Private Vegas Read online

  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.

  Chapter 55

  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.

  Chapter 56

  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?

  Chapter 57

  MO-BOT LOCKED HERSELF inside her corner office on the basement level, home to Private’s forensic lab. She heated water in her microwave, brewed an aromatic tea of spearmint, blackberry leaves, eucalyptus, and licorice root, then began to research Tule Archer, née Tallulah Amoyo of Bakersfield, California.

  Mo-bot typed the victim’s name into Private’s search engine, which automatically clicked through the results, organizing data by type: criminal, biographical, automotive, educational, and social. After the first sort, the intelligent software highlighted the most pertinent information and composed a comprehensive record.

  The computer finished this data collection before the tea was done steeping.

  Mo-bot went over Tule Archer’s newly composed dossier, homed in and winnowed out, asked new questions of the search engine, and received collateral material to add to the file.

  As she worked, Mo-bot took a call from Emilio Cruz, the sexiest person of either gender at Private Investigations Worldwide. She also consulted with Sci about a software suite, talking with him over the network even though he was only thirty feet away.

  She relayed information from the LA lab to Sci on the chemicals used in the Wilkinson car bomb, noting that latex had been found inside what remained of the gas tank. After she finished with Sci, Mo-bot texted her husband, Trent, reminded him that he had a dentist’s appointment at noon and a meeting with their contractor at two, and that their youngest son had science club at three fifteen.

  Mo-bot went back to work.

  The key facts about Tule were these: Born in California of Filipino agricultural workers in 1992, Tule grew up in Bakersfield, where she went to public school, got average grades, and was known as a prankster and a bit of a comic. She attended East LA College, took courses in art and theater, and then moved to Las Vegas.

  Her tracks became more dramatic once she was working as a dancer and cocktail waitress.

  Mo-bot watched videos of song-and-dance routines at the Black Diamond Hotel and Casino and Tule often had lead parts. Mo-bot saw both talent and ambition in this young woman.

  Same time that Tule was dancing and serving drinks to VIPs, she was cited for a DUI, then arrested for having a fight with another showgirl backstage. Not long after that, according to justice court, Tule and her roommate, Barbie Summers, skipped out on their rent, leaving their dogs and furnishings behind.

  Leaving dogs was telling—but what it told, Mo-bot couldn’t be sure. Were they running from? Or running to?

  Mo-bot got into the Clark County Recorder’s Office records and found the entry for Tule’s wedding to Hal Archer, and then she turned up Tule and Hal’s wedding announcement in the LA Times; looked like they’d decided to have a second wedding, a much bigger one, back home in California.

  That wedding in LA marked a dramatic turn in the life of Tallulah Amoyo, a new Real Housewife of Beverly Hills. But a few days after their first anniversary, Tule was dead, and, indisputably, Hal Archer had done it.

  Mo-bot attached the LAPD’s report on Tule’s murder, and when the dossier was cooked, she sent a memo to Jack, copied it to Sci and Justine.

  Then Mo-bot, a woman who was capable of keeping innumerable plates in the air, stopped everything to look at Tule Archer’s LA Times wedding photo. The scene was Vibiana, a former cathedral in downtown LA, now renovated and reimagined as a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot way beautiful, over-the-top events venue.

  In the picture, Tule wore a twenty-thousand-dollar wedding gown and an ecstatic smile on her face; next to her, Hal Archer looked proud and in love with his arm-candy bride.

  “What happened, Tule?” Mo-bot asked the image on her screen. “What the hell went so wrong?”

  Chapter 58

  LORI KIMBALL WAS in a black mood.

  She pulled her SUV up to the 7-Eleven, parallel-parked it between a large motorcycle and a Chevy Volt.

  What had put her in a bad state was the road repair work outside her office on South Hope Street, which had forced a detour around the block, where a red light had effectively canceled her death race home.

  She couldn’t blame herself. There was no need to take a point penalty, but it was depressing to lose that excellent bridge between her go-nowhere job and the terminal tedium of house-wifery.

  She knew that the adrenaline from the race was like rocket fuel, that it was probably keeping her brain from shorting out forty years before its time.

  Damn it. She really hated being shut down.

  Lori picked up her purse from the passenger seat and marched inside the convenience store, then sidled over to the cooler and selected an iced coffee, a pitiful consolation prize. She brought the plastic cup up to the line at the cash register, taking her place behind a shirtless, hairy biker and his sunburned girlfriend.

  She was eavesdropping on their inane, mumbly, pothead conversation when she became aware that someone was speaking to her.

  “Hey there. Ms. Kimball, right?”

  She turned. It was a California Highway Patrol officer in the customary tan uniform: short-sleeved shirt with buttoned pockets and a brimmed hat. His bushy eyebrows looked familiar to her. She glanced at the gold-star badge above his pocket, saw the name Schmidt.

  “Yes, I’m Lori Kimball.”

  Then she remembered him.

  He said, “I recognized your car. You’re not still speeding all to hell on the Five, are you, Ms. Kimball? Not still smoking up the freeway for the fun of it?”

  “Absolutely not. You got through to me, Officer,” Lori said, managing to throw in a merry laugh. She touched her hair, twinkled her eyes. “I don’t want to lose my license. I’ve been very well behaved since you gave me that ticket, believe me.”

  “Happy to hear it.”

  Fuckin’ power tripper.

  Lori paid for her coffee, said good-bye to the highway cop, and went outside to her car. She pulled out of the lot carefully, and when she got onto the street she noticed that the officer’s black-and-white Ford Crown Victoria was following behind her.

  She kept well within the speed limit as she approached and then took the ramp to the 110 North. The trooper didn’t follow her, but regardless, he’d definitely brought her down.

  Lori got into the right lane and gradually moved into the center, other cars passing her on both sides. She was the only person on the freeway driving the speed limit, for God’s sake.

  The only one.

  So, fuck it.

  Two antique American cars were just ahead of her, one to the left, the other to the right. Lori jammed down the gas and pierced the opening between them like she was flying a silver bullet.

  Whoo-hoo. This was better. Way better.

  She motored through the Figueroa tunnels at a cool eighty-three, covering most of the death race at record speed. She was so high in the zone that she almost missed her exit. She still had time to make her move, but in overco
mpensating for her overshot, she jerked the wheel too hard. Her wheels screamed as she took the right onto West Doran Street, the left side of her vehicle lifting off the asphalt, then dropping back down as she made a sharp right onto San Fernando Road.

  Lori was panting from sheer exhilaration. She was in the homestretch now, turning onto Grandview, passing Pelanconi Park on the right, trees on both sides lining her up with the Verdugo Mountains straight ahead. Traffic was light, no one challenging her or getting in her face, so Lori gave the engine some gas and took the car up to a very sweet seventy-two.

  But it was over too soon.

  Lori sighed as she slowed, then took the left onto West Mountain Street, a boring block in the boring neighborhood where she spent two-thirds of every day of her boring life. She pulled into the driveway of a small, white cinder-block-and-stucco house with blue awnings over the front windows.

  Lori sat in the car for another minute, feeling her heart rate slow, thinking things over. Today had been a setback. But there was always tomorrow.

  Tomorrow was another day entirely.

  Chapter 59

  I WAS IN court on time, clean-shaven, appropriately dressed, my face still the color of boiled shrimp from the car explosion. My brother was relaxing in the back row of the gallery, tanned and toothy, looking like a PR flack at an Oscar party. He fanned his hand in a wave.

  I turned my back on Tommy and shut off my phone because there was nothing more important than being here for Rick. Didn’t matter what happened anywhere else in the world.

  Judge Johnson entered the courtroom with her little dog underfoot, and in a few minutes, the jury filed in and court was called to order. After Her Honor had a chat with the jury, Dexter Lewis, fittingly dressed in a gray sharkskin suit, called a witness, Sergeant Michael Degano, a detective with the LAPD.

  Sergeant Degano was balding, about forty, and had the kind of five o’clock shadow that colors the jowls by noon. When he took the stand, he looked at Lewis in a way that suggested this wasn’t his first testimony at a criminal trial and he wanted to get on with it.