The Witchfinder (7 page)

A half-partition masked the working part of the studio and doubled as a background screen on the other side. It was painted deep blue to absorb light and flatter the subject. A stool for posing stood in front of it facing a Nikon perched on a tripod.

Lights, a reflecting umbrella, and assorted props stood and leaned and lay about like soldiers off the line. What looked like a genuine human skull grinned from the lap of a department-store mannequin without arms, dressed for the beach. An old steelcase Nikon, larger than the one on the tripod, wallowed in a morass of nylon straps on an oak desk that looked as if it had done time in a service station. Bare metal showed through chips in the black enamel. That would be the camera he carried up snow-capped peaks to photograph endangered species. His kind of photographer belonged on the same list.

He transferred a stack of trade magazines from the desk to the floor, snapped on a gooseneck lamp, and placed the picture in the center of the circle of light. For some time he bent over it, peering through a glass like a jeweler’s loupe, placed directly on top of the photograph. He grunted once more and straightened.

“The girl’s head came from somewhere else. The skin tones are close, but you won’t get an exact match one time in a million; too many variables. This is a very nice job. Whoever did it air-brushed the join so well you’d think it was a crease in the skin if you didn’t know what to look for. You came to the one guy in southeastern Michigan who knows what to look for.”

“You can skip the commercial. I’m sold. What about the guy?”

“Oh, it’s all him. He was in bed with nine-tenths of someone.”

“That puts him in on the frame.”

“Either that or he’s just about the coolest son of a bitch who ever did a candid in his birthday suit. When did you say this was done?”

“I didn’t, but it was about eight years ago.”

“Well, one of your possibilities is dead, but last I heard his son was still running the family studio in Flint. I can think of two others who are this good with an airbrush. I’ll make a list, but you’ll have to look them up yourself. I’m not the telephone company.”

I said swell. He made it out on a scratch pad with a happy face in the corner with a bleeding wound in its forehead, tore off the sheet, and traded it for a hundred of Jay Bell Furlong’s dollars. As I was leaving I told him to watch out for snow leopards.

“They’re pussycats. It’s the fucking solid citizens you have to watch out for. They won’t be rare in my lifetime.”

I
T WAS PAST
quitting time, but I was still going, like a battery commercial.

I stopped back at the office to look up the names Quarrels had given me. Two were listed in the metropolitan area, which was a break, and Information had the number of the studio in Flint. But with any luck and thanks again to the squat Indiana Jones from Birmingham, I might not need any of them. I called Imminent Visions in Allen Park hoping for an appointment with Lynn Arsenault, the genuine half of the picture that had shot down Lily Talbot, and got a recording informing me the offices were open from 8:00
A.M.
to 5:00
P.M.
Monday through Friday. Not to be outdone because of a mere six-figure difference in annual revenues, I closed up and went home.

The teenager next door had bought a street rod, a blaze-orange ’69 Roadrunner with a jacked-up rear end and twin scoops punched into the hood. For forty-five minutes every morning and every evening for three days he had been gunning the big 389 in his parents’ driveway, cleaning the carburetor for cruise night Saturday night on Jefferson. He’d rammed a broomstick up each of the twin glass-packs to clear out all those pesky baffles, just in case they couldn’t hear it in Toronto. I had considered and discarded several plans, the best of which involved going over there under the first new moon and slipping a Clark bar into the gas tank.

Hamtramck was a quiet town back when there were Polish names on all the mailboxes, clean and safe and well-tended; even the trash cans in the alleys sparkled. Then the last administration had condemned its historic section to make room for a General Motors plant, shipping in vandals and arsonists by the carload when the residents were slow to evacuate. They evacuated, the thugs remained. Now the place is just more of Detroit and you don’t leave the windows open when you go away if you want to come back to your furniture. By the time I’d flung up all the sashes that weren’t painted shut I had sweated right through the summerweight. I hung it in front of a window to air, stood under a cold shower for five minutes, and put on a thin cotton robe. The suit was still there when I came out, evidence that either the neighborhood was improving or my taste in clothes wasn’t. I put the oven on the lowest reasonable setting, slid in a tray of frozen drumsticks and peas, opened a beer, and sat in front of the fan in the living room to watch the news.

It was the same thing on all the local channels: a dozen recent Debate Club graduates representing all three sexes and most of the acknowledged racial and ethnic persuasions trying to do the work of one competent reporter. The city cops had chased a speeding driver into a station wagon containing a family of three, another preschooler had been killed in the crossfire between warring youth drug gangs, and the ACLU had won another district court victory in its campaign to stamp out Christianity. The national news was more of the same, with a better wardrobe. The ghoul shift outside Jay Bell Furlong’s room at Cedars of Lebanon was in its third week and the news reader stationed on the sidewalk in front of the hospital was running out of quotes from James Russell Lowell. He plainly wanted to be off covering something that required a trenchcoat. I flipped around until I found a rerun of
M*A*S*H
.

The telephone rang during a commercial for PMS, or maybe it was con.

“Inaction News desk.”

“Walker?”

Stuart Lund’s public-school accent was thickening with the dusk. Head colds are that way too.

“Not much to report, Mr. Lund. I talked to Oswald Belder and Karen and John Furlong, also to someone who knows a thing or twelve about faking photographs.” I gave him what I could without checking my notes for fashion details.

“You seem to be running in place,” he said. “We’ve known all along Arsenault had to be involved.”

“The first day of an investigation is mostly catch-up. I’ll talk to Arsenault tomorrow.”

“He’ll just deny everything.”

“If he didn’t, you wouldn’t need me. Demolishing alibis is part of the service.”

“Will you use force?”

I rapped the mouthpiece twice with the rim of the beer can. “Brass knuckles. They spit out the truth with their teeth.”

“I don’t suppose I’ll ever be a true American. I never know when I’m being gulled.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. I still don’t understand steak-and-kidney pie.” I set down the beer. It was getting warm anyway; which was another thing about the English I didn’t understand. “The truth is I’m getting a little old to throw people down staircases. Fortunately, a big bag of novelties and notions comes with the license. One of them usually clicks before the opening-round bell.”

“Just don’t break his jaw so he can’t talk.”

“Now who’s being gulled?”

“I once defended an Irish rebel who blew up a busful of English schoolchildren. Violent details are not foreign to my experience.”

“Mine neither. But if it’s muscle you’re looking for, you could have hired it anywhere in town for a lot less than I charge.”

“I never considered anything of the sort.” But he sounded disappointed.

“How’s Mr. Furlong?”

“Dying, although not as precipitately as he was this morning. He’s asleep now. He sleeps often, but never for long, and then he has errands for me. For a week now I haven’t been in bed long enough to bother with changing into and out of pyjamas.” There would be a
Y
in the word the way he used it.

“How’s your gout?”

“I’m in considerable discomfort. Thank you for asking. Please report when you have something.” He was quiet long enough for me to wonder if he was still on the line. Then he said, “Have something soon.”

I cradled the receiver. The string of commercials had come to an end and the
M*A*S*H
rerun hovered back on. It was the episode in which Hawkeye and Trapper John ordered ribs all the way from Chicago. That reminded me of dinner. I went to check on progress.

I wouldn’t have ordered it from Korea. The breading on the chicken was like oatmeal and the peas were like nothing in nature. I only buy the things because I like how the courses are arranged. If the rest of the human race could keep the house in one compartment, the office in another, and leave the last for dessert, life would be a Banquet
^®
.

The TV listings had
The Magnificent Ambersons
on Channel 31 at 3:00
A.M
. Old movies on regular television were getting to be as rare as glass bottles. I set the alarm for 2:45 and turned in early. I got up with the bell, plugged in the coffee pot, and sat down in front of a $19.95 electroplated gold necklace on the Home Shopping Network. I checked the selector. It was 31, all right. When it became obvious they weren’t going to interrupt the necklace for Orson Welles I turned off the set and went back to bed. Sometimes the peas jump the little partition and spoil the applesauce.

I’d been asleep five minutes when the kid next door started gunning the Roadrunner.

My first sip of coffee six hours later was from a paper cup at the office. I’d left the pot at home percolating all night and the stuff that eventually came out of the spout was what county road crews use to fill potholes. The counter down the street, where I was accustomed to getting carry-out in good insulating Styrofoam, had in a fit of environmental consciousness switched to waxed cardboard, the kind that started to biodegrade on the way upstairs. I had burns on my fingers to match the brand on my arm from yesterday’s car-window incident. It could have been worse. I could have had gout.

The mail was a trip down memory lane. The dealership that had sold my Cutlass to its original owner before Kent State had tracked me down to inform me that the car was being recalled to repair a loose nut at the base of the steering column that made the doors fly off at sixty-five miles per hour. If their people decided to go into the detective business I was through. Two bills I’d sent out for services rendered came back stamped
ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
. An eleven-month-old overdue parking ticket had come to the attention of a clerk downtown who spelled
warrant
with one
R.
I filed it under the blotter with the others and slam-dunked everything else. Then I sat back with my eyes closed and waited for my watch to say nine o’clock. That would be as early as I could expect a prime mover like Arsenault to be in his office.

When I woke up shortly before ten I went into the closet, bathed my face, and stood by the fan flapping my damp shirttail while a receptionist put me through. It was another muggy morning, with no relief predicted before the weekend.

“Mr. Arsenault’s office. This is Greta.”

“Hi, Greta. Hot enough for you?”

“Who’s speaking, please?”

“Tell Mr. Arsenault I’m calling for Jay Bell Furlong.”

“Isn’t he very ill?”

“That’s why he isn’t making his own calls.”

“One moment.”

I got violins. It wasn’t until the French horns came in that I realized I was listening to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” By then the promised moment was long gone.

“This is Lynn Arsenault. Who is this?”

That No. 3 sandpaper never goes with a voice in its early thirties. He sounded like Mr. Potter in a high school production of
It’s a Wonderful Life.

“Mr. Arsenault, my name is Amos Walker. I’m a licensed private investigator working for Jay Bell Furlong. I wonder if I could have an interview today.”

“About what?”

“Lily Talbot.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“I have a photograph of you together.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There’s a bare chance you don’t,” I said. “The woman you

were photographed with was wearing a different head at the time.”

He surprised me by jumping on it. I’d had him pegged for another stall. “I can give you five minutes at eleven o’clock. No more. My calendar’s jammed.”

I said five minutes would be sufficient and we were through talking to each other.

Allen Park is to Detroit what the interior of Africa was to the British Empire under Victoria: Unexplored Territory, a place everyone has heard of but few know exactly where it is or what goes on there. It’s downriver, for one thing, and the peculiar centrifugal force that has been destroying the Motor City since the collapse of the Edsel tends to fling departing residents west, not south. Beyond the spines of the factory stacks its skyline is flat, its surface gridded with broad, empty streets and sutured together with grass-grown railroad tracks leading to and from the calcified Ford River Rouge plant, and when you sit at a stoplight with your windows down you hear the slow, measured heartbeat of life in a nursing home. There are even farms. It seemed a curious location for the headquarters of an expanding architectural firm like Imminent Visions.

But as the man said when the woman’s husband asked him what he was doing naked in his wife’s bedroom closet, everybody’s got to be someplace.

The building was four stories of red brick laid in one-ton sections like giant Legos and sandblasted for that look of genteel old age. It showed just enough of Jay Bell Furlong’s prejudice for the horizontal to support the claim of either Vernon Whiting, Visions’ late founder, or Furlong that the other was a thief. With its flat roof and boxed elms it made me think of Beaver Cleaver’s elementary school, but then I don’t know a groined arch from a ruptured disc.

There was a row of ten diagonally striped parking spaces next to the ramp leading down to an underground garage with a swing-arm gate across the entrance labeled
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. As I pulled into the only available visitor’s slot, the gate opened for an emerald-green Porsche that whipped around the corner and into the street without a sign of a brake light. It’s a well-known fact that when you pay $75,000 for an automobile it comes equipped with its own invisible force field.