The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,63

onto Bodin.”

“As much as the judge will let me.”

“You’d get it in,” Petra says.

“Again—”

“Sorry, but if either Thompson or Poptanich recants—”

Bill leans across the table and stares at Boone. “Can you truthfully say that you are one hundred percent certain that my son didn’t kill that man?”

“No.”

“Then this is crazy,” Bill says. “We have a good deal, we should take it. I’ll make that clear to Corey, and you, Alan, will do the same. Let’s not forget here who’s paying your bill.”

“I know who’s paying my bill,” Alan says, “but I will put the options in front of Corey, accurately and equally, and then he can decide. And Bill, if that means you stop paying my bill, fuck you, and I’ll do it pro bono.”

When Shakespeare wrote that we should kill all the lawyers, Boone thought, he didn’t know Alan Burke.

75

“Boone,” Alan says after Bill slams the door behind him, “you’re giving me whiplash. One second you want the kid strung up, then you jump the case from manslaughter to a hate crime, now you’re saying he’s innocent.”

“I didn’t say he was innocent,” Boone argues. “I said he didn’t throw the punch. If he was part of a gang that assaulted Kelly, he should do time. But he doesn’t deserve the death penalty.”

“Who said anything about the death penalty?”

“Red Eddie.”

“Oh?”

Boone tells them about Eddie’s threats against Corey.

Alan takes this in, then says, “I will present young Mr. Blasingame with his options in an evenhanded way. And if he chooses to go to trial, God help the both of you! But you, Petra, can help both him and yourself by lining up the best causal biomechanics expert in the universe, and you, Boone, had better go back to digging like a dog on crank. It wouldn’t hurt if you found Nazi paraphernalia and KKK robes in Mr. Bodin’s closet, for instance.”

“Right away, Alan.”

“Got it.”

“Thank you,” Alan says.

He leaves the room.

“He certainly seemed in a hurry,” Petra says.

“He’s pissed off.”

“Not Alan,” she says. “Blasingame. He seemed in a terrible hurry to accept a deal that would put his son in prison for ten years.”

“He doesn’t want to roll the dice on a jury,” Boone says. “I get it.”

He does and he doesn’t. If I were in his place, Boone thinks, and someone told me that there was a good chance my kid didn’t do it, I’d leap at that hook. Blasingame couldn’t push it away fast or hard enough.

And on the topic of confessions . . .

“Look,” Boone says, “about the other day—”

“I was completely out of line,” Petra says. “I assumed an intimacy that simply doesn’t exist and—”

“I was an immature, hypersensitive jerk.”

“Yes, all right.”

“So you’re busy tonight?” Boone asks.

“I have that thing,” Petra says. “But I should be free and clear by . . . tennish.”

“Tennish.”

“Around ten.”

“No, I knew what you meant,” Boone says. “I just . . . yeah. Ten . . . around tennish. Should I call you?”

“Or just come over.”

“To your place,” Boone says.

“Well, yes,” says Petra. “Not to the restaurant, I meant.”

“No.”

To her place, Boone thinks.

To close the deal?

76

“Either there is a deal in place or there is not,” Cruz Iglesias snaps.

Iglesias is in an ugly mood, cooped up in the modest house in Point Loma, on the run from Ortega’s assassination squads and the American police. He’s bored, edgy, and irritated that his business is not being conducted the way he expects.

“It just might take a little longer than . . .”

“No, we’re done.”

“I really think . . .”

“I don’t care what you think anymore,” Iglesias says. “We’ve tried your way. We’ll do it my way now.”

Iglesias snaps the phone shut. He doesn’t want to hear any more excuses or any further pleas for more time. He’s given these gueros ample opportunity to work out their problems, he’s been more than generous. He has tried to act like a gentleman, and expected that they would do the same, but it just hasn’t happened.

At the end of the day it’s about money. Gentlemen or no gentlemen, these yanqui buffoons are messing with his money, a lot of it, and that is something that he simply cannot tolerate.

He yells for Santiago to come out of the kitchen. His lieutenant is whipping up his deservedly famous albondigas, and it smells wonderful, but Iglesias has more urgent business than homemade cuisine.

“You look ridiculous in that apron,” he says when Santiago comes in.

“This is a new shirt,” Santiago protests. “Three hundred dollars, Fashion Valley. I don’t want to get it