Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 62

Caine was waiting for me on the freedom side of the chain-link barrier. He put an arm around me and hurried me quickly through the seething throng of bikers and gangbangers outside the jail.

The car was waiting for us. Aldo sprang from the front seat and moved fast to open the back door for me.

“You okay, Jack?”

“No worse than if I got hit by a car and slept it off for a couple of days in a drainage ditch,” I said.

Aldo grinned. “Oh, man, that’s bad. But we’ve got you now. Listen, there’s coffee for you in back.”

Had it only been five days since Aldo had picked me up at the airport and driven me home? It felt like at least a decade had passed.

Caine got into the backseat beside me, and the Mercedes shot out into the stream of traffic.

“I want to stop home and change.”

“The hotel would be better, Jack. They just took down the tape around your house an hour ago. No one’s been inside to clean. Cody brought some clothes to the hotel.”

I nodded, thought about my blood-soaked bed. My house forever colored by that blood.

There was a newspaper on the seat beside me. A big photo on page one. It took me a second to realize that the shackled man standing in line for the TTCF bus was me.

The headline read “Morgan Freed on Bail.” The subhead was “Accused Killer Walks on Twenty Million Bail.”

The lede paragraph was about Colleen’s murder, then a few lines about Phil Spector, Robert Blake, O. J. Simpson. Other LA killers.

“When’s the trial?” I asked Caine.

“We don’t have a date. Not yet,” Caine said. “And we don’t want one too soon.”

I knew what he meant. All we had in our favor was me telling the cops I didn’t do it. Another way of saying we had jack shit.

The car waited for me outside the Beverly Hills Sun. I went up to my opulent, gilded room. I stripped down, stood under the six shower heads in the travertine marble stall. Those streams of clean hot water almost resurrected me.

Thirty minutes later, about noon, I walked through the doors of Private and loped up the stairs.

Cody’s workstation was vacant, but there was a client pacing the open space outside my office. It was Dewey Arnold, lead attorney for Hamilton-Price, the biggest sports agency in the world.

“Dewey, come in. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I don’t need to come in, Jack.”

“No?”

I had been headed toward my office, but I stopped, turned around, and looked into Dewey Arnold’s craggy face.

I had known Dewey since I was a teenager. His firm had represented me during my one-season shot at professional football. Hamilton-Price had been my father’s client. Hamilton was still friends with my uncle Fred, who co-owned the Oakland Raiders.

Hamilton-Price had been with Private for the past five years.

“Let me just say it, Jack. You’re fired. We don’t want to work with you anymore.”

“Dewey. Come in. Let’s talk about this. I’m not guilty of anything. It’s a-”

“I’ve heard. It’s a frame,” he said. “We don’t care. We don’t like the stink. I settled up with accounting and I’m putting out a press release this afternoon. We’re moving our business to Private Security.”

“You’re going to my brother?”

“Out of loyalty to your family. Hamilton said to tell you good luck.”

If you say the word luck and put a lot of power behind that ck sound, spit comes out of your mouth. I wiped my cheek as Dewey Arnold stalked toward the elevator.