“Come home to the L.A. office, Steve. You can come out again tomorrow.”
“Yeah. After the funeral,” Steve said, “I can come down and look at Charlie’s bloodstains on the sidewalk. If it rains I can watch the rain wash them away.” He stared at the concrete beneath his feet with its funny color. “I wish it could rain in my head and do the same.”
Lisa waited. “All right,” she sighed. “What do we do?”
His shoulders came up. He threw away a dead cigarette he’d forgotten to use.
“Walk. Come on, Lisa. We’re looking for a murderer who lives in a house on the canal.”
They walked south.
The territory was familiar. Steve explained. “The houses start here, thick, and peter out four miles down the coast. You find oil wells there, pumping, and the canal waters get dirty black with it. It—smells like old blood.”
The cold light made Steve’s face whiter, the skin of it boned tight on his cheeks, his eyes lonelier and colorless, and his hair blacker in contrast.
“While you were in El Monte yesterday, Lisa, someone phoned the office. An old man named Gerbelow who works an oil well on the Venice flatlands, said he was being blackmailed. Blackmailer’s alias is Markham. Funny things were happening.”
“What things?”
“Accidents at night, to oil equipment. Someone slipping around in the dark doing it. Charlie figured whoever was responsible lived nearby the canal system, I guess. So many nights, funny hours. I stuck in the office. Charlie interviewed Gerbelow, first, then strolled along the whole canal system, looking for some clue to the setup—”
Lisa’s hand tightened on his arm. “The papers said it was accidental. Charlie Brandon walked off the pavement in the dark, struck his head and drowned in six feet of water…”
Steve’s jaw muscles tightened. “I let the cops think it was accidental, too. Didn’t want them plowing around. This is my case, mine and Charlie’s.” He looked at all the mouse-colored houses, each a grey replica of its brother. One-story flats with mist to tuck them in at twilight, and a salt wind blowing fury at morning. “Charlie must’ve figured some theory, walking around. I wish I knew what it was.”
“Have you seen old man Gerbelow yet?”
“I phoned him and told him we’d be down. He said he’d only seen Markham once, a couple months ago when Markham first started his game. Gerbelow’s got bad eyes. The only thing he said was that Markham had a young voice; young and cocky.”
Steve walked faster.
“Is that where we’re going, Steve? To Gerbelow’s?”
“Yeah. It’s a four-mile walk. We can look for things on the way down.”
Lisa shivered and half turned as they walked. It was almost completely dark now.
“Funny how you thin
k someone’s following you—and it’s only the wind.”
* * *
Four miles down, the canal begins to veer toward the sea. The beat of the ocean comes in a kind of salt anger upon piers, rocks and sand flats. There, the oil wells knit land and sea together with pumping black fingers. You hear them groaning, creaking over their work. You can’t see what they’re doing in the dark, but you hear them complaining all the while.
A wind raked away the fog-clouds for a moment, like pale leaves on a big dark lawn, to let stars come through like funny far away flowers coming in bud. Steve whistled through his teeth.
Lisa went with him toward this one particular oil well that was set back from the canal about a hundred yards among a dozen others that climbed up and up and didn’t want to stop. An oil well looks like the kind of thing the Guy uses to take down stars every night and shine them with a rag; a regular ladder up.
There was a light shining in a small shack. The teeter-totter of the oil pump moved up and down, up and down with a sighing, creaking, blowing; like a nervous finger.
“Hey, Pop!”
No answer. Steve heard Lisa whimper and a moment later she held onto him and said, “There he is, Steve. Up there, with his head under the power-shaft.”
It was no place for a head. Steve gagged as he climbed the ladder up and stood atop the machinery shed where old man Gerbelow lay like a man sleeping, his head stuck under a shaft that went up and down, up and down. Steve’s eyes followed it, up, down, up, down, until they blurred it out, wet, sick. He couldn’t see. He could only kneel and a moment later say,
“Did it rain today, Lisa?”