The Witchfinder Read online

  “That’s cool. Dude was asking to get whacked.”

  “You had trouble?”

  “His door accidentally fell open while his secretary was telling me he was in conference. The mouth on him.” He broke off for a moment. He was listening to the tape. Then: “You know what? He was in there all by himself There wasn’t nobody to confer with.”

  “Corporate’s a bitch. Is that you I’m hearing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “Swell as Mel’s wells. Hocked my axe last week. Long as it was around I could hear the ghost of my fingers playing it all night. I’d rather listen to the real thing.”

  “It doesn’t come from the fingers, you know.”

  “I know.”

  I told him again to call me if anything broke. I hung up, but I kept my hand on the receiver, jingling the change in my pocket.

  Then I fed in some more coins and started another layer of callus on my index finger.

  “Hi, this is Nate Millender. If it’s paying work, leave a message. If it’s going to cost me, keep trying, you never can tell. Well, you know this shit.”

  I took my own advice and didn’t leave a message.

  I looked at my watch again. It was still just past noon. Some days are like that. Millender couldn’t still be out on his boat, because his sailing companion, Royce Grayling, had been in Allen Park bright and early. On assignment, probably. Blissful in his ignorance that he was the only remaining mile of road between me and the witchfinder.

  I looked at my watch. Just past noon.

  Outside the sky was a clear blue bowl. No shadows to hide in.

  At least this time I wouldn’t have to go home and change into my burglar clothes.

  Seventeen

  HOME TO NATE MILLENDER was an apartment on Cadillac Boulevard, not as ritzy as it sounds, but about as far up the scale as you can climb inside the Detroit city limits before you have enough together to get out. It was also his business address.

  The building was sandstone, eight stories high with arched windows marching along the top floor like stylized camels and wrought-iron railings erected in front of the basement windows to dishearten the less ambitious burglars. The block to the north was all Queen Anne houses with fresh paint jobs and clipped lawns, narrow gables thrust skyward like aristocratic noses. The block to the south had empty spaces in its rows of brick boxes; crack houses gone the way of Joe Firebug and the wrecking ball. Millender’s block was poised between the two neighborhoods like a runner caught off base, trying to decide which direction to run.

  Fans whirred in two of the open windows. Air conditioners thrust their boxlike backsides out some of the others. Still others were shut tight, the rooms they belonged to awaiting their next occupants. Vacant apartments are another bellwether of a city in trouble, like empty bleachers at the ballpark. But they weren’t boarded up. There was hope.

  The foyer smelled of potpourri and clean rubber. A steel-framed glass door with a grid between the thick panes wouldn’t budge when I tugged on the handle. I pressed the yellow Bakelite button next to the mailbox with N. MILLENDER lettered on it in soft pencil. The door remained locked. I selected a friendly sounding name higher up. The lock clonked.

  The fourth floor was Millender’s, paneled in yellow imitation maple with a flocked red carpet in the hallway. I knocked on Millender’s door, waited, knocked again. Same no answer.

  I took inventory. The celluloid strip in my wallet was out of its class; the molding curled over the edge of the door. I dove for the precision tools.

  Nutpicks are best, the kind with curved points like lazy hooks. On jobs like that I carry them in a small paper bag in my jacket pocket along with a cracker and half a dozen walnuts, just in case I’m stopped and searched. I was going on three years on the same walnuts. They would taste like clothespins.

  The cheapest lock in creation requires two picks to open: one to hold back the spring-activated shield that protects the tumblers from tampering, the other to tamper. This one wasn’t the cheapest and a long way from burglar-proof, but it took me six minutes; my specialty’s motor tailing, not breaking and entering. I lost two of those minutes while a round-shouldered woman with a cap of white hair and her escort, a tall, narrow-chested old party wearing a bright cloth cap with a fuzzy ball on top, came hobbling down the hallway. They were leaning on each other and wheezing from the four-flight climb in weather that kills more elderly people than broken hips. I poked the paraphernalia up my sleeve, knocked, and pretended to be waiting for an answer while they made their way past. Finally the old man fished a key ring the size of a bowling ball out of the deep pocket of his slacks, sorted through the items dangling from it with the care of someone selecting his own coffin, and let them into an apartment two doors down. Sixty seconds later I had click.

  Millender loved sailing. He had a Maxfield Parrish print of a square-rigger leaning sheets to the wind on a choppy sea framed on the wall facing the door, a regatta trophy standing all alone on the mantel of a false fireplace, brass running lamps mounted on the walls. The living room, which took up most of the floor plan, was dusted and tidy, the furniture arranged at right angles; squared away. In the shallow kitchenette a teabag lay calcifying in an insulated mug with a ketch screen-printed on the side, the way even a fastidious bachelor on a tight schedule might leave it, but the sink and counter gleamed. He had a mariner’s love of spotlessness and order.

  There was time enough to toss those rooms later. Bedrooms are best for hidden booty.

  The bed was a double, made neatly. There was a driftwood lamp on the nightstand, a three-drawer bureau with toilet items laid out on it and a small case full of books on the order of Conrad and C. S. Forester. The only picture was a magazine print in a cheap frame of a pair of satyrs rolling their eyes at each other in a woodland setting.

  There was something familiar about the room, but I couldn’t stand a quarter on just what it was. It was as if I’d seen it in a dream I’d forgotten.

  Not knowing what I was looking for, I looked at everything, including the underside of the mattress and the backs and bottoms of all the drawers. I even pried the top off a plastic container of talcum and poked around inside with the handle of a rattail comb. Just for fun I tasted the powder on the end of a finger. I had him then, if they ever got around to passing a law against cornstarch.

  He liked Hawaiian shirts, duck pants, tennis socks, slingshot underwear, and nude studies. He kept the pictures in a thick envelope under the shirts. They were black-and-whites mostly, eight-by-ten experiments in light and texture with borders, smooth taut skin against rough barnwood and stucco. They ran to a single style, and from the rubbing of the varnished surfaces they seemed to have been taken for Millender’s personal use. And they were all male.

  I here was nothing rampant about them or even obscene according to the Supreme Court. They were just art studies of darkly handsome well-built young men in their prime without clothes. I didn’t know any of them from Praxiteles. I put them back.

  Millender had gutted a walk-in closet and wired and plumbed it for use as a darkroom. It was just big enough for a double sink and a stainless steel counter holding up some equipment that was new to me since I’d given up developing my own surveillance photos and started going to custom labs. Several negatives clothespinned to the wire hammocked over the sink contained nothing more titillating than a fleet of sailboats cruising fully erect on the flat surface of what might have been Lake St. Clair.

  The bathroom was a snooze. Not even any interesting prescription pills in the medicine cabinet. He used Grey Flannel soap.

  I went back into the bedroom. It still looked familiar, with something discordant to boot. I stood in the doorway with my hands in my pockets and frisked the place with my eyes. They stopped at the picture of the satyrs.

  It had been lithographed from a nineteenth-century original, engraved in that whimsical style the Victorians applied to mythological subjects lest they be accused of sympa
thy with the lascivious pagans. The nude photographs were kept out of sight; they were not ornaments. It was the only visible testimony to the appetites of the man who slept in that room. Moreover, it was the only decoration in the apartment without a nautical theme.

  I went over and took it down off its nail. There was no wall safe behind it, only a rectangular patch of unfaded paint whose size and shape matched the picture. The frame was plastic, the back plain cardboard held in place with bent staples. It was the work of a second to pull it apart. Between the magazine print and the cardboard was an envelope much smaller than the one in the bureau drawer and a savings passbook from the National Bank of Detroit. I slid out a small negative and three photographic prints just over wallet size. They were all the same. A younger, trimmer Lynn Arsenault than the one who was on his way to the Wayne County Morgue lay in bed with a Nate Millender who didn’t look a day younger than the one I had met at the Grosse Pointe Marina. Some guys just never age.

  Both men were naked. Neither of them looked alarmed by the presence of a camera.

  Looking at Arsenault I had that same sense of revisitation I’d felt when I first entered the room. I remembered the envelope in my pocket, the one containing the extortion note I’d had delivered to Arsenault at Imminent Visions and the counterfeit photograph I’d gotten from Jay Bell Furlong. I took out the picture and held it next to one of the prints from inside the frame. It was the same pose. The bed was the same and so was the room. It was the room I was standing in. The only thing different was Arsenault’s companion. Millender had been less muscular then, slender rather than lean, with almost no hair on his body. In that position he might have passed for a fairly flat-chested woman, except for his head.

  I turned to the passbook and started paging through it. Ichabod Nathan Millender—a better reason than most to go by his middle name—was a man of regular habits when it came to transactions. He never missed a month.

  It might have been the job and the extra set of senses that comes with it. It might have been a change in the nearly nonexistent current of air in that shut-up room. More likely I caught a flash of movement in the mirror over the bureau. Whatever it was, I was in motion, diving across the bed and twisting to get my hand on the revolver in its holster, when the room went supernova. Heat scorched my eye sockets, white flame leapt up the walls, melting gaping black holes in them, as if they were plastic. The ceiling bellied and came down on top of me. It was a lot heavier than plastic.

  They say you never hear the shot.

  As usual, they’re wrong.

  Eighteen

  I WAS EXPERIENCING a midlife crisis.

  Some of the old rules still apply. A man towing forty should be steering a desk in a cubicle downtown, or maybe a tractor or a bulldozer in the open air, worrying about his kid getting his driver’s license and whether his wife’s sudden interest in abdominal crunches is connected with the new young intern she can’t stop talking about and if he has enough insurance to get the house out of hock if he blows a major artery at lunch. He’s supposed to be developing hemorrhoids, a roll around his trunk, and an affinity for Ban-Lon and Sansabelt on weekends.

  He sure isn’t supposed to be sprawled on his stomach across the bed in a stranger’s apartment, staring glassily at a fat beige spider that had survived the most recent vacuuming and wondering if it would have time to spin a strand from its web to the end of his nose before the morgue wagon came.

  Dad was right. I should have taken a civil service test.

  The spider wasn’t much more than a blur. I was looking at it with my lazy left eye. The right was either an empty socket or caked with blood.

  There was quite a lot of blood. I couldn’t see it, but I had been careless enough times to know that smell, copper and iron with just a hint of Scotch whisky, just as a dog recognizes its own scent.

  I felt detached. It wasn’t my blood anymore.

  Lying there I was suddenly aware that the bed had changed. It had sprouted wheels and was rolling down a set of steel tracks, clickety-clack, picking up speed on the downgrade with Casey Jones at the controls. Casey was going too fast. I hung on tight as we swooped over the next hill. At the top the coupling came loose. The wheels left the tracks and I was headed into the empty blue bowl of the sky.

  I was rescued from falling by a sailboat. The bronze sloop from the trophy on Nate Millender’s mantel had sailed off its pedestal, swelling to full size as its canvas filled and tacking around to scoop me up without slowing. Over the Monopoly board of the western neighborhoods we swept, across the jagged business-chart skyline of downtown, splashing down in the Detroit River. Down the river to Lake Erie, through the inlet to Lake Ontario, and along the St. Lawrence Seaway to the North Atlantic, where we had to watch out for U-boats. I smelled the salt air, copper and iron with a hint of Scotch whisky.

  I never lost sight of the spider, though. As it shrank in the distance, losing size but gaining detail, it opened its mandibles and said:

  “Where’s that EMS unit? This guy’s going to bleed to death before they get here.”

  I was curious to know who was on the other end of this arachnoid conversation, since it didn’t seem to be directed at me; but I couldn’t stay to find out. The curvature of the earth came between us and then the sun set on the water, staining the surface blood red before extinguishing itself beneath the waves. And me with it.

  “Bulls got no bench. We’ll catch ’em next year.”

  “Who’s we? Isiah’s gone, we lost Rodman. We got former Pistons scattered all over the NBA. This free-agent shit is ruining the game.”

  “What if we had Jordan?”

  “Hell with Jordan. I don’t want no players that bad-mouth Detroit.”

  “That narrows the field.”

  “I’d sooner play the guy that waxes the court. I got community pride.”

  “Hey, this guy’s awake.”

  “I’ll get Mrs. Tarnower.”

  “Wait up.”

  I never got to see the participants in this pre-game show. I was looking at perforated ceiling tiles and wondering if they were made in Dublin. Tracing a Great Circle route from Newfoundland due east, I should have reached Ireland first. But unless the natives had abandoned Barry Fitzgerald’s brogue for the Detroit black dialect, something had gone wrong with my navigation.

  On a brighter note, I was seeing with both eyes now. I needed them to count eighty-six holes in the tile directly in my line of sight. I turned my head a micromillimeter to start on the tile next to it and somebody—a Belfast potato-harvester, possibly—hit me with a shovel. A bolt of black lightning arced between my temples and the ceiling vanished behind a purple cloud. I closed my eyes and counted my pulse instead. I got eighty-six to the minute, the same number as the holes in the ceiling tile.

  When I opened my eyes I was looking at a pair of glasses on a female face with a moustache and a mole on the side of its nose. If this was an angel I must have been in the part of heaven reserved for private investigators.

  The face in its time disappeared. In a little while I found I could move my head slowly without black lightning. A kid in jeans, Reeboks, and a T-shirt reading I BRAKE FOR NUKES was standing next to the bed monkeying with a clipboard. I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth and asked him if he was supposed to be in here. The voice I used had been rejected by Bela Lugosi.

  When he grinned, his freckles disappeared into crescents in his cheeks.

  “If I’m not, I wish you’d tell the nurse. I’ve got a softball game to pitch.”

  “You’re a little young for an orderly.”

  “I guess that’s why they made me a doctor.”

  “And I’m Long John Silver.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Silver. I’m Dr. Ebersole. Got a stethoscope and everything.” He picked up the end and waggled it.

  “That how they dress for the ER now?”

  He glanced down at his teenage chic. “The softball team’s looking for a sponsor. We can’t af
ford uniforms.”

  “I knew you weren’t a doctor.”

  “I didn’t say I was one of the rich ones. Hold still, please.” He produced a penlight, pried open my eyelids, and shone the beam into the pupils. It pierced through to the back of my skull like a red-hot needle. “This your first concussion?”

  “What, today?”

  He snapped off the light. “Are you an athlete?”

  “No, I just fall down a lot.” I moved my eyes around. The noise made my headache worse. “Detroit Receiving, right?”

  “How’d you guess? This town has more hospitals than churches and traffic lights.”

  “I recognized the pallet. Just where was I shot this time?”

  “ ‘This time’?”

  “I’d tell you, but I’m saving it for my unauthorized autobiography.”

  He hung the clipboard on the foot of the bed and hooked his thumbs in his tight pockets, frowning. That made him a doctor.

  “I took seventeen stitches in a laceration above your right ear. The skull wasn’t fractured, but you’re concussed and you lost blood. A lot of blood. I could get more technical, but I was out the day they taught Latin.”

  “Playing softball.”

  “I love softball. If I liked medicine half as much I’d be surgeon general by now.”

  “People would mistake you for a drum major. When do I get sprung?”

  “You’re lucky to be in a position to ask that question. One of the officers who found you started to call it in as a homicide. You had almost no pulse. There was blood clotted in your right orbit.”

  “Orbit?”

  “Eye socket. He thought it was the exit wound.”

  “I’m here for the night, huh.”

  “You don’t have the picture, Mr. Walker.” He leaned on the bedrail. “When you came in, you had no vital signs. That was twenty-nine hours ago and you’ve been unconscious ever since. I’d like to keep you two weeks, but we need the bed. There was a gang fight last night on Erskine. The young man on the other side of that curtain had his kidneys crushed by a baseball bat. Next week is graduation, and you know how effective those public-service ads are about not mixing alcohol and gasoline when you’ve got a brand new sheepskin and a license to drive. But I’m holding you as long as they’ll let me. Cerebral trauma isn’t the sniffles.”