James Patterson - #1 Suspect

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.

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.”

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.”