Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

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.