Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

It was a lie. He’d had a plan for hours now. It just wasn’t anything his wife would have wanted to hear.

  They’d both had over fourteen hours to sleep on things now, so Dana’s next question hardly surprised him. He’d asked it of himself more than once today. ‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing? There isn’t anything else we can do?’

  ‘Other than go to the police?’ He shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid, Joe.’

  ‘Yeah. That makes two of us.’

  ‘No, I mean for you. I don’t want you to get hurt or . . .’ She glanced at Jake again. ‘Or to see you do something that can’t be undone.’

  Reddick spooned some sugar into his coffee, gazed absently into the vortex he created stirring it around in his cup. ‘Let me tell you how things go down if we do the only other thing we can do and turn Baumhower and his pal over to the cops. They take Baumhower in for questioning right away but they don’t know who his friend is and Baumhower isn’t saying, so he remains at large. Maybe for a week, maybe for a month, maybe for as long as it takes them to squeeze a name out of Baumhower, and they can’t do that until they know what the hell this is all about.

  ‘They’ll expect me to tell them and I won’t be able to, because I don’t have a clue myself, which will only make them wonder if Baumhower isn’t right when he says I’ve got to be some kind of wack job off his meds who’s making all this shit up. You’ll corroborate my story, of course, but then they’ll talk to Jake, and what will he say?’

  He looked up at Dana and waited for her to answer.

  ‘He’ll say the big man in the mask was just a friend of yours playing a game.’

  ‘Exactly. Because that’s what we’ve told him, right? And now the cops aren’t just thinking I’m crazy, they’re thinking me and my “friend” in the mask are trying to set Baumhower up somehow. Trying to run some kind of bizarre extortion scam, or something. So they let Baumhower go and turn their attention to me, and now both Baumhower and his pal are free to look for you and Jake, find you, and kill you like they promised they would.’

  ‘But that would be crazy! The police would know Baumhower did it immediately.’

  ‘Sure they would. But they still wouldn’t have a motive for his threatening me in the first place, and without that, I’d look like a better suspect to them than he would. Estranged husband with a history of mental illness – I’d be tailor-made for the rap. And Baumhower – depending on what it is he’s trying to hide by keeping me silent about our accident – might actually prefer to take his chances killing us all than have the cops find out about it.’

  Dana’s head wagged from side to side, the color all gone from her face. ‘OK, enough. I don’t want to hear any more.’

  Reddick understood how she felt. He was long past caring, because caring was a luxury he couldn’t afford anymore, but he could have easily been sickened by it all himself. Knowing what he had to do – what the fates were giving him no choice but to do if he ever wanted to live a moment without fear again – made him feel like a caged animal. But a cage was exactly what he was in, and turning the man who’d put him in it over to the authorities was not the way out, for all the reasons he’d just given Dana, and more.

  They tried to make small talk for the duration of their breakfast, but it was a wasted effort. Their mutual dread for what lay ahead hung over the table like a foul odor, robbing them both of the will to so much as crack a halfhearted smile. When Jake picked up on their mood and inquired about it, as they’d known he would eventually, Dana volunteered a lie before Reddick could, explaining they were sad because she and Jake couldn’t go home for a while. Something bad had happened with the plumbing and until Daddy could go back and fix it, she and Jake would have to stay at the motel. It was a ridiculous fable that Jake questioned like a military interrogator, but in the face of receiving no other details, the boy had no choice but to accept it as an at least partial form of the truth.

  Reddick drove his wife and son back to the motel, hugged Jake goodbye as if for the last time in his life, then gave Dana $300 in cash and left her with a few last minute instructions: ‘Keep your eyes open, stay close to your phone, and avoid using credit cards whenever possible.’ This last was taking things to yet another extreme, but Reddick didn’t give a damn; they’d had to use a credit card just to get the room and that was where Reddick wanted it to end. If Dana thought he was being ridiculous, she was smart enough not to say so.

  At the door, he put the SIG Sauer in his wife’s hand and said, ‘Don’t give me any shit about this. If somebody comes through this door you don’t want to see, you’re going to have to stop them on your own. I won’t be able to get here in time to help.’ He nodded in the direction of Jake, sitting on the bed behind her reading a comic book. ‘Understand?’

  Dana nodded and took the gun, looking bone tired, then surprised Reddick with a kiss and promised to do exactly as he’d instructed.

  ELEVEN

  As Finola Winn’s luck would have it, Gillis Rainey was a momma’s boy.

  Winn and her partner Norm Lerner might have spent weeks trying to identify the dead man’s blackened, gas-swollen body otherwise. The Coroner had managed to pull a fair set of prints off the corpse but they hadn’t matched those of any criminal presently in the system; Rainey had no arrest record and so he had no prints on file. And though the preliminary autopsy had given them a cause of death – diabetic ketoacidosis – no medical alert bracelet that could have borne the dead man’s name was found on his body.

  It was looking like Rainey would remain a John Doe indefinitely until, in her last official act before shutting down her computer late Friday night, Winn checked Missing Persons one more time and came across the report Rainey’s mother had filed on him less than twenty-four hours earlier. Lorraine Rainey’s description of her son fit Winn’s John Doe to a T, right down to his Type 1 diabetes and fondness for $900 Ermenegildo Zegna shoes.

  According to the report, Gillis Rainey was a fifty-one-year-old real estate broker and confirmed bachelor from West Hollywood who hadn’t been seen or heard from in almost a week, or since late the previous Friday night. He wasn’t the kind of son who called his mother every day, nor she the kind of mother who needed that kind of attention, but neither had ever before gone more than three days without at least trading phone messages. Six days was a new record for them, and to Lorraine Rainey it suggested something was wrong. Gillis Rainey – her only child – was diabetic and he didn’t always take care of himself right. If he’d gone off somewhere with one of his wild friends and forgotten his insulin kit, or gotten too busy dancing at one party or another to take his insulin as prescribed, he could be in serious need of medical attention. It wouldn’t have been the first time his foolish, overgrown frat boy lifestyle had nearly killed him.

  Late Saturday morning, Detectives Winn and Lerner drove down to Cheviot Hills to see Lorraine Rainey at home, a set of carefully selected crime scene photos in hand. They were hoping she could positively identify their John Doe as her son. Visits like these were always tough on a cop, but Lerner was damn near whistling on the drive out. He was certain this trip would close the door on a case he’d had figured as a suicide or accidental death all along, and nothing made him more unbearably happy than proving to be more perceptive about something than Winn.

  Lorraine Rainey lived in a little three-bedroom house on Beverly Drive that dated back to the early 1950s. It looked like every other single-story house on the block, clean and well kept, one big picture window facing the street off an open porch adorned with white lattice work. The lawn out front was so green and perfectly trimmed, it could have been cut from right field at Dodger Stadium.

  She answered the door just as Winn was trying the bell for the second time. Winn guessed she was a woman just entering her seventies, and not without a fight. Short and lean, with a mop of sandy brown hair laced with gray, Lorraine Rainey didn’t wear the standard-issue senior uniform of pale gray Nike sweatsuit and running shoes like
other people her age; on her, the outfit resembled that of an infantryman heading off to war. It was all Winn could do not to salute under the weight of her coal-black, hawk-like gaze.

  ‘Yes?’

  They were the police; surely she had to suspect as much. Who else could this salt-and-pepper pair be? And yet no hint of the dread Winn had expected to see was there.

  ‘Good morning, ma’am.’ Winn flashed her badge and introduced herself and her partner. ‘We’re here to see a Ms Lorraine Rainey.’

  Finally, she got a reaction.

  ‘Goddamnit!’ Lorraine Rainey said. Not fearing the worst, but cursing like a drunk over a spilt beer.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re here about your son Gillis,’ Winn said, thinking that maybe the old girl had misunderstood the purpose of their visit.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  Winn and Lerner exchanged a look. Lerner said, ‘A body’s been recovered we believe may be that of your son, yes ma’am. But we haven’t yet made a positive ID.’

  ‘We were hoping you could take a look at a few photos,’ Winn said, ‘tell us if you think the body is in fact your son’s.’

  Lorraine Rainey let out a heavy sigh and nodded, her anger replaced by something resembling mere exhaustion. ‘Come on in.’

  They settled in the living room, a pristine re-creation of the American good life, circa 1950, the detectives seated on one side, their hostess on the other. A ticking clock on the fireplace mantel was the only sound in the entire house. Winn removed the photographs from her purse, a half-dozen in all. ‘I know this may be difficult for you. But please do the best you can to look these over carefully.’ She passed the photos to Lerner, who handed them over to Lorraine Rainey.

  Gillis Rainey’s mother saw the first photograph and immediately closed her eyes against the sight. She let her chin drop down to her chest, paused a moment, then raised her head up again, eyes glistening. Through a film of tears she refused to wipe away, she studied the rest of the photos one by one, taking her time, a low rumble now and then escaping from somewhere down deep in her throat.

  She nodded her head when she was done, handed the photographs back to Lerner. ‘Yes, that’s my son,’ she said. And then: ‘Goddamnit!’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Lerner asked, only because either he or Winn had to.

  Lorraine Rainey glared at him. ‘Yes, I’m sure! Those are his clothes and his rings. I was with him when he bought that watch. You don’t think I know my own son?’

  ‘We’re very sorry, ma’am,’ Winn said, grateful that Lerner was the target of the woman’s wrath and not she.

  ‘What happened to him? Why does he look like that?’

  Winn told her where and when the body had been discovered, and how, checking to see how she reacted to each piece of the news. It all seemed to be a complete surprise to her.

  ‘In the river? You mean the concrete one?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Up near Atwater Village,’ Winn said.

  ‘I don’t understand. What the hell would he have been doing down there?’

  ‘We don’t know. To tell you the truth, we were kind of hoping you could tell us. As of now, it doesn’t appear he was a victim of any foul play. The Coroner says cause of death was diabetic ketoacidosis, which, in simple layman’s terms, means he hadn’t taken his insulin for quite some time.’

  ‘Can you tell us if your son was good about that? Taking his meds, I mean?’ Lerner asked.

  ‘No. Not hardly,’ Lorraine Rainey said, suddenly angry again. ‘Gillis could be very irresponsible at times. He liked to party like a man half his age and anything that got in the way of that would often go ignored. Including the warnings of his mother.’

  ‘Warnings?’ Winn asked.

  ‘I had to constantly tell him to slow down. Be careful. Those kids you run around with don’t need to eat or sleep, but you do. You’ll kill yourself trying to keep up with them, I said. But do you think he’d ever listen? Not on your life.’ She shook her head with disgust.

  ‘What kids were these?’

  ‘What? Oh. Young boys, mostly. People he worked with, clients and colleagues. I never met any of them, but I heard all about them. How much money they had, what kind of cars they drove. And of course, how much they all loved to dance. Gillis couldn’t go a day without dancing.’ She smiled, forgetting her outrage for a brief moment, then caught herself and melted down again, finally starting to cry outright. ‘The damn fool! Now look what he’s done! Left me all alone, the selfish sonofabitch!’

  The cops let her go for a while, as afraid to intrude as they were reluctant. She pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from her sweatpants’ pocket, dabbed her eyes and blew her nose a couple times, and only then did Lerner say, ‘Can we get you anything? A glass of water from the kitchen, maybe?’

  Gillis Rainey’s mother shook her head indignantly. ‘No. I’m all right. But thank you.’

  Winn jumped right back in, anxious to get this interview over with before the subject could keel over dead herself, the victim of either a broken heart or an aneurism, it was impossible to tell which. ‘This is a difficult time for you, we know. We only have a few more questions.’

  Lorraine Rainey nodded and blew her nose into the white handkerchief one more time.

  ‘You say your son liked to go out dancing. Would you happen to know where?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The specific clubs he frequented. I’m wondering if any of them would have been near the river where he was found.’

  She shook her head again. ‘I wouldn’t know where he went. That’s something you’d have to ask his little friends about.’

  ‘If you could give us a name or two, and phone numbers if you have them, we’d be happy to do that.’

  ‘I can’t help you with phone numbers. And all I ever heard were first names. London. Tony. Perry. Does that help?’

  It didn’t in the slightest, but Winn put the names down in her notebook anyway.

  ‘You say you don’t know what your son would have been doing down in the river where he was found.’

  ‘No. I can’t imagine.’

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive me if you find this next question objectionable, but it has to be asked: Is there any chance he was down there trying to buy illegal drugs? Did he use marijuana or any other narcotic that you’re aware of?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Never.’ Lorraine Rainey appeared angry enough to leap from her chair and take Winn by the throat. ‘And yes, I do find the question objectionable!’

  Winn glanced over at her partner, who raised an eyebrow in lieu of a shrug. Gillis Rainey being a drug user would have gone a long way to explain his presence in the river, where buys of everything from grass to meth were routinely made from sundown to sun-up. But the Coroner had found no trace of drugs in the dead man’s body and his mother was clearly of the opinion he had no use for such diversions.

  ‘Again, I apologize,’ Winn said. ‘But we’re trying to make sense of what happened to Gillis, and why his body turned up where it did.’

  Maybe he liked to walk the river to clear his head,’ Lerner said to Lorraine Rainey. ‘Is that possible?’

  She glared at him, trying to decide if she liked him any better than she did Winn. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  ‘We understand that diabetics can become seriously disoriented when they’ve gone too long without an insulin injection,’ Winn said. ‘In fact, it’s not uncommon for them to wander off and go missing for extended periods of time. Perhaps that’s what happened in this case.’

  Winn waited patiently for Gillis Rainey’s mother to recognize the statement as a question.

  ‘Are you asking me if anything like that ever happened to Gillis before?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Then the answer is yes. It happened to him at least once that I’m aware of, and I’m sure it happened to him on several other occasions that I was never told about.’

  ‘Can you tell us about the one instance that you kn
ow of?’

  ‘He woke up alone in a stranger’s bed way out in Desert Hot Springs and called me in a panic. He said he had no memory of whose house he was in or how he’d gotten there, and he didn’t have his insulin kit. I had to call nine-one-one to have an ambulance sent out to save him. He couldn’t call himself because he was slurring his words so badly he would have never been understood. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he’d been drinking.’

  ‘But he hadn’t been.’

  ‘No. I told you. My son enjoys—’ She stopped, took a deep breath, and pushed on. ‘I mean, he enjoyed taking chances with his health, as I’ve mentioned, but he wasn’t crazy. He didn’t use drugs and he hadn’t touched a drink in over nine years, or since the day he was first diagnosed.’

  ‘So if I may,’ Lerner said, desperate to move things along so he and Winn could get the hell out of there and file this case away under ‘Not a Fucking Homicide’ where it belonged, ‘it sounds like what you’re telling us is, in your opinion, what happened to your son was just an accident. He went out partying last Friday night, forgot to take his insulin as he sometimes did, and for one reason or another, went down into the LA River where he died.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what else I could think.’ The question was a baffling one to her. ‘What do you think happened to him?’

  Both cops remained silent.

  ‘Oh, no, no. You don’t mean to suggest he was murdered?’

  ‘As I mentioned a moment ago, we’ve found no evidence to that effect as of yet,’ Winn said, reasserting her role as the lead detective in the room. ‘But it’s our job to consider all the possibilities, no matter how remote. Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm your son, Ms Rainey? Anyone at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Friends, relatives, romantic interests . . . ?’

  ‘No. No one.’

  ‘What line of work was Gillis in?’

  ‘He was in real estate. He bought properties and helped others do the same.’

  ‘He worked for himself?’