Private Vegas (Private 9)

Although when I met Jinx, she was in a bad way.

Traveling businessmen had been murdered in hotels around town and up the coast, and Jinx’s hotels had gotten more than their share of dead white-collar guests.

Jinx had been frightened and angry, and she hired Private to protect her clients and her hard-won reputation. Cruz, Del Rio, and I worked the case, and Jinx and I became close. Not skintight, but good friends, anyway. There had been some electricity between us too, but we’d left it unplugged.

In the past couple of days, Jinx had helped me locate Gozan Remari and Khezir Mazul by digging into her insider’s database and connecting with her hotelier network. It was Jinx who’d told me that the Sumaris had checked into Shutters, and thanks to her, I knew they were still there.

Currently, we were catching up, talking about Rick’s trial, about the Sumaris, and the tragedy of Maeve Wilkinson’s death. And I told her about Hal Archer but without mentioning his name.

“He’s a big, ballsy entrepreneur,” I said. “And given the vast number of people he has intimidated in his life, I don’t understand how a twenty-two-year-old woman could have provoked him into stabbing her to death with a kitchen knife.”

“Did he do a background check on her?”

“Not through us. She was a cocktail waitress. He met her in a casino. Fell for her. Prenupped her and married her in a drive-through chapel a week later. I’m having her checked out now, postmortem.”

Jinx stood up, undid a hook at the back of her dress, and let the dress drop to the deck in a pale yellow cloud. She was wearing a little bikini underneath her clothes, bright pink against her porcelain skin.

I was breathing a little heavily when she resumed her position on the chaise. I poured her another drink, topped off my own, and let the sound of the ocean fill in the sudden gap in the conversation.

I remembered a time when we were having dinner together, sitting close in a booth at a nice restaurant. We were fudging the line a little between client meeting and date. Jinx had had a few tequila cocktails and said she wanted to tell me how she’d become who she was. She thought I should really know.

Her story was shocking then, and it all came back to me now.

Jinx had been working a summer job as a waitress at a country club when she met a wealthy man with a grand and engaging personality. She’d married him at age nineteen, despite her parents’ protests, and learned later that they’d been right to protest.

Jinx’s husband was a drinker and an all-round wife abuser. She got the last word, and twenty years later, she still blamed herself for her husband’s death.

She wasn’t entirely wrong to do so.

“The person you meet isn’t necessarily the person you get,” she said now. Her voice was soft, maybe nostalgic. Maybe regretful.

“Apparently your client didn’t know the cocktail waitress very well. And she didn’t know who her husband was either.”

Chapter 54

JINX SAID, “WELL, are we going for a swim or not?”

She was walking down the steps at the shallow end of the pool in her tiny, shiny bikini and I was going inside to change when I heard my name. Justine was coming through the glass doors to the deck, still wearing work clothes: dark suit and heels.

“Justine?”

“I didn’t know where to park my car,” she said. “I left it out front, hoping for the best.”

She laughed.

I blinked at her and she kissed me, kept going out to the pool deck, still talking.

“You left your iPad in my car,” she said. “I called you, Jack, but no answer, so I thought I’d run over with it.”

She was taking the tablet out of her purse when her peripheral vision caught the shapely blonde in my pool.

I read the shock and then the hurt in Justine’s face, and she read the reflexive guilt in mine.

“Oh,” she said, looking away from me. “Hi, Jinx. It’s been a long time…”

Jinx said, “How’ve you been?” and Justine said, “Fine, thanks,” but they were speaking like actors in a British comedy of manners, no one saying what they meant.

Justine turned back to me, her eyes as hard as gun barrels. She said, “I see this isn’t a good time. I’ll let myself out.”