Private Vegas: (Private 9)

by Patterson, James

  To the left of the pool was another Bali-inspired pavilion. I knew that the view through the back of the structure was the broad cityscape of Los Angeles far below. But the front doors were closed.

  “Can I bring anything to you?” the young man asked. He was polished and confident, but he watched my expression with the kind of intensity found in people for whom pleasing or displeasing was the difference between life and death.

  I told him, “Several people who work for me will be arriving. Can you just send them back here?”

  I gave him the names and thanked him. Then I circumnavigated the pool. I knocked on a wooden door that was as thick as a tree, and when there was no answer, I called Hal on his phone. After four rings, he picked up.

  “Are you inside the pool house, Hal?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Jack Morgan. I believe you rang. I’m right outside, Hal. Now open the door.”

  Chapter 49

  HAL OPENED THE door, said, “What took you so long?”

  His thick, white hair was sticking out at wild angles. His eyes were red. His belly was hanging over the sash of his maroon silk robe.

  He wasn’t normally a drunk, but right now, his breath was so saturated with alcohol, I could almost see the fumes.

  I stepped into the pool house, said, “Stay out of my way for a couple of minutes, okay, Hal? I’m going to look at this place like a cop would look at it.”

  “Want something? I’m drinking scotch.”

  “I need to work fast, Hal. Sit down somewhere.”

  The so-called pool house would be most people’s idea of a palace. It was built along the same general theme as the main house: the stone floors, the vaulted mahogany-and-bamboo ceiling. The wide-open, freaking fantastic view of the city way the hell down there, making it seem like the pool house was in the clouds.

  There were a couple of lounge chairs facing the canyon’s cliff side, a table between them, a baby watermelon cut into slices. There was also a pricey bottle of scotch, two glasses, a crystal ice bucket.

  I went toward the changing room, careful not to touch any evidence, and stopped cold in the doorway.

  The late Mrs. Harold Archer was lying faceup on the soft, blood-soaked carpet. She was wearing a small bikini, pale blue, pulled up over her breasts, covered with blood. She had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly.

  I couldn’t count the number of wounds, but they looked like they’d been delivered in a moment of high passion and fury.

  Tule’s left hand was flung out to her side. There was a gigantic diamond ring on her ring finger, and there was a kitchen knife six or seven inches away from her chest. The knife, her hand, her body, the white carpet, the cream-colored walls—everything was spattered, splashed, and sprayed with blood.

  A man’s bathing suit and a boxy printed shirt were flung over the arm of a chair. The clothes were so bloody I couldn’t tell the color of the fabric.

  Beyond the body, bloody footsteps led to the bathroom.

  I followed the prints to the doorway and stood outside the room. I could see everything in this uncluttered space. Red footprints led to a shower stall with a lot of heads, a marble floor, and a glass wall facing the view. Bloody water was still pooled around the drain, and large handprints were on the marble, the soap, the shampoo bottle, and the glass.

  Hal had cleaned up, put on his robe, and called me.

  I saw the one knife that had been used to cut the melon and murder Tule Archer. And nothing else that could have been used as a weapon.

  Hal was going to have a tough time proving self-defense.

  Chapter 50

  I’D BEEN INSIDE the pool house for only a couple of minutes, and in another two or three, I was going to be obstructing justice. It wasn’t going to take a forensic genius to figure out what had happened here, but I wanted Sci to see the scene anyway.

  I left the changing room the way I found it, went back out to the larger room, where Hal had draped his large sloppy self in a lounge chair and was looking at the view. The sun was going down leaving a bloody swath of sky.

  I came up behind him and said, “Hal, tell me what happened.”

  He spoke without turning. I had to strain to understand his slurred speech.

  “She said she was thinking about my heart. That she visualized it before she went to sleep every night. That she could see all the arteries and where they went into the valves and she could see the scars where the arteries were stitched into place.”

  He turned to look up at me over his shoulder.

  “You see what she was doing, Zhack?

  “She said she was picking at the scars every night, pulling the tissue loose. She was going to pull out the arteries with her mind. She could do it. She was a wicked girl.”

  He rubbed his chest with the hand that wasn’t holding the tumbler of alcohol.

  “She was harassing you, you’re saying? She was trying to frighten you to death.”

  “That’s it. She was trying to kill me, one night at a time. And she was going to do it, Jack. And that’s why I had to put her down.”

  There was still time for Sci to get here, same for Cruz. But what the hell could any of us do? I’d rarely seen a crime so open-and-shut, but still, I was amazed that a big, rich, powerful man like Archer had resorted to killing an unarmed and helpless woman.

  I took out my phone. I have Chief Mickey Fescoe on speed dial. I punched the number.

  Hal suddenly became alert. “Who are you calling?”

  “Friend of mine. Chief of police.”

  “Nooooo,” Hal shouted.

  He stood up, grabbed the chair for balance, and dropped his glass. “No, no, no. Make this mess go away. That’s what I hired you to do.”

  Hal flailed out to grab me, but I stepped out of his reach, said into my phone, “Mickey, I need you to send some people to sixty-five forty-seven Donovan Drive. Hal Archer’s place. Go to the pool house in the back. Yep. We’ve got a dead body. I’ll be here.”

  Chapter 51

  I OPENED THE pool house door for four cops I didn’t know.

  Hal Archer was sitting in the lounge chair again, staring out over the canyon. He had made himself a fresh scotch, and I thought there was a good chance he would pass out.

  There was an equally good chance he would launch himself over the cliff, so I kept an eye on him as the detectives did a walk-through.

  Detective Sergeant Joan Feeney introduced herself and her partner, Detective Phillips, told me that she and Chief Mickey Fescoe were old friends. Meaning, on this case she was reporting directly to him. As Feeney’s partner went into the next room, she took out her notebook and asked me to tell her what I knew.

  I told Feeney that Hal Archer was a client, that Private Investigations was contracted to do security checks on his executive staff and whatever else Archer and his family needed in the way of surveillance and security.

  Feeney asked, “And what brought you here today, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Mr. Archer called to tell me that his wife was trying to kill him. He wanted me to evaluate her. Tell him if I thought he was in danger. He asked me to talk to her, reason with her if I could.”

  “I see. You came out to reason with her.”

  She wrote it down.

  “A half hour after he first called me, I called him back and then he told me that his wife was dead,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Feeney. “As I understand it, the DB in the next room is the wife that was allegedly threatening to kill Mr. Archer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And did your client say that he killed her?”

  “He just said that she was dead.”

  Lying to the police was obstruction, and I was breaking the law on behalf of my client. But I had turned Archer in; I didn’t feel that I needed to put him on death row.

  Feeney asked, “Did you disturb the scene in any way, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Not at all. I looked. I saw. I phoned Mick.”

  F
eeney’s partner, Detective Phillips, was saying to Hal, “Did you kill your wife, Mr. Archer?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I do know you’re blocking my view.”

  Phillips said, “Stand up, Mr. Archer. Put your hands behind your back.”

  Feeney took my phone number, closed her notebook. She looked in at the victim, called Chief Fescoe, and gave a report. Hal said to the cop, contempt oozing with every word, “I’m not standing until I feel like it. Lift a hand to me and I will sue you personally and then I’ll sue all these cops.”

  Detective Phillips lifted him by his elbows until he was standing, and Feeney pulled Hal’s right arm behind his back, did the same with the other arm, locked the cuffs around his wrists. Hal screamed, “You’re going to be sorry. You wait.”

  Feeney read him his rights and Hal shouted over her.

  “No, you don’t. Jack. Tell this rookie bitch—”

  I caught up with Hal, stayed right with him as he was pushed and hoisted through the house and along the marble walk to the curb.

  I told him, “Cooperate, Hal. Do what the police say, but don’t talk about anything that happened here.”

  “You fickle prick.”

  “Shut up, Hal. I’m calling your attorney now. You’ll be neck-deep in lawyers within the hour.”

  Hal was looking at me like he was a pet dog that had bitten the neighbor’s child and was now being dragged to the dog catcher’s van. It was as if he just didn’t understand what he’d done. He showed no remorse for stabbing his wife to death.

  I stood on the sidewalk and watched the cops stuff a bellowing Hal Archer into the backseat of the squad car. It was true that he’d soon be surrounded by a wall of his own lawyers.

  But I didn’t think there was a law firm in the world that could save Hal Archer from spending the rest of his life in an eight-by-six-foot cage.

  Chapter 52

  AN HOUR AFTER leaving Hal’s Balinese-style estate, I cruised past scorched earth outside my house, stopped to key open my front gates, then parked my loaner inside the garage.

  Security lights threw a hard glare on all the corners of my property, and once inside the house, I searched room by room, turning on lamps and overheads, hoping to find that no one had gone through the place, taken anything, touched my surveillance system, or shot a friend in my bed.

  The premises were clear. Well, Colleen’s sad ghost was there, as always. But there were no living souls.

  I went to the kitchen, flipped on the TV, and watched the news while I put fruit, ice, and rum into the blender.

  The anchorman was talking about the recent series of car bombs and so I tuned in to the report about the nineteen-year-old woman who’d been burned alive only yards from the front door of her parents’ house.

  Maeve Wilkinson, deceased, had a role on a popular sitcom and was regarded as a bright light with a big future. The screen behind the TV reporter flashed shots of Maeve on set and in a club, and then showed a close-up of the burned wreck of a car.

  I’d already seen what remained of the car after a fire so intense that it was impossible for the ME to remove Maeve Wilkinson’s body without it crumbling to ash.

  The anchor turned the story over to the reporter on the scene who was one of dozens of journalists trying to get quotes from the bereaved parents.

  Corinne and Lionel Wilkinson were in their forties, and they looked like people who, until yesterday, had had everything in the world to live for. Lionel went to the microphone, said that he was offering a substantial six-figure reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever had killed his daughter.

  Then he broke down. His knees buckled, and a man who looked to be a family friend caught him. His weeping wife grabbed him too. As reporters shouted questions and moved toward the Wilkinsons, their friends became roadblocks, and the victim’s parents disappeared behind the gates of their home.

  Seeing them in the harshest light on the worst day of their lives, knowing that they would never recover from their daughter’s unthinkable, horrific, and utterly senseless death, tore at my guts.

  I switched off the tube. I no longer had any doubt. The car fires weren’t personal; they were crimes of opportunity. My car, the Wilkinsons’ car, had both been sitting out in the open. I’d bet anything that the others had been left in similar circumstances.

  I called Eric Caine and after he assured me that Rick’s trial was going as well as could be expected, I went back to making daiquiris. Much later, I would realize that my phone had vibrated while I was running the Cuisinart. I wish that I had heard it and answered the call.

  Chapter 53

  MY FRIEND AND former client Jinx Poole had dropped by for drinks. We lounged in chairs facing the ocean, the frosty pitcher of strawberry daiquiris on the teak table between us, a soft breeze blowing through our hair.

  Jinx wore a strapless yellow dress, espadrilles, and a choker of diamonds. Hers is a swirly and girlie style, but Jinx is a hard-core businesswoman who rebuilt a low-rent hotel with a settlement from her dead husband’s estate. After that, she had turned three other slummy hotels into five-star gems, each more profitable than the last.

  Although when I met Jinx, she was in a bad way.

  Traveling businessmen had been murdered in hotels around town and up the coast, and Jinx’s hotels had gotten more than their share of dead white-collar guests.

  Jinx had been frightened and angry, and she hired Private to protect her clients and her hard-won reputation. Cruz, Del Rio, and I worked the case, and Jinx and I became close. Not skintight, but good friends, anyway. There had been some electricity between us too, but we’d left it unplugged.

  In the past couple of days, Jinx had helped me locate Gozan Remari and Khezir Mazul by digging into her insider’s database and connecting with her hotelier network. It was Jinx who’d told me that the Sumaris had checked into Shutters, and thanks to her, I knew they were still there.

  Currently, we were catching up, talking about Rick’s trial, about the Sumaris, and the tragedy of Maeve Wilkinson’s death. And I told her about Hal Archer but without mentioning his name.

  “He’s a big, ballsy entrepreneur,” I said. “And given the vast number of people he has intimidated in his life, I don’t understand how a twenty-two-year-old woman could have provoked him into stabbing her to death with a kitchen knife.”

  “Did he do a background check on her?”

  “Not through us. She was a cocktail waitress. He met her in a casino. Fell for her. Prenupped her and married her in a drive-through chapel a week later. I’m having her checked out now, postmortem.”

  Jinx stood up, undid a hook at the back of her dress, and let the dress drop to the deck in a pale yellow cloud. She was wearing a little bikini underneath her clothes, bright pink against her porcelain skin.

  I was breathing a little heavily when she resumed her position on the chaise. I poured her another drink, topped off my own, and let the sound of the ocean fill in the sudden gap in the conversation.

  I remembered a time when we were having dinner together, sitting close in a booth at a nice restaurant. We were fudging the line a little between client meeting and date. Jinx had had a few tequila cocktails and said she wanted to tell me how she’d become who she was. She thought I should really know.

  Her story was shocking then, and it all came back to me now.

  Jinx had been working a summer job as a waitress at a country club when she met a wealthy man with a grand and engaging personality. She’d married him at age nineteen, despite her parents’ protests, and learned later that they’d been right to protest.

  Jinx’s husband was a drinker and an all-round wife abuser. She got the last word, and twenty years later, she still blamed herself for her husband’s death.

  She wasn’t entirely wrong to do so.

  “The person you meet isn’t necessarily the person you get,” she said now. Her voice was soft, maybe nostalgic. Maybe regretful.


  “Apparently your client didn’t know the cocktail waitress very well. And she didn’t know who her husband was either.”

  Chapter 54

  JINX SAID, “WELL, are we going for a swim or not?”

  She was walking down the steps at the shallow end of the pool in her tiny, shiny bikini and I was going inside to change when I heard my name. Justine was coming through the glass doors to the deck, still wearing work clothes: dark suit and heels.

  “Justine?”

  “I didn’t know where to park my car,” she said. “I left it out front, hoping for the best.”

  She laughed.

  I blinked at her and she kissed me, kept going out to the pool deck, still talking.

  “You left your iPad in my car,” she said. “I called you, Jack, but no answer, so I thought I’d run over with it.”

  She was taking the tablet out of her purse when her peripheral vision caught the shapely blonde in my pool.

  I read the shock and then the hurt in Justine’s face, and she read the reflexive guilt in mine.

  “Oh,” she said, looking away from me. “Hi, Jinx. It’s been a long time…”

  Jinx said, “How’ve you been?” and Justine said, “Fine, thanks,” but they were speaking like actors in a British comedy of manners, no one saying what they meant.

  Justine turned back to me, her eyes as hard as gun barrels. She said, “I see this isn’t a good time. I’ll let myself out.”

  I said, “No, no, join us, Justine.”

  She said, “See ya,” shoved the tablet into my hand, then went back through the open sliding doors. I called out, “Justine. Wait,” but she didn’t and she was moving fast.