Private Vegas (19 page)

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.”

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.

I shot a glance at Jinx, said, “I’ll be right back.” Then I went after Justine, who swept through the house and out the front door like a gust of wind through my heart.

But when she stopped at the gatepost to punch in her code, I caught up with her.

“Sweetheart, Jinx is just a friend. Nothing is going on. Come back. Have a drink.”

“No, thanks, Jack. I only came by to drop off your thing, the iPad. And I’ve done it.”

“Justine, honestly,” I said, but by then she had ducked into her car. The door slammed shut, the engine started, the headlights went on, and she expertly navigated the tricky backing-up maneuver out of my driveway and onto the highway.

I found Jinx out on the deck, dressed again.

She stepped into her espadrilles, and I said what was already abundantly clear. “Justine had to leave.”

“I have to go too, Jack. A little nagging headache is turning into a big nagging headache.”

“Frozen daiquiris can give you brain freeze…”

She laughed. “Good one, Jack.”

“Well, I’m sorry about the awkward moment. It’s good to see you.”

“It’s okay, Jack. Another time.”

I walked Jinx out to her car. We exchanged cheek kisses. I waved. She tootled her horn and got onto PCH unscathed.

I felt embarrassed, deflated, and headaches must have been going around, because I had one too. I went inside and nuked frozen Salisbury steak with peas.

Then I ate dinner alone in front of the TV.

JUSTINE TOOK A run with Rocky, even going an extra lap along the grassy median on Burton. But the three-mile jog didn’t calm her down, not at all. She was mad at Jack, hurt by Jack, and freaking
furious
at herself.

At home again, Justine let Rocky into the fenced-in backyard, went to her laundry room and stripped off her clothes, threw them into the washer.

She pictured Jinx Poole: the hair, the body, the ads for her constellation of hotels with their five-diamond ratings. She could easily see Jinx and Jack together, an excruciating image that made total sense. Unlike the dumb arrangement she’d worked out with Jack so that she could be with him and still keep her options open for her own protection.

And you know what? He had every right to do the same.

She was an idiot. Correction: she was an idiot with a broken heart.

Justine went to her bathroom, stood naked in front of the mirror behind the door. She sucked her stomach in, turned to each side, then got into the shower and sat on the floor. She pulled up her knees, laid her head down on her crossed arms, and let the dual pulsating showerheads beat a three-quarter time on her body.

What was wrong with her? What was wrong with
them?

She thought about meeting Jack five years before.

Back then, she’d been working in a mental hospital three days a week and saw private patients on the other two days in a high-rise in Santa Monica.

One day, going to work at her private practice, she got into the elevator, and Jack got in right after her. She pushed the button for her floor, shot a sideways glance at this gorgeous, confident sandy-blond-haired man. Then she watched him lose his cool when he rode with her to the tenth floor before realizing he hadn’t pressed his floor number and completely missed his stop.

Both of them had laughed.

The next time she saw Jack, it was in the same elevator. He told her his name and asked her to dinner. Justine could do a quick read on anyone, a survival mechanism in her line of work. She didn’t get a whiff of anything crazy off Jack Morgan.

She introduced herself, said okay to dinner, and three days later, he picked her up at home and took her to a small, very hip, quite intimate Italian restaurant.

After they ordered, Jack had fiddled with the cutlery, then told her that he’d been a captain in the Marine Corps, a pilot, and that he’d served for three years in Afghanistan. He said that the war had changed him and that he was seeing a shrink in the building where she worked, hoping to get a grip on his memories and dreams.

It was unusual conversation for a first date, but Justine went with it. It was as if Jack wanted her to know every hairy thing about him so that she could make an informed decision about whether to go forward or not.

He said to her, “Justine, when you said you’d have dinner with me, it was as if you’d cupped your hands around my heart.”

She’d touched his hand. He said, “Who are you?”

She told him, and from this first date, Justine determined that Jack Morgan was open and that he wanted to grow. That was one side of him.

Months later, she said, “Jack, you’re like a clam. With a rubber band around your shell.” That was the other side.

He had said, “I
can’t
tell you everything, Justine. I’ve seen too much. I’ve lived through too much. I have thoughts I want to keep even from myself. I keep ninety-five percent of my interior life locked up. You see the five percent that gets over the wall.”

Justine had to adjust her first take on Jack as an open, emotionally expressive man, but by then, it was too late. First impressions no longer mattered.

Justine was hooked. She loved him entirely.

He loved her too. He hired her at Private, made her a partner. They bought a house and lived together. They fought about the ninety-five percent that he kept behind the wall, because walls went against everything she believed in. They went against everything she was about. Jack’s lies and evasions undercut
her
integrity.

They fought, broke up, reconciled. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Justine wanted their relationship to work, but it couldn’t. Jack was who he was. As much as Justine loved him, it hurt her to be with Jack.

Maybe this time she would learn.

I WAS FEELING surly when I walked into the war room at 8:00 a.m. Twenty pairs of eyes followed me as I went to the fridge, grabbed a can of Red Bull, then took my seat at the conference table, the only piece of furniture remaining from when Private belonged to my dad.

I said, “Hello,” then rested my eyes on Justine, who was sitting across from me. I couldn’t read anything on her beautiful face.

I said, “I want to bring everyone up to date on Harold Archer. As some of you know, I went to his house at his request yesterday evening. I found him in his pool house with the body of his dead wife, Tule.

“Tule had been murdered; looked to me like she’d been killed in a rage. There was every manner and type of blood spray and spatter on the floor, furnishings, and walls. I saw a bloody kitchen knife, probably the murder weapon, next to the body. I couldn’t count the stab wounds, but there were a lot of them. Hal had showered and left his bloody clothes across a chair.”

I picked up the remote, and images of the crime scene went up on the wall-to-wall flat-screens around the room. It was all there: stark, bloody murder.

I said, “I called the police. There was nothing else I could do. Hal is in custody pending his arraignment tomorrow. He took my advice and lawyered up.

“Any questions so far?”

Cruz asked, “Did the wife have a weapon?”

“None that I could see.”

“Was Hal injured?”

“Not that I could see.”

Justine asked, “Did he tell you that he killed her?”

“I’m going to say no to that. Now, here’s the thing. We have to do what we can to give Hal’s lawyers something to work with. Mo-bot, I need you to turn up anything you can on Tule Archer—her past, her known associates, her record if she has one. Do some background on Hal too, while you’re at it.”

“I’ll have something for you in an hour,” Mo said.

I knew she would.

Mo-bot’s real name is Maureen Roth. She’s fifty, married with three kids, a serial slayer in the World of Warcraft, and mother hen to the younger operatives at Private. She’s called Mo-bot because of her almost robotic mind. She has an eidetic memory and can multitask like an air traffic controller on speed, doesn’t get frazzled or riled. I never had to think twice about Mo.

I concluded the Archer report, and Justine brought everyone up to date on the car-bomb situation, which had heated up considerably since Maeve Wilkinson’s death. When she was done, Cruz leaned forward and told the group that all was quiet on the Sumar front.

“Gozan and Khezir are staying put in their hotel room, watching sports and porn,” said Cruz.

The other senior investigators gave summaries of their cases, and then we were done. Notably, Del Rio’s seat was empty.

“I’ll be in court today,” I said. “If anything blows up—cars, cases, whatever—Justine is in charge.”

Mo-bot saluted Justine. There was a smattering of laughter and I asked again, “Any questions?”

There were none.

I had a wide range of questions that I kept to myself.

Why had Hal Archer gone lethal on his wife? What could I do to make peace with Justine? How would I do on the stand today when Caine called me to testify on behalf of my best friend, Rick Del Rio?