The Witchfinder (17 page)

I turned to the passbook and started paging through it. Ichabod Nathan Millender—a better reason than most to go by his middle name—was a man of regular habits when it came to transactions. He never missed a month.

It might have been the job and the extra set of senses that comes with it. It might have been a change in the nearly nonexistent current of air in that shut-up room. More likely I caught a flash of movement in the mirror over the bureau. Whatever it was, I was in motion, diving across the bed and twisting to get my hand on the revolver in its holster, when the room went supernova. Heat scorched my eye sockets, white flame leapt up the walls, melting gaping black holes in them, as if they were plastic. The ceiling bellied and came down on top of me. It was a lot heavier than plastic.

They say you never hear the shot.

As usual, they’re wrong.

I
WAS EXPERIENCING
a midlife crisis.

Some of the old rules still apply. A man towing forty should be steering a desk in a cubicle downtown, or maybe a tractor or a bulldozer in the open air, worrying about his kid getting his driver’s license and whether his wife’s sudden interest in abdominal crunches is connected with the new young intern she can’t stop talking about and if he has enough insurance to get the house out of hock if he blows a major artery at lunch. He’s supposed to be developing hemorrhoids, a roll around his trunk, and an affinity for Ban-Lon and Sansabelt on weekends.

He sure isn’t supposed to be sprawled on his stomach across the bed in a stranger’s apartment, staring glassily at a fat beige spider that had survived the most recent vacuuming and wondering if it would have time to spin a strand from its web to the end of his nose before the morgue wagon came.

Dad was right. I should have taken a civil service test.

The spider wasn’t much more than a blur. I was looking at it with my lazy left eye. The right was either an empty socket or caked with blood.

There was quite a lot of blood. I couldn’t see it, but I had been careless enough times to know that smell, copper and iron with just a hint of Scotch whisky, just as a dog recognizes its own scent.

I felt detached. It wasn’t my blood anymore.

Lying there I was suddenly aware that the bed had changed. It had sprouted wheels and was rolling down a set of steel tracks, clickety-clack, picking up speed on the downgrade with Casey Jones at the controls. Casey was going too fast. I hung on tight as we swooped over the next hill. At the top the coupling came loose. The wheels left the tracks and I was headed into the empty blue bowl of the sky.

I was rescued from falling by a sailboat. The bronze sloop from the trophy on Nate Millender’s mantel had sailed off its pedestal, swelling to full size as its canvas filled and tacking around to scoop me up without slowing. Over the Monopoly board of the western neighborhoods we swept, across the jagged business-chart skyline of downtown, splashing down in the Detroit River. Down the river to Lake Erie, through the inlet to Lake Ontario, and along the St. Lawrence Seaway to the North Atlantic, where we had to watch out for U-boats. I smelled the salt air, copper and iron with a hint of Scotch whisky.

I never lost sight of the spider, though. As it shrank in the distance, losing size but gaining detail, it opened its mandibles and said:

“Where’s that EMS unit? This guy’s going to bleed to death before they get here.”

I was curious to know who was on the other end of this arachnoid conversation, since it didn’t seem to be directed at me; but I couldn’t stay to find out. The curvature of the earth came between us and then the sun set on the water, staining the surface blood red before extinguishing itself beneath the waves. And me with it.

“Bulls got no bench. We’ll catch ’em next year.”

“Who’s we? Isiah’s gone, we lost Rodman. We got former Pistons scattered all over the NBA. This free-agent shit is ruining the game.”

“What if we had Jordan?”

“Hell with Jordan. I don’t want no players that bad-mouth Detroit.”

“That narrows the field.”

“I’d sooner play the guy that waxes the court. I got community pride.”

“Hey, this guy’s awake.”

“I’ll get Mrs. Tarnower.”

“Wait up.”

I never got to see the participants in this pre-game show. I was looking at perforated ceiling tiles and wondering if they were made in Dublin. Tracing a Great Circle route from Newfoundland due east, I should have reached Ireland first. But unless the natives had abandoned Barry Fitzgerald’s brogue for the Detroit black dialect, something had gone wrong with my navigation.

On a brighter note, I was seeing with both eyes now. I needed them to count eighty-six holes in the tile directly in my line of sight. I turned my head a micromillimeter to start on the tile next to it and somebody—a Belfast potato-harvester, possibly—hit me with a shovel. A bolt of black lightning arced between my temples and the ceiling vanished behind a purple cloud. I closed my eyes and counted my pulse instead. I got eighty-six to the minute, the same number as the holes in the ceiling tile.

When I opened my eyes I was looking at a pair of glasses on a female face with a moustache and a mole on the side of its nose. If this was an angel I must have been in the part of heaven reserved for private investigators.

The face in its time disappeared. In a little while I found I could move my head slowly without black lightning. A kid in jeans, Reeboks, and a T-shirt reading
I BRAKE FOR NUKES
was standing next to the bed monkeying with a clipboard. I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth and asked him if he was supposed to be in here. The voice I used had been rejected by Bela Lugosi.

When he grinned, his freckles disappeared into crescents in his cheeks.

“If I’m not, I wish you’d tell the nurse. I’ve got a softball game to pitch.”

“You’re a little young for an orderly.”

“I guess that’s why they made me a doctor.”

“And I’m Long John Silver.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Silver. I’m Dr. Ebersole. Got a stethoscope and everything.” He picked up the end and waggled it.

“That how they dress for the ER now?”

He glanced down at his teenage chic. “The softball team’s looking for a sponsor. We can’t afford uniforms.”

“I knew you weren’t a doctor.”

“I didn’t say I was one of the rich ones. Hold still, please.” He produced a penlight, pried open my eyelids, and shone the beam into the pupils. It pierced through to the back of my skull like a red-hot needle. “This your first concussion?”

“What, today?”

He snapped off the light. “Are you an athlete?”

“No, I just fall down a lot.” I moved my eyes around. The noise made my headache worse. “Detroit Receiving, right?”

“How’d you guess? This town has more hospitals than churches and traffic lights.”

“I recognized the pallet. Just where was I shot this time?”

“ ‘This time’?”

“I’d tell you, but I’m saving it for my unauthorized autobiography.”

He hung the clipboard on the foot of the bed and hooked his thumbs in his tight pockets, frowning. That made him a doctor.

“I took seventeen stitches in a laceration above your right ear. The skull wasn’t fractured, but you’re concussed and you lost blood. A lot of blood. I could get more technical, but I was out the day they taught Latin.”

“Playing softball.”

“I love softball. If I liked medicine half as much I’d be surgeon general by now.”

“People would mistake you for a drum major. When do I get sprung?”

“You’re lucky to be in a position to ask that question. One of the officers who found you started to call it in as a homicide. You had almost no pulse. There was blood clotted in your right orbit.”

“Orbit?”

“Eye socket. He thought it was the exit wound.”

“I’m here for the night, huh.”

“You don’t have the picture, Mr. Walker.” He leaned on the bedrail. “When you came in, you had no vital signs. That was twenty-nine hours ago and you’ve been unconscious ever since. I’d like to keep you two weeks, but we need the bed. There was a gang fight last night on Erskine. The young man on the other side of that curtain had his kidneys crushed by a baseball bat. Next week is graduation, and you know how effective those public-service ads are about not mixing alcohol and gasoline when you’ve got a brand new sheepskin and a license to drive. But I’m holding you as long as they’ll let me. Cerebral trauma isn’t the sniffles.”

Twenty-nine hours.

“The pictures,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Where are my things?”

“Your clothes and valuables are locked up in that cabinet. You won’t be needing them for a while.”

It was one of those sheet-metal numbers that open with a sharp look.

“There’s a detective waiting outside to talk to you,” he said. “I can say you’re resting.”

“No, the longer they wait the uglier they get.”

“Not this one.”

“That bad, is he?” I groped for the buttons on the bedrail. The motor hummed and I sat up. My head throbbed in long steady swells. More nautical stuff. Phooey.

Ebersole glanced at the watch on the underside of his wrist. It had a cartoon character on the face. “I can still make the third inning. I’ll look in on you tomorrow.”

“Personal question.”

At the door he turned to grin. “I’ll be thirty at the end of August.”

“Happy birthday.”

The door closed behind him.

A cheesecloth curtain on a rolling rail separated my bed from my neighbor’s. I could hear his heart monitor measuring out his life in uncertain blips, the trickle of his damaged kidneys draining down a plastic tube. Dusty-brass daylight crept between vertical blinds on the room’s only window.

The right side of my head felt tight and puckered. I reached up and touched a square patch of adhesive and thick cotton and smooth flesh around it where there used to be hair. I made a bet with myself it would grow in even grayer.

“You look like crap.”

I had closed my eyes for a moment. I may have dozed. I hadn’t heard the door opening.

At first I thought it was the drugs they were feeding me through the tube taped to my arm. Impressions only, to start. A trim waist and legs in a snug black evening dress of some material that ate light, a slit that showed a flash of white thigh when she walked. Bare shoulders and deep cleavage, pearls against skin dusted lightly with freckles. Enormous blue eyes and light brown hair, almost honey-colored but not quite, pushed to one side and free for once of the plastic band that made her look like a cheerleader. Instead she looked like prom night. Saying I looked like crap.

“You don’t,” I said. “Working undercover, Lieutenant?”

“So to speak?”

I grinned; weakly, I hoped. It didn’t take much acting.

She said, “I’m on my way to dinner at Carl’s Chop House and then the show at the Fisher. Cops have lives, too. Just thought I’d drop by and see if you were dead yet.”

“What time did you draw in the pool?”

Mary Ann Thaler smiled. It wasn’t a thing she did often, because her fellow officers in the Detroit Detective Division might not take her seriously. Before she could speak I pointed at her purse, a silver mesh clutch the size of a Montana belt buckle.

“That big enough for the cuffs and your departmental piece?”

“Just the gun. I can always tie you up with my pantyhose. Unless there’s something you want to tell me.”

“I thought you were Felony Homicide.”

“I am. You committed the first and almost became a victim of the second.”

“Where are your glasses?”

“Contacts. Tortoiseshell rims don’t go with pearls. Don’t change the subject. Do you always carry walnuts and related utensils?”

“You’ve been through my personal effects.”

“Only dead people have personal effects. How come I never see you eating walnuts?”

“It isn’t polite in front of ladies and cops. Who’s your date? Has he got a job?”

“Shut up and let me do mine. You’re no Jimmy Valentine; you scratched up the lock on your way in. What did you find in Millender’s apartment?”

“What did you find on me?”

“Nuts.”

Assuming that was a legitimate answer, whoever had shot me had taken the envelope from my pocket. If so he’d also gotten the pictures and the negative I’d found. “Do I get a lawyer?”

“You’re not under arrest. All you get is me.”

“Off the books?”

She spread her arms. “Where would I be wearing a wire?”

“No comment.” I groped for my shirt pocket out of habit. I was wearing a paper robe. “I guess you don’t have cigarettes either.”

“Don’t use ’em. Quit stalling.”

“Millender’s got a twenty-three-foot sailing sloop to support. He supports it with a keyhole lens. I was after some pictures.”

“Homosexual pictures?”

I looked at her for a second. “I don’t think they have sex.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Laughter is the best medicine,” I said. “Who said anything about homosexuals?”

“I pulled Millender’s sheet. He’s got three lewd-and-lascivious beefs in highway rest stops, one conviction, and just finished probation on a federal rap for sending pornography through the mails. He’s his own favorite model.”

“Sort of like Rembrandt.”

“Rembrandt kept his jerkin on. This guy’s a state-of-the-art sicko. Who’s your client?”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant. I’m having a relapse.”

“Impossible. The bullet only hit your head.” She tapped a glossy nail against the purse containing her artillery. “Okay, we’ll start slow and work our way up to Double Jeopardy. Who shot you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it Millender?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the capital of South Dakota?”

“Pierre.”

She nodded. “I just wanted to hear you tell the truth once.”

“I guessed about Pierre.”

“I used to tease John Alderdyce whenever he got his blood up over something you did,” she said, “or didn’t do, or said, or didn’t say, or wouldn’t. He told me I should count myself lucky I hadn’t tripped over you yet on a case of my own. I’m counting now.”

“How is John?”