of me.”

“No, no. It’s just that it’s

that

kind of case.”

“Right.”

Quit being a dick, Boone tells himself. She said she was sorry. What more do you want? Stop being such a big relationship baby. So he says, “How about tomorrow night? I think this thing is wrapping up, I’d probably be loose.”

“Well, why don’t we just see?”

Petra says.

“I’m not exactly sure what my schedule’s going to be. Actually, now that I think about it, I might be committed to get together with some friends. Foodies . . . dinner in the Gaslamp, that sort of thing.”

That is, Boone thinks, not the sort of “thing”

you’d

be interested in.

SEI.

“Sure,” he says. “Why don’t we play it by ear?”

“That sounds like a good idea,”

Petra says.

“Well . . . sorry to have bothered you.”

“No, you didn’t. It was nice to have a break.”

“Always glad to be of service.”

That went well, Boone thinks. “Foodies.” Foodies should be lined up against a wall, read that day’s specials, then machine-gunned.

At about 1:00 a.m. Boone sets the GPS tracker to alert him if the car moves, finds his portable alarm clock in the back, sets it for six-thirty, tilts the seat back, and goes to sleep.

Donna Nichols comes out at 6:37 a.m.

An overnight bag slung over her shoulder.

A middle-aged, burly white guy with curly, sandy-colored hair and a red goatee, wearing just a silk bathrobe, stands in the doorway and kisses her good-bye. Then he bends over, picks up the newspaper, and goes back inside.

Donna opens her car door, tosses the bag into the front passenger seat, gets in, and backs out of the driveway. Boone waits for a minute, the blips on the screen telling him that she’s headed home, then pulls up and checks out the name on the mailbox: “Schering.” Then he pulls ahead and finds a different parking spot.

At eight-twenty, Boone looks into his rearview mirror and sees Schering’s garage door open. A tan Mercedes 501 backs out and heads down the hill. Boone gives it a second, then follows. He doesn’t want to tail him too closely and get made, and he can always reverse Schering’s full identity through the address and the license plate, but it would be easier to find out where the man works and do it that way. He catches up with Schering as he takes a right onto Camino Del Mar, heading south. Schering turns onto Torrey Pines Road, and for a second Boone wonders if he’s going to Nichols’s house on a when-the-cat’s-away theory, but then Schering drives past the golf course and takes a left into a business park of small, two-story office buildings.

The Mercedes pulls into a slot marked “Reserved.”

Schering gets out of the car. Boone notices that he’s dressed SoCal Summer Professional—blue blazer, khaki slacks, white shirt open at the collar. Expensive brown Oxford shoes, highly shined. No wedding ring. Schering grabs his Halliburton briefcase from the passenger seat, walks to the building behind the parking spot, and climbs a set of exterior stairs to the second floor. Boone waits a minute, gets out, and walks up the same stairs. He reads on the signboard that three offices share the floor—a lawyer, a title company, and “Philip M. Schering, Geological Engineering Consultant.”

Schering does dirt.