Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Today was the day it would all be over. Reddick had no more need for patience or stealth. His plan now was simple: Find Cross and kill him. Lay his weapon down immediately thereafter and wait for the police to cuff him. No muss, no fuss.

  He couldn’t trust Iris Mitchell to stay out of his way, so he’d left her this morning at his place, bound and gagged in his bedroom as she had been for most of the night. If the two of them were lucky, she wouldn’t be there much longer. Cross would be dead by noon and, at Reddick’s urging, the cops would show up to rescue her soon thereafter.

  Reddick’s first stop today had been Cross’s condo in Santa Monica. He’d arrived just after eight a.m. and departed less than ten minutes later, having completed a seek and destroy mission that was a model of speed and efficiency: He blasted his way into Cross’s building, searched every room of his unit, and got out as soon as it became obvious Cross wasn’t there, fleeing the scene in Dana’s sedan almost too quickly for more than a pair of potential witnesses to take note of him.

  Now he was sitting in the waiting area of Cross’s office in Century City, flipping through the pages of a magazine while listening to every word Cross’s receptionist – a short, zaftig Asian with braces on her teeth – spoke into the phone. He’d flashed an old private security badge at her when he walked in, told her he was here to see Cross regarding the matter of the burglary at Andy Baumhower’s residence over the weekend. Mr Cross wasn’t in, she’d said, but Reddick was welcome to wait for him if he cared to. Reddick, satisfied she wasn’t feeding him a line, accepted the offer and sat down.

  He was taking a calculated risk, setting a trap for Cross he might see right through should he call in and hear that a ‘cop’ was there waiting for him, but Reddick simply lacked the will to do anything else. This was his last stand. The havoc he’d wreaked at Cross’s condo, the callous disregard he’d shown for anyone who might have had the misfortune of getting in his way, had taken something out of him. Maybe for the first time in days, he was able to see the sick, rabid dog he had become, the murderer of unarmed men, and the realization left him too spent to go on chasing Cross forever. He still wanted Cross dead, he still needed him dead, but the blind, white hot rage that had made his killing of Andy Baumhower and Ben Clarke possible was something Reddick no longer possessed.

  Cross had to come to him now. Either inadvertently or by way of deception, it didn’t matter which. And he had to do it fast, before Reddick lost the courage altogether to kill him.

  Twenty minutes went by, then thirty. The girl behind the receptionist’s desk answered three incoming calls as he listened, advising the person on the other end of the line each time that Mr Cross wasn’t in. Reddick began to get antsy. He picked up another magazine, nearly tore its cover off peeling it open. He could see the LAPD uniforms now, poring over the wreckage of Cross’s condominium, calling in a general description of the armed man one of Cross’s neighbors had seen running down the hall on his way out of the building . . .

  The door opened behind him and Reddick looked up, saw two people enter the room and approach the receptionist: a black woman and a white man, both middle-aged, the former dressed like a well-heeled attorney, the latter a used car salesman on the skids. The guy gave Reddick a brief glance, then turned back around. Reddick had never laid eyes on either him or his friend before, but he knew who – or what – they were in an instant.

  ‘May I help you?’ the receptionist asked.

  Finola Winn showed her the contents of a brown leather ID folio, said, ‘I’m Detective Winn, this is Detective Lerner. We’re here to see Perry Cross.’

  The girl behind the desk made a face, pinned between the twin forces of confusion and surprise. ‘Is Mr Cross in some kind of trouble?’ she asked.

  Winn and Norm Lerner traded a glance.

  ‘Not necessarily. We just need to ask him a few questions, that’s all,’ Winn said. ‘Is he in?’

  ‘You mean questions about the burglary at Mr Baumhower’s place?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Baumhower. I thought . . . Well, aren’t you all here about the same thing?’

  She craned her neck to see past the two detectives, and turning around to follow her gaze, they saw that the man who’d been sitting there earlier was suddenly gone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  For the first time in his life, Cross didn’t trust himself to tell a lie. He was sure that a lie would get stuck in his throat, and that Ruben would kill him on the spot, right there in the car in the parking lot of Ben’s club. So he did the next best thing and offered Ruben a highly modified version of the truth, laying the blame for everything that had gone wrong over the last thirteen days at the feet of Joe Reddick.

  ‘Who the fuck is Joe Reddick?’ Ruben asked.

  Cross said Reddick was some crazy Andy Baumhower had once done business with who’d been trying to extort money from him for months, and when Baumhower wouldn’t pay him off, the asshole went ballistic. First he’d killed Baumhower, then gone after his three Class Act partners, possibly killing Ben Clarke and Will Sinnott as well, Cross wasn’t sure. He described the visit he’d just paid to Clarke’s home and how the test call he’d made to Sinnott’s cell phone had all but convinced him that both men were inside the house, dead.

  Ruben listened intently to all of this, mild curiosity turning into something far more incendiary right before Cross’s eyes as he began to suspect what Cross was leading up to.

  ‘This is all terrible news,’ he said. ‘I like Ben, and I hope you’re wrong about him being dead. But none of this has anything to do with me, does it? Or the money you’re going to pay me Friday, as agreed?’

  Cross tried to make his mouth move, failed, and tried again. ‘No. No, of course not,’ he stammered. ‘It’s just . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Reddick. Goddamn Reddick. His interference has made it damn near impossible for us to function. We’ve got your money, Ruben, that’s not a problem, but it’s not all in one place, and we were in the process of gathering it all together when Reddick started fucking with us. If not for him, I’d be handing you what we owe you right now, I swear to God.’

  ‘I don’t care about “right now.” What I care about is what you intend to give me four days from now. If Ben and Andy and your other friend – Will? – are all dead like you say—’

  ‘I can still get the money for you. All by myself, every penny of it. But I can’t do it and worry about Reddick, too. I need him out of the way so I can work without having to look over my fucking shoulder every five seconds.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’ve reported this man to the police, yes? After he killed Andy? So why haven’t they found him by now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cross lied, unable to see where he had any alternative. Their reasons for having never turned the police on to Reddick were all related to their catastrophic kidnapping of Gillis Rainey, and that was something Cross had already decided to withhold from Ruben, lest he realize how desperate they’d been, only two weeks ago, to raise his quarter million dollars. ‘The guy’s smart. He knows things. If he were easy to find, we would have found him and killed him ourselves.’

  ‘You know what I think? I think this is all bullshit,’ Ruben said, finally showing a flash of anger. ‘I think you can’t pay me, and Ben and the others have all run away and left you – what is the expression? – “holding on to the bag.” So you tell me this ridiculous story about Joe Reddick so I’ll give you enough time to maybe run away, too.’

  ‘No! No!’ Cross cried. ‘I’m telling you the truth, I swear it!’

  ‘Perhaps you do not understand how great an insult it will be if, on Friday, you cannot keep the promise you all made to me. I trusted you and Ben; I believed you when you told me you could take dirty money and make it clean. If I have to go back to my family now and tell them it was a mistake to do business with you . . .’

  ‘Please. You have to believe me. I can still get you
your money. I just need the rest of the week to work on it. Without any more distractions from Reddick.’

  ‘Reddick, Reddick. Joe Reddick! Fuck this Joe Reddick!’

  Ruben turned to his man Poeto, who could have been a mustachioed, oversized test dummy propped behind the car’s wheel for all the interest he’d shown to this point in their conversation.

  ‘¿Qué piensas, Poeto? ¿Será mierda, ó no? Debo de creer lo que me dice esta perrita gringa, o será que le clavo mi pinche cuchillo en su ojo.’

  The driver gave Cross a disinterested look, as if examining a spoiled piece of meat. ‘Patrón, yo no creo que él tenga los huevos para mentírle. Pero tal vez él tenga demasiado miedo para no intentarlo. Quizá deberíamos ir a la casa del Señor Clarke y ahi nos darémos cuenta sí sus amigos estan muertos como él dice.’

  As Cross watched, his inability to understand a word of the exchange he had just heard magnifying his sense of doom, Ruben nodded, the driver’s answer to his questions apparently meeting his approval. Ruben turned back to Cross, said, ‘You will take us to Ben’s house now. If there are two dead men inside like you say, I will give you four more days to meet your obligations to me. And I will personally see to it that this puta “Joe Reddick” – if there really is such a person – doesn’t bother you anymore.’

  Cross started to exhale with relief, until he saw Ruben reach into a jacket pocket and withdraw a small, military-style folding knife. Opening the stubby, curved blade, Ruben said, ‘But first, I must ask you to convince me that this will not all be a waste of my time. If you want me to believe that everything you are telling me is true, you need to offer me some token of your good intentions. Otherwise . . .’

  Cross broke into a cold sweat, unable to turn his eyes away from the razor-like weapon Ruben was rolling around in his hand like a toy. ‘I don’t . . . What do you want me to do?’

  Ruben smiled. ‘There is this thing gangsters do in Japan. It is called “Yubitsume.” When they have fucked something up very badly, to show the members of their clan how sorry they are, they cut a finger off. Sometimes, more than one. I saw it in a movie once. It was sick.’

  By the grin on his face, it was clear to Cross that Ruben’s use of the word ‘sick’ was as a euphemism for something that had excited him to the point of orgasm.

  ‘And you are sorry, right, Perry? That I must kill a man I do not know, and wait four more days for you to pay me what you owe me, because you have made it necessary for me to do so?’

  Cross could feel the contents of his stomach grow instantly rancid, and if his life had not depended on his doing nothing to upset Ruben further, he would have given in to the urge to vomit all over the man’s rental car. He wasn’t ready to mutilate himself, but he wasn’t ready to die, either. And yet Ruben was waiting for him to choose between the two.

  Cross nodded his head and put a quavering hand out for the knife.

  After Winn commandeered a freight elevator, flashing her badge and barking orders at a maintenance man she found standing in an open utility closet, she and Lerner caught the guy they’d seen up in Cross’s office down in the lobby, just as he was about to exit the building. Lerner kept asking his partner all the way down what they were doing, chasing after somebody who wasn’t the man they’d come here to see, but if Winn knew the answer, she was keeping it to herself.

  Sucking wind, Winn introduced herself and Lerner, displaying her badge yet again, and the guy just looked at them like two kids trying to sell magazine subscriptions for the annual school fundraiser.

  ‘How can I help you, detectives?’

  ‘We just saw you upstairs in the offices of Class Act Productions,’ Winn said. ‘You seemed to leave in quite a hurry when we showed up.’

  ‘Well, I am in a hurry,’ the guy said, unfazed by the accusation, ‘but that’s got nothing to do with you. I’ve got a ten o’clock meeting in Burbank I’m not gonna make if I don’t get out of here pretty quick. What’s this all about?’

  ‘Would you mind if we asked to see some ID, Mister . . .’

  ‘Reddick. Joe Reddick.’ He handed Winn his wallet, open to his driver’s license. They were all standing just inside the lobby entrance and a heavy flow of foot traffic was swarming all around them. Lerner wasn’t sure, but he thought he caught Reddick – if that was really his name – give the doors a brief glance, as if measuring his distance from the nearest one.

  Winn looked Reddick’s ID over, held on to his wallet after she was done. ‘What line of work are you in, Mr Reddick?’

  ‘I’m a field investigator for the City Attorney’s office. Look—’

  Lerner nodded his head to no one, suspicions confirmed. Not every ex-cop in the world looked like one, but the mark of the Job on Reddick was as hard to miss as a full-body tattoo.

  ‘And your interest in Class Act is?’ Lerner asked, cutting in on his partner’s line of questioning. Something about Reddick had his interest now and he was anxious to figure out what it was.

  ‘Their CEO was witness to an accident a couple months back involving an MTA bus and a pedestrian who’s now suing the city. I was here to get a statement from him, but the asshole stood me up.’

  ‘Are you referring to Perry Cross?’ Winn asked.

  ‘That’s him. Let me ask you guys again, in case you missed the question the first time: What’s this all about? What do you want with me?’

  ‘The girl upstairs seems to think you’re one of us. She said something about a burglary at “Mr Baumhower’s” place. Any idea what she was talking about?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘You didn’t tell her you were a police officer investigating a burglary?’

  ‘Impersonating a police officer would be a criminal offense. Why would I do something like that?’

  ‘You tell us, Mr Reddick,’ Lerner said. ‘Why would you do something like that?’

  He smiled in lieu of crossing his arms and setting his feet, just to let Reddick know he could take all the time he wanted to answer; Lerner and Winn weren’t going anywhere.

  ‘OK, so maybe I did misrepresent myself a little up there,’ Reddick said, clearly more pained by the confession than shamed by it. ‘It’s like I said: I’ve been chasing this jackass Cross for days now and getting nowhere. He’s ducking me. So I thought, this morning we’ll try something different. See if he’d be more receptive to a call from Detective Reddick than Joe from the City Attorney’s office. It was a dumb move, but I was desperate. I don’t get a statement from this clown soon, I’m gonna be out of a job.’

  He looked to the cops for some reaction and got very little in return. Lerner still couldn’t figure it out. There was something oddly familiar about Reddick – his name, his face? – but Lerner couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  ‘The name “Gillis Rainey” mean anything to you?’ Winn asked, breaking the short silence.

  ‘Rainey? No.’ Reddick shook his head.

  Winn finally handed his wallet back to him. ‘OK. Thanks for the help. If we need to talk to you again, we’ll be in touch.’

  Reddick nodded, slipped his wallet back into his coat pocket.

  ‘And no more playing policeman, Mr Reddick. No matter how “desperate” you get. Understand?’

  ‘Sure thing. Thanks for the pass.’

  He slipped away. Winn waited until he was out of sight to turn to Lerner and ask, ‘Well? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. He had no reaction to Rainey’s name that I could see. Still . . .’

  ‘He wants more from Perry Cross than just a statement.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s the feeling I got, too. Along with something else.’

  Winn waited for him to go on.

  ‘I know the guy from somewhere. His name or his face is familiar to me, maybe both.’

  ‘Well, he used to be a member of the club he only pretends to be in now, that much is obvious. Yes?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. No doubt about it.’

  ‘So maybe you ran across him when he wa
s on the Job?’

  Lerner shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I don’t think so.’ He’d met a lot of cops in his time with the LAPD, some with other agencies and others in various divisions within the department, so it was hard to say for sure that Reddick hadn’t been one of them. But that just wasn’t the feeling Lerner had about him.

  He gave himself a few more seconds to think about it, then shook his head, said, ‘Aw, what the hell. Whoever he is, he’s probably got nothing to do with Rainey. And that’s all we’re supposed to be interested in here, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Winn said, though she sounded less than convinced.

  Boarding a regular elevator this time, the two cops went back upstairs to have another talk with Cross’s receptionist.

  THIRTY

  If Reddick didn’t know before that his time for killing Cross was running out, he knew it now. He’d bought himself, at best, a few more hours of freedom, bullshitting detectives Winn and Lerner of the LAPD into letting him go, but that was it. Any minute now, the pair – who he imagined were investigating the death of Gillis Rainey, since they’d dropped the dead man’s name – would connect him to the break-in at Cross’s condo and have every uniform in the city watching out for him.

  He had to find Cross fast.

  He sat in Dana’s car, having parked it not far from Cross’s office building, just south of Century City, and tried to think. He couldn’t afford to keep chasing Cross’s tail. That was a loser’s game. He still had to find a way to bring Cross to him, laughable as such an idea was, considering what Cross knew about his intentions.

  He’d had the asshole’s phone number, just as he’d had Clarke’s and Sinnott’s, since he pulled it off Andy Baumhower’s laptop Saturday night, but he’d been loath to use it before now. He hadn’t worried that calling Clarke would send him running because Clarke hadn’t been smart enough to run, but Sinnott and Cross were a different matter. He thought both men could be easily spooked into taking flight, possibly disappearing for good, so he’d resisted the temptation to contact either just for the sake of scaring them shitless.