“Your former agent?”
“He feels like I owe him my fucking career. I’ve cost him millions. Since I left, he hasn’t gotten a worthwhile client. And he’s violent. Marks belongs to a shooting club.”
“How would he have gotten his hands on your clothing? Or been able to get a sample of your hair?”
“You find that out. You’re the police.”
“Did he know you’d be in Cleveland that night? Did he know about you and Kathy Kogut?”
“Nick is merely proposing,” Leff cut in, “that other possibilities do exist for who could be behind these crimes.”
I shifted in my seat. “Who else knew about the book?”
Jenks twitched. “It wasn’t something I paraded around. Couple of old friends. My first wife, Joanna….”
“Any of them have any
reason to want to set you up?”
Jenks sighed uncomfortably. “My divorce, as you may know, was not exactly what they call mutually agreeable. No doubt there was a time Joanna would’ve been delighted to find me on a deserted road while she was cruising along at sixty. But now that she’s back on her feet, with a new life, now that she’s even gotten to know Chessy…I don’t think so. No. It isn’t Joanna. Trust me on that.”
I ignored the remark and looked firmly into his eyes. “You told me your ex-wife’s been to your house.”
“Maybe once or twice.”
“So, she’d have access to certain things. Maybe the wine? Maybe what was in your closet?”
Jenks seemed to contemplate the possibility for a moment, then his mouth crinkled into a contemptuous smile. “Impossible. No. It isn’t Joanna.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He looked at me as if he were stating an understood fact. “Joanna loved me. She still does. Why do you think she hangs around, covets a relationship with my new wife? Because she misses the view? It’s because she cannot replace what I gave her. How I loved her. She is empty without me.
“What do you think?” he snorted. “Joanna’s been holding specimens of my hair in a jar ever since we were divorced?” He sat there, stroking his beard, while the resolve on his face softened into a glimmer of possibility. “Someone has it in for me…but Joanna… she was just a little clerk when I met her. She didn’t know Ralph Lauren from JCPenneys. I gave her self-esteem. I devoted myself to her, and she to me. She sacrificed for me, even worked two jobs when I decided to write.”
It was hard to think of Jenks as anything other than the ruthless bastard who was responsible for these horrible crimes, but I pressed on. “You said the tuxedo was an old suit. You didn’t even recognize it. And the gun, Mr. Jenks, the nine millimeter. You said you hadn’t seen it in years. That you thought it was kept somewhere at your house in Montana. Are you so sure this might not have been planned for some time?”
I could see Jenks subtly shifting his expression as he came around to the impossible conclusion.
“You said that when you started writing, Joanna took a second job to help support you. Just what sort of work?”
Jenks stared up toward the ceiling, then he seemed to remember.
“She worked at Saks.”
Chapter 108
SLOWLY, UNAVOIDABLY, I was starting to feel as if I were on the wrong airplane, heading to the wrong city.
Against all logic, I was growing surer and surer that Nicholas Jenks might not be the killer. Oh, brother!
I had to figure out what to do. Jenks in handcuffs was the lead picture in both Time and Newsweek. He was being arraigned in Napa for two additional murders the following day. Maybe I should just stay on the wrong plane, get out of town, never show my face in San Francisco again.
I got the girls together. I took them through the mosaic that was starting to come clear: the acrimonious contest over the divorce, Joanna’s sense of being discarded, her direct access to the victims through her contacts at Saks.
“She was an assistant store manager,” I told them. “Coincidence?”
“Get me proof,” Jill said. “Because as of now, I have proof against Nick Jenks. All the proof I need.”