Night Relics (41 page)

He let his mind run, calculating how much of his life was about to come down in a smoking heap: his house, his marriage, his
financial security. Of course the truth was he’d set himself up for it; all it took was a monster like Pomeroy to knock him
down. It occurred to him again that
Pomeroy himself was very nearly the perfect victim—secretive, no family, certainly no friends….

He put away the pistol and let the idea slide away from him. For fifteen minutes he stood by the roadside, leaning against
his truck, listening to the sound of the creek and the rustling of leaves. A car went by, but it wasn’t Lorna. The wind gusted
a couple of times, and the day grew increasingly lonesome and empty. Klein began to feel fidgety, wondering if he was waiting
in vain. Or worse, if he was waiting around while Pomeroy worked more of his creepery on someone.

What the hell
was
Pomeroy doing up there? He was the last man on earth to take a damned hike. Had he followed somebody up there? Klein set
out toward the creek, in a sudden hurry now that he had decided to move. At the edge of the water he stopped, full of indecision,
his hand on the gun in his pocket. He turned around and jogged back to the truck, putting the pistol away in the glove compartment,
locking up, and then turning around and heading down the hill again.

He picked his way across the creek and up through the oaks that led to the mouth of Falls Canyon. The narrow defile was nearly
choked with broken alder and sycamore limbs, fallen from trees growing up the canyon walls. Drifts of leaves covered the tangle
of brush, and he was forced to clamber partway up the steep cliffside to find the trail again where it rose above the floor
of the canyon.

He picked up his pace when the way was clear, the soft dry dirt rising around him, dusting his arms with grime. Here and there
he could see the marks of crepe-soled shoes, the kind Pomeroy wore when he was out here conducting business. He stopped to
listen, damned if he was going to let the bastard come upon him unawares. There was nothing but the morning silence, though,
barely disturbed now by the wind.

He wiped his face on his sleeve and continued up the
trail, stepping over fallen branches. Soon the trail forked, and he took the upper fork on instinct, knowing that it led to
the ridge. The lower fork led to the falls—an unlikely destination for Pomeroy unless he was just out sightseeing, which was
nearly unimaginable. Thick brush overgrew the trail, and he pushed through it sideways, climbing into the shade of a granite
ledge and resting for a moment, wiping the sweat off his forehead. A big lizard darted across the path just then, running
for the shelter of a heap of sticks and leaves and brush, nearly shoulder high, that blocked the trail ahead.

Klein stepped toward it, wondering whether he’d have to leave the trail and climb around it, and at the same time reaching
for the broken end of a branch. He stopped suddenly, then reversed direction and trod backward, shouting inadvertently and
bumping up against the cool granite behind him.

A man’s face, dirty and bruised, eyes and mouth wide open, stared out at him from the interior of the tangled debris. One
upturned hand and arm lay parallel to the broken branch Klein had just reached for. A dirty gauze bandage dangled from where
it was wrapped around the lifeless hand, and the hand itself, supported by the tangle of brush, clutched a knot of dead leaves.

I
T TOOK
K
LEIN A FEW MOMENTS TO REALIZE THAT THE
dead man was Pomeroy. The skin on his arms was discolored from bruises and dried blood, and his face, visible through the
mass of debris and vegetation that nearly covered the corpse, was distorted with terror. His eyes were wide open and seemed
almost to bulge, as if he’d been suffocated or strangled. It was the big ring on the finger of his outstretched hand that
was unmistakable.

“Jesus,” Klein said out loud, turning away and looking back down the trail. For a moment he held his breath, and then he let
it out slowly. He couldn’t fathom this—who could have done it? There were probably plenty of people in the world who wouldn’t
mind seeing Pomeroy dead, but why out here, up on this God-forsaken ridge? What, had he been
lured
up here?

Then he knew suddenly that there couldn’t be any such explanation. He looked at Pomeroy again, at the leaves clutched in his
hand, stuffed in his half-open mouth. What the corpse reminded him of was himself, last night, crouched in the corner of the
poolhouse while the wind pounded at him, choking him with dead things.

It was the wind that had killed Pomeroy.

He nearly turned back down the path, full of sudden fear. The breeze only whispered through the chaparral now, vaguely stirring
the dirty gauze that hung from Pomeroy’s wrist. Klein closed his eyes for a moment, forcing himself to think clearly. Why
did it
have
to be the wind that had
killed Pomeroy? The path leading up to the ridge was steep. Pomeroy had tripped on loose brush, tumbled forty or fifty feet,
probably broken his neck. That was all—a stupid accident, bad luck for Pomeroy, but good luck for the rest of the world.

Klein was free of him. The realization was like the passing of a cloud shadow. He nearly laughed out loud, and for one giddy
moment he almost reached out and shook Pomeroy’s limp hand. The corpse’s discolored face sobered him, though, and it dawned
on him that whatever had happened to Pomeroy, he couldn’t let the body be found. That much was obvious. They would think Klein
had killed him. They would
know
it. He’d been yelling it out loud for the last couple of days, wandering around the hills with a loaded pistol. He’d screamed
it at Lorna. Beth had overheard him say the same thing. And Winters … Christ, he’d called Winters yesterday morning and advertised
that Pomeroy was out of control and had to be stopped. Winters would hang him out to dry. And to top it off, his truck had
been parked for the last hour alongside Pomeroy’s Isuzu, down at the damned turnout. When push came to shove, there was enough
circumstantial evidence to drown him. And when the rest of it came out—the scheming, the blackmail—it would all be over except
for the prison sentence.

The wind was still now, and the air had grown hot. In the silence he listened for the sound of footsteps on the trail, for
hikers taking an afternoon stroll to the top of the falls. He had to hide the body, and the quicker the better. He pushed
against a broken branch that hooked around Pomeroy’s back and neck, digging into the flesh of his cheek. Dead leaves and twigs
cascaded to the ground, and Klein jerked his hand away when the body moved and the head abruptly fell sideways and dangled
at an unnatural angle.

Klein steeled himself, grabbing the branch with both hands and yanking it free, throwing it as far into the scrub as he could
manage. He hauled away a clot of loose limbs,
tumbling the corpse into the brush beside the trail. Methodically he pulled the rest of the debris to pieces, scattering it
into the chaparral, scooping up handfuls of twigs and leaves and tossing them into the wind.

Finally the corpse lay on its back, its face staring at the sky. He crouched next to it, holding his breath while he twisted
the ring from Pomeroy’s finger. Then he went through his pockets, pulling out his wallet, car keys and a small address book
containing the names and phone numbers of canyon residents.

“Good,” he said when he saw the book. He sighed heavily, starting to breathe again, and slid all of it into his own pockets
before grabbing Pomeroy by his belt and shirt collar. Slowly he began to drag him up toward the ridge, setting his feet, hauling
the corpse a yard or so, and then setting his feet again. Down would have been easy, but down was no good; there wasn’t any
part of the canyon that wasn’t hiked through by boy scouts or picnickers or somebody. Up on the ridge, though, some distance
off the trail…

Halfway to the top he stopped to rest, thinking suddenly that he could throw the body off the top of the falls, make it look
accidental or something. But just as suddenly he abandoned it. What would they make of the stuff in the corpse’s mouth? How
long had he been here? A couple of hours?
Any
competent coroner would know that he died first, had choked to death, and then been tossed over the top, and they’d be on
Klein like a pack of dogs within a couple of days. Getting clever like that would be the worst thing to do.

He looked toward the top of the trait, another twenty or thirty feet up, then slid the body farther across the scree-covered
dirt. Both its shoes came off almost at the same moment. Klein cursed, dropping Pomeroy and hurrying down to retrieve them.
He tied them together with the laces and hung them around Pomeroy’s neck before grabbing his wrists and starting again, trying
not to look at the bloated
face, which lolled back and forth. The loose gauze bandage dangled nearly to the ground, and when Klein finally dragged the
corpse onto a level spot, he let it lie, bending over and wrapping the gauze around the wrist again, brushing off the clinging
oak leaves.

He rested his hands on his knees finally, catching his breath. Pomeroy was a little man, thank God. Maybe that had been his
problem. Klein remembered then that Pomeroy had described himself to someone at the Spanglers’ as the “Napoleon of car sales.”
When the hell was that? Only a few days ago, and here the poor son of a bitch lay dead with one hand flopped across his chest.
After a moment he set out up the ridge trail, jogging slowly and looking to both sides for a break in the dense shrubbery.
Soon he came to what looked like a kind of deer trail—a narrow opening in the chaparral that led away into the interior, toward
where the hills rose again toward an even more elevated ridge. Beyond that lay the Santiago Truck Trail, which traversed the
high, wild ridges leading up to Santiago Peak, but between here and there was nothing but a couple of miles of unbroken and
untraveled wilderness.

He made his mind up and jogged back down, hurriedly now. The day was wearing on. It’d been a couple of hours since he’d talked
to Joanne, and it all of a sudden was more important than ever that he find Lorna and try to set things straight. Picking
up the shoes, he set out again, pulling the corpse by the feet now. Pomeroy’s head bounced on the trail, dust rising around
it, his hair gray with the dust. Flies settled on the bruised face, were dislodged almost at once, and then buzzed around
and settled again.

At the game trail Klein didn’t hesitate, but hauled Pomeroy through the brush, jerking him along, unmindful of broken branches.
Hell, there was no way to be tidy, to hide his trail. When he came to a stop, finally, Pomeroy’s shirt was shoved up under
his armpits, and Klein reached down and yanked it over the white, hairless belly. He rolled the corpse over, turning away
at the sight of the back of Pomeroy’s
head, scraped clean of hair after being dragged up the path. He noticed then that there were already vultures overhead, circling
in long, declining loops. Pulling and dragging the corpse deeper into the greasewood and sage, the flies swarming around now,
he managed finally to wedge it beneath a clump of heavy brush, shoving the shoes in with it. He considered searching out sticks
or pulling up plants in order to hide the body even more thoroughly, but then abruptly gave up.

“That’s it,” he said out loud, stepping out toward the trail. The thought occurred to him then that taking Pomeroy’s clothes
off would hurry the process of decay, make things easier for the flies and for the carrion eaters that would find their way
down off the ridges. But the idea was too ghoulish, and he set out again, the stiff chaparral plants springing into place
behind him, dense enough so that unless someone happened to stray off the trail and wander into the scrub, the body might
never be found. He headed down the ridge trail, back toward the cars, aware that the wind was rising, the dense vegetation
shifting around him like the surface of the sea.

H
E DROVE
P
OMEROY’S CAR INTO THE CREEK AND LEFT IT
there, the keys in the ignition, and walked the half mile back up the canyon to the truck. Within a few days the Isuzu would
be stripped, shot full of holes, turned into another rusting hulk. Six months from now the county would haul a crane and a
flatbed truck up the canyon clearing out wrecks at the taxpayers’ expense.

When they got around to it, they’d trace the car to Pomeroy. But so what? That was inevitable. There was nothing in the wrecked
car to indicate there’d been any violence, nothing in it of any value. What it looked like was a typical car theft—joy riders
ripping off a new four-wheel-drive vehicle and driving through the canyon like maniacs, abandoning the car after they’d wrecked
it. There was nothing in it to suggest that Pomeroy was dead, that his body lay decomposing beyond the top of Falls Canyon….

He unlocked the truck and slid into the driver’s seat, taking a look at Pomeroy’s wallet and at the little notebook. Inside
the notebook, after the several pages of names and phone numbers and figures, there were half a dozen blank pages and then
another page containing a couple of sentences written in very careful handwriting, full of flourishes and curlicues and loops.
“I might compare thee to the flowers,” the first line read, but then the word
thee
had been crossed out and replaced with
you.
The sentence was repeated, the
you
replaced with the words
my Darling.
The rest of the page was filled with doodles of flowers and lightning bolts and question marks trailing off into nothing.

“Poetry,” Klein said out loud, shaking his head. It was unbelievable, Pomeroy trying to write this kind of trash. It didn’t
jive with the Pomeroy that Klein knew. He dropped the notebook on the seat and sorted through the stuff in the wallet. There
were a dozen credit cards and an assortment of business cards. Tucked in among the credit cards was a library card issued
by the city of Irvine and a couple of membership cards to video stores. There was nearly eighty dollars in cash along with
a couple of store receipts, including a computer-printed receipt for a two-dollar video rental—
Way Out West,
the old Laurel and Hardy movie.