The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

“He’ll agree,” Bill says. “It’s best for him, best for everyone, to get this over with.”


And off the front pages of the papers, Boone thinks. With real-estate prices already crashing, it’s tough enough, right, Bill? And how many players want to tee off with the murderer’s father? Sweep it under the rug, sweep Corey into the hole.

“He’ll have to serve at least ten years,” Alan warns, “on the sixteen to twenty.”

Bill says, “He’ll be twenty-nine when he gets out, still a young man with his whole life in front of him.”

Right, Boone thinks. A weak unit like Corey in the state pen for ten years? What’s he going to be like when he gets out . . . if he gets out . . . if someone doesn’t pick up Red Eddie’s contract first? And suppose he does make it through. What kind of life is he going to have as a convicted killer?

But let it slide, Boone thinks. Keep your piehole closed. Bill’s right—it’d be better for everyone. Corey gets his cheap manhood, Johnny gets to keep his rep and his career, you get to go back to the Dawn Patrol.

Forgotten and forgiven.

Over.

Out.

Alan stands up. “Okay, I guess that’s it,” he says. “I’ll go talk to Corey and we’ll get this done. Given the facts, I really don’t think it’s a bad result.”

“Turn it down,” Boone says.



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“What?!”

Bill’s all red in the face.

“Turn it down,” Boone repeats. “He didn’t do it; he didn’t throw that punch.”

“How do you know?” Bill asks. “How do you know he didn’t throw it?”

“I asked him,” Boone says. “I saw it in his eyes.”

“You saw it in his eyes?!”

“I think we’ll need a little more than that for a jury, Boone,” Alan says softly, although Boone notices a little flush on his cheeks.

Boone makes his case: The testimony of Corey’s three Rockpile buddies is suspect from the get-go; Jill Thompson couldn’t demonstrate the distinctive punch that she allegedly saw; George Poptanich’s statement came fresh from Steve Harrington’s EZ Bake Oven. Add to that the fact that Corey is a crappy martial artist without the strength, mass, or coordination to throw that punch. And Boone saw it in his eyes.

“He told you he did it,” Alan says.

A confused kid, Boone tells them. Drunk and high. Scared. In the tank with sharks who smell blood and know how to go in for the quick kill. It happens more than you’d think.

“If Corey didn’t do it,” Alan says, “who did?”

“My money would be on Trevor Bodin,” Boone says. “He has the size, the athleticism, and the temperament. He’s another one of Mike Boyd’s disciples. If we do a little digging, I’ll bet we’ll find that he’s also mixed up in this white supremacist stuff.”

“Then why does it get laid on Corey?” Petra asks.

“Because—no offense, Mr. Blasingame—he’s the weakest unit,” Boone says. He lays out a possible scenario for them. The Rockpile Crew confronted Kelly. Let’s say it was Bodin who threw the lethal punch. They got away in the car. Corey was so blasted that maybe he even passed out. The other three made an agreement to throw Corey under the bus. It sounds just like Bodin, and the Knowles brothers would have been too afraid to have gone against him. When the cops pulled them over, they pointed the finger at Corey.

So when Harrington interviewed Thompson and Poptanich, he already had Corey down as the killer and communicated that knowledge to the witnesses, fairly forcefully in Georgie Pop’s case. John Kodani had all those statements when he went in to work Corey. He confronted him with them and got him to confess.

Corey probably doesn’t even know what did or didn’t happen. But he does know that he’s a hero in the idiot racist set. Add to that the probability that the Aryan Brotherhood boys in the lockup tell him to be a stand-up guy. He still thinks his dad’s money’s going to get him off, but the longer he sits in the hold, the harder it is to stick with the ‘I’ve got nothing to say’ mantra. One more tap, Boone tells them, and that wall cracks.

Corey’s confession is the foundation of Mary Lou’s case. Once it cracks, the whole thing could come sliding down.

“But can we crack it?” Alan asks. “How good a witness will Kodani be?”

“Very good,” Boone admits.

“There you go,” Bill says.

“You can make him look bad,” says Petra.

“Don’t stroke my ego. I don’t like it.”

“Sorry,” Petra says. “But you could also throw reasonable doubt on the case against Corey by casting suspicion onto Bodin.”

“As much as the judge will let me.”

“You’d get it in,” Petra says.

“Again—”

“Sorry, but if either Thompson or Poptanich recants—”

Bill leans across the table and stares at Boone. “Can you truthfully say that you are one hundred percent certain that my son didn’t kill that man?”

“No.”

“Then this is crazy,” Bill says. “We have a good deal, we should take it. I’ll make that clear to Corey, and you, Alan, will do the same. Let’s not forget here who’s paying your bill.”

“I know who’s paying my bill,” Alan says, “but I will put the options in front of Corey, accurately and equally, and then he can decide. And Bill, if that means you stop paying my bill, f*ck you, and I’ll do it pro bono.”

When Shakespeare wrote that we should kill all the lawyers, Boone thought, he didn’t know Alan Burke.



75

“Boone,” Alan says after Bill slams the door behind him, “you’re giving me whiplash. One second you want the kid strung up, then you jump the case from manslaughter to a hate crime, now you’re saying he’s innocent.”

“I didn’t say he was innocent,” Boone argues. “I said he didn’t throw the punch. If he was part of a gang that assaulted Kelly, he should do time. But he doesn’t deserve the death penalty.”

“Who said anything about the death penalty?”

“Red Eddie.”

“Oh?”

Boone tells them about Eddie’s threats against Corey.

Alan takes this in, then says, “I will present young Mr. Blasingame with his options in an evenhanded way. And if he chooses to go to trial, God help the both of you! But you, Petra, can help both him and yourself by lining up the best causal biomechanics expert in the universe, and you, Boone, had better go back to digging like a dog on crank. It wouldn’t hurt if you found Nazi paraphernalia and KKK robes in Mr. Bodin’s closet, for instance.”

“Right away, Alan.”

“Got it.”

“Thank you,” Alan says.

He leaves the room.

“He certainly seemed in a hurry,” Petra says.

“He’s pissed off.”

“Not Alan,” she says. “Blasingame. He seemed in a terrible hurry to accept a deal that would put his son in prison for ten years.”

“He doesn’t want to roll the dice on a jury,” Boone says. “I get it.”

He does and he doesn’t. If I were in his place, Boone thinks, and someone told me that there was a good chance my kid didn’t do it, I’d leap at that hook. Blasingame couldn’t push it away fast or hard enough.

And on the topic of confessions . . .

“Look,” Boone says, “about the other day—”

“I was completely out of line,” Petra says. “I assumed an intimacy that simply doesn’t exist and—”

“I was an immature, hypersensitive jerk.”

“Yes, all right.”

“So you’re busy tonight?” Boone asks.

“I have that thing,” Petra says. “But I should be free and clear by . . . tennish.”

“Tennish.”

“Around ten.”

“No, I knew what you meant,” Boone says. “I just . . . yeah. Ten . . . around tennish. Should I call you?”

“Or just come over.”

“To your place,” Boone says.

“Well, yes,” says Petra. “Not to the restaurant, I meant.”

“No.”

To her place, Boone thinks.

To close the deal?



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