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 drink 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.
‘We should have never taken his money in the first place,’ Sinnott said. ‘And we should have never given Gillis ours.’
‘Fuck Gillis,’ Cross said, deflecting Sinnott’s implied accusation. ‘He got what he deserved.’
‘Maybe so. But he may get the last laugh yet. Jesus, Perry, why did they have to find his body so goddamn soon?’
‘Now or later, what’s the difference? They still have to ID it. And even then, what’s that to us? The asshole died of natural causes.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Chill out. You sound like Andy. We’ve got enough to worry about without worrying about fucking Gillis.’
‘Andy?’
‘You think
you’re
a nervous wreck? I’ve been trying to talk him down off the ledge ever since you sent that email around about Gillis’s body being found. He’s convinced that guy he had the car accident with is going to do like Ben said and report it to the cops. What was his name? Roddick?’
‘Reddick. Joseph Reddick,’ Sinnott said.
‘I told him, so what if Reddick goes to the cops? They’ll take the report and forget about it. If they had some reason to believe Gillis was murdered, they might give a shit about some guy driving like an idiot near the spot where his body turned up. But Gillis
wasn’t murdered
.’
‘Not technically, no,’ Sinnott said. ‘But he died during the commission of a crime. A crime that we committed.’
‘And do the cops know that, Will?’
‘No. I mean, I don’t think they do.’
‘They don’t. There’s no way they could. Gillis’s body was clean, we didn’t leave a fucking mark on it. Even if the police knew the body was his – which they apparently don’t, at least not yet – they’d have no reason to suspect foul play.’
It was true. Aside from binding his hands and gagging him with duct tape, Sinnott and his friends had never subjected Rainey to any physical abuse that he could remember.
‘There’s nothing for them to think but that Gillis was just some poor schmuck off his meds who wandered down into the river and died,’ Cross said. ‘God knows, Andy could’ve picked a less conspicuous place to dump him, but he also could’ve chosen worse. We’re in the clear, Will. Believe me.’
Sinnott wanted to believe him. Oh, how he wanted to believe him. But Cross had established long ago that he was the last person in the world to trust in matters of risk assessment.
‘What does Ben say about it?’ Sinnott asked, but before Cross could answer, they heard something crash to the floor out in the hall.
Cross jumped to his feet, muttering, ‘Goddamnit,’ thinking Iris had finally taken her temper tantrum too far. But when he got to the door and peered out, there was nobody there. The only sign that someone had been was a shattered crystal flower vase, uprooted from its perch on a side table, spilling water and Dendrobium orchids across the hardwood floor.
‘Iris?’
Without his noticing, he realized now, she had grown abruptly silent. He went to the bedroom, found it empty. No clothes in the closet, no travel bags on the bed. He checked the rest of the condo. As near as he could tell, Iris was gone, along with anything that might have proven she’d once spent substantial time there.
Cross returned to the den, Sinnott watching him for clues, and flopped back into his original seat on the divan. He grabbed the TV remote, turned the game on again, and said, ‘Whatever.’
Iris hadn’t been standing outside the door of the den for long, but she’d been there just long enough to overhear more of Perry’s conversation with Will than either would have ever wanted to share. She’d gone to the den intending to leave Perry with a proper goodbye, only to flee his condo instead like a rabbit from a pack of hounds.
They’d murdered Gillis Rainey.
At least, that’s what it had sounded like to her. Or was she just reading something into their exchange that hadn’t really been there?
Will:
He died during the commission of a crime. A crime that we committed.
Perry:
Gillis’s body was clean. We didn’t leave a mark on it.
And Perry had gone on to say something about Andy Baumhower ‘dumping’ a body. What else could any of it mean but that the three of them – and in all likelihood, Ben Clarke, as well – had murdered this man Gillis Rainey? The same Gillis Rainey, no doubt, Perry had been cursing to hell for months now as a liar and a thief?
Iris was driving away from Perry’s condo, her foot heavy on the gas to put as much distance between herself and Cross as possible, when a sudden lurch of nausea forced her to pull the car over to the side of a freeway on-ramp. She got her door open just in time to avoid vomiting all over the leather seats of her Audi TT. A truck flying up the ramp barely missed shearing her door off and taking her head along with it, but she didn’t care. Right now, she had to wonder if she didn’t deserve to die, being such a fool as to fall in love with a piece of work like Perry Cross.
She had known he was narcissistic; he had proven that almost daily. And of course he could be cruel. Anyone as driven to succeed as Perry would have to be cruel, on some level. But capable of murder? She would never have imagined it. There should have been signs of such a terrible potential that, try as she might now, she couldn’t recall ever seeing.
Still, there was no denying what she’d heard. This man Rainey was dead, and Perry and his friends had murdered him. As revenge, Iris could only imagine, for refusing to pay them the $100,000 Perry claimed he owed them. One hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money by any reckoning, but it shouldn’t have been enough to drive men like these to such extremes. That it had could only mean that one or more of them was in some kind of serious financial trouble. Trouble that had to start with Perry. That was the only reasonable explanation for both Rainey’s murder and Perry’s forging her signature on a seventy-five hundred dollar check.
Tooling down the 405 freeway aimlessly, windows down to keep cool air blowing in her face, Iris went from shock to terror in less than a heartbeat. What if Perry and Will knew how much she’d overheard? She had tried to slip out of the condo without making a sound, but in her rush to back down the hallway, she’d knocked a vase full of flowers off a table on to the floor, where it exploded with what felt to her ears like a thundering crash. Surely, one of the two men in the playroom had heard the vase shatter and, finding her gone, put two and two together. What would they do now? If they were capable of killing Rainey, why would they not be just as capable of killing her to keep her quiet about it?
She thought about going to the police, but she didn’t entertain the idea for long. Thinking through the story she would have to tell, she realized how little there was to it. They would ask a million questions she had no answers to, along with one she did: Had Perry or Will actually used the word ‘murder’? No. Neither man had. Upon hearing this admission, the police would then wonder if she hadn’t simply misunderstood what she’d heard, or leapt to a wild conclusion unsupported by any facts. They would treat her like a crazy woman.
No. She couldn’t go to the police. But she couldn’t go home, either. Not until she knew, one way or the other, if what she suspected about Perry and his friends was true.
She drove through the night and contemplated her next move. Hours away from the realization that her wallet, and every piece of ID she owned, was still back in Perry’s condo where she’d left it.
THIRTEEN
L
ike Iris Mitchell, Andy Baumhower was afraid to go home.
He was also equally reluctant to talk to the police, though not for fear they would think he was crazy. He was afraid they would think he was guilty of murder, which, of course, he was. That and kidnapping, and now – thanks to Ben Clarke – attempted blackmail.
Clarke had found him this afternoon at the Woodland Hills offices of Baumhower’s limo service company, Prime Rides, Inc., and told him about his visit to Joseph Reddick’s home the day before. He’d made the confession like it wasn’t a confession at all, just a status report he was doing Baumhower a favor by passing on.
Baumhower was stunned beyond all belief. The big oaf actually thought what he’d done was something to be proud of.
‘You stupid bastard,’ Baumhower had told him, barely able to exhale enough to speak. ‘Here we are accusing Perry of being out of his fucking mind, when it’s really you who’s certifiably insane.’