I stiff-armed the door, saw that the conference room was packed: Sci, Cruz, Mo, and Del Rio, arrayed around the black table, hunched over coffee, texting and phoning, looking up when I came in.
Associates filled the row of swivel chairs around the perimeter, buzzing about a hot case that had been resolved at four this morning when a team of Private investigators caught a runaway teen and her user boyfriend withdrawing funds from an ATM with her mom’s bank card.
Justine’s seat was empty. Justine was never late for a meeting. Had never been late in five years.
The chatter stopped as I pulled out my chair.
Cody brought in my Red Bull and a list of names.
“What’s this?”
“Candidates for my job. I’m setting up appointments for you to meet the best three. Best three in my humble opinion.”
I nodded. “Let’s get started.” I introduced Christian Scott, said that Scotty had been with the Joffrey Ballet, suffered a knee injury, joined the California Highway Patrol as a motorcycle cop.
“Scotty was one of three guys who brought down a major doper, four hundred pounds of weed in the trunk. It was Scotty who pulled him over on a hunch-”
“A hunch and the rear of the car was sending up sparks on the freeway,” Scotty said.
“He’s got good hunches and, I’ve been told, a pretty decent pirouette,” I said into the laughter. “Scotty has just finished his six thousand hours as an investigator at California Casualty, so his license is in the mail.
“Stand up and show us your face.”
There was applause. Scotty stood and said he was glad to be here. Then investigator Lauri Green raised her hand and said, “Jack, I gotta go in a minute. Just to let you know Mara Tracey is out on bail.”
Lauri was talking about our shoplifting movie star, made ten million a picture and still lifted a hundred-dollar sweatshirt from a boutique, attracting tabloid headlines, paparazzi popping up out of the shrubbery, and a publicized date next week in front of a judge.
Mara’s husband had hired us to keep eyes on her. We discussed tailing Ms. Tracey, then Cruz got up and filled the group in on the dead businessman at the Beverly Hills Sun. He sketched in the backstory: the string of four other dead men in other hotels, and the dead-end lead to an escort service. He talked about research he was doing now, interviews with hotel staff, and so on. He was keeping himself in the background, he said, now that the cops were on the case.
He didn’t mention the Noccias’ stolen van full of boosted pharmaceuticals-I was keeping that one off-limits to the group.
When Cruz sat down, I tapped keys on my laptop and Colleen’s photo filled the center flat screen on the wall.
My ears hummed and my heart rate shot up when I saw that picture. Only two days ago, Colleen had been alive and well.
I dropped my eyes to the keyboard, trying to get a grip on my emotions. When I spoke, my voice cracked.
“Most of you knew Colleen. She was most likely killed to torment me and to implicate me in her death.”
Del Rio said quietly, “Dude.”
I swallowed hard and kept going.
“As you’ve probably heard, I’m not only the prime suspect, I’m the only suspect. Meanwhile, Colleen’s killer is out there somewhere-laughing his ass off.”
CHAPTER 37
I leaned back in my seat at the conference table. I was aware of my colleagues looking at me as I stared at Colleen’s face on the screen. Her expression was sunny, luminous, and it wasn’t a portrait, just a snapshot for her ID card taken on her first day of work at Private.
I remembered how an hour after that photo was taken, Colleen was sitting outside my office, going through my mail. She had looked up when my shadow crossed her desk and said, “Is someone wanting to harm ye, Mr. Morgan?”
“A dozen people I can think of. Why?”
She showed me a padded envelope marked up with red grease pencil, block letters reading, “Time Dated Material. Open Upon Receipt.”
An arrow pointed to the pull tab. It wasn’t ticking, but the envelope had no return address and the lettering looked insane.
We had evacuated the building, eighty of us standing out in the glaring sun on Figueroa while the bomb squad took the envelope out with a robot and x-rayed it in the bomb-mobile. The contents were shredded newspaper and a note, same red letters with a lot of rays coming out from the words “BANGETY-BANG-BANG-BANG.”
Fingerprints were traced back to a repeat offender, Penn Runyon, a psycho who’d been incarcerated for the illegal sale of weapons and had been released a few months before.
Runyon was interrogated, said he’d read about me in the paper, how I’d tracked down and brought in an escaped con who was a friend of his.
Actually, it was Tommy had who brought down Runyon’s friend, not me.
Common mistake: Jack Morgan, Private Investigations. Tom Morgan Jr., Private Security.
Runyon wanted to know if he’d killed me. Really? You sent a nonexplosive paper bomb, buddy.
So Runyon got it all wrong.
Colleen, on the other hand, had gotten it all right. She was the best assistant I ever had. And more. I’d cared about her deeply.
I stopped reminiscing about Colleen and brought my attention back to the present. I said to my investigators, “Colleen worked here at Private for over a year. We started going out. It wasn’t a secret.”
“She was a great girl,” Del Rio said.
“Yes, she was. She was visiting friends here in LA and somehow she was captured or tricked, then murdered in my house.”
I talked about the terrible scene I had found in my bedroom, then turned the floor over to Sci, who looked fifteen years old in his pineapple-print aloha shirt, painter’s pants, and tennis sneakers.
He read from a report citing the cause and manner of Colleen’s death, homicide by gunshot to the heart. And he said that there was evidence that she’d had sex sometime before her death.
“We’ll have the DNA profile later today,” Sci said.
I said, “No matter what we find, the LAPD isn’t going to buy it because we can’t tell anyone that we processed the crime scene. So we’ll have to use what we’ve found to trap the doer and then lead the cops to him.”
There were questions about the time of Colleen’s death, where I was when it happened, whether the murder weapon had been found, and if the killer had written, called, or left a message for me to find.
“The killer was a pro. This was a well-planned murder, and it can only have been a setup to frame me. We’re working overtime until we nail the shit who killed Colleen.”
At that, the door to the conference room opened and Justine came in, tall, slim, elegant in navy-blue suit and cream-colored silk blouse.
“Sorry,” she said, taking the seat next to mine.
“We’re just wrapping up,” I said. “You want to report on Danny Whitman?”
“Possible new case,” she said to the group. “Young movie star with a criminal zipper problem. I’m meeting him today.”
“Thanks, Justine. Anyone else?”
“I need a few minutes with you, Jack,” Justine said. “If you can spare the time.”
I adjourned the meeting. And after the room emptied, I closed the door and sat down next to Justine.
