The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

“At home.”


“Alone?”

“No, my husband was with me.”

Johnny asks, “When did he get home?”

“Early,” Donna says. “Seven, maybe?”

Nice, Johnny thinks. She has him home by seven, the shot isn’t heard until shortly before eight-seventeen. While someone is pumping a bullet into Schering’s head, the Nicholses are at home doing Dr. Phil’s Relationship Rescue. Funny how life works.

“You said your husband confronted you with the evidence of your infidelity,” Johnny says.

“I didn’t say that,” Donna snaps. “I said that he told me he knew. There was no ‘confrontation.’”

“Did you ask him how he knew?”

“Yes.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That he had hired a private investigator who had me under surveillance,” Donna said. “Who had tracked me to Philip’s house.”

“Did you deny it?”

“There didn’t seem to be a point,” she said. “Obviously, he knew.”

“So your husband had Schering’s address.”

“I suppose so, yes,” Donna says. “But my husband isn’t a violent man. He couldn’t have done this.”

Yeah, but he did, thinks Johnny, who’s not a big believer in coincidence. On the same day a man finds out his wife is f*cking around, the f*cker gets killed. That’s motive, not coincidence. And now the wife, guilty as hell about the affair, colludes with the alibi.

“Do you know what an accessory is?” he asks.

“Don’t patronize me, Detective Kodani.”

“Your husband is not a practiced criminal,” Johnny says. “Sooner or later—I’m betting sooner—he’s going to confess to this killing. When he does—not ‘if,’ Mrs. Nichols, ‘when’—your lying about this alibi will make you an accessory. You can write each other from your respective cells.”

“Should I retain an attorney?”

“That’s entirely your choice, Mrs. Nichols,” Johnny says. “Shall we break off this interview so that you can make a phone call?”

“Not just now, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She’ll f*cking kill on the witness stand, Johnny thinks. Cool, beautiful, sympathetic. Contrite about her affair. Burke will lead her through her testimony and the jury will believe her. Then women will want to be her and the men will want to do her. She’ll pull her husband right out of the shit.

It’s good to be Dan Nichols, he thinks.

If you can afford to marry a Donna and hire an Alan Burke, you get away with murder.



92

Petra, an uncharacteristically ratty terry-cloth robe wrapped around her, is standing in the open doorway of her condo when Boone gets off the elevator.

“Murder?”

“I didn’t do it.”

She ushers him into her apartment. It’s nice, one of those old warehouse conversions that came along with downtown urban renewal when the new ballpark was built. It’s the new, hip, trendy area—which suits her, Boone thinks, because she’s hip and trendy.

Except for that robe. Maybe I got the booty call thing wrong.

“Murder?”

Boone looks out the window. “Hey, you have a view of the park.”

“I hate baseball. Murder?”

“Right. Cricket is probably more your—”

“I hate sport. Murder?”

“Hot dogs taste better at the ballpark,” Boone says. “You have to put a lot of mustard—”

“Boone!”

She’d fallen asleep on the sofa, waking up only when he buzzed her number. When she heard “murder” she let him in and then ran into the bathroom for the robe to disguise the sexy negligee. The right side of her hair is all mushed from the sofa, but the makeup that she had put on so carefully is intact.

He sits down on the sofa, she sits beside him, and he tells her about the whole Nichols thing. There’s no confidentiality issue, because as an associate at Burke, Spitz, and Culver, she’s also Dan Nichols’s lawyer.

“So the police put you at the murder scene,” she says.

“It wasn’t a murder scene when I was there,” Boone says. “It was more of a porno scene.”

“Right,” she says. “And you were never in the house.”

“Right,” Boone says. “Look, I’m really sorry. I thought of calling you when they first picked me up, but calling a lawyer would have looked bad, and then I got all torqued and then going to see Nichols—”

“I understand.”

“You do?”

“Of course,” she says. “Look, can I get you something? Coffee, a drink, something to eat?”

Dave the Love God is a false god, Boone thinks. A mere wooden idol, a Wizard of Oz. He knows nothing of women. At least, not this woman. “You know, I am a little hungry.”

“Right.”

She gets up and walks into the kitchen. He follows and looks over her shoulder as she opens the refrigerator, which is virtually empty.

“Let me see,” she says, “I have yogurt . . . and . . . some more yogurt . . . and . . . Oh! Cottage cheese.”

“How about just some coffee?” he asks.

“Good, right,” she says. “Except that I don’t have any, actually. I have tea. A very nice herbal tea I get at this special shop down on Island. Imported from Sichuan.”

Drinking herbal tea is like sucking dew off a lawn, Boone thinks. Which he has done, after a Mai Tai Tuesday at The Sundowner, but it doesn’t sound so good when you’re not horribly drunk and desperately dehydrated. Besides, herbal tea is one small step removed from yoga, leg warmers, and spa treatments. Boone says, “Maybe just some water.”

She gets him a glass of water and then says, “Crackers! I have crackers.”

Petra had hosted a little predinner wine and hors d’oeuvres thing a few weeks ago and had some crackers left over. She searches the cabinets and finds the box, then looks for an appropriate plate on which to set them.

“The box is just fine,” Boone says.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

She hands him the box and sits down on the counter. He stands beside her and they eat crackers and drink water as Petra starts breaking down Boone’s situation. Boone was at the house but not in the house, but at what point in time? And has the medical examiner established a time of death? Obviously, that would be key.

Boone’s listening but not really listening. He’s not all that concerned with being a “person of interest” in the Schering murder anymore, as he’s been willingly bumped off that platform by Dan Nichols. He looks at the little crumbs that cling to the corner of Petra’s mouth, which, with her tousled hair, give her a very attractive air of imperfection. And the robe has slipped a little on her left shoulder, revealing the spaghetti-thin strap of something blue and silky and . . .

How do you kiss someone with crackers in your mouth? Is it “how,” he wonders, or “should,” as he casually takes a drink of water and tries to swish it around his mouth nonchalantly to clear it of the cracker yuck.

Petra’s going on about . . . something . . . when Boone leans over, brushes a crumb off her lips with his finger, and then kisses her. If she’s surprised, she’s pleasantly surprised, because her lips do that fluttery, butterfly-wing thing and she brings her hands to the back of his neck and pulls him in a little closer.

Her lips are freaking incredible, Boone thinks, so soft and surprisingly full, and the kiss lasts a long time before he breaks it off to kiss her neck, where her skin is so white and delicate it seems almost fragile, and he likes it when she turns her head a little to open more of her neck to him.

Her perfume is unreal. Sunny was never a perfume girl. She was more of a sun-salt-and-air-are-nature’s-perfume girl (which certainly worked, salt and sun being aphrodisiacal to him), but Petra is definitely a girlie-girl, with the negligee and the perfume, and he finds he likes it, really likes it as he works his way down her neck and then back up and then gently nudges a strand of her black hair out of the way and kisses her ear.

“If you do that,” she says, “I can’t stop you.”

“I don’t want you to stop me,” he says.