The Witchfinder (6 page)

“I like Uncle Oz,” John said.

She didn’t look at him. “Ozzie Belder was worse than any mistress any wife ever had to compete with for her husband’s affections. He stole Jay from me, he and the business; stole him as surely as some office tramp with black panties and her brains in her vagina.”

This time her son colored, stoplight red from his polo collar to the roots of his crewcut. “Honestly, Mother.”

“Be quiet. This doesn’t concern you. I loved Jay when he couldn’t get his designs past the office boy at the shoddiest contracting company in town. I packed his lunchpail when he went to work as a hod carrier and helped him out of his clothes when he came home covered with white dust and too tired to take off his boots. I sank every penny my parents left me into a year’s lease on his first office and all its furniture, including the drafting board. It was the two of us all the way to the top, that’s how we planned it. Well, we never discussed what was to happen afterward.”

“Ozzie,” I said.

“Ozzie. Everything changed the day he came on board. From then on I was the toy wife Jay took down off the shelf at the end of the day and wound up to cook his dinner and share his bed. At the office—the office I paid for—they treated me like a visitor. When Furlong, Belder, and Associates threw a party at the old Book Cadillac to celebrate its first overseas contract and it came time for Jay to toast the person most responsible for the firm’s success, it was Ozzie he raised his glass to. I knew then it was over. I was six weeks’ pregnant with John at the time. Ask Ozzie what it’s like to carry a baby you know will be the child of divorced parents. If I framed anyone with a smutty picture it would be him, not Jay. That’s if I thought anyone would believe he could ever get it up without a balloon frame to keep it there.”

“Please
, Mother.” There were greenish streaks in the red of John’s face. He was upstaging the daffodils.

“Framing Belder wouldn’t guarantee your son’s inheritance,” I said.

She gave me the granite stare. After a moment she turned over the picture, took a second look, and skated it back my way. “I never met her. I only knew her face from the newspapers. Photographers can’t resist a rich old goat with a sleek young thing. I didn’t care by then, of course, but I never believed they’d ever marry. If it wasn’t a picture it would be something else.”

I looked at it again before putting it away. “What was wrong with her?”

“Nothing would be. Nothing less than perfection would do for the great Jay Bell Furlong, at least in public. It’s what was wrong with Jay. He wore those flashy yellow suits on the street, but at home it was old sweaters and tennis shoes with holes in the toes. Oh, he enjoyed parading around with a pretty girl one third his age when people were watching. Artists are like that, never mind what they say about the quest for inner truth. In his case it was a different story after the last flashbulb faded. Look at the other two women he married. I was dowdy enough in those days, overweight and with no idea of how to dress, but they were worse. You don’t have to put on airs with a homely unfashionable woman. That’s what he looked for in a spouse: the opportunity to stop being Jay Bell Furlong for eight hours at a stretch. He wouldn’t have gotten that from this Lily person.”

“Maybe he changed.”

“People don’t change. You know that at least as well as I, Mr. Detective. They just become more like they were at the start.”

I drank some coffee. It tasted less bitter now. “I was asking John if he knew anything about photography when you came in.”

“He doesn’t.”

“I can answer the question myself, Mother.”

I gave him the sympathetic face.

“I invested some money once with a fellow from a film lab who claimed he’d invented an affordable holographic camera,” he said. “You know, so people on vacation could take three-dimensional pictures of Aunt Edna standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. He spent a couple of days showing me around the lab. I still remember some of what I learned.”

“What became of the camera?”

His eyes lost some of their shine. “After figuring in advertising and distribution it retailed at eighty-seven thousand five hundred dollars.”

“You’ve known my son less than a half hour, but as I said, you’re a detective.” Karen Furlong was smiling, not a sight to remember with the lights off. “Do you think he’s capable of fooling his father with a falsified picture on the basis of a couple of days’ training? Or a couple of years?”

“It wouldn’t take him that long to find out where to go to have it done.” I finished my coffee. “Thanks for your time, Mrs. Furlong. I’m just going down the list, like I said.”

“Who’s next?”

“That depends on who’s in town. A couple of the grandchildren are coming in, and I don’t have an address on Mr. Furlong’s brother Larry. I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him lately.”

“Not since shortly after the wedding. He and Jay had a fight about something, I never knew what. An old friend in Royal Oak sent me a clipping from one of the
Observer
papers some years ago, a human-interest piece about a postmaster who was retiring after fifty years with the civil service. It was Larry. I thought about sending it on to Jay, but only for a moment. I’m not in the business of arranging reunions.”

“Do you remember which community he was postmaster in?”

She shook her head. “It must have been somewhere in Oakland County or it wouldn’t have been in the
Observer
. I threw out the clipping.”

I thanked her again and rose. John got up with me. “I’ll see you to the door,” he said.

“Mr. Walker knows the way, John. He’s a detective. Come rub Mother’s neck. There’s a draft.” She closed her eyes and tipped her head right and left. It was ninety out and there wasn’t a breath of air stirring.

“Good luck with the horses.” I shook one of the big soft hands.

“Thanks. Say! Maybe I could sell them for research. If there’s something in their blood that can cure insomnia”—the light-bulb faded—“no, I’d be better off to stick with the movies. See, sometimes the ideas come so fast I don’t know which one is the best one.”

“The burden of genius.”

“I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.” He stepped behind his mother’s chair and began kneading the muscles at the base of her neck with his spatulated fingers. I told her good-bye, but her eyes were still closed and she wasn’t listening. The effort of holding back the age from her face seemed to have drained her. When she relaxed her muscles, the years pooled in pockets of shadow.

A
HOLE HAD OPENED
in the overcast above the northern suburbs, allowing white sunlight through like a spill of molten steel. I drove with my jacket off and my shirtcuffs turned back, and jerked my arm inside when it touched hot metal. For the rest of the day I wore a red welt like a brand across the flesh of my forearm. The weatherman on the radio predicted ninety-eight tomorrow.

More and more cars were displaying the special commemorative license plate observing the first hundred years of the automobile, an uninspiring rectangle with the background and characters reversed, blue on white. You had to get right up on the rear bumper to see the washed-out lines of a spindly horseless carriage stamped in the center. Henry Ford would have smelted down the entire run to make another Model T.

I fought homebound traffic all the way north to Birmingham. The ozone was blue with monoxide. I rolled up my window. Another century of that and we’ll all have snorkels growing out of the top of our heads.

Cassandra Photo operated out of the second floor of a yellow brick building with a formal-wear emporium at street level and wrought-iron curlicues to draw the admiring eye away from the bars on the windows. A hairstyling salon called Le Cut shared the strip on one side, with a gift shop selling fourteen-karat pencil cups and Waterford bedpans on the other. Grosse Pointe is old auto money, stacked and stored in ten-thousand-dollar bricks in climate-controlled vaults with the furs. Birmingham is platinum cards carried in quick-draw holsters. The credit came from downtown Detroit banks the cardholders hadn’t visited since Nixon.

I parked between a silver BMW and a red Corvette that came up to my knees and went in through an air-locked compartment containing the stairs to the second floor. The chill air inside reminded me I’d left my jacket in the car, but I merely rolled down my cuffs and buttoned them on the way up. Formality is the first casualty of summer.

You can tell a lot about a building by its stairs. There are stairs between green-painted plaster walls fretted with graffiti and paved with rubber speckled with cigarette burns like suppurating sores, lighted (when they are lighted at all) by dusty fifteen-watt bulbs that illuminate only themselves and the shrunken pupils of the human animals that live in their shadows; glossy black-painted iron stairs cast in lacy patterns, rising like smoke through the middle of clean bright rooms full of new merchandise around brass firemen’s poles with polished handrails; broad gilded sweeping stairs for the customers of expensively renovated theaters as opposed to narrow cramped Skoal-smelling stairs in the back for the help; creaky stairs layered six inches deep with the odors of meals cooked and consumed and forgotten by people who have passed beyond need of food; quiet cushioned stairs for discreet upholstered people who read the stock market and shipping reports and count their cholesterol; clean, pine-smelling stairs in new buildings full of their future; dirty shuddery garbage-stinking stairs in old buildings emptied by their past; stairs that serve as bathrooms; stairs that serve no purpose at all; cold echoing penitentiary stairs painted gray; crowded chattering schoolhouse stairs too trafficked to paint; stairs to go up but not down, stairs to go down but not up, stairs on the inside to take you to something, stairs on the outside to take you away from something else. They are the ferries of civilization on the cusp of the millennium, and more than any other part of the structures they inhabit they reflect the attitudes and life histories of the people who use them. Any reliable detectives’ handbook should include a chapter on stairs.

The one I was climbing was carpeted in maroon plush with an Oriental design and had a smooth oak handrail attached to a wall wainscoted in the old manner, although the building wasn’t fifteen years old; unlike their counterparts in Detroit, the Birmingham city fathers become nervous whenever a piece of construction approaches the age of consent. Every time I go there I see a building that wasn’t there the last time, although I never see one going up or its predecessor coming down. They do it at night with infrared glasses and pneumatic hammers wrapped in chinchilla to avoid disturbing the residents. The local tax base would keep the Third World in prayer rugs and brown rice through the end of the century.

The door to the photo shop stood open. One of those two-tone paint jobs designed to create a psychological demilitarized zone between the two parts of commerce divided the room into equal sections, blue for the customer, white for the vendor. Like photographers’ studios everywhere, the walls were covered with pictures in frames, but that’s as far as the comparison carried. There were no laughing children, no Golden Anniversary couples or glowing brides and grooms, no dogs, no sunsets. Instead there was a tight color shot of Alan Trammell sliding headfirst into base that made you want to spit out gravel, and next to it a close-up of a distracted and scowling local high-placed member of the Malevolent Brotherhood of Bent-Nosed Sicilians with whom I had once had a run-in, and of whom no known photograph existed, or so it said in his FBI jacket. The Feds are prouder of their photo files than they are of having shot Dillinger.

That wasn’t the best of it, though. The cleanup spot went to a blowup the size of a bedsheet. The camera had caught a Big Cat in the middle of a pounce, at an angle that put nothing behind it but empty blue sky. Red spots glinted in both of its tawny eyes and its curved fangs were ivory-colored against the pure white of its coat. Its body was twisted half around, the hinges of its spread jaws exposed in a silent scream of rage or agony or both. It seemed to echo in the stillness of that room.

“Fucking sherpa I brought along to keep me from falling off the mountain shot the poor bastard just as I tripped the shutter.”

I turned to look at the man seated on a stool on the other side of the glass counter. He was using a precision screwdriver on an ordinary Minolta cradled between his thighs.

“Why?” I asked.

“He
said
he was saving my life.”

“Was he?”

“This world’s got photographers coming out of its ass. What we don’t have enough of is Tibetan snow leopards. My life was worth that picture.”

“Could be he didn’t see it that way. Maybe he sees more leopards than photographers.”

“All I know is he skinned it and traded the hide for a new snowmobile.”

“What was a
News
photographer doing taking pictures of cats in the Himalayas?”

“I was freelancing for the
National Geographic.
They were all set to put it on the cover when the fucking
Exxon Valdez
ran aground.”

He swung the camera up onto the counter by its strap and slid off the stool. It didn’t bring his head up more than a couple of inches. He was a squat solid thirty, moon-faced, with ditchwater-colored hair twisted into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and wore a gray T-shirt bearing the stenciled legend
PROPERTY OF JACKSON PRISON: DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF FREEDOM
. “Walker? I’m Randy Quarrels.” He took my hand in the crossed-palm clasp I hadn’t experienced in twenty years. His short thick fingers were as strong as C-clamps.

“It’s a long hike from Tibet to a storefront in Birmingham, Michigan,” I said.

“Well, freelancing’s just another word for bare-assed and out of work. There’s something to be said for steady employment. The word is bullshit.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m strictly hand to mouth.”

“You bring it?”

I schoonered the doctored photograph across the top of the counter.

He stopped it—he had fast hands, ideal for shooting leopards—looked at it, held it up to the light and squinted, then turned and carried it toward the back, grunting for me to join him. I swung up the gate and followed. Below the T-shirt he had on khaki shorts with safari pockets and sandals. His legs were covered with old healed-over scars, from thorns or claws I couldn’t tell.