The Gentlemen's Hour

She shakes her head. “I’ll get you started,” he says. “Phil was what you call a geo-whore. Bill used his services. They were going to meet the other day at the La Jolla sinkhole.”

She nods.

He plays a hunch.

“Does Paradise Homes mean anything to you?”

She keeps looking out the window.

Then she nods again.

117

Monkey sits at his computer at home and looks at Sunny’s Web site.

It’s a satisfying encounter, but all it does in the end is piss him off.

Why should guys like Boone Daniels get all the hot women?

Monkey goes through the checklist of possible answers.

Looks.

Okay, nothing he can do about that. Well, he could shave, get a haircut, brush his teeth, eat something other than processed sugar and pastry items, and hit the personal hygiene section at Sav-on every once in a while, but it isn’t going to make him look like Boone, so fuck it.

Sexy job.

A brainless PI? Forget it.

Become a surfer.

Involves deep, cold, moving water and physical exertion beyond the . . . never mind.

What else attracts women?

Money.

But you don’t have money, he tells himself, looking around his shithole one-bedroom east of the Lamp, a building that will soon go condo, which he can’t afford.

But you could get money, couldn’t you?

What was Neanderthal Daniels sniffing after?

Paradise Homes?

Monkey wipes the keyboard off, logs into his database, and goes hunting. I may not have looks, a sexy job, a surfboard, or money (yet), but I have access to information, and information is power, and power is money and . . .

An hour later he has his answer.

He picks up the phone, waits for someone to answer, and says, “You don’t know me, asshole, but my name is Marvin. You have a problem, and I’m the solution.”

Thinking . . . How do you turn Monkey into money?

Just drop the k, baby.

Invigorated, he goes back to Sunny’s Web site.

118

Boone turns on La Jolla Shores Drive, then takes a left on La Playa, then a right, and pulls into the parking lot at La Jolla Shores beach.

Nicole looks at him funny.

“You want to take a walk on the beach?” he asks.

“A walk on the beach?”

“Great time of day for it.” Well, any time is a great time for it. But early evening on a hot August day, with the sky just starting to soften into a gentle pink and the temperature starting to drop: perfection. And dusk is a great time for confession—give your sins to the setting sun and watch them go over the horizon together. Put your past in the past.

So why don’t you do it? he asks himself.

No answer.

She flips down the sunshade and looks at herself in the mirror. “I’m a mess.”

“It’s the beach, nobody cares. Come on.”

“You’re nuts.” But she goes with him.

They don’t say anything for a long time, just walk and watch the sky change color, and think about what she told him.

Bill used Schering as a geo-engineer on a lot of development projects over the years. Schering would go out, do a report on the suitability of a site for construction, and Bill would use that report to take to the county for approval. Most of Schering’s reports were legitimate, but sometimes . . .

Sometimes he would shade the report a little, maybe overlook a weakness, a flaw, a potential danger. And usually the county would accept Schering’s report, but sometimes the inspectors needed a little . . . persuasion to pass on a piece of land.

“Phil was the bagman,” Boone said.

“I guess so.”

It made sense. As a geo-engineer, Schering had relationships with the county engineers. He could go to breakfast or lunch, arrive with an envelope, leave without it. A week or so later, the permits would get issued. They did it a bunch of times.

“I was no blushing virgin either,” Nicole said. She took the bonuses, the gifts, the vacations, all the little perks that came with flowing money. Schering took the payments to the geo-engineers; she took them to the politicians.

“What about Paradise Homes?” Boone asked.

It was Bill’s really big shot, Nicole told him. His chance to go from Triple-A to the major leagues. He got a group of investors together, called the company “Paradise Homes,” and put everything he had into buying the land. But . . . the land was no good. Bill got pretty drunk one night in the office after they’d . . . after she’d given him what he needed to relieve the stress . . . and he told her. She didn’t understand all of it—she wasn’t sure he did, either—but the land sat over some kind of geological problem. Sandy soil over rock, and there was a shifting plate or something underneath.

Schering tried to tell him, to warn him, but Bill begged him . . . begged him . . . to write a different report. For the county, for the investors.

“Hold on,” Boone said. “The investors didn’t know about the land problem?”

No, because Bill knew that if they knew, they’d never put their money into it. Schering argued that it was a time bomb, but Bill argued what was time when you’re talking about earth movement? The earth is always moving. The problem could be hundreds or even thousands of years away. And they were talking millions and millions of dollars. . . .

Schering wrote a clean report. Did what he had to do to get it through the county. A lot of envelopes went out . . . vacation homes were sold under market value. Ski places in Big Bear, weekend desert spots out in Borrego. . . .

The site was approved.

“How do you know all of this?” Boone said. “I know Bill talked a little when he was ‘comfortable,’ but—”

“I dug in the files,” she says. “I kept copies of Schering’s original reports and compared them to the new ones he wrote.”

“Why?”

Bill was blackmailing her; she thought she’d turn it around and blackmail him. Win her freedom, maybe take a little of all that money with her on the way out.