He walks into The Sundowner, where Not Sunny is caught off-guard by his uncharacteristically early appearance. She’s leaning against the bar, catching a standing nap, when the door opening wakes her. She sees Boone and signals the cook to get his usual going on the grill. Then she walks over and pours him a cup of coffee.
“Thank you,” Boone says.
“You’re welcome.”
“Uhhhh, what’s your name?”
“Not Sunny.”
“No, I mean, what’s your real name?” Boone asks. “Not the one we glossed you with.”
The question takes her by surprise. Having been called Not Sunny during working hours for several months now, she actually has to think about it for a second. “Jennifer.”
“Thank you, Jennifer.”
“Okay,” she says. “Your usual?”
“Yeah. No,” Boone says. “It might be time to change things up a little, Not—Jennifer. I’ll have . . . the, uhhhh . . . blueberry pancakes.”
“Blueberry pancakes?” Not Sunny Jennifer asks.
“Are the blueberries fresh?”
“No.”
“I’ll take them anyway.”
“Okay.”
She goes to piss off the cook, who already has the eggs working.
Boone goes back to contemplating losers.
If Schering kept faith with Hefley’s, Boone thinks, the next possible losers would be the homeowners. So you’d have to have a homeowner with a lot of bucks to lose having an uninsured house fall into the rabbit hole, or a homeowners’ association.
Now, homeowners’ associations in SoCal are known for their brutality and utter ruthlessness in enforcing their codes, but Boone can’t quite envision one commissioning a contract murder, although he’d loved to have sat in on that meeting.
He doesn’t even know if there is a homeowners’ association for the neighborhood, so decides that his first task after consuming the pancakes is to go down to the County Building and start researching ownership records. Come up with a list of the homeowners and try to see if any of them are likely candidates.
Not Sunny Jennifer brings him the pancakes.
And a bill.
“Will there be anything else?” she asks as if she worked hard to memorize the line.
Boone’s a little startled. As an unofficial bouncer and keeper of the peace at The Sundowner, he hasn’t received a bill for breakfast in years. Not Sunny Jennifer sees the surprised look on his face. Anxiety overwhelms her, and she gives it straight up. “Chuck said to next time you came in. Charge you. Like, you’re not family.”
“Relax. It’s cool.”
“I feel weird.”
“Don’t,” Boone says. He gets up, digs out his wallet, and leaves enough cash to pay the bill, plus a generous tip.
“Just tell Chuck for me that someone else can keep things cool around here from now on. I don’t go where I’m not invited.”
Not Sunny Jennifer frowns—it’s a lot to remember.
“Just tell him adios,” Boone says.
“‘Adios,’” she repeats.
Adios.
113
Searching real-estate records at the County Administration Building is a sure antidote to any genre-inspired desire to be a private investigator.
The (sad) truth is that a real PI does a hell of a lot more paper-chasing than sitting around the office slugging bourbon while some long-legged blonde drapes herself across his lap and begs for sexual penance for her sins and a tenor saxophone wails in the background. Most of the work is a slog through records, and Boone hasn’t heard a Coltrane riff yet.
The County Administration Building is an enormous edifice that takes up three blocks on the east side of Harbor Drive, smack in the middle of the tourist district. Across the street, visitors come to see the old sailboats that are now maritime museums, or the decommissioned aircraft carrier, or go on harbor cruises, or grub down at Anthony’s Fish Grotto. Farther down Harbor Drive are the enormous docks where the big cruise ships come, spilling tourists out to hit the bars and clubs a few blocks away in the Gaslamp District, or to take a pedicab ride, or just stroll the long promenade that curves around the harbor, where hundreds of small, private sailboats moor.
But the CAB is a monument of mundane bureaucracy set in the middle of all the good times, like a stern librarian with a finger to her lips.
It’s a busy place, with people coming in to file records, take exams for various professional licenses, get married, all manner of happy crap. Boone has to take the Deuce for several orbits around the huge parking lot before he finds a spot.
So now he sits at a computer station and sifts through real-estate transfer notices, tax records, and building permits, and cross-references them against street maps, utility plots, and newspaper accounts of the sinkhole episode. It takes him well into the afternoon, but by then he has a list of the eighteen owners whose homes were destroyed.
Then he runs the list of names through his own mental file-card tray of local bad guys. The truth is that very few people will kill for money, even lots of it. Very few people will kill at all, even in the “heat of passion,” and fewer still will kill in the fabled “cold blood.”
But those who will, do, and if you’re looking at San Diego—the busiest corridor for illegal substances trafficking since Satan slipped Eve the apple—you have to think about drug money and the expensive houses it can buy in a town like La Jolla. The big drug barons—most of them from Tijuana—are, of course, multimillionaires, and multimillionaires invest their multimillions in the most exclusive neighborhoods. Now, you’re talking about people who can and have killed over a nickel, so offing someone to protect a $3 million or $4 million investment is a no- brainer.
But Boone’s mental search comes up with no matches. None of the owners listed is a drug lord, mob guy, or otherwise sketchy, although Boone is aware that some of the homes might have ghost owners behind the recorded names. But that would be a dead-end street anyway, so he asks himself about more potential losers in the game of negligence hot potato.
If Hefley’s were to subrogate, he reasons, who would it sue? And if a homeowner were left with a destroyed home and couldn’t collect from the insurance company, who would he sue?
Either the builder or the county.
The builder for some kind of negligence, or the county for issuing a permit for that builder to construct a house on unsafe ground.
You can cross off the county—it has no budget line for contract killings—so you’re left with the builders.
Boone leaves the CAB and drives up to Mira Mesa.
