Billy Summers

‘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.

‘Klerke has a taste for young girls.’

‘How young?’ she asks.

‘Nick said thirteen or fourteen.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It gets worse. Do you want to hear?’

‘No, but tell me anyway.’

‘There was at least one occasion – he told Nick it was only one, for what that’s worth – when there was a girl who was a lot younger.’

‘Twelve?’ Her face says that no matter how much of a shit that jowly old lizard may be, she wants to believe that’s the limit of his depravity.

‘According to Klerke she was no more than ten, and Patrick had the pictures to prove it. What Roger Klerke told Nick at their meeting on that island was that he was “pretty drunk and just wanted to see what it was like.”’

‘Dear God.’

‘The rest of it is as simple as dominos falling over. Patrick had the pictures on a thumb drive. Swore they existed nowhere else, that the man who took them was dead and buried in the desert. He told his father that he wanted to be CEO. He also wanted a transfer of most of his father’s voting stock, which would render meaningless any objections the board might have to the new direction he wanted to take WWE in. He wanted his brother – “my asshole brother” is what he called him, according to Nick – transferred to the Chicago offices, which I guess in the media business is like Siberia. He wanted those changes effective as of January 1, 2019, and he wanted it all in writing. Then and only then would he turn over the flash drive with the pictures.’

‘How could Klerke be sure there weren’t more pictures?’

Billy shrugged. ‘Maybe there were. In any case, what choice did he have? And Patrick must have been at least bright enough to know that if the pictures came out, the company stock would tank no matter who was CEO.’

Alice thinks that over and says, ‘Like mutually assured destruction. In a way.’

‘I guess. What I know from Nick is that Klerke agreed, and once his lawyer had a letter announcing his intentions to basically retire and turn the company over to his older son, and once that letter was published in the board minutes, Patrick gave the thumb drive to his father. Who destroyed it. Patrick never foresaw his father going to Nick Majarian and hiring a man to kill him. His imagination just didn’t stretch that far.’

‘It isn’t the grasshopper and the ant. More like a Shakespeare play. One of the bloody ones.’

‘With Patrick dead, when Klerke steps down – given his health it won’t be long – Devin will take over.’

He pulls into a service area, because the Mitsubishi needs gas and because his throat is dry and he wants a cold drink. Alice checks out the Quik-Pik shelves and uses the restroom while he pays. When she gets back into the car she’s crying.

‘I’m sorry.’ Her purchases are in a little white bag. She takes out a pack of Kleenex, wipes her nose, and tries on a smile. ‘But while I was in the bathroom I made us a reservation at the Ramada Inn in Wendover. It’s supposed to be nice.’

‘Good. And you don’t have to be sorry.’

‘I keep thinking about that horrible man with a child. He deserves to die.’

Billy thinks, that’s the plan.

4

By the time he finishes – again weaving what he knows from Nick into what he deduced on his drive back from Promontory Point – some of the cars on the highway are showing headlights.

‘Klerke told Nick he wanted the best man for the job, a guy who’d do it and get away clean and not talk about it afterward. Nick said he knew a guy—’

‘You?’

‘He said he thought of me first, but never even went to Bucky with it. He said he was pretty sure I wouldn’t do it because Patrick Klerke was maybe not bad enough to fit my scruples. He put it to Allen as an ordinary cleaning job.’

‘That’s what he called it? Cleaning?’

‘Yes. The figure they settled on was eighty thousand dollars, twenty before and the rest after. Basically the same method of payment I was promised, but on a smaller scale.’

Alice is nodding. ‘He didn’t want Allen to know what a big deal this was. How much was involved.’