The Witchfinder (31 page)

I’d read up on the latest developments in the Fisher Building demolition derby and turkey shoot, in the loose sections of newspaper laying around the waiting area; why anyone bothered to buy one in an airport was a mystery I wasn’t paid to solve. There was nothing I hadn’t known already, not counting errors and embellishments.
USA Today
had run a honey of a picture of the wreckage on its front page. When a 1941 Packard runs into an 1896 Ford, it’s national news. My name didn’t appear in the caption.

I sensed Lily Talbot before I saw her. Walking down the concourse, she turned heads male and female in a kind of personal telegraphy, like an infrared beam tripping breakers. It wasn’t a question of beauty, although she possessed that quality, common enough in the age of liposuction, silicone, collagen, rhinoplasty, and broadening tastes. It was a combination of looks, attitude, and carriage.

She beat watching the traffic on the runway. Her long pleated skirt, trailing scarf, and boots with three-inch heels drew attention to her unconventional disregard for current fashion, and her short red hair to her long classic skull, like something found among the porcelains in an Egyptian tomb. She walked with her back straight but not rigid, her chin raised but not upthrust, and she maintained a lively artist’s interest in her surroundings that set her apart from the job lot of attractive women who stared through people and things as if they didn’t exist in their dimension. I was on my feet before I thought about getting up.

We touched hands. She smiled noncommittally and said something that evaporated in the air. We adjourned to an uninhabited corner by an unused gate, where I ditched my filter in an ashcan. She smelled lightly of lilac. An uncomplicated scent for a complex character.

“I wasn’t sure you’d get my message,” I said. “Jean Sternhagen said you were out of town.”

“An art auction in Toledo. When I called in she told me what you told her and I drove right up. You made quite an impression on her.”

“Chicks dig a bandage.”

She looked around. “Where is he?”

“Boarding. His kind of passenger gets on early.”

“You’re going along?”

“He paid for my ticket yesterday and hired me to escort him. After what happened he changed his mind about staying in Detroit. L.A.’s his home now. I was just waiting for you.”

“But you couldn’t be sure I was coming.”

“People generally do, in the end. Guilt is a waste of time, but it’s stronger than love or hate when it comes to making people do things they don’t want to.”

“I never said I didn’t. The world isn’t that cut-and-dried.”

“Sure it is.”

“I find that surprising, coming from you.”

“The world’s black and white, good and bad, no matter what you hear. The people who say it isn’t have already chosen black.”

“You seem pretty sure of your philosophy.”

“It’s a philosophy.”

“Could I see him?”

“I’ll ask.”

I went over and talked with the clerk at the counter, an unbruised twenty under all the varnish and peroxide. When I got back, Lily was looking out the window. A Tinkertown train was hauling baggage around the tail section of the plane parked at the gate.

“She’s checking,” I said. “Just in case you smuggled an atomic device past security.”

“Thank you.” She leaned a shoulder against the glass. “I was too busy framing bids to follow the news. Bids I never got to enter because of your message. Jean’s information was sketchy and the car radio had it all garbled. What happened?”

I told her. It was still fresh because I’d gone over it several times for the cops and again for Furlong. I was typing it all up in the office for whoever cared to read it when I got the call from Henry Ford Hospital, where he’d checked in after leaving the Marriott. When the airline called later to report that all the arrangements had been made I’d just had time to call Jean Sternhagen, throw a change of clothes and a razor into the bag, and drive out to catch the 1:28 nonstop to LAX. Then the flight was delayed two hours because of twisters in Oklahoma and Kansas.

“So Royce Grayling’s dead,” she said when I finished.

“He was DOA at Detroit Receiving, but that’s just for the blotter. The cops pulled a dead man out of the Packard.”

“Are you in trouble with the law?”

“The answer to that question is always yes. But not as much as I was a couple of days ago. I called Sergeant St. Thomas in Allen Park and Lieutenant Thaler in Detroit and gave them the whole story before I met with Stuart Lund. I had a hunch he’d cut and run. I needed the backup. Two homicides solved for two departments in one afternoon is worth some points. Not that you’d know it from the way they interrogated me.”

She said nothing. I moved a shoulder.

“It’s a job. It’s not as pretty as running an art gallery.”

“I still don’t understand why Grayling shot Stuart.”

“Professional pride. He had a lot of it. Enough anyway to cowboy the job when he learned from his plant at Detroit Police Headquarters that I was meeting with the man who tried to frame him for that bald-faced murder in Allen Park. He still might have gotten away with it, but there were twice as many cops on hand as he expected.”

“How is Stuart?”

“Still in a coma at Receiving last time I checked. He won’t be much good for anything even if he comes out of it, and I doubt he will. One of Grayling’s slugs severed his spinal column. Getting yourself paralyzed from the neck down is a hell of a way to cure a bad case of gout.”

“Poor Windy.”

“It would’ve been a short run even without Grayling. His wife was talking, and Rio de Janeiro has all the lawyers it needs. Anyway, Poor Windy was a killer and a corrupter. He tried to ruin your life.”

“He didn’t ruin it.”

“That wasn’t his fault.”

She looked away, toward the crowded gate area. “Three dead, and one might as well be. All over a broken engagement eight years old.”

“Engagements get broken every day without people getting killed. Furlong’s estate is worth millions. It all comes down to greed. Sooner or later everything does.”

She looked at me. “Do you really believe that?”

“I do today. My head hurts and I hate to fly.”

“It wasn’t greed. It was love. Stuart loved Jay, don’t you see that?” Her slightly Oriental eyes were dry and clear.

“He knew Furlong was straight.”

“That isn’t what I’m talking about and you know it. Or maybe you don’t. Jay didn’t. He could be remarkably blind for an artist; even I knew that in the short time we were together. But he wasn’t always that way. He trusted Stuart with a secret he wouldn’t even share with me until he was absolutely certain we were going to spend our lives together.”

“You mean the fact that he really did steal one of Vernon Whiting’s designs when they worked together?”

“He told you?”

“No. I figured it out when he said he thought Whiting had put you up to seduce him. He’d only have considered that if he thought Whiting had a good reason to want revenge.”

“It was an act of desperation, when Jay was overworked and blocked and not thinking straight. He regretted it the rest of his life. It put a bitterness in him, right at the core. I think that bitterness would have broken us up in the end. That’s the ironic part. The fake picture was unnecessary.

“It wasn’t a homosexual thing, Stuart’s love for Jay,” she went on, “although Stuart himself might have thought it was. When two people share a vision for years they develop a bond much stronger than sexual attraction. When one or the other breaks that bond, anything can happen. The money was just an excuse. Scar tissue over a broken heart. What do you think of that?”

“I think you should take Jean Sternhagen out to dinner before she smashes a Monet over your head.”

She stared at me.

“Or a Manet,” I finished.

After a second she smiled.

Airport security approached in the person of a bearded party in black-rimmed glasses and a blue serge suit cut badly over his shoulder rig. He was carrying a Motorola and had a gold ring in one ear. “Mr. Walker?”

“Miss Talbot.” I indicated her. “She wants to see Mr. Furlong.”

Just then the clerk at the counter got on the P.A. and announced general boarding.

“There’s my ride.” I offered my hand.

Lily Talbot took it. “Thanks. For trying. I guess that makes two blind artists you’ve known.”

I said good-bye. Security took charge and she accompanied him through a door he opened with a computerized ID card, on out to where the cargo-handlers were getting ready to load Jay Bell Furlong’s coffin aboard the plane.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.