17
THE CLATTER OF plates and bottles was giving Klein a headache. If he had been in any other company there wouldn’t have been a problem, but he was eating at the steak house with Pomeroy, who had been explaining things in detail—gesturing, offering Klein unnecessary and unwanted advice.
There were ten good reasons not to be there listening to Pomeroy, and only one good reason to be there. Pomeroy was becoming a liability. It was necessary right now to humor him, and then to damned well think of some way to get him out of the picture entirely. Short of murder, Klein didn’t have any ideas.
Pomeroy had even come up to the house today. Thank God Lorna hadn’t been home. Pomeroy couldn’t be persuaded that he and Klein shouldn’t seem to be closely associated with each other, and he dropped by like an old friend, full of howdies, smirking around as if he had a secret that he couldn’t share. Either he was the most happily self-deluded man Klein had ever met, or else he had a bigger agenda, and was running some kind of lowball bluff. He yammered on now, looking grave, talking about the world of car sales.
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.”