The Witchfinder (26 page)

“Okay, you got me,” he said. “To begin with, you don’t have an Uncle Roy. Vietnam and Cambodia—hey, me, too; but you know that. First Air Cavalry, tough gig. M.P. over here on your second hitch, every week but one of the police training course here in town. You dropped the ball there. It’s never a good idea to knock out teeth belonging to sons of prominent politicians. No matter what they try to do to you in the locker room.”

“I was younger then. Now I’d choose the gut. Easier on the knuckles.”

He went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “Married for a little, which is a bitch as I well know. Junior partner in the present concern until a bullet caught up with the experienced end, leaving you in sole proprietorship. I know where the piece of shit who fired it is living now, in case you’re interested.”

“Pass.”

“Right, revenge is for suckers. With my contacts, the address wasn’t too hard to pry loose. I just sort of thought it might come in handy if I needed an in. According to my sources you’re not an easy man to trade horses with.”

“Depends on the horse.”

He reached inside his coat, watching me for a reaction. I didn’t give him one. The material was too light to conceal anything more lethal than a handkerchief, and anyway I knew he wore his holster on his hip. He produced a fold of wrinkled paper and spread it out on the desk. I recognized it before I saw the pasted-in letters.

$ ten 000 wait 4 mY CALL

“Sloppy job,” I admitted. “They tell me there are better ways of doing it now, but I’m a traditionalist. I don’t even watch colorized movies.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me where I got it?”

“I know where you got it. Your aim isn’t what it was in Southeast Asia.”

“That was in the open. A moving target in a small room is harder to hit. You aren’t doing anything stupid like taping this conversation, are you?”

“What if I am?”

“Well, what do you think?”

I rolled my chair back from the desk and spread my arms. He got up, came around, and opened all the drawers, lifting a stack of insulated mailers in the deep drawer on the left to make sure. The file cabinets were locked, but he checked the cracks for wires leading to hidden microphones. Finally he resumed his position in the customer chair. He hadn’t turned his back on me the whole time.

“You could be wearing a wire,” he said, “but probably not. You didn’t know I was coming. I almost finished the job, you know, in the apartment. It was my first instinct.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“The pickings were too good. The kitschy note, the racy picture, Millender’s ad from the phone book. I figured there had to be more hid out in a safe deposit box or with a lawyer. In the Event of My Death, and blah-blah. Was I right?”

It was my turn. I got out the pack and matches, watching him for a reaction when my hand went to my pocket. Nothing. Well, we’d lamped each other pretty good at the marina. I fired up and blew a jet at the ceiling. “When you ask a question like that, does anybody say no?”

He rolled his shoulders. “You’d be surprised. Anyway I had to ask. I’m pretty straight-on, Walker. The people I work for have to screw themselves through doorways, but that’s politics. They see a window, they expect it to be locked. So they get out their jimmies and glass-cutters and suction cups and get to work. Me, I try the window first. And you know what? Three times out of ten it’s open.”

“You can be too straight-on,” I said. “Like not bothering to leave the gun at the scene of a suicide.”

“I’ve heard that story too.”

“Like arranging a landlubber’s accident for Nate Millender when it was clear just from his decor he was no amateur sailor.”

“Most sailing accidents happen to experts,” he said. “Ask the Coast Guard.”

“I like to think I postponed his accident a day. You’re too good a mechanic not to scrub an assignment once a trained detective came along to place you at the scene. Maybe not, though. The lake was pretty crowded that afternoon. Maybe it was a dry run.”

“No pun intended.” He smiled.

“The next day, after witnesses saw Millender on Belle Isle, buying gear and eating tomatoes, you caught him alone, brained him, slipped him into the water, and launched his sloop. Smearing gray matter on the boom sweetened the pill.”

He patted the pocket where he’d stashed his telephone. “I had an emergency meeting in town. I borrowed a car from the curator of the Dossin Museum on the island. An old friend. You can check the time with him.”

“Once a body’s been floating a couple of days, nobody can determine time of death within twelve hours; plenty of time to scare up forty people of good reputation to testify you were with them when the tragedy took place. That tin soldier’s been wound up so many times it runs without a key.”

“See, that’s what sitting in an office will do to you. Your mind wanders all over the place and brings back any old thing.”

“It was a good plan.” I used the ashtray. “Complicated enough to seem incredible, but not so tangled you might trip over details. That’s why Arsenault was such a disappointment. You took chances. You were seen in the vicinity at the time he was killed. You must have been in a hurry.”

“I haven’t hurried since I was fourteen. I made mistakes. I don’t make them now. I didn’t tag Arsenault.”

It was the first flat-out denial he’d made. For some reason it disappointed me.

“Arsenault was a lapsed Catholic,” I said. “That early guilt training never goes away. Being bled by Millender didn’t help him forget. It all came back on him hard enough to drive him back to the Church, where he was advised to take his confession to Lily Talbot and beg forgiveness. When push came to shove he couldn’t do it, so he threw money at her, disguised as a business transaction.

“She took it, as who wouldn’t? She probably thought she’d earned it. But even a watered-down act of self-abasement on Arsenault’s part set off alarm bells. What if he took it a step further and told her who set up the frame that split her and Jay Bell Furlong? She might go straight to Furlong with the information, and that would leave the culprit—we’ll call him the witchfinder, just for fun—out in the cold. No bequest. So now Arsenault belongs to the ages.”

He wasn’t smiling now. He was someone hanging on to a story he didn’t care for but wanted to know how it ended.

I went on. “Millender was a footnote: the man who rigged the photograph, a blackmailer who might dip his straw anywhere, a small spill to be wiped up. If you were going to blow off a job quick and dirty, it should have been him. Maybe the assignments came too close together. Busy couple of days for Suicide Sam.”

“Mister,” he said, “I don’t know any Lily Talbot or anything about rigged pictures. Are you talking about the one you had in your pocket?”

“You’re letting me down, Royce. We’re just two guys talking: no wires or tape recorders. You’ve been hanging around politicians too long. You’re not a straight-on guy anymore.” I got rid of some more ash. “Okay, let’s hear your version.”

“You don’t know anything, do you? I mean for real.” There was awe in his tone. “When I entered my late good friend Nate Millender’s place, found a burglar on the premises, and took action against the rising tide of crime in our fair city, I thought you had some kind of handle. When I frisked you I was sure of it. But you really do work without a net.”

I took one last deep drag—it was like drawing a strand of rusty barbed wire down my throat—and punched out the cigarette. My hand wanted to shake but I didn’t let it.

“I don’t recommend it in your case,” I said. “When you jumped me, the world didn’t know Millender was anybody’s late anything. The body hadn’t been found.”

“But his brains had. Don’t try to shit a shitter.”

I moved a shoulder. “Just staying in practice. For once in my life I don’t want the killer. Arsenault was a career snake. Worse, he was an uncommitted one, without the stomach to accept what he was or the guts to change. Millender was a leech. As far as I’m concerned the earth’s oxygen supply was wasted on both of them. I just want what I was hired for. Who hung a frame on Lily Talbot?”

“I wish I could help. For once in my life I do. I knew Arsenault from when I worked at county and he made zoning requests. The mayor’s shopping around for a new convention center and he tagged me to get a bid from Imminent Visions. Errands are the job most of the time.”

“You had an appointment with him the morning he was killed.”

“I had a conflict. I tried to cancel, but I couldn’t get an answer on the phone.”

“It wasn’t working; but that’s another story. Arsenault’s secretary said you kept the appointment.”

He ran a finger along his square jaw. “She said that? That makes me very unhappy.”

“Is that why she disappeared?”

“Did she.” His face was full of thought.

I shifted gears. “Say she’s lying, and you’re clean on Arsenault. Why Millender? And don’t tell me you swung his way. I’ll throw you out on your gun.”

“Much as I’d like to see you try.” The grin was back. “Can I be hypothetical?”

“I wish you were.”

“I love you too. Millender liked to take pictures of naked men doing things naked men like to do together; not furry-chested specimens like you and me, goes without saying. Suppose somebody who ought to know enough to stay away from cameras unless he’s kissing a baby just kind of wandered in front of one in his birthday suit, in the wrong company. Male company. Hey, if they had any brains they wouldn’t chase after public office in the first place, right? Hypothetically speaking, remember. It’s bad business to judge the people you work for.”

“Which one was it? Hypothetically speaking.”

“If I told you that I’d just be making more work for myself. And I’m indolent.” He tasted the word.

I shook my head.

“Too much coincidence. Why should Arsenault and Millender die within twenty-four hours of each other if there was no connection?”

“If I could answer that, I’d know what the hell we were talking about. I can only give you my side.’

“Hypothetically speaking.”

“Fuck that, I’m tired of it. We’re just two guys talking, like you said. Millender had
CANCELED
stamped on his forehead the day we started hanging together. These things take time. The cops who bother to backtrack tend to focus on new people and new developments in the deceased’s life. You have to establish some kind of norm. Keeps you from being singled out.”

“Makes sense.”

“Of course it does. I never hurry. But when a private cop comes around asking about Millender’s photography, it’s time to fill in a date on the stamp.”

“What brought you to his apartment later?”

“The party I was working for had bought the negative and all the prints; but Millender’s word was all he had on that. I needed to be sure there weren’t any more lying around. I almost forgot.” Again he went into his pocket. This time he laid Millender’s passbook and the negative and prints of Millender and Arsenault on the desk. They looked even more lewd there than they had in the apartment; the passbook no less so than the pictures. “I recognized Arsenault. I thought the shots might come in handy if we wound up doing business with Imminent Visions, but that was before the news broke.”

I made no move to pick them up. “What’s the catch?”

“Call it professional courtesy.”

“Not without choking on it.”

He raised a hand. “Whatever. I can’t afford to collect junk I don’t need. I move a lot.”

“Picky neighbors?”

“Candy-ass employers. Sooner or later they get to feeling ashamed of themselves. Keeping me around reminds them of too many things.”

“Bummer.”

“I’m used to it. And the demand always exceeds the supply.”

I let a little silence settle. Then I reached out with my left hand and shuffled the items into a stack. He didn’t have to know I was unarmed.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“We’re square for now. You shot me, but you didn’t cross the T. That puts me in a minority of one, for which I suppose I should show a little gratitude. I’ll consider this stuff a bonus.” I opened the passbook. “You wonder why Millender bothered working at all.”

“Everybody needs a cover.” He got up and turned the chair around.

I watched him. “You mean like ‘currently attached City of Detroit, no title or office, duties unspecified’?”

“Politics is fuzzy. Good thing, too. There’d be no place for me if it wasn’t. You, too, maybe.” He stuck out his hand.

I didn’t look at it. “Don’t tell that one even to your pillow.”

He lowered the hand. There was no daylight in his face. The grin was strictly Edison.

“Let’s you and me make an effort to stay out of the same room from now on,” he said. “I scrape guys like Nate Millender off my heel all the time. You might spoil my appetite.”

“Hypothetically speaking.”

He shook his head. “Straight on.”

“You had your last word,” I said. “Now skeedaddle.”

His grin hung in the air a moment after he’d left, like the Cheshire Cat’s.

In a little while it was replaced by the hard glitter of Sergeant St. Thomas’s glasses.

Mondays.

T
ODAY IT WAS
a blue suit, pale salmon shirt, and gay floral print tie, the kind that have bred and multiplied and overrun all the men’s departments, stampeding the stripes, dots, and club patterns of old. I’d decided not to shop for ties until the fad blew over; but it seemed to have settled in with all the grim determination of AIDS and the three-button suit. On him it looked all right.

“I just ran into Royce Grayling downstairs,” he said. “How’d you manage to smoke him out?”

“I didn’t have to. If I sit here long enough every crook and cop in town drifts in with the smog. Did you wrap him up or grill him on the spot?”

“He promised to drop by this afternoon and make a statement.”

“Good of him to fit you in. Most of the killers I know are booked up three weeks in advance.”

“I didn’t draw up the system, Walker. If I did, every cop would be on a five-year contract, subject to renegotiation when his conviction record bumps up above two-fifty.”

“How’d you spot him?”