‘He owns World Wide Entertainment,’ Alice says. ‘That’s a network plus about twelve cable channels. One of them is that news station that loves Trump. There’s this bunch of rabid commentators—’
‘I know the ones you’re talking about.’
He’s seen WWE News 24, everybody has. It plays all the time in hotel lobbies and airport terminals. Billy sometimes stops for a few minutes to absorb some rightwing pundit’s bilge, then either moves on or changes to one of the movie channels if he has access to the controller. He had no idea they franchised local TV stations, though. Had no idea (at least at first) what Hoff was talking about and didn’t care. He hadn’t thought it was important. But it was. Very. It was how Hoff got into this. It was why the Channel 6 news crew didn’t go chasing the fire in Cody. It was how Ken Hoff ended up dead in his own garage.
‘This guy wanted you to kill Joel Allen? This guy? He’s old. And rich.’
Yes, Billy thinks. Old and rich and used to being emperor. Ken Hoff had only thought he was starring in a movie. Roger Klerke really has been. He’s the man who thinks he deserves everything, and that it should not just be brought to him but that it should be served to perfection. Which included film footage of Joel Allen’s death.
And I was the waiter, Billy thinks.
‘Tell me what happened at Promontory Point.’
Billy does as she asks, skipping over only what Nick told him before Billy sent him into his safe room like a bad kid grounded and confined to his bedroom. When he finishes, she says, ‘You did what you had to do.’
This is true, but it’s the verdict of a young woman barely old enough to buy a legal drink. He’s sure Ken Hoff thought the same. ‘Yes, but it was wrong choices that got me to the point where I had to do it.’
‘That old lady,’ Alice says, and shakes her head. ‘Amazing. Do you think she’ll be all right?’
‘Not if her son dies.’
She gives Billy a look he’s actually glad to see. If she feels safe enough to be pissed at him, she’s probably still getting down the road to being all right. ‘Don’t you think she bears some of the responsibility for the job he was doing? Working for a gangster?’
Billy can’t answer that.
‘Now tell me what you’re leaving out. What the gangster told you. Tell me why.’
They’re on the Interstate now. The shadows are starting to lengthen. The game between the Giants and the Cardinals will be over. One team won and the other team didn’t. A clean-up crew will be on its way to Promontory Point. Billy’s got the cruise control pegged just below seventy.
‘Nick hired Joel Allen to do a killing, but Nick was just the go-between. He even told me that, although he called himself the agent. It was Roger Klerke who wanted the job done, and paid millions for it. They met on an island in Puget Sound and struck the deal there.’
‘Who did he want killed?’
‘His son.’
3
Alice jumps like a person startled by a slamming door. ‘Peter, Paul, something like that! He was supposed to take over from his father!’
‘It was Patrick,’ Billy says. ‘You knew?’
‘Just kinda-sorta. Because my mother has News 24 on all the time.’
Alice’s mom and probably seventy per cent of the cable-watching news junkies in America, Billy thinks.
‘I’d mostly leave the room, I hate that drivel but it’s not worth arguing about with her. Only it was like their top story for almost a week, even ahead of Trump.’ She looks at him. ‘Now I know why. Klerke owns News 24.’
‘Correct.’
‘They said it was a gang thing and Patrick Klerke got mistaken for somebody else.’
‘It was no gang thing and no mistake. Klerke’s apartment was in a building with all sorts of security. A gangbanger never could have gotten past the gate guard, let alone into the building. Plus no one heard the shot. Allen must have used a potato-buster.’
‘A what?’
‘A silencer.’
‘24 was all over the cops to catch the guy but they never did. Because by then Allen was probably out of town.’
‘Sure, over the hills and far away,’ Billy agrees. ‘And if he hadn’t shot those two men because he lost big at poker, he’d probably still be over the hills and far away. Maybe even then, if he hadn’t gone back to LA and mistaken some lady writer for a hooker.’
‘Why would Klerke … his own son? Why?’
‘I can only tell you what Nick told me. There’s probably more to it, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time.’
‘Because of that man’s mother. Marge.’
‘Yes, Marge. I knew she’d head for the main gate, I had to believe she knew the code to open it, and I left the gate guard—’
‘Sal.’
‘Right, him. I left him with his shotgun. So I only had time for the abridged version.’
‘Then tell me that.’
‘Klerke was old. Not old old, but old for his age and with a host of medical problems. He needed to name a successor – to keep his board happy, I guess – and most people expected it would be Patrick, the elder son. But Patrick was a heavy drug user and a party animal who used to get through his yearly stipend before the end of April and come to daddy on the first of May, begging for more.’
Alice smiles. ‘He maybe should have gone to his mother. They can be a softer touch.’
‘Patrick’s mother died of an overdose. Pills. Or maybe it was suicide. Maybe even murder. Klerke’s divorced from the younger son’s mother. That’s Devin.’
‘I think he was on TV, too. Made a statement or something.’
Billy nods. ‘What Nick told me reminded me of the story of the grasshopper and the ant, with the addition of a father smart enough to tell the difference. Patrick was the grasshopper. Devin, his younger brother by four years, was the ant. Industrious and smart. Nose to the grindstone. Shoulder to the wheel. Klerke called his sons together and told them his decision. Patrick was furious. As far as he was concerned, he was the one with the brilliant ideas to move WWE forward and his brother was nothing but an office drone.’
Billy thinks of the mean little eyes in the photograph and imagines Klerke saying something delicate like You picked up most of your brilliant ideas from your libtard hip-hop wannabe friends while you were snorting dope. However he put it, he’d driven his older son into a rage. In most cases it would have been an impotent rage, but Roger Klerke had an Achilles heel, and Patrick either knew about it then or found out shortly thereafter.
‘I don’t know how he knew about it, Nick didn’t tell me. Maybe he didn’t know, either. Maybe Patrick got a clue from someone in his lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-foolish circle of friends. Maybe he overheard something. But he wasn’t entirely dumb, because he was able to follow the dots to a certain small house outside of Tijuana.’
‘A whorehouse.’
‘Not exactly. It was privately funded by Klerke himself, Nick said, for his exclusive use. He paid tribute money, a lot of it, each year to the Félix brothers, who basically run the Tijuana Cartel. There may have been certain other inducements, as well. Money laundering would be my guess. It doesn’t matter. Nick said Klerke never brought friends, because word gets around.’
‘Was Patrick doing business with the cartels?’ Alice asks. ‘Moving dope for them? There’s a word for it.’
‘Muling,’ Billy says. ‘He might have been.’
‘He could have heard about it from one of them. That might have been his loose end.’
Billy pats her shoulder. ‘That’s good. We’ll never know for sure, but it makes more sense than the hearing-it-from-a-friend idea.’
She smiles at the compliment, but only a little. She knows where this is going, Billy thinks. A girl a little less intelligent might not, a girl who hadn’t been recently raped might not, but this girl checks both boxes.