The Gentlemen's Hour

Jones smiles and shakes his head. “Monkey, I need you to talk to me.”

His voice is soft. Cultured and gentle, with the slightest hint of an accent.

“I did everything you wanted,” Monkey says.

True enough. After he arranged the meeting they came to his place—this gentleman and some Mexican gangbangers—put a gun to his head, sat him down, and had him erase all the records pertaining to Paradise Homes from the databank. Then they took him down to the basement, hung him from the steam pipe, and asked him how he came to be so interested.

“You haven’t told me what I want to know.”

“I did,” Monkey says. “I told you all about what Blasingame did. I told you all about Daniels.”

“But you haven’t told me with whom Mr. Daniels is working,” Jones says. “You seemed to indicate that he is a rather stupid man, unlike yourself.

He could not have put this all together the way you did.”

“He works alone.”

“Oh, dear, Monkey.” Jones shakes his head again, then reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls out a pair of surgical gloves, and carefully fits them on. “You are very clever with records, Monkey, and very thorough. You made one tragic error, though, in placing your faith entirely in them. You didn’t realize there are people whose names never appear in records.”

Then he reaches inside his jacket pocket and removes a thin, metallic rod, flicks his wrist, and the telescopic baton slides out to its full, one-foot length. “I believe it’s more or less a commonplace for a person in my situation to say something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Bad luck for you, Monkey. You see, I do want to hurt you.”

He does.

122

Mary Lou Baker goes off on Johnny B.

“Did your boy Steve run the witnesses through the microwave?” she asks Johnny after summoning him to her office.

“What—”

“One of my star witnesses, George Poptanich, otherwise known as ‘Georgie Pop,’ came to see me,” Mary Lou says. “He says Harrington twisted his arm to identify Corey.”

“What, he had an attack of conscience?”

“He had an attack of terror-induced constipation!” Mary Lou yells. “It now seems he’s scared shitless about having maybe fingered the wrong guy. Yeah, he’s going to make a great witness, John—a two-time loser who goes back on his story.”

“You still have Jill Thompson,” Johnny says.

“Burke doesn’t think so,” Mary Lou says. “Burke says she’ll recant. Who interviewed her?”

You or Harrington?”

“Steve did.”

“He gets fucking cute with me,” Mary Lou says, “he’ll take you down with him.”

Johnny nods. About all he can do. Harrington has a reputation for taking the straightest line between two points.

“What about you?” Mary Lou asks. “Did you tune Corey up on the confession?”

It pisses Johnny off. Mary Lou is no fresh-faced kid, but an experienced, many-laps-around-the-pool prosecutor who knows how things work. Knows that all confessions are orchestrated to some extent or another.

“I played nice with him,” Johnny says. “Look at the tape—there are no gaps.”

“I didn’t ask if you hit him. I asked if you tricked him . . . led him in any way.”

Of course I tricked him, Johnny thinks. I grabbed him by the nose and I led him. That’s what we do, Mary Lou. That’s what you pay us for. He didn’t say that, though. What he said was, “The confession will stand up, ML.”

“He’s going back on it.”

“Fuck him. Too late.”

“What about your witness statements?”

“What about them?” Just to buy a little time and pay back some of the annoyance.

“Are they finessed?”

I should hope so, Johnny thought. Finesse is a job requirement. But he says, “Did I show Trevor, Billy, and Dean a crystal ball of what their futures would look like if they didn’t come to Jesus? Sure. Do they have ample motive for throwing Corey under the bus to salvation? You bet. But this describes, what, eighty-five percent of our witness statements in a good year.”

Mary Lou stares at him and taps her pencil on the desk. It’s amazingly annoying. Then she says, “I’m going to cut a deal.”

“Oh, come on, Mary Lou!”

“Don’t give me the hurt, indignant shit!” she yells back. She calms down and says, “It’s for your sake, too, Johnny. Alan threatened to nail you to the cross on the stand.”

“I’m not afraid of Alan Burke.”

“Put your dick back in your pants,” Mary Lou said. “I’m only asking, does he know something I should know?”

“If he does, I don’t know what it would be,” Johnny said.

“You took Blasingame straight to the house, right?” Mary Lou asked.

Johnny heard the implied question. They both knew Steve Harrington’s reputation for tuning suspects up before they sing on tape. But this wasn’t some Mexican from Barrio Logan or a black kid from Golden Hill; this was a rich white boy from La Jolla, and Steve knew better than to mess with that potential lawsuit.

“It was all by the book, Mary Lou.”

She stares at him again and decides he’s telling the truth. Kodani’s reputation is straight-up. “Alan has Daniels working for him on this, doesn’t he?”

“What I hear.”

“Daniels was a good cop,” Mary Lou said. “What happened to him wasn’t right.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You’re surfing buddies or something, aren’t you?”

“Not so much anymore,” Johnny says.

Since Boone went to the Dark Side.

“So I don’t have to worry,” Mary Lou asked, “about leaks coming out of the detective division?”

“I resent that, Mary Lou.”

“Just checking, John,” she said. “Don’t get your back up. There are eyes on you, you know. The powers wouldn’t mind an Asian chief of detectives. The diversity thing. I just don’t want to see you fuck yourself up out of a misguided sense of friendship.”

Johnny knew that a public spectacle, like Burke going Deliverance on him in court, would definitely fuck him up. Add to that the potential of a high-profile murder case involving Dan and Donna Nichols . . . the rest of Johnny’s career is on the line over the next few weeks.

Make those cases, he thinks as he drives over toward The Sundowner and looks for a place to park, and I’m on my way to chief of division. And, admit it, that’s what I want. Do a bad public wipeout on those cases, and the old glass ceiling is going to come down on my yellow skin and slanted eyes like a bad, angry wave, and I will be Sergeant Kodani for the rest of my derailed career.

So he isn’t all that thrilled when his cellie rings and he sees it’s Boone.