I had a question to ask him, or maybe it was a comment, but the interior of the vehicle was starting to spin and I had to close my eyes to stop the motion. Beneath me, the seat whirred and reclined farther, till I was almost flat, and he was so sweet and thoughtful. That was my last thought, before I fell asleep. How sweet Sam was.
I couldn’t imagine what my life would look like without him.
CHAPTER 70
SAM
How do you justify murder? I had two reasons: jealousy and revenge.
Screw her for not appreciating him, or me, or respecting and understanding what was right underneath her nose. Screw him for tossing me aside every time she snapped her fingers, or paid him the slightest bit of attention, or screwed up in some new and unimaginative way.
I had a few options. I could have walked away from him and her, licked my wounds, built my life without them and the nonstop blender they put my heart in, but the problem was the money. Mike’s business kept me fat—money always needed to be washed, and real estate flips were one of the best ways to do it. Last year, he accounted for more than 70 percent of my business and referred me more big-ticket clients than I gained through any other source. Ignoring the heartbreak, I literally couldn’t afford to lose him, which was why I ditched that option for an easier one—getting rid of her.
Poor Lillian made it easy on me. Put a drink in her hands and she’d guzzle it. Swap a pill in her medicine bottle and she’d pop it. A year ago, for two months straight, I replaced all her bipolar medication with an estrogen blocker to see how she reacted. I tested GHB in her drinks at Perch, and she blacked out for a solid six hours. I could have cherry-picked a variety of options to take when she was in my car, thatpumpkin latte clutched in her spindly little hands, but I had a plan, of course. As Benjamin Franklin once said, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail, and killing someone wasn’t something I could afford to fail at. Imprisonment, along with poverty and emotional abandonment, would not be in my future, and I spent hundreds of hours envisioning the perfect way to end Lillian Smith’s life.
That’s why this was the perfect murder, and it’s why I will never be caught. Tomorrow belongs to the people who plan for it today, and I planned for this day for years.
But before I walk into the brilliance of how and why I killed Lillian, I do want to clarify that I didn’t set out to sleep with her husband, or to fall in love with him. Five years ago, I met a cute and quirky writer in a meditation class, and that was where our friendship began.
I didn’t know or care that she had a husband. I liked her. She made me laugh. She was fragile and found me entertaining, and I was in between relationships and bored and warmed to the idea of a more intellectual friend, one who actually knew who Eckhart Tolle was and could debate modern philosophy and theories of life and death and the battles and journeys of each.
I didn’t just like Lillian; I grew to love her. I took her son to bike meets and taught him how to play chess and set him up with my housekeeper’s daughter—a beautiful girl he should have banged but didn’t. And I talked business with her husband and lured him into the real estate market with a few inside deals that no one else could have gotten done. I drank beers while he grilled steaks and played the “man’s game” because I’m good at that. I can butch up better than a straight guy, and when Lillian began to struggle ... that was when things turned. She was going through emotional dips and peaks, and Mike and I played babysitter, taking turns watching and helping her, which put us in almost constant communication. In the late nights, when she fell asleep on the couch, we would sometimes stay up drinking, and sometimes I wouldstay over, because I was drunk and it was late, and everything was still innocent but there was a vibe.
God, that vibe. It was electric and reminded me of my very first boyfriend, back when I was straight as an arrow—a preacher’s son, for shit’s sake—and already had a girlfriend, one who wore proper things, and sang in the choir, and didn’t ever push me for anything, anything more than a kiss. A girlfriend with an older brother, John. When our eyes met, my breath would hitch in my chest and my heart would race. He made the first move, and when he kissed me, I felt like it was the single most exciting and significant moment in my life.
I felt that same forbidden electricity with Mike, and maybe it was caused by Lillian, or by the fact that he tried so hard to avoid it, so hard to stay in the straight lane that he had committed to already. Whatever the reason, just a single brush of our hands felt miraculous, the air between us so charged with energy that I didn’t know how she didn’t feel it, how it wasn’t glaring and obvious to anyone who passed within a mile.
And that vibe only heightened when the market turned and—for the first time—one of Mike’s client’s real estate deals went south. That was when he brought me into the fold, when we did some slightly illegal maneuvering and his trust in me grew, our bond tightened, my profit share increased, and Mike Smith turned into a verifiable badass, right before my eyes.
Intelligence is hot. Intelligence, money, and power are sexy as hell—and Lillian had no idea what her husband was packing.
So yeah, I fell for him. But he also fell for me. He could tell her that it was just sex, but that was a lie. He loves me. We are in love. He had to put us on hold to satisfy Lillian’s temper tantrum, but she showed her true colors quickly with the affair, and I assumed he would run back to me once that happened.
I assumed. That was my first mistake, and one that Mike himself always hammers into me, which only made it taste more rotten whenLillian told me that he was standing beside her, that they were fighting this together and would make it through the embarrassment and reality of the video—the video that my private investigator had filmed, the video that I myself had edited and posted for maximum damage, both to Lillian and Mike’s relationship, and also to her and Jacob’s.
It should have been an easy nail in their marriage’s coffin—proof that their relationship was flawed past the point of repair. It should have been an easy and quick decision for Mike, but he failed in that decision, just like he had failed in how he handled Lillian finding out about his “affair.”
So I had to kill her. I had to make the decision for him. It wasn’t easy, but it helped that she had been so selfish, of late. It helped me to look at our friendship and realize how one-sided it was. Just like her marriage to Mike, my friendship with her was all about helping Lillian. Supporting Lillian. Picking up her pieces as she fell apart and putting her back together.
Killing her was the end of a long road, with plenty of places for her to veer off and into safety, had she just been less selfish and more considerate of others.
And now, even in death, she’s being a pain. Luis wants me in Lynwood, so I’m canceling a showing and driving over to do a puppet dance for him and his thugs. I’m certain this is about Colorado, and I have all the figures with me, but pulling out of our pending deals, as I told Mike, is a mistake. Not my mistake, thank God, but no one would be freaking out if Lillian were alive and the cops weren’t sniffing around Mike.
Maybe it was a mistake to make the fake calls from Lillian’s phone. At the time, I’d considered it to be brilliant. No one would be looking at me, the dearest friend, not when there were two fantastic candidates for her murder—David and Mike. And if Lillian had killed herself, she would certainly have called and ordered her own obituary. It’s the exact kind of off-the-wall action she was known for.
I originally moved to Los Angeles to become an actor, so mimicking Lillian’s quiet rasp was a breeze, especially given that I mocked her sayings regularly to Mike. The phone-call recipients had certainly bought it. The concern in the voice of the domestic-abuse center’s operator—Do we need to get you someplace safe?—had been a testament to my vocal skills, and I had driven an erratic trek through the city, dropped her cell in the back of a courier truck, then spent the drive back to Malibu patting myself on the back for my creativity while Lillian’s body rolled around on the back seat.
Now I’ve followed Luis’s men through a shitty ranch-style home, and we are walking down a set of unfinished stairs into a basement. There is a group waiting for us, and I duck my head to avoid hitting the ceiling and squint as my eyes adjust to the dim light.
Jacob’s is the first face I recognize, and my stomach sinks at what it means if he is here. Luis turns in his chair to face me, and just past him, seated at a folding table beside Jacob, his head in his hands, is Mike.
Okay. So it’s this sort of meeting.
CHAPTER 71
SAM
This basement is filthy. In prior meetings with Mike’s clients, we met at steak houses and expensive hotel suites and, once, on a G5. This is the sort of exchange I’d prefer to stay out of, though the danger factor of the cartel business has always given me a sort of bad-boy factor that I have enjoyed, a secret hidden layer of my life that added dimension.