“If I don’t follow this through, I add credence to what practically everyone thinks. You don’t know what it’s like in television. It’s a male domain. All the decision-makers are male. And every goddamn one of them assumes I’m good for interviewing baby whales. Every goddamn one of them that I’ve ever met assumes, when the going gets rough, I’ll tuck my skirts up and run.”
“And you’re going to prove them wrong.”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
We left the Harbor Freeway and headed north on the San Diego Freeway. It was nearly seven when we got to Candy’s place. She parked and set the brake and looked at me.
“You’ll stick, won’t you?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Even though I’m not paying you?”
“Yes.”
“I could pay you a little bit each month for a year or so, maybe.”
“I could give you one of those little payment books like the banks do,” I said. “No money down, thirty-six easy payments. Budget Rent-a-Sleuth.”
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t need the money,” I said. “The station paid me fine.”
We were still sitting in the car in front of her house. She was looking at me. “And you’ll stay until it’s finished?” she said.
“Yes.”
“For no pay.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m not sleeping with you?”
“Despite that,” I said.
“Why?”
“I like you. You need help. It’s help I can supply.”
She looked at her watch. “My God,” she said. “It’s seven o’clock. Peter will be here in fifteen minutes.” She was out of the car and heading for the house in that peculiar female run that high heels produce.
I went and sat in my rented Fairlane down the street on the other side and waited. I was thinking wistfully of the burrito I’d had for lunch, when Brewster arrived. He wasn’t in the Caddy. He was driving himself in a dark green Mercedes 450 SL.
No one was with him. Why not? Why had he changed his pattern? Was he going to do something that he did not want witnessed? I was not pleased. Brewster didn’t seem to mind. He went up to the door at a brisk pace as if he didn’t care whether I was ever pleased by anything. In five minutes he came out with Candy on his arm. They got in the Mercedes and drove off.
Chapter 25
OFF SEPULVEDA BOULEVARD, out toward the airport, visible from the street, there are some vestigial oil rigs-still pumping-reminders that all the money in L.A. didn’t come from movies.
I tailed Brewster and Candy out there and onto a side road. The side road forked one hundred yards in from Sepulveda. Brewster took the left fork. Far down the road I saw his taillights stop and then darken. I took the right fork, went around a bend, parked, and headed back on foot.
The oil pumps were all around now in the dim evening, making very little sound, unattended, rocking without apparent cause, slightly saurian. I went in among them, cutting across the small field toward the other fork where Brewster had parked. I could feel the tension skitter along my backbone and bunch in the muscles around my shoulders. This was no place to bring a date. Brewster was too old to go parking. I hadn’t seen a picnic basket.
I moved carefully in the dark, trying to make no sound. I was in business clothes-a dark blue sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off, blue jeans, and dark blue jogging shoes. No bright colors. I’d left my Wind.. breaker in the car. I didn’t care if people saw my gun. In fact I rather hoped they would, and be impressed.
The sounds of planes coming and going from LAX made a near, steady noise above us. So steady, it faded into background, and you only noticed it when it paused. I saw Brewster’s car. The lights were out. The doors were closed. I moved up very carefully behind it and looked in the window. It was empty. I stood stock-still and listened. The sound of airplanes. The sound of the wells pumping. The sound, faintly, of traffic on the San Diego Freeway beyond Sepulveda. No other sound.
I crouched behind the car and tried to see in among the pumps. The stars were out, but there was no moon, and there wasn’t much light. There were no streetlights on this road, and no houses anywhere in sight. The steadily moving apparatus of the wells was alien and hostile in the darkness.
I moved in among the oil rigs, placing each foot very carefully as I went. I listened after every step, but all I heard was an increasing wind. It made odd noises among the. oil pumps as it came, hot and steady and affectionless, a bit eerie as it moved through the anachronistic machinery. The ground in the oil field was soft dirt, and as the wind stiffened, it picked up dust and moved it around. I began to move faster and less carefully. I was getting scared. Candy had been in there alone with Brewster too long. The wind was coming harder now, as if reinforcements had caught up with the advance breeze. It rattled loose cabling on the oil rigs. I began to run, dodging equipment as I did, trying to cut diagonally across the oil field so that I’d cover as much in one sweep as I could. Except I didn’t know the size or shape of the field and therefore didn’t know what a diagonal was. I was squinting against the blowing dirt. I had my gun in my hand. And I was trying to fight down the sense of urgency that was pushing up my throat. Clouds that must have ridden in with the wind began to gather over the stars, and the oil yard became even darker. I had to slow down. I could barely see the length of my footfall in front of me and I wouldn’t help Candy much if I ran head-on into one of the pumps. In places the footing was mucky and slippery, and there was a fetid smell that the wind was not able to drive away.
As I moved in the darkness I noticed that there was scrub growth in parts of the oil field. When I was very close, I could see them and see how the wind made their shapes contort as their branches moved restively, like animals too long restrained. Then I heard the shots. The sound sat on top of the wind the way a bird sits on a power line. I whirled, looking for muzzle flash, and spotted some over to my left as more shots rode in on the wind. I ran toward them, my gun out. Two more shots. I banged into the superstructure of one of the pumps and spun around and staggered and kept my feet and kept going toward the spot where the memory of muzzle flash still vibrated in my mind. There was a brief flare of what must have been headlights swinging away, and then only the wind sound and the darkness. The wind had cooled, and there was thunder rolling to the west, and a new smell of rain in the air. I stopped for a moment and listened, staring toward the place where I’d seen the muzzle flashes and the headlights. Then lightning made a jagged flash, and I saw a car parked ahead of me. I moved toward it. I reached the car before the thunder caught up to the lightning.
The car was a five-year-old Plymouth Duster. It was empty. I listened and heard nothing but the wind. The lightning flashed again. In front of the car was a wide cleared space, maybe for parking. I saw no people. The rain smell was stronger now, and the thunder came closer upon the lightning. The storm was moving fast. I opened the car door and reached in and, crouched behind the open door, I turned on the headlights.
Nothing happened. Nothing moved. I went flat on the ground, it was gravel, and looked underneath the car. Nothing. I got up carefully and moved out from the car in a crouch. The headlights made a wide theatrical swash of visibility in the darkness. Twenty feet in front of the car was Franco Montenegro’s body and next to him was Candy’s.
I went down on my knees beside her, but she was dead, and I knew it even before I felt for a pulse and couldn’t. find it. She had taken a couple of bullets in the body. There was blood all over her front. Beside her on the ground her purse was open. The .32 was out. Unfired. She’d tried. Like I’d told her to. There was a small neat hole in her forehead from which a small trickle of dark blood traced across her forehead. I glanced at Franco. He had a similar hole. The last two shots I’d heard. The coup de grace, one for each. I sat hack on my heels and stared at Candy. Despite the blood and the bullet hole she looked like she had. For something as large as it is, death doesn’t look like much at first.