Private: #1 Suspect (17 page)

CHAPTER
80

JUSTINE HAD JUST opened her front door when her phone rang. She hit the light switch in the foyer. Rocky barked, ran to her, and threw himself against her thighs.

She tousled his ears, tossed the car keys onto the console, and checked the caller ID on her phone. It was Danny’s manager, Larry Schuster.

What did he want now? Was this another threat to sue?

She was still shaking from the sickening events of the past few hours: the dead teenage movie star, the threats from Mervin Koulos, and the pitiful arrest of Danny Whitman, who’d kicked and screamed until three cops managed to stuff him into the cruiser.

Justine said hello into the phone.

“Do you still work for us?” Schuster asked.

“You’re kidding, Larry. Danny broke our contract when he drove away from the set—”

“He drove away from the set, but he’s innocent of everything else.”

“Larry, I’m sorry for Danny and sorry for you, but we’re out of this. It’s time you got lawyers involved.”

“Just talk to him. Let him tell you what’s going on.”

“Larry, he’s told me. He feels like someone else is running his life, but as I understand it, no one told him to run off with Piper Winnick this morning—and now she’s dead.”

“They’re seeing each other. They’re
involved
. They went to sleep and when he woke up, she was gone. He didn’t push her off that cliff. He went looking for her and he found her down there.”

“Maybe the studio’s lawyers are good enough to settle the rape case, Larry, but if Danny were my client, I’d get the best criminal-defense attorney in California. There should be a dozen five-star cannons who would love to defend Danny Whitman. Geragos, Tacopina—”

“I’m at the medical services building at Twin Towers,” Schuster said. “The police left Danny alone for a minute and he took a head-first run at the wall in the interrogation room.”

“Are you
kidding?
How badly is he hurt?”

“It’s a pretty good concussion. He’s depressed. He was in love with Piper. Do you understand?”

“I
don’t
understand, Larry. What do you want from me?”

“You’re a shrink. And Danny trusts you. He asked me to get you, and I said I would try.”

“I’m a shrink, but I’m not
Danny’s
shrink.”

“I told the cops that you
are
so that I could get you in to see him. Will you just talk to him? Maybe you can make some sense of this, Dr. Smith, because I know Danny very well. I’ve seen him every day for the last four years, and I’m telling you, Danny didn’t kill anybody.”

Justine was exhausted, stressed out, sleep deprived, and now she was conflicted too.

Should she go see Danny because he was still her client and he had asked for her?

Or should she wait until she’d spoken to Jack and Private’s lawyer, Eric Caine?

Nefertiti rubbed against her.

Justine bent to pet her cat.

Everything about Danny Whitman was bothering her. Was he a psychopath? Was that why neither she nor Larry Schuster had seen Danny’s potential for violence? Or was he a lamb, as innocent as Schuster said?

For her own peace of mind, she had to know.

“Dr. Smith?” Schuster said.

“I’m here.”

It was an hour’s drive to Twin Towers in traffic. Getting past the bureaucracy at TTCF could take all day, and she still might not get to see Danny.

“I’m being paged,” said Schuster. “I’ve left your name at the main gate.”

CHAPTER
81

IN THE FOUR hours since Justine had last seen Danny Whitman, he’d been transferred from Lost Hills, the best jail in the state, to TTCF.

He was now in the Twin Towers medical services building, which was packed to the walls with prisoners, many of them mentally unbalanced.

She’d worked in places like this one. They were never good.

After being patted down again and sent through a metal detector again, Justine stood in the doorway and looked around.

The rectangular room had armed guards on both sides of the door, bars in the small high windows, fresh industrial-green paint on the walls, and a pervasive, almost punishing odor of disinfectant.

She located Danny in one of the hospital beds, two down from the glass-enclosed nursing station. He had two black eyes, wore a paper robe and a gauze turban, and he was handcuffed to the bed rails.

Justine had been told that she had fifteen minutes with Danny, no physical contact permitted, and that if she broke that rule, her meeting with Danny would be terminated immediately.

Danny looked up when she came toward him. He appeared happier to see her than she had expected. She hardly knew him. What did he think she could do for him?

Justine pulled a plastic chair up to the side of the bed. “We don’t have much time, Danny. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Piper and I were in love, but we couldn’t tell anyone because of her age, and listen, the paparazzi—”

“I’m sorry, Danny. The short version, okay?”

Justine was assessing him. Did he comprehend? Was he lucid? Was he truthful? Was he living in this time and place or in a world of his own creation?

“Yesterday morning when we were setting up in the Ferrari, Piper said to me, ‘Too bad we can’t just get out of here,’ and I was thinking with my heart. We’d never spent the night together.…It was a great opportunity.…I drove to the cabin I bought last year under a fake name. Oh, God. If I’d used my brain, she’d still be alive.”

He was crying again.

“Danny. In twelve minutes, I’ll be thrown out of here, so please talk to me. Did you have a fight with Piper?”

“Oh, no. We had a wonderful day. We partied until we both passed out in bed. I woke up—maybe something woke me up. Piper wasn’t there.”

“Then what happened?”

Danny dried his face with the sleeve of his gown and went on.

“I went out to look for Piper. It was totally dark outside, but I saw a car parked next to the Ferrari. It was right in the flower bed. No car should have been there. Then I saw a flashlight moving through the trees, and I started walking up the trail and calling Piper.

“All of a sudden, the light disappeared. I heard the car start up behind me, and I thought maybe Piper was having regrets, that she had called for someone to pick her up. But then…I found her shoe at the edge of the drop. I thought, ‘No, she can’t be down there,’ but when I looked over the edge…I knew there was nothing I could do for her. I called you. I called everyone.”

The guard came toward Danny’s bed and said, “Time’s up.”

Danny looked directly into Justine’s eyes. “I swear to you, Dr. Smith, I didn’t do that to Piper. You have to believe me. Someone is doing something to me. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know who’s doing it. But that car I saw at my cabin? Whoever owns it is the one who killed Piper.”

CHAPTER
82

CARMINE NOCCIA’S FATHER was a thug; so was mine. Carmine and I had both gone to Ivy League schools, we’d both served in the Corps, and both our fathers had given us the keys to the family business.

Beyond that, Carmine Noccia and I had nothing in common.

Carmine was a third-generation killer, never caught, never even charged. The FBI had him on their watch list, but they had no evidence to support their certain knowledge that he’d had three people murdered.

There’d been no fingerprints. No smoking guns. No surveillance tape.

Snitches had been killed before testifying.

Carmine’s father, the don, was ready to retire, and Carmine was rumored to be stepping into his job—and more. According to the stories, the Noccia family was expanding east in the coming year, from their Vegas hub to Chicago.

It was unprecedented in Mob history for a satellite organization to return to its roots, but Noccia had brass and his father had raised him to accomplish big things.

The hijacked van stuffed with thirty million in pharmaceuticals had been the first major move in Carmine’s expansion plan, and now that same van was standing in his way. And because six months ago I’d reached out to Carmine to protect my brother from a lesson he might not have lived to regret, I was in bed with a mobster. On a first-name basis.

Noccia called me at around three in the morning. He didn’t say hello. He said that his distributors, having paid for the drugs, were very
unhappy
.

He’d made this point to me before.

I said, “We’re on the job, Carmine. I didn’t need the wake-up call.”

“We don’t have clocks around here,” he said.

Another way of saying that my time was his time.

I brought Noccia up to date on the plan going forward, and he hung up without saying good-bye.

I fell back to sleep.

I was running after Colleen, trying to tell her that I was sorry, but she wouldn’t stop running away from me. The phone rang again.

This time my caller was my good friend Lieutenant Mitchell Tandy.

“I’m in the neighborhood, Jack. I’d be happy to stop by if there’s anything you’d like to tell me.”

“I told you, Mitch. I didn’t do it.”

Tandy laughed pleasantly and hung up.

By the time Justine phoned to report on Danny Whitman’s arrest on suspicion of murder, I was wide awake.

CHAPTER
83

I CHECKED OUT of the Sun and drove to work, keeping the car to ten miles below the speed limit. Tandy tailed me to Figueroa Street, gave me a two-blast salute from his horn when I turned into the underground garage below my office building.

Mitchell Tandy was a hyena.

I walked into my office at half past seven, caught Justine’s second call that morning. She told me that Danny Whitman was in the hospital at TTCF.

I cringed just thinking about that place. It was like an ice-cold hand gripping the back of my neck: a bad feeling, and it was impossible to shake off.

“What do you think, Jack?” Justine said. “Should we cut Danny loose? Or should I work with him and his cast of sidekicks until I know whether or not he killed Piper Winnick?”

“Sounds to me like you think he’s innocent.”

“I’m leaning that way. He thinks someone is screwing with his head. Gaslighting him. Who would do that? What would they get out of it?”

Justine was the heroine of lost causes. When she got it wrong, she’d say, “Princess Do-Good strikes again.” But her instincts
were
good. The worst you could say about Justine was that she put in too much time on her cases and got too emotionally involved.

That said, if she could prove Whitman innocent, that would be a point for Private. A point we needed.

“It’s your call,” I said.

I got into Cruz’s report on his interviews at a Cuban club in Hollywood, and when Val Kenney came in at eight, I asked her to break down the report and flag items for follow-up.

While Cody and Val worked outside my office, I put some time in on
California v. Jack Morgan,
found out a couple of things about Colleen Molloy that she hadn’t told me. I was digging into that when Val came in. “I’ve got something on the woman Cruz met with last night,” she said.

“Carmelita Gomez?”

“Karen Ricci. The woman in the wheelchair.”

“Go on.”

“Before she was Karen Ricci, she was Karen Keyes. She did a five-year stretch at the women’s jail for extortion. There was a riot and she got clubbed. That’s how she ended up in the wheelchair. She’s out early for good behavior.”

Val was putting her time with the Miami PD to good use. I was about to tell her to follow up on Ricci, but she wasn’t done yet.

“I’ve got something else, Jack. The story Carmelita Gomez told Cruz isn’t right. She said that a driver named Billy Moufan tipped her off.”

“He was Gomez’s driver, right?”

“That’s what she said. She told Cruz that after her john was killed at the Seaview, her driver, Billy Moufan, told her that a limo driver might have done it, that this same limo driver may have killed the john at the Moon.

“But no one named Billy or William Moufan has ever been issued a chauffeur’s license in California. I can’t find that name in any database, no matter how I spell it.”

“So you’re saying she lied to Cruz.”

Val said, “At best, she was concealing the name of the driver who tipped her off.”

I asked Val to brief Cruz, then Cody buzzed me, saying Jinx Poole was on line one.

I took the call.

Jinx said, “Can you have dinner with me, tonight, Jack? It’s important.”

CHAPTER
84

AT ONE-FIFTEEN in the afternoon, Del Rio and Cruz were parked inside the big lot under the shadow of the 96th Street bridge. The lot was a mile and a half from LAX, bounded by the eight-lane Sepulveda Boulevard and a loop of the Sky Way. Limos, taxis, and other commercial transport continually streamed in and queued up under alphabetical signs, waiting to enter the airport.

They were watching one guy in particular, Paul Ricci, a bouncer from Havana, married to the tipster in the wheelchair. Ricci was shooting the bull with three other drivers.

Ricci glanced at the Private fleet car, then opened the door to his own car and got a sandwich out of a cooler. He called out to one of the other drivers, “Baxter. You got any Grey Poupon?”

Baxter laughed, said, “I’ll give you a little brown poop-on. How’s that?”

Watching this from inside the Mercedes, Cruz said to Del Rio, “That’s him. Ricci is the one in the cheap suit and the chauffeur’s hat.”

Del Rio put on his jacket, said to Cruz, “Can you see my gun under this?”

Cruz said, “You look like you’re packing even when you’re sleeping.”

Del Rio said, “That’s good, because I want Ricci to freeze in place. I don’t want to chase the guy. I kinda twisted my foot when I was rock climbing.”

Cruz said, “Aww. Face it, Rick, you’re getting old.”

Del Rio told Cruz that he wasn’t old and that he could still beat the crap outta anyone his size.

“You don’t have to do that, Rick. I’ll protect you,” said Cruz.

Del Rio gave Cruz an evil look.

Cruz laughed, tightened the band on his ponytail. When it was the way he liked it, he said, “Ready, pardner?”

Together, Cruz and Del Rio walked over to where the four men were standing under the D sign.

Two of them, including Paul Ricci, were limo drivers. The other two wore uniforms of “The Air Shuttle Guys.” The shuttle guys were fat, no problem. But the limo driver standing next to Ricci was ripped and young. Looked like he’d done some time.

Cruz said, “Paul Ricci?”

All conversation stopped.

Ricci puffed himself up. “I’m Ricci. Wha’chu want?”

Cruz said, “Don’t you remember me?”

He opened his jacket and showed the guy his gun, the one he’d had to give up outside the club.

Ricci looked at the gun, pivoted, and, his hat flying off his shaven head, took off toward the exit at a fast run.

Cruz shouted, “We just want to
talk
to you.”

The guy ran pretty fast.

“Shit,” said Del Rio.