I listened to a message from an edgy Carmine Noccia, heard from Del Rio and Scotty, then got an update from Cruz about the murder at the Beverly Hills Sun. I talked at length to our Rome office, during which time Justine returned my call. I called her back and got her voicemail.
“I’m on the road,” I said. “I’ll try you again later.”
At just after eight p.m., I pulled into my driveway. I was undoing my seat belt when a police cruiser drove up behind me and parked on the shoulder of the highway. The cruiser’s grill lights sent bursts of color across the gates and the stucco wall.
The lights came on in my mind too. I’d been driving on autopilot for the past forty minutes, had driven myself home, although I hadn’t meant to come here at all.
The squad car door slammed behind me. I buzzed down my window, and a flashlight beam blinded me so that I could only see the patrolman’s silhouette.
“License and registration, please.”
I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been speeding. I got my license out of my wallet, handed it out the window, reached across the seat to the glove box, and located my registration. Handed that out too.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” said the cop.
I waited. Stared at the yellow tape and the notice on my front door. I listened to the crackling and chirping of the cop’s radio, remembering how two nights ago, right about this time, I’d gotten out of the car right in this spot.
I’d signed the voucher, said good night to Aldo, passed my fob across the gate card reader, entered the house, and stripped down as I made for the shower.
A couple hours after that, I was being grilled by two hardened LA cops who’d determined I was guilty of killing Colleen before I’d said a word.
As I waited for the cop to come back to the car, I thought about being interrogated that night. Detective Tandy’s theory, part of it, anyway, seemed plausible.
Had Colleen come to my house to surprise me?
I could see her doing that. She would have known it was risky, but it was in her character to take a chance that after all we’d had together she could change my mind.
I pictured Colleen curled up in a chair in my living room, waiting for me to arrive. Maybe she’d heard a car stop outside the gate.
I could see her going to the window, peering out into the dark, hearing the whirr of the gates rolling back. Maybe she’d opened the door, called out, “Jack?”
Had someone said, “Hey, Colleen.”
Had he looked just like me?
Had Tommy caught her by surprise, backed her into the house, made her lie down on the bed? Maybe Colleen went for my gun-she knew where it was. But she wasn’t fast enough. Wasn’t strong enough. The gun was snatched out of her hand. And she was shot three times.
Did Tommy really do that?
Another set of images spooled out in my mind’s eye.
In this scenario someone had been tailing me.
Say he was watching when I left Colleen’s hotel room the week before. He knew me. He knew Colleen. He wished me harm, and he’d come up with a plan.
I saw Tommy.
Let’s just say he’d kept his eye on Colleen while I was in Europe. At some point in that four-day period, he’d kidnapped her, and an hour before I was due to land at LAX, he’d restrained her somehow and driven her to my house. He’d used her gate key, pressed her finger to the biometric lock…
My thoughts were interrupted by a car door slamming behind me. I heard the cop walking back to my car.
The flashlight beam was pointed at my face again as he handed me my identification.
“Mr. Morgan, do you know why I stopped you?”
“No. I live here. You know that, right? This is my house.”
“This is a crime scene. Why are you here?”
“I need a change of clothes.”
“That’s not happening, Mr. Morgan.”
“Okay,” I said. I started up the engine. It roared.
But the cop wasn’t letting me go. Not yet. He scrutinized my face from behind his light.
I understood why he’d stopped me.
The cops were watching my house in case the killer came back to the scene of the crime.
The cop looked at me as if that was just what I’d done.
CHAPTER 47
Jinx Poole’s flagship hotel was set like a diamond tiara at the top of the intersection of South Santa Monica and Wilshire.
I drove my Lambo around the generous, curving driveway to the front doors of the Beverly Hills Sun, handed my car keys to the valet, and went directly through the busy marble-lined lobby to the elevator bank.
A gang of partygoers broke around me, and when they had dispersed, I got into the elevator. I leaned against a cool stone-paneled wall as it rose to the fifth floor, where Marcus Bingham had been strangled to death and where I was staying until my house was mine again.
I headed toward my room, but instead of going in, on impulse I opened the fire door and walked up a flight of stairs to the bar on the roof.
The air was cooling down, and looping strands of pin lights twinkled like stars, illuminating a scene rich with possibilities of sex with a stranger or maybe even romance.
A jazz trio was playing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” at the far end of the deck, the music wafting across the swimming pool. Couples flirted at the bar, leaned toward each other on the chaises around the pool. Flaps were closed on the white canvas cabanas.
I stood at the edge of all this hazy, hedonistic optimism, then took a seat at the freestanding bar. I asked the bartender, “What am I having?”
He looked at me, then answered by pouring me a double Chivas straight up.
I’m not a big-time drinker. But if I ever needed hard liquor, this was the night.
I lowered my head so that there was no mistaking my purpose at the bar. I didn’t want company. I wanted oblivion.
But I felt someone’s eyes on me. When I looked up, a woman at the end of the bar was staring at me intently. She was in her late twenties, dark hair tied back into a ponytail, the lines of her slight frame camouflaged by loose clothing that was too dark for California and too big for her.
The woman looked familiar, but I didn’t know her. I looked away, got the bartender’s attention, and ordered another double.
When I looked up from my drink a few minutes later, the woman was gone.
CHAPTER 48
Two young business guys in neon-colored shirts sat down in the empty seats at the end of the bar. They ordered screwdrivers, talked about the stock market and their shrinking expense accounts that wouldn’t cover a free weekend at the Beverly Hills Sun.
I blotted out their voices by concentrating on the music and the glowing scotch in my glass. I thought about Sci’s report of that two-second phone call made from the landline inside my house to Tommy’s cell phone at around the time of the murder.
That call was bad for me because it seemed to establish that I had been in my house when the crime went down.
But I hadn’t made that call.
I hadn’t called Tommy, so…had he called himself from my phone to make it seem that I had been home?
Or had Tommy commissioned a hit?
Had Colleen’s killer called Tommy from my house to tell him that Colleen was dead? Job done. Had Tommy been right outside on the beach, and that’s who Bobbie Newton saw, thinking Tommy was me?
I sat on that barstool, but in my mind I was driving to Tommy’s house. I wanted to confront my brother, to beat the truth out of him. And then I wanted to keep beating him until he didn’t look anything like me. So that, guilty or not, he could never play my double again.
But Justine was right.
I needed proof. Without it, the semen in Colleen’s body would be enough evidence to convince a jury that I was her killer.
I emptied my glass, left cash on the bar, and took the stairs down to the fifth floor.
I turned toward my room and again I noticed the woman who had been sitting at the bar a half hour before. Now she was on the far side of the elevator bank, twenty feet away. Her back was turned to me and she was fumbling in her handbag as if looking for her key.