The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

“For instance?”


“For instance,” Boone says, “was Corey in a lot of fights in school? That’s something the prosecution is going to ask, so we’d like to know it first. Was he popular, unpopular, maybe picked on? Did he have friends . . . a girlfriend, maybe? Or was he a loner? Did he do well in school? How were his grades? Why didn’t he go to college, for instance?”

“Ninety-seven percent of our graduates go on to a four-year institution,” Hancock says.

Boone is tempted to say that Corey is also going on to an institution, probably for a lot longer than four years, but he keeps his mouth shut. She senses it anyway.

“You have an attitude, Mr. Daniels.”

“No.”

“Yes,” she insists, “you do. You may or may not be aware of it—I suspect you are—but let me tell you what it is, just in case. You look down on these kids.”

“Hard to do from where I stand, Dr. Hancock.”

“That’s just what I mean,” she says. “You’re a reverse snob. You believe that kids in a school like this shouldn’t have any problems because they have money. And when they do have a problem, you sneer at them as spoiled and weak. How am I doing?”

Pretty damn well, Boone thinks. Why is every woman I sit down with lately using me like a dartboard and hitting bull’s-eyes?

“You’re doing great, Dr. Hancock, but I’m here to talk about Corey Blasingame.”

“You can call me Lee.” She leans back in her chair and looks out the window at the immaculately groomed sports fields, where girls are out for soccer practice. “The problem with my giving you a sense of Corey is that, sadly, I never had one. I consider him one of my failures, in that I never really got to know him myself.”

Getting a grasp of Corey Blasingame was like grabbing Jell-O, she told Boone. No teenager’s personality is solidly formed by that age, but Corey’s was unusually amorphous. He deflected attention, was particularly adept at finding cracks and slipping through them. He was neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad. He got Cs, not As or Fs, which might have called attention to him. He never ran for student office, joined any clubs, associated with cliques. But neither was he your classic loner—he always sat with people in the lunchroom, for instance, and seemed to join in their conversations.

No, he was not shunned or picked on, certainly not bullied. Girlfriends? He had dates to dances and such, but there was no particular girl, certainly not one of those conspicuous high school romances. But he was never a homecoming king, or on the court, or anything like that.

He did play baseball in his sophomore year.

“And now you are wondering,” Lee says, “why I don’t know more. Yes you are, and don’t bother to deny it. I know because I’ve asked myself a few thousand times why I didn’t know more, and the hard truth that I’ve had to tell myself is that I really didn’t notice him. He wasn’t a kid you noticed. He just wasn’t, and I have spent many a sleepless night trying to convince myself that I didn’t fail him by not noticing, that I didn’t fail the man he killed as well. You just never imagine that . . .”

She trailed off and gazed out the window.

“No, you don’t,” Boone says. He wants to say something to take her off the hook but he can’t think of anything that’s not just stupid, and he also knows from experience that no one else can take you off the hook you made yourself.

Boone’s in the parking lot when a guy trots up behind him.

“You were just in the office asking about Corey Blasingame?” the guy asks. He’s pretty young, maybe in his late twenties, and has that look of a teacher who’s still excited about being a teacher.

“My name’s Daniels,” Boone says. “I’m working for Corey’s lawyer. Do you remember him?”

“Ray Pedersen. I was the jayvee baseball coach.”

“I wondered about that one year,” Boone says. “Was he any good?”

“No,” Pedersen says. “He thought he was a pitcher on his way to the bigs. He had a decent slider, but his fastball never broke out of the seventies. A lot of his pitches went deep the other way.”

“Did he get cut or did he quit?”

“He quit,” Pedersen says.

“Because . . .”

“Have you met the dad?” Pedersen asks.

Boone shook his head.

“Meet the dad,” Pedersen says. “It explains everything.”



34

The dad, Boone learned from Pedersen, used to stand behind the backstop and scream at his son.

Not an uncommon type in SoCal schoolboy baseball, which does send some kids to the big leagues, but Corey’s dad was a stereotype gone crazy.

“Way over the top,” Pedersen says.

Every pitch, Bill Blasingame would yell his critique at the top of his lungs. Even while the kid was in his warm-up, Blasingame would shout instructions. It went beyond encouragement—Bill would berate his son about the inadequacies of the last pitch, question his nerve, his courage, his skill.

And harass the umpire. “It caught the corner! It caught the freaking corner! Come on, ump. Wake up!”

It got to the point where Pedersen talked to him about it, asked him to dial it down a little, sit in the stands where he wasn’t such a distraction to the boy. Blasingame didn’t take it well, said he was a taxpayer, had a right to stand where he wanted—as a parent, he had a right to talk to his own kid, and nobody was going to tell him different.

Yeah, except Pedersen did.

Pedersen banned him from the ball field.

It happened after one particularly brutal incident.

Pedersen had put Corey on the mound in the top half of the eighth with what looked to be a safe four-run lead. It was garbage time, really, but it was a chance to get Corey some playing time, and Pedersen was out of pitchers anyway.

The kid blew up.

First pitch was a fat fastball that got cracked for a double.

Bill went off. “Have you been watching the game?! The kid can’t hit a changeup! Why are you throwing him a fastball? Wake up! Wake up!”

Next batter, Corey opened up with two balls, his dad started pawing around behind the backstop like an enraged bull, and Corey followed with a slider that got hit clean into left field, brought in the runner, and put the batter on first.

“You’re throwing stupid! That was stupid!”

Pedersen got out of the dugout, walked over, and said, “Take it easy. It’s a game.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’re losers, right there.”

“You’re not helping. Take it easy.”

Corey’s next pitch was a hanging curve that ended up over the right-field fence. Now the lead was down to one, with no outs, and Bill Blasingame started playing to the crowd. “Get him out of there! He sucks! He’s my kid, for chrissakes, and I want him out of there.”

Pedersen remembered that people just sat there in embarrassed silence, it was that awful.

It got worse.

Corey hit the next kid with a pitch and put him on base. His next twelve pitches were balls as his father screamed, ranted, threw his hands in the air, made a show of covering his eyes with his forearm. “Suck it up! Be a man, for chrissakes! Get it together! Man up!”

When the go-ahead run came across the plate, Bill totally lost it. “You dickless wonder! You worthless little piece of crap! I always wanted a daughter and I guess I got one!”

Pedersen trotted over. “That’s it. You’re gone. I want you out of here.”

“You think I wanna be here?” Bill yelled. “Happy to go, my friend. Happy to go!”

But it was too late. Pedersen acknowledged that he should have had him gone weeks earlier. The damage was already done. Corey stood on the mound, fighting back tears. People in the stands looked at their feet. His own teammates couldn’t figure out anything to say to him. Pedersen went out to the mound.

“He’s something, your dad.”

Corey just nodded.

“I don’t think you have it today,” Pedersen said. “Is your arm hurting?”

“Yeah, it’s hurting.”