Private Vegas (17 page)

He sent me the keys and a bankbook for an offshore account worth more than eleven million dollars. He had bonds and equities worth another four, and that was mine too, along with a storage locker filled with old furniture, Dad’s client list, and all the dirt he’d collected on his paying customers.

He was quite a sweetheart, my dad.

I turned down his offer, and three days later, he was dead, shanked in the liver over some insignificant dispute.

His will was read. I was my father’s heir and I took over what remained of Private Investigations. I built it back up, and I did it clean and big. I bought the building downtown, staffed and equipped it with the best that Dad’s money could buy. I brought in a mostly first-class clientele and opened offices overseas. Private is in the black big-time.

As a result, my brother hates me more than ever. And there isn’t a day when I don’t think about what he’s likely to do to me out of revenge. I’ll bet he doesn’t trust me either.

THREE HUNDRED E-MAILS had collected in my in-box since court recessed for lunch. I responded to a third of them: the ones from clients, heads of three overseas offices, Eric Caine, Justine, and Cruz.

There was an e-mail from Hal Archer too, and I thought about how I had grown up calling him Mr. Archer, that he was loyal enough to stay with Private after my father was imprisoned, even after Tom Sr. turned the remains of his client list over to me.

I inherited Hal Archer.

He may have been my first client. But I never liked him. He was a bully. He demeaned his employees, all of them, including his contracted consultants, guys like me. Did I want to fire a client whose business was worth three million a year to Private’s bottom line?

I did.

I hit my phone’s Call Back button, listened as the line connected and Hal answered.

“Hal, it’s Jack. I have an idea. I have a good friend, I used to work for him, as a matter of fact, and I think he would be more suited to handling your business than Private is.”

“I killed her, Jack.”

The air went absolutely still as I tried to process what Archer had said.

“That’s not funny, Hal.”

“I killed that bitch in self-defense. Maybe you’ll come over to my house now, Jack. That is, if you’re not too busy.”

His voice was saturated with sarcasm, but the quaver was still there. Archer was afraid. And this time, he had reason to be.

“Who else knows about this?” I asked him.

“Only you.”

“What about people working in the house for you?”

“They’re in the main. We’re in the back. Pool house.”

“Don’t let anyone in. I’m on the way.”

“Your father would have said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything, Hal.’”

“Don’t go anywhere. Don’t touch anything. Don’t talk to anyone. I’ll be there soon.”

THE BEVERLY HILLS Post Office is the part of town that falls into ZIP code 90210, and it contains nearly all of the luxury gated communities in LA, including Beverly Park, where movie stars and studio heads and other moguls live and reign.

Harold J. Archer’s estate cost him twenty million to build, which he did on the site of another twenty-million-dollar manse he’d bought to knock down. It fronted the best street, and from the edge of a canyon in the back, it had a drop-dead view over the city of Los Angeles.

Hal’s wasn’t the priciest palace in Beverly Park, but he also owned homes in Provence, St. Barts, and Bali, so I guess it added up to a whole lot of money for walls, roofs, and views.

I parked the Mercedes outside on the steep street and sat for a moment, knowing that I was about to walk into some tremendously upscale version of hell.

I snapped out of it as a lithe young man, some kind of valet, trotted out to the curb and asked me if I was there to see Mr. Archer and was Mr. Archer expecting me?

I said that Hal had invited me to join him in the pool house. The valet checked with Archer by phone, and Archer gave the valet the okay. I followed him up the green marble pathway through a contiguous line of pyramidal teak pavilions to the entrance of what Hal called “the main.”

Young-man-without-a-name opened the heavy brass and mahogany door, and I entered the foyer to the combination living room/kitchen. The entire house was tiled in golden marble, and the center of this room’s floor was divided by a rill. The thin and musical stream of running water ran through the house, out the wide-open folding doors, and to the infinity pool that seemed to be running over the edge of the canyon.

To the left of the pool was another Bali-inspired pavilion. I knew that the view through the back of the structure was the broad cityscape of Los Angeles far below. But the front doors were closed.

“Can I bring anything to you?” the young man asked. He was polished and confident, but he watched my expression with the kind of intensity found in people for whom pleasing or displeasing was the difference between life and death.

I told him, “Several people who work for me will be arriving. Can you just send them back here?”

I gave him the names and thanked him. Then I circumnavigated the pool. I knocked on a wooden door that was as thick as a tree, and when there was no answer, I called Hal on his phone. After four rings, he picked up.

“Are you inside the pool house, Hal?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Jack Morgan. I believe you rang. I’m right outside, Hal. Now open the door.”

HAL OPENED THE door, said, “What took you so long?”

His thick, white hair was sticking out at wild angles. His eyes were red. His belly was hanging over the sash of his maroon silk robe.

He wasn’t normally a drunk, but right now, his breath was so saturated with alcohol, I could almost see the fumes.

I stepped into the pool house, said, “Stay out of my way for a couple of minutes, okay, Hal? I’m going to look at this place like a cop would look at it.”

“Want something? I’m drinking scotch.”

“I need to work fast, Hal. Sit down somewhere.”

The so-called pool house would be most people’s idea of a palace. It was built along the same general theme as the main house: the stone floors, the vaulted mahogany-and-bamboo ceiling. The wide-open, freaking fantastic view of the city way the hell down there, making it seem like the pool house was in the clouds.

There were a couple of lounge chairs facing the canyon’s cliff side, a table between them, a baby watermelon cut into slices. There was also a pricey bottle of scotch, two glasses, a crystal ice bucket.

I went toward the changing room, careful not to touch any evidence, and stopped cold in the doorway.

The late Mrs. Harold Archer was lying faceup on the soft, blood-soaked carpet. She was wearing a small bikini, pale blue, pulled up over her breasts, covered with blood. She had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly.

I couldn’t count the number of wounds, but they looked like they’d been delivered in a moment of high passion and fury.

Tule’s left hand was flung out to her side. There was a gigantic diamond ring on her ring finger, and there was a kitchen knife six or seven inches away from her chest. The knife, her hand, her body, the white carpet, the cream-colored walls—everything was spattered, splashed, and sprayed with blood.

A man’s bathing suit and a boxy printed shirt were flung over the arm of a chair. The clothes were so bloody I couldn’t tell the color of the fabric.

Beyond the body, bloody footsteps led to the bathroom.

I followed the prints to the doorway and stood outside the room. I could see everything in this uncluttered space. Red footprints led to a shower stall with a lot of heads, a marble floor, and a glass wall facing the view. Bloody water was still pooled around the drain, and large handprints were on the marble, the soap, the shampoo bottle, and the glass.

Hal had cleaned up, put on his robe, and called me.

I saw the one knife that had been used to cut the melon and murder Tule Archer. And nothing else that could have been used as a weapon.

Hal was going to have a tough time proving self-defense.

I’D BEEN INSIDE the pool house for only a couple of minutes, and in another two or three, I was going to be obstructing justice. It wasn’t going to take a forensic genius to figure out what had happened here, but I wanted Sci to see the scene anyway.

I left the changing room the way I found it, went back out to the larger room, where Hal had draped his large sloppy self in a lounge chair and was looking at the view. The sun was going down leaving a bloody swath of sky.

I came up behind him and said, “Hal, tell me what happened.”

He spoke without turning. I had to strain to understand his slurred speech.

“She said she was thinking about my heart. That she visualized it before she went to sleep every night. That she could see all the arteries and where they went into the valves and she could see the scars where the arteries were stitched into place.”