The Witchfinder (8 page)

A construction crew in lightweight blue coveralls and canary-colored hardhats was busy with spades and a pneumatic drill in a barricaded area next to the building, widening an excavation that had been made in the pavement by a yellow backhoe parked nearby. I stopped to ask the foreman, a heavy-shouldered redneck in his fifties, what the project was. His coveralls were black with sweat.

He took a toothpick out of the corner of his mouth as if it were impeding his view and onced me over. I must have looked enough like an employee of the building to talk to. “Problem with the underground cable. Something gnawed through the insulation, probably. Up on the poles it’s birds, down here it’s ground moles.”

“Power?”

“Phone.”

“Thank God for cellulars.”

“If you don’t mind every punk kid with a scanner listening in. You’d be surprised what some turkeys talk about over the fucking public airwaves.”

“At least you’re working in the shade.”

“Just till noon. If we don’t finish up by then I’m pulling the crew for a job on the east side of something.”

The lobby was done in glazed green-and-white Mexican tile with shiny Bakelite walls and a three-story shaft ending in a skylight. In the center of the room stood a seven-foot granite statue with holes in it on a pedestal three feet high. The sculptor’s name was engraved in a brass plate on the pedestal. I didn’t recognize it, big surprise. The guard stationed behind the statue was made of the same grade of rock, but without holes, and wore a tan uniform with brown leather patches reading
I.V. SECURITY
embroidered in red. He shifted his attention from a bank of closed-circuit TV monitors to my ID, found my name on a clipboard, and told me to go to the fourth floor. He gave me a plastic tag with a big numeral 4 to hang on my handkerchief pocket.

Another guard at the elevator, this one female and hewn from softer igneous, checked out the tag and rang for the car. When the doors opened, technology kicked in: A video camera mounted on a heat-sensitive swivel near the ceiling tracked my progress down a hall carpeted in soundproof gray.

Assuming that the late Vernon Whiting had had anything to do with the security in the building, that brief trip laid to rest my curiosity as to who had stolen from whom in the Furlong-Whiting relationship. Crooks buy the best locks.

Lynn Arsenault’s name was lettered in gold on a rosewood door near the end of the hall. I opened it on yet another reception room, overgrown with tropical plants in hammered copper pots. The woman who would go with the kidney-shaped desk, coming on sixty with a light blonde wash to cover the gray and glasses with octagonal gold rims, stashed an oversize watering can behind one of the plants and took her post. She had on a tailored suit and a man’s silk necktie. “Yes?”

I showed her the ID. “I’ve got an eleven o’clock with Mr. Arsenault.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Walker.”

“That’s okay. I get a new picture taken next month.”

“No, I mean Mr. Arsenault had to go out. There’s a problem with one of his buildings.”

“Can’t he find someone else to hold it up?”

“Imminent Visions’ designs do not fall down.” She tilted her head toward a wall tiled with plaques and framed certificates of merit.

I put away the ID folder. “Where is the building? Maybe I could meet him there.”

“He didn’t say which building. He took a call. I gathered it couldn’t wait. Would you care to reschedule? He has an opening next week.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m very sorry. Normally Mr. Arsenault never misses an appointment.”

“Seriously?”

“He’s the youngest chief executive officer in the industry. You don’t get to be that kind of success without a reputation for keeping commitments.”

“You said he took a call. Did you put it through?”

“No, he took it on his private line.” She looked at me over the top of her glasses. “Are you asking all these questions as part of an investigation?”

“I’m just stalling. I like the smell of African violets.”

Her face brightened. “Do you know much about them?”

“A little. I did an undercover bit behind the counter in a nursery for a week. One of the employees was smuggling hydrangeas out the back door.”

“Hydrangeae, actually. Latin plural.”

“It was only a week. I had coffee yesterday with a woman who grows dahlias.”

She might have sniffed. “Dahlias are just sunflowers with a superiority complex.”

“The woman’s name is Karen Furlong.”

“Oh, yes.” She punched her glasses back up her nose. “We’ve never met. But the name is well known here. Our founder, Mr. Vernon Whiting, used to work with Jay Bell Furlong.”

“Did you know Mr. Whiting?”

“I was his secretary for twelve years.”

Furlong’s name had brought down the temperature. The room was no longer safe for tropical plants.

“I’ll call.” At the door I looked back. The octagonals were still on me. “Does Arsenault drive a green Porsche?”

She found a smile. “Did he almost run you down? He’s a maniac in that thing. We’re all worried he’ll wrap it around a telephone pole.”

In the lobby I returned the plastic tag to the guard at the monitors. “Do they think someone’s going to sneak in and steal a building?”

“Hard to fence.” He hung up the tag.

I went back out into the heat. The shade was shrinking on the west side of the building and the construction crew was packing up, leaving the excavation open and the underground telephone cable exposed. I only noted it because it’s a detective’s job to observe and remember.

“H
I, THIS IS
N
ATE
M
ILLENDER.
If it’s paying work, leave a message. If it’s going to cost me, keep trying, you never can tell. Well, you know this shit.’’

I waited for the beep, introduced myself, and said, “Randy Quarrels says you’re the best man in town for the job I’ve got in mind.” I added that I was on an expense account and left my number at the office.

A kid in clown pants and a ball cap back to front, with an electronic beeper clipped to his belt, saw me break the connection and loped toward the telephone. I held up an index finger and dialed the number of the other name I’d gotten from Quarrels. He held up another finger, but hung back. We were standing inside the entrance of a Perry Drugs in downtown Allen Park.

“Well, spit it out.”

Here was a voice squeezed from the lungs of someone who went around all hunched over by the chains he had forged in life. Either that or he smoked too much. I put away the Winston I’d been about to light and asked the voice if it belonged to Ulysses Worth.

“Eulisy.”

“I’m sorry?”

He gave me the letters. “My mother couldn’t spell. That’s the closest she got when it came time to fill out the birth certificate. You the guy with the twins?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“I’m expecting a guy with twins. He wants their picture taken in matching Red Wings jerseys.”

“I’m not the guy. Randy Quarrels says you’re the best in the business for what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“If I could discuss it over the telephone, we aren’t talking about the same business.”

“Hey, man, if this is a sting I ain’t worth the cost of the wire. You don’t get any lower in the food chain than Eulisy Worth.”

“I’m strictly private sector. Not a cop. Not a Fed. I’m not with the Klan or Citizens for a Porn-Free America or Sprint. All I want is your time and I’ll pay for that.”

“This cash? I mean
cash
. Nobody signs nothing.”

I still had my half-empty cigarette pack in my hand. I dumped out the butts and crackled it in front of the mouthpiece. “Nothing else quite sounds like C-notes,” I said. “When can I come out?”

“Anytime you want, if you don’t mind me working while we talk.”

“I’m on my way.”

The kid with the pager looked up from a display of condoms, but I worked the riser and called my service. “Anything yet from a Nate Millender?”

“No, no messages, Mr. Walker.” The girl sounded genuinely apologetic. She was my favorite that week. I thanked her and hung up.

The kid watched me slide the cigarettes back into the pack, then swooped in. He was punching buttons as the door wheezed shut behind me. I figured I’d slowed down the city’s drug traffic ten minutes.

Eulisy Worth lived and worked in one of those small white frame houses with a shared driveway and a screened-in front porch, the kind you see on the news whenever a drive-by shooting takes place or an unemployed auto worker barricades himself in with his family and a gun. They are part of the landscape in a city that at one time boasted the highest percentage of private homeowners of any urban center in the United States, and so common they’re invisible. This one was on Benson, in case it matters. All the lawns were the color of burned rice. A Dodge minivan with a square of cellophane taped over one window was parked in the driveway.

The screen door was latched. I rapped and waited. After thirty seconds or so I rapped again and pressed my folded handkerchief against the back of my neck. There was evidence the neighborhood had had trees and shade before the city widened the street to drop in a new sewer. Some of the saplings it had planted as an afterthought were still standing. One or two had leaves. Harsh summers and raging winters had beaten the sidings and pavement the same shade of gray.

I rapped a third time. A series of locks and bolts snapped and squeaked on the other side of the door. I hoped the closed windows meant air conditioning inside.

The man who came out to unhook the screen door was small and black and wiry, with a modest flat-top and round wire-rimmed glasses. The prescription was so weak the lenses sent back the light in flat white disks like window glass. He wore a tank top made of cargo netting, Desert Storm camouflage pants with lots of bulging pockets, and square-toed cowboy boots. I liked the look fine except for the moist sheen on his skin. That meant no air conditioning.

“Where are the twins?” He looked past my shoulder. He had gray eyes that darted like silverfish.

“I’m not the guy with the twins. We settled that over the telephone. Walker’s the name.”

“The guy with the C-notes.”

I took out my wallet and showed him the corners of the bills. Not a cigarette pack this time. I’d stopped at the bank on the way.

“Those the new ones? Let me see.”

I slid one out and stretched it between my hands.

He squinted. “Ben’s off-center.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Sure they ain’t queer?”

“I just spend them. I don’t ask them about their private life.”

“Well, bring ’em in.”

He held the screen door while I stepped inside, then searched the street one more time before he hooked it.

“I sure hope that guy shows up with the twins. The Asian market is nuts for twins, the blonder the better.”

“You said you were shooting a couple of kids in Red Wings jerseys.”

“That was on the phone. For all I knew you was using a cellular. Don’t tip nothing over, okay? The equipment’s rented.”

Someone had punched out a couple of walls and converted the ground floor into a studio. There were reflectors everywhere, a bank of lights on a stand, and a full-size video camera on a professional aluminum frame. There were stacks of three-quarter-inch videotape on the floors and on all the furniture except the bed. It wasn’t a bed, really; just a king-size mattress on the floor. A red plush spread had been flung over it, the better to show off the naked female flesh displayed there.

Nudity is deceptive. What looked at first glance to be a pile of writhing bodies turned out to be just two girls in their late teens, one black, the other a pale redhead, lying half entangled on the spread. I could tell my presence was embarrassing them. The black girl yawned and scratched herself under one breast while the redhead applied fresh lipstick from a neon-colored tube.

“Places, ladies,” Worth said.

The lipstick went out of sight and the girls swung into a passionate embrace.

“We can talk while I’m shooting.” Worth poked a CD into a tabletop player. “The music’s just for mood. Someone else’ll dub in the oohs and aahs later.”

The music was Gilbert and Sullivan.

“I didn’t know there was a lesbian pornography market,” I said.

“There isn’t. And the people I work with prefer to call them ‘adult features.’” He had strapped on the camera and was doing a slow schottische around the bed. “Dykes don’t rent videos. Straight couples prefer soft-core. The rest of the market is lonely guys—
lots
of lonely guys—and they ain’t interested in looking at some other guy’s pimply butt. With two women they think they’re getting double their money’s worth.”

“This your day job?”

“Day
and
night. That’s how I keep up the payments on this here mansion. Smile, ladies. You’re supposed to be having a good time.”

The black girl said, “I got a button sticking me in the ass.”

“Use it. You’re an actress.”

“Randy says you’re a wizard in the darkroom,” I said.

“Best in the Midwest.” A mobile made up of metal cutouts of spaceships and sportscars hung from a wire above the mattress. With one hand he set it spinning, then panned up with the camera to catch the motion. Onscreen it would look like a window-shattering climax.

“So why do skinflicks? Excuse me, ‘adult features.’”

“Two words,” he said. “Cyberspace.”

“I think that’s one word.”

“Who gives a shit? The point is, any fourteen-year-old with a PC can click his mouse and outperform an expert with a house full of copy cameras, air brushes, and developing fluid. You see a movie lately, all them explosions and car crashes? Computer generated. Special-effects guys that were pulling down a million a year five years ago are putting in for food stamps. Still photography got the worst of it. I got downsized right out of my career.”

“Bummer.”

He stopped to kick out the tape and see how much was left. “You said you had work for me.”

“I want a picture of two people together.”

“Hire a studio. Or buy a Kodak and do it yourself. It’s cheaper.”