Private: #1 Suspect (23 page)

CHAPTER
107

A MESSAGE FROM Justine was waiting for me when I got home.

“Jack. I want to stay at Private. That’s a definite yes. Also, if I was rude the other night, I’m sorry. I’m still feeling…bruised. See you tomorrow.”

I listened to the message a couple more times, strained it for subtext, listened for hidden meanings. All I got for sure was that Justine was staying at Private.

Was there still a chance we could reconcile?

Or were we done for good?

I heard her saying
There is no “us,” Jack. I’m not sure there ever was.

I had showered and changed into jeans and a polo shirt when the intercom buzzed. I went to my new security system and checked the gate monitor.

Jinx was there with a tray in her hand, silver covers over the food.

She was right on time.

I buzzed her in, and when she came to the door, I took the tray and put it on the hall table.

Her face was sunny and beautiful, and her glasses were cute, the lenses a girly shade of pink. She was wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt.

Same color blue as her eyes.

Same color blue as the shirt I was wearing.

She said, “Hey, look at you.”

I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d rather look at you.”

“Okay,” she said.

We laughed and I wrapped her in my arms, gave her a long hug.

As I hugged her, she told me what she’d brought for dinner, heirloom tomato salad and crab cakes with mango salsa. She was excited, talking very fast.

I had already had dinner at Cody’s farewell banquet, but Jinx didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to hear it from me.

“I made the salsa myself,” she said, still holding on to me. “Specialty of the house.”

“I have a bottle of Pinot Grigio on ice.”

“I hoped you would,” she said, grinning up at me. She had a very pretty smile.

I got the wine and we took dinner out to the deck, settled into chairs, took a few breaths, and relaxed.

We toasted the setting sun as it did a fan dance with a bank of fat gray clouds. It was all special: the view, the salsa, the wine, and Jinx, who was turning out to be very good company.

She kicked off her sandals, hugged her knees, and asked me to tell her more about myself, something that wasn’t on my corporate bio.

I could give a pretty good tour of my life using the map of scars on my body, but no. Not right now. I was thinking of a football story, something funny, when a musical ringtone came from the living room. Jinx’s phone.

She said, “I’m not answering that.”

“Good.”

When her phone rang the second time, it broke the mood for real. I closed the sliding glass doors, but we could still hear the phone when it called out again.

Jinx said, “It might be…Let me just get it. I’ll be right back.”

I stared out at the surf as Jinx opened the doors. I liked Jinx, was enjoying whatever this was, a date or just getting to know her.

I thought about telling her that I could make her cell phone disappear, that I could demonstrate my famous forward pass and send it into the ocean.

I thought she would laugh.

But then I heard her say in the next room, “Please. Just tell me.” And then, “Oh, no. No. I’ll be right there. Don’t touch anything.”

Jinx returned to the deck, a look of panic on her face.

“Someone else was killed in my hotel, Jack. Another man is dead.”

CHAPTER
108

I STOOD WITH Jinx just outside the Fellini Room on the second floor at the front of the hotel. It wasn’t the best location or the priciest room, but there was easy access by way of the stairs from the lobby.

The distraught young guy standing with us in the hallway was the manager, “Mr. Knowles.” His face was red, his lower lip quivered, and his eyes were swollen.

I looked beyond him into the room and saw a murder scene horrifying enough to shake up a kid with a degree in hotel management. It shook me up too, and I’d been through a war.

A man lay dead, half on the bed, half on the floor. A homemade wire garrote with two wooden handles had been pulled so hard around his neck an artery had been severed. The victim’s blood had splashed onto the unmade bed before he died.

“That’s Mr. Albert Singh,” said Knowles. “He checked in at one a.m. Had the ‘Do Not Disturb’ light on all day. He didn’t put any charges on his bill.”

Mr. Singh looked to be in his twenties, was wearing briefs and a white T-shirt. He had a wedding band on the ring finger of his outstretched hand.

“Ms. Poole, I said I’d wait for you,” Knowles was saying to Jinx, “and now you’re here. I’ve had enough, Ms. Poole. Here are my keys and my pass. I’ll send back my uniform, but I have to go home—”

I touched his arm, interrupting his exit speech.

“Mr. Knowles. I’m Jack Morgan, Private Investigations. I work for Ms. Poole. Talk to me for a minute. Tell me what happened.”

His voice was a screech. “Like I know? Housekeeping knocked on the door. There was no answer. The housekeeper came in and saw
this
.”

Old hotels, even those renovated in high style, weren’t designed with modern security in mind. If the killer was running true to form, he’d ducked the cameras. It might actually be impossible to secure this hotel and still keep it open for business.

If Mr. Singh was like the five other men killed in this manner, my theory was that he had hired a hooker. Sometime after she’d left, he’d let the killer into his room. Maybe a limo driver pretending that he was a hotel engineer investigating a leak, or hotel security. Most guests would let the guy in.

The LAPD was working the case, and we hadn’t gotten in their way. But we hadn’t helped them either. We had an unproven theory.

That was pretty much all we had.

Like Knowles, I felt like calling it quits. I was sorry I had taken the job. Sorry I had let Jinx down.

“Jinx, we have to call the police,” I said.

She had her fist to her mouth. I wasn’t sure she even heard me. I took out my cell phone and called it in.

Then I called Del Rio.

“I was just calling
you,
” he said. “We’ve got breaking news on the hotel john killer. Come quick. We need you to talk to someone, Jack. Someone who needs convincing.”

CHAPTER
109

I HAD A clear view of the hotel’s entrance through the windows of the late Albert Singh’s room. Cops streamed into the Sun’s driveway, and sirens wailed as more sped up South Santa Monica Boulevard.

I put my hands on Jinx’s shoulders and made eye contact with her. I said, “I’ll call you as soon as I can. You’re going to be all right.”

I didn’t want to leave her, but Del Rio said he needed me urgently. I had to go.

I left the hotel by the rear exit, got my car out of the lot, and drove to Fifth Street. I found Del Rio and Cruz in a garbage-strewn alley called Werdin Place. A half block from King Eddy’s, Werdin ran between buildings and served as a parking place for owners of the businesses on the block. The shops were closed for the night, and Werdin was deserted.

Cruz greeted me at the top of the alley. Behind him, Del Rio held his gun on a forty-ish black man who was sitting on the ground, his fingers interlaced behind his neck. He was in what we called “Private custody.”

Del Rio said, “Jack, I’d like you to meet Mr. Tyson Keyes.”

Keyes didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on the heap of trash bags ten feet away.

Del Rio had filed a report after he’d talked to the bouncer from Havana. The bouncer had told Del Rio that Keyes was a felon of the violent kind and that he knew the name of the hotel john killer.

Del Rio said, “Mr. Morgan, Mr. Keyes doesn’t want to talk to us. I told him if he didn’t tell us who killed those johns, I would blow his head off, but that corporate policy dictates I get your permission first.”

I stooped down to Keyes’s level. “Mr. Keyes,” I said, “no one will call in shots coming from this location. You know that. And here’s something you don’t know. Mr. Del Rio has nothing to lose. He has cancer. He’ll be dead before he ever sees jail again.”

I looked past Cruz’s startled expression, said, “It’s metastasized, isn’t that right, Rick?”

“Right you are, Jack. I’ve made peace with my maker. I’m ready to go at any time.”

Keyes said, “That’s what you want? The
name
of who killed those johns? I thought you wanted me to say
I
did it. Yo, I
want
you to get that crazy bitch off the street.”

“Wait,” I said. “A woman killed those johns?”

“You deaf, man?” Keyes asked me. “Yeah, she’s a she, all right. I was banging her while my old lady was in prison. I thought we had something going, but she doesn’t like men, yo. She fuckin’
hates
them.

“One night, I was sleeping, she put a
coat hanger
around my neck. I put my gun in her ear. Told her she had to the count of three to get the hell out of my life. Then I heard one of her tricks died by a wire. See, I picked Candy up from the Seaview the night that trick was killed, yo. She called me up without going through her service. She used me as her wheelman, you hear me? That’s not right.”

“What’s Candy’s full name?” Del Rio said.

“You let me go if I tell you?”

Del Rio lowered his gun.

“Carmelita Gomez. She works at that Cuban club from ten to four, so, like, she can still squeeze in a few tricks on the side—”

Cruz leaned in so that his eyes were only inches from Keyes’s face.

“Where can we find Ms. Gomez now?”

CHAPTER
110

CRUZ AND DEL RIO were in the car in front of me, forcing me to keep to a sane speed as we headed north into the Valley.

I dictated case notes into a recorder as I drove.

I described the scene at the Sun and brought the Poole case file up to date.

The facts, as we knew them, were starting to make sense.

Karen Ricci, the woman in the wheelchair who had tipped Cruz off, was an escort service call booker. She’d told Cruz that a limo driver knew who had killed the hotel johns, and that she’d gotten that information from her friend, a former escort and current coat checker, Carmelita Gomez.

Cruz had interviewed Gomez and she’d given him false information.

Now we had a lead from Ricci’s first husband, Tyson Keyes. Keyes had picked Gomez up from her date with Arthur Valentine, the john who had been killed at the Seaview hotel last year.

If Carmelita Gomez was the hotel john killer, it was clear that she had easy access.

Twenty minutes after leaving Keyes, we found Gomez’s name on a mailbox on Stagg Street, in front of one of the tan-colored stucco houses in a cookie-cutter development of middle-class homes.

Gomez’s house was set back from the street, centered on a small mat of a yard. A driveway curved in from Stagg, coursed along the fence on the west side of the lot, and ended at a garage in the backyard.

Cruz and Del Rio pulled the fleet car into the mouth of the driveway, and I parked across the street.

I got out of my car and joined Cruz at Gomez’s front door, while Del Rio headed toward the back. With our guns drawn, Cruz and I flanked the doorway.

Cruz rang the bell, and in a moment the porch light came on.

Cruz said, “Carmelita, it’s Emilio Cruz. From the other night.”

There was no response, so Cruz tried again. “Look through the peephole, Carmelita. You know I’m not a cop.
No seas tonto.
Don’t make me kick the door in.”

A car started up at the back of the house. I saw headlights. Everything happened very fast after that.

CHAPTER
111

ONE SECOND, RICK was walking toward the back door.

The next, he’d flattened himself against a stockade fence so he wouldn’t get creamed by an old red Chevy Impala that tore across the lawn and passed the car Cruz had parked in the driveway.

Cruz leaped from the front steps and both he and Del Rio ran toward the fleet car. Gomez seemed to have gone from zero to almost sixty in no seconds flat, but I saw her face as the Impala shot past me and made a hard right turn on two wheels.

Gomez didn’t look afraid. She looked determined.

Del Rio yelled to me, “Should I call the cops?”

I shouted, “Yes.”

I got into my car, made a U-turn, and followed Cruz and Del Rio east on Stagg, a narrow road, not a speedway.

Gomez was out in front and gaining ground, driving through the residential development as if she were both drunk and crazy. She took out a mailbox, sideswiped a couple of parked cars, and ran a stop sign.

She took another two-wheel turn, this time a sharp left onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, scraping the side of an SUV that was headed north in her lane of traffic.

I got onto the boulevard in time to see the red car rocket ahead in the inside lane. Horns blared. The Impala weaved—left, right, back to the inside lane. Cars swerved. Hubcaps rolled across the road. Cruz and Del Rio drafted right behind the Impala but couldn’t pass.

Gomez wasn’t just running, she was escaping like a wildfire was burning up the street.

Sirens blared as we flew through the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Strathern Street, an area cluttered with minimall shops: a liquor mart, a flower shop, a 76 station, fast-food joints.

Then the road flattened into a straightaway that ran between two- and three-story commercial buildings on both sides.

Del Rio’s call to 911 and Gomez’s outlaw run had brought out the cruisers, and when Carmelita Gomez turned, six squad cars were screaming behind us. The sounds of others were in the distance.

Gomez didn’t slow, stop, or falter.

In fact, the more cars pursuing her, the faster and crazier she drove.

CHAPTER
112

CRUZ WAS DRIVING the fleet car, Rick in the seat beside him, Jack’s blue Lamborghini filling the rearview mirror. Ahead of them, Carmelita Gomez was sending all of their speedometer needles into the red. Cruz kept his foot on the gas, staying close, aware that if Gomez braked or plowed into another car, he couldn’t stop in time.

The woman was guilty of something, for sure.

Cruz tried to get his mind around what Tyson Keyes had said about her, and he was picturing that cute but snooty woman in a whole different way.

He flashed on her standing near the wardrobe at Havana, wearing that tight pink dress, not looking at him the way women usually looked at him. At all.

He remembered her later, sitting next to him in the car, finally giving up a guy she said was her driver, Billy Moufan, saying that Moufan knew the killer’s identity.

But there was no Billy Moufan. Anywhere.

Tyson Keyes had been her lover
and
her driver. And he had said Gomez was a man-hater who had sex with men for a living. How twisted was that?

A car horn blew loud and long as the speeding caravan forced a Caddy tight up against the median strip.

Del Rio said, “Pay attention, Emilio.”

“Pay attention? I’m driving in a straight line. It’s too fast, man? You want me to pull over and you drive? That’s okay with me. I want to piss my pants, you hear me?”

The Impala made a sudden screaming right onto Neenach, and Cruz followed, Jack tight behind them.

Neenach was residential, a lot like the street where Gomez lived, two lines of facing single-story stucco homes fronted by low walls or small gardens, a few trees sprouting up between the houses and the asphalt.

Cruz didn’t want to take his eyes off the road long enough to check the speed, but his gut told him they were going ninety down Neenach, flying toward the intersection at Haddon.

But Gomez didn’t take the turn at Haddon.

There was a sound wall up ahead where Neenach Street dead-ended at the freeway. Gomez wasn’t stopping. She sped into the cul-de-sac, a dead end with a semicircle of houses, maybe six of them, facing the high cement wall that separated them from the freeway.

Cruz slammed on the brakes.

So did Jack and the four cruisers behind him. Cars spun and jackknifed, ran up on lawns and into parked cars. Rubber burned. There was the grating sound of metal compacting as cars slammed into garbage cans and walls.

Cruz saw the Impala leap forward in stop action. The car seemed to pause in the air, then fold up as it collided with the wall. Cruz had his hand on his door handle before his car stopped, and then he was out and running.

Rick and Jack were also running toward the crash, but Rick was yelling at Jack, “Jack, stop. That car is going to blow.”

Jack shouted back over the noise,
“I have to know if she’s alive,”
and kept running toward the crushed red metal that had been Carmelita Gomez’s car.