* * *
Steve began talking it out to Lisa as they walked down toward the sea, led by Black. “We found Charlie lying in the water near a bunch of abandoned circus wagons at the far end of the canal. So the murderer doesn’t live there, Lisa. He wouldn’t kill a man in front of his own house.”
Lisa looked at all the black shacks and the fog rolling between them. “Here then, Steve?”
Steve exhaled slowly. “Maybe here. It would be someone who’s lived here all his life, knows the whole territory and the people. Maybe it was someone I played with when I was a kid, living down on Windward Avenue. That would be something. Yeah.”
They reached the ocean to watch the breakers crash and shake the sand underfoot. A foghorn blew melancholy notes way out toward Catalina Island.
“You think the murderer came this way, Steve?”
“No. Breakers are too damn big, and the Coast Guard is too damn vigilant these days. No.” He lit another cigarette. “The more I think about it, Lisa, the more I think the murderer doesn’t live here among his victims, or at the end of the canal where we found Charlie. No, a happy medium would be better. Somewhere between here and where we found Charlie. That might be it.”
The first iron wrench flew through the dark like a metal bird.
Black grunted and fell down and never got up again.
Lisa screamed and twisted about. Steve knocked her down himself. The second iron wrench smashed off his right side, on the lower rib casing, glancing it. By the impact of it, Steve wondered how much was left of Black’s skull if that first wrench hit him square.
Steve fell with it, letting it rock him back. He let go of his muscles and lay watching a shadow run off by itself. Steve’s first two shots from his gun richocheted off iron; the third went into air, the shadow with it, behind wooden girders, Steve up and after it, quick. He left Lisa behind, and in the middle of his running he heard her footsteps ticking after. He cut off down a gravel path to the north, instead of going straight ahead, in case the murderer was waiting with another wrench in the shadows.
He reached the canal, breathing hard. A moment later Lisa grabbed him and sobbed on his lapel. It seemed that Black was dead, too. It seemed that Steve had been the object of that thrown wrench, but Black had gotten in the way. Lisa sobbed about it.
He held onto her, keeping his eyes on everything at once. The oil towers looked like they wanted to fall down on you, leaning way over, dark and high, with fog playing their timbers like a harp.
“Oh, Steve, Steve—”
“Hold onto yourself, sweets. Our little playboy’s let himself in for too much playing. He should have been satisfied killing Gerbelow. But he stuck around to see what we thought, too. I guess he didn’t like the way I talked back there.”
They stood there together, like a couple kids, a c
ouple kids in Gigantica. A thousand towers marching through the fog over them, grunting and puffing and steaming. Steve breathed easier, but the pain on his right side was knotting up like a snail in a hot shell.
Lisa said, “This’s been an awful night, Steve. We’re not any better off than we were. Let’s get out of here, let’s go home.”
He felt tired, himself, sucked out, hot, cold, old, worn. But he swore under his breath and stepped away from her, scowling.
“Charlie’s funeral is tomorrow. I can’t go look him in the face without doing something about it, now.”
There was a long silence. Lisa’s voice was funny when she said, “What sort of person was Charlie when he was a kid?”
“Charlie?” He thought about it, uneasy and talking just to hear himself in the dark. “The old days? We ran around at the beach, played on the piers, fooled around the canal. Charlie’s mother used to whip him for playing near the canal. I remember, one time—” The canal…
Steve shut up and walked. Lisa followed without a word, looking aside at his suddenly hard white face. He practically ran down three hundred yards of canal looking for something. When he found it he stopped and stood over it.
A trail of water across cement, dripped and spread and soaking into it.
“There was water on top of Gerbelow’s shed, Lisa, by his body. There’s water, here, too, where Markham came out of the canal.”
“Are you sure, Steve?”
“Yeah. For the first time, I think I am.”
“But nobody ever saw anybody swimming in the canal, Steve.”
“There are ways and ways of doing things. I got a screwy, half-baked idea. All that crap about climbing towers like an ape-man was so much hash. Markham threw that in to confuse everybody. He didn’t want people thinking about the canal too much. He wanted them to suspect one another. But he was an outsider, and this is where he came in.”
Steve peeled off his coat in a cold dream. He unlaced his shoes, slowly, quietly, and then said, “You know what Markham looks like? Once you’ve found a main clue in a setup like this, the other pieces fall in place.” He shucked his socks. “Markham’s young. Maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. Not much older. Young and healthy. He’s got a chest development that would do for a horse.”