Night Relics (11 page)

Klein had lost track of what the point was. He realized
he hadn’t eaten half of his steak, which was the size of a packing crate. Normally he could put away the sixteen-ounce sirloin
without any problem, but Pomeroy had killed his appetite. He was nervous about simply being seen in the company of the man.
The words
fraud
and
collusion
kept popping up in his mind like idiot cards.

The waitress appeared right then and Pomeroy couldn’t keep his eyes off her tight jeans. Klein almost told him to quit being
such a damned hormone case, but talking sense to him was like shooting peas into a can.

“Another beer?” the waitress asked Klein. She picked up his empty bottle.

“I’m fine, Peg, thanks.”

“I’ll have another glass of milk. A refill,” Pomeroy said to her. “And
cold
this time, if you please. That last one was tepid. Check the date stamp on the dispenser. I think it’s about to turn. If
you start giving your customers bad milk, you won’t have any customers left. That’s a tip.”

The waitress nodded at him. “Sure,” she said, taking away his half-empty glass.

When she was gone, Klein said, “I used to work in a restaurant, back before I got into construction. There was a guy I worked
with, a waiter, who used to hate that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing was that?”

“Advice from a customer. Complaints.”

“Hey,” Pomeroy said, holding his hands out. “The milk wasn’t cold, period. It’s another case of the customer being right.”

“This guy I worked with, you know what he’d do to your milk?”

“What?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“That’s disgusting,” Pomeroy said, “whatever it
was. Typical of small minds, I suppose.”

Klein shrugged.

The waitress returned with the fresh milk along with a
small stainless steel mixing bowl half full of ice. She sank the milk into the ice, winked at Klein, and left.

“What you have to realize,” Pomeroy said, nodding at the milk, “is that if you can judge a person’s character, eventually
you can get what you want from them. ‘ He stared at Klein for a moment, as if he had said something significant and was letting
it sink in. Then he turned away and watched the waitress work the tables along the far wall. Smiling faintly, Pomeroy spun
the milk glass in the bowl of ice, cooling it off. Klein wanted to dump it over his head.

“This pal of yours …” Pomeroy started to say.

“What
pal
?”

“Your friend who … what? Spit in people’s milk?”

“That was a guy I
worked
with. He was an asshole He wasn’t my
pal
.”

“Well, he’d love this.…”

Klein listened with growing attention to the story of the rats in the water tank. Pomeroy seemed to have worked it all out
very carefully. He knew just how sick you’d get from drinking contaminated water. No real damage if you got to the antibiotics
in time. Little bit of a bug. Some gastrointestinal distress, that’s all. Over in a day or two. Of course you’d have to drain the tank and disinfect it and fill it again. And you’d go crazy wondering how the hell rats
had got in there in the first place. But really what it was was a minor sort of irritation, something to make an old man fed
up with living out in the sticks, where you were at the mercy of every damned rat in creation.

Klein nodded, following the story uneasily. Peg walked past and he signaled her. “I think I need another beer after all,”
he said. He fought to maintain some self-control, but he was losing badly. Pomeroy was walking all over him. Why? That’s what
Klein wondered. Pomeroy was going to lengths here. Clearly he thought he had some kind of upper hand, but in regard to what?
And what really frosted Klein was that he had seen it coming. He had known what Pomeroy was, that he was capable of this kind
of vicious trick.
This was his own damned fault.

Ten years ago he and Pomeroy had some dealings together, back when Pomeroy had been working for Delta Core Sampling, a Newport
Beach firm that had finally been litigated to death. The building that housed the company had burned under mysterious circumstances,
eradicating incriminating records.

Providing false core samples had been the issue in the litigation. A couple of houses out in Oceanview Heights had slid down a
hillside that had turned out to be clay instead of bedrock. The core samples provided by Delta had been fakes, allegedly drilled
out of an adjacent hill. Klein had built the houses. That was a few years before married Lorna—part of a past that was better
left in shadow. The owner of the drilling company, Pomeroy’s boss, had died of a heart attack. Pomeroy had walked away and become
a car salesman, apparently very successful, though there was no explaining the success.

So there were reasons that Pomeroy could sit here telling Klein about poisoning a man’s water tank with dead rats, and Klein
couldn’t just hit him over the head with a beer bottle and do the world a hell of a favor. The second most regrettable thing
in Klein’s life was getting involved with Pomeroy again. The truth was, Klein had set the man loose on the canyon, bankrolled
him, pep-talked him. Monsters by Dr. Kleinstein.

And that’s where the trouble would come from. It wouldn’t be fraud that would take them all down, it would be Pomeroy and his
bag full of rats.

“So when I tried to pet the creature,” Pomeroy skid showing Klein his bandaged hand, “it took a bite out of me.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Klein said.

Pomeroy shook his head, as if he couldn’t imagine why either. “I’ve got a couple of other nice plans, too. Even better. We’ll
wedge the old man out of there yet. That’s the nicest place in the canyon. I’m thinking of keeping it
for myself. A little investment.”

“Why don’t you lay off the nice
plans,
” Klein said, working to keep from shouting. “A checkbook ought to do the trick. We’ve had this conversation more than once.
We’ve picked up a few places, we’ve got a lot of maybes, we’ve got twenty people to talk to still. All signs point to
success.
Leave the goddamned rats at home from now on. And as far as personal investments go, keep the bigger picture in mind.”

“Relax,” Pomeroy said, lowering his voice. “The beauty of this is that it’s rats. They’re a naturally occurring pest out there.
Put arsenic in the tank, and they’ll come looking for you. Put a rat in the tank and they put out a warrant on Mother Nature.
It’s foolproof. It’s biodegradable.”

“Clear it with me next time.”

Pomeroy shrugged.

“Mr. Ackroyd happens to be a friend of my wife’s,” Klein said. “They used to work together. He’s a nice old guy. Now what
the hell am I going to do, just let him get sick? Shit.” He looked around tiredly. With Pomeroy, if it wasn’t one thing, it
was another. The man was a grab bag of bad surprises.

“It’s nothing personal,” Pomeroy said. “It’s business.”

“It’s
bad
business,” Klein said. “You’ve got to remember that we’ve got a fairly heavy backer here. Sloane Investments, I mean. They
prefer a soft touch. You don’t have one. Take my advice and work one up before you wake them up, will you? This whole thing
could dissolve in about a dozen phone calls.”

“Sometimes a soft touch doesn’t work. Sometimes you’ve got to push someone.”

“Don’t try to push me.”

Pomeroy sat back in his chair. “There’s pushing and there’s pushing,” he said. Then, widening his eyes, he rolled up a paper
napkin, shoved an end into the candle vase, and let the paper catch fire. He dropped the burning
napkin into the bowl full of ice and water alongside his milk glass, pushing it under the ice with his finger.

“Hey,” he said, standing up. “There’s someone I know. Small damned world, isn’t it?”

Klein didn’t look up. Any friend of Pomeroy’s was sure to be worth avoiding.

“Thanks for dinner,” Pomeroy said. “I’ll cover the tip. Next time let’s try a restaurant that’s a little more upscale, though.
All these chopped-up neckties hanging from the ceiling give me the creeps. That can’t be sanitary.” He threw two singles on
the table and walked away.

“Anything more?” Peggy asked Klein a few moments later.

“What? No. I guess not,” Klein said. “Look, I’m sorry about that guy. He’s the king of the jerks.”

“I guess I’ve seen worse.”

“They don’t come any worse,” Klein said, taking the check from her. He calculated a twenty-percent tip, put the money on the
table along with Pomeroy’s two dollars, and got up to go. Then he saw that Pomeroy hadn’t left yet. He was standing at a table
near the front entrance, gesturing and talking. Seated at the table, not talking, was Beth Potter—Klein’s next-door neighbor—along
with her son and her boyfriend. Klein sat back down, looking away quickly when he saw Pomeroy point in his direction. In his
mind he pictured card houses collapsing.

“Stupid,” he muttered. “Really stupid.”

“T
HAT ONE WAS MINE,
I
THINK
,” B
OBBY SAID, POINTING
at a pink-and-yellow necktie that hung from the steak house ceiling. “My dad used to take me here all the time.”

A party of a half dozen people sat at an adjacent table. Three of them wore loud ties that had been cut in half when they
entered the restaurant. Yellow cardboard triangles had been stapled on beneath the knots, with the words “I lost my tie at
a necktie party at Trabuco Oaks” scrawled across the cardboard in blue felt pen. Ten thousand severed ties hung from the wooden
ceiling like multicolored bats. Peter realized that he had a hell of a headache, and that he was tensing the muscles in his
jaw without meaning to.

“Take your hat off,” Beth said to Bobby.

“How come?”

“Because it’s polite.”

“That guy over there’s got one on,” Bobby said, gesturing across the room at a man who looked like a lumberjack.

“I know him,” Peter said. “He’s got a condition. Otherwise he wouldn’t be wearing it.”

Bobby took off his hat unhappily and tried to smooth his hair down with his fingers. “Can I have some quarters?” he asked.

A video game stood just inside the doorway, around the corner in the waiting area. Peter dug five quarters out of his pants
pocket and gave them to Bobby, who stood up, telling his mother to order him a cheeseburger and a Coke.
No longer at the table, he put his hat back on.

“His father took him here
once,
” Beth said when Bobby had gone. “Somehow Bobby always inflates it. He
promised
to take him all the time, but he never did. He used to call up and set up a time, but then he wouldn’t show up. The first
time it happened Bobby went outside to wait by the street. He must have sat on that eucalyptus log out front for two hours,
waiting for his father, but the dirty bastard just never showed. He called the next day to explain. The first of many explanations.”

Peter found suddenly that he was crying—for Bobby, for himself, for a world that fell apart like a badly made toy. The tears
had come out of nowhere.

He rubbed his eyes and forehead, shading his face, trying to hide his crying from the people around him. Then he forced himself
to take a deep breath and tried to drink out of his water glass, but his hand shook and he spilled water on the tabletop.
He forced a swallow past the lump in his throat and sat back in his chair, forcing a smile, as if to admit that he was a fool.

“What’s wrong?” Beth asked anxiously. She sat forward, lowering her voice. “What’s
your
condition? It’s what I said this morning, isn’t it? I didn’t say it very well.”

Peter hesitated. He thought he could hear the wind blowing outside. The sound of it mingled with the clank of dishes and the
drum of footsteps on the plank floor. “Amanda and David have disappeared.”

“What do you mean
‘disappeared’?”

He shrugged.

“Do you mean she took David and left? To tell you the truth, I considered that pretty strongly myself for a couple of weeks
when it looked like Walter was going to insist on some kind of joint custody. He backed down, but I was ready to go. It can
be a really bad mistake, though.”

He shook his head. “I mean something’s happened to them.” He drained his water glass. Bobby reappeared just
then, empty-handed. He hadn’t been gone more than two minutes.

“Got any more quarters?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Peter said, smiling crookedly. He pulled out his wallet and found five singles. “Get change from the cashier, okay?
And put a couple quarters in the jukebox.”

“Five bucks?” Bobby asked.

“Use it all,” Peter said to him. Bobby left again, tucking the bills into his pocket. The look on his face brightened Peter
up a little, enough for him to find the words necessary to tell Beth about Amanda’s disappearance and about his trip to the
sheriff’s office that morning.

She sat silently, letting him talk. When he was done he shrugged, not trusting himself to say any more.

“And they’re not going to do
anything
?” she asked.

“Nothing they can do.”

“I heard about that incident in Falls Canyon. It’s harder than hell even to find it, let alone to get back up in there. This
time of year it’s all choked with brush. Did Amanda like to hike? Would she have gone out of her way like that?”

Peter shook his head. “She played tennis if the courts were clean enough, but that’s about it.”

“Well, I think it’s pure coincidence about what the hiker saw out there, if he saw anything at all. There’s no way it has
anything to do with Amanda and David.”

“She might have tried to walk back here to the Oaks across the ridge,” Peter said. “David knew about the trail. They might
have …” He paused for a moment, looking for the right words. “They might have found the falls from the top. I don’t know. She
was pretty mad, I guess.”

“Mad? Mad enough to what? Commit a double suicide with her son by jumping off the top of the falls? That’s not mad, Peter,
that’s something different. You really believe that?”

He shook his head.