The Witchfinder (16 page)

“I understand you haven’t seen each other in almost fifty years. I guess you don’t get along.”

“You guess right, son.”

I let the silence work on him. Sometimes that’s the advantage of using the telephone. Dead air makes some people nervous. Buster Furlong was one of them. Or maybe he just wanted to talk.

“Big-deal architect couldn’t be bothered taking care of his own mother when she got old and sick,” he said. “Let Buster do that, I got buildings to put up.”

“He said that?”

“He didn’t have to. Oh, he sent money when he thought about it. I looked after her till it got to be too much, then I put her in a home. Had to. It was just too much for one man. It was a nice enough place if you don’t mind being talked to like you’re still in rompers. She got confused the last couple of years, thought I was Jay half the time. I let her think it. It was like having the family all together.”

There was a series of rattling coughs, followed by a noise like an engine revving up and then an explosion. He’d spat into a handkerchief or something. “I put off getting married till she was out of the house. By that time I was old myself and so was Trudy.”

“Your wife?”

“Cancer took her. We had nine years. Would’ve been twenty if Jay’d pitched in and helped out with Ma. Couple of weeks a year in California might’ve made all the difference to the old lady. Hell, to me, too, not having to fuss over her for a little while. I bet I hinted at it twenty times in letters till Jay stopped answering them and I gave up writing them. Your parents still living, son?”

“No.”

“Just as well. Married?”

“Not now.”

“Don’t wait too long, that’s my advice. One morning you wake up and you’re old. I don’t recommend it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Like hell you will. But you’ll remember I said it when it happens.”

“I guess you don’t know who might have had the picture made up.”

“It sure as hell wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do to him what he did to Ma.”

“One last question, Mr. Furlong.”

“Buster.”

“Does the name Royce Grayling mean anything to you? He’s in politics.”

“Nope. All I ever knew about politics, or needed to, was when to take down the picture of the old president and put up the new one. And not to tell jokes about the Kennedys when the Democrats are in office.”

I wished him luck with the beef.

“Serves me right for buying more than I’ll live to eat.”

Another one off the list. I was down to the second and third generations.

I looked at my watch. Just past noon. If Lund had moved quickly and the police had proceeded at their usual drab but efficient clip, he would be entertaining them at the Westin any time now. As soon as I thought of him I put him out of my head. I didn’t want to put the whammy on him while he was feeding them the lines I’d written. Superstition has its place in the odds.

I screwed the receiver back into my ear. Unlike the cheesy partitions between the multiplex theaters in the mall, the walls of the grand old Fox were thick enough to absorb sound, but when I leaned against the wall next to the telephone I could feel the vibrations of the space-opera soundtrack on the other side.

“Yeah?” Hurricane Bob would never learn the proper way to answer a telephone.

“It’s Walker. Did you deliver that message directly to Arsenault?”

He described the dead man down to his gabardine.

“That’s him,” I said. “You got a place to go to beat the heat?”

He hesitated. “I got an idea you ain’t talking about the weather.”

“Somebody pumped a slug into Arsenault’s head in the company garage right after you left. The cops have your description. I’ll stand you to a room if you need it, but it has to be way out of town. You know cops and motels.”

“Moths and porchlights. Don’t need it. Gandy’ll put me up. You know Gandy.”

Richard Gandolph was the bass player Bob had neglected to include in his record contract; the man who had hired me to save Bob’s life when the music stopped. Gandy and Buster Furlong didn’t live in the same world.

“Call me if you need anything,” I said. “But don’t leave any messages with the service.”

“A message is what got me in this hole. But I ain’t blaming nobody.” A solo guitar was playing low on his end, slow and snarly. It might have been one of his old demo tapes. “Say, man, you didn’t, uh—”

“Arsenault? Not my modus. I have a poison ring.”

“That’s cool. Dude was asking to get whacked.”

“You had trouble?”

“His door accidentally fell open while his secretary was telling me he was in conference. The mouth on him.” He broke off for a moment. He was listening to the tape. Then: “You know what? He was in there all by himself There wasn’t nobody to confer with.”

“Corporate’s a bitch. Is that you I’m hearing?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Swell as Mel’s wells. Hocked my axe last week. Long as it was around I could hear the ghost of my fingers playing it all night. I’d rather listen to the real thing.”

“It doesn’t come from the fingers, you know.”

“I know.”

I told him again to call me if anything broke. I hung up, but I kept my hand on the receiver, jingling the change in my pocket.

Then I fed in some more coins and started another layer of callus on my index finger.

“Hi, this is Nate Millender. If it’s paying work, leave a message. If it’s going to cost me, keep trying, you never can tell. Well, you know this shit.”

I took my own advice and didn’t leave a message.

I looked at my watch again. It was still just past noon. Some days are like that. Millender couldn’t still be out on his boat, because his sailing companion, Royce Grayling, had been in Allen Park bright and early. On assignment, probably. Blissful in his ignorance that he was the only remaining mile of road between me and the witchfinder.

I looked at my watch. Just past noon.

Outside the sky was a clear blue bowl. No shadows to hide in.

At least this time I wouldn’t have to go home and change into my burglar clothes.

H
OME TO
N
ATE
M
ILLENDER
was an apartment on Cadillac Boulevard, not as ritzy as it sounds, but about as far up the scale as you can climb inside the Detroit city limits before you have enough together to get out. It was also his business address.

The building was sandstone, eight stories high with arched windows marching along the top floor like stylized camels and wrought-iron railings erected in front of the basement windows to dishearten the less ambitious burglars. The block to the north was all Queen Anne houses with fresh paint jobs and clipped lawns, narrow gables thrust skyward like aristocratic noses. The block to the south had empty spaces in its rows of brick boxes; crack houses gone the way of Joe Firebug and the wrecking ball. Millender’s block was poised between the two neighborhoods like a runner caught off base, trying to decide which direction to run.

Fans whirred in two of the open windows. Air conditioners thrust their boxlike backsides out some of the others. Still others were shut tight, the rooms they belonged to awaiting their next occupants. Vacant apartments are another bellwether of a city in trouble, like empty bleachers at the ballpark. But they weren’t boarded up. There was hope.

The foyer smelled of potpourri and clean rubber. A steel-framed glass door with a grid between the thick panes wouldn’t budge when I tugged on the handle. I pressed the yellow Bakelite button next to the mailbox with N. MILLENDER lettered on it in soft pencil. The door remained locked. I selected a friendly sounding name higher up. The lock clonked.

The fourth floor was Millender’s, paneled in yellow imitation maple with a flocked red carpet in the hallway. I knocked on Millender’s door, waited, knocked again. Same no answer.

I took inventory. The celluloid strip in my wallet was out of its class; the molding curled over the edge of the door. I dove for the precision tools.

Nutpicks are best, the kind with curved points like lazy hooks. On jobs like that I carry them in a small paper bag in my jacket pocket along with a cracker and half a dozen walnuts, just in case I’m stopped and searched. I was going on three years on the same walnuts. They would taste like clothespins.

The cheapest lock in creation requires two picks to open: one to hold back the spring-activated shield that protects the tumblers from tampering, the other to tamper. This one wasn’t the cheapest and a long way from burglar-proof, but it took me six minutes; my specialty’s motor tailing, not breaking and entering. I lost two of those minutes while a round-shouldered woman with a cap of white hair and her escort, a tall, narrow-chested old party wearing a bright cloth cap with a fuzzy ball on top, came hobbling down the hallway. They were leaning on each other and wheezing from the four-flight climb in weather that kills more elderly people than broken hips. I poked the paraphernalia up my sleeve, knocked, and pretended to be waiting for an answer while they made their way past. Finally the old man fished a key ring the size of a bowling ball out of the deep pocket of his slacks, sorted through the items dangling from it with the care of someone selecting his own coffin, and let them into an apartment two doors down. Sixty seconds later I had click.

Millender loved sailing. He had a Maxfield Parrish print of a square-rigger leaning sheets to the wind on a choppy sea framed on the wall facing the door, a regatta trophy standing all alone on the mantel of a false fireplace, brass running lamps mounted on the walls. The living room, which took up most of the floor plan, was dusted and tidy, the furniture arranged at right angles; squared away. In the shallow kitchenette a teabag lay calcifying in an insulated mug with a ketch screen-printed on the side, the way even a fastidious bachelor on a tight schedule might leave it, but the sink and counter gleamed. He had a mariner’s love of spotlessness and order.

There was time enough to toss those rooms later. Bedrooms are best for hidden booty.

The bed was a double, made neatly. There was a driftwood lamp on the nightstand, a three-drawer bureau with toilet items laid out on it and a small case full of books on the order of Conrad and C. S. Forester. The only picture was a magazine print in a cheap frame of a pair of satyrs rolling their eyes at each other in a woodland setting.

There was something familiar about the room, but I couldn’t stand a quarter on just what it was. It was as if I’d seen it in a dream I’d forgotten.

Not knowing what I was looking for, I looked at everything, including the underside of the mattress and the backs and bottoms of all the drawers. I even pried the top off a plastic container of talcum and poked around inside with the handle of a rattail comb. Just for fun I tasted the powder on the end of a finger. I had him then, if they ever got around to passing a law against cornstarch.

He liked Hawaiian shirts, duck pants, tennis socks, slingshot underwear, and nude studies. He kept the pictures in a thick envelope under the shirts. They were black-and-whites mostly, eight-by-ten experiments in light and texture with borders, smooth taut skin against rough barnwood and stucco. They ran to a single style, and from the rubbing of the varnished surfaces they seemed to have been taken for Millender’s personal use. And they were all male.

I here was nothing rampant about them or even obscene according to the Supreme Court. They were just art studies of darkly handsome well-built young men in their prime without clothes. I didn’t know any of them from Praxiteles. I put them back.

Millender had gutted a walk-in closet and wired and plumbed it for use as a darkroom. It was just big enough for a double sink and a stainless steel counter holding up some equipment that was new to me since I’d given up developing my own surveillance photos and started going to custom labs. Several negatives clothespinned to the wire hammocked over the sink contained nothing more titillating than a fleet of sailboats cruising fully erect on the flat surface of what might have been Lake St. Clair.

The bathroom was a snooze. Not even any interesting prescription pills in the medicine cabinet. He used Grey Flannel soap.

I went back into the bedroom. It still looked familiar, with something discordant to boot. I stood in the doorway with my hands in my pockets and frisked the place with my eyes. They stopped at the picture of the satyrs.

It had been lithographed from a nineteenth-century original, engraved in that whimsical style the Victorians applied to mythological subjects lest they be accused of sympathy with the lascivious pagans. The nude photographs were kept out of sight; they were not ornaments. It was the only visible testimony to the appetites of the man who slept in that room. Moreover, it was the only decoration in the apartment without a nautical theme.

I went over and took it down off its nail. There was no wall safe behind it, only a rectangular patch of unfaded paint whose size and shape matched the picture. The frame was plastic, the back plain cardboard held in place with bent staples. It was the work of a second to pull it apart. Between the magazine print and the cardboard was an envelope much smaller than the one in the bureau drawer and a savings passbook from the National Bank of Detroit. I slid out a small negative and three photographic prints just over wallet size. They were all the same. A younger, trimmer Lynn Arsenault than the one who was on his way to the Wayne County Morgue lay in bed with a Nate Millender who didn’t look a day younger than the one I had met at the Grosse Pointe Marina. Some guys just never age.

Both men were naked. Neither of them looked alarmed by the presence of a camera.

Looking at Arsenault I had that same sense of revisitation I’d felt when I first entered the room. I remembered the envelope in my pocket, the one containing the extortion note I’d had delivered to Arsenault at Imminent Visions and the counterfeit photograph I’d gotten from Jay Bell Furlong. I took out the picture and held it next to one of the prints from inside the frame. It was the same pose. The bed was the same and so was the room. It was the room I was standing in. The only thing different was Arsenault’s companion. Millender had been less muscular then, slender rather than lean, with almost no hair on his body. In that position he might have passed for a fairly flat-chested woman, except for his head.