way around the narrow, curving streets and then parks in the lot just south of the Spreckels Amphitheater.
Boone hits the gas to catch up and pulls into a slot just in time to see her walking north up the Prado, the main street in Balboa Park. Following her up past the Zen garden to the Prado restaurant, where she meets three other women and goes inside.
Ladies who lunch, Boone thinks. He buys a newspaper, finds a bench over near the Botanical Garden across the street, and waits. He’s sweaty and hungry, so he breaks the monotony by walking back to a kiosk outside the Prado and buying a pretzel and a bottle of mango juice, then goes back and sits down, just another unemployed slacker killing an afternoon in Balboa Park.
62
Mary Lou Baker is skippy.
But then again, she always is.
The happy warrior.
Now she looks across the table at Alan Burke and says, “Oh, please, Alan. Save the cat-with-the-canary cryptic smile for some young pup who’s impressed with your resume. I have your client’s confession, I have five witnesses, I have the medical examiner’s report that Kelly’s death was consistent with a severe blow to the head. You have . . . let me think . . . right, that would be nothing.”
Alan maintains the feline smile, if only to get her more jacked up. “Mary Lou,” he says as if addressing a first-year law student in class, “I’ll get the ME to testify that the severe blow to the head could have come from striking the curb. I’ll get three of your witnesses to admit that they pled to reduced charges in exchange for their testimony. As for the so-called confession, come on, ML, you might as well tear it up right now and put it into the office john, because that’s about all it’s good for.”
“Detective Sergeant Kodani has a sterling reputation—”
“Not when I’m done with him,” Alan says.
“Nice,” Mary Lou answers. She leans back in her chair, puts her hands behind her head, and says, “We’ll drop ‘special circumstances.’”
“The judge will drop the ‘special’ before we go to motions,” Alan says.
“You’re going to roll the dice on that?”
“Seven come eleven.”
Mary Lou laughs. “Okay, what do you want?”
“You go manslaughter, we have something to talk about.”
Mary Lou jumps out of the chair, throws her hands up into the air, and says, “What do I look like to you . . .
?! Christmas comes in
now?! Look, we’re wasting our time here. Let’s just go to trial, let the jury hear the case and hand your client life without parole because you want to come in here and joke around.”
Alan looks wide-eyed and innocent. “We can certainly go in front of a jury, Mary Lou. It would be an honor and a pleasure to try a case with you. And no one is going to blame you for an acquittal. You were handcuffed by a shoddy investigation and a rush to judgment, what could you do? I’m sure Marcia Clark would—”
“I’d go second degree,” Mary Lou says. “My best and final offer.”
“That’s fifteen to life.”
“Yeah, I’ve read the statute,” she says.
“Sentence recommendation?”
She sits back down. “It would have to be somewhere in the midrange, Alan. I won’t push for max, but I can’t go minimum, I just can’t.”
Alan nods. “He serves ten on sixteen?”
“We’re in the same ballpark.”
“I’ll have to take it to my client,” Alan says.
“Of course.”
Alan stands up and shakes her hand. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mary Lou.”
“Always, Alan.”
The Gentlemen’s Hour.
63
The women finally come out of the restaurant. Kisses on the cheek all around, promises to do this again “sooner,” and then Donna starts walking back toward the parking lot. Boone gives her a good head start, then catches up, passes her, and is in his van waiting when she pulls out of the lot. He gives her a lot of time, watching her progress on the screen as she drives west on Laurel Street through the park, down toward the airport, then gets on the 5 north.
She could be heading home, but she takes the exit for Solana Beach and parks on Cedros Street. Boone is just a couple of minutes behind her as she parks and then walks from store to store on this block of expensive furniture stores. Then she goes into a clothing boutique and spends forty-five minutes. And some money, apparently, because she comes out with a couple of dresses on hangers and goes back to her car.
Now she drives home and pulls into the garage.
Boone sits a block away. Ten minutes later, a car pulls into the driveway. A young man in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, bicycling shorts, and
gets out and rings the bell. Donna lets him in.
She wouldn’t, Boone thinks. She wouldn’t have the nerve or the bad taste to do this right in her own home. Doesn’t happen. He takes his binoculars, scopes the license plate, and calls Dan.
“That’s Tony,” Dan says. “Personal trainer.”
“Uhhh, Dan, I know this would be really cliche, but—”
“Tony also dances in an all-boy nude dance review in Hillcrest,” Dan says, naming San Diego’s preeminent gay neighborhood. “Unless he’s swapped jerseys—”
“Okay, then.”
Tony comes out an hour later. Donna, red-faced and sweating, waves good-bye and goes back in.
So it’s good being Donna Nichols, Boone decides. A little spa treatment, a nice lunch, some high-end shopping, a customized workout, hopefully a quiet dinner at home. And, just as hopefully, Dan is wrong about his wife’s infidelity. Just a little premature midlife insecurity on his part. Has probably happened to half the guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour.
Yeah, no.
Because it’s August, and August blows.
There’s no surf, K2 is gone because some stupid kid has to belong to something, women reach into your insides and rip them out, and Donna Nichols comes out of her house dressed to kill.
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
