Boone tells him everything he observed with Donna and Phil Schering. Her driving straight to his house, spending the night, kissing him good-bye in the morning.
“So, you’re sure about this?”
“Dan, what do you need?” Boone asks. “She spent the night. No offense, but I don’t think they were baking cookies and watching chick flicks.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“I wanted to be wrong.” Dan says.
“I know you did. I wish it broke that way.”
“Fuck,” Dan says. “I mean, you think you’re happy, right? You think
happy. You give her everything . . .”
Boone doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. He could go the whole
route, but it’s too easy a line. All he can do is walk with the guy and let him blow off steam.
Matrimonial sucks.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Dan says.
“Don’t do anything in a hurry,” Boone says. “Take your time, think about it. A lot of marriages make it through this kind of thing . . .”
Great, Boone thinks, now I’m Dr. Phil.
“I don’t know,” Dan says.
“You don’t need to know right now,” Boone says. “Chill for a spell, lay out, don’t act from anger.”
“Don’t act from anger”? I sound like K2.
Which is another difficult conversation on the horizon.
73
“Take the deal,” Bill Blasingame says.
Boone sits at the table in the main conference room at Burke, Spitz, and Culver. The door is shut, but the picture windows provide a view of the harbor where an aircraft carrier is currently docked, dominating the scene, looking impossibly large and lethal.
“Don’t we want to ask Corey about it?” Petra asks. “It’s his life.”
Boone sees Alan shoot her a don’t-speak-unless-spoken-to look but she stares right back at him. Good for you, Pete, Boone thinks.
“Corey will do what I tell him to do,” Bill says. “I think we’ve seen what happens when Corey takes charge of his own life.”
Keep your mouth shut, Boone thinks. Sit there, look at the nice harbor, and keep your stupid surf-bum mouth shut. Let this go the way everyone wants it to go.
“Still,” Alan says, “I’m obligated to consult Corey. He’s the defendant. He has to explicitly agree to any deal.”
“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 . . .
he gets out . . .
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.
74
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
?!”
“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
