The Witchfinder (3 page)

“Well, I broke off the relationship. I didn’t trust myself even to speak to Lily. The tabloids would have lapped up a public scene. I had Stuart send her a letter on Furlong and Belder stationery, gave notice at Wayne State, and went—fled—back to L.A. The only cowardly act in my adult life. I’m telling you all this to give you some idea of how I felt when I found out the picture is a fake.”

“It’s a good one,” I said. “I didn’t spot it.”

“You’d need a glass and some training. I had both but didn’t bother to use them. I fired that pup Arsenault from my firm the year before when I found out he was spying for Whiting. It all fit together, so I never questioned the picture. Then last month I was sorting through some things, getting my affairs in order, when I found the original of the photograph they used of Lily. The damn thing was taken of us together at a charity dinner at the Pontchartrain, an Associated Press photo. I’d clipped it and never looked at it again. I didn’t recognize it, the expression and angle of her face, in the composite. Some genius I am. Another, please, Windy.” He gestured toward the empty glass on the refrigerator.

Lund hesitated. “Are you certain?”

“I think you’ll agree the condition of my liver is someone else’s concern.”

The attorney upended a dwarf bottle of gin into the glass, added ice, and passed it over the back of the loveseat. The stain on Furlong’s cheeks when he drank lasted as long as breath on a mirror.

“The question is,” he said, “who faked the picture and who sent it to me? Find out.”

“Who stood to gain from a breakup?”

“My heirs. Naturally I’d have bequeathed the bulk of my estate to my widow and distributed what was left among the others. If I didn’t, the State of California would have, and not the way I’d have chosen. For an old man, the list is fairly short.”

I got out my notebook and pen while he took another hit from his glass.

“My son John, who has spent every penny I’ve given him on various crackpot schemes, including video telephones and solar houses in Seattle, where it rains two hundred days out of the year. My charming first wife Karen, his mother. She tried to run me down in my driveway the morning of the day I left her, and I’ve no reason to believe she’s mellowed in thirty years. Oh, and my kid brother Larry, who I haven’t seen or spoken to since nineteen forty-seven. I assume he’s retired from the post office by now if he’s still living. Assorted other relatives. I had Stuart prepare a file.”

Lund picked up the manila folder from the table and handed it to me. It contained the photograph and a word-processed typescript double-spaced on heavy bond secured with brass fasteners. The first name after the paragraph on Lynn Arsenault was Oswald Belder.

I looked up. “Your partner?”

“He inherits the business. I can’t believe he’s mixed up in this. Ozzie’s the conscience of the firm. I’d trust him with anything but this mission. He’d have tried to talk me out of it. And he might have succeeded.”

I paged through the dossier. Despite his disclaimer, it seemed like a lot of suspects for one lifetime. “Most of these addresses are out of state. I’ll have to farm some of it out. You might get faster results with a larger agency. Say, two people.”

Furlong smiled for the first time. It made his face look like the label on a bottle of iodine.

“You didn’t think I dreamed up this deathwatch ploy for my personal amusement, did you? It was the best way to get the news around. Most of the heirs have already made contact with Windy. Some of them are already in town for the reading of the will. The rest are on their way. The English gentleman will give you the details.”

“Why Detroit? Los Angeles is crawling with private operators.”

“In my condition you put a lot of thought into where you go, because the odds are that’s where you’ll spend eternity. Detroit is home. I was born here. This is where I found my direction and it’s where I intend to be buried.” He’d quit smiling. “Also I’m fairly certain Lily wouldn’t come out to the Coast even if I promised her an interview with the ghost of Diego Rivera. She runs an art gallery here. That’s the second part of the assignment, Walker. I want you to talk to her. I need to apologize to her while there’s still time.”

“It could take a while.”

“You’ve got four weeks. Less than that, if I’m any judge of doctors. The checkbook, please, Mr. Lund. I’ll draw this one up myself.”

He’d made that simple act sound like a job for heavy equipment. Which it was, for him; by the time he’d signed his name, a plain signature as legible as the name of the bank engraved in block capitals across the top, he was sweating in that air-conditioned room.

“What happens when I find the witchfinder?”

“I’ll have the satisfaction of looking into the eyes of a coward.”

H
E TORE THE CHECK LOOSE
and held it up. Stuart Lund looked at it and gave it to me. It was made out in the amount of seventy-five hundred dollars.

“That should get you started,” Furlong said. “Now I’ll rest.”

Lund helped him to his feet and through the door to the bedroom. It was a lot of weight for one very old cane to support; but as the architect had said, they built things better then.

When the lawyer returned I filled several more notebook pages with information on the incoming relations. I left him resting his sore foot on an ottoman and went straight to my bank. When a man who tells you he’s terminally ill cuts you a check you don’t stop for lunch.

With a comfortable eight thousand, five hundred dollars lying between me and a reservation at the Cardboard Hilton, I paid some bills, pocketed a couple of hundred to walk around on, and treated myself to a stuffed breast of chicken in a restaurant on West Congress, complete with flatware and tablecloths. Between bread and coffee and the main course I carried my notebook to the pay telephone by the restrooms and made an appointment for that afternoon with Oswald Belder, Furlong’s business partner. Most of the relatives on the list had not yet arrived in town.

Next I tried Lily Talbot’s art gallery. A female voice with wintergreen laid in over the cornpone told me Miz Talbot wasn’t expected in until tomorrow. I said I’d call back. Solvency breeds patience.

The world headquarters of Furlong, Belder, & Associates shimmered in heat waves like isinglass curtains, an urban mirage. It was a retired warehouse on the lip of what they call Bricktown now, converted in the Furlong manner into wide bands of pink stucco with continuous tinted windows slitted in like wraparound glasses. An endangered species, warehouses. I don’t know where we’re going to store all our stuff when the last of them has gone to indirect lighting and swank magazines in the lobby.

Receptionists on two floors directed me to a waiting room the size of a softball field, lined with striped carpets and pressed-tin paneling. Watercolors in black steel frames represented original Furlong designs in ideal settings with plenty of space and garnishes of pruned shrubbery. Another ideal setting, an S-shaped curl of molded plastic aspiring to be a desk, sheltered a burnished black work of art inside its curves. She wore cornrows and dangling earrings that refracted light. The top two buttons of her teal silk blouse were unfastened, below which shadows beckoned. As I approached she reinterred a beige telephone receiver in its form-fitting standard and asked if she could help me.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to wear diamonds during the day,” I said.

She touched an earring. Her smile was cool in an oval face that didn’t seem to have any pores. “They’re cut crystal. It’s hard to ask for a raise when you’re wearing precious stones, Mister”—her lashes swooped down over her appointment book, then back up—“Walker?”

“That is I. He in?”

She lifted the receiver, passed along my name, and hung up. “Mr. Belder’s office is at the end of the hall.” She tilted her head toward an opening without a door. The earrings swung and sparkled.

“Thanks, Crystal.”

“Damaris is the name.”

The band of tinted glass across the back of Belder’s office looked out on the river and Hiram Walker’s distillery—no relation—on the Canadian side. The room was nearly as large as the reception area, painted powder blue, with a deep navy shag carpet and recessed shelves containing oversize pictorial books on architectural subjects and scale models of buildings and stairways. An easel behind the desk held up a detailed sketch of the Pentagon; only the block legend in the corner identified it as a shopping center. Belder—or the man occupying his swivel—sat profile to the door with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, glowering at the sketch. He was a long sack of assorted bones in a blue suit cut to his peculiar shape, wearing thick glasses in aluminum frames. He smeared his glistening black hair straight across his scalp from a part above his left ear. The skin at his left temple was spotted like old cheese and he seemed to be worrying at a set of teeth that didn’t fit him nearly as well as the suit.

He spoke without stirring or looking away from the easel. “Do you know anything about drafting?”

“Not a thing,” I said.

“I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s like one of those pictures in a magazine where you spot the errors and win a cruise. I never made it up the gangway.”

“It looks like a good place to buy a thousand-dollar screwdriver.”

He lifted his chin. “Say that again.”

“All it needs is a flag and a row of staff cars parked in front.”

“That’s it.” He straightened and clapped both palms on his knees. “It won’t do to remind consumers how much of their withholding is being spent on the military. No more three-martini lunches for the boys in market research.” He swiveled and stood. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Walker. You may have saved us some ugly press.”

He wasn’t as tall as he looked sitting, but his knees bent slightly, and anyway, anyone was bound to seem short after a meeting with Jay Bell Furlong and his attorney. Belder had a long sad face blurred with years and what might have been drink, and pocked all over like the Sphinx. My information said he was ten years younger than his partner, but he looked older and a lot less well. His was the type that always acted as pallbearer for more robust friends.

“You probably would have caught it yourself.”

“Maybe not. Sometimes it takes a stranger walking through a door.” He waited until I was sitting before he resumed his own perch. “You’re working for Stuart Lund, you said. Is he in town?”

“Briefly. He doesn’t want to be away from L.A. too long.” Furlong’s actual condition and presence in Detroit were the secrets of the day.

“Yes.” The sad face got sadder. “I wanted to go there as soon as I heard, but my doctor says with my blood pressure I might as well arrange for a hearse to pick me up at the airport. He’s young enough to think that a bad thing. I sent a telegram. No flowers. Jay had—has—definite opinions about pretty things that die and shed petals all over his interiors.”

“His opinion of you is just as definite. Lund says he considers you the conscience of Furlong and Belder.”

“Jay often said that. Once, many years ago, when the company was overextended, I talked him out of signing a deal with a manufacturer who wanted to put his name on a line of prefabricated houses. I convinced him there are some things you just don’t sell. Well, the manufacturer found someone else, went
Fortune
Five Hundred, and we had to close down our offices in London and San Francisco. But an office is just desks and a water cooler in the corner. A man’s name carries the value he himself places upon it.”

He got up, turned a blank sheet down over the drawing on the easel, and sat back down with a little exhalation that smelled like cherries. “I sometimes think of repeating that old gesture, but we’re a corporation now. You can’t be a conscience to a committee. However, you haven’t come to listen to an old man cry in his expensive imported beer.”

I didn’t jump on the cue. I asked him if I could smoke. He used the intercom and a moment later the black vision I had seen in the reception room glittered in, laid a ruby-colored glass ashtray on the corner of the desk, and shimmered away. She crowded six feet in her modest two-inch heels. Furlong’s hiring practices weren’t exactly consistent with his love of the horizontal.

Belder interpreted my thoughts. “A half-century-old joke. Frank Lloyd Wright, Jay’s mentor, was a short man. That’s why his ceilings are so low. Jay got a perverse pleasure, whenever Wright came to visit the old office, out of watching him look up at the clerks from the mail room. I wouldn’t ever accuse my senior partner of overlooking talent and skill in favor of stature, but his little rebel conceit has become second nature in Personnel. I doubt they even realize it when their eyes drift first thing to the physical description in the employment application.”

I set flame to a Winston and sledded the match down the tray’s glossy side. “Stuart Lund hired me to track down all the heirs to Furlong’s estate,” I lied. “The reading of the will is to take place here in town as soon as the last of them makes it in.”

“Sounds like an easy enough job. People undertake the most arduous journeys whenever a rich relation’s health fails.”

“Not so arduous in your case. You’re already here.”

He nodded. On him it looked like palsy. “I inherit the business and its headaches. But I already have those. I’ve
been
Furlong, Belder, and Associates ever since Jay decided that just being Jay Bell Furlong was occupation enough. Perhaps it is. In my extremity I’ve come to the happy realization that mediocrity has its advantages. I have little to live up to. But to correct you, I’ve nothing to do with any will. We drew up a mutual agreement when we formed the partnership. Whichever of us predeceases the other, the survivor claims full interest.”

“Which, in dollars and cents, comes to—what?”

There was no guile in that funereal face. Either that, or there was nothing but. The expression that moved across it said he was going to answer the question, truthfully and to the last decimal point. The one that came right behind it said nothing. He folded his long, spotted hands on the place where his blotter would have been if he had one. “Lund would have that information,” he said. “Are you really working for him?”