The Witchfinder (24 page)

“I don’t suppose there’s a way we can settle this here,” I said.

“Officer Redburn?”

“No.”

“You heard him, Walker. With Duane around I never have to look at the manual. How’s your head?”

“The bandage needs changing.”

“We’ll get it looked at. What happened, by the way?”

“Conception.”

“A lot of people make that mistake. That’s why Goodyear invented rubber. Let’s go. You follow the Tigers? We can listen to the game in the car.”

He was standing now, a middle-built professional drifting in the gray channel between his final promotion and retirement, who looked as if he’d forgotten how to be rough, impersonally or otherwise. Plenty of overtime went into achieving that look.

We walked through the living room Indian file, the sergeant in front. His partner brought up the rear with one hand on my arm and the other resting on his Glock. St. Thomas twisted the deadlock and swung the front door wide. Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler of the Detroit Police Department was standing on the stoop. She had two uniformed officers with her.

“You’re under arrest, Walker,” she said. “Material witness in a homicide.”

Belatedly she realized I wasn’t alone. She looked at Redburn first, then at St. Thomas, reacting instinctively to rank.

“Hello?”

T
HERE WAS AN EMBARRASSED
little silence. Being the host, I broke it.

“Lieutenant Thaler,” I said, “Sergeant St. Thomas. Officer Redburn, Lieutenant Thaler. Mary Ann, Duane. I don’t know Sergeant St. Thomas’s Christian name. Am I leaving anybody out?”

I watched the lieutenant’s absorbent blue eyes taking it all in behind the brainy-girl glasses. Prom Night was over: She wore her hair in bangs and down to her shoulders with an inward-turning flirt at the ends, no heels, a beige sleeveless cotton top that showed off the gentle definition in her upper arms, and green-and-white-striped culottes. Shorts violated the plainclothes dress code, but she would be the kind who pushed the envelope. She wore a bag on her right shoulder big enough for gun, cuffs, and the Stationary Traffic Unit—no date purse today—with the flap open and her hand resting inside. It would be interesting to see how her fast draw compared with Sergeant St. Thomas’s.

She was looking at him. “Flatrock?”

“Allen Park.”

“I thought Flatrock was where Millender’s body beached.”

“Who’s Millender?”

“You’re not investigating Nate Millender’s murder?”

“Never heard of him. We’re investigating the murder of Lynn Arsenault.”

“Never heard of him.”

I said, “I thought you people kept tabs on all the area homicides.”

“I told you last night I have a life,” she said. “What’s this about, Sergeant? I have a warrant.” She drew a long fold of paper out of her bag.

“We have one too.” He showed her his.

“I have jurisdiction.”

“We have Walker.”

“I have two armed men.”

“I have to sit down,” I said.

An open convertible boated down the block trailing Anita Baker from speakers the size of refrigerators. The mood changed.

Thaler said, “Let’s all sit down. It’s too hot to argue out here.”

We went back into the living room. Redburn took off the cuffs on St. Thomas’s order and I sat between them on the sofa, kneading blood back into my wrists. Thaler sat in the easy chair, spine straight, knees together, with her hands on the bag in her lap. She looked like the neighbor girl come to interview for babysitter. One of the uniforms pried open a window and switched on the fan. The air stirred resentfully and started circulating.

“Ladies first,” said St. Thomas.

“I’m not a lady. I’m a lieutenant with Detroit Felony Homicide.”

“I didn’t mean it as a putdown. I was just being polite.”

Her dimples came out. “Bullshit, Sergeant. This is my beat.”

“I’ll tell it,” I said. “I like co-ed mud wrestling as much as the next guy, but it’s my living room and I’m the one who gets to clean the rug.”

I laid it out then, everything in its order, starting with the call from Stuart Lund that had gotten me out of bed and into the hotel at the airport. St. Thomas, who had heard most of it from Furlong and Lund, watched me with the unblinking patience of a cat staking out a mousehole; looking for places where the two versions didn’t line up. Thaler, female for all her profession and rank, stared at the floor most of the time, making eye contact only when I surprised. Then she glanced away quickly as if I’d caught her at something. It was a good dodge, and so far as I could tell it was all her own. Redburn and the Detroit uniforms were just furniture. I didn’t have time for them while two brains, conditioned by training and experience not to accept anything at face value, picked over my monologue behind four panes of prescription glass.

The fan hummed in the silence that rolled down after I finished talking.

The lady from downtown broke it. “I meet more liars in a working day than the average person meets in a lifetime. You may not be the best I ever heard, but, brother, you’ve sure got the biggest store.”

“Are you talking about last night or now?”

“Both. If you’re not lying now you’re just plain stupid, and stupid is one thing you’re not.”

“I resent that.”

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“How was your date?”

“None of your business, and don’t change the subject.” She tapped her fingers on her bag. “If Royce Grayling killed Millender and Arsenault, that has nothing to do with your job, which is to find out who smeared this Lily Talbot and got Furlong to call off their engagement. Which means you’re interfering in an official homicide investigation for the sake of your own curiosity. How stupid is that?”

“Two investigations.” St. Thomas was looking at me. “Up until five minutes ago, the messenger who visited Arsenault just before he turned up dead was our best lead, after you. I’ve had half the squad out looking for him for two days. Now you say he was your plant. Maybe I won’t book you after all. Maybe I’ll just report you to Ma Bell for vandalizing telephone company equipment and let her do the rest.”

“Oh, man.” One of the downtown cops shuddered.

Thaler turned over a hand. “You’re doing just what John Alderdyce warned me about: using your assignment as an excuse to run out and play Bulldog Drummond. If you even try to deny it, I’ll tack obstruction of justice on to the material witness beef.”

“Self-analysis isn’t a spectator sport,” I said. “I’m curious, all right. It’s an asset to the job, and you know it. I’ve got questions about some of the things Grayling did, if he did them, that don’t match up with his history. He’s taking too many chances and not following up. Until I have answers I won’t be able to separate the two killings from my case.”

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “Millender didn’t die on the cruise you saw him off on with Grayling.”

I touched my bandage. It was moist. “You’ve been busy.”

“I haven’t read Charlie Brown all year; no time. Witnesses saw Millender in good health buying sailing tackle in a specialty store in Grosse Pointe Farms Friday morning. The day after you saw him.”

“Positive ID?”

“He was an old customer. He was eating a tomato from a sack he bought at the market next door. When the body washed up we went back with a morgue photo and the clerk made a tentative. Well, you know what a floater looks like.”

“Unfortunately.”

“We should have a positive from the FBI tomorrow on the prints. So it happened on a different cruise. We’ll talk to Grayling, but if he’s the heavyweight you say he is he’ll have an alibi solid enough to jump on. That careful enough for you?”

“There’s still Arsenault,” I said, “and witnesses to place him at the scene.”

“Witness,” St. Thomas put in. “Just one.”

I looked at him. He’d removed his glasses and was polishing the lenses with a lawn handkerchief. Most nearsighted people look incomplete and vulnerable when they take them off; with him it was like unsheathing twin steel blades. He didn’t stop at the lenses, but went on to wipe off the bows and nosepiece.

“Arsenault’s secretary, Mrs.—?” He glanced at Redburn, who paged through his notebook.

“Greta Griswold.”

“Good old Detroit name. I’ll bet her great-great grandmother served sauerkraut to Cadillac. Apparently she was the only one who saw Grayling at Imminent Visions the day Arsenault was killed. He didn’t come past the guard in the lobby.”

“What about the security monitors?”

“We’ve been through every foot of videotape. No Grayling.”

“Why did she lie?”

“Damn. I’m glad you thought of that. We’ll be sure to ask her, just as soon as we find her.” He held the glasses up to the light, squinting, then put them back on. He folded the handkerchief carefully to avoid new creases and returned it to his pocket.

“She powdered?”

“Right after we questioned her the first time. Told the office manager she was too upset to work and asked if she could go home. She went home, all right. She packed everything but the refrigerator and peeled rubber. The squeal’s out. She won’t run long.”

“What about Grayling?”

“Tougher proposition. Nobody in the City-County Building has seen him in a couple of days. Not unusual, we’re told. He keeps his office in his glove compartment and spends most of his time on the road. No secretary. His desk is clean. I mean clean. There isn’t even a pencil in it. We’ve got a car at his place on Outer Drive.”

“He lives in the city?”

Light snapped off the silver frames. “He’s a municipal employee, Walker. It’s required.”

“He can afford to keep a phantom address inside the limits and live in Grosse Pointe.”

“Maybe he prefers to hang his hat in the town where he was born.”

“Grayling was born here in Hamtramck.”

“Right, like you go through Customs when you cross Joseph Campau. It’s all Detroit. Tell you something.” He leaned back against the arm of the sofa. His underarm pistol gleamed. “I grew up on Riopelle where the rumrunners used to dock. Harbortown they call it now, all six toxic blocks of it with condos made out of warehouses. We used to fish in the river. I made comic book money playing euchre in the B-and-O boxcars on the siding. I’d be a Detroit cop like the lieutenant here if I didn’t have a hole in one eardrum. I love every crummy inch of this town. It’s home.”

“No offense, Sergeant. It’s the only urban center in the country where a city address means you can’t afford to move out.”

“It’s a damn shame.”

“It’s a tragedy. So are two murders. What are you going to do when he comes home, slap the cuffs on him?”

“So far only two people say he’s a suspect. One’s on the lam and the other’s under arrest for lying his ass off. Sorry, Lieutenant.”

“Go to hell.”

“We’ll just talk to him,” he said.

“If he lets you,” I said.

He sat up. “That means exactly what?”

“Royce Grayling isn’t Pittsburgh Phil,” I said. “He caps people between lunch with the governor and handball with the mayor. Just you and me sitting here discussing his greatest hits is grounds for a defamation suit. Which he’d win, because he goes fishing with the judge. That doesn’t scare me. You’ve been through my drawers, you know what I’m worth. It wouldn’t pay his court costs. The point is he hauls a lot of freight. Don’t tell me you’re going to grill him like some working stiff who tried to hire an undercover cop to kill his wife. Like the lieutenant said, I’m not stupid.”

“So the system stinks. My kid wants to quit school and join the NBA. That stinks too. But I didn’t throw up my hands and walk away.”

“So you’re going to grill Grayling?”

“Maybe just brown him a little, like I did my kid. He starts his junior year in September.” He stood. “Saddle up, Duane. We can still catch the late innings. No, put the cuffs away. We got what we wanted.”

Mary Ann Thaler said, “You’re backing off?”

“He’s all yours, Lieutenant. We’ll be in touch if Arsenault ties into your floater.”

“Wait, I’ll walk you out.” She got up, slinging the bag over her shoulder.

I looked up at her. “What about me?”

“I almost forgot.” She rummaged inside her bag, found what she was looking for, and put it on the coffee table. It was my revolver. I hadn’t seen it since Nate Millender’s apartment. “When I’m wrong I admit it,” she said. “You are stupid.”

The front door closed behind all five cops.

W
HEN THEY WERE GONE
I walked through the house, locking doors and checking dark corners for cop eggs. Then I went into the bathroom to cleanse the wound and change dressings.

I tried sleeping, but I was running a slight fever, and as always happened when in that condition I dreamed I was stranded in West Equatorial Africa. This time I was hunting lions. One in particular, a canny old male, had carried off a couple of hundred villagers and left a trail across the veldt like the floor of a slaughterhouse. While I was following it I got that old tickle at the base of my brain that told me I was the one being hunted. I unslung the big-bore Mannlicher from my shoulder, drew back the bolt to inspect the load, slammed it back into the breech, and turned around to face the old graymane just as it sprang. I shouldered the rifle, drew a quick bead between its yellow eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

The shell didn’t go off, of course. It never does.

I woke up in a puddle of sweat. My fever had broken. I took a shower, being careful to keep the bandage from getting wet, threw on my cotton robe, and sat down in the living room to watch TV. It was early evening. The ballgame was over—the Tigers had lost, as usual, to the worst team in both leagues—and Channel 4 was running another episode in its series of documentaries marking the one hundredth anniversary of the invention of the automobile.

In 1896, George Baldwin Selden, a fifty-one-year-old tinkerer and backyard inventor who had failed for twenty years to build an internal combustion engine that worked, was granted a patent naming him the sole owner of an unproven invention. In time he fell under the influence of a consortium of investors who employed the patent to extort money from fledgling automobile manufacturers in return for a license to operate. Leland fell into line, as did Chrysler, the brothers Dodge, and twenty or thirty other early moguls whose names have long since disappeared along with their emblems. Henry Ford alone held out, continuing to manufacture his Model T despite a blizzard of summonses, injunctions, and even an advertising campaign warning consumers that the purchase of a Ford included the guarantee of a lawsuit. Henry bore on in the face of additional pressure from legislators, the pro-Selden press, and his fellow automakers, until a federal court ruled in 1911 that no one person or group could claim credit for the gasoline engine. The consortium dissolved, and Selden died eleven years later at the age of seventy-seven, a failure to the finish. But the celebrants had fixed upon the date of his scurrilous patent as an excuse to throw a centennial.