Boone gives her the good news.
Her response is underwhelming.
But predictable.
“I want to talk to Teddy.”
“Once again,” Petra says, “I don't think that's such a good-”
“Either I talk to Teddy,” Tammy says, “or I don't testify. You think it over, let me know what you decide.”
She walks back into the bedroom.
“Succinct,” Boone says.
99
They reach Teddy at his home number.
Wife must be out of town, Boone thinks.
He hands the phone to Tammy.
“Teddy?” she asks. “Are you alone?”
That's all she asks. That's it. After all the “I want to talk to Teddy” OCD, she asks that one question, apparently gets her answer, and punches off.
Then says, “Okay, I'll testify.”
100
Downtown San Diego is surprisingly small.
You can easily walk around it in the better part of an hour, and it might be the only major city in the country where a healthy person can walk from the airport to downtown with no problem.
That walk would take you along the bay that borders downtown on the west and south, and created the city. Mexican explorers stopped in San Diego back in the 1500s for its excellent harbor and left behind the usual mixture of soldiers and missionaries that defined most of Southern California until the Anglos took it in 1843. By the 1850s, a fleet of Chinese junks fished for tuna from the harbor, but were later moved out by Anglo and Italian fishermen.
Downtown was pretty sleepy until the big real estate boom of the 1880s, when town fathers like the Hortons, Crosswhites, and Marstons built up a legitimate downtown with office buildings, stores, banks, and restaurants. The seedy Stingaree District, with its bars, gambling joints, and brothels thrived between downtown and the southern harbor, and madams like Ida Bailey and gamblers and procurers like Wyatt Earp and his wife made fortunes and gave San Diego the risquй reputation that still clings to it today down in what is now known as the Gaslamp District.
But it was the U.S. Navy that really defined downtown San Diego and still does. From virtually anywhere you stand in downtown, you can see a navy base or a ship. Take that walk from the airport and you'll see aircraft carriers docked in the harbor, navy planes landing at their base on North Island. Sometimes you'll see a submarine pop up from underwater right in the bay and glide into port.
San Diego is a navy town.
Back in 1915, the good city fathers chased all the brothels out of the Gaslamp, but then they had to invite them back when the navy threatened to stop its ships from calling in port, an embargo that would have bankrupted the city.
And it's more than symbolic that downtown's major street, Broadway, ends on a pier.
A few blocks east on Broadway sits the courthouse.
Petra, with Boone in the passenger seat and Tammy in the back, pulls into the parking structure of her office building and finds her designated spot.
Tammy looks great cleaned up in a cream-colored blouse over a black skirt that Petra bought for her in the ladies' department at Nordstrom, which is really no surprise. What did surprise Petra was how good Boone could look.
She didn't think he owned a sports jacket, never mind the tailored black suit with a crisp white shirt and a sedate blue tie.
“Wow,” she said. “I had no idea.”
“I have two suits,” Boone replied. “A summer wedding and funeral suit and a winter wedding and funeral suit. This is the winter wedding and funeral suit, which doubles as a going-to-court suit.”
“Do you go to court a lot?”
“No.” Nor to very many weddings, Boone thinks, and, even more fortunate, to fewer funerals.
They walk out of the parking structure and walk the two blocks to the courthouse.
The courtroom is small and modern. On the third floor of the Superior Court Building here in the downtown area, the room is painted in those institutional blue tones that are meant to soothe and don't. The two counsel tables are uncomfortably close together, and the witness stand is close to the jury.
The gallery holds only about twenty people, but that's ample space for this morning. An insurance bad-faith case isn't sexy and rarely attracts much of a crowd. A few of the courthouse regulars, trial junkies, mostly retired people who have nothing more exciting to do, are sitting in the gallery, looking bored and vaguely disappointed. An insurance company representative, conspicuous in his gray suit, sits in the front row taking notes.
Johnny and Harrington are there.
Semi-pissed off, because they couldn't find a judge who'd let them take Tammy in before she testified in the civil case. Semi, because they really want to talk to her about the Angela Hart case, but on the other hand, if she's here to fuck Danny Silver, that can't be a bad thing. Let her get deeper into the shit with Silver, so she has no place else to go except to them.
Petra sits at the defense table.
You couldn't tell from her looks, Boone thinks as he slips in and sits down in the back row, that she's been up for more than twenty-four hours, almost shot, and nearly frozen. She looks fresh and focused in a pinstriped charcoal gray suit, her hair pinned up, subtle makeup on her eyes.
Very professional.
Maximum cool.
She turns and favors him with a smile as subtle as her makeup before she turns around to watch Alan Burke, who is just starting his examination of Tammy Roddick.
She looks good. Just enough like a stripper to believe that she was with Silver Dan the night his warehouse burned down, not enough like a stripper to lose credibility. She's wearing a lot less eye makeup, but those green cat eyes still jump out at you. And she's calm.
Ice.
Alan Burke always looks good. Hair combed straight back like a blond Pat Riley, his skin tanned from surfing but glowing from the SPF lotion he uses religiously. Alan may be the last guy left in the Western world who still looks good in a double-breasted suit, and this morning he has on a navy blue Armani, a white shirt, and a canary yellow tie.
He's smiling.
Alan is always smiling, even when things are going bad, but especially when he's shredding an opposing witness. But he has a friendly witness now, one who's about to kill his opponent for him.
Dan Silver sits beside his lawyer at the plaintiff's table, giving Tammy the stink eye. Dan is one of those guys who never look good no matter what you dress them in. If it's true that the clothes make the man, then nothing can make Dan Silver. He's forsaken the cowboy rig this morning for an ill-fitting suit, tight across the shoulders but baggy against his trunk. The suit is a greenish gray, which does nothing to help Dan's sallow skin, bad complexion, and heavy jowls. His hair is in an old-fashioned pompadour with a little ducktail, a statement that things were
