“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.
CHAPTER 88
Jinx looked haunted as she told me about Clark Langston’s life and death, still afraid of her dead husband. Maybe she still loved him too.
“We were on a dirt road that circled the lake,” she said. “Boaters were packing up their gear. The road turned into a rut, overgrown with grass and weeds, and in every way deserted.
“I was still doing my GPS voice,” Jinx continued. She smiled, but it was a nervous smile. “This laughable pretense of control over my husband was inspiring me, Jack. We were now locked in a crazy game of chicken. And he was goading me, saying, ‘You think I don’t know what you’re up to?’
“I don’t know how he knew it, but an idea had occurred to me-that maybe I could get him to crash his Maserati. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to die, and if I died too, it was all right.
“I said, ‘Take the next left.’ That was the road to the national recreation area.”
I sat back in my seat and watched her face. I imagined this power struggle twenty years before, the tyrannical older man and his bride who fantasized about getting even. Emotionally, Jinx was still back there.
“It was still light enough to see,” she said to me. “I told him to take the next turn, which was onto a boat ramp. He did it, and we took the ramp going forty.
“I lost my nerve. I screamed, but Clark was having a high time scaring me, making me sorry that I’d dared him. He laughed at me, Jack. He pressed his foot down even harder on the gas.”
“Did he realize where he was?”
“I’ll never know. He might have thought he could stop the car in time and misjudged the distance. Maybe he thought that his quarter-million-dollar car would fly. All I know for sure is that he never braked.
“I undid my seat belt,” Jinx told me. Her head was lowered. She was rushing now, trying to get the story over with.
“I had the door open, and I jumped before the car hit the water. I went numb for a while after that. I heard nothing, saw nothing, thought only of reaching the shore, which wasn’t far away.
“I didn’t look back. I walked for a while, got a ride, told the police that my husband had lost control of his car.
“When they pulled the car out of the lake, Clark was still wearing his seat belt. His blood alcohol was three times the legal limit, and his death was ruled accidental. No questions.
“I went to the funeral. I cried. Then I moved to LA. I took back my maiden name, and I got my degree.”
“You bought a hotel.”
Jinx said, “Yes. Right after I graduated. I bought a hotel with the two million dollars stipulated in my prenuptial agreement. I borrowed a lot more. I renovated the whole place, reopened it as the Beverly Hills Sun, and then I bought the other two. I was in a frenzy. I needed to work, to prove to myself that my life was worth something. That I didn’t need Clark’s love-or his disdain.
“Jack, what I did at Whiskeytown Lake-I wanted him to die, then I made my wish come true.”
She had started to tear up, but she wouldn’t let herself go. She said, “I’ve been feeling that the killings in my hotels are payback for Clark’s death, for the money I got from him.”