‘Yes.’
‘Was he doing well?’
‘Well? He was a goddamn millionaire. You should be doing so well.’
Winn bore the blow without flinching, taking the old woman’s tragic loss of a son into account, and said, ‘Then money would have been no problem for him recently.’
‘A problem? Certainly not.’
‘What about the people you say he helped? His clients? Were they doing equally as well?’
‘I don’t understand the question. What does any of this have to do with what happened to my son?’
‘We’re trying to determine if he could have been having any serious disagreements with someone he worked for or with,’ Lerner said, having decided he may as well play the part of a real, on-duty homicide investigator since Winn was determined to do so, with or without him. ‘It’s just routine, ma’am.’
‘If his clients were all happy with the work he was doing for them, it’s a moot point,’ Winn said. ‘But if they weren’t—’
‘No one can satisfy everybody,’ Lorraine Rainey said irritably. ‘I told you, my son was in real estate. Sometimes you make money in real estate and sometimes you don’t, and some people just don’t understand that. They think every investment is guaranteed a return and when they don’t get it, or have to wait too long for it, they cry bloody murder.’
‘Are you thinking of anyone in particular?’
‘I already gave you his name. Perry something or other. Gillis said he was making him crazy, complaining because Gillis couldn’t turn a property they’d bought together around fast enough.’
‘Do you know if threats were exchanged?’
‘Threats? Certainly not. Gillis thought the whole thing was funny.’
‘Funny? In what way?’
‘He used to laugh whenever he talked about it. The young man was a friend of his, they went out dancing together. Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you?’
‘Yes, ma’am, I have,’ Winn said, finally at the end of her patience with this obnoxious old witch. She stood up and signaled for Lerner to do the same. ‘We want to thank you for your time. And of course, you have our deepest condolences.’
She handed Lorraine Rainey a business card. ‘Please feel free to call if you have any questions, or if you can think of anything else in the next few days that might help us with our investigation.’
‘Investigation? What the hell is there to investigate?’ Gillis Rainey’s mother threw Winn’s card to the floor at her feet. ‘My goddamn selfish son finally killed himself, just the way I always told him he would if he didn’t take better care of himself. He got what he deserved. What the hell is there to investigate?’
Out in the car, Winn looked over at Lerner and said, ‘You want to go solo next time, Norm, all you have to do is say the word.’
‘Come on . . .’
‘We don’t need to be sweating this one. I get it. But going through the motions before kicking it to the curb wouldn’t kill you, would it?’
‘Hey, I’ve got no problem busting my ass when a murder has actually been committed. If you see something here that says “homicide” to you, I’ll be happy to hear about it.’
‘Nobody’s saying it’s a homicide. I’m just saying it’s not clear to me what the hell it is. What’s this guy who lives out in West Hollywood doing down in the fucking LA River near Atwater Village? Even if he was off his meds and half out of his mind, how in the hell would he end up down there? Without his wallet or any ID?’
‘You heard the old girl. He was a party animal, No,’ Lerner said, using the nickname her fellow cadets had given Winn way back in her first days at the police academy. ‘He ran the club scene with boys half his age, and he didn’t much give a damn for doctor’s orders.’
‘So?’
‘So despite what his mother seems to believe, he probably wasn’t declining every time his pals passed the bong or the blow. Chances are good he was an occasional user, at least, and every user has to go out and make a buy sometime, right?’
‘Except he didn’t make a buy that night. The Coroner didn’t find anything in his body and we didn’t find anything on or around it.’
‘So he died before he could make a connection.’
‘And his wallet?’
‘That one’s easy. He got rolled after the fact, by somebody who found him before the bird lady who called us in did.’
Gillis Rainey had been down in the storm drain for days. Winn had to admit that was plenty of time for his body to have been noticed by one of the river regulars who would’ve had no problem relieving a stiff of all his cash and credit cards. And yet . . .
She shook her head and started the car. ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘Everything you say could be right, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.’
Lerner fell silent for a moment, then gave in. ‘OK. Our man was murdered. Kindly tell me what the method was that left no marks on the body, or traces of toxins in his system. And it’d be nice to hear a motive, too, if you can spare one.’
Winn could only wish she had an answer or two for him. Accidental death may not have added up completely, but what kind of cockeyed murder was she suggesting this was instead? She put the car in gear and started driving. ‘Give me some time to think about it,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ll come up with something.’
TWELVE
Iris Mitchell had threatened to leave Perry Cross before. She didn’t need his bullshit; she was drop-dead gorgeous, Harvard educated, and only twenty-six years old. If she wanted to, she could replace Perry with someone else just as rich and pretty in less time than it took the Earth to make one complete revolution around the sun. But replacing Perry with more of the same – just one more iteration of the ideal, storybook partner she’d been struggling to find since the braces had come off her teeth at the age of fourteen – would be pointless. She finally understood that. It was time to compromise: rich or pretty, she couldn’t have both, because men who were both always thought those things were all a girl had any right to ask for.
Perry wasn’t the worst fiancé she’d ever had; in fact, he was better than most. He was even-tempered and generous to a fault. He was punctual and courteous and never forgot a birthday, and he made love with a soft, refined touch. But he was a pathological liar unlike any Iris had ever encountered before. While most liars of her experience were victims of compulsion, Perry was nothing of the kind. He lied selectively and with premeditation, and always about things of the utmost importance. Things that could spell the difference, for instance, between his being a prosperous, self-reliant life partner, and one she dared not turn her back on for a minute.
This time, Iris had not only caught him in a lie, but in the act of defrauding her to the tune of seventy-five hundred dollars. That was the amount of the personal check he had stolen from her purse, forged her name to, and then cashed, all in the space of the last forty-eight hours.
‘I didn’t sign that check,’ he said. ‘You did.’
‘I did?’
‘You don’t remember because you were half asleep. I made it out but you signed it while you were still in bed.’
‘No,’ Iris said, shaking her head repeatedly. She’d been fucked up that morning, true enough, suffering the aftereffects of her friend China’s kick-ass book launch party on the Strip the night before, but there was no way she’d been so far gone that she could sign a check made out to Perry for seventy-five hundred dollars without remembering it now. Hell, no.
‘Well, that’s what happened,’ Perry said, ‘whether you believe it or not.’
She glowered at him, sitting there in the den of his Venice condo with a ball game on and a beer in his hand, looking like her accusations of theft were hardly worth being distracted from the score. She could scream at him for another two hours and it wouldn’t change a thing; he had given her his explanation for the check and, other than repeating it, he had nothing else to offer her. He had needed a small loan to cover a transfer
of funds between accounts that had been slow to occur and she had agreed to give it to him while half asleep Wednesday morning. He’d taken a check from her purse, she’d scribbled her name on it, and then drifted off to sleep again. The end. It was a straightforward, uncomplicated lie that he was, as always, totally committed to, and how she chose to react to it was her business.
‘You’ve been gambling again, haven’t you?’
She’d gone to Vegas with him a month ago and seen him lose more money than even he could laugh off convincingly, and he’d promised her then he was through, that he’d cut his right arm off at the shoulder if he wagered another cent before seeking help.
‘Life is a gamble,’ Perry said. He’d turned his full attention back to the football game.
‘This is it, Perry. I’m done,’ Iris said.
And this time, she wasn’t just talking. She stormed out of the room and went off to the bedroom to pack her things, cursing herself for having ever kept more than a toothbrush here in the first place. She didn’t expect Perry would follow and he didn’t, giving her one less reason to think she was making a mistake.
As she gathered her clothes together on the bed, the same bed she and Perry had made love in only hours earlier, she tried to understand what it was about Perry Cross she had found so irresistible. She had dated men with more money and better looks, who came from better families and had gone to better schools. Smarter men, men who made her laugh more and treated her with greater respect. What the hell did Perry bring to the table that these men hadn’t?
Confidence. That was what. Not the kind that any man who’d achieved some level of success in his chosen profession could always claim, but the kind that threatened to change worlds. An unshakable, unrelenting sense of self-worth Perry filled a room with just by entering it. It was a message a woman could read in his merest glance, one that said he intended to have his way, right or wrong, and you could either move aside, come along for the ride, or lose everything you possessed trying to stop him.
Iris had chosen to go along for the ride.
Exactly eighteen months later, almost to the day of their first meeting at a Grammy awards after-party at Staples Center, the thrill of it had finally worn off. The downside to Perry’s exhilarating power had proven to be addiction and treachery, character flaws she might have been able to handle individually, but not in combination. Perry was a compulsive gambler and a liar, and now he had taken up stealing from her, and that was where Iris had to draw the line. You could fuck around with other women if you wanted to, and tell all the stupid, unbelievable lies to cover your tracks you could come up with; Iris could live with that kind of deceit because she’d been there, done that, too many times to count, and had learned how to reciprocate. But ripping her off – treating her like some clueless fool who’d left her bank card in an ATM machine just for your convenience – was unforgivable. It was one thing to be a man’s bitch, and quite another to be his punk, too.
Iris Mitchell was nobody’s punk.
She was halfway through packing a bag when the doorbell rang. One of Perry’s friends, no doubt, she thought. Fuck him. But then it occurred to her that Perry would only sit there on his lazy ass and scream at her from the other room to go get it, and rather than submit to one more minute of his bullying, she went to the door.
It was Will Sinnott. Will was a souse with a ten-year-old’s sense of humor who’d been trying for years to drink his way out of the closet, but he was far and away the least repulsive of Perry’s three business partners. Iris was almost relieved to see him standing there, despite the hangdog look on his face.
‘Hey, Iris. Is Perry here?’
‘In the playroom,’ Iris said, tossing the words over her shoulder as she rushed back to the bedroom to finish packing.
Iris rarely seemed happy to see him, so Sinnott was surprised only by the severity of her rude welcome. Left to do so on his own, he showed himself in and found Cross exactly as promised, swallowed up in the cushions of a black leather divan in the den, staring blankly into the nonsense of beer commercials on TV.
‘What’s with her?’ Sinnott asked.
Cross didn’t bother looking up. ‘Who?’
‘Iris. Who else would I be talking about?’
Cross shrugged, fired the remote control at the flat-screen to change the channel. ‘I had to borrow some money. She doesn’t remember giving it to me. Whatever.’
Sinnott stepped back to peer down the hall, saw Iris through the open door moving frantically around the bedroom, piles of clothes in hand.
‘Looks like she’s moving out,’ he said.
‘Ask me if I give a shit,’ Cross said. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV.
Sinnott understood the situation immediately. Cross had ‘borrowed’ his fiancée’s money the same way he’d ‘borrowed’ Ruben’s. He was desperate, as were all the Class Act partners. It wouldn’t have been beneath Cross to treat someone he allegedly loved so callously under the most normal of circumstances, and now he was in the bind of his life. To him, simply taking what he needed from Iris, rather than wasting time asking for it, must have seemed like a complete no-brainer.
‘What can I do for you, Will?’ Cross asked.
‘I’ve been trying to call you all morning and you never called me back. Is your phone on?’
‘No. It’s Saturday. I’ll turn it on after lunch. What is it?’
The man was insane. They were thousands of dollars in debt to an enforcer for the Lizama drug cartel, and he didn’t think it important to have his cell phone on outside of normal business hours.
Sinnott said, ‘My father agreed to help.’
Cross finally turned around to face him.
‘It’s not the seventy grand we were hoping for, but it’s something.’
‘How much?’
‘Fifty. With conditions.’
‘Shit. You couldn’t get the seventy? With conditions, you should’ve insisted on seventy.’
‘Perry, you asshole, you should be grateful he gave me a fucking dime!’
Cross had no idea how hard it had been, to what extent he’d had to prostrate himself to win his father over. Harmon Sinnott was a cold-hearted bastard who despised Cross with a passion, believing him to be both a destructive influence on his son and an associate beneath Will’s station. He hadn’t worked for a cent of the vast fortune he’d inherited from his own father but, if only for the sake of appearances, he’d always been gainfully employed running one business enterprise or another, and without the aid of others. Partnerships, in his mind, were for losers. Hence, his view of Class Act Productions, and the three young men Will was allied with under its banner, was that of a sieve, a glorified boys’ club that would never have anything to teach his son about capitalism other than how to make a failure of it and look like a drunken fool doing so.
‘So what are the conditions?’ Cross asked, finally turning off the television to fully acknowledge Sinnott’s presence in his home. ‘Aside from getting off the bottle?’
Sinnott didn’t say anything, having hoped Cross wouldn’t broach the subject until much later.
‘Ah. It’s come down to me again, hasn’t it?’ Cross stretched and yawned, then grinned broadly. ‘Well, don’t sweat it, Will. Daddy’s entitled to his opinion. And I’m sure the boys and I can figure out a way to get along without you, given thirty seconds or so to think about it.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘You’re right. That was uncalled for. Can I get you a drink? Wait, don’t tell me. Of course I can.’
Cross went to the wet bar and fixed Sinnott his usual libation, a Bulldog gin martini, dirty. It was barely noon. Sinnott watched him work the shaker, trying to generate the will to walk away, but in the end he simply walked over and took the glass from Cross’s hand, cursing his lack of backbone every inch of the way.
Maybe his father was right. Maybe he was just a puppet on Cross’s string.
‘So how short are we?’ he asked, sipping his d
rink with the casual, detached manner of a man on a blind date. ‘With the fifty I just brought in, I mean. Can you make up the difference, or . . . ?’
‘Not at present, no. We’re still a good twenty Gs short.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yeah. Bummer.’
Sinnott looked to see if he’d meant the comment as a joke, but as Cross poured bourbon over ice into a glass for himself, there was nothing on his face to suggest as much.
‘So what now?’
‘I don’t know. Stall for time, maybe? Have Ben talk to Ruben to see if he’ll grant us an extension.’
‘An extension?’ Sinnott finished off his drink and immediately went to work fixing himself another, an act that by now had become an automatic reflex to him. ‘Perry, this is an assassin for a Mexican drug family we’re talking about, not a loan officer for B of A.’
‘Business is business. Doesn’t matter where the money comes from. And just because he’s supposed to be crazy, that doesn’t mean he can’t be reasonable. We give him two thirty now and promise to deliver the remaining twenty in thirty days, plus interest, why shouldn’t he find that acceptable?’
‘Because that’s not what we agreed to do. We gave the man our word he’d get his full quarter million back by Friday. If we don’t do that—’
‘What’s he going to think? That we’re stiffing him? This guy who jams ice picks through people’s heads, if Ben is to be believed? I doubt we look that stupid to him, Will. Ruben will understand. He’ll have to.’
‘And when he asks why we don’t have the full two hundred fifty thou? What do we tell him?’
Cross rolled the ice cubes around in his glass, said, ‘We tell him what he’s probably heard from a hundred other business associates lately: The world economy’s been in the toilet for two years, with the US stock market leading the way. As a result, we’ve suffered a few unexpected losses that have left us a little short, but not so short we can’t pay him an additional thirty grand in thirty days if he’d be willing to wait. How the hell could he argue with that?’
Sinnott shook his head and shrugged, growing tired of testing Cross’s powers of persuasion. He left his stool at the bar for an armchair, where he nursed his drink as if determined to make it last for hours. Amid their silence, the two men could hear Iris still knocking about in the bedroom, drawers slamming shut and pieces of luggage being bounced across the floor.
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