Screw it, Boone thinks, I don’t need his hero worship. It’s a drag anyway. I’m not who he thinks I am? Cool. I’m not who he thinks I am.
Maybe I’m not what anyone thinks I am. Or what they want me to be.
Cheerful is hunched over the adding machine as usual. He doesn’t look up but waves his hand and says, “Up bright and early, I see.”
“I was up most of the night,” Boone says. He walks through the office and gets into the shower. He comes out, wraps a towel around his waist, and tells Cheerful all about the events of the night—the cops picking him up, Dan Nichols being a (probably worthy) murder suspect.
“Send his check back,” Boone says.
“I already deposited it.”
“Then send him a refund,” Boone says. “I don’t want blood money.”
“You’re so sure he did it?”
“I have some doubts.”
Cheerful gets up from his chair and stands over Boone. No, he
over Boone, and asks, “So are you going to sit there on your ass being pissy and feeling sorry for yourself, or are you going to do something about it?”
“I’ve already done—”
“Bullshit,” Cheerful says. “You’re an investigator, right? You think Nichols might not be the real killer? Then go out and
the real killer.
”
Yup.
Boone throws some clothes on and heads out.
Refund, Cheerful thinks.
No wonder he’s always broke.
97
Boone hops into the Deuce and drives up to Del Mar. If Schering picked up one woman at Jake’s, maybe he picked up others. Maybe it was his happy hunting ground.
Jake’s is an icon.
The restaurant, just across the street from the old Del Mar train station, sits on the beach. Actually
the beach. You get one of the front tables at Jake’s during high tide, you’re practically in the water. You sit there and watch kids play out in front of you, and just to the south there’s a tasty little break below the bluffs where the surfers hang. You ever get tired of living in San Diego—the traffic, the prices—you go to Jake’s for lunch and you aren’t tired of living in San Dog anymore.
You wouldn’t live anywhere else.
Boone doesn’t go to one of the front tables today, he goes to the bar. Orders himself a beer, sits and checks out the surf, then strikes up a conversation with the bartender. Lauren’s a pretty young woman, tanned with sun- bleached hair, who took the job because it keeps her on the beach. It takes two slow beers to get around to the subject of Phil Schering.
“I knew him,” she says.
“No kidding?”
“He used to hang out here a lot,” she says. “It was sort of his place. His out-of-office office. He did a lot of business lunches here.”
“What kind of business was he in?”
“Some kind of engineer?”
With that upward, Southern California inflection that turns every sentence into a question. Boone’s always thought it was a reaction to the transience of California life, like—it is . . . isn’t it?
“He hang out at the bar a lot?”
“Sometimes, not a lot,” Lauren says. “He wasn’t a big drinker and this isn’t exactly a pickup joint.”
“No,” Boone says, “but was that what he was looking for?”
“Aren’t we all?” Lauren asks. “I mean, looking for love?”
“I guess.”
Boone lets a good minute pass, looks past the bar out the window where the ankle-high surf curls onto the sand. He gets up, leaves the change from a twenty on the bar, and asks, “So, did he find it? Schering, I mean. Love?”
“Not that I noticed,” Lauren says. “I mean, he wasn’t really the player type. You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“You do,” she says, scooping up the change, “because you’re not the player type either. I can always tell.”
Off Boone’s quizzical look she adds, “I gave you a big opening and you didn’t walk through it.”
“I’m sort of seeing someone.”
“Tell her she has a good guy.”
Yeah, Boone thinks—I’ll let her know.
98
So the Phil Schering as playboy theory looks shot, Boone thinks as he hands his ticket to the valet and waits for the kid to bring the Deuce around. We’re probably not looking for a jealous husband, but who else would have a capital grudge against a soils engineer?
The valet hops down from the Deuce and looks surprised when Boone hands him three dollar bills. Based on the vehicle, he was probably hoping for a quarter. But the kid looks enthused.
“Are you Boone Daniels?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude, you’re a legend.”
Great, Boone thinks as he gets behind the wheel. I’m a legend. Legends are either dead or old. He pulls out onto the PCH and moves his mind from the topic of being old back to the topic of a motive for killing Phil Schering.
Motives are like colors—there are really very few basic ones, but they have a thousand subtle shades.
Your primary motive colors are crazy, sex, and money.
Boone doesn’t linger on the first. Crazy is crazy, so there’s no line of logic you can pursue. It’s too random. Of course, there are shades of crazy: You have your basic, organic, Chuck Manson or Mark Chapman crazy. There’s also the “temporary insanity” crazy, aka “rage”—a tsunami of anger that washes away normal restraint or inhibition; a person “sees red” and just goes off. A subcategory of rage is drug or alcohol-induced rage—the booze, pills, meth, ice, steroids, whatever, make a person commit violence they otherwise would never do.
None of these applies to what facts Boone knows about the Schering murder.
Boone goes on to the next major motive, sex. Murder over sex is closely related to rage, as it’s usually provoked by jealousy. So if sex was the motive, Dan Nichols is the number-one suspect, as it doesn’t appear as if there were other jealous husbands or boyfriends. Yeah, Boone thinks, but for the moment anyway you’re looking for someone other than Dan, so move on.
