The Witchfinder Page 9

  “I specifically instructed you to tell no one that Jay is in Detroit.”

  “Technically he’s not. But a loophole in geography isn’t big enough to stick my neck through. It was a judgment call.”

  “Is that what it was.”

  “I didn’t know Mr. Furlong when he had his health. Back then I might have bought into his impassive act. It’s got cracks in it now. As much as he wants to know who framed Lily, he wants to square things with her more. The only way to do that is face to face.” I blew smoke and fanned it away from him. “If it means anything, I don’t think she’ll tell anyone. If it doesn’t, I’ll return the retainer, minus a thousand and change for two days’ work and expenses. You’ll get a written report so the next op you hire can hit the ground running.”

  “Do you think she’ll see Jay?”

  “I’m already in trouble with you for thinking.”

  He drummed his fingers on that silver crook. He got more mileage out of a cane than anyone since Chaplin. Finally he gripped it, lowered his foot to the floor, and levered himself upright. A spasm of pain swept across his broad soft face like a sheet of hail. It passed quickly and he adjusted his cuffs. The links were gold, with crests inlaid in enamel.

  “I can’t say I approve of the way you’ve handled Jay’s trust. However, if I were familiar with the correct procedure I wouldn’t have needed your services. We’ll keep things as they are for now. In future I insist you consult with me before you change the game plan.”

  “Sometimes things break too fast for that. But I’ll keep you posted.”

  “I can see you’re a man who’s accustomed to behaving as he pleases.”

  “Almost never that. But I’m out there, and you’re not.”

  “Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it.”

  It was a classy retreat, like at Dunkirk. You had to hand it to them. They’d lost an empire and kept the crease in their pants.

  “What do you make of this business with Arsenault?” he asked.

  I leaned down and put out the cigarette in the big glass tray on the coffee table. The base was spotless. I was seldom so busy anyone was kept waiting long enough to smoke one down to the butt.

  “Lily Talbot thinks it was coincidence,” I said, “or she says she does. I don’t buy it. However he got to where he is, Arsenault hasn’t stayed there by throwing away money. There’s a chance he felt guilty about his role in what happened to her and wanted to make amends. He may still feel that way. I hope so. Psychologists say guilt is a useless emotion. They’re wrong.”

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “You’ll know when I’ve done it.”

  “You are insufferable.”

  “Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it.”

  It didn’t sound as good coming from me.

  His waxy eyes took an impression of mine, then looked away. “Call any hour with news. I don’t expect to leave the suite again until it’s time to go back to California.” He didn’t add that he’d be making the trip alone.

  I went over and opened the hall door and held it while he limped through. “You should have asked the doctor to give you something for your foot.”

  “I have medication. Sometimes it’s more effective than other times. In any case I hardly need a second opinion to convince me I’m fat.” He paused on the threshold. “Oh, two more heirs have arrived. They’re on your list: the granddaughter and her husband, parents of Jay’s great-grandchild, Jason. They’re staying at the Westin.”

  “I’ll talk to them.”

  “Nothing there, I suspect. The girl’s a child of the sixties and distrusts all things worldly. The trip would be the husband’s idea. He’s a twit.”

  “That’s like a jerk, right?”

  The moustache twitched. “I despair of ever mastering the idiom.”

  When he left I changed the bulb in the lamp and switched on the fan in the office. The pigeon feather was waiting. It fluttered up from the floor, hovered for a moment, considering its options, then drifted down and lighted on the handle of the file drawer I’d been meaning for months to reorganize. I plucked off the feather, flicked it out the window, and went to a movie. When you start taking orders from pillow stuffing you might as well be in politics.

  Eleven

  IT WAS A WEEKNIGHT and a long way from dark, but the cruisers on Jefferson were already clearing their pipes. That stretch of pavement along the river is laid out like a dragstrip. A thing like that can’t be expected to pass unnoticed in the town that put America on ethyl. A Jeep C-J towed by a swollen exposed engine chromed to within an inch of its life shrilled past me, throttled down as it drew alongside a black Pontiac crouched on pneumatic risers, and gunned its carburetor. The Pontiac roared in response; the challenge was accepted. Both vehicles lunged forward, flaying rubber from four wheels and etching glistening streaks behind them like goosed snails.

  Youth. Someday they’ll find a cure.

  Farther up, where the river slows and broadens and the avenue changes its name to Lake Shore Drive, things were more peaceful. The Grosse Pointe Police Department is small, but better equipped than some armies in South America.

  All the parking spaces at the marina were taken. I blocked a Dodge Ram pickup that looked as if it might be there a while and walked along the dock counting numbers. The waves licked at the pilings in long satiny sheets with sunlight sparking at the edges. Sails flocked the surface like bright birds, a speedboat blatted by, towing a skier in an orange life jacket and a white bikini with a yard of yellow hair fluttering behind. The wind slung an arc of fine sun-smelling spray into my face like a lawn sprinkler. It was a different universe here where grownups played, but not necessarily more peaceful. Michigan has more registered boats than any other state in the union, including Hawaii and California; which makes sense, because it has the longest coastline. The problem, in the Detroit area, is that most of them seem to be berthed on Lake St. Clair.

  On nice weekends the scramble for the open water resembles the Jefferson Avenue dragway, with one added attraction, for those who love adventure: At least a third of the people at the tiller don’t know one end of their craft from the other or who has the right of way. No minimum age is required to steer a boat through waters crowded with swimmers, skiers, and other vessels. No law demands sobriety on the part of the pilots. The Spanish Armada stood a better chance against the gale.

  The berth I was after belonged to a twenty-three-foot sloop, blue as the water, with a teak half-deck up front—I wasn’t sure if they called it a forecastle—and brass fittings that snapped back the light. Mathew Brady was the name scripted along the bow.

  “Walker?”

  I looked at the lean length of caramel-colored skin and runner’s muscles grinning up at me from the stern.

  “Ahoy the boat,” I said.

  “Call me Nate.” He laid aside the line he was coiling and got social. His grip was corded with iron, no surprise; photography is hard physical labor. “Sorry about the change of venue. This is the first chance I’ve had to get out on the water since Memorial Day.”

  Millender had on white shorts, a long-peaked fisherman’s cap, and nothing else. His teeth were blue-white in a face burned as dark as Eulisy Worth’s, only his close-cropped towhead said he hadn’t been born with that pigment. He was middle thirties but could pass for twenty.

  “You’ve got a pretty day for it.”

  “It’s a short season, but it’s the best in the country. You don’t have a hernia or anything like that, do you?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “Good. Pass me that cooler.”

  It was a blue-and-white plastic Coleman on the dock, big enough to pack a terrier. I hoisted it over the railing and he took it in both hands and lowered it to the deck. It was vein-popping heavy.

  “Where are you headed, New Zealand?”

  “We’re overnighting on Belle Isle. Twelve beers apiece should get us to sunup.”

  “Who’s drinking the other twelv
e?”

  “You know Royce?”

  I followed the incline of his head. The man approaching from the other end of the dock was a well-built forty, just under six feet and a hundred and eighty in baggy white ducks, canvas shoes, and a red Windbreaker. The white sun visor he wore shadowed his face. He was carrying a pair of float cushions wedged under his left arm and a picnic hamper in that hand. It was an awkward way to lug those items unless you wanted to keep one hand free.

  Much of his weight was in his chest and shoulders, and as he came near I saw that we were fellow campaigners in the war against five o’clock shadow. He hesitated a half-step when he saw me standing by the sloop, but regained momentum smoothly. I might have missed it if I hadn’t been briefed on his case and didn’t know a thing or two about the species. That studied casual gait is a hallmark of some housecats, and they’re the most efficient killers in civilization.

  Oh, we were going to get along.

  “I bought a roast chicken. I hate sandwiches.” He was looking at me.

  “Great, we can use it to wash down the beer.” Millender reached up and took the hamper. “Royce Grayling, meet Amos Walker.”

  Grayling nodded, smiling, but his right hand remained at his side. His face was broad with no fat in it and he had a thick brown moustache above a mouth as wide as Jean Sternhagen’s but without the humor, although the lips were pulled back to show a full set of good teeth. His eyes were pale. He looked like the young Ernest Hemingway except for those eyes. There was no daylight in them.

  “I think we were in the same room once,” he said. “A Democratic fundraiser four years ago at the Masonic Temple. I was with the old mayor. You were bodyguarding a city councilman’s wife.”

  “I was guarding her diamonds for the insurance company. Her body just went where the diamonds went. I don’t remember meeting you.”

  “We didn’t.”

  I showed my teeth. “You must be one of those people who never forget a face.”

  “That’s one claim I never made. How would I know if I forgot one? I asked about you.”

  “I didn’t know I looked that interesting.”

  “You didn’t. That’s why I asked. It was the first time I’d heard your name.”

  “But not the last.”

  “The town isn’t that big.” He tossed the cushions onto the half-deck and tugged down the elastic hem of his Windbreaker, but not before a tube of shiny brown leather poked out the bottom along his right hipbone, right where I wore mine. I didn’t need to see that to know I hadn’t wasted the hundred and fifty I’d paid Worth for the dope on Royce Grayling.

  Millender got a hand up from his friend—the left one, of course—and bounded onto the dock. In his bare feet he came just above my shoulders. In addition to being strong, photographers are often small. It has something to do with crawling into tight spaces to take pictures of wolf cubs and not banging into black lights in darkrooms.

  “What’s the job?” he asked me.

  I waited while a quartet of chattering femininity in halter tops and briefs passed by on the arms of a couple of lifters in Speedos. Millender’s eyes followed appreciatively. Grayling’s remained on me.

  “Randy Quarrels says you can put Abe Lincoln’s head on Marilyn Monroe’s body and fool Joe DiMaggio,” I said.

  “That’s the job?”

  “That’s the basic idea.”

  “You’re an insurance cop?”

  “Private.”

  “Ah. Who’s this DiMaggio, a client?”

  I looked at Grayling. He rolled his big shoulders. “Notch baby.”

  I said, “He’s the reclusive type. He’s willing to pay enough to stay that way.”

  “I get it. As for instance?”

  “I don’t guess you have a rate card for this kind of job.”

  “He’s a good guesser,” he told Grayling. “What are we talking about, prints or slides or video? Video’s big right now, but it costs to edit.”

  “I’m not interested in video.”

  “I can cut you a bargain, then. A few years ago, no. The computer’s eliminated most of the overhead. All I need is material to work with. I can provide that, too, of course, but—”

  “It’ll cost. I know. Can you do this?” I showed him the picture of Arsenault and Lily Talbot.

  A tanned face got stiff. “Who the hell are you?”

  “We established that. How about it?”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “I’m not your boy. Try the boys on Michigan Avenue. You’ll know them by their big hats and pink suits.” He stepped down into the boat. “Let’s cast off, Royce. The wind gets cute when the sun goes down.”

  “Sorry you came all this way,” Grayling said.

  We stood there a minute guessing each other’s weight; the only two characters on the lake wearing jackets because nobody else was wearing a holster.

  I said, “The client pays for the gas.”

  “Well-heeled, is he?”

  “Stinking.”

  “That’s the kind to have. I never did understand the pro bono boys. You’re worth just what they pay you.”

  “Sometimes not as much.”

  He smiled again. His facial expressions were purely hydraulic.

  “Do you have a card? Nate might change his mind.”

  “In a pig’s ass. Shake a leg, Royce.”

  Grayling didn’t move. I fished out a card with my left hand and gave it to him. He took it with his left, glanced at it, put it in a pocket, and zipped it up.

  “Well, you got out of the heat for a little while.”

  “I don’t mind it so much.”

  The smile stayed in place. “You know, neither do I.”

  He busied himself with the lines then and I wasn’t there anymore.

  The light was changing on my way back down Jefferson, angling just off the horizontal between the buildings downtown. The newer ones sparkled. The older ones, built mostly between the century’s turn and Black Friday, gleamed with an old gold light like pre-Prohibition whiskey. These were the neo-classical, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Renaissance Albert Kahn designs that Jay Bell Furlong and his set had ridiculed, then found affection for when they saw what the generation that came after them put up next door. When the last of them fell, imploded in a pile of Italian marble and splinters of mahogany, they would leave holes in the sky like missing constellations.

  I stopped for a drink at a hole I knew on Lafayette between the News and Free Press buildings—both of them Kahn’s—looking for faces I recognized and working on not thinking. No help there. The late harvest of communications-school graduates didn’t drink, and the crop I’d grown up with were either retired or huddled inside the metal detectors at the Detroit Press Club.

  I bombed out on the no-thinking part too. I was beginning to like Nate Millender almost as much as I liked Lynn Arsenault. And I wondered how long it had been since liked referred to somebody I wasn’t planning to bring down.

  When I left the bar, dusk was boating in, towing behind it that brimstone smell of carbon settling and concrete cooling. In a little while the streetlights would blink on and then the headlamps, a set at a time like bats awakening, and the city would turn itself darkside out like a reversible jacket, shaking out the creatures that breathed and bred in its folds. Figuring in a brief stop at my house, by the time I got to Allen Park it would be dark enough for what this one had in mind

  Twelve

  NIGHT WORK IN THE detective business carries its own set of rules.

  The first covers wardrobe.

  The idea is not to look like one of the Beagle Boys. You can take your inspiration from the movies, put on the black watch cap, matching turtleneck, and skintight trousers, and pose for the cover of Sneak Thief Quarterly, but if you do it out in the real world you’re going to be arrested as a suspicious person. Especially when everyone else in your zip code is wearing a sport shirt and cotton twill.

  I chose a bl
ue short-sleeved sweatshirt, a dark gray nylon jacket to cover my arms, and a new pair of blue jeans, prewashed so I could walk without making as much noise as a sheet of tin. I don’t own a ski mask and wasn’t about to go shopping for one in June. Leave the burnt cork on the face to Cary Grant. If you’re not alert enough to turn your back when headlamps rake around the corner you’ve got no business breaking the law in the first place. Not to mention the inconvenience of coming up with a good story if the police stop you, minstrel shows being rare these days.

  Finally I laced on black high-tops with thick waffled soles, threw a pair of stiff rubber gloves and bolt-cutters with insulated handles into the trunk, and was off to risk my license for about the thousandth time since Easter. I had a good night for it. The sky was heavily overcast and I couldn’t see my feet. I was in great shape as long as I didn’t trip over any other burglars.

  The street rod next door was parked in the driveway, protected only by a canvas car cover. I hesitated as I pulled out of the garage—it seemed a shame, dressed as I was, not to creep over and cut the starter cable, assuring myself a full night’s sleep—but I had a living to earn and put my foot on the gas.

  When I got to Imminent Visions I didn’t slow down. Much of the metropolitan drug trade takes place in office parking lots after hours, and the places attract police stakeouts. I circled the block for a better look. Lights were on in some of the offices, but there are always some, and in the entrance to the underground garage reserved for employees, the greenish glow of the security lights inside made a pool on the pavement, but the attendant’s booth was empty. No marked units were crouched in the likely places. No vehicles, marked or otherwise, were parked in any of the neighboring driveways facing out. It was coming up on nine o’clock by the dial on my dashboard; lunch hour for most cops on the four to midnight.

  In and out fast, fingers crossed.

  I found a legal space on the street, in the dark middle ground between the lamps on the corners and across from an eight-foot board fence where construction was going on, but not at that hour. The snick when I opened my door sounded like a rifle shot in the still air. I got out and leaned on it until it shut. I kept listening, I wasn’t sure for what. The score from The Pink Panther, maybe.