Private: #1 Suspect (4 page)

CARMINE NOCCIA SAID, “It’s a fucking disaster, Jack. One of my transport vans was jacked in Utah. Three of my guys were killed, dumped in the desert. I don’t think the cops are going to help me recover my property—which needed to be done yesterday. It’s a good thing I’ve got you in my corner.”

I don’t do business with mobsters.

Make that past tense. I didn’t do business with mobsters until my identical twin brother, Tommy Jr., racked up a six-hundred-grand gambling debt and I paid it off to keep Tommy’s sweet wife from becoming a widow.

A few months ago, Del Rio and I had flown to Vegas to see Noccia in his over-the-top, Spanish-style manse complete with racehorses and a man-made recirculating river located about five miles from the Vegas Strip.

I’d brought a cashier’s check for the full amount of my brother’s debt, and Noccia and I had exchanged favors. We realized that day that we’d both been in the Corps. As marines liked to say about themselves, “Never a better friend. Never a worse enemy.”

Carmine Noccia and I had shaken hands on that.

Now Noccia poured coffee for himself, used the cream, passed it to me. He said, “My guys were good. The highway robbers were better. And that’s all I know about the sons of bitches.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last night,” Noccia said. “Our van was coming west from Chicago. We had a tracking device in there. No one knew anything was wrong until the van passed Vegas and kept pinging until it got to LA. The jackers must have discovered the GPS and trashed it when they stopped to check the inventory.”

“So you think the van is in LA?”

“I would say yes. LA is a big distribution hub. It’s a valuable cargo, Jack.”

“Drugs?”

He nodded. “Prescription variety.”

“How much?”

“Street value of thirty million.”

Now I understood why Noccia had been waiting for me before our doors opened. In the past, the Mob had frowned on the drug trade, but pharmaceuticals were a fast-growing and highly profitable business, just too good to pass up.

Pharmaceuticals were also easy to steal at any point along the distribution chain. Even a mom-and-pop store with a twelve-dollar padlock on the gate could have a hundred fifty grand worth of Oxy in stock on any given day.

Every pill was a tiny profit center, 100 percent FDA approved. The largest tablets of OxyContin were 80 milligrams. At a buck a milligram, one 80 mg pill was worth eighty bucks, and they came in bottles of a hundred. That meant one little bottle was worth eight thousand dollars. A truckload—thirty million or more.

Noccia had a big problem. He was desperate to control the damage and at the same time he couldn’t let anyone know he was dealing in pharmaceuticals. So instead of turning his own crew loose on the underground, he’d come to me.

More people died from illegal prescription drugs than all the street drugs combined. This was a very bad business and I wanted no part of it.

Noccia leaned in toward me, fixed me with his big brown eyes. “I’ve been waiting thirty years to say this, Jack. I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

I GAVE NOCCIA a smile I didn’t mean and said, “Carmine, I don’t do drug-recovery missions. We do corporate work. Government contracts. You know.”

“You do more than that, Jack, but that’s your business. I’ll give you ten percent of the street value. That’s three million dollars—cash. All you have to do is find the merchandise. With your connections, it’ll take you a few days, tops. Three million dollars, Jack. How many cheating husbands do you have to tail to make that?”

Cody buzzed me on the intercom. “Mr. Morgan, your nine o’clock is here.”

I said to Carmine, “I wish I could help you, but this isn’t my kind of work.”

I ran my eyes over my schedule; my appointments were stacked up like incoming aircraft at LAX, every half hour to the end of the day. I thought about Colleen, lying on a cold slab, the medical examiner slicing her open from her collarbone to her bikini line.

As I sat here, cops were going through my house, putting my life under their Slap Chop while Carmine Noccia dangled millions of dirty dollars in front of my face.

I lifted my eyes and looked at the mafioso with a big future, a future that had now been compromised by the loss of a monumental inventory and three men.

Carmine’s expression was cold. No more kiddin’ around with
Godfather
lines. He interlaced his manicured fingers on my desk.

“I’ll double your take to twenty percent,” he said. “Tax free, six million in cash.”

The bigger the offer, the more I wanted nothing to do with it—or him.

“Thanks, but I’m not interested, Carmine,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’ve got another meeting.” I got to my feet.

Noccia also stood up.

We were the same height.

“You misunderstand me, Jack. You’ve got the job. What you want to tell me is how fast you can recover my merchandise—because very soon those goods will be all over the country and I’ll be out thirty unacceptable million. Call me when you have the van.”

“No, Carmine,” I said again. “No can do.”

“What part of ‘can’t refuse’ don’t you get, Jack? You know where I’m going. ‘Never a better friend.’ I’m calling in my marker. Here’s my number,” he said, writing it across an envelope. “Stay in touch.”

He tossed the pen down and it skidded across my desk as he walked away.

I heard Noccia say to Cody, “I can find my way out.”

I sat back in my chair and looked out at the wide cityscape of downtown LA. If I didn’t take the job, what would happen? Was I prepared to go to war with the Noccia family?

I got Del Rio on the line, kicked it around for a few minutes: what was possible, what was the wisest, safest plan of attack. Rick said his piece. I said mine. And then we kicked it around a little more.

When we had a working plan, I asked Cody to show my nine o’clock appointment into my office.

THE ATTRACTIVE WOMAN sitting in a blue armchair made me think of old black-and-white gumshoe movies adapted from novels by Chandler, Hammett, Spillane.

Amelia Poole looked like Sam Spade’s new client: glamorous white female, late thirties, short brown hair, no bling on her ring finger.

In place of a cigarette holder and a fox fur around her neck, Ms. Poole gripped an iPhone and had a fine necklace of gold chains and diamonds at her throat.

“Looks like you pulled an all-nighter, Mr. Morgan,” Ms. Poole said with a quick grin, stashing her phone in her handbag. “I know because I just pulled an all-nighter myself.”

“I’m sure yours was more interesting than mine,” I said, flashing on Del Rio’s bedroom with its military mattress and plain white walls.

Amelia Poole had a pretty smile, but it was forced. Her eyes were somber.

Why had she come to see me? Was she being sued? Stalked? Did she need me to find a lost child?

I knew from her dossier that Amelia Poole had bought and renovated three old hotels in choice locations into first-rate, five-diamond Poole Hotels. I had been to the rooftop bar at the Sun, stayed a couple of times at the Constellation in San Francisco. I agreed with the ratings.

Also in her dossier was mention of some unsolved robbery-murders in her hotels and a couple others that had sent a shiver through the California Chamber of Commerce.

The cases were still open, but tourist slayings didn’t make the front page in the current political-economic climate.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Poole, but I wasn’t told why you wanted to see me.”

“Jinx,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Call me Jinx. That’s the name I go by.”

“I’m Jack,” I said.

I poured coffee, and she told me that she had heard about Private and that she knew we were damned good. She continued to look nervous, as if she were trying to keep whatever was bothering her under wraps.

Ms. Poole played with her diamonds, took snapshots of me with her darting eyes.

I said, “So, what brings you to Private?”

And then she blurted it out. “A guest was killed in his room at the Sun last night. I haven’t told anyone. I haven’t even reported it to the police. I’m scared. This is the third guest who was killed in one of my hotels, and I don’t know what to do.”

HOTEL ROBBERIES WEREN’T rare, but hotel murders were. Jinx Poole told me that all of the murder victims—three at her hotels, two at other California hotels—were businessmen, out-of-towners traveling alone.

“The police are worse than hopeless,” she said. “The last time they came, they shut the place down, closed the bar for forty-eight hours. They interviewed every guest, freaked out my staff, and didn’t come up with a suspect, not one!

“Our bookings tanked. We’ve got empty rooms in high season—I mean, who’s going to stay in a hotel where someone was murdered?

“Jack, I’m desperate. People are being killed. I don’t know why. I don’t know who is doing this. But all I have are these hotels. I need your help.”

I wanted Jinx Poole to have the LAPD work the crime and hire Private to set up an airtight security system going forward—but the woman was getting to me.

She was vulnerable, but she was bravely working hard to solve her problem. I liked her. I understood her feelings. Completely.

Still, we didn’t have the manpower to take on a multi-victim crime spree on the wrong side of law enforcement. We were booked to the walls, and now our number one job was finding whoever killed Colleen Molloy.

I asked Jinx questions, hoping that her answers would help me decide what to do.

She told me that the dead guest at the Sun was Maurice Bingham, midforties, lived in New York, an advertising man who was in LA on business.

No sounds of a fight had been reported. The hotel staff knew Bingham. He paid his tab by credit card, didn’t make extraordinary demands. He wasn’t due to check out until tomorrow—which was promising news.

It meant that no one was looking for him yet in New York and that it was reasonable to assume that this early in the day, with the “Do Not Disturb” light on, housekeeping hadn’t yet found his body.

“Tell me about your security system.”

“Cameras are in the hallways, of course. And we have a few at the pool.”

“I need you to shut down the cameras on the murder floor for about an hour so we can get in and out. Can you do that?”

“Yes. So you’ll take the job?”

“I can’t make any promises, but we’ll check out the room and the body. Call it a consultation.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll need access to the room.”

Jinx Poole opened her handbag, took out a master key card, and handed it over.

“I need a place to stay for a couple of nights. I can check into the Sun,” I said.

“Great idea,” said Jinx Poole. “The Coppola Suite is empty. Be my guest.”

WITH THE EXCEPTION of city dumps, hotel rooms are the worst places on earth for gathering forensic evidence. Even in five-diamond hotels, DNA, fibers, and fingerprints from a few hundred previous guests will all be present.

But it was worth a try.

Carl Mentone, a high-tech geek known at Private as Kid Camera, manned the laptop with the Delta program that mapped out the Bergman Suite from every angle. My laptop came to life with streaming video that bounced off a satellite and delivered crystal images to my office.

As if I were standing inside the doorway, I watched Sci, Del Rio, and Emilio Cruz enter the suite, the Kid giving me the video tour of what $1,500 a night looked like in a Beverly Hills hotel.

Gold silk curtains framed the windows. Cozy furniture was grouped around a mahogany table, and good art hung on the walls. The lamps were standing upright. Throw pillows were in place. There hadn’t been a struggle. So what had happened here?

By the desk, looking like a particularly grotesque sculpture, was the dead man.

Sci stooped beside the body of a white male wearing dark trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt. His hair had been recently cut, businessman-style. He wore a wedding band. His wrist was white where his watch used to be.

Sci peered at the dead man’s neck. “A garrote,” he said. “It’s a thin, coated copper wire, commonly found in hardware stores. The victim tried to claw the wire loose but failed.”

“Has he got ID?”

“Wallet’s gone,” said Sci.

Cruz leaned in toward the lens and said, “Jack, there’s no problem with the lock. The victim either let the killer in or had a key. There’s an open bottle of Chivas on the table, two glasses. Dregs of scotch in the glasses.”

“Let’s go into the bedroom,” I said.

The Kid led the others, set the laptop on a table. The quality of the images I received was so fine that I could see the weave in the jacquard bedspread lying in a tangle on the floor. Pillows had also fallen to the carpet. The sheets were twisted toward the foot of the bed.

“Looks like sex to me,” said the Kid.

Sci set his scene kit on the floor and went to work running an alternate light source with variable wavelength filter over the sheets.

“Right you are. We’ve got sex,” he said.

“No wallet in here either,” said Cruz, pawing through a small pile of personal items on the nightstand. A ballpoint pen, spare change, rental-car keys.

The Kid took his webcam into the bathroom. I saw swim shorts and goggles on a hook behind the door, toiletry kit on the vanity, towels on the floor.

Emilio Cruz took a seat on the closed toilet lid and spoke into the lens.

“Jack. This killer was cool, maybe professional. There’s no sign of a fight. Like I said, the dude let his killer into the room. Had a drink with him, and then maybe he said or did something to piss the guy off. The killer got behind him and strangled him. Bingham never had a chance.”