“No.”
“That’s funny. The top of the shed’s wet, and it’s not blood. The fog’s only been in a short while, no time for condensation there. Funny,” he said, turning away. He came down into the raw wind and shadows, looking at the canal. Nothing moved anywhere for a moment. Then there was a shadow. Steve saw it running, far off, maybe a hundred yards away.
Steve had his gun out before he’d run four steps, but by that time the shadow was gone, and when Steve reached the canal there was nothing, only the sound of Lisa running on high heels after him. He looked upward at the towers with their platforms and ladders and webs of metal. Good hiding place, those, scuttle up in the shadows and lie watching and waiting over people below. So many towers. Too many. So many platforms and ladders and places to hide. Steve sighed. “Let’s go back to Gerbelow’s. There’s been another accident. An old man tinkered with his machinery and got his head under the wrong dingus.”
It was just about then they heard the scream.
* * *
They ran back.
They found a little man thin as steel wire quivering on Gerbelow’s shack wall, pouring vomit over a fence in a kind of hot, acrid protest to the species of death that lay up there on the roof. In between awful sucks of breath the little man sobbed, “God Almighty, he’s dead! If he’d kept his mouth shut, he’d be alive. You see, see him up there, you!” And he made sick again. “I was just—coming by to pay a visit, and—and—”
The little man wiped his mouth with a hairy, fumbling wrist and got Steve and Lisa in a kind of frightened focus. “You. YOU killed him! You—Markham!”
Steve held his badge in his hand like a pebble. The little man eyed it, swore softly, shook like the skin of a horse’s flank. “Police. Detectives. Ah. They come a couple nights, get tired waiting, go away. Soons they go—huh—Markham slips out of hiding. He watches. He knows, by damn, by damn. Police always too early or too late. Damn.” He bent over, coughing.
Steve quietly asked the man where he lived. The man shook an unsteady hand at the next well. “My name’s Black. Oh, God, my stomach, my heart, my eyes. I don’t want no trouble, don’t make me none!”
“You knew what was happening to Gerbelow?”
Black knew, and kept his voice low about it. “He paid money to Markham so Markham would let him alone. Lots of people paid rather than have their machinery smashed. Machinery’s rare, hard to get, hard to repair; the war and all. Oh, God, look at his head up there!” He retched again.
Steve lit a cigarette and gave it to Black to calm him. Black sucked it hungrily, eyes glinting at Lisa, then Steve. He couldn’t keep quiet. “Now, look, I—I never seen this—blackmailer.”
“No?”
“No. Nobody ever saw him. He telephoned. I wasn’t bothered, myself. He didn’t ask much money from the others. Just a little. Everybody paid, it was such a small amount of their total profit, and kept their machines whole.”
Black went on and on. He told about an oiler named Big Irish Kelly who burned up, screaming, in his shack one night three months before. Markham had set the fire, not intending to murder. But Kelly was caught inside, anyhow, and that was the first blood on Markham’s hands. An accident, but good as murder.
Steve interrupted the nervous flow of Black’s tongue with: “Time’s moving. Look, now, Black, show us around the fields. We’re new here.”
Black put his small back to the fence and trembled. “Not on your life. Look what it got Gerbelow! This Markham comes night after night. No noise. No sound. Only the fog.” He whispered it. “Coming like the fog he would, soft, and going like a wave pulling back into the sea, leaving nothing. People set traps. Did they work? Hell, no. Markham knows everybody’s mind. We found ropes on the towers. Figured maybe he swings like an ape around up in the girders in the wind. Surrounded a tower once, but everybody was scared to climb up, scared of being booted off and down. The police came, but they didn’t find anything but some sacks shaped like a body, stuffed and propped up in the girders. Markham was gone, like one of them Hindu rope climbers into air.”
“Did he ever bring a car with him?”
No car. Lisa suggested a canal boat.
Black was getting calmer now, and snorted smoke. “Hell, no. He never ran away from us, not far anyway before’d vanish. He didn’t drive; no car in miles, and no boats. And if he’d swum we’d seen him, sure!”
Steve threw away his cigarette and casually asked,
“By the way, how is your oil well pumping these days, Black?”
That rocked him. Black closed his eyes, waited, opened them again, sullen and dark and replied, “If you want to know—my well’s bone dry…”
Steve watched Lisa thoughtfully. In the dim light she looked beautiful; she smelled new, freshly young against the old smell of the sea, the primordial odor of oil.
Black’s voice was sullen, like his eyes. Steve watched him, now, and said, “Your well’s dry. So you’re jealous of your neighbors and their riches. You live close by. You know the lay of the land. You could be the blackmailer, and come and go like the fog, eh? Couldn’t you?”
“Gerbelow and the other people could tell you the blackmailer’s voice is young. That don’t fit me!”
It didn’t. And anyway, Steve figured, it would be pretty dumb to kill someone right next door. And the fact that Charlie’d searched miles down the canal pretty well eliminated Black, anyway.
Steve put away his gun. “You’ll have to escort us, whether you like the idea or not, Black. I can’t have you running around behind me. There’s a lot I want to see and hear. You lead the way.”
Black led, grumbling. They walked toward the sea. On the way, Steve considered a few things. Gerbelow and Charlie’d both been killed when they were warm on the trail. Markham seemed like the patient kind of guy who’d wait a few months for it to blow over, and come back later. Meanwhile, though, he’d keep his eye peeled on Lisa and Black and himself. Might even be around right now, listening, hiding. If we get too warm, he’ll try and conk us, too. One killing leads to another. You go on, day after day, trying to cover up…