Private: #1 Suspect (21 page)

JUSTINE TRIED TO see everything at once as she entered the Crystal Ballroom.

It was a sumptuous place, a grande dame of a room; round, pale, decorated in an art deco style, looking much as it had when the hotel was built in 1931.

Justine did a visual check of the exits, the walls of silk-draped windows, the tall French doors leading out to the Crystal Garden. And she checked out the tables under the magnificent chandelier.

There were celebrities at every place: movie stars both young and old, fashion designers, and talk show hosts. Piper’s parents were near the stage, and Danny’s people were at a table in the center of the room. Larry Schuster was there, and Alan Barstow, as well as Danny’s entourage and their dates and wives.

If she and Nora didn’t screw this up, Danny Whitman could be out of jail tonight.

Across the room was a large stage, the wall behind it forming a backdrop for a Piper Winnick slide show. Still shots from Piper’s films and endearing candid photos from her childhood flashed by. Four-foot-tall vases of white roses flanked the stage, and there were candles everywhere.

Mervin Koulos stood behind the podium at center stage.

He looked impressive today: a six-foot-tall, perfectly groomed Hollywood producer of a shattered picture with an untraditional, non-Hollywood ending.

One of his stars was dead. The other star was in jail. And he’d figured that this disaster would be his salvation.

Justine walked along the left-hand wall toward the steps to the stage. Nora Cronin advanced on the stage from the other side of the room.

Meanwhile, Merv Koulos was telling a story about Piper, and he was having a hard time getting his words out.

He said, “I’ll never forget when Piper was cast in the role of Gia in
Shades of Green.
She said to me, ‘Merv, it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to work with Danny Whitman.’

“Lifelong dream,” he choked, his voice cracking. “Imagine that. She was just sixteen.”

Justine and Nora had both reached the stage, but Koulos saw only Justine, who had walked right up to the podium and touched his arm.

Koulos started. He looked bewildered.

He put his hand over the microphone and said, “Dr. Smith. What is this?”

Justine said, “Merv, I want you to say this into the mic. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been called away. It’s an emergency.’”

Koulos kept his hand over the mic and whispered, “Whatever the hell you think you’re doing, it can wait. If you didn’t notice, I’m giving a
eulogy
.”

“Merv. Look to your left. See that woman in the blue blazer, waggling her fingers at you? That’s Lieutenant Cronin. Homicide. She needs to speak with you, urgently.”

Koulos scowled. The buzzing of conversation rose up from the tables. Koulos spoke into the microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. and Mrs. Winnick, I’m very sorry for the interruption. This is some kind of prank, and it’s in very poor taste. Will someone please call security?”

Nora crossed the stage. She had her badge in her hand and three uniformed officers following her as she came toward Koulos. She said, “Mr. Koulos, please put your hands behind your back.”

“Are you crazy?” Koulos peered out into the audience. “I need help here. Alan? Give me a hand, will you?”

All conversation died—then Koulos panicked.

He broke away from the podium, knocking the microphone to the floor. He ran toward the stage door, but the cops were quicker and they brought him down, pulling back his arms for Nora, who clapped on the handcuffs.

The fallen microphone carried Koulos’s desperate cries for help and Nora Cronin’s response.

“Mervin Koulos, you’re under arrest for the murder of Piper Winnick.”

Now the audience panicked too. Women screamed. Chairs went over.

Koulos yelled at Nora over the recitation of the Miranda warnings. “So much hell is going to rain down on you. You’ll be a meter maid by the time I’m done with you. If you’re that lucky.”

Justine watched the cops drag Koulos to his feet. Then she turned away and walked down the stage steps, her job done.

As she moved toward the exit, she thought about greed: how Koulos had lived too large, had borrowed too much, had put every penny into this film starring Danny Whitman, a guy too damaged to bring it off.

But Koulos had an insurance policy on the film in the form of a completion bond worth a hundred million dollars.

He wouldn’t be collecting that money now.

Jack was waiting for her near the door. He put his hand to her waist and walked her out.

“Well played,” Jack said to Justine. “Well played and well done.”

IT WAS EIGHT P.M.

I was standing just inside Private’s front entrance, saying good night to my friend and attorney Eric Caine. He hadn’t said so directly, but he had let me know that without new evidence, my defense in the case of
California v. Jack Morgan
was looking bad.

As I closed the door, a storm came up out of the blue. Rain slashed against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the building and haloed the headlights of the traffic streaming along Figueroa.

Caine ran to his car, and I headed up the winding staircase to my office, where I planned to put in another four or five hours of work on my own behalf.

As I climbed the quarter-turn span between the third and fourth floors, I saw Justine coming down.

She was still wearing the black dress she had worn to Piper Winnick’s memorial service, and seeing her sent a jolt to my heart, as it did every time.

I said, “Hey.”

Justine returned the hey and kept going down the stairs. I stopped and said, “Justine, did you eat? Let’s go out and celebrate your Koulos bust—”

“No, thanks anyway, Jack. I’m wiped out. I can’t wait to get home.”

“Are you sure linguini marinara and some good wine wouldn’t beat being home alone? I need to talk to you.”

“Not tonight, Jack. Ask Cody to fit me into your schedule tomorrow.”

She started to pass me on the stairs, and I didn’t like it. She wasn’t tired so much as she didn’t want to deal with me. As though I were a guy standing behind her in line at Starbucks, breathing down her neck and yakking into his phone at the same time.

I said, “Then spare me a couple of minutes now. Are you going to take that job offer? I have to know.”

Justine sighed, shifted her weight, adjusted the strap on her shoulder bag.

“They’re matching my compensation plus fifteen percent.”

“So you’ve made your decision?”

“I like Private. I like my job.”

“Stay, Justine. I’ll match their offer and more.”

“Thanks. Let me think about it overnight.”

“You’re mad at me, Justine. I understand. But will you please talk to me? I want to talk about…us.”

Justine gave me the subzero look that I remembered well from fights we’d had when we lived together.

“There is no ‘us,’” Jack,” she snapped, “and I’m not sure there ever was. But I still give a damn. So as your friend, I want to say don’t ever take your eyes off Tommy.”

After the memorial service, I’d tailed Tommy’s car from his office to his house, watched him tinker with a sprinkler and then go inside for his home-cooked meal.

His phone was tapped, his car was bugged, and right now, Mo-bot was monitoring the live feed from the “spy eyes” I’d personally trained on his home.

I said, “Short of implanting a device in his skull, there’s not much more I can do.”

“Tommy hit on me again, Jack. I don’t take him seriously, but you should.”

Again?

Tommy had hit on Justine
again?

I felt a knife slide into my gut. Not just because Tommy was still trying to beat me at girls, but because Justine had filed the edge of this news so that it would really cut deep.

I said, “Did you go out with him?”

“When you were in prison. Strictly business. At least it was for me.”

“Nice one, Justine. Thanks for keeping me in the loop.”

Justine said, “See you tomorrow,” then she took the outside rail and walked past me.

I stood on the staircase until I could no longer hear the sound of her heels striking metal treads.

Point taken, Justine.

Parting shot duly noted.

I DRANK DOWN a Red Bull in the break room while I waited for coffee to brew. I thought of a few comebacks for Justine—mostly why she should forgive my completely unpremeditated good-bye tryst with Colleen.

I’m human. I’m sorry. I couldn’t possibly be more sorry.

Why couldn’t she forgive me?

I went to my office, booted up my laptop, opened files in the “Colleen” folder, and revisited facts that Colleen had never told me.

Item: Right out of high school, Colleen had married a man named Kevin Molloy. The marriage was annulled six months later, but Colleen had kept her married name. In the year that Colleen and I had dated, she’d never mentioned an ex-husband, not once.

Had Molloy followed her to LA?

Did he still love her?

Item: A businessman named Sean McGough had paid Colleen’s way to the USA in 2009. McGough was still in Dublin, had not left Ireland in three years. Who was McGough to Colleen? And why had she also failed to mention him?

Item: Mike Donahue. Colleen had said he was like an uncle to her. As with Molloy and McGough, I had put Donahue’s life through an electronic sieve. Donahue had gotten his American citizenship in 2002. He’d gotten two DUIs in LA and another in Seattle, where he was supporting a boy of seven. He hadn’t married the child’s mother.

If Donahue had wanted to kill Colleen, it would have been easy. She’d trusted him. Still, I had never gotten any sense that he’d had a romance with her, that he’d been jealous of her feelings for me, that he was anything other than an avuncular man with an Irish pub that Colleen had frequented when she’d lived in Los Feliz. A dead end.

Another folder.

I had collected all of the personal e-mails between Colleen and me going back to the day I first kissed her. I went time-traveling for a while, got lost reading her words and mine, remembering the growing romance at the office, all the love we had made in her rose-covered cottage.

And I remembered Donahue calling me. “Come to the hospital, quickly.” Seeing Colleen with bloody gauze around her wrists. Knowing what she’d done to herself after I’d told her it was over.

I got up, paced the hallway, made more coffee, stared out onto Figueroa. The rain had moved on. I went back to my desk and clicked on the video folder.

I’d seen all of the videos stored there, except for the one Mo-bot had shot while Tandy and Ziegler were perp-walking me out to the car at the curb.

Now I forced myself to play the video and look at myself from Mo-bot’s second-story point of view.

There I was, just ripped from the Private Worldwide meeting, stumbling between Tandy and Ziegler in the blinding sunshine. The media had been shouting questions and I’d kept my eyes down.

I watched every frame—and I saw something I hadn’t seen that day. Correction. I saw some
one
. Clay Harris.

Clay Harris was a Morgan family hand-me-down, not exactly harmless, almost a Morgan family curse.

It couldn’t be happenstance.

Harris lived in Santa Clarita, twenty miles out of town, yet there he was, standing behind the media surge with a very good view of me.

Why was Harris lurking in front of Private the moment I was taken in for Colleen’s murder? He was smiling, and I thought I knew why.

EMILIO CRUZ DIDN’T like it.

This was what was called a “bad job.” Like if a middleweight found himself mixing it up on the street with a heavyweight. The best the smaller guy could hope for was not to get killed.

Cruz understood that Jack had to do this job for Noccia. The guy was lethal. He was vindictive. He killed people. And he got away with murder.

Not only was Cruz doing this for Jack, he was doing it for his partner.

Rick was over forty. He was stiff. He was slow. He was going to have to scale walls. In the dark.

Scotty picked up some of the slack for Del Rio. He could do one-armed cartwheels and run like a cheetah. But Scotty was a former motorcycle cop. He’d never gone outside the law like this, and doing a job for a mobster was against everything that had made Scotty a good cop.

Right now, while Rick cruised around looking for a parking spot, Scotty was sitting behind Cruz, jouncing his knee, sending shocks through the front seat.

Cruz said again, “Rick, we should go in through the back wall. I don’t like the roof. At all.”

Del Rio said patiently, “We know what Scotty scoped out. If we go through the wall, we don’t know what we’re going to find. Could be heavy crap stored against it. We could hit pipes.”

Now Del Rio was swearing because Boyd Street, where they’d parked before, was locked in. Not an empty space on either side of the block.

Cruz said, “Ricky, I’m telling you. I don’t like this.”

Del Rio said, “There.”

And he parked in a “No Parking Anytime” driveway that maybe wouldn’t attract the attention of a random drive-by cop at this time of night. Maybe.

Before the car had come to a stop, Scotty was out the back door. He crossed the street in his black duds, his ski mask in hand. When he crossed Artemus, he ducked into the shadow of the pottery’s outside staircase and, as he’d done before, rattled a window until he set off the alarm.

The alarm screamed out over a couple of square blocks, and Cruz knew that it also alerted the techs at Bosco Security Systems’ control center through the phone line.

The same people who had manned the phones twenty-four hours ago were very likely on duty now. They’d received three false alarms from this address, and team Del Rio was counting on Bosco to tell the building’s owner and the cops that the alarm indicated a system failure, not a break-in.

The Private investigators waited for a police response that didn’t come.

Fifteen minutes later, under the pale light of a new moon, Cruz, Scotty, and Del Rio crossed Anderson and proceeded into the narrow gap between the Red Cat Pottery and the auto parts building next door.

Employing a rock-climbing maneuver called “bridging,” they inched up the brick crevasse between the buildings.

Two cars hissed past on slick pavement as the Private guys slowly ascended to the Red Cat Pottery’s roof.