The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,86

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.

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The San Diego County Building Permits office sits on a very nondescript street in a nondescript suburban neighborhood in North County, and is generally known not by its name but by its location.

“Ruffin Road.”

Ruffin Road is limbo. Building plans have been held up for years by the bureaucrats at Ruffin Road, or just been lost, misplaced, or misfiled, never to be seen again. Contractors will explain interminable delays by simply saying, “I’ve been at Ruffin Road,” or “It’s held up at Ruffin Road,” and those excuses will be accepted.

San Diegans have opined that Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Holy Grail are all to be found at Ruffin Road, if only you could get a clerk to search, and the more waggish insist that Osama bin Laden is not hiding in Tora Bora or Waziristan, but is safely filed as “vin Laden, Osama” somewhere in the bowels of Ruffin Road.

Ruffin Road makes the DMV look like the drive-through window at In-N-Out Burger. Anyone who has ever built a new home, remodeled an old one, or rebuilt after a fire or landslide pronounces “Ruffin Road” in the same hushed tone that was once used for the Bridge of Sighs, the Tower of London, the Inquisition.

“I have to go to Ruffin Road” is a statement met with sympathy not unmixed with relief that it’s the other guy, not you.

Burly roofing contractors—hard-drinking brawlers who work the highest buildings with a scornful laugh—stand trembling before the counter at Ruffin Road, metaphorical hat in hand, waiting hopefully, plaintively, for an inspector to give their plans, literally, the stamp of approval. Desperate homeowners on their fifth or sixth try to get that addition approved stand in tortured suspense as one of the bureaucratic Torquemadas pores over the latest version of their proposed plans.

It is to this dire place that Boone repairs to get the names of the contractors who built the homes that now sit at the bottom of the La Jolla sinkhole. He goes up to the inaptly named “Reception Counter,” where a middle-aged woman, her hair dyed a color not found in nature, her glasses actually hanging from her neck on a beaded chain, sits on guard.

“Shirley.”

“Oh, God, what the cat dragged in?”

“How’s your daughter, Shirley?”

“Out again,” Shirley says. “Third time.”

“Is a charm,” Boone answers.

“Your lips, God’s ears,” Shirley says. “Anyway, thanks for what you did.”

Elise had a meth problem and missed a court date, to boot. Shirley called Boone to try to find her before the bail bondsman or police could take her into jail. Boone did and took her to the hospital so at least she could detox in a bed instead of a cell, and the judge ended up suspending sentence and allowing her to go directly into rehab.

“No worries. Is Monkey in?”

“Where else would he be?”

Nowhere, Boone thinks, it was a rhetorical question. Monkey Monroe ran the records room of Ruffin Road