The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,23

simple place. A small living room with a kitchen area, one bedroom, one bath. All the plank boards painted white. The very cool thing for Boone is that it sits literally right over the water. He can even open a window, stick a pole out, and fish right from his bedroom.

Boone comes in, goes to the fridge for a cold Dos Equis, and sits down at the kitchen table with a fresh notepad, a pen, and the Blasingame file.

The two remaining eyewitness statements are key. Alan Burke can knock some of the sting out of the Rockpile Crew testimony because the other members have something to gain, but two objective eyewitnesses are far more damaging.

Jill Thompson is twenty-one years old, a part-time student at SDSU, and a barista at Starbucks. The night of the killing, she and a friend of hers, Marissa Lopez, had been club-hopping along Garnet Street.

Marissa hooked up with a guy, Jill didn’t.

She was walking west on Garnet when she saw a man walk east and cross the street to the parking lot.

“Then these four guys came out of the alley. They seemed pretty drunk to me. One of them just walked up to the man and hit him. The man fell. The guys got in their car and drove away. I went over to the man. He was unconscious. I used my cell phone to dial 911, but I guess it was too late.”

Simple, straightforward, Boone thinks, and consistent with the other witness statements, as baked as they might be.

Jill Thompson gave the police a detailed, accurate description of Corey and what he was wearing, and later picked him out of a lineup as the man who had punched Kelly Kuhio.

The other witness is George Poptanich, a fifty-four-year-old cabdriver who was parked in the lot that night. It was common for taxis to wait in that lot for their dispatchers to send them to bars to pick up fares too drunk to drive.

Poptanich was sitting in his cab when he heard the Rockpile Crew come out of the alley to his left. He noticed the pedestrian because he thought he might be a possible fare. Then he saw one of the “punks” walk up to the pedestrian “aggressively.” He started to get out to help but there wasn’t time before one of the kids punched the pedestrian in the face. Poptanich yelled at them, but the punks jumped into a car. Poptanich noted the license number, jotted it down in his log, and called 911. Then he went to assist the girl who was with the pedestrian. By this time, people were coming out of the bars.

A police cruiser picked the Rockpile Crew up five minutes later on the PCH, ostensibly on their way to La Jolla.

Poptanich also picked Corey out of the lineup as the kid who threw the punch.

There’s a knock at the door.

Boone opens it.

“You wanna get dinner?” Dave asks.

He has a speargun in his hand.

25

Forty-five minutes later they jump into the water of La Jolla Cove.

Boone has a mask with a lamp, a snorkel, duck fins, and his Ogie speargun, and now he and Dave, similarly equipped, swim out toward underwater caves, the aforementioned “holes” that gave the place, at least in Boone’s mind, its name.

Caves and underwater holes are good, because that’s where the fish are.

The swim feels good, just a little cold and refreshing on a soft night. Most of the year they’d wear wet suits because the deep current runs cold, but it’s still warm enough in August to go with just trunks.

It’s a fine thing to do, night spear fishing, and they owe it all to a group of nonagenarians collectively called the Bottomscratcher’s Club. These were a bunch of WWII vets who had crashed in planes, sank in ships, and survived amphibious assault landings, and came home to San Diego to find that their adrenaline-hyped systems weren’t being sufficiently fed. So they started free diving in the underwater caves of La Jolla Cove.

If the tight caves, heavy surf, and tricky currents weren’t dangerous enough; it’s worthwhile to note that the only creatures that previously hunted under these waters were the great white sharks attracted by the numerous sea lions, their favorite meal, and that a free diver in a wet suit and fins looks an awful lot like a sea lion.

Actually, spear fishing had been against the law in San Diego up until the formation of the Bottomscratcher’s Club, when a lawmaker observed that if any man