Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 87

Nothing about Jinx Poole said “killer” to me. She was smart, cool, a respected businesswoman, and her admission sounded literally, factually, unbelievable.

Yet I believed her.

Still, I was just about shocked out of my shoes-and I didn’t hide it.

“Jinx, you can’t tell me that you committed a felony. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a priest. I can be subpoenaed. Forced to testify.”

“I don’t even understand why I want to tell you,” Jinx said to me. “But I feel I must. I want you to know about my husband’s death from me.”

I didn’t like this setup. I hardly knew Jinx Poole. Why was she confiding in me? The question jumped into my mind for the first time: Did she have something to do with the hotel murders?

“My husband was Clark Langston,” she said. “You’ve heard of him?”

“He owned some TV stations in the nineties?”

“Yes, that was him.”

Despite my warning, Jinx began to tell me her story. She described meeting Clark Langston twenty years before, during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Berkeley. She was waiting tables at the Lodge at Pebble Beach.

“Clark had a boat, a plane, vacation homes in Napa, Austin, and Chamonix. He was so charming, like George Clooney, maybe. Rich and handsome and funny-and he always had friends around him. He was magnetic, you know what I mean? I was a kid. And I fell for him, Jack. I fell very hard.”

Jinx kind of lit up as she described what she had thought was only a fantastic summer romance. Then Langston told her that his divorce had gone through. He proposed, offered her a big diamond ring and a big life to go with it.

“I married him that September,” Jinx said. “My parents told me to wait, but I was nineteen. I thought I knew everything. I knew nothing. I left school and became Mrs. Clark Langston and got all that came with that.”

Jinx stopped talking. She swallowed, made a few halting starts. She was having trouble going on, but after a moment, she did.

“A few months into our marriage, he started putting me down in public, flirting with other women, telling me to fetch things for him. Actually, it was worse when we were alone. He drank every day. Until he was stupefied.

“I had never known a real drinker, Jack, and Clark was an angry drunk, a violent drunk. He’d wrench my arms behind my back, shove me against a wall, and rape me. Soon the only kind of sex we had was rape. That’s how he liked it.

“One time, he had his hands around my throat, had me bent back over the sink and was screaming in my face about how worthless I was. There was a knife on the drainboard, and suddenly it was in my hand, pointed at his back-I didn’t realize that I had grabbed it. It was the first time murder actually occurred to me.”

“Did you tell anyone about him? What he was doing?”

“No. You didn’t do that in his circle, and I no longer had a circle of my own. No one would have believed me anyway. And sometimes, this is the crazy part, I saw the man I loved-and I still loved him. Imagine that.”

“I’m sorry to hear this, Jinx. It’s a bad story.”

The waiter brought our meal, asked if we needed anything else. I told him we were fine, but my appetite was gone.

Jinx said to me, “When we’d been married for about two years, we went to a wedding far off the beaten track, if there’s ever been a track to Willow Creek Golf and Country Club.

“Clark was in his element. He gave a toast and he also gave the new couple a car as a wedding gift.

“When the bride danced with Clark, I saw embarrassment and fear on her face. I’d worn that look myself. Hell, I’m wearing it now. I realized that the bride had also been victimized by my husband, but she’d been luckier. She’d gotten away.

“We were driving home when Clark got lost. We had a GPS, one of the first, but I didn’t know how to work it, and Clark was crazy hammered, taking hard turns at high speeds, driving up on the shoulder of the road. It was at the end of the day in a remote rural area.

“Clark said, ‘Get out the map, Fluffy. Can’t you do anything?’ I got the map out of the glove box and started to read him the directions back to the freeway-and that gave him a big idea. He told me to give him the directions in the electronic voice of the GPS. To do an imitation.”

I nodded, told Jinx to go on.

“There was a sign for Whiskeytown Lake. Clark said, ‘Whiskeytown. Sounds like my kind of place.’ I started talking like the GPS. ‘Turn right. In one. Mile. Turn right. In one half. Mile.’”

Jinx turned to me, looking small and young and vulnerable.

“I’ve never told this much of the story to anyone before. I’m sorry, Jack. I think I’ve made a mistake.”

I thought she had made a mistake, but now I was with her on that twisting road and I couldn’t see around the corner.

Had Jinx stabbed her husband?

Had she strangled him with a wire garrote?

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re safe with me.”

That was when I realized that my point of view had shifted.

I wanted to hear Jinx’s story.

And I wanted her to be okay.