Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  The whippet-thin Baumhower, meanwhile, one of Clarke’s three equally white, twentysomething partners in the fledgling consortium of diverse businesses they called ‘Class Act Productions,’ was perched on a stool at Cross’s wet bar, right alongside Will Sinnott, who was already hard at work on tomorrow morning’s hangover.

  ‘Fuck you, Ben,’ Baumhower said.

  Drunk or sober, he wasn’t fond of Clarke, and had never gone out of his way to disguise the fact. On several occasions, in fact, in order to receive the respect he felt his Herculean stature deserved, Clarke had found it necessary to demonstrate to Baumhower just how easily he could break the smaller man’s neck. Another such demonstration seemed to be in the making until Cross, to whom Clarke deferred shamelessly, raised a hand to freeze him in his tracks.

  ‘Take it easy, Ben. Andy ran into a little bad luck, that’s all.’

  Cross was standing before the wall of dark, one-way glass that stretched from floor to ceiling behind his massive rosewood desk, watching an elderly woman with a head full of alarming white hair blow a five-foot putt by a mile. From his office suite up on the nineteenth floor of the Century Court Towers building in Century City, his view of the Los Angeles Country Club’s back nine was without limit, and he often liked to show his back to his three friends in order to follow play down on the greens.

  ‘Bad luck my ass,’ Clarke said. ‘He fucked up. We’re all dead now, and he knows it.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault, asshole,’ Baumhower said.

  ‘Yeah? You should’ve run away, you dipshit! The guy can place you at the scene now. He’s got your name, your address—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ben,’ Cross said flatly, shaking his head. ‘Better that it weren’t true, yes, but as long as this fellow never comes to connect Andy to Gillis’s body . . .’

  ‘What, and you don’t think he will? The master criminal here dumped Rainey in an open storm drain, for Chrissake. After we told ’im to lose the body where nobody’ll ever find it.’ He turned to Baumhower again. ‘In case you never heard, Einstein, the homeless hide out in those storm drains all the time. If one of ’em doesn’t come across Rainey before the week is out, it’ll be a goddamn miracle.’

  ‘All right! I made a mistake! I think we all get it, Ben, Jesus!’ Baumhower had had enough of Clarke’s constant harping. ‘But let’s not forget whose idea it was for me to get rid of the body in the first place, shall we? If you’re such a goddamn expert on the proper disposal of dead bodies, why the hell didn’t you and Perry take care of RaIney’s yourselves?’

  ‘Because you’re the one who killed the poor bastard,’ Sinnott said. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth all morning.

  Baumhower turned to face him, surprised. He and Sinnott weren’t allies, exactly, but they often found themselves on the same side of an issue whenever Cross and Clarke, the master and his lackey, joined forces in a company debate. Baumhower couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed, having the fat and inebriated wuss that was Will Sinnott turn on him now.

  Even if every word he’d just said was true.

  They were just four little rich boys with money. Murder was supposed to be out of their league.

  Clarke’s old man was a Fortune 500 communications magnate; Baumhower’s father was an internationally renowned orthopedic surgeon and his mother an equally famous divorce attorney; Sinnott’s parents were just plain filthy rich, born to money made three generations ago in the newspaper and textile industries. All the wealth and power Cross possessed, however, he had amassed himself, in spite of his parents. His father was the alcoholic owner/operator of a fast food franchise in North Hollywood, and his mother was a part-time stenographer. Neither had ever given Cross a dime.

  Clarke and Sinnott had attended Stanford together and had hooked up with the other two after graduation through various intermediaries. Cross had been a regular at McCullough’s, Clarke’s Westwood area nightclub, and the two hit it off immediately, Clarke all but mesmerized by the other man’s moviestar good looks and unflappable cool. The four became inseparable – two sociopaths and a couple of weak sisters who admired them – and they all shared the same ambitions toward fame, fortune, and autonomy from the moral boundaries that lesser men had to abide by. They formed Class Act Productions so as to pool their resources and unify their efforts to become billionaires by the time they were each thirty-five. That they might find it necessary to break a law or two along the way concerned none of them in the least, though only Clarke would not have blanched at the idea of murder.

  But murder was what they had committed, however inadvertently.

  Baumhower and Sinnott had been against Cross’s insane plan to kidnap Gillis Rainey from the start. They wanted no part of it. But Rainey owed them money he seemed determined not to repay and Cross was insistent that such desperate measures were necessary to get it back. He not only wanted a unanimous vote on the old fool’s abduction, he demanded they all take an active role in the enterprise, something only Clarke was eager to do. Sinnott, being the gutless wonder that he was, eventually caved in to them both, and that left Baumhower no choice but to do likewise, certain that the fifty-one-year-old Rainey’s kidnapping would somehow blow up in their faces.

  It did exactly that – and Andy Baumhower was to blame.

  He was to blame because, less than sixteen hours after their former ‘financial advisor’ had been snatched from his West Hollywood home and left in Baumhower’s charge, Rainey was dead, putting the $100,000 refund they had been hoping to extort from him forever out of reach. Cross had forgotten that Rainey was a diabetic. Baumhower had thought all the thrashing about he’d been doing inside the storage room Clarke had locked him up in at the back of McCullough’s had simply been the man’s feeble attempts to either escape, or attract a would-be rescuer’s attention. Who could have guessed the sonofabitch was having a diabetic seizure?

  Certainly not Andy Baumhower. He sat outside that storage room door all of last Saturday afternoon without making a single move to go inside, certain there was nothing more to Rainey’s frenetic groaning and foot stomping than desperation and rage. Imagine his surprise when Rainey turned up dead.

  It was a mistake any of the others could have made just as easily, but since Baumhower had been the one to make it, Cross had assigned him the task of disposing of the dead man’s body. He said it was the only fair thing to do.

  Cross couldn’t believe his accursed luck.

  Clarke was laying the blame for their predicament entirely at Andy Baumhower’s feet, but everyone knew it was really Cross who was responsible. He was the one who’d brought Rainey into the Class Act fold to begin with.

  His friends had always been able to see the low-rent real estate tycoon and self-proclaimed ‘investments broker’ as the silver-tongued shyster that he was, but not Cross. Forever on the lookout for another mentor, Cross had met Rainey at an otherwise boring dinner party and immediately insisted the Class Act wunderkinds do business with him. Rainey promised he could turn $100,000 of Class Act’s money into a hundred and twenty-five in only six months, and Cross wouldn’t rest until his partners had bought in, dismissing all their objections as the murmurs of small men who were terrified of becoming big ones.

  It was a decision he deeply regretted now, of course.

  Almost eight months later, Rainey had yet to return their original investment, let alone produce a profit from it, and it had seemed he was determined to go on punking them that way indefinitely, counting on their reluctance to spend money he knew they didn’t have by taking him to court. Now the asshole was dead, and every dime of their hundred grand was gone.

  It was a huge setback, to be sure, but only Cross knew the full extent of it. Clarke was blowing a gasket over this guy Joseph Reddick, when Reddick was actually the least of their problems. Their real problem was Ruben Lizama. Cross had managed to keep Ruben’s name out of things up until now, not wanting to hear all the wailing and gnashing of teeth he would have to endu
re if his friends found out what he’d done, but he couldn’t keep them in the dark any longer. They needed to recoup their hundred grand, fast, and put together another $150,000 to go with it, and the sooner they figured out how to do both, the better.

  They were all just dead men walking if they didn’t.

  FOUR

  Of Ruben Miguel Lizama’s three older brothers, Jorge Junior, the eldest, was his favorite.

  Which really only meant that his tolerance for Jorge was greater than it was for either Juan or Roberto. Juan and Roberto liked to get in Ruben’s business, while Jorge never did. As the heir apparent to Jorge Lizama Senior, one of the most powerful Mexican drug lords operating out of North America, Jorge was too self-secure to have any interest in the private affairs of his brothers, no matter how his knowledge of them could be used to his own advantage.

  Ruben liked that.

  What Jorge liked about Ruben, conversely, was his baby brother’s complete indifference to power. While the prospect of someday inheriting the family business from the legendary El Principito (‘The Little Prince’) had both Juan and Roberto openly salivating, Ruben seemed almost put off by the idea. The amenities of wealth gave him great comfort but, unlike his older siblings, he had no use whatsoever for the influence wealth had on other people. Ruben had ways of his own to secure the cooperation of others, and none of them had anything to do with money.

  This last was something Jorge Junior didn’t like about Ruben, but for which he had a great deal of respect, nonetheless.

  ‘So. ¿Que pasa, manito?’ Jorge said.

  It was late Monday afternoon in Manhattan, only hours after Perry Cross and friends had gathered together to discuss Andy Baumhower’s car accident with Joe Reddick on the opposite coast. The two Lizama brothers were sitting in Jorge’s lavish suite at the Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue, enjoying a panoramic view of Central Park at dusk, the $40,000 in chump change their father had sent Ruben here to deliver having already exchanged hands. Rene, Jorge’s chief bodyguard, sat nearby, watching soccer on a muted television, face folded up in deep concentration.

  Ruben shrugged, said, ‘No mas aqui. I’m tired. All this running around . . .’

  ‘You’re an errand boy. That’s what errand boys do, run around.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘There are more important things you could be doing. If you wanted—’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything “important.” I’m just tired, that’s all.’

  Jorge saw the look Ruben was giving him, knew it was an order to back off. Ruben was perfectly satisfied being his father’s personal messenger, and maybe always would be. If he had any burning ambition at all, it was to someday become his father’s most trusted enforcer, a job no member of a major crime family ever held, due to all the risks it entailed. Aspiring to be a lowly soldier, a thug who did all the messy blood work the drug trade demanded, was crazy, and Jorge Junior didn’t understand it. But that was Ruben. He had a morbid fascination with blood, and he had established himself as someone who could spill it in creative, memorable ways that often worked to the family’s advantage.

  Jorge was thirty-two, Ruben only twenty-six, and yet the two men could have practically passed for identical twins. Only the ten extra pounds Jorge was carrying around made them distinguishable from one another. Both had the same dark complexion and smooth, angular jaw as their father, and both were thick in the chest and narrow in the waist, the exact opposite of Juan and Roberto and the portly Jorge Senior. The pair even wore their raven black hair the same way, combed straight back and tied in a simple ponytail.

  ‘OK. Lo siento,’ Jorge said. ‘Let’s talk about something else, hmm?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like your four friends in California. The rich little gabachos.’

  Ruben was slow to say anything. ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s none of my business, of course. And what’s none of my business, I usually treat that way. You know that, yes?’

  ‘I know it. What is it, Jorge?’

  His brother glanced over at Rene, said, ‘Roberto knows about them, little brother. He knows about everything.’

  ‘What everything?’

  ‘Please. No games. I didn’t have to tell you this, I could have just kept quiet. But I don’t like to see you fucked with, so I’m telling you: He knows about the money you gave them. I don’t know how, but he does.’

  Ruben studied his brother carefully, letting him see the suspicion behind his eyes. ‘Maybe he found out the same way you did. By spying on me like a woman.’

  Jorge shook his head. ‘I don’t spy. But people tell me things. I pay them well to tell me things.’

  ‘OK. So Roberto knows. So what?’

  ‘So if Papi doesn’t know already, he soon will. And if anything goes wrong—’

  ‘Nothing’s going to go wrong. I know these guys, I checked them out. They’ll deliver as promised, don’t worry.’

  ‘Me? I’m not worrying. I’m not the one doing business with fucking hueros. You know how Papi feels about—’

  ‘Working with white boys, yes, yes. I know all about it. But Papi’s not me. I have my own way of doing business, I’m my own man.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Roberto can tell Papi whatever he likes. Juan, too. It makes no difference to me.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. My brothers forget that Papi will die soon, and you will be el patron, not them. And when that happens, all the ass kissing and backstabbing they’ve done to get ahead will be for nothing. And I won’t have to pretend I don’t despise them anymore.’ He stood up, brushed the lint from his suit as a prelude to leaving. ‘Tell them that the next time you see them, huh?’

  ‘Ruben . . .’

  Ruben turned at the door, said, ‘Relax, big brother. I know what I’m doing. I always do.’ He grinned, then walked out before either Jorge or Rene could stop him.

  During the long elevator ride down to the hotel lobby, alone in the car throughout, Ruben thought about the news he had just received, and what, if anything, he should do about it. His father would be furious to learn he had entrusted $250,000 of the cartel’s money to four baby-faced Americanos, it was true, but nothing of consequence would come of El Principito’s anger as long as Ben Clarke delivered on his promises. That was the key. Clean money was clean money, no matter where it came from, and if Clarke and his three partners could launder the quarter million as promised, when promised, Jorge Senior and his two overly ambitious sons, Juan and Roberto, would have little to complain about.

  The Class Act boys were due to produce the money in exactly eleven days. Ruben had planned to fly into Los Angeles a day or two early just for the occasion, but now he had a better idea. He would fly in a full week early instead. Relax and enjoy himself over the weekend, then say hello to Clarke and the others first thing Monday morning. Long before they were expecting to see him.

  Just to make sure they weren’t planning to make him look stupid in front of his family.

  FIVE

  Orvis Andrews was looking for a big payday. The biggest of his life, in fact. The figure his lawyers were throwing around was eleven million, but many observers believed he could get more than that, if he and his legal team played their cards right. Two of the LAPD’s finest had beaten Andrews senseless nine months earlier out in Woodland Hills, trying to take him in on a spousal abuse charge without having to kill him first, and the black man was now suing the department and the city which funded it for all his injuries were worth.

  And what injuries he had. A broken pelvic bone, one shattered kneecap, a broken left eye-socket, and three broken teeth, two upper, one lower. Witnesses said when the cops brought him into County/USC Hospital prior to booking, he looked like somebody the tanks had run over in Tiananmen Square.

  On the surface, it appeared to be the Rodney King fiasco all over again, except that this time, no one had been around with a handy camcorder or cell phone to record Andrews’s beating fo
r posterity, leaving certain aspects of it open to debate. Like how it happened and why, for instance. Not surprisingly, Andrews’s story was that the cops had seen a brother who needed some knots on his head and immediately proceeded to administer them, whether such action was called for or not. The cops, meanwhile, were crying self-defense, claiming the six-foot-six-inch, 230-pound Andrews had resisted arrest with a vengeance, fueled by rage and controlled substances of unknown origin. The truth was probably somewhere in-between, but since eyewitnesses to the incident were scarce, and what there were had only conflicting opinions about what, exactly, they had seen that night, it seemed the court was going to have to decide for itself what precipitated Orvis Andrews’s beating, and what, if anything, he was entitled to in the way of compensation.

  Fortunately for Andrews, this decision would be made based entirely on the merits of the evidence at hand, rather than the sympathies of the court. For if ever a plaintiff appeared undeserving of the court’s sympathy – or anyone else’s sympathy, for that matter – Orvis Andrews did. Because Andrews was not a particularly nice man. He was a career criminal with a bad temper whose eclectic rap sheet was exactly six pages long, and counting. Which, while it didn’t grant the LAPD license to beat him within an inch of his life for sport, did help to explain why the officers involved might have thought it necessary to treat him differently than their average, law-abiding citizen.

  With Andrews’s case scheduled to go to trial in less than three weeks, Reddick’s surveillance of the big man had just gone into high gear. As a chief investigator for the City Attorney’s office, it was Reddick’s job to investigate the validity of civil claims made against the LAPD, and in that role, he’d been following Andrews around now for almost a month. It was the most boring work Reddick had ever done.

  Among the many injuries Andrews was claiming to have sustained in his late night waltz with the police was a spinal contusion that had left him partially paralyzed on the right side of his body, and he’d been hobbling about, first on crutches, then with the aid of a cane, ever since leaving the hospital. In twenty-six days of surveillance, Reddick had yet to see the big man move an inch without the benefit of one or the other, the crutches or the cane, making him about as exciting to watch for eight hours a day as an ant farm.