Private: #1 Suspect (8 page)

MIKE DONAHUE’S TAVERN was an Irish pub with a restaurant that could have been transported from Galway or Cork and simply planted in Los Feliz.

When Colleen first came to Los Angeles, she was determined to get her citizenship. In the hours between quitting time at Private and going home to study, she stopped at Donahue’s. It was where everyone knew your name, and nearly everyone in front of the bar and behind it had relatives in Ireland.

Mike Donahue came from a town only a few country miles from where Colleen grew up. He had gone to school with Colleen’s father, and when they met, Donahue became an uncle to her in the City of Angels.

I was outside Donahue’s Tavern, the red-painted, gold-lettered sign hanging above the doorway, patrons spilling out to the curb.

Inside, the place was throbbing with loud music and the shouts of customers trying to be heard. The horseshoe bar was packed three deep all the way around. There was a raucous dart game going on in the back.

Mike was at the taps, serving up the suds. He was a heavyset man with a thick beard and deep lines around his eyes and across his forehead, grooves that came from smoke and sun and laughter.

But when he lifted his eyes and recognized me in the doorway, I saw terrible sorrow there.

He threw a cloth down on the bar and came out from behind it. I lost sight of him as he worked his way through the crowd, then he broke through a knot of drinkers and approached me.

I never saw the punch coming.

I was taken down by a fist like a two-by-four. The pain in my jaw seemed to shoot to all points: my nose, neck, shoulder, out to my fingertips. When I opened my eyes I was staring up into a circle of angry faces. Mike’s was one of them.

I wasn’t welcome here.

I’d gotten it all wrong. And so had Donahue.

I was enraged—with everything and everybody. I wanted to strike, fast and hard. I could take Donahue. I thought I could take the three bruisers standing around him too. And if I couldn’t, it might even feel good to take a beating.

Turn the emotional pain into the physical kind.

I struggled to my feet, and Donahue put his hand on my chest and pushed me into the wall. He said, “You shouldn’t have come here, Jack. I’m mad enough to do bloody murder in front of God and witnesses.”

I clenched my fists at my sides. “Mike. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”

“Is that your story, then?”

“Story? I was crazy about Colleen. Why would I want to kill her?”

“Maybe she was cramping your style, Jack.”

“Listen to me.”

I felt desperate for him to believe me. I grabbed both his biceps and shook him, shouted into his face. “
I didn’t do it
. But I
promise,
I will find out who killed Colleen. And I will hurt him.”

I HELD AN ice pack to my jaw with one hand, a Guinness in the other. Donahue sat across from me at a small table in his dark restaurant, a candle flickering between us. After twenty minutes of shouting at each other, I had managed to convince him of my innocence.

“Did I say I’m sorry, Jack?” Donahue said in his Irish brogue.

“Yes. You did.”

Donahue sighed.

“It’s okay, Mike. I understand. And no harm done.”

A waiter brought my dinner, a plate of chops and chips, and put it down in front of me. I refused another drink, looking at my plate with two minds.

One, I hadn’t eaten in a long time.

Two, I wanted to throw up.

The dinner was Donahue’s peace offering, so I put down the ice and picked up my cutlery.

“She was sad,” Donahue said. “We talked about this boyfriend of hers, in Dublin, and I think she loved him in a way, but he didn’t make her heart race. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Not in love with him.”

Donahue nodded. “Do you want me to cut your meat for you, boy-o?”

I smiled painfully, speared potatoes with my fork, and said, “She didn’t tell me that. She said she was happy.”

“Putting on a brave face, more like it,” said Donahue. “Or maybe looking to see if you’d changed your mind. If you still loved her.

“But anyway,” he continued, “I’d stopped worrying she was going to hurt herself. I never thought that someone would do this terrible thing to her.”

“Everyone loved her, Mike.”

“So
why?
” Donahue asked me. He thumped the table with his fists. China jumped. Beer sloshed. “Why am I sending her back to Dublin in a box?”

I laid down my knife and fork, pushed my plate away.

“It had nothing to do with Colleen,” I said. “Someone killed her to hurt me. Someone who hates me.”

“Who was it, Jack?”

“I don’t know. Yet. I’m working on it. Whoever he was, he was a pro. He could have found a way to kill me without putting Colleen in the middle. But that wasn’t what he wanted.

“He set me up so that I would get taken down one step at a time. First, this…loss. Then humiliation. Then I’d be locked up for life. Or get the needle. That was the plan.”

“May the cat eat him. And may the divil eat the cat.”

“Copy that.”

We sat silently as the dishes were cleared.

When we were alone again, I looked into Mike’s sad eyes. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m the one who owes you an apology. If Colleen hadn’t been involved with me, she’d still be alive.”

I PULLED UP to the Beverly Hills Sun, Jinx Poole’s flagship hotel, at just after ten. I stepped out of my two-hundred-thousand-dollar car looking as if I’d been dragged behind it for a couple of miles. I gave my car keys to the valet and checked in at the desk.

The clerk said, “Mr. Morgan, I believe the woman on the red sofa is waiting for you.”

It was Justine.

Thank God.

I was so glad to see her, my eyes got wet. Thinking about stretching out on clean sheets, Justine lying beside me, of feeling her skin against mine, flooded me with relief.

But why was she here? I called her name. She looked up, and I crossed the plush and glittering lobby to her, saying, “How long have you been waiting? Are you okay?”

I couldn’t read her expression.

“What’s going on, Justine?”

“It’s just—we have to talk. Gloves off. Nothing but the truth.”

“Let’s go to my room,” I said. I turned my head, pointed to my bruised jaw, and said, “I’ve got to lie down.”

“You stink of beer. You were in a bar fight?”

“You don’t miss a thing.”

“Sit down. Please. This won’t take long.”

It didn’t sound good, whatever was coming. I eased myself onto the sofa next to Justine.

“I’m just about brain dead. Maybe we should talk tomorrow.”

“Very little of your brain is required.”

I looked at her and she hooked me in with her eyes. I loved Justine. I loved her.

“When you saw Colleen last week, before you left for Europe—what happened?”

“We had lunch at Smitty’s. I have a receipt somewhere. I haven’t had time to go over my credit card bill.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Christ. You shouldn’t do this. Do I ever grill you? Can’t you just trust me?”

“Did you say ‘trust me’? I’ll take that to mean it wasn’t just lunch. Oh, Jack.”

She shook her head.

I threw up my hands. “If you don’t believe me about this,” I said, “then what’s the point? How can we work things out if you don’t trust me?”

Justine got up, hooked the strap of her handbag over her shoulder, and without looking back, left the hotel through the revolving doors. I watched her through the glass. She gave her ticket to the valet and faced the street as he went for her car.

Justine could read me like an FBI polygraph. Lying to her was futile. I could chase after her, but what more could I say?

The valet brought her car, and Justine slid in behind the wheel, strapped in, and took off fast down South Santa Monica.

This time I was sure I’d lost her. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was pretty much what I deserved.

THE NEXT MORNING, I walked from my office across the hall to the “war room,” thinking about Colleen. I wondered what she’d been doing in her last hours, trying to see through her eyes how she’d been trapped by a man with murderous intentions. I imagined her horror when that gun—probably
my
gun—had been aimed at her chest, her killer taunting her before he squeezed the trigger.

I had a horrifying thought.

What if she’d believed her killer was
me?

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.”

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.