Hard Count (Burnside Series Book 11)

by David Chill

  “Stand up,” Knapp ordered, and proceeded to tell Sylvester Means he had the right to remain silent, consult with an attorney, and have an attorney present if he chose to. He asked Means if he understood his rights. Means said he did, and then reiterated he hadn’t done anything.

  “You’ve already committed one crime I can nail you on,” Knapp said.

  “What’s that?” Sly asked.

  “Lying to a police officer.”

  “Aw, c’mon man, that’s no crime.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” Knapp sneered. “It’s a misdemeanor felony. Providing false identification to a police officer. It’s punishable by up to 6 months in jail. But that’s the least of your problems right now.”

  “Look, I was just messing with you!”

  “But I’m not messing with you,” Knapp said, and pulled the class ring out of his pocket. He held it up to Means, who looked quickly down at his right hand and then back up to us.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he said.

  “Oh, this guy’s great,” Knapp said. “Hey son, all it’s going to take is some DNA testing, and it’ll be confirmed as yours.”

  “So what?” he said.

  “So it was found right next to a shallow grave containing the body of Gavin Yunis. And you were found nearby. By me.”

  He blinked a couple of times. “Doesn’t prove anything, man.”

  “We’ll see. Stand up and turn around,” Knapp ordered. “Hands on top of your head.”

  Means slowly rose and did what he was told. Knapp frisked him, found nothing on his person, then twisted his arms behind his back and applied the handcuffs. He grabbed Sly by the arm, and led him down the hallway. I followed.

  “We have a search warrant for your home,” Knapp said. “Let’s take a ride and see what we find there. If you’re clean, you only have to worry about lying to a police officer.”

  The three of us started walking back down the hallway when a familiar voice called out.

  “Hey, hey, hey. What do you guys think you’re doing?”

  We turned to see Cliff Roper approaching us. He had on a gray suit, a pale blue oxford cloth shirt, and a red tie. He didn’t like what he was seeing.

  “This is a private office,” he declared. “You think you can just barge in here and haul someone off without telling me?”

  Knapp wearily pulled out his shield. “LAPD. We barge in where it’s necessary. And we don’t need your permission.”

  “Like hell you don’t,” he responded.

  “You want to go with him?” Knapp asked. “I can get you on interfering with a police investigation. Maybe aiding and abetting a murderer.”

  “And I can have Pete Bates on the line in thirty seconds,” Roper countered. “You think you can do that? Put a call in to the chief and get through? So don’t get tough with me. I got some juice in this town.”

  Knapp gave Roper the once-over and then looked at me. “You know this guy, right? He’s the one who took you to Riviera the other day.”

  “One and the same,” I said.

  “He for real?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  Knapp turned back to Roper. “What’s your interest here?”

  “My interest is I got a draft coming up at the end of this week. And Sly here is working on some important business,” Roper said, looking at me, and trying to size up the situation. “Unless he’s gone rogue. What are you looking at him for? Spitting on the sidewalk?”

  “He’s a suspect in a capital crime,” Knapp said. “Maybe two separate ones. Maybe you’re involved, too. We have a warrant to search his home. Maybe I should get one to search yours, too.”

  The gravity of the situation began to dawn on him. Roper looked at Sylvester Means curiously. “You got something you want to tell me, Sly?”

  Means took a breath and struggled to try and get comfortable with the handcuffs. That wasn’t going to happen. “Look Cliff,” he said. “Everything I’ve done has been on your behalf. And Brady’s. You’ve got to help me.”

  Cliff Roper let this sink in for a minute and then looked at Knapp. “Get this guy out of here. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him before in my life.”

  Knapp looked over at me. I shrugged. Knapp looked at Means and yanked him forward. “Let’s see what you’ve got at your crib.”

  We left Cliff Roper staring silently at us as we took Sylvester Means down the elevator and loaded him into Knapp’s car. We drove over to Sly’s apartment on Yucca Street, about ten minutes away. It was in a small, decrepit building of twelve units, a two-story beige stucco structure that had seen better days. The paint was peeling, the steps were unswept, and there was a foul smell in the air. Knapp had the manager open the apartment door, then he put on a pair of latex gloves and handed me a pair.

  We walked in, and it looked like any other small, cheap apartment. It was a studio, sometimes called a bachelor apartment. There was a pullout sofa bed that had not been folded back in, and some clothing hung on a pipe that ran along the interior perimeter of the unit. The kitchen was a small stove, mini-refrigerator and a sink piled high with dirty dishes. The coffee table held three empty beer bottles, and an open bag of Cheetos. A garbage can nearby was overflowing with empty Styrofoam containers that once held burgers and tacos. The apartment appeared to be a step down from being called a dump.

  “You want to take us on a tour of your castle?” cracked Knapp. “Or should we just toss the place ourselves.”

  “Look, man. You got this all wrong,” Means said.

  “Tell us how we got this wrong,” Knapp crowed. “You shot Gavin Yunis. It’s all over for you.”

  “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to shoot him. I mean, hell, it was his fault.”

  “His fault? This I got to hear,” Knapp said, smiling and folding his arms across his chest.

  “Look, okay,” Means said, his face showing the strain of reality setting in, not to mention the discomfort of handcuffs that were snapped on tightly. “He jumped me at the wrong time. It was just an unfortunate series of events.”

  At this point, Knapp started to laugh. It was the second time I had seen him laugh this morning, and I couldn’t say it was a pretty sight. “Why don’t you tell me what really happened? Why were you even on his property?”

  Sly licked his lips. “Okay, I was trying to scare him. Curtis Starr. Fire a couple of shots into his backyard, get him paranoid. Make him a little crazy, have him think someone was out to get him.”

  “Okay, sure,” Knapp said, clearly enjoying the spectacle. “I do that all the time. Don’t you, Burnside?”

  I nodded warily and didn’t smile. There was nothing funny to me about human tragedy. But for certain cops, this type of dark humor was part and parcel to who they were. I didn’t like Knapp, but at least he was getting Means to talk.

  “Yeah, I fired a couple of shots, nowhere near close to hitting Starr, but then Yunis jumps me. Tries to wrestle the gun away from me. I couldn’t believe it. In the struggle, the gun goes off and he gets shot in the chest. Man, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Oh, okay,” smiled Knapp. “So you decided to dig a shallow grave and bury him. That makes sense to me. Anyone in that situation would do that, huh?”

  “Look man, I said I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call you guys, the police, could I? They’d want to know what I was doing there in the first place.”

  Knapp shook his head and kept smiling. He was too busy enjoying himself to ask the follow up question I was waiting for, so I jumped in.

  “That brings up the big question here,” I said. “Just why were you on his property? Why were you trying to scare Curtis Starr?”

  “Because I was hired to. This thing wasn’t my idea.”

  “Oh?” I asked, as casually as I could. “Who hired you?”

  Sylvester Means licked his lips again. He took a couple of breaths and hesitated.

  “If you don’t tell us, we can’t help you,” I said, knowing we had no intention of he
lping him at all.

  “By his wife,” Means finally said. “Brady’s stepmom.”

  “Lauren Starr?” I confirmed.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And why would she do that?”

  He took a breath. “We were having a thing together,” he said.

  I peered at him. “You two were having an affair? How did that happen?”

  “It’s not that surprising,” he said, an odd streak of pride forming. “I’ve been to Brady’s house a bunch of times. One time Brady wasn’t there, no one else was, and Lauren invited me in. Surprised me.”

  “She instigated it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “After that, we’d meet at a hotel. We did it a few times. She was unhappy in her marriage.”

  “No surprise there,” I muttered.

  “She told me she wanted a divorce. Curtis wouldn’t give it to her. They had some prenuptial agreement, something where, I don’t know, she wouldn’t get any money unless they were married for like five years or something. She didn’t want to wait.”

  “Then what was the grand plan here?”

  “Lauren told me just to fire a few shots nearby. Scare him. That way she could get him to change the prenuptial agreement. She wanted a pile of money. Before Curtis lost it all. She promised me a chunk of it.”

  “And that was her plan,” I peered at him. Something wasn’t adding up.

  “Yeah,” Means said. “Just scare him. She said it would be like a prank. There was like no risk in anyone getting hurt. It was harmless. Man, I need some money. You see how I live.”

  I looked around. “Yeah, we see,” I replied, thinking that other people live in this building and don’t go around pretending to shoot someone just to move to a better apartment. “Doesn’t Cliff Roper pay you enough?”

  “Enough to get by, but not to live a decent life,” he said.

  I didn’t bother to debate him on what a decent life really meant. “And Lauren said she’d pay you for this. How much?”

  “A bundle,” he said. “I could retire before I hit thirty.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, wondering what amount of money constituted retirement in his mind. “Did she give you any upfront money?”

  “Yeah, five thousand now, I’d get the rest when she got the rest of her money.”

  “Okay. You’re saying Lauren Starr was behind all of this. And that Gavin Yunis’s death was an accident,” I mused. This was a pretty standard ploy by defendants, and more often by defense attorneys, a way to put a wedge of doubt in the minds of a jury. A bit like a bank robber who accidentally shoots someone in the course of committing the theft. He probably didn’t mean to, but someone was dead as a result of his actions, and that was, at the very least, manslaughter. I didn’t bother to bring up the particulars of that, because there was one other detail we needed to iron out.

  “Yeah, an accident,” he insisted. “Totally an accident. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “All right, Sly,” I said. “How are you going to explain the death of Anna? You know. Curtis’s girlfriend?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” he said, with a wave of a hand.

  “What kind of a car do you drive?” I asked.

  “Um. A Honda,” he said absently. “Honda Accord.”

  I looked at him carefully. “A white one, right?” I asked slowly, recalling my conversation with Curtis at Riviera, and starting to piece together a plan.

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “Video at that convenience store along PCH,” I lied. “It showed a white Honda Accord pulling up next to the green BMW that night. That’s where the shots came from.”

  “There’s video?” Sly asked, incredulously.

  “Yeah, I said, looking over at Knapp. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”

  Knapp nodded blankly, and it took him a second or two to get it. Fortunately, Sylvester Means was too busy trying to think up a way to weasel out of the second killing to pay much attention.

  “Uh-huh,” said Knapp, the smile now gone from his face. “White Accord. All on video. Even got the plate number.”

  The panicked look on Sly’s face told us all we needed to know. I moved in for the finish. “Here’s where we’re at Sly. We have you cold. You tell us the truth, and maybe we get you out of this. Did Lauren have you do this one, too?”

  Sly looked around wildly. “Um, look, uh …” he said, his mind whirring, trying to come up with something plausible.

  “There’s still time to get out of this. If you tell us the truth,” I said, wondering if my nose was starting to grow. “We’re on your side, but only if you’ll play ball with us.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Our offer to help you get out of this expires in ten seconds. Talk or you’ll be the one taking the fall all by yourself. And you’re looking at the death penalty. You’re in this deep. Real deep. Accident or not.”

  Sly was breathing heavily. Knapp watched the whole thing unfold without saying anything more. “Okay,” Sly finally managed. “Yeah. This was all her idea. But it was a mistake. I wasn’t trying to shoot Anna.”

  I stared at him. “You were trying to shoot Curtis.”

  Sly swallowed. “Yeah. I was following them. They pulled into that convenience store along PCH around 2:00 am the other night. It was perfect. No one was around. Curtis and Anna were in the car together. It should have been perfect, anyways.”

  “Why’d you shoot Anna?”

  “Like I said. I didn’t mean to. Look, the whole plan was to shoot Curtis. But just as I aimed, Curtis leaned forward. I don’t know, maybe my hand got shaky. And it was like a hair trigger, it kept going off, must have fired three or four times. Anna got it instead. She wasn’t part of the plan. Like I said, this was all an accident.”

  “And then you would drive away,” I said. “And all this for five thousand dollars. Plus a few dollars when you grabbed Anna’s purse.”

  “Look. It was for a lot more than that. Way more. And Lauren and I would be together. She’d be loaded. Turns out Curtis had this insurance policy. Worth ten million. She said I’d get half of it.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to piece all of this together. “All that stuff you said before. About firing shots to scare him? That was nonsense, right? Pure bull?”

  “Yeah,” he said, sheepishly. “I just made that up. The plan was to shoot Curtis in the Jacuzzi. I didn’t know you found my ring. And I didn’t know you had video evidence about Anna. That changed everything.”

  “Sure. So again. You were going to shoot Curtis in his Jacuzzi last week. That was the plan.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then Yunis messed everything up for you.”

  “Totally. I don’t know what he was thinking,” Sly Means said. “Maybe he was trying to play cop. Maybe he didn’t like someone firing a gun on his property. Man, if he had just walked away, none of this would have happened. It would have been fine. But it turned into a real mess.”

  I nodded. The irony of it all was that Gavin Yunis and Curtis Starr had been having a long simmering feud. But when Sly Means went on to Yunis’s property to shoot Starr, Yunis saved his life. At a cost of his own.

  I saw Knapp look away in disgust. I didn’t quite know how to point out to Sly that even if everything in the scheme that Lauren hatched had worked out perfectly, there would be no room for Sly in her future. The way this type of grand plan normally worked out was that the mastermind got someone else to do all of their killing. But in the end, Lauren would almost certainly have murdered Sly. He would be the only one who knew about the plot, and people like Lauren wouldn’t want loose ends like Sly walking around. It was also unlikely she’d want to part with five million dollars, if she didn’t have to. There was always the possibility Sly could turn on her, demand more money, or threaten to snitch on her to the police. There was a reason for the old saying, dead men tell no tales.

  “You want me to testify against Lauren?” he asked. “Would that get me off the hook here?�
��

  Knapp looked at him. “You write out a statement that Lauren paid you to do this, and we’ll handle Lauren. And we’ll take care of you.”

  Sly nodded, confused, but somewhat agreeable, albeit desperate, and not thinking clearly. “How’d they get video of this?”

  I shrugged. “There’s video cameras everywhere.”

  “Should I be getting a lawyer here?” he asked. “You know, to iron all this out?”

  I glanced at Knapp. This would be his area. He looked over at Sly for a long moment. “We’ll talk about that when we get back to the station. But that’s up to you. You’ll need to help us on a few things. You use one gun?”

  “Right. Lauren gave it to me. It was Curtis’s.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I threw it down a storm drain.”

  “Where?”

  “On Mandeville, just before Sunset.”

  “Okay,” Knapp said. “Let’s go over to the station. You’ll write out everything you just told us. We’ll take care of you. Won’t we, Burnside?”

  I nodded. Sylvester Means would indeed be taken care of, I was sure Knapp had a keen plan for that. Once Sly put everything down on paper, he would be arrested and charged with two counts of homicide. By cooperating with us, he would be spared the death penalty, but he would likely be facing the all-too-real prospect of two life sentences. By the time he figured out there was no video evidence, he’d have signed his confession, one that no defense attorney would be able to poke holes in. Whether Sly’s testimony would be enough to actually convict Lauren was another matter. The person pulling the trigger almost always takes the brunt of the punishment. The mastermind often had some wiggle room though, because it is much easier to prove a physical act of murder than it is to prove a conspiracy. Sylvester Means did not seem to know that now, but he certainly would soon.