The Witchfinder Read online

  The man behind the wheel didn’t fall out right away. He hovered, his head tipped back against the rest, then slid sideways. He turned at the waist in a slow ballet. His shoulder touched the concrete floor first and then his head fell to the side and back, spotting the grainy surface from the hole in his left temple. His feet never left the floorboards.

  Fourteen

  I LOOKED DOWN at him for a while without moving; trying to siphon off some of the wisdom from those half-open eyes. Now I noticed the one smell that didn’t belong in a garage, a mixture of sulphur and saltpeter that stung my nostrils like nettles. It would have hung on longer than usual in the motionless air, but in another few minutes it would be gone entirely.

  The expression on Arsenault’s face was serene. It belonged in a Renaissance painting. It was the same one he had turned to the camera eight years ago; fleshier now and pinched at the corners of the mouth, but still youthful. Nothing removes stress from one’s life like leaving it.

  I sat on my heels and touched his skin. It felt warm, but the close air would have preserved his body temperature longer. I wiped off my DNA, then used the handkerchief to mop my palms. Despite that they were as cold as the concrete.

  I stood and looked around. From where the shooter had stood I could see the attendant asleep in his booth. Nothing in that. His back was turned, and a small-caliber report in those surroundings would have sounded like someone dropping a pen on the floor. It wouldn’t have awakened a man with a hearing disability. It wouldn’t even have carried ten yards beyond the entrance, where I had sat in my car listening to the weather report on the radio. The telephone men wouldn’t have paid it any attention. Or it might have happened before we got there.

  I had a thought.

  I was either getting old or the muggy conditions were rusting my reflexes.

  Just to prove that wasn’t it, I sprang the Detective Special from its clip in a fast-draw. There was no one in view to impress, but the porous rubber grip absorbed perspiration from my hand and the weight of the frame steadied my arm.

  There were a dozen more vehicles parked on that level. I inspected them all, jerking open doors that weren’t locked and thrusting the gun inside. Nobody was hiding in any of them. I crept up to the fire door by the elevator on the balls of my feet, swung it open by the handle and pivoted, drawing down on a flight of empty steel steps. The heavy door made a lonely sound drifting shut.

  Putting away the revolver I went back to the body and frisked it. His suit, gray gabardine with an eggshell silk lining, was made in London. He had an antique Curvex wristwatch worth a couple of thousand on a gold link band and a calfskin wallet full of gold and platinum cards with no compartment for cash. Rich people are always broke. He had an ivory comb, a roll of breath mints, and an unopened package of condoms with a conquistador on the box.

  I found one more thing in his breast pocket, an envelope containing a zany-looking paste-up note, a convincing composite photograph, and a clipping from the Yellow Pages. That fixed time of death: somewhere between the morning forecast on WJR and a Ford commercial, with a trained detective sitting fifty feet away. I put the last discovery in my own pocket.

  Lynn Arsenault. A sexually responsible young man, with nice hair and sweet-smelling breath. He’d spoken twenty words to me over the telephone.

  The geezer in the booth was still sawing logs by the board foot. I could have driven a herd of longhorns past him and never been part of his life. I almost did—go past him, that is, without the beef—but then I remembered the Ameritech workers. They were gone now, but they’d logged in, and they were drilled by the company’s PR consultants to keep their eyes and ears open for suspicious activity. If you consider a stranger sitting alone in a car without air conditioning on the hottest day of the year suspicious.

  I sighed and rejoined the system.

  I separated my ID folder from the honorary Wayne County sheriff’s star I used to serve papers and tapped the metal against the glass of the booth.

  The snoring changed pitch. The attendant stirred and transferred the weight of his head from his right hand to his left. Then he fell into the old cadence.

  I tapped again. He swiped at his face as if a fly were tickling the hairs curling out of his eyebrows. His eyes stayed closed.

  I went on tapping until they opened. I watched the pupils contract. His bottom lids were red-rimmed and loose and I could see a sty on one of them the size of a BB.

  “What the hell.” His voice grated like a rusty flywheel. I could tell right through the glass he needed one of Arsenault’s breath mints.

  “Rise and shine. It’s not Woody Woodpecker.” I showed him the buzzer.

  His lips moved over the embossed lettering on the enamel. The corners of his mouth were stained white with Maalox.

  I put away the badge. “I’m looking for a car involved in a hit-and-run last Saturday on Seven Mile. Green Porsche, vanity plate Peter Robert Edward David Numeral Eight Oscar Robert. The computer in Lansing kicked out a registration in the name of Lynn Arsenault who works at this address. You got a car here answers that description?”

  He worked his lips again, reading the letters I’d given him. Recognition broke the surface like a whale breaching. Then he shoved it back under.

  “I don’t see no warrant. What kind of a hit-and-run?”

  I broke eye contact. Two small color portrait shots of dark-haired boys in Sunday shirts were taped to the glass on the other side of the booth. They were about eight and ten and looked like brothers, if they weren’t pictures of the same boy taken two years apart.

  “Nine-year-old boy got run over on his bike,” I said. “He’s critical.”

  “Oh, shit.” He reached for a gold chain inside the collar of his uniform shirt. I like Roman Catholics. Confession comes second-nature to them.

  “That’s pretty much what his parents said. He’s an altar boy at St. Boniface.”

  “Predator. Pred-eight-or, get it? It’s in back by the elevator.”

  “Show me.”

  “I ain’t supposed to leave the booth.”

  “Are you supposed to snooze in it?”

  “I was resting my eyes.”

  “On what? Let’s go.”

  He touched the chain again, adjusted his bifocals, and reached for the doorknob.

  “Nice-looking grandkids,” I said when he came out.

  “They’re my sons. The oldest starts sixth grade in September.”

  “What grade is your wife in?”

  “That ain’t nice.” When he stuck out his lower lip he showed a bottom row of nicotine-stained teeth.

  “Sorry. I take it back. I take back what I said about your snoozing too. You need all the sleep you can get.”

  “Her too.” He locked up, chuckling, and led the way. He had slits cut in his black Oxfords through which white socks bulged like escaping dough. His wide belt divided his spare tire into duals.

  “Get much traffic through here?” I asked.

  “Same old. It’s restricted to employees. I don’t think Mr. Arsenault’s your man. He runs the show here, and he’s—” He stopped walking. “Mother of God.”

  I hadn’t disturbed Arsenault’s position. Corpses are like road maps: You just can’t get them back the way they were. The hole in his temple showed and blood had leaked into a round garnet-colored pool on the floor around his head.

  “Stay here.”

  I went over and bent down and made a business of looking for the carotid. His skin seemed to have cooled, but that was just projection; it had only been a few minutes. I straightened.

  “Dead. Who’s been in here since you came on?”

  “Just the regulars.”

  “Any of them come back out?”

  He shook his head. His face was gray. “They never do before lunch.”

  “They wouldn’t get past an alert party like you.”

  “I got to work the gate,” he said. “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “You wouldn’t need to work t
he gate if they came out on foot.”

  He said nothing. There wasn’t anything in it anyway, unless I’d been asleep too. It was just a question someone with the sheriff’s department would ask.

  “Got a telephone in that booth?”

  “I ain’t supposed to call out on it.”

  “You won’t have to. Give me the key. Stay here and don’t let anyone near the body.”

  The inside of a cheek got chewed. Then he unclipped the retractable steel case from his belt. “The brass one.”

  I closed the door and dialed Stuart Lund’s suite at the Marriott. After two rings a male switchboard operator came on and told me Mr. Lund had asked not to be disturbed. He asked if he could take a message.

  I hung up and dialed 911. The old attendant rapped on the glass.

  “Get back to Arsenault,” I said through the speaking grid.

  “I can hear the elevator and the door to the stairs from here, and there’s the entrance. If anybody’s going to mess with the body any other way, I ain’t equipped to stop ’em. Who you calling?”

  “The cops.”

  “You’re the cops.”

  “I mean the locals.”

  A human voice answered on the eighth ring, some kind of record for the emergency line. I told it what it needed to know and broke the connection. When I came out of the booth the old man’s face was a stack of scowls. “I guess I’ll have another look at that badge.”

  I gave him back his keys. “It’s a loaner. I’m private.”

  “What about that hit-and-run? That a loaner too?”

  “What say we just tell them what we found and let John Law ask the questions?”

  “I ain’t holding nothing back.”

  “I didn’t figure you would.”

  “They might want to know how is it you didn’t ask me if that was Mr. Arsenault laying there if you never saw him before.”

  “Now, why would they ask that?”

  “They ain’t. I am.”

  “Well, is it?”

  “Too late, Mac.” He went inside and banged the door shut. The clear glass separating us might have been lath and plaster for all the attention he paid me after that. He had a lot more bark on him than he looked.

  I ignored him back. While I was doing that, he must have broken the rule about not making any calls out, because in ten minutes we were up to our hips in office brass.

  There were just two of them, but they made as much noise as a crowd. One was a director of design who looked like an accountant, bald to the ears with a pair of eyeglasses on a chain around his neck and the full spectrum of colored pens in a pocket protector. His companion was a chief accountant who looked like another accountant. They disagreed about which of them had spoken to Arsenault last, they were at odds over whose responsibility it was to speak to the cops, they were not in concurrence that a full-time office security force would have prevented this tragedy from taking place at all. That last appeared to be an old argument.

  They both thought the parking attendant, whose name was Gregory, had been hasty about notifying the authorities. Gregory stayed in his booth and didn’t say anything until the chief accountant lifted his glasses to peer at me and asked him if I’d been searched for the murder weapon.

  “You do it,” Gregory said. “I ain’t your private police force.”

  The design director turned his back on all of us. I had the impression he was mad at the chief accountant for getting to be the one who said “murder weapon.” Neither of them had paused by the elevator long enough to give the corpse any more than a passing glance.

  I winked at Gregory. His face was space for rent.

  Fifteen

  THE BLONDE WHO had been talking with the telephone men earlier came clacking out on her high heels, and when she spoke to the two men from the office the question of who called the shots in the boss’s absence was answered. The pair withdrew. Tapping her foot waiting for the cops she ignored Gregory, the corpse, and me until I lit a Winston.

  “There’s no smoking,” she said.

  I asked if anybody had broken it to the cars.

  “The building, the basement, the grounds. It’s all a smoke-free environment.”

  That ended my interest in her.

  In the beginning were the uniforms: a sergeant with gray sideburns and sad friendly eyes and a female officer with nothing in her expression but the manual of arms. They went down and looked at the body, but they didn’t touch anything. It’s really amazing what fear of infection has done to the curiosity of the cop on the beat where two hundred years of department regs failed. They took notes, inspected everybody’s ID, asked a few questions, and wrote down the answers in professional shorthand. They spoke politely and if they had opinions they’d left them in their lockers. They could have given a lecture to their brothers and sisters in the big city upriver about where the job started and stopped.

  In a little while a gray LeBaron pulled up to the gate and tipped out the plainclothes team. Cops always come in pairs. St. Thomas was black, medium built, and wore glasses in glittering silver frames and a charcoal three-piece suit too heavy for the weather, although he never broke a sweat all the time he was there. His companion, a chalk-faced third-grader named Redburn, had a round fat chin like a baby’s and that hungry-eyed look that came from rubbing holes in his gold shield with a cloth soaked in Brasso. He sweated enough for both of them.

  Redburn went straight to the body. St. Thomas set up shop near the booth, conferring in turn with the uniforms, the blonde office manager, and then Gregory, the parking attendant. He stood close to each, spoke only in murmurs, and never called over the next candidate before dismissing the last. Then he walked down to the Porsche and stood over its driver, writing in a leather-bound notebook with a Cross pen. I think he used the Palmer Method.

  When the police photographer showed up, St. Thomas spent five minutes telling him what he wanted. After the photo session he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and went over the body. His partner recorded the inventory in a dimestore spiral. St. Thomas bagged the items he found in Arsenault’s pockets, gave them to Redburn, and crooked a finger at me. I went over.

  “Walker, right? What’s this about a hit-and-run?”

  “Cover story, Lieutenant.”

  “Sergeant.”

  “You dress higher. The real story wouldn’t have gotten me past the booth.”

  “Try me.”

  I left out most of it, and what I gave him wasn’t true. It sounded even cheesier than it had in my head. The nut-brown eyes behind the silver frames returned nothing on my investment. When I finished he made no comment, but turned to his partner.

  “So our man walked up to the car—there’s powder residue on the broken glass, and anyway a twenty-two wouldn’t have penetrated beyond a dozen feet—drilled him through the window, and walked away,” St. Thomas said. “Who opened the door?”

  Redburn pouted at his notes. “The victim, probably. Reflex. Convulsions.”

  “Maybe. I’ve had my car two years and I have trouble enough finding the handle in a hurry without a bullet in my head.”

  “You don’t have a Porsche, Sarge.”

  “Life’s a bitch. What made you so interested in Arsenault’s car?”

  I played with a cigarette. I had a handle on him now. He was one of those come-back-at-you cops.

  “I got a glimpse of the car the first time I was here. I wanted a look at the registration. He went from a junior partnership to company prexy in Horatio Alger time, dropped a load at an art gallery in the city on paintings for his office last year. Then there was the car. Either he was the hottest thing in architecture since mortar or he had something on old man Whiting.”

  “The office manager says Whiting’s been dead a couple of years. Did you expect the car to be in his name?”

  “I just wondered if they were company wheels or if he bought them out of his salary. And if his salary totaled as much as he spent.”

  “Whose does? Thorough,
aren’t you?”

  “I don’t have a hobby.”

  “It’s a nice car if you like foreign. It couldn’t shine the hubcaps on a thirty-nine Cord.”

  “You a buff?” I lit the cigarette.

  “I tinker. That your bomb in the visitors’ lot?”

  I said it was.

  “Cutlass is okay. Those old muscle jobs are mostly overrated. The Stanley topped two hundred miles per hour in eighteen ninety-eight.” He pointed his pen at the corpse. “Who do you like for that?”

  “Whoever it is, he’s still in the building. Or was when I came in here.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I sat in my car for thirty minutes before I decided to take a look. I had the front of the garage in sight the whole time. I’d driven around the building and there was no other way in or out except by the elevator or the fire stairs.”

  “Why the stakeout?”

  “I was early.”

  St. Thomas caught the eye of the office manager, who was spelling her name for one of the uniforms. She clip-clopped over.

  “Everybody in today?” he asked.

  “One out sick, two on vacation. The rest all reported in. If you like I’ll have a list made.” She gave him one of the smiles she’d given the telephone workers.

  “That’ll help, thanks. Any visitors?”

  “Yes. Yes! A messenger to see Mr. Arsenault. I didn’t talk to him, but Greta said there was something odd about him.”

  “Greta?”

  “Mr. Arsenault’s executive assistant. Secretary, if you want to be old-fashioned.”

  “What did she find odd about this messenger?”

  “It was something about his hand. He wore some kind of contraption on it, she said. A prosthetic device.”

  “We’ll talk to her. Anyone else?”

  “No.”

  St. Thomas glanced at his watch, a plain one with a leather strap. “Slow day.”

  “Well, he had one other visitor, but he’s a regular. Mr. Grayling.”

  “Royce Grayling?”

  She looked at me. She hadn’t forgotten the smoking incident.