Assume Nothing (25 page)

‘How can I help you, detectives?’

‘We just saw you upstairs in the offices of Class Act Productions,’ Winn said. ‘You seemed to leave in quite a hurry when we showed up.’

‘Well, I am in a hurry,’ the guy said, unfazed by the accusation, ‘but that’s got nothing to do with you. I’ve got a ten o’clock meeting in Burbank I’m not gonna make if I don’t get out of here pretty quick. What’s this all about?’

‘Would you mind if we asked to see some ID, Mister . . .’

‘Reddick. Joe Reddick.’ He handed Winn his wallet, open to his driver’s license. They were all standing just inside the lobby entrance and a heavy flow of foot traffic was swarming all around them. Lerner wasn’t sure, but he thought he caught Reddick – if that was really his name – give the doors a brief glance, as if measuring his distance from the nearest one.

Winn looked Reddick’s ID over, held on to his wallet after she was done. ‘What line of work are you in, Mr Reddick?’

‘I’m a field investigator for the City Attorney’s office. Look—’

Lerner nodded his head to no one, suspicions confirmed. Not every ex-cop in the world looked like one, but the mark of the Job on Reddick was as hard to miss as a full-body tattoo.

‘And your interest in Class Act is?’ Lerner asked, cutting in on his partner’s line of questioning. Something about Reddick had his interest now and he was anxious to figure out what it was.

‘Their CEO was witness to an accident a couple months back involving an MTA bus and a pedestrian who’s now suing the city. I was here to get a statement from him, but the asshole stood me up.’

‘Are you referring to Perry Cross?’ Winn asked.

‘That’s him. Let me ask you guys again, in case you missed the question the first time: What’s this all about? What do you want with me?’

‘The girl upstairs seems to think you’re one of us. She said something about a burglary at “Mr Baumhower’s” place. Any idea what she was talking about?’

‘None.’

‘You didn’t tell her you were a police officer investigating a burglary?’

‘Impersonating a police officer would be a criminal offense. Why would I do something like that?’

‘You tell us, Mr Reddick,’ Lerner said. ‘Why
would
you do something like that?’

He smiled in lieu of crossing his arms and setting his feet, just to let Reddick know he could take all the time he wanted to answer; Lerner and Winn weren’t going anywhere.

‘OK, so maybe I did misrepresent myself a little up there,’ Reddick said, clearly more pained by the confession than shamed by it. ‘It’s like I said: I’ve been chasing this jackass Cross for days now and getting nowhere. He’s ducking me. So I thought, this morning we’ll try something different. See if he’d be more receptive to a call from Detective Reddick than Joe from the City Attorney’s office. It was a dumb move, but I was desperate. I don’t get a statement from this clown soon, I’m gonna be out of a job.’

He looked to the cops for some reaction and got very little in return. Lerner still couldn’t figure it out. There was something oddly familiar about Reddick – his name, his face? – but Lerner couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

‘The name “Gillis Rainey” mean anything to you?’ Winn asked, breaking the short silence.

‘Rainey? No.’ Reddick shook his head.

Winn finally handed his wallet back to him. ‘OK. Thanks for the help. If we need to talk to you again, we’ll be in touch.’

Reddick nodded, slipped his wallet back into his coat pocket.

‘And no more playing policeman, Mr Reddick. No matter how “desperate” you get. Understand?’

‘Sure thing. Thanks for the pass.’

He slipped away. Winn waited until he was out of sight to turn to Lerner and ask, ‘Well? What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. He had no reaction to Rainey’s name that I could see. Still . . .’

‘He wants more from Perry Cross than just a statement.’

‘Yeah. That’s the feeling I got, too. Along with something else.’

Winn waited for him to go on.

‘I know the guy from somewhere. His name or his face is familiar to me, maybe both.’

‘Well, he used to be a member of the club he only pretends to be in now, that much is obvious. Yes?’

‘Oh, yeah. No doubt about it.’

‘So maybe you ran across him when he was on the Job?’

Lerner shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I don’t think so.’ He’d met a lot of cops in his time with the LAPD, some with other agencies and others in various divisions within the department, so it was hard to say for sure that Reddick hadn’t been one of them. But that just wasn’t the feeling Lerner had about him.

He gave himself a few more seconds to think about it, then shook his head, said, ‘Aw, what the hell. Whoever he is, he’s probably got nothing to do with Rainey. And that’s all we’re supposed to be interested in here, right?’

‘Right,’ Winn said, though she sounded less than convinced.

Boarding a regular elevator this time, the two cops went back upstairs to have another talk with Cross’s receptionist.

THIRTY

I
f Reddick didn’t know before that his time for killing Cross was running out, he knew it now. He’d bought himself, at best, a few more hours of freedom, bullshitting detectives Winn and Lerner of the LAPD into letting him go, but that was it. Any minute now, the pair – who he imagined were investigating the death of Gillis Rainey, since they’d dropped the dead man’s name – would connect him to the break-in at Cross’s condo and have every uniform in the city watching out for him.

He had to find Cross fast.

He sat in Dana’s car, having parked it not far from Cross’s office building, just south of Century City, and tried to think. He couldn’t afford to keep chasing Cross’s tail. That was a loser’s game. He still had to find a way to bring Cross to him, laughable as such an idea was, considering what Cross knew about his intentions.

He’d had the asshole’s phone number, just as he’d had Clarke’s and Sinnott’s, since he pulled it off Andy Baumhower’s laptop Saturday night, but he’d been loath to use it before now. He hadn’t worried that calling Clarke would send him running because Clarke hadn’t been smart enough to run, but Sinnott and Cross were a different matter. He thought both men could be easily spooked into taking flight, possibly disappearing for good, so he’d resisted the temptation to contact either just for the sake of scaring them shitless.

By now, however, Cross probably knew that Clarke and Sinnott were dead and was already inclined to run, so Reddick had little to lose by giving him a call. He just couldn’t imagine what he could say to the little prick over the phone to coerce him into a meeting.

Reddick was tired of the hunt and Cross had to be even more so. Maybe he’d agree to a meet just for the chance to put an end to it, once and for all, if Reddick could convince him the odds of his survival would all be in his favor.

‘
Bring all the friends you want, I don’t give a shit. Just show up.
’ Would Cross take that kind of bait?

Reddick doubted it. And he didn’t want to give him that much of an advantage, in any case. What he wanted was him and Cross in a room, alone, no friends and no witnesses. Five minutes, that’s all he needed. But how to get the sonofabitch in that room? What besides the promise of closure did Reddick have to offer Cross as a lure?

Iris. He’d forgotten all about Iris.

Unless she’d found a way to free herself, she should still be back in the bedroom of his home where he’d left her, bound and gagged. Threatening to kill her for Cross’s benefit would be pointless, he knew, because Cross wouldn’t take such a threat from him seriously and wouldn’t give a shit if he did. Reddick had already put a gun to the girl’s head once in Cross’s presence and seen what he would do about it, which was nothing. But if Iris called Cross instead of Reddick, under some false pretense, maybe she could do what Reddick couldn’t, talk Cross into a rendezvous of some kind where Reddick would be waiting for him in her stead.

Of course, Iris would want no part of such a plan. She’d know she was leading Cross to his death and would refuse to make the call. But Reddick would have to convince her to do it regardless. Her status as an innocent bystander in this war between him and Cross notwithstanding, if he had to hurt her, he would. He would do whatever was necessary. He was too desperate now to keep making allowances for decency and fair play, and his goal of ensuring Dana and Jake’s long-term safety, by killing the last man who could threaten it, was too close at hand.

He would try to scare Iris into calling Cross first. If that didn’t work, he would find the will somewhere to win her cooperation by other means.

The stub that had once been the pinky finger on Cross’s left hand hurt like a sonofabitch. Ruben had wrapped a tourniquet around it, using a strip of cloth torn from Cross’s shirt sleeve, so it wasn’t bleeding much anymore, but the pain was still damn near unbearable.

And yet the finger was the least of Cross’s problems. They all knew now that Clarke and Sinnott were indeed dead. They knew it because, right after Cross had completed the twisted self-surgery Ruben had forced upon him, Ruben’s driver had driven them out to Clarke’s place and, following his employer’s instructions, broken into the house to find the bodies. He’d just sauntered around back, acting as cool and entitled to be there as a man from the gas company, and forced his way into the home, in broad fucking daylight, Cross had no idea how. When the big man had reappeared a few minutes later, strolling back to the car the same way he’d left it, Cross could tell by the look on his face that what he’d seen inside the house wasn’t good. No translation of his all-
Espanol
report to Ruben had been necessary.

‘Well? I was right, wasn’t I?’ he asked. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ Ruben said. ‘They’re dead.’ His rage was beyond his power to completely conceal, but he was holding it in check well, demonstrating more self-control than Cross would have thought the man possessed. ‘But it is strange.’

‘What’s strange?’

‘Poeto says it doesn’t look like this man Reddick was the one who killed them. He says it looks like Ben killed the other man and then died of other causes. A drug overdose, perhaps.’

‘What? That’s crazy!’ Cross cried.

‘Your friend Will was shot, yes, but with Ben’s gun, and he is the only one with any visible wounds. Poeto says Ben’s body is sitting in a chair and that there is a liquor bottle and pills nearby. He says there is no sign that anyone else was ever there.’

Cross’s head began to reel. Ruben was looking at him with open distrust now. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what it looks like to fucking “Poeto.” Reddick killed them both, just like he killed Andy. He’s an ex-cop, he knows how to fix things so they appear to be something else.’

‘An ex-cop? Now this Joe Reddick of yours is an ex-policeman?’

It was a detail Cross had previously neglected to mention, and not accidentally.

‘Yeah. What, didn’t I tell you that?’

Ruben didn’t answer him right away, searching his face for the deceit he was certain had to be there. ‘I think I’ve heard enough about this man, Perry. I want to meet him, face-to-face. You will take us to him.
Now
.’

Cross shook his head, swallowing air as if it were a horse pill. ‘I can’t. I don’t know where he lives. But I can find out. All I need—’

Ruben lunged across the seat to slap him across the face with the back of his right hand, hard enough that Cross’s butchered pinky finger was momentarily forgotten. ‘Enough of this bullshit! I am out of patience with you! You will tell me where I can find this imaginary friend of yours or I will cut your lying tongue out of your mouth and make you fucking
eat it
!’

Cross was too terrified, and now in too much pain, to do much more than babble. ‘I don’t . . .’

Of his three partners, he was the only one who had never found a use for Reddick’s address; Andy had taken it from Reddick himself after their accident, Ben had gotten it from Andy, and Will had almost certainly collected this piece of data when he’d researched Reddick online. Given time, Cross could get it, too, but he had no more time. The fury on Ruben’s face said his time had all run out.

Ruben closed the space between them in one pounce, locked Cross’s wounded hand in a vise-like grip and said, ‘Last chance,
pendejo
. Where is this Joe Reddick?’

His bloody stump of a finger clamped tight within Ruben’s fist, pain searing a hole in his brain, Cross came to the very edge of blacking out. He was doomed. But then:

‘Wait. Wait!’

He had remembered the call he’d placed to Iris’s brother-in-law, Frank Blake, the night before, and the favor he’d asked of him.

Ruben was still leaning in to breathe into his face, eyes as bright as white flame, but he eased his grip on Cross’s hand almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes?’

‘One call. There’s a man who might know,’ Cross said, gasping for air. ‘Please. Let me make just one call.’

Ruben didn’t move, or speak. He looked into Cross’s eyes as if he were trying to light his very soul on fire. The knife had reappeared in his right hand, a silver promise of death hovering only inches from Cross’s throat.

‘OK.’ Ruben released Cross’s left hand, slid back across the car’s rear seat to give him room. ‘One call. No more. Go.’

Cross found his cell phone and dialed Blake’s number. He was without faith and had never said a prayer in his life, but that didn’t stop him now from begging Jesus Christ himself to intervene on his behalf and put Blake on the other end of the line.

Both Ruben and his driver watched intently as Cross listened to the phone ring in his ear, sounding as if it might never stop.

‘Please,’ Cross said out loud.

He counted seven rings, then eight.

‘Hello?’

It was Blake. Cross closed his eyes and exhaled with relief. ‘Frank, it’s Perry. I’m calling to see if you got that info I asked for last night. On Joe Reddick?’