The Witchfinder (12 page)

“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

N
IGHT 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 blue 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.

After that I moved quickly. I popped up the trunk, pulled on the gloves and a pair of rubbers I kept there in case of sudden weather—the power level would be much lower than Detroit Edison’s, but taking chances is for bungie-jumpers and matadors—and reached for the bolt-cutters just as a car turned into the street. I pivoted away from its lamps, blocking the Cutlass’s license plate with my body while I pretended to struggle with the spare tire. The car ticked on past without slowing.

I stepped up the pace another notch. The prospect of a cellular 911 call knocked ten minutes off my schedule. I took out the cutters, lowered the trunk lid without closing it, and loped toward the visitors’ parking lot. There didn’t seem to be much use in walking at an unsuspicious pace while in possession of a tool that could get me ninety days at County.

Allen Park is quiet after dark by city standards. Crickets sang, the measured surf of canned laughter coming from someone’s television set reached me, perhaps from as far away as Canada across the river. Detroit throbbed in the distance, never entirely silent as long as trucks prowled the interstates at night to avoid scales and factories ran around the clock. A fire siren climbed and fell, an ambulance whooped on the downstroke. Someone else’s tragedy, as remote as an earthquake in Peru. Call it the night of a thousand apathies.

I’d brought along a pencil flashlight. It stayed in my pocket. There was enough illumination from the security lights to guide me to the area where I’d parked that morning. The telephone crew had erected a nylon tent to protect its excavation from weather and left up its barricades to protect itself from a lawsuit when someone fell in. I stepped between them, found the flap, and ducked inside, letting it fall shut behind me. Now I could use my light.

I found the cable quickly. It was bright orange, and the crew had inserted a couple of wooden dowels underneath it to lift it free of the earth. I stepped down into the hole, put the penlight between my teeth, and groped for the conduit. The hard rubber gave a little when I squeezed.

That was a break. I was afraid it would turn out to be cased in steel, and I hadn’t bothered to bring a hacksaw because the time it would have taken me to saw through it fell outside the margin of safety I had arranged for myself. I had both hands on the bolt-cutters when another pair of headlamps swept across the tent.

I froze.

I was afraid to dive for cover in case the movement was silhouetted against the nylon. The lights stayed on me for a long second. I could feel their heat. My own shadow loomed in front of me like my own guilty conscience. Then it moved. The lights slid the length of the tent and beyond. I heard tires swishing on asphalt, the sound of an engine slowing, idling, and then picking up speed, fading away as it moved off down the street. A driver had chosen the entrance of the lot to turn around in.

No more hesitation now. Whoever it was might have seen something and gone off to report.

The thick conduit was a healthy bite for the cables. I spread the handles all the way, worked the parrot’s-beak blades back and forth against the rubber until they bit, planted my feet solidly in the soft earth, and brought the handles together in one clean scissoring jerk.

Conduit and cable parted with a dry cough, blue and white sparks splashed. I stamped out the ones that were still glowing on the ground. I was a vandal, not an arsonist.

L
IKE MUMMIFICATION
, frigate design, and the lost-wax process, the art of the extortion letter is now a thing of the past.

The computer, as it has done with so many other areas of endeavor, has made the business of shaking down a victim much less messy, while robbing it of most of its charm. No longer must the novice blackmailer waste time combing through an entire newspaper hunting for all the words and letters he needs, encumbered by latex gloves so he can keep his fingerprints at home where they belong. He need merely print out his demands on an accommodating screen and dispatch them through the ether, anonymously and without fear of being traced. No paste, no scissors. No riddled pages of newsprint or scraps of cut-up paper to gather up and throw away where the trash man might find them and report them to the police. No worrying about loose hairs, scales, and other specimens of DNA adhering to the stationery.

On the other hand, there is no romance, either. No jaunty uneven lines or Peter Max-like jumbled fonts or exotic, piratical clashes of characters in Baskerville black and Barnum & Bailey yellow, cavalierly disregarding all the rules of upper and lower case laid down by Strunk and White. Cyberspace has managed to make one of our most popular tools of felony look like a recall letter from General Motors.

I’m a traditionalist. Also I don’t own a computer, and even if I had access to one that night and knew how to use it, I had no way of sending my communication to Lynn Arsenault’s place of work short of the post office, because some destructive creature of the night had put its telephone lines out of commission. So I did it the old-fashioned way. The result wasn’t all that impressive for the above-mentioned effort, but I was proud of the clarity and economy:

$ ten 000 wait 4 mY CALL

I clipped the pasted-over sheet of blank notepaper to the phony photo of Arsenault with Lily Talbot, tipped them into a new envelope fresh from the box, and threw in Nate Millender’s Yellow Pages ad, cut from under
PHOTOGRAPHERS—FREELANCE
. I sealed the flap with a sponge dipped in tap water and block-printed
LYNN ARSENAULT—PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL
on the outside with a No. 2 pencil. I’d considered spelling it
CONFIDENSHUL
, but cuteness can get you nailed.

I scooped the litter into the kitchen wastebasket, dumped a can of tuna between two slices of bread, and washed it down with milk for dinner. Quite a day. I’d pried into people’s private affairs, violated a client’s confidence, destroyed public property, and framed an extortion. Now I went to bed and slept the sleep of the innocent. I dreamed of waylaying travelers in Sherwood Forest with cobbled-up stickup notes and donating the proceeds to the Errol Flynn Memorial Home for Rakes, Rogues, Rooks, and Rascals for Rent.