Assume Nothing (5 page)

For Orvis Andrews, it was bowling.

Three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, four days after Andy Baumhower’s mini-van had exchanged sheet metal with Reddick’s Mustang, Andrews limped into Arrowhead Lanes way the hell out in Lancaster and rolled six games. Reddick sat at the opposite end of the near-empty building and, lower back aching for the fourth day in a row, discreetly aimed a compact video camera at the black man as he bowled four 200-plus games and one in the high 190s, after starting off slow with a 145. And all with a house ball and his right arm, the one the LAPD was supposed to have rendered useless.

Reddick hoped Andrews hadn’t already spent that eleven million.

Meanwhile, seventy miles to the south of Bakersfield, an amateur bird watcher named Angela Cromartie was walking along a stretch of the LA River in Silverlake when she spotted something with her binoculars that was most definitely not a Blacknecked Stilt. It was a man’s leg, protruding from the shadows engulfing a storm drain opening in the north wall of the basin. She thought it had to be something else, a pile of old clothing with a shoe jutting out of it at an odd angle or something – but no. She kept the binoculars trained on it until she was sure: It was a man’s leg, fully clothed, and it wasn’t moving.

It didn’t have to belong to a corpse. There were dozens of other explanations for it. But as she pulled her cell phone from a wind-breaker pocket and started inching her way up to the storm drain, moving as if through slabs of mud, she couldn’t make herself believe a single one of them.

SIX

T
he next morning, Thursday, the story was on page twenty-two of
The Los Angeles Times
. It was only four paragraphs long.

It said that the body of an unidentified Caucasian male, age approximately fifty, had been discovered in the LA River near the Atwater area of Los Angeles late Wednesday afternoon. An Eagle Rock resident named Angela Cromartie had stumbled upon the fully clothed corpse while walking the river and alerted authorities. Cause of death was unknown pending toxicology tests, but a police spokesperson told reporters the body, which investigators estimated had been in the river about a week, showed no obvious signs of foul play.

Reddick never saw the story, but Will Sinnott did. He’d been waiting for such a news report to make the papers, or appear somewhere online, ever since Andy Baumhower had told his Class Act partners about the car accident he’d had immediately after dumping Gillis Rainey’s body in the river. Like Ben Clarke, Sinnott had recognized the accident, and Andy’s mishandling of it, as a catastrophe rife with danger. If Rainey’s body were ever discovered and identified, and this guy Andy had crashed into – Joseph Reddick – heard about it, and put two and two together . . . the cops would be knocking on Andy’s door within hours. And after that?

End game.

Oh, Cross talked like he didn’t believe it, like Ben was just overreacting to the most remote of all possible outcomes, but Sinnott knew better. There were only so many blunders a group of amateur criminals could make before their incompetence finally caught up with them, and Sinnott and his friends had already committed more than their fair share.

Rainey’s body turning up now, less than a week after Baumhower had disposed of it, had been all but inevitable, and Sinnott had little doubt it was the harbinger of even worse things to come.

As bad as the news was, however, he knew it wasn’t going to warrant anyone’s full attention, because the boys behind Class Act Productions had a much more immediate problem on their hands.

In eight days, they were due to pay Ben’s psychotic friend Ruben Lizama a quarter million dollars, and they were still trying to figure out how the hell they could scrape up that kind of cash in so short a period of time.

Unlike his three spineless business partners, Ben Clarke actually relished the idea of becoming a serious criminal.

At this stage in his young life, with no felony arrests to his credit, the twenty-four-year-old Stanford grad with the lumberjack build and gravel pit voice was merely a bully who aspired to the next level; he could talk the talk, but he had yet to walk the walk. Clarke found this deeply annoying, and he was bound and determined to change it.

Though he had no practical experience in serious crime himself, he had many casual acquaintances who did. It was a natural byproduct of the business he was in. Clarke’s end of the Class Act consortium consisted of three highly profitable Los Angeles area nightclubs – McCullough’s out in Westwood, where Gillis Rainey had died, Nightshades in Santa Monica, and Primo Joe’s, just around the corner from Cross’s office in Century City – and all were popular hangouts for the most beautiful young gangsters Los Angeles had to offer. Pimps, dealers, call girls, and gangbangers – Clarke entertained them all, and was thrilled to do so.

But no one intrigued him more than Ruben.

A regular guest of all of Clarke’s establishments, Ruben was rich, beautiful, and effervescent, everything Clarke demanded to see in his clientele, and the man drew desirable women to him like a magnet. Clarke liked to think that the LA nightlife began and ended with his three clubs, and that never seemed a more justifiable conceit than when Ruben and his tiny entourage were somewhere in attendance, igniting the room with light and laughter.

Of course, Clarke had recognized Ruben as a drug trafficker immediately, but this only added to his allure. Ruben was living the life Clarke dreamed of having himself someday, one unaffected by the moral and ethical constraints smaller men were forced to adhere to, and Clarke considered every minute spent in Ruben’s company an education he couldn’t get anywhere else.

It was with this kind of fawning admiration that Clarke eventually offered Ruben entree into the Class Act inner circle. He was hoping that, merely by linking his own fortunes with Ruben’s, some of the Mexican national’s magic might somehow rub off on him. Clarke and his three partners had been looking for seed money at the time, struggling to get the fourth and last segment of their combined businesses – Will Sinnott’s exotic car detailing service – off the ground, and they’d been too hungry and over-zealous to much care where it came from. Had they known who Ruben really was, Clarke’s friends would have wanted nothing to do with him, but Clarke led them all to believe he was just a common coke peddler trying to go legit, and they bought it. They were too green to do otherwise. Baumhower fretted and Sinnott whined, but in the end, with Cross’s blessings, Clarke took $250,000 of Ruben’s money and promised him Class Act Productions would clean, press, and return it in one year.

Now that money was gone. Fucking Cross had gambled it away. Gone out to Vegas with his goddamn girlfriend and burned up a quarter million dollars belonging to an enforcer for one of the three biggest and most dangerous drug cartels in Mexico.

‘You had better be fucking kidding me,’ Clarke had said when Cross made the confession Monday.

But Cross hadn’t been kidding, of course – who the hell would joke about such a thing? – and Clarke had his hands locked around the smaller man’s throat, before either Baumhower or Sinnott could stop him, the moment this became obvious.

Killing Gillis Rainey had been a bad mistake. Leaving his body in the LA River, then getting involved in a traffic accident with somebody immediately afterward, had been a monumental blunder. But fucking with Ruben Lizama’s money was suicidal. It was the kind of thing a man did when life held no meaning for him anymore, and he didn’t care how much pain he would have to endure just to see it come to an end.

‘I
told
you, Perry. Jesus Christ,
I told you
!’ Clarke bellowed when Sinnott and Baumhower, working as a team, had managed to put some distance between him and Cross. ‘This guy’s crazy! The man hammers ice picks into people’s ears, for Chrissake!’

‘Come on, Ben. You don’t really believe that?’

‘You’re goddamn right I do!’

Clarke had never seen it himself, but the people he’d heard it from were not in the habit of making up such colorful stories.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Sinnott said, whimpering, and Clarke turned to look at him just in time to see him vomit on to his own shoes.

Cross pretended not to have noticed. ‘I had a run of bad luck. I thought we’d get our money back from Gillis.’

‘And then?’ Clarke said. ‘Gillis only owed us a hundred thousand, Perry. Where the hell did you think Ruben’s other hundred and fifty was going to come from if you’re only just now bothering to tell us this shit?’

Cross didn’t answer.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Baumhower said, almost laughing. ‘He was going to roll the dice again!’

‘I told you, I had a run of bad luck. It wasn’t going to last, it never does. I would have made Ruben’s money back, and more.’

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand? You crazy sonofabitch!’ Sinnott said, wiping his face and hands with a bar towel. ‘You’re sick, Perry. You need help!’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You heard the man,’ Clarke said. The others had never heard him speak to Cross this way before. ‘You’re sick. You’ve got an illness, and you told us you were gonna do something about it. You were gonna see a doctor, you said.’

Jesus, Perry thought, he sounds just like Iris.

‘I intended to,’ he said. ‘I just thought . . . Well, I thought I had things under control.’

The four men fell silent as one, the magnitude of their dilemma slowly sinking in.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Sinnott asked.

The question was meant for everyone, but Perry took it upon himself to answer it. ‘Well, for one thing, convert as many assets to cash as we can, as quickly as we can. After that . . .’

They all looked at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

‘. . . as much as I hate to suggest it, I think the tried and true would probably be best.’

Baumhower began shaking his head from side to side as if he were trying to break something loose within. ‘Not a chance. No way. You’re talking about what, two hundred thousand dollars? I couldn’t get another dime out of my folks if I put a gun to their fucking heads.’

‘And that goes double for me,’ Sinnott said. ‘My father’s cut me off. He’s all done loaning me money.’

‘Perhaps if your parents were made to understand the gravity of the situation, they’d reconsider,’ Cross said.

‘And exactly how are we supposed to do that?’ Clarke asked him. ‘Make them understand the gravity of the situation? “Hey Mom, Dad, we owe a drug dealer two hundred fifty thousand in a week, and if we don’t come up with the scratch, he’s gonna cut our balls off.” Is that what we’re supposed to say?’

‘Of course not. What I would do is make up a story in which, if you don’t get the loan, your family’s good name will become front page news for all the worst possible – and most socially embarrassing – reasons. Your folks may not give a shit about your balls, but they sure as hell care about their reputations. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.’

No one even bothered to try.

In the four days since that time, Cross had proven to be a prophet. Using bullshit cover stories along the lines of what he had proposed, Clarke and Baumhower had already managed to squeeze roughly a hundred thirty grand, in total, from their respective parents, and each was hopeful they could get another ten or twenty between them if it became absolutely necessary. Only Sinnott’s parents had refused to cave, his father holding fast to his promise that the bank of Harmon Sinnott was closed to his son forever.

All four partners were cash poor and buried in debt, Cross most especially; by selling what little they could at fire sale prices, they anticipated being able to pull together a little over $50,000, at the most, over the next several days. That, even added to what Clarke and Baumhower had received from their respective parents, wouldn’t be near enough. Sinnott’s old man had to come around for at least another seventy, and fast, or Will and his friends were going to find out just how much truth there was in the horror stories people liked to tell about Ruben Lizama.

When Clarke read Will Sinnott’s email, referring his Class Act partners to the online version of the
Times’
story on the discovery of Gillis Rainey’s body the day before, he could barely believe it. It would have been funny had it not been so terrifying. The burial pit they’d dug for themselves just kept getting deeper and deeper.

Rainey’s body being found so soon was a complication they didn’t need. To survive, over the next seven days everyone had to be thinking about one thing, and one thing only: scraping the rest of Ruben’s money together. But Clarke knew his weak sister associates couldn’t be counted on to do that and worry about facing a murder rap, too. As long as there was a chance the police could connect them to Gillis Rainey, no matter how remote, Baumhower and Sinnott, and perhaps even Cross, were going to be distracted by the possibility.

This guy Joseph Reddick was the problem. He was the one who could put Rainey and Baumhower together. The odds were a hundred-to-one against that he ever would, but it could happen. It would be just their luck. The only way to reduce the discovery of Rainey’s body to a non-issue was to make Reddick a non-issue.

Baumhower and Sinnott would bitch and moan, and Cross would probably object strenuously, but this time around, Clarke was going to tell his best boy where he could stick his objections and play lead dog for once. He’d raised his share of Ruben’s money and the others were going to need clear heads to do the same.

This dumb shit Joseph Reddick had to disappear and Ben Clarke, felon in training, knew just how to make it happen.

SEVEN

R
eddick’s boss at the City Attorney’s office was a self-important little prick named Carl Hart. Hart was a short, dark-haired man in his late twenties who had eyes like a squirrel and the build of a weekend marathoner determined to run himself straight into the grave; there was more fat and muscle on one of Reddick’s fingers than there was on the arms that stuck out of Hart’s ubiquitous short-sleeve shirts. His emaciated appearance and perpetually foul attitude made for an asshole Reddick could hardly stand to be in the same room with without wanting to throw a chair out the window.