Private: #1 Suspect (18 page)

CHAPTER
85

PAUL RICCI, LIMO driver by day, bouncer by night, weighed two hundred pounds, a lot of it muscle. He steamed past the small administration building at the entrance to the parking lot, took a hard left on the sidewalk, and got his speed up on the side street.

Cruz took off after him.

Cruz was smaller but faster and was closing in on Ricci, who was running alongside a high vine-covered fence, heading due north toward Sepulveda Boulevard.

Cruz did not want to end up on the boulevard. A foot chase through eight lanes of traffic was a pileup waiting to happen.

Cruz shouted, “Ricci. Stop,” but Ricci ran out into traffic, showing some good open-field moves as he wove between fast-moving cars.

Horns blared, first at Ricci, then because traffic had slowed. A moment later, Cruz had lost sight of him.

Cruz stood in place for a few seconds, taking in nice deep breaths of diesel fumes, trying to see everything at once. Vehicles of every size and shape obscured his view, and now he was getting mad.

What was wrong with the guy, running like that?

Then Cruz saw Ricci’s shiny head. He was across the road at the base of the staircase leading from Sepulveda up to the Sky Way. There was no place to go once he got to the top, but Ricci was going anyway. Asshole.

Cruz waded out into the roaring traffic, holding up his cop-like badge so that cars would slow for him, calling out, “Ricci, for Christ’s sake.
I’m not a cop
.”

Cruz got across Sepulveda as Ricci was climbing the upper section of the switchback. Ricci turned his head, saw Cruz gaining on him—and lost his footing. He grabbed the handrail too late and went down, giving Cruz the chance he needed to close in.

Cruz took the stairs like Rocky and caught up with Ricci. “Okay?” he asked. “Is this enough running for one day?”

He reached to give the guy a hand up, and Ricci took the help. But as soon as he was on his feet, he swung at Cruz’s jaw. The bouncer was off balance, and Cruz easily ducked the punch, then he returned the favor with a punch of his own.

Cruz’s fist connected beautifully with Ricci’s jaw, and Ricci went down again, this time for the count.

“California light-middleweight champ, 2005,” Cruz shouted to Ricci. “That’s who you’re fighting with.”

Right then, Del Rio drove the Mercedes up the sidewalk to the base of the stairs.

He got out and straightened his jacket.

“The relief column has arrived,” he called out to Cruz.

Del Rio joined Cruz and Ricci on the steps, where a couple of people passed them without making eye contact.

Del Rio said to Ricci, “Listen, douchebag. We don’t care about your life story, okay? Just tell us what we want to know and we’re gone.”

Ricci rubbed his jaw. “You’re not cops?”

Cruz said to Del Rio, “You believe him?” Cruz put out his hand and helped the guy up again. “Listen, Paul. We’re not cops. We don’t want to hurt you or anyone. We paid Karen and Carmelita for information about five murdered johns in the LA area. We didn’t get it.”

“What information? What information?”

The guy was still panicky, and now Cruz was thinking that one of the people walking up to the Sky Way might have called the police.

He said, “Carmelita said a driver named Billy Moufan had told her that one of their drivers was the killer. She said that Billy OD’d. But there’s no such person as Billy Moufan and there never was. The thing she didn’t say is that you drive a limo. Big oversight. Are you ‘Billy Moufan’? Do you know who killed those johns?”

“No, no, no. It wasn’t me. I’ve only had my chauffeur’s license for six months. Let me show you my license. Lookit.”

Del Rio looked.

Ricci said, “If I tell you the guy’s name, we’re done, right? And you gotta keep us out of it. I don’t want Karen or Carmelita to get hurt.”

“That’s the deal. You never told us the name or where to find the guy.”

“Okay,” Ricci said. “Listen, he’s Karen’s first husband. Tyson Keyes. He’s the driver who tipped off Carmelita about the killings. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t want to know.”

Paul Ricci refused a ride back to the lot, so Del Rio and Cruz got into the car and headed downtown to Private.

“Tyson Keyes. Does he
know
who did the killings? Or did he
do
the killings?” Cruz asked Del Rio.

CHAPTER
86

I DIDN’T WANT to have dinner with anyone.

I wanted to tail my brother from his office, see where he went, with whom, what he was up to.

But Jinx was a client, a nice person, and if I had to dine with anyone, she topped the very short list.

I said, “Would an early dinner work for you?”

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.