‘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.
‘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.’