The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran

Author:Sara Gran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER 13

THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS

* * *

Los Angeles, 1999

The Richter file on Merritt’s case was a living paradox, full and empty at the same time. Here was Merritt Underwood re-created as a series of numbers—what he paid for his house in Topanga, his bank balances, his test scores from art school, the amount of cholesterol per liter of Merritt’s blood. There were about three hundred pages to sift through, many of them redundant and most of them useless.

I looked at his grades from art school. An incomplete for photography. An A on his senior thesis. When Merritt died his blood alcohol level was .5. His iron levels were low. His testosterone was high.

It was 128 pages into the file before I found something interesting—a report from the mechanic who examined the car Merritt was driving when he died. The Richter report on the accident was technical and dull and useless. All I took from it was the name of the mechanic—Marcus Mikkelson—and where to find him.

I tracked Marcus down in his garage in Atwater Village. The Water it was At was the Los Angeles River, a trickle through a paved riverbed across the street from the garage. He was a plump, seemingly happy man about forty with nightmarishly bad teeth who remembered every gear and belt and screw of every car he’d worked on.

“Oh yeah,” Marcus said when I asked him about Merritt. “I remember it very well. I don’t need to look at the file. Tires were ripped to shreds. Both the right tires. Horrible, just horrible. Guy’s driving down the canyon, it’s midnight, from what I gather he’d been drinking, shouldn’t’ve been behind the wheel to begin with, and then both right tires go out. Bam. Bang. Heads right off the cliff, down the canyon, crashes at the bottom. Terrible. Just terrible.”

“You think someone could have rigged the car?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” Marcus Mikkelson said. He looked at his hands, which were black with oil and soot. “Cops searched the area, found nothing, no glass, no spike strips, nothing like that—”

I started to interrupt him, but he stopped me.

“But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible,” he said. “Here’s what I think: I think something—coyote, deer, gravity—shook some rocks down from the mountain. Like”—he held up his hand in a circle, to indicate rocks around Ping-Pong ball size—“but not circular. Shale-type rock; I’m no geologist, but you know what I mean: pieces of rock with sharp edges. Little knives. So I think, small rocks on the road, too dark to see them, too drunk to see them, no room to avoid them anyways, drives over them, in course of doing so kicks them back down the mountain, so to speak, blows out his tires, loses control of the car, and bang. Horrible. Terrible. Goodbye.”

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