Private: #1 Suspect

by James Patterson; Maxine Paetro

  She said early would be fine, and I guessed that if we met at six, I could be watching Tommy’s house by eight.

  I drove to the Red O, just opened in 2010 by award-winning chef Rick Bayless. The place was visually dramatic, starting with the huge wooden doors that led from Melrose into a glass-covered courtyard.

  Inside was a blend of design and architecture evoking South Beach and a hot resort town in Mexico. There was a communal table up front, hand-wrought chandeliers overhead, a curving glass tequila display tunnel, and huge pots of palms everywhere.

  I’d read that the Mexican nouvelle cuisine here was incredible even in a town noted for its Mexican food. At six, I could smell the spicy chocolate aroma of mole and I realized I was hungry for a really good meal.

  Jinx was waiting for me in one of the small eating spaces tucked into an alcove off the main room. The ottomans, couches, and deep chairs were all covered in black leather. As much as I liked the decor, though, Jinx was the real attraction.

  We kissed cheeks, ordered drinks, and as soon as the waiter brought the tequila cocktails, Jinx said, “Tell me something good, Jack. I’m counting sheep at night, and last night I got into the hundreds of thousands.”

  I smiled.

  She said, “I mean it. Two hundred thousand.”

  I smiled again and we both laughed.

  It had been almost a week since I’d taken on Jinx Poole as a client, and Cruz and Del Rio had put a lot of time on her tab.

  “I think we’re getting somewhere,” I said to Jinx.

  The waiter took our order, and when he left, I told Jinx about Cruz’s night at Havana and about Del Rio and Cruz confronting a limo driver under the Sky Way earlier today.

  “We have a pretty good idea how to find this Tyson Keyes. If he knows who killed the johns, we’re going to find out.”

  “Why were Karen Ricci and Carmelita Gomez holding back his name?”

  “Ricci was afraid of him,” I told her. “Apparently Keyes is abusive. I don’t know why women marry men like that. And I don’t understand why they stay with them.”

  “My husband was abusive,” Jinx told me. “It’s complicated. I’ve been wanting to tell you about it.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Jinx sipped her drink. She had said she wanted to tell me, but I could see from her expression that it wasn’t an easy story to relate. I sat next to her and waited her out.

  “I killed him,” she said. “I want you to know that I killed my husband.”

  CHAPTER 87

  NOTHING ABOUT JINX Poole said “killer” to me. She was smart, cool, a respected businesswoman, and her admission sounded literally, factually, unbelievable.

  Yet I believed her.

  Still, I was just about shocked out of my shoes—and I didn’t hide it.

  “Jinx, you can’t tell me that you committed a felony. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a priest. I can be subpoenaed. Forced to testify.”

  “I don’t even understand why I want to tell you,” Jinx said to me. “But I feel I must. I want you to know about my husband’s death from me.”

  I didn’t like this setup. I hardly knew Jinx Poole. Why was she confiding in me? The question jumped into my mind for the first time: Did she have something to do with the hotel murders?

  “My husband was Clark Langston,” she said. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “He owned some TV stations in the nineties?”

  “Yes, that was him.”

  Despite my warning, Jinx began to tell me her story. She described meeting Clark Langston twenty years before, during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Berkeley. She was waiting tables at the Lodge at Pebble Beach.

  “Clark had a boat, a plane, vacation homes in Napa, Austin, and Chamonix. He was so charming, like George Clooney, maybe. Rich and handsome and funny—and he always had friends around him. He was magnetic, you know what I mean? I was a kid. And I fell for him, Jack. I fell very hard.”

  Jinx kind of lit up as she described what she had thought was only a fantastic summer romance. Then Langston told her that his divorce had gone through. He proposed, offered her a big diamond ring and a big life to go with it.

  “I married him that September,” Jinx said. “My parents told me to wait, but I was nineteen. I thought I knew everything. I knew nothing. I left school and became Mrs. Clark Langston and got all that came with that.”

  Jinx stopped talking. She swallowed, made a few halting starts. She was having trouble going on, but after a moment, she did.

  “A few months into our marriage, he started putting me down in public, flirting with other women, telling me to fetch things for him. Actually, it was worse when we were alone. He drank every day. Until he was stupefied.

  “I had never known a real drinker, Jack, and Clark was an angry drunk, a violent drunk. He’d wrench my arms behind my back, shove me against a wall, and rape me. Soon the only kind of sex we had was rape. That’s how he liked it.

  “One time, he had his hands around my throat, had me bent back over the sink and was screaming in my face about how worthless I was. There was a knife on the drainboard, and suddenly it was in my hand, pointed at his back—I didn’t realize that I had grabbed it. It was the first time murder actually occurred to me.”

  “Did you tell anyone about him? What he was doing?”

  “No. You didn’t do that in his circle, and I no longer had a circle of my own. No one would have believed me anyway. And sometimes, this is the crazy part, I saw the man I loved—and I still loved him. Imagine that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this, Jinx. It’s a bad story.”

  The waiter brought our meal, asked if we needed anything else. I told him we were fine, but my appetite was gone.

  Jinx said to me, “When we’d been married for about two years, we went to a wedding far off the beaten track, if there’s ever been a track to Willow Creek Golf and Country Club.

  “Clark was in his element. He gave a toast and he also gave the new couple a car as a wedding gift.

  “When the bride danced with Clark, I saw embarrassment and fear on her face. I’d worn that look myself. Hell, I’m wearing it now. I realized that the bride had also been victimized by my husband, but she’d been luckier. She’d gotten away.

  “We were driving home when Clark got lost. We had a GPS, one of the first, but I didn’t know how to work it, and Clark was crazy hammered, taking hard turns at high speeds, driving up on the shoulder of the road. It was at the end of the day in a remote rural area.

  “Clark said, ‘Get out the map, Fluffy. Can’t you do anything?’ I got the map out of the glove box and started to read him the directions back to the freeway—and that gave him a big idea. He told me to give him the directions in the electronic voice of the GPS. To do an imitation.”

  I nodded, told Jinx to go on.

  “There was a sign for Whiskeytown Lake. Clark said, ‘Whiskeytown. Sounds like my kind of place.’ I started talking like the GPS. ‘Turn right. In one. Mile. Turn right. In one half. Mile.’”

  Jinx turned to me, looking small and young and vulnerable.

  “I’ve never told this much of the story to anyone before. I’m sorry, Jack. I think I’ve made a mistake.”

  I thought she had made a mistake, but now I was with her on that twisting road and I couldn’t see around the corner.

  Had Jinx stabbed her husband?

  Had she strangled him with a wire garrote?

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re safe with me.”

  That was when I realized that my point of view had shifted.

  I wanted to hear Jinx’s story.

  And I wanted her to be okay.

  CHAPTER 88

  JINX LOOKED HAUNTED as she told me about Clark Langston’s life and death, still afraid of her dead husband. Maybe she still loved him too.

  “We were on a dirt road that circled the lake,” she said. “Boaters were packing up their gear. The road turned into a rut, overgrown with
grass and weeds, and in every way deserted.

  “I was still doing my GPS voice,” Jinx continued. She smiled, but it was a nervous smile. “This laughable pretense of control over my husband was inspiring me, Jack. We were now locked in a crazy game of chicken. And he was goading me, saying, ‘You think I don’t know what you’re up to?’

  “I don’t know how he knew it, but an idea had occurred to me—that maybe I could get him to crash his Maserati. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to die, and if I died too, it was all right.

  “I said, ‘Take the next left.’ That was the road to the national recreation area.”

  I sat back in my seat and watched her face. I imagined this power struggle twenty years before, the tyrannical older man and his bride who fantasized about getting even. Emotionally, Jinx was still back there.

  “It was still light enough to see,” she said to me. “I told him to take the next turn, which was onto a boat ramp. He did it, and we took the ramp going forty.

  “I lost my nerve. I screamed, but Clark was having a high time scaring me, making me sorry that I’d dared him. He laughed at me, Jack. He pressed his foot down even harder on the gas.”

  “Did he realize where he was?”

  “I’ll never know. He might have thought he could stop the car in time and misjudged the distance. Maybe he thought that his quarter-million-dollar car would fly. All I know for sure is that he never braked.

  “I undid my seat belt,” Jinx told me. Her head was lowered. She was rushing now, trying to get the story over with.

  “I had the door open, and I jumped before the car hit the water. I went numb for a while after that. I heard nothing, saw nothing, thought only of reaching the shore, which wasn’t far away.

  “I didn’t look back. I walked for a while, got a ride, told the police that my husband had lost control of his car.

  “When they pulled the car out of the lake, Clark was still wearing his seat belt. His blood alcohol was three times the legal limit, and his death was ruled accidental. No questions.

  “I went to the funeral. I cried. Then I moved to LA. I took back my maiden name, and I got my degree.”

  “You bought a hotel.”

  Jinx said, “Yes. Right after I graduated. I bought a hotel with the two million dollars stipulated in my prenuptial agreement. I borrowed a lot more. I renovated the whole place, reopened it as the Beverly Hills Sun, and then I bought the other two. I was in a frenzy. I needed to work, to prove to myself that my life was worth something. That I didn’t need Clark’s love—or his disdain.

  “Jack, what I did at Whiskeytown Lake—I wanted him to die, then I made my wish come true.”

  She had started to tear up, but she wouldn’t let herself go. She said, “I’ve been feeling that the killings in my hotels are payback for Clark’s death, for the money I got from him.”

  “Jinx, did you make your husband a drunk, an abuser, a rapist? Did you make him drive off that ramp?”

  I was continuing in this vein, but she stopped me. She put her hand on my chest. She was struggling to get something out.

  “I’m afraid…to trust myself again…to be with a man.”

  She was leaning against me.

  “I feel like I want to hold you,” I said.

  She looked up at me, her eyes full of tears. “I need to be held.”

  I took her into my arms, and at last she cried.

  I hadn’t expected to feel close to her. I didn’t even welcome the feeling, but it was undeniable. I liked Jinx a lot.

  CHAPTER 89

  IT WAS JUST after midnight. Except for a plastic bag blowing around the street and the odd car lost in the wrong neighborhood, absolutely nothing was happening on Anderson and Artemus.

  The Private fleet car was a gray 2007 Chevy sedan, parked on Anderson, just south of Artemus, where the guys had a view of the entrance to the Red Cat Pottery, as well as the loading docks on Artemus.

  Del Rio was at the wheel, Cruz riding shotgun, Scotty in the backseat. Everyone was very quiet.

  Cruz said, “Call Jack.”

  Del Rio got Jack on the line and told him where they were. They exchanged thoughts on how to steal a fortune in illegal pharmaceuticals on behalf of the Vegas Mob without getting caught, without getting thrown in the clink for twenty years, with no help from Carmine Noccia.

  Del Rio said, “It’s getting late, Jack. That Oxy is going to leave the warehouse one box at a time. In another few weeks there’s going to be an empty van in there and Noccia is going to break heads. He’s going to start with yours.”

  Jack gave Del Rio the go-ahead, and Del Rio hung up.

  Cruz started the car and drove to Boyd, a dead-end street parallel to Artemus, where he found a space among the delivery trucks and panel vans parked all along the length of it, both sides of the street walled in by cement-block warehouses colorfully tagged with spray-painted graffiti.

  Del Rio twisted around in his seat. “Scotty. You’re up. Let’s rock ’n’ roll.”

  Scotty took a slug off his water bottle and said, “I’m liking the window below the stairs.”

  “Make it quick,” Del Rio said.

  Scotty pulled on a pair of work gloves, turned the dome light to the “off” position, and opened the back door.

  Del Rio said, “Wait a second.”

  When the taxi had passed on Anderson, Del Rio told Scotty to go. Scotty was wearing black from neck to toe and was almost invisible except for the shine coming off his blond hair. Del Rio and Cruz watched as he reached the top of the alley and crossed the street, still in view of the Chevy.

  Then Scotty disappeared.

  A half minute after that, an alarm shrieked, and seconds later, the back door of the car opened and Scotty got in, saying, “Did you time me?”

  Cruz laughed. “You were quick, yo. Like in those films where they stop time and the one guy runs between all those frozen people, you know?”

  Del Rio said, “Let’s see how fast the cops answer the call.”

  Four minutes later, the first sirens came up South Anderson and stopped out of sight. From the proximity of the squawking car radios, Del Rio figured they were outside the roll-up gates at the loading dock.

  The three investigators ducked down in their seats, Del Rio assuring himself that so far no crime had been committed. Scotty had only rattled a window until the alarm went off. They waited for more cars to arrive, but only the two cruisers showed up.

  When the cops had left, Del Rio and his team did the same thing: set off the alarm, then waited for the cops to come and leave again. Then they did it once more.

  CHAPTER 90

  JUSTINE WOKE UP to a racket.

  Rocky was going nuts and bananas, barking, his toenails clacking as he got traction on the hardwood floors in his scramble toward the front door.

  Justine looked at the clock. It was just before seven.

  What the hell was this? In between Rocky’s barks, she heard her doorbell ringing insistently.

  She threw a robe on over her silk PJs and walked to the foyer, thinking it had to be Jack. Who else would dare? She peeked through the peephole, then opened the door to Danny’s manager, Larry Schuster.

  His clothes were rumpled, his patchy beard was coming in—in sum, he looked like he’d slept in his car.

  “I’m sorry about the time, Dr. Smith. I have to talk to you.”

  “Call me Justine. Did something happen to Danny?”

  “No, he’s still in the hospital. I was driving around all night. I finally came to a decision.”

  “Here’s an idea, Larry. I’ll be at the office at nine. Why don’t you meet me there?”

  “This will only take a few minutes. Please. It’s important. I can’t take a chance that someone sees me and thinks I told you what I know.”

  “You’ll never eat lunch in this town again?”

  Schuster smiled. “Exactly.”

  Justine told Schuster to come in. She led him to the kitchen, asked him to make coffee an
d to take a seat at the counter. She went to her bedroom and reappeared a few minutes later, dressed for work.

  Justine took a carton of milk out of the fridge, then poured coffee into mugs.

  “Sugar?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Justine put the sugar bowl next to the milk. She fed her cat and her dog and told Schuster to start talking.

  “There were other girls.”

  “There were other girls what?”

  “Besides Katie Blackwell, three other girls in the past year threatened to sue Danny for unwanted, um, sexual contact.”

  “Shit,” Justine said. “You should have told me this before I took the case, Larry. This is a contract breaker, as if we didn’t already have enough reason to tell you and Danny good luck without us.”

  “Please don’t do that,” Larry said.

  “I was a shrink in a mental hospital, did you know that?”

  “Yes. That place in Santa Monica. Crossroads.”

  “That’s right. So I know a thing or two about mental disorders. But the way Danny keeps fooling me makes me think he’s delusional. He believes his own stories.”

  “No, he’s telling the truth. He was loyal to Piper. He didn’t have sex with those girls.”

  “Then who did? This crap about someone else running his life could possibly get Danny some kind of insanity deal, but I wouldn’t count on it. You should prepare yourself. Danny is looking at prison for a very long time.”

  “He didn’t molest those girls and he didn’t murder Piper either.”

  “Larry, unless you say, ‘I know he didn’t do it, because I killed her,’ I’m not going to believe you.”

  Schuster said nothing. He just stared at her.

  “Did you kill Piper, Larry?”

  “No. No. I’m sorry. I was just thinking whether it’s all right for me to tell you what I think—”

  “Tell me, damn it. Or get the hell out of here and don’t ever call me again.”

  “Alan Barstow.”

  “Do not make me drag this out of you.”

  “Alan Barstow paid off those other girls. And he tried to pay off Katie Blackwell. Alan stands to make many, many millions on Danny and will do whatever it takes to keep him as a client.”