Assume Nothing (10 page)

‘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?’

‘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

I
ris 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.