The Witchfinder Read online

  He sat back suddenly, as if a string had snapped. “Well, I won’t have to look at it much longer.”

  But he wasn’t through. The glitter fixed itself on me. “I started here, did you know that? Took a degree in engineering from the Detroit Institute of Technology in thirty-three, worst goddamn year in the century to try to start a career. I worked my ass off with the WPA as an apprentice mason for three years, thirty a week and glad to get it. Before I ever drew my first groined arch I’d built a dozen with my own hands, hoisted the pieces one by one up a sixteen-foot ladder. I was so muscle-bound I could barely close my fist around a Number Two Ticonderoga. My first wife married me for those muscles. When they went away so did she. No refills, Windy. The stuff goes a lot further than it used to.”

  Lund, who had come forward to take Furlong’s glass when he drained it, put it on top of the little refrigerator.

  “The Depression hung on here and I went West and invented California Modern, not that anybody ever gave me the credit, nor would I want it, considering what they did to it. Well, you can read about what else I did in back numbers of Architectural Digest. I never saw Detroit again until eight years ago, when the business retired out from under me and I accepted a job as guest lecturer at Wayne State. ‘He draws! He speaks! He wears yellow on the cover of GQ! Come See the Living Fossil Before It’s Too Late!’ ” He balled his fists on his knees, bone on bone. “Anyway it paid better than the WPA, and I got to fool myself into thinking I was still part of things. Also that’s where I met Lily.”

  I finished my drink, sat back, and crossed my legs. We were drifting into my waters now. There was usually a Lily.

  “She was a graduate student,” Furlong said, “and, yes, she was young enough to be my granddaughter. Beautiful woman. Lovely skin. Lousy architect, but a first-rate artist. She dropped by my office between classes to show me her portfolio. We went out for coffee. We went out for dinner. We had breakfast. I bought her a ring. That’s the chronology. The time span doesn’t matter.”

  He paused to recharge his cells. The story was taking as much out of him as several flights of stairs.

  “I’m not the imbecile you’re starting to think me,” he said. “I was a grandfather then—a great-grandfather now—with three wrecked marriages and a score of silly affairs at my back, and sex is just candy, you can have enough for a lifetime early if you’re greedy enough at the start. I was. And love is a chimera, not nearly as tangible nor as pressing as bursitis after a certain age. Of course I felt something. Of course Lily was in love: with the idea of being married to Jay Bell Furlong, as well as to his line of credit and controlling interest in Furlong, Belder, and Associates, with offices in New York, L.A., Detroit, and Tokyo. And as Windy might say, it was a good job she was.

  “It makes more sense than falling in love with an incandescent smile and masses of hair, things that will go to porcelain and naked scalp soon enough. When I had those things I had better taste than to choose a partner with so little foresight. You have to respect a woman first because respect is likely to be all you wind up with at the finish. I respected Lily.”

  “This is the part where I find it difficult to squeeze back the tears.” Lund rubbed the ball of a meaty thumb over a flaw in the silver on his cane.

  “Stuart’s a romantic. It’s the reason he never remarried after his own divorce.”

  “It most certainly is not. I’m a homosexual.”

  “Who isn’t these days?” Furlong’s color came and went. “All right, damn it, I’ll say it. I was lonely. I was and am a monument, with a footing as deep as the tallest of my buildings. I could pick up a telephone and order the Hollywood goddess of my choice as my escort for the evening—I could make her my wife—but she wouldn’t be the company Lily Talbot was. She was intelligent and stimulating. She took sides, not always mine, and forced me to reconsider my position on everything. A companion like that is damn rare where I am. A man needs someone he can talk to without having to hire a tutor to brief her first.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Furlong,” I said. “I’m nobody’s choice for judge. I’m guessing you didn’t marry.”

  The architect opened one of his fists. Lund shifted his cargo to his tender foot like a clerk laying out Fabergé eggs and gave me something from a manila folder on the table. It was a five-by-seven photograph, a crisp professional-looking black-and-white shot like you hardly ever see in our Kodachrome society, of a couple in a naked condition amid rumpled bedding. The woman was dark-haired, with good bones and an athletic body. The man was fair and flabby. The photographer had caught them in the act of breaking an embrace, the woman starting to turn her head, not yet looking directly at the camera, the man staring full into the flash. A reflection of the bulb showed in each of his shiny pupils.

  I returned the picture. “I can see why you became attracted.”

  “The picture came by mail to my office at Wayne State in a brown envelope without a return address,” Furlong said. “U.S. Postal Service mark, addressed with a typewriter. They weren’t all in museums then. I still have the envelope if you want to see it.”

  “I left my junior fingerprint kit in my other pants.”

  “Understand, it wasn’t the sleeping around that bothered me. Only an ass expects sexual integrity under those circumstances. It was her partner I objected to. The young man’s name is Lynn Arsenault. At the time the photo was taken he was a junior partner in Imminent Visions.”

  “Furlong and Belder’s principal competitor,” Lund explained.

  “To hell with that, it’s misleading. This isn’t about free enterprise. Imminent Visions was founded by a man named Vernon Whiting. The son of a bitch is dead now, and the worms can have him if they can keep him down. He was my apprentice. I taught him how to use a protractor and then he went around telling everyone I stole one of his designs. He told it enough times and in enough places it’s entered the lore of this profession. By the end I think he believed it himself. When I saw that picture of Lily with Arsenault, I was convinced Whiting arranged for her to romance me in order to steal some of my own designs; revenge for a wrong I never did him.

  “Well, I broke off the relationship. I didn’t trust myself even to speak to Lily. The tabloids would have lapped up a public scene. I had Stuart send her a letter on Furlong and Belder stationery, gave notice at Wayne State, and went—fled—back to L.A. The only cowardly act in my adult life. I’m telling you all this to give you some idea of how I felt when I found out the picture is a fake.”

  “It’s a good one,” I said. “I didn’t spot it.”

  “You’d need a glass and some training. I had both but didn’t bother to use them. I fired that pup Arsenault from my firm the year before when I found out he was spying for Whiting. It all fit together, so I never questioned the picture. Then last month I was sorting through some things, getting my affairs in order, when I found the original of the photograph they used of Lily. The damn thing was taken of us together at a charity dinner at the Pontchartrain, an Associated Press photo. I’d clipped it and never looked at it again. I didn’t recognize it, the expression and angle of her face, in the composite. Some genius I am. Another, please, Windy.” He gestured toward the empty glass on the refrigerator.

  Lund hesitated. “Are you certain?”

  “I think you’ll agree the condition of my liver is someone else’s concern.”

  The attorney upended a dwarf bottle of gin into the glass, added ice, and passed it over the back of the loveseat. The stain on Furlong’s cheeks when he drank lasted as long as breath on a mirror.

  “The question is,” he said, “who faked the picture and who sent it to me? Find out.”

  “Who stood to gain from a breakup?”

  “My heirs. Naturally I’d have bequeathed the bulk of my estate to my widow and distributed what was left among the others. If I didn’t, the State of California would have, and not the way I’d have chosen. For an old man, the list is fairly short.”

  I got out my notebook
and pen while he took another hit from his glass.

  “My son John, who has spent every penny I’ve given him on various crackpot schemes, including video telephones and solar houses in Seattle, where it rains two hundred days out of the year. My charming first wife Karen, his mother. She tried to run me down in my driveway the morning of the day I left her, and I’ve no reason to believe she’s mellowed in thirty years. Oh, and my kid brother Larry, who I haven’t seen or spoken to since nineteen forty-seven. I assume he’s retired from the post office by now if he’s still living. Assorted other relatives. I had Stuart prepare a file.”

  Lund picked up the manila folder from the table and handed it to me. It contained the photograph and a word-processed typescript double-spaced on heavy bond secured with brass fasteners. The first name after the paragraph on Lynn Arsenault was Oswald Belder.

  I looked up. “Your partner?”

  “He inherits the business. I can’t believe he’s mixed up in this. Ozzie’s the conscience of the firm. I’d trust him with anything but this mission. He’d have tried to talk me out of it. And he might have succeeded.”

  I paged through the dossier. Despite his disclaimer, it seemed like a lot of suspects for one lifetime. “Most of these addresses are out of state. I’ll have to farm some of it out. You might get faster results with a larger agency. Say, two people.”

  Furlong smiled for the first time. It made his face look like the label on a bottle of iodine.

  “You didn’t think I dreamed up this deathwatch ploy for my personal amusement, did you? It was the best way to get the news around. Most of the heirs have already made contact with Windy. Some of them are already in town for the reading of the will. The rest are on their way. The English gentleman will give you the details.”

  “Why Detroit? Los Angeles is crawling with private operators.”

  “In my condition you put a lot of thought into where you go, because the odds are that’s where you’ll spend eternity. Detroit is home. I was born here. This is where I found my direction and it’s where I intend to be buried.” He’d quit smiling. “Also I’m fairly certain Lily wouldn’t come out to the Coast even if I promised her an interview with the ghost of Diego Rivera. She runs an art gallery here. That’s the second part of the assignment, Walker. I want you to talk to her. I need to apologize to her while there’s still time.”

  “It could take a while.”

  “You’ve got four weeks. Less than that, if I’m any judge of doctors. The checkbook, please, Mr. Lund. I’ll draw this one up myself.”

  He’d made that simple act sound like a job for heavy equipment. Which it was, for him; by the time he’d signed his name, a plain signature as legible as the name of the bank engraved in block capitals across the top, he was sweating in that air-conditioned room.

  “What happens when I find the witchfinder?”

  “I’ll have the satisfaction of looking into the eyes of a coward.”

  Three

  HE TORE THE CHECK LOOSE and held it up. Stuart Lund looked at it and gave it to me. It was made out in the amount of seventy-five hundred dollars.

  “That should get you started,” Furlong said. “Now I’ll rest.”

  Lund helped him to his feet and through the door to the bedroom. It was a lot of weight for one very old cane to support; but as the architect had said, they built things better then.

  When the lawyer returned I filled several more notebook pages with information on the incoming relations. I left him resting his sore foot on an ottoman and went straight to my bank. When a man who tells you he’s terminally ill cuts you a check you don’t stop for lunch.

  With a comfortable eight thousand, five hundred dollars lying between me and a reservation at the Cardboard Hilton, I paid some bills, pocketed a couple of hundred to walk around on, and treated myself to a stuffed breast of chicken in a restaurant on West Congress, complete with flatware and tablecloths. Between bread and coffee and the main course I carried my notebook to the pay telephone by the restrooms and made an appointment for that afternoon with Oswald Belder, Furlong’s business partner. Most of the relatives on the list had not yet arrived in town.

  Next I tried Lily Talbot’s art gallery. A female voice with wintergreen laid in over the cornpone told me Miz Talbot wasn’t expected in until tomorrow. I said I’d call back. Solvency breeds patience.

  The world headquarters of Furlong, Belder, & Associates shimmered in heat waves like isinglass curtains, an urban mirage. It was a retired warehouse on the lip of what they call Bricktown now, converted in the Furlong manner into wide bands of pink stucco with continuous tinted windows slitted in like wraparound glasses. An endangered species, warehouses. I don’t know where we’re going to store all our stuff when the last of them has gone to indirect lighting and swank magazines in the lobby.

  Receptionists on two floors directed me to a waiting room the size of a softball field, lined with striped carpets and pressed-tin paneling. Watercolors in black steel frames represented original Furlong designs in ideal settings with plenty of space and garnishes of pruned shrubbery. Another ideal setting, an S-shaped curl of molded plastic aspiring to be a desk, sheltered a burnished black work of art inside its curves. She wore cornrows and dangling earrings that refracted light. The top two buttons of her teal silk blouse were unfastened, below which shadows beckoned. As I approached she reinterred a beige telephone receiver in its form-fitting standard and asked if she could help me.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to wear diamonds during the day,” I said.

  She touched an earring. Her smile was cool in an oval face that didn’t seem to have any pores. “They’re cut crystal. It’s hard to ask for a raise when you’re wearing precious stones, Mister”—her lashes swooped down over her appointment book, then back up—“Walker?”

  “That is I. He in?”

  She lifted the receiver, passed along my name, and hung up. “Mr. Belder’s office is at the end of the hall.” She tilted her head toward an opening without a door. The earrings swung and sparkled.

  “Thanks, Crystal.”

  “Damaris is the name.”

  The band of tinted glass across the back of Belder’s office looked out on the river and Hiram Walker’s distillery—no relation—on the Canadian side. The room was nearly as large as the reception area, painted powder blue, with a deep navy shag carpet and recessed shelves containing oversize pictorial books on architectural subjects and scale models of buildings and stairways. An easel behind the desk held up a detailed sketch of the Pentagon; only the block legend in the corner identified it as a shopping center. Belder—or the man occupying his swivel—sat profile to the door with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, glowering at the sketch. He was a long sack of assorted bones in a blue suit cut to his peculiar shape, wearing thick glasses in aluminum frames. He smeared his glistening black hair straight across his scalp from a part above his left ear. The skin at his left temple was spotted like old cheese and he seemed to be worrying at a set of teeth that didn’t fit him nearly as well as the suit.

  He spoke without stirring or looking away from the easel. “Do you know anything about drafting?”

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  “I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s like one of those pictures in a magazine where you spot the errors and win a cruise. I never made it up the gangway.”

  “It looks like a good place to buy a thousand-dollar screwdriver.”

  He lifted his chin. “Say that again.”

  “All it needs is a flag and a row of staff cars parked in front.”

  “That’s it.” He straightened and clapped both palms on his knees. “It won’t do to remind consumers how much of their withholding is being spent on the military. No more three-martini lunches for the boys in market research.” He swiveled and stood. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Walker. You may have saved us some ugly press.”

  He wasn’t as tall as he looked sitting, but his k
nees bent slightly, and anyway, anyone was bound to seem short after a meeting with Jay Bell Furlong and his attorney. Belder had a long sad face blurred with years and what might have been drink, and pocked all over like the Sphinx. My information said he was ten years younger than his partner, but he looked older and a lot less well. His was the type that always acted as pallbearer for more robust friends.

  “You probably would have caught it yourself.”

  “Maybe not. Sometimes it takes a stranger walking through a door.” He waited until I was sitting before he resumed his own perch. “You’re working for Stuart Lund, you said. Is he in town?”

  “Briefly. He doesn’t want to be away from L.A. too long.” Furlong’s actual condition and presence in Detroit were the secrets of the day.

  “Yes.” The sad face got sadder. “I wanted to go there as soon as I heard, but my doctor says with my blood pressure I might as well arrange for a hearse to pick me up at the airport. He’s young enough to think that a bad thing. I sent a telegram. No flowers. Jay had—has—definite opinions about pretty things that die and shed petals all over his interiors.”

  “His opinion of you is just as definite. Lund says he considers you the conscience of Furlong and Belder.”