Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

‘Oh, Joe, thank God,’ she said, sounding half-asleep, when he’d identified himself. ‘I’ve been worried sick.’

  ‘No need. I’m fine.’

  As he’d anticipated, she wanted to know everything: how he was, where he was calling from, how he’d spent his day. He answered the first two questions but not the third.

  ‘We’ve already been over this. I’m doing what I have to do,’ he said. ‘Let’s just leave it at that.’

  She fell silent, knowing she was doomed to imagine things now that were likely to be far worse than the truth.

  ‘Where’s Jake?’ Reddick asked.

  ‘In bed. He’s beat.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘He’s been in and out of the pool all day. We may have told him we’re here because the house is flooded, but he’s treating this like a vacation.’ Before Reddick could offer a response, she said, ‘Joe, please. You can’t not tell me anything.’

  He thought it over, putting himself in her place. Relenting, he said, ‘I can tell you that what we’re up against is bigger than what I thought this morning. Turns out it isn’t just Baumhower and his friend with the knife we have to worry about. There are at least two others.’

  ‘Two others?’

  He gave her a greatly abbreviated version of the story Baumhower had told him, leaving just enough on its bones to explain why Baumhower and his friends had been so desperate to keep him silent about the car accident he’d had with Baumhower six nights before.

  ‘Oh, my God. I think I read something about that somewhere,’ Dana said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The murder. Yesterday or the day before, I can’t remember which, I read something about a body being found down in the LA River.’

  ‘Did the story say whose body it was?’

  ‘No. The police were still trying to identify it.’

  ‘But the story said it was murder?’

  ‘I think so. Or maybe . . . No, wait.’ She thought it through. ‘Maybe it didn’t say anything about it being murder, at that. I think all it said was that the cause of death had yet to be determined. Still, it has to be the same guy, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Most likely.’

  ‘Then our problem’s solved, isn’t it? If the police are already looking for Baumhower and his friends—’

  ‘No,’ Reddick said.

  ‘Joe, just listen to me for a minute—’

  ‘It won’t work, Dana. We can’t just turn these assholes in.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because for one thing, it wasn’t technically a murder. According to Baumhower, the victim’s death was accidental. California law may not recognize the difference, but a judge handing down sentence just might. And that’s assuming they’re all convicted, which is anything but a safe bet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that these are people with enough money and pedigree to beat almost any rap. Their lawyers are the kind that either make murder charges vanish completely, or get prison time reduced to the bare minimum.’

  Just in the fifteen minutes he’d had Baumhower’s laptop up, he’d learned enough about the Class Act quartet to know that all this was true. Baumhower and his friends weren’t just four brown-skinned thugs off the street the system could be counted on to lock up and throw away the key; these were young, white men of privilege with the kind of personal and familial resources that made the prospect of serious prison time vanish into thin air every day. Reddick had seen it happen too many times to pretend otherwise.

  There was another, more salient reason he couldn’t turn Baumhower’s three surviving partners in to the police, of course – he’d just shot Baumhower to death – but Reddick couldn’t share this with Dana without taking the chance she’d call the authorities herself, just to keep him from killing anyone else. Even though they had a tacit understanding that murder had been his intent all along, hearing that he’d actually taken someone’s life – and the life of an unarmed man, at that – would probably undermine what will she had left to serve as his silent accomplice.

  ‘But maybe this time—’ Dana started to say.

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ Reddick said, anxious to get off the phone.

  ‘Joe . . .’

  ‘I didn’t ask for any of this to happen, Dana. Whatever I have to do to keep you and Jake safe from these fuckers, they brought upon themselves. Remember?’

  In the hush that followed, he could picture his wife softly nodding her head. Afraid to say anything more.

  FIFTEEN

  Shortly after one a.m. Sunday morning, Andy Baumhower’s cell phone rang atop the bedside table of a twenty-eight-year-old commercial carpenter named Tony Ortiz. Roused from a deep sleep, Ortiz reached a hand out in the dark to grab the phone, then stopped, remembering the instructions he’d been given earlier that evening. He sat up, yawning, pulled a tube sock he’d placed on the nightstand before turning in over his right hand, and then used that hand to answer the phone.

  ‘Yeah?’

  He got to his feet and took the phone into the kitchen, not wanting his wife Maria to hear the ensuing conversation.

  ‘Reddick?’ the caller asked.

  He hadn’t been told anything about him, but if Ortiz had been forced to guess, he would have said the guy was a big, red-faced white boy.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Reddick. Joe Reddick. Cut the bullshit, asshole.’

  Ortiz had to chuckle. ‘Sorry, home, but there ain’t no “Reddix” here.’

  ‘What, you think tryin’ to sound like some stupid vato from the ’hood is supposed to fool me? How dumb do you think I am?’

  Now Ortiz openly laughed. ‘I don’t know how dumb you are,’ he said, ‘and I don’t give a fuck. Buenos noches, pendejo.’

  He hung up and turned Baumhower’s phone off, then went back to bed, chortling himself to sleep.

  From behind the wheel of an emerald green BMW flying south along the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass, Ben Clarke tried Andy Baumhower’s number two more times before giving up. It had been a long shot, seeing if somebody would be dumb enough to actually answer the dead man’s phone, but the payoff in relief was immeasurable. Back at Baumhower’s crib, before the police had shown up, Cross had almost convinced Clarke that Joe Reddick was behind Andy’s murder, but now Clarke knew for certain the story they’d told the cops instead was true. Whoever the idiot was he’d just spoken to over the phone, he wasn’t Reddick. Man of many talents or no, there was no way a white bread like Reddick could have mimicked a younger, Spanish-speaking, East LA homeboy – and likely burglar and murderer – to such perfection.

  No fucking way.

  It was a load off Clarke’s mind. With Baumhower dead, their task of scraping together Ruben’s money before he came looking for it had just become more difficult than ever. Clarke didn’t need to be worrying about Reddick, too. Cross had given him implicit orders to kill Reddick back at Baumhower’s place, thinking he was an immediate threat, but now that could wait; Reddick hadn’t killed Andy Baumhower, so there was no rush to do away with him. Clarke would get around to wasting the fool once all their business with Ruben was over and done with.

  Assuming it ever would be.

  Sunday morning around eight, Reddick walked across the street from his Echo Park apartment to see his neighbor Toni Ortiz. The two men had met months before on the day Reddick moved in, Ortiz sprinting over from his front porch, a lit cigarette pinched between his lips, to catch a floor lamp that was about to fall off the U-Haul trailer Reddick had rented for the afternoon. Ortiz helped Reddick and the day laborer he had hired finish the unloading for the price of all the beer he could drink, and he and Reddick had been friends ever since.

  ‘Well?’ Reddick asked.

  Ortiz placed Andy Baumhower’s iPhone, wrapped up in an old blue washcloth, into Reddick’s open palm, grinning like a man about to tell an offhand joke. ‘It rang just like you said. I think it was about one a.m., maybe a little later, I’m not sure.’


  ‘And?’

  ‘Man asked for you. I tol’ ’im to go fuck hisself.’

  Reddick requested details and was pleased to hear there weren’t many. Ortiz’s conversation with Clarke – and it almost certainly had to have been Clarke – had been short and sweet, exactly as Reddick had hoped. Whether the ruse had worked or not, only time would tell, but he had at least given Clarke and his two friends one more reason to think he had had nothing to do with Andy Baumhower’s death. He had big plans for the trio today and taking them by surprise was essential to his success.

  Reddick thanked Ortiz for his time and paid him the fifty dollar fee they’d agreed upon. Ortiz took the money, shook Reddick’s hand warmly, and watched his neighbor get into his car and drive off before going back to bed himself, having asked not a single question about Andy Baumhower’s phone or the pissed off white man who had placed a call to it hours earlier. He’d been happy to do Reddick the midnight-hour favor, but he didn’t want to know any more about the white man’s private affairs than was absolutely necessary.

  He just had the feeling it’d be easier to go on liking Reddick that way.

  Iris Mitchell had recognized her mistake the moment she went to get out of the car Saturday night. Her purse wasn’t there. She’d left it back at Perry’s.

  It had taken all the courage she could muster just to spend the night in her own home, rather than at her parents’. Her father would have been happy to have her, no questions asked, but her mother would have grilled her like an auditor for the IRS. And what explanation could Iris have given her that wouldn’t have made her sound like she’d lost her mind? Her parents loved Perry Cross; they knew nothing about his gambling and propensity to lie because she’d gone to great lengths to maintain their ignorance of such things. Now, all of a sudden, their future son-in-law was not only a thief and a liar, but a murderer, too?

  They’d never believe it. They’d tell her what she’d overheard Perry and Will say back at Perry’s condo was part of something much more innocent than a murder conspiracy, just bits and pieces of a harmless conversation she’d completely misconstrued in the heat of a lovers’ quarrel. And they would convince her they were right. Before she knew it, they’d have her talking to Perry on the phone, accepting his explanations for everything and apologizing for having been such a tempestuous, impressionable fool.

  As it was, one long, sleepless night later, she had almost brought herself to this point on her own. But not quite. Doubt was creeping in as memory began to lose its finer edges – had Will said ‘a murder that we committed’ or simply ‘a crime’? – but she was still confident enough in her interpretation of what she’d overheard the day before to be afraid. Too afraid to see or talk to Perry until she’d had sufficient time to think things through. They were finished, in any case; his forgery alone had sealed that deal. The only thing left to be determined was how dangerous it was to be around him now.

  It was a question she would have put off answering indefinitely, given a choice. But her wallet was at Perry’s and she had to get it back. Her ID and her checkbook were in it, and Perry had already proven that such things could not be entrusted to him for long.

  It was Sunday. He could loaf around the house all day on Saturdays, but on Sundays Perry liked to go out, either to the gym, the beach, or – prior to his oath of abstinence, anyway – one of those sleazy card casinos in Gardena. Iris still had her keys. If she timed it right, she could slip into his condo while he was gone, retrieve her wallet, and leave, avoiding any contact with Perry altogether.

  She just needed to be a little lucky.

  SIXTEEN

  The first sign Finola Winn had that something wasn’t quite right at Gillis Rainey’s West Hollywood home was the unlocked front door; she turned the knob and the door just swung open in her hand. Inside, a number of other things struck her as odd: lights on throughout both floors, a full set of keys on a table in the alcove, a BlackBerry smartphone and wallet atop a dresser in the master bedroom. Rainey’s car – a late model Lincoln Navigator – was sitting in the garage.

  Winn was here alone, having not been up to the fight she knew she’d have to wage to get her partner to start their Sunday shift by tagging along, working a case that seemed to deserve the smallest share of their time. Still, she could guess what Norm would have said without actually having to hear him say it: So what?

  People left the lights on in their homes all the time, and walked out of the house without their keys with similar regularity. A diabetic like Rainey, off his meds for one reason or another, could have strolled outside one early evening a week ago, perhaps to retrieve the trash bins from the curb, and forgotten where he was going and why he was going there before he even reached the end of the driveway. How he could have gotten from there to Atwater Village and the Los Angeles River would be harder to figure, but not impossible. To a skeptic like Norm Lerner, there was always a way to explain the presence of a stiff that did not involve criminal activity.

  Winn, on the other hand, could detect the mark of foul play in the most innocuous of things, which was why she could see nothing at every turn in Gillis Rainey’s home now but the evidence of . . . what? A kidnapping, maybe? There was a full glass of white wine on a coffee table in the living room and the stereo was on but silent, as if Rainey had been listening to a CD before he left – or was taken from – the house. The dead man’s insulin kit, complete with insulin, lay open on the counter of the master bath.

  Winn pictured her partner in the foyer, looking this way and that, sniffing the air like a bloodhound trying desperately to catch the scent of something that wasn’t there. ‘I don’t see any signs of a struggle. Do you?’

  No, Winn would have had to admit. She didn’t. Which didn’t prove that Rainey hadn’t been forcibly removed from the premises, but it did make such a scenario more difficult to envision.

  ‘You put a gun in somebody’s face at the front door, there quite often isn’t any struggle,’ she said, actually sparring with a man who was only standing there beside her in her mind.

  Norm would tell her she was reaching, allowing all the conclusions she’d jumped to following their conversation with Rainey’s mother to color her judgment, and he’d probably be right. The house was a cornucopia of incongruities, maybe, but as a crime scene it was sorely lacking. If Gillis Rainey had left the place in a curious state of flux, there was nothing here to indicate he’d been forced to do so against his will.

  She and Norm had other cases on their docket. Bigger cases, more pressing cases, and most importantly, cases that required no imagination to be classified as homicides. It was time to do the responsible thing and move on.

  Which was not the same thing as giving up. When she eventually left Rainey’s home, it was exactly as Winn had found it, with one small exception: She took the dead man’s cell phone with her. Inside the car out front, she turned the BlackBerry on, hoping to scan through Rainey’s contact list, only to find the device was password protected. No computer geek herself, she’d have to get one of the department’s tech guys to open the phone up for her. Calling in a favor might get it done as early as tomorrow.

  In the meantime, she’d work her other cases with Norm and wait. Then, once she had access to Rainey’s data, she’d check it for one associate of his in particular: his ‘little friend Perry,’ as Lorraine Rainey had called him. If the man was there, she and Norm would run him down and pay him a visit.

  Just to see how hard he’d take the news that his dancing and business partner, Gillis Rainey, was dead.

  SEVENTEEN

  Reddick chose to take Perry Cross down first.

  Ben Clarke was the man he wanted dead most in all the world, but the plan he’d come up with for dealing with Andy Baumhower’s three friends made starting with either Cross or Will Sinnott a wiser choice. He’d decided to kill all three at once, in one place, rather than individually, and so his first mark had to be someone capable of drawing the other two into a trap at Reddick’s beh
est just to save his own skin. Based upon what he’d already seen of the big man, Reddick didn’t think Clarke would fit the bill. Baumhower had described Cross as Class Act’s unofficial leader and intimated Sinnott was a drunk. Between the two, Cross seemed better suited for Reddick’s purposes.

  He had gone over the files on Baumhower’s laptop thoroughly that morning and compiled several pages of notes; he felt like he knew his three targets as well as anyone working on such short notice could. He knew where each man lived and conducted business; their marital status and line of work. Photos on Baumhower’s MacBook had given him some idea of what each man looked like and email exchanges between the trio had established their hierarchy as clearly as a PowerPoint presentation. If any one of them could call a Sunday morning emergency meeting the other two would feel compelled to attend, it was Perry Cross.

  Cross’s condo in Venice was on the second floor of a converted apartment building on Abbot Kinney that featured no form of security Reddick could ascertain. The main entrance was unlocked and the open carport out back had no gate to discourage theft. Maybe if Cross had been the equal of his partners he’d have been able to afford a more impregnable home, but Reddick had read enough about him on Baumhower’s MacBook to know that he was the financial runt of the Class Act litter.

  After spending thirty minutes surveying the territory, Reddick left his car and went to the building’s entrance, a small black gym bag in hand. It was a little after nine o’clock. He paused to study the names on some of the mailboxes, then went inside and climbed the stairs to the second floor, encountering no one on the way. At the landing, he drew a pay-as-you-go cell phone he had purchased the day before from his bag and called Cross’s home number. An answering machine picked up after the fourth ring and Reddick, trying to sound several years older and considerably less composed, left Cross a message:

  ‘Oh, hey, I’m calling for Perry Cross? Are you there? Mr Cross, this is Brad Dunphy in unit one-oh-five downstairs. Listen, I’m really sorry, but I just scratched up the side of your car pretty badly down here in the carport. I was going to leave you a note, but—’