The Witchfinder
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
Tags: #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction
Loren D. Estleman
For the cousins:
Marlene and Gene,
Janet,
Buck (in fondest memory),
Randy, Jason, Jan, Lindy, and Bobbie;
and for Aunt Irene
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death.
—Lyman Beecher
T
HERE ARE MORNINGS
, just after dawn on unseasonably hot June days when every breath you draw is filtered through forty pounds of wet laundry, that you welcome the clear cold icicle of the telephone bell ringing.
You sit on the edge of your bed for a while waiting for the overcast to clear, uncertain whether you were preparing to rise or retire, then the ringing comes again, an hour behind the first, and you get up and squish out into the living room where the air from the open window chills you in your damp underwear, and the second ring is just ending. Everything you hear and see and do is at quarter-speed. It’s a kind of brownout of the brain.
“Is that Amos Walker?”
A man’s voice, ageless and tweedy, with Big Ben chiming on the consonants. I’d tapped into an episode of
Upstairs, Downstairs
.
“It was last night. I can’t answer for it now.” I sounded like a low-revolution drill even to myself. “What time is it on my side of the Atlantic?”
“Shortly after six. Did I wake you?”
“Hold the line, please.”
Hearing the birds now—they were singing at normal speed, which in my present condition sounded like a chorus of slipping fan belts—I found a box of matches and a butt longer than an inch in the ashtray on the telephone stand and lit up. The smoke chased the bees out of my head. “Okay, I checked the bed and I’m not still in it. Who am I speaking to?”
“My name is Stuart Lund. I’m an attorney.”
“Not a barrister or a solicitor?”
One of those screwy computer scales you hear on the telephone played in the pause on his end. “No, I’m a naturalized American citizen and have been for fifteen years. I’m prepared to offer you a retainer in the amount of one thousand dollars if you’ll agree to meet me this morning here in my suite at the Airport Marriott.”
“Which airport?”
“Detroit Metropolitan, of course. Did you think I was calling from England?”
“The accent threw me off.”
“Indeed. I wasn’t aware I still had one.”
“You don’t need one if you’re going to use words like
indeed
,” I said. “Okay, make the offer.”
“I believe I just made it.”
“You said you were prepared to. I thought you people were more careful with the language than us born Yankees.” The filter ignited. I punched out the butt. The stench of scorched rubber hung on the stagnant air. “Pardon the impertinence, Mr. Lund. Also the effrontery. I’m experiencing a power surge. My standard retainer is fifteen hundred.”
“There will be a substantially larger sum involved if I decide to employ your services as an enquiry agent. The thousand is merely for coming out. It’s yours whether or not we agree to do business.”
“Are you acting on behalf of a client?”
“More accurately, in compliance with a client’s wishes. I’m representing the estate of Jay Bell Furlong.”
“Jay Bell Furlong the architect?”
“The same. Can I expect you?”
“I haven’t read or seen the news since last night. Has he died?”
“As of my last call to Los Angeles five minutes ago, no. Although my use of the term
estate
is technically premature, as his executor I’m under instructions to waste no time. Which is precisely what I seem to be doing.” His tone acquired a measured amount of impatience, as if he’d raised one of a series of internal floodgates an inch.
“I’ll be there in less than an hour, Mr. Lund.”
He gave me the number of the suite and broke the connection.
I showered, toweled off, and shaved, feeling fresh sweat prickling out of the open pores as I stood in the cross-draft between the window and the bathroom doorway. Dressing, I selected a blue shirt, dark blue knitted tie, the tan summerweight, and brown mesh shoes, on the theory that if I looked cool I might at least make someone else feel cool and maybe he’d return the favor. I combed my hair and reconnoitered the gray. The beard beneath the skin was as blue-black as ever, but my temples were beginning to resemble the Comstock Lode.
There was no time for breakfast, even if I were in the habit. I swigged orange juice straight from the carton, overcame the urge to climb into the refrigerator with it when I put it back, and went out to the garage. I drove with all the windows down and the wind lifting my combed hair, which the hell with it. When that model of Cutlass roared off the line, air conditioning was for Rolls Royce.
My clientele had taken a stylish turn. At eighty and change, Jay Bell Furlong was the last of the legendary school of American architects who had cast away the posts and lintels and marble scrollwork of the Old World. They had substituted horizontal lines for vertical, invented the concept of harmony with the environment, and fought a desperate and ultimately losing battle against the Xeroxed glass, girder, and reinforced-concrete designs rolling out of the cost-effective East. Theirs was the last dying bellow of art in a field seized by accountants and the low bid. For a heartbeat their bold innovations had swept a continent. Now Louis Sullivan was forgotten, Frank Lloyd Wright was dead, and Furlong was about to be, rigged as he was with tubes and insulated wire in the cancer ward at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, the elephants’ graveyard of forgotten movie stars, one-hit rockers, and disgraced presidents. The media deathwatch had been going on for a week. Furlong’s rallies and relapses made the Eleven O’Clock Report as regularly as the box scores.
What his attorney was doing in Detroit, where impressive architecture was looked upon as an empty lot in the making, was foggy.
As I swung into the short-term lot at the airport, a leviathan of a 757 shrieked overhead at a steep angle, sucking its wheels into its belly and dragging its shadow over the car like a coronation train. The sky the jet was headed for didn’t look any more inviting than the ground. A low dirty cloudbank had been stalled over the metropolitan area for days, trapping the kind of temperatures and humidity normally associated with the Philippines. Old people die like goldfish in that weather, also high school juniors at fast-food restaurants with hundred-dollar sneakers and short tempers.
The lobby air hit me like a bucket of ice water after the convector of the pavement. That particular Marriott may be the only hotel in the world built directly onto an airport terminal.
Certainly it’s the only one this side of Beirut where you have to pass through a metal detector to check in or visit. I said something on that order to the guard at the gate, who scowled and tipped his head toward a sign that informed me my First Amendment rights were suspended on the premises. I told him what I thought of that, but by then I was two floors up in the elevator.
Stuart Lund came in at six-two and three hundred pounds in gray silk tailoring with a large head of wavy yellow hair, blue eyes like wax drippings, and a black chevron-shaped moustache he hadn’t bothered to bleach. He was about fifty. After opening the door to his suite, he shifted a mahogany cane with a cast-silver crook to his left hand and offered me his right. “You’re punctual. Very admirable.”
I stepped past him into a large room that would have been cheerful if the drapes weren’t drawn, with fat armchairs and a free-standing refrigerator under lock and key. A television on a swivel was tuned in to CNN with the sound very low. Lund asked me to sit and approached the refrigerator, leaning a little on the cane.
“I never shall get over the way they see to one’s creature comforts in this country’s hotels. I’m sinfully well stocked. It’s early, but I understand all you detectives are seasoned imbibers.”
“That’s fiction,” I said. “Make mine a Bloody Mary.”
“One of the more fascinating queens.” He used the key, married the contents of a toy vodka bottle and a miniature can of tomato juice in a barrel glass, and brought it over. “I apologize for not joining you. The lag,” he explained, lowering himself into a chair that for anyone else would have been a loveseat.
“Did you fall off the ramp?”
He lifted his eyebrows, then glanced down at the cane. “Gout, I’m afraid. The complaint of colonial governors and certain kings of France. I’m under physician’s instructions to lose a hundred pounds, but I’m in revolt. People who have been fat all their lives and suddenly become thin are pathetic to see, like polar bears wasting away in the wrong climate. The stick belonged to an ancestor: Sir Hudson Lowe, Governor of St. Helena and Bonaparte’s gaoler for the last six years of the Corsican’s life.” He pronounced the word the same as
jailer
, but he wouldn’t have spelled it that way.
“My grandfather rode shotgun on a beer truck.”
He wiggled his moustache, then hooked the cane on the arm of the loveseat and produced a fold of paper from an inside breast pocket.
The check bore Jay Bell Furlong’s name and address in the upper left corner. Lund had signed his own name. I pocketed it. “Power of attorney?”
“The privilege did not come cheap. I’ve been Jay’s legal adviser, secretary, business manager, confidant, and frequently his whipping post ever since he brought me here from Gloucester. He disengaged me from a firm of solicitors that represented William Pitt, and which another ancestor of mine helped establish. It was quite the family scandal at the time; although I daresay dear old Uncle Nigel’s decision to attend a meeting of the House of Lords in a chiffon evening dress and diamonds has supplanted it.”
“Was it before or after six?”