The Witchfinder Read online

  Nudity is deceptive. What looked at first glance to be a pile of writhing bodies turned out to be just two girls in their late teens, one black, the other a pale redhead, lying half entangled on the spread. I could tell my presence was embarrassing them. The black girl yawned and scratched herself under one breast while the redhead applied fresh lipstick from a neon-colored tube.

  “Places, ladies,” Worth said.

  The lipstick went out of sight and the girls swung into a passionate embrace.

  “We can talk while I’m shooting.” Worth poked a CD into a tabletop player. “The music’s just for mood. Someone else’ll dub in the oohs and aahs later.”

  The music was Gilbert and Sullivan.

  “I didn’t know there was a lesbian pornography market,” I said.

  “There isn’t. And the people I work with prefer to call them ‘adult features.’” He had strapped on the camera and was doing a slow schottische around the bed. “Dykes don’t rent videos. Straight couples prefer soft-core. The rest of the market is lonely guys—lots of lonely guys—and they ain’t interested in looking at some other guy’s pimply butt. With two women they think they’re getting double their money’s worth.”

  “This your day job?”

  “Day and night. That’s how I keep up the payments on this here mansion. Smile, ladies. You’re supposed to be having a good time.”

  The black girl said, “I got a button sticking me in the ass.”

  “Use it. You’re an actress.”

  “Randy says you’re a wizard in the darkroom,” I said.

  “Best in the Midwest.” A mobile made up of metal cutouts of spaceships and sportscars hung from a wire above the mattress. With one hand he set it spinning, then panned up with the camera to catch the motion. Onscreen it would look like a window-shattering climax.

  “So why do skinflicks? Excuse me, ‘adult features.’”

  “Two words,” he said. “Cyberspace.”

  “I think that’s one word.”

  “Who gives a shit? The point is, any fourteen-year-old with a PC can click his mouse and outperform an expert with a house full of copy cameras, air brushes, and developing fluid. You see a movie lately, all them explosions and car crashes? Computer generated. Special-effects guys that were pulling down a million a year five years ago are putting in for food stamps. Still photography got the worst of it. I got downsized right out of my career.”

  “Bummer.”

  He stopped to kick out the tape and see how much was left. “You said you had work for me.”

  “I want a picture of two people together.”

  “Hire a studio. Or buy a Kodak and do it yourself. It’s cheaper.”

  “The two people I’m talking about aren’t that easy to get in the same place at the same time.”

  “Raise your right leg.”

  “What?”

  “Not you. Linda, is it?”

  “Lisa,” said the redhead.

  “Raise your right leg, Lisa. No, not like that. Like you’re pulling on a stocking. That’s it. Oh, very nice. Do you dance professionally, Lisa?” He was standing on the mattress now, zooming in on the foot she had pointed at the ceiling.

  “Just on the runway. I don’t do laps.”

  “Exactly what kind of picture are we talking about?”

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “Not you.”

  “Kind of like what you’re shooting now,” I said, “only without motion and it doesn’t matter if the subjects ever knew each other.”

  He stepped down to the floor and turned off the camera. His eyeglasses caught the light in blank circles. “How do you know Randy Quarrels?”

  “Mutual friend.”

  “Get dressed, both of you.”

  “It’s only been an hour,” the black girl said. “You promised three hours’ work.”

  “I’m out of inspiration. Don’t worry, you’ll get the full pony.”

  She stood and stretched. She was my height and it was obvious she worked out. Except for her coloring she reminded me of Quarrels’ snow leopard.

  “Get a move on. I’ve seen it before.” Worth stooped and jerked a plug out of the wall. Gilbert and Sullivan fell silent, the bank of lights went out with a hiss. Instantly the room seemed less hot.

  “Well, shit. This the first time any boy hurried me into my clothes.” Swishing her hips, the black girl followed the redhead around a curtain slung from a clothesline. Lisa’s pale buttocks had less definition than her partner’s.

  “You too,” Worth told me.

  “I’m already dressed.”

  “I mean get out. Randy and I didn’t get along, but I never thought he’d tag me for a blackmailer.”

  “What’s the difference to a pornographer?”

  “Who’re you, Jerry Falwell? I run a legitimate business.”

  “A legitimate business you won’t discuss over the telephone.”

  “That’s just to keep the right-wing nuts off my front porch. The neighborhood’s zoned commercial and I don’t use the mails or internet. My stuff sells to the same video stores that carry The Wizard of Oz. Okay, it ain’t Norman Rockwell. It ain’t even Norman Bates. But it’s honest work. Last month every tenth tape Aunt Matilda took home was Hot Cross Nuns. That was one of mine. It ain’t just old men in raincoats anymore.”

  I tipped my head toward the curtain. “Who did those girls vote for in the last election, Barney the Dinosaur?”

  “They’re pros. I got releases signed by their mothers. One of them appeared in three of my productions before she retired. What do you do for a living, bind Bibles?” Lights flashed off his glasses like bolts from God.

  “Throttle down, Fellini. So you’re a grindhouse Griffith with ethics. There was only one way to find that out. For the record, I’m trying to trace a frame, not frame one of my own. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place. You’d have to be as good an actor as you are a He let out air. “What work you in?”

  I told him. “I’ve got ID if you need it.”

  “Why would anyone lie about a thing like that?” He undid the harness and laid the video camera on a spavined sofa loaded with tapes and lingerie.

  “Randy and I worked together at the News a couple of times,” he said. “I was freelancing, doing some stuff for the Sunday magazine. You know, color shots of Denny McLain washing the Caddy and remembering the good old days when he threw strikes for the Tigers and broke legs for Big Vinnie the Camel.”

  “Not the best use of your talents.”

  “Talent’s what amateurs have. Pros need cash. Sometimes, when a prominent citizen kicks off and his widow has only a picture of him wearing a hat, it’s somebody’s job to take the hat off in the photo lab. I showed Randy how to do it so even an expert couldn’t tell what’d been done. Parlor stuff. He thought I was a genius.”

  director.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’ve got a good eye and a steady hand. That’s all the genius you need in photography, and now you don’t even need that. I ain’t doing what I’m doing for fun. One set of tits looks pretty much like all the rest.”

  “Do you know who took the hat off this one?” I handed him the Talbot-Arsenault picture.

  He glanced at it and gave it back. “Not offhand. The girl’s head came from another shot.”

  “Quarrels needed a glass to tell him that.”

  “That’s why he referred you to me. But it’s not my racket.”

  “Whose racket is it?”

  “Nate Millender.”

  “Quarrels mentioned him. He didn’t say it was his racket, just that he was capable of this kind of work.” I pocketed the picture.

  “It’s his racket. Or it was. Damn computers are putting everyone out of work, even criminals.”

  “Not all of them. Who’s backing him?”

  He took off his glasses and wiped them on his pants. “You’re asking plenty for just a peek at Ben Franklin.”

  “How much?”

 
The actresses came back from behind the curtain. The black girl had on white shorts, cork sandals, a red handkerchief blouse tied under her breasts, and a white vinyl bag slung over one shoulder. The outfit did more for my libido than her nudity had. The redhead wore an army tunic over a T-shirt and artfully torn Wrangler’s. That did nothing for me.

  “You said three hours,” the black girl said. “That’s seventy-five apiece.”

  “Pay them,” said Worth.

  I produced my wallet and thumbed out two hundreds. The black girl opened her bag, fished among a pile of wadded-up bills inside, and traded me a fifty. The hundreds went into the bag and she snapped it shut.

  Lisa, the redhead, said, “Hey!”

  “C’mon. We’ll break ’em at the mall.”

  “Don’t look so sad,” Worth said when they’d left. “One of them’s got a scholarship to Michigan.”

  “Which one?”

  He shrugged and adjusted his glasses. “They all look alike to me. One set of tits.”

  I watched him tidying up, stacking tapes and coiling cables. He was a one-man production crew. “What else do I get for a hundred and a half?”

  “A warning, for one thing. You want to watch yourself with Millender. He does a lot of political work. Those boondogglers play tackle.”

  “That’s worth about a dollar.”

  He plunked himself down next to the camera, exhausted suddenly. Sweat was fogging his freshly mopped glasses.

  “There was a construction bid scandal up in Iroquois Heights a few years back. You know the Heights?”

  “Well enough to burn my clothes every time I come back.”

  “There are crookeder places. There have to be.” But he didn’t sound convinced. “Anyway, kickback schemes are old stuff here in town, and up there if someone didn’t grease all the wheels all the time, the whole damn place would squeak to a stop. But this one wouldn’t go away. Did I mention it was an election year?”

  “It usually is.”

  “Bogardus was the name of the city councilman who took the heat. One morning his driver came to his house to pick him up and found his front door open. He went in and there’s Councilman Bogardus stretched out on the living room rug with two bullets in his chest. Cops never found the gun. There was a coroner’s inquest. You want to hear the verdict?”

  I remembered the case. For two weeks it had seemed the reporters would never stop squawking about it. Then they did. A plane crashed, a local beauty queen was crowned, a child’s body turned up in a culvert, and Bogardus went to the library files with the pet rock. But I let Eulisy Worth tell it.

  “Suicide. Apparently he shot himself twice in the upper thorax, which if you ever tried it you wouldn’t call it the easy way out, then hid the gun someplace where two thorough police searches couldn’t turn it. All in the sixteen seconds it took his heart to stop pumping. That was raw even for the Heights. You know Royce Grayling?”

  “Some kind of dogsbody at city hall. He ran errands for the old mayor.”

  “Not just the old mayor. He’s got free range between Lansing and Toledo. Cops clock him doing ninety in a hospital zone, run his ID, and send him on his way with a polite touch to their visors.”

  “Your point?”

  “Up north they call Grayling Suicide Sam.”

  “I get it. What’s he got to do with Millender?”

  “They’re tight as hatches. Sailing on Lake St. Clair every weekend, poker at Millender’s place Wednesday night. You couldn’t blast them apart.” He patted the video camera as if it were a big friendly dog. “Worth the hundred and a half?”

  “Maybe the best deal I’ve had all year,” I said.

  Nine

  THAT’S THE THING about the work: Just when you think you’ve got an uncomplicated little inheritance fraud, it turns into politics and murder.

  Either one is bad enough on its own. When you link them up you need six stiff belts and a loaded gun.

  So I went back to the office for mine.

  I held the number of belts to one and saved the six for the cylinder of the Smith & Wesson I’d been carrying ever since the Detroit Police Academy and I had parted over philosophical differences. I was using hollow points now, a concession to all the heavier stoppers out there. The shiny chrome cases made me feel like the Lone Ranger.

  A homicide inspector I knew had tried to interest me in a Sig-Sauer 9mm Automatic, or at least an S&W L-frame. But I’d just gotten the rubber grip of the old Detective Special worn to the shape of my fist, and anyway those jacketed slugs have an annoying habit of greasing straight through their targets when they ought to be staying inside them, doing things. Call me sentimental.

  I wiped off the works with an oily rag, squeaked the revolver into its stiff leather holster, and used it to pin down a stack of blank affidavits fluttering in front of the fan while I called the service.

  “Yes, Mr. Walker. You have a message from a Mr. Nate Millender. You’re to call him back.” She made it sound as if I’d heard from the Nobel committee on sleuthing.

  I thanked her, clicked off, dialed, and got the bright voice I remembered from the recording.

  “How big is the expense account?” Millender asked when he had my name.

  “Big enough for the job. It’s a big job. When can I come out?”

  “I’m shooting in Ann Arbor all day; assignment for Newsweek. Say six.”

  I said six.

  I yawned and looked at the calendar, a bank giveaway with a picture of Tahquamenon Falls pounding smoke out of the rocks at its base. I looked at my watch. Then I looked back at the calendar, but it was still June so I looked at my watch again. It was past lunchtime but I wasn’t hungry.

  I broke out my notebook and started to call the Talbot Gallery. The line was purring when I hung up, snapped the holster onto my belt, and put my jacket on over it. Art galleries are often air-conditioned.

  Downtown was more confusing than usual; and there are still gaunt, hollow-eyed delegates in straw hats from the 1980 National Republican Party convention driving around Grand Circus Park with expired out-of-state plates, looking for the way to the airport. The weather had brought out a herd of RVs for the annual shakedown cruise and old men in cataracts were trying to maneuver the brontosaurus-size vehicles around hairpin corners with their blue-haired wives yelling at them from the swivel seat. The curbs were taking a hell of a beating.

  Half the street spaces were blocked and the lots and garages were full. I parked in a towaway zone behind a dormant Winnebago and sorted through the collection of plastic signs I keep in the glove compartment. I selected SAFETY INSPECTOR and clipped it to the visor.

  The gallery was a walk-in at street level on Congress, a block down from the Penobscot Building, and would rent for roughly what I had earned thus far in my adult life. Its name was etched in discreet block capitals on the glass door. Behind me the door closed against the pressure in a pneumatic tube with all the racket of a manicured hand sliding into a silk-lined pocket.

  The first refrigerated puff from inside evaporated the sweat on my skin. Thirty seconds later I wanted to turn up my collar and pull it over my ears. Why they had hung paintings on the walls instead of hams was one for Sotheby’s, or maybe Armour Star.

  Track lighting glanced shyly off eggshell-colored walls, illuminating canvases in minimal frames and statuary on columns. Photorealism seemed to be on its way back, but there was no discouraging the usual assortment of exploding pigs and warped hunks of plywood with placards reading JUPITER ASCENDANT or something equally helpful. Their prices were neatly processed on three-by-five cards and apparently serious. A stereo system turned so low it might have belonged to the next building played atonal arrangements simulating the tide slapping a beach. It made you want to find the bathroom.

  At that hour the place belonged to me and a security guard in a green uniform, who if he hadn’t raised a hand to scratch his forehead might have had me looking for his price card. He placed the back of the hand against his mouth, c
overing a yawn. Daring me to make a break for the door with a Rodin under my coat.

  Free-standing partitions divided the exhibits. A woman approached from behind one of them as I was admiring a clay head with its tongue hanging out.

  “It’s called The Mortal Thought,” she said. “Please don’t say it looks like someone got hold of a bad burrito.”

  I looked at her. Something, contempt or amusement, was pulling at the corners of her mouth. It was an interesting mouth, artistically speaking: unfashionably wide in a face with beveled edges. She had brown eyes with short lashes she’d made no attempt to lengthen, a straight nose, and a broad clear forehead. Her hair was brown and hung in crinkled tendrils on either side of the center part. The mouth made sense when you took in the whole face. She would have looked very good next to Jay Bell Furlong’s planes and angles. She looked very good standing alone. She didn’t look much like her picture, but it had been eight years.

  She was tall, of course.

  I said, “I was thinking of the last time I saw something like it. It was in Louisiana, when they were still using the gas chamber.”

  Her lips parted. I’d surprised her. “It’s interesting you would say that. It was sculpted in Madrid before the First World War. It represents an execution using the garrote. May I ask what you were doing visiting the gas chamber?”

  “It was a business trip. Are you Miss Talbot?”

  “No, I’m Jean Sternhagen, her assistant. Miz Talbot’s busy in the office. I can help you if there’s something specific you want to see.” A puzzled line marred the wide brow. She hadn’t made up her mind how to take me.

  Now I recognized the honey-over-grits dialect of yesterday’s brief telephone conversation. She came from one of those states where they’re still combing minie balls out of the carpet.

  “I need to talk to the boss.” I gave her one of my cards.

  She pursed her lips over it, excused herself, and swept away. She had on an ivory silk blouse with a calf-length skirt designed for sweeping.

  In a little while a woman came my way who was no more than life size, with red hair cut short like a boy’s and wearing a black jumpsuit pinched at the waist by a silver belt, the slacks tucked into knee-length black boots. Instead of a riding crop she was carrying my card.