Night Relics (24 page)

“Me either,” Klein said quickly. “Lorna’s blonde, too.”

“That’s right!” Winters said. “
She
was the life of the party the other night. What was that joke she told? Something about the elephant and the Hindu.”

“Something like that,” Klein said.

“So what’s on your mind? Want to hack a few divots?”

“I haven’t shot a round in a year,” Klein said. “I wouldn’t know how to hold my club.”

“Hold your
club
? Sounds like that joke about ‘Madame Thumb and her four comely daughters.’ Hey, listen to this, speaking of holding the club.
There’s a Yale man and a Harvard man taking a leak. They zip up, see, and the Yale man heads for the sink. The Harvard man,
though, he heads for the door. The Yale man says to him in this old-boy accent, ‘At Yale they taught us to wash our hands
after urinating,’ and the Harvard man turns to him and says, ‘At Harvard they taught us not to piss on our hands.’ ”

Klein snorted into the mouthpiece, then thrust the receiver away, holding it at arm’s length he was laughing so hard. He thumped
it down onto the top of the desk and stamped his foot, trying to regain control of his voice. “
Hoo
, that’s funny!” he said finally, then laughed again. Winters was dead silent on the other end, as if letting Klein get it
out of his system.

“You’re a hell of an audience, Lance,” he said finally.

“And you tell a hell of a joke, I guess.” He waited for a moment, but Winters didn’t say anything more. The joking around
was apparently over, just like that.

“I just wanted to run a little business matter past you,” Klein said. “Nothing much.”

“Shoot.”

“You met Bernard Pomeroy the other night, didn’t you? That party at the Spanglers’ house.”

“Can’t say that I did,” Winters said.

“Sells Mercedes Benzes out in Newport Beach. He didn’t hit on you to buy a car?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Well you
would
remember. He’d have sold you one.”

“I’ll watch out for him.”

“He’s doing a little sales work for me, out in the canyon.”

“Out in the canyon?”

“That little enterprise of ours that Sloane financed.”

“Oh, sure. Of course. Some kind of problem with it?”

“No,” Klein said. “We’re not doing bad. Not bad at all. Pomeroy’s tenacious.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. He sounds like a good man. You take care of things out there.”

For a moment Klein thought he was going to hang up. “I intend to,” he said, trying to work things around to the point. “We’ve
got a timetable, but I don’t want to rush things, for all the obvious reasons.”

“You’re the boss,” Winters said.

Klein could hear him rustling papers. “You know, it’s funny you should say that. If Pomeroy’s got one fault it’s that he’s
a little—what the hell?—overanxious, maybe. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not yet,” Winters said. “What
do
you mean?”

“Well, let’s just say he’s not subtle. He could sell raincoats in the desert if he set his mind to it. But he has a hard time
taking no for an answer. Tries to jerk their wallet out of their pocket. He’s kind of a purse snatcher when he gets impatient.”

“I’m still in the dark,” Winters said. The paper rustling had stopped. He was paying attention now. “What are you saying here?”

“Nothing, really,” Klein said, easing off. “I’m just a little concerned that if he goes around acting like a cowboy … You
know … He might piss on his hands.” He laughed weakly.

“I think that would be a large mistake, Lance.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I agree with you on that.”

“Tie him down, then. I don’t have to tell you how important it is for this whole thing to work.”

“Of course not,” Klein said. “Everything I’ve got is tied up in it.”

“Other people have things tied up, too. Your creditors are my creditors. Don’t drop the ball on me.”

“Hell no,” Klein said. “I appreciate what you’re saying to me.”

“And you can appreciate how a man has a reputation in the financial community, especially in regard to investment consortiums
like Sloane.”

“We’re rock solid. I didn’t mean to imply that …”

“And Sloane isn’t interested in your man Polaroid or any of his affairs. They don’t care about your gardener, either, or your
grandmother’s niece. This is a question of where the buck stops, Lance. That’s the bottom line. Do you follow me?”

“Absolutely,” Klein said. “Loud and clear. I just thought that some weight might be brought to bear….”

“I’m virtually certain you don’t want that,” Winters said flatly.

Klein was silent for a moment. There wasn’t a single thing he could say. He was fairly sure he’d been threatened, and there
was no way in hell he wanted it spelled out more explicitly. The conversation was over. He’d never in his life engaged in
a conversation that was more clearly over.

“Well, thanks for letting me yak in your ear,” he said. It sounded weak, but he hurried on, trying to finesse things. “Sometimes
it’s good to talk things through. You see things from a different point of view.” He could hear Winters’s voice, but it was
muffled, as if he was holding his hand over the phone and talking to someone else. Klein waited him out.

“Go ahead,” Winters said finally. “What was that?”

“I guess nothing much,” Klein said. “I just wanted to touch base.”

“Always happy to hear from you,” Winters said. “My best to the wife.”

“Thanks, and tell …” Klein started to say, but Winters hung up before he had a chance to finish his sentence. He listened to
dead air for a moment. When he hung up the phone his hand was shaking. What an incredible blunder! He should have seen it
coming. Winters was up to his eyeballs
in the whole deal, and here Klein had called up and set off every bell and whistle in his head. It almost seemed like a good
idea to call back right now and clarify things. He didn’t want Winters thinking that there was some kind of problem when there
wasn’t. No use worrying about trifles.

He reached for the phone again, but didn’t pick it up. Instead he stood up and headed toward the door. It was damage-control
time. A drink made some sense, after all. Something would come up to answer the Pomeroy question. What the hell, he could
tell Pomeroy any damned thing at all about his conversation with Winters, tell him a story about a guy with a baseball bat….

He opened the door, and there was Lorna, standing right there, a surprised look on her face. He couldn’t believe it. She’d
been sneaking around in the hallway, listening at the door.

T
HE CAT SEEMED TO SCRAMBLE FOR A MOMENT ON THE
chair cushion as if trying to get up. Pomeroy dropped the cardboard box, pumped the gun, and fired again, hitting the cat
low on his side, just in back of the ribs. The animal pawed the air now, and he reached down and pressed it to the cushion,
holding it there. Die, he thought. For God’s sake…

There was a noise out on the road right then, like a car door shutting, and Pomeroy stiffened, careful not to spin around
like a guilty man. He bent over, picked up the box,
and upended it, spilling the contents out onto the dirt. Then, before turning around, he put the box over the cat, which lay
still now. No one could have heard the little popping noise that the pellet gun had made, so unless they’d
seen
him there was no problem. He set his face in a smile and looked casually back toward the Trooper, ready to say something
sad and philosophical about the poor cat. What was it that cats died of? Cat fever. Was that it? The cat was dying of it,
suffering terribly….

There was no car on the road but his own. At first he couldn’t see anything. Perhaps it was just the wind, his imagination.
Then there was a movement in the front seat, and suddenly he saw a face staring out at him through the dusty windshield, half-obscured
by the glare of the sun.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. There was a kid in the goddamn front seat!

The camera! Pomeroy understood it at once. The little bastard was ripping off his Nikon. Pomeroy had left the door open and
the camera was sitting there on the seat, plain as day….

He lifted the box and pushed the cat into it, then picked up the tuna fish and can opener and twine. He slid the gun into
his pocket and then looked at his hand. Somehow there was blood on it; from the cat? Or was it his own blood, from where the
damned thing had torn him up yesterday?

“Hey!” he shouted, picking up the box now and heading along the side of the house. The kid was in no particular hurry. He
was rummaging around in there, probably going through the glove compartment. There was the toiletries kit in there, but nothing
valuable. Holding on to the box with both hands, Pomeroy began to run. The boy was looking out past the hinge side of the
open door, waiting till the last possible moment.

“Hold it right there!” Pomeroy shouted. He might as well save his breath. The boy backed out through the open door, turning
and running down toward the creek and into the deep shadows of the alders beyond. The camera dangled
from his hand. He was dressed weirdly, like Tom Sawyer, another backwoods hick in the making.

Pausing just long enough to shove the box into the car, Pomeroy slammed the door and took off down the trail. He was damned
if he was going to let the kid have a five-hundred-dollar camera. At the edge of the creek he paused, listening to the wind,
to the tree limbs brushing together in a leafy rush of sound that seemed to fill the canyon from side to side. The kid was
gone, just like that. But if he had crossed the creek there’d be wet footprints beyond, and there weren’t; no way he could
have jumped across. The creek was too broad.

Without waiting, he pushed through a thick stand of willows, breaking down the little pencil-thick stalks. The kid must have
headed upstream. Downstream the vegetation was too thick. He wouldn’t have had time to get through it. Upstream, beyond the
willows, there was a nothing little trail, mostly stamped-down grass. The wind shrilled through the alders, the tall straight
trunks swaying ominously. Dead leaves blew into his face, and he covered his eyes with his forearm, pushing shrubbery aside
with his arm. The damned place was full of poison oak, but he didn’t know what it looked like, and if he was going to get
the Nikon back there was sure as hell no time to study it now.

He climbed over a fallen tree and slid to the ground on the other side. Something caught on his pants pocket. There was a
small tug, and he felt the material tear. Cursing out loud, he clambered out into a clear area again. The stream ran swift
and narrow ahead of him, with broad, solid-looking rocks sticking up out of the water. That was it. That’s where the kid would
have gone across. The trail went on up the hill on the other side, disappearing within the moving shadows of close-growing
oak trees. The kid probably had some kind of hideout back there. The walls of the ridge were pocked with caves, mostly played-out
old tin mines that had never amounted to anything. He stepped
across the rocks in the creek, leaping the last three feet to the trail, then sprinted uphill toward the sheer canyon wall.
The wind would hide the sound of his running, and if he hurried he could catch the kid before he had a chance to get to his
hiding place.

Beneath the oaks the ground was soft with a heavy layer of mulch, and it was damp and very nearly still. The trail simply
ended there. The canyon wall rose steeply above, so that the limbs of the trees brushed against it, and a person could easily
have climbed up the loose rock and scrub in order to walk straight out onto a limb. He searched the trees overhead, but there
was nobody up there. There was nothing—no indication that the kid had come that way at all. If he had, he would have had to
be a mountain goat to go any farther.

Pomeroy turned around, heading back. It occurred to him for the first time that the kid might have seen him shoot the cat.
He hadn’t checked before he shot. He’d just blasted away like some kind of idiot. But if the kid
had
seen him, why steal the camera? Pomeroy could use that to advantage—I won’t tell on you if you won’t tell on me….

Had the kid picked up the damned camera and taken a picture? Pomeroy started to run toward the road. That was
just
what he needed. He leaped across the creek, leaving the trail and struggling up the loose dirt of the hillside, taking the
shortest route back to the car. He saw the blue paint of the Trooper through the trees.

At first it didn’t dawn on him that something was wrong with it, but then, just as he staggered up and stopped by the bumper,
breathing heavily and sweating, he realized that the door was open. Five minutes ago he’d slammed it shut, but it was open
now.

He looked around, wary, glancing into the interior of the car and then jerking his head back. It was empty. If the kid had
come back after something, he was gone now. Quickly, he walked around to the opposite side of the car to shut the door. Then
he saw it: his camera lay in the weedy dirt,
beaten to pieces. The case was cracked and the lens was gone entirely, probably having flown off into the bushes. The back
of the camera had sprung open, and the film was gone.

That was no good. The kid had snapped a picture, then taken the film with him and wrecked the camera out of spite.

He noticed then that the front fender of the Trooper was dented in. The little bastard! He’d smashed the goddamn Nikon against
the fender until the strap had broken! Pomeroy picked up the broken camera and tossed it into the car, onto the front seat.
Insurance would…

The
box
was gone—the cat, the goddamn tuna fish, all of it. He had put it on the front seat and shut the door. The kid had come back
after the box. Why? He must have seen
everything
. Pomeroy rested his face in his hands for a moment, massaging his temples, then stepped back and kicked the fender. This was
unbelievable. Set up by a
kid
. But for what reason? The kid couldn’t even know who he was.