Private: #1 Suspect Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”

CHAPTER 15

    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