The Witchfinder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “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.

  Six

  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.<
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  “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.

  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.”

  Seven

  IT 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.”

  “Walk
er?”

  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.