12
POMEROY PICKED UP a foil-wrapped towelette from the dashboard and tore it open, carefully wiping his face with skin freshener. Dust and leaves swept through the deserted schoolyard across the street, and he felt suddenly lonely and disconnected as he listened to the wind. It reminded him of playing alone on autumn afternoons in the empty field of his neighborhood school. What he remembered most keenly was the drone of distant, unseen airplanes. Somehow there was a world of loneliness in the sound of an airplane. It was sentimental weakness, though, thinking like that now. The past was simply past, and unless you could use it, it was nothing but a liability to recall it.
He tossed a bag full of videotapes into the backseat. He had spent longer in the video store than he’d meant to, looking at titles. Once, five years ago, he’d been at a party for a salesman friend of his that was getting married—not exactly a friend, really, just a man he worked with. They’d drunk beer, the rest of the men had, shown porno movies of the worst kind—women together, men and women committing perversions … He had walked out. There was no way he was going to sit around with a bunch of beer-swilling perverts and watch filth.
The video store had a whole section in the back full of movies like that. In the privacy of his own home a man might look into them. Some of them might be quite artistic, really, which was something you could appreciate if there weren’t a lot of drunks shouting obscenities at the screen. There was no way he could check one out, though, not face-to-face with the clerk behind the counter….
Even though there were a couple of hours to kill, he had no desire to drive back out into the canyon today. There was the chance that he could shoehorn another cabin owner into thinking about selling, but the cat bite in his hand throbbed, and the wind was just too damned wild, blowing straight down off the hills like that. And besides, there were other highly entertaining things to do.
He pulled into the post office parking lot and cut the engine, then took a padded manila envelope out from under the seat and slid a sheaf of papers halfway out of it. He shuffled through them slowly, stopping to scan a line or two on a page or to glance at a set of figures. He had made the copies in the fifteen-cent Xerox machine at the local grocery store, and some of them were so badly reproduced that they were edged with black shadows. Klein would get the point, though. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of clear sentences and he’d get the point as clear and sharp as if he’d been hit with a pickax.
Pomeroy laughed silently, unable to make up his mind. Bills, transcripts, letters—everything he had was pretty good, although most of the letters and bills wouldn’t mean much by themselves. They were substantiating evidence, really. Finally he decided on one of the best of the lot, a five-page transcript of a telephone conversation that Klein would no doubt rather not be reminded of. There were a couple of other choice articles among the papers; could have copies of them in due time, if he needed them. The extortion business, if you did it right, was like cooking a bird. You didn’t pour the heat to it all at once and burn it to a crisp. You let it simmer.
The transcript itself was ten years old—or at least the original was—and Klein had no idea on earth that it existed, although Pomeroy was willing to bet that hadn’t forgotten about the phone call itself. Pomeroy hadn’t. He could remember every detail of it.
The shady little business meeting that followed the call had taken place at Angel Stadium: Angels versus Oakland, September 29, 1983. Pomeroy himself had been there along with old Larry Collier and a contractor out in Tustin who did core samples and geological surveys. It had even rained that evening, just a few big drops like a warning out of the sky before the clouds passed on. In the west a rocket had gone up out of Vandenberg, fizzling out and corkscrewing over the Pacific, painting the sky with a smoke trail that was clearly meant to be handwriting. Going into the game, the Angels had been contenders, two games out of first, and then lost that night to Oakland eight to two, sealing their fate on the very same night that Klein was sealing his. That was Klein in a nutshell, always coming close, but never quite making it to the series.
There was a certain synchronicity to things when the game was going right—or wrong, as was the case with Klein and the Angels. The universe played along, dealing out signs and symbols. If you understood the language, you could read your fate in the sky or on a baseball scoreboard.
From the glove compartment, he took a cassette taps of Klein’s voice, recorded for posterity, and slid it into a fresh manila envelope along with the transcript of the recording. He had already addressed the envelope with rub-on letters, very neatly. It looked pro. Nothing to arouse suspicion in anyone but Klein himself, and Klein was already suspicious. Once he opened the envelope and took a good hard look at the contents, suspicion wouldn’t enter into the transaction anymore.
Wind shook the car, and people up on the sidewalk turned their faces away from it, hurrying to get inside one of the open shops.
He moistened a sponge with water out of a plastic bottle, rubbed the gum on the flap, and sealed the envelope. Then he started the car, drove to the mailbox in front of the post office, and dropped the envelope into the chute. It would probably be routed through the main post office and get to Klein on Monday. By then Klein would have been simmering long enough, and Pomeroy could turn up the heat.
It was late in the afternoon, and the traffic was fairly heavy through Live Oak Canyon, mostly commuters driving home to Coto and Santa Margarita. Pomeroy owned condo up there himself: athletic club, tennis courts, pool complex. It was close enough so that he could still make it home in time to put a fresh bandage on his hand and take a quick shower before his dinner meeting with Klein.
Traffic cleared, and he swung out onto the highway, heading northeast toward the turnoff to Trabuco Oaks. In his rearview mirror he saw a Volkswagen bus pull up behind him, signaling to make a left, up Parker Street, into the Oaks. A blond woman was driving, and he knew right away who she was.
“Beth,” he said out loud. Linda’s name only occurred to him afterward, as a sort of echo. He looked at his bandage-wrapped hand. Beth would heal both wounds! The sight of her sent a thrill through him now, and for a moment his breath caught in his throat as it had that morning, as if the mere sight of her would physically incapacitate him. Running into her twice in one day! What were the odds of that? He couldn’t let the opportunity slide. It would be the easiest thing in the world right now to find out where she lived.
He breezed past Parker, watching in the mirror as the bus turned left, disappearing beyond the general store. Fifty yards farther, he made a quick U-turn across the left shoulder and pulled straight out onto the highway again.