“You deaf, man?” Keyes asked me. “Yeah, she’s a she, all right. I was banging her while my old lady was in prison. I thought we had something going, but she doesn’t like men, yo. She fuckin’ hates them.
“One night, I was sleeping, she put a coat hanger around my neck. I put my gun in her ear. Told her she had to the count of three to get the hell out of my life. Then I heard one of her tricks died by a wire. See, I picked Candy up from the Seaview the night that trick was killed, yo. She called me up without going through her service. She used me as her wheelman, you hear me? That’s not right.”
“What’s Candy’s full name?” Del Rio said.
“You let me go if I tell you?”
Del Rio lowered his gun.
“Carmelita Gomez. She works at that Cuban club from ten to four, so, like, she can still squeeze in a few tricks on the side-”
Cruz leaned in so that his eyes were only inches from Keyes’s face.
“Where can we find Ms. Gomez now?”
CHAPTER 110
Cruz and Del Rio were in the car in front of me, forcing me to keep to a sane speed as we headed north into the Valley.
I dictated case notes into a recorder as I drove.
I described the scene at the Sun and brought the Poole case file up to date.
The facts, as we knew them, were starting to make sense.
Karen Ricci, the woman in the wheelchair who had tipped Cruz off, was an escort service call booker. She’d told Cruz that a limo driver knew who had killed the hotel johns, and that she’d gotten that information from her friend, a former escort and current coat checker, Carmelita Gomez.
Cruz had interviewed Gomez and she’d given him false information.
Now we had a lead from Ricci’s first husband, Tyson Keyes. Keyes had picked Gomez up from her date with Arthur Valentine, the john who had been killed at the Seaview hotel last year.
If Carmelita Gomez was the hotel john killer, it was clear that she had easy access.
Twenty minutes after leaving Keyes, we found Gomez’s name on a mailbox on Stagg Street, in front of one of the tan-colored stucco houses in a cookie-cutter development of middle-class homes.
Gomez’s house was set back from the street, centered on a small mat of a yard. A driveway curved in from Stagg, coursed along the fence on the west side of the lot, and ended at a garage in the backyard.
Cruz and Del Rio pulled the fleet car into the mouth of the driveway, and I parked across the street.
I got out of my car and joined Cruz at Gomez’s front door, while Del Rio headed toward the back. With our guns drawn, Cruz and I flanked the doorway.
Cruz rang the bell, and in a moment the porch light came on.
Cruz said, “Carmelita, it’s Emilio Cruz. From the other night.”
There was no response, so Cruz tried again. “Look through the peephole, Carmelita. You know I’m not a cop. No seas tonto. Don’t make me kick the door in.”
A car started up at the back of the house. I saw headlights. Everything happened very fast after that.
CHAPTER 111
One second,Rick was walking toward the back door.
The next, he’d flattened himself against a stockade fence so he wouldn’t get creamed by an old red Chevy Impala that tore across the lawn and passed the car Cruz had parked in the driveway.
Cruz leaped from the front steps and both he and Del Rio ran toward the fleet car. Gomez seemed to have gone from zero to almost sixty in no seconds flat, but I saw her face as the Impala shot past me and made a hard right turn on two wheels.
Gomez didn’t look afraid. She looked determined.
Del Rio yelled to me, “Should I call the cops?”
I shouted, “Yes.”
I got into my car, made a U-turn, and followed Cruz and Del Rio east on Stagg, a narrow road, not a speedway.
Gomez was out in front and gaining ground, driving through the residential development as if she were both drunk and crazy. She took out a mailbox, sideswiped a couple of parked cars, and ran a stop sign.
She took another two-wheel turn, this time a sharp left onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, scraping the side of an SUV that was headed north in her lane of traffic.
I got onto the boulevard in time to see the red car rocket ahead in the inside lane. Horns blared. The Impala weaved-left, right, back to the inside lane. Cars swerved. Hubcaps rolled across the road. Cruz and Del Rio drafted right behind the Impala but couldn’t pass.
Gomez wasn’t just running, she was escaping like a wildfire was burning up the street.
Sirens blared as we flew through the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Strathern Street, an area cluttered with minimall shops: a liquor mart, a flower shop, a 76 station, fast-food joints.
Then the road flattened into a straightaway that ran between two- and three-story commercial buildings on both sides.
Del Rio’s call to 911 and Gomez’s outlaw run had brought out the cruisers, and when Carmelita Gomez turned, six squad cars were screaming behind us. The sounds of others were in the distance.
Gomez didn’t slow, stop, or falter.
In fact, the more cars pursuing her, the faster and crazier she drove.
CHAPTER 112
Cruz was driving the fleet car, Rick in the seat beside him, Jack’s blue Lamborghini filling the rearview mirror. Ahead of them, Carmelita Gomez was sending all of their speedometer needles into the red. Cruz kept his foot on the gas, staying close, aware that if Gomez braked or plowed into another car, he couldn’t stop in time.
The woman was guilty of something, for sure.
Cruz tried to get his mind around what Tyson Keyes had said about her, and he was picturing that cute but snooty woman in a whole different way.
He flashed on her standing near the wardrobe at Havana, wearing that tight pink dress, not looking at him the way women usually looked at him. At all.
He remembered her later, sitting next to him in the car, finally giving up a guy she said was her driver, Billy Moufan, saying that Moufan knew the killer’s identity.
But there was no Billy Moufan. Anywhere.
Tyson Keyes had been her lover and her driver. And he had said Gomez was a man-hater who had sex with men for a living. How twisted was that?
A car horn blew loud and long as the speeding caravan forced a Caddy tight up against the median strip.
Del Rio said, “Pay attention, Emilio.”
“Pay attention? I’m driving in a straight line. It’s too fast, man? You want me to pull over and you drive? That’s okay with me. I want to piss my pants, you hear me?”
The Impala made a sudden screaming right onto Neenach, and Cruz followed, Jack tight behind them.
Neenach was residential, a lot like the street where Gomez lived, two lines of facing single-story stucco homes fronted by low walls or small gardens, a few trees sprouting up between the houses and the asphalt.
