There was shouting from outside. She looked out the window into the Kleins’ backyard, where Lance Klein was striding back and forth at the edge of the pool, obviously mad as hell. He suddenly stopped, looked at the telephone, and then threw it hard into the bushes along the side of the house. She wondered whether it was the phone he had meant to loan her.
“What am I going to eat, then?” Bobby asked. “Can we go down to Emory’s and get a box of Pop-a-Toast? Peter’s never had Pop-a-Toast. Maybe we could buy a box of it and surprise him.”
“Good idea,” Beth said. “We’ll bring him a box of Pop-a-Toast and a rosebush. Right now, though, try to remember where your other shoe is.”
“It’s under the bed. I just remembered.”
She forced herself to ignore Klein, who was worked up into a frenzy and was kicking the hell out of a lawn chair. It was none of her business, thank heaven.
“What’s it doing under the bed?” she asked, turning away from the window. “In fact, what are all those stuffed animals doing under the bed?”
“That’s the zoo,” Bobby said, using both hands to pour another glass of milk. “It’s only the zoo animals under there.” Without drinking the milk, he got up and led Beth back into the bedroom. He slid easily under the bed, hauling out animals until he found the shoe. A plastic man in a hat sat in the shoe as if it were an automobile. Bobby pulled the man out, pressed a lever on its back, and the man’s stomach flew open to reveal sausage strings of plastic guts.
“See,” Bobby said, “you can take his guts out too, and pretend to feed them to the lions or something.”
“Fascinating,” Beth said to him. “Put the shoe on and let’s get going. And brush your teeth and comb your hair.”
“I’ll brush my teeth,” Bobby said, pulling his shoe on, “but I don’t need to comb my hair. I’m wearing my hat. Did you find the alien?”
“Not yet,” Beth said, walking back toward the kitchen.
“I think maybe it’s outside,” Bobby said. “But I’m not sure.” He disappeared down the hallway to the bathroom.
There was half a cup of cold coffee left, which Beth drank standing at the kitchen window again, staring out at the windblown hillsides. She realized then that all morning long she had been avoiding looking into the service porch, and she wondered if she would ever be able to look out through the back door window again without seeing that bandage-wrapped face in her mind.
A horn honked out front, and just then a blue Isuzu Trooper pulled into Klein’s driveway. A man got out, slamming the door and carefully smoothing down his hair. It took a moment for Beth to recognize him.
6
“I’LL HAVE TO KILL HIM,” KLEIN SAID OUT LOUD, SPEAKING to the empty backyard. “There’s just no other way. Stupid damned …”
Then it occurred to him that Pomeroy’s talk about Beth put a new light on things. If it was him last night, looking through the windows, then there was the chance he wasn’t a pervert at all, that he was just trying to put the fear into Beth because he thought she’d seen him loading up Ackroyd’s water tank with rats. That would be typical Pomeroy method—instant excess.
Either way, clearly Pomeroy was over the top. He had gotten to Klein bad last night and then again over the phone just now. Klein was running, and Pomeroy knew it. It was time to stop running.
There was the sound of a car pulling up, a door slamming. Klein ran along the side of the house and looked over the fence toward the driveway. There was no white Cherokee out there. Pomeroy was driving a blue Isuzu Trooper this morning. He could easily have ditched the other car.
A couple of moments later one of the french doors swung open and Pomeroy stepped out into the yard.
“Barney,” Klein said, holding out his hand as if nothing had gone wrong over the phone. Pomeroy shook it. “You had me going for a second there, partner. What I want to know is that things are under control.”
“You never have to ask me that, Lance. That’s my middle name.”
“Good,” Klein said, gesturing at a lawn chair. “Then we’re on the same wavelength.” The two of them sat down near the fence where they were sheltered from the wind. “Glass of juice?”
Pomeroy shook his head.
“So give me the good news,” Klein said, “if you’ve got any.”
“Well,” Pomeroy said. “All in all it was a good morning. I got out there real early. Lot of people working on their places. I managed to get prices on three out in Holy Jim. Number two, number five, and number twenty-eight. They’ll all sell. Thirty-five thousand on number two.”
“That’s gotta be bullshit,” Klein said. “We can get number two for twenty, max. Fifteen. Number two’s nearly a teardown. I can’t believe you’re letting these people hose you like this. You’re a goddamn car salesman, Barney. How about twenty-eight? That’s a good item.”
“Forty K.”
Klein thought about it. Cabin twenty-eight was an easy thousand square feet, with solar equipment and a detached shed. There were leaded windows, a river-rock fireplace, and a thousand-gallon water tank. Propane tank owned, not rented. It was a good, solid cabin, unlike number two, which was a termite-eaten pile of crap. “Name and number?”
Pomeroy pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Klein. There was an address and phone number on it. “Name’s Newman,” Pomeroy said. “Ocean-side couple. She’s in and out of the hospital with some kind of heart trouble.”
“That’s perfect. We’ll take them down. How about number five?”
“Thirty-eight. And that’s firm.”
“And you said cash?”
“Of course I said cash.”
“Then they’re not serious. Give them a week to think about it. They’ll come around. And, Barney,” Klein said, talking evenly, trying to put an almost humorous edge on his voice, “for Pete’s sake quit talking about leaning on people, will you? I don’t run a business that leans on people. That kind of thing isn’t in my book. And if it was, then we sure as hell wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
Pomeroy waited, smiling faintly, and Klein had to force himself to keep his temper.
“You know what I’m talking about?” Klein asked. “All you’ve got to do is make it clear that you’ve got cash and that you want to spend it. If they don’t make a buck off you, then the guy next door will. That ought to be enough to get them thinking. Let the money do the talking, Barn.”
Pomeroy tilted his chair against the fence, still saying nothing, still smiling. Klein decided to wait him out. If he went on explaining himself he would start to sound frantic, and that was no good.
Finally, nodding heavily, Pomeroy changed the subject: “Hell of a nice place you’ve got here.”
“It’s a good investment,” Klein said.
“No, I mean it’s more than that. Nice pool. Sweet little neighborhood. Neighborhood looks like something off a Christmas card.”
“Well,” Klein said. “Lorna likes it pretty well.” Immediately he wished he hadn’t mentioned Lorna. Pomeroy seemed to light up at the sound of her name. He nodded as if that were just what he was driving at.
“What I mean is that it would be a dirty damned shame to pour this all down a rat hole.” Pomeroy waved his hand around to take in all of it—the house, the pool, the view. He straightened his chair up and looked steadily at Klein. “Bad management could threaten it. We’ve both seen that happen.”
“Yeah,” Klein said. “I guess we have.” This was it. Pomeroy was going to spring it.
“Poor old Larry Collier.” He shook his head. “Still, a heart attack isn’t a bad way to go. And they’d have screwed him, too. There was plenty there to convict him. Those fake perc tests and core samples. If that fire hadn’t got the evidence …” He shook his head again, as if it were a hell of a shame.
Klein was silent. Finally Pomeroy had gotten around to the inevitable. What would it be, extortion?
“Does your wife … what’s her name again?”
“Just
leave her out of it,” Klein said. “I told you that once. Don’t make me say it again.”
“Hey,” Pomeroy said, holding up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I was just wondering if she knew about those cheap-shit houses you built that slid into the ravine, that’s all. Wasn’t someone hurt? Man, I can hardly remember. A kid, wasn’t it? It’s a hell of a sad thing when a kid gets hurt. Paralyzed, I seem to recall.”
Klein forced himself to sit still.
“I don’t know if there’s any statute of limitations on that kind of thing. It’s worth looking into, though. You can’t be too safe nowadays. World’s full of people that would take you straight to the cleaners if they got their hands on all that burned-up evidence. And there’s even worse things than that.”
“I bet there are,” Klein said. “Am I going to guess, or are you going to tell me about them?”
“Well,” Pomeroy said, “it’s a hell of a thing for a good woman to find out that kind of thing about her husband. That was what happened to poor old Larry. You knew that part, didn’t you?”
Klein watched his face.
“It took old Larry apart a piece at a time. He tried to hold it all together, but it was like the tide coming in. There wasn’t a damned thing he could do. Information leaked out—Lord knows how. Then the lawsuits. He tried paying people off, and that didn’t work. Next thing you know, his wife found out about all of it—all of Larry’s little secrets. Just between me and you, Lance, old Larry had a thing for girls. And I do mean girls.”
“Barney, shut the hell up,” Klein said. “That was years ago. Larry’s dead. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
“No,” Pomeroy said. “Wait. This is a great story. You won’t believe this, but there was a call girl service in Anaheim back in the early seventies, probably going on since who knows when. Girls nine, ten years old. The whole thing blew up back in—hell, when was it? My memory’s gone. August twenty-fourth, 1974. Story broke the next day in the Bulletin. Maybe you read about it.
“Anyway, poor old Larry Collier got arrested along with a bunch of other businessmen—city-father types. Paid a hell of a fine, which he could afford, believe me. I really think that what finally killed him was his wife hearing about it. All the details. He really hustled to hush it up. No one knows how it happened, his family finding out like that. I’m certain that’s what killed him, though, more than the bankruptcy. He’d had a bypass, too. Ate heart medicine like candy. I’m surprised it didn’t explode when he was diddling one of those ten-year-old …”
Klein hit him in the face, a wild punch that caught Pomeroy’s cheek and knocked him over backward. His chair hit the fence, skidded sideways, and dumped him onto the concrete. Klein stood up and grabbed a handful of Pomeroy’s shirt, pulling him halfway to his feet. He threw his fist back to hit him again, but Pomeroy jerked loose, tripped over the fallen chair, and scrambled like a crab toward the pool. He stood up and held both hands in front of himself, backpedaling toward the poolhouse.
“Settle down, Lance,” Pomeroy said. “Think about the consequences.”
“You’re dead,” Klein told him. “I swear to God I’ll kill you. You don’t come here again. You don’t phone. You’re through. Do you understand me now? Or do you need another fist in the face?”
“Uh-uh,” Pomeroy said. He shook his head slowly, a grin twisting his mouth. “You’re the one who better get the picture straight, Lance. When you work outside the law, there’s a whole new set of rules. One of them is this. We’re partners. You don’t let your partner down, or maybe he lets you down, hard. The second one is that you learn to accept things. Keep the consequences in mind.”
Klein sat back down in his chair, suddenly tired. A gust of wind blew more leaves through the fence just then, scattering them across the surface of the pool.
“That’s life, isn’t it?” Pomeroy asked, patting his hair down and nodding at the leaves. “The wind blows and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it except bend.”
Then his face changed suddenly. He crouched down and looked hard at the fence, as if he’d seen something through the slats. He picked up his overturned chair and climbed up onto the seat, balancing himself on the bars on either side and holding on like Kilroy to the top of the fence in order to peek over the top.
Smiling broadly now, he looked back down at Klein and winked, as if this beat all, as if he’d never before been quite so pleasantly surprised.
7
SUDDENLY CURIOUS, BETH WALKED OUT ONTO THE SERVICE porch and looked down through the blinds into the Kleins’ backyard. What’s his name—Adams—came out through the back door and he and Klein sat down out of the wind.
Carefully, she reached through the blinds and unlatched the window, sliding it open an inch. Their voices rose and fell, nothing but murmurs.
Strange that Klein would have lied about knowing the man. Well, he hadn’t really lied; he had just played things down. Beth hadn’t given much thought to what Adams might have been up to out at Mr. Ackroyd’s yesterday, but suddenly she suspected that it wasn’t anything good. It wasn’t surprising that the cat had torn him up….
She pictured the face at the window again—wrapped in what? Gauze bandage? She looked closely at his hand now—some kind of wide Band-Aid on it.
God, could it be him? Did Klein suspect it, and that’s why he was being so solicitous with the locks and the phone and all?
She closed the window now, opened the back door, and stepped out onto the porch, careful that the wind wouldn’t slam the door. Across the lawn, an enormous green plastic turtle sat near the fence, full of sand and leaves and scraps of eucalyptus bark and with a scattering of toys stuck in it.
The slats of the redwood fence had shrunk over the years as the wood dried out, and through it she could see the forms of the two men who sat with their backs to it. They would see her pretty easily too, if they turned to look. She moved as silently as she could. Half-hidden by the avocado tree next to the sandbox, she watched them through the fence.
Adams was talking, and it was clear from his tone that there was nothing friendly about their conversation. “I was just wondering,” he said, “if she knew about those cheap-shit houses you built that slid into the ravine, that’s all. Wasn’t someone hurt? Man, I can hardly remember. A kid, wasn’t it? It’s a hell of a sad thing when a kid gets hurt. Paralyzed, I seem to recall.”
The tone of the man’s voice filled Beth with rage; it was so smarmy, so clearly false.
Klein didn’t say anything, and Adams droned on, mixing up jocularity with threats, telling a story about some mutual Mend. Obviously Klein was in trouble. Adams wasn’t just talking to hear his head rattle; he was clarifying Klein’s position.
Then, abruptly, there was the sound of a chair scraping, followed by a grunt and Adams’s chair slamming back against the fence. For a moment there was nothing but hoarse breathing and someone scrabbling around on the concrete. Beth leaned toward the fence, trying to see more clearly.
“Settle down, Lance.” It was Adams’s voice, husky, but trying to sound controlled. “Think about the consequences.”
“You’re dead,” Klein told him, sounding flat and final. Beth found herself suddenly wondering what to do. Was he serious?
She almost ran for the house, but the sound of Adams’s voice stopped her. There wasn’t any fear in it, just the voice of a man speaking the matter-of-fact truth. “When you work outside the law,” he said, “there’s a whole new set of rules….”
She had the wild urge to cough or speak or somehow shut them up before they said something that she shouldn’t hear. There was the scraping of chairs again, and Beth stepped out from behind the eucalyptus tree, heading for the house while they were busy putting things back together. Then Adams’s face appeared over the top of the fence. He looked down at Klein, smiling like an idiot. It was all she could do not to run.
“Why, hello, Beth,” he said. “I’ve been anxious to talk to you. What? You live here, n
ext to the Kleins?”
“Yes,” she said. “Small world. I’d love to chat, but I’m really pretty busy right now.” She backed away toward the house, trying to keep her fear from being obvious.
“Maybe a little later, then? I’d like to get to know you a little better.”
“That’s it!” Klein shouted, and Beth could see him stand up, strobelike, through the fence boards. There was the sound of Adams’s lawn chair spinning away, and then Adams abruptly slammed downward, his chin banging against the top of the fence. He grunted, then disappeared. Breathlessly, someone shouted, “Wait!” and then there was scuffling and the sound of someone getting hit.
Beth ran for the house and in through the back door, which she shut behind her and locked. She stood there until her heart quit slamming, and then went to the window again, looking out through the slats, ready to call the police if she had to.
Lorna stood by the pool, clutching her bathrobe shut even though it was already tied. Adams’s hair was a mess, as if Klein had been yanking at it, and he stood at the edge of the pool, angrily straightening his clothes. They were talking plenty loudly enough now for Beth to hear them.
“Get the hell out of here!” Klein shouted at him. “Lorna! Get the gun out of the nightstand. Now!”
“Now, Lance …” Lorna started to say, but Klein shouted, “Now!” again, and then shouted, “Dirty son of a bitch!” and brushed past Lorna toward the doors, disappearing into the house. Beth could still hear him yelling incoherently. Adams headed up the side of the house toward the front, breaking into a run and going out through the gate.
A moment later Klein appeared by the pool again, carrying a pistol, but by then the blue Isuzu was backing out of the driveway, and in a moment Adams was gone.
“What was all that?”
Beth jumped, jerking her hand away from the blinds, which clattered against the window.
“You spying on the Kleins again?” Bobby asked.
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