The Witchfinder

by Loren D. Estleman

  After that I moved quickly. I popped up the trunk, pulled on the gloves and a pair of rubbers I kept there in case of sudden weather—the power level would be much lower than Detroit Edison’s, but taking chances is for bungie-jumpers and matadors—and reached for the bolt-cutters just as a car turned into the street. I pivoted away from its lamps, blocking the Cutlass’s license plate with my body while I pretended to struggle with the spare tire. The car ticked on past without slowing.

  I stepped up the pace another notch. The prospect of a cellular 911 call knocked ten minutes off my schedule. I took out the cutters, lowered the trunk lid without closing it, and loped toward the visitors’ parking lot. There didn’t seem to be much use in walking at an unsuspicious pace while in possession of a tool that could get me ninety days at County.

  Allen Park is quiet after dark by city standards. Crickets sang, the measured surf of canned laughter coming from someone’s television set reached me, perhaps from as far away as Canada across the river. Detroit throbbed in the distance, never entirely silent as long as trucks prowled the interstates at night to avoid scales and factories ran around the clock. A fire siren climbed and fell, an ambulance whooped on the downstroke. Someone else’s tragedy, as remote as an earthquake in Peru. Call it the night of a thousand apathies.

  I’d brought along a pencil flashlight. It stayed in my pocket. There was enough illumination from the security lights to guide me to the area where I’d parked that morning. The telephone crew had erected a nylon tent to protect its excavation from weather and left up its barricades to protect itself from a lawsuit when someone fell in. I stepped between them, found the flap, and ducked inside, letting it fall shut behind me. Now I could use my light.

  I found the cable quickly. It was bright orange, and the crew had inserted a couple of wooden dowels underneath it to lift it free of the earth. I stepped down into the hole, put the penlight between my teeth, and groped for the conduit. The hard rubber gave a little when I squeezed.

  That was a break. I was afraid it would turn out to be cased in steel, and I hadn’t bothered to bring a hacksaw because the time it would have taken me to saw through it fell outside the margin of safety I had arranged for myself. I had both hands on the bolt-cutters when another pair of headlamps swept across the tent.

  I froze.

  I was afraid to dive for cover in case the movement was silhouetted against the nylon. The lights stayed on me for a long second. I could feel their heat. My own shadow loomed in front of me like my own guilty conscience. Then it moved. The lights slid the length of the tent and beyond. I heard tires swishing on asphalt, the sound of an engine slowing, idling, and then picking up speed, fading away as it moved off down the street. A driver had chosen the entrance of the lot to turn around in.

  No more hesitation now. Whoever it was might have seen something and gone off to report.

  The thick conduit was a healthy bite for the cables. I spread the handles all the way, worked the parrot’s-beak blades back and forth against the rubber until they bit, planted my feet solidly in the soft earth, and brought the handles together in one clean scissoring jerk.

  Conduit and cable parted with a dry cough, blue and white sparks splashed. I stamped out the ones that were still glowing on the ground. I was a vandal, not an arsonist.

  Thirteen

  LIKE MUMMIFICATION, frigate design, and the lost-wax process, the art of the extortion letter is now a thing of the past.

  The computer, as it has done with so many other areas of endeavor, has made the business of shaking down a victim much less messy, while robbing it of most of its charm. No longer must the novice blackmailer waste time combing through an entire newspaper hunting for all the words and letters he needs, encumbered by latex gloves so he can keep his fingerprints at home where they belong. He need merely print out his demands on an accommodating screen and dispatch them through the ether, anonymously and without fear of being traced. No paste, no scissors. No riddled pages of newsprint or scraps of cut-up paper to gather up and throw away where the trash man might find them and report them to the police. No worrying about loose hairs, scales, and other specimens of DNA adhering to the stationery.

  On the other hand, there is no romance, either. No jaunty uneven lines or Peter Max-like jumbled fonts or exotic, piratical clashes of characters in Baskerville black and Barnum & Bailey yellow, cavalierly disregarding all the rules of upper and lower case laid down by Strunk and White. Cyberspace has managed to make one of our most popular tools of felony look like a recall letter from General Motors.

  I’m a traditionalist. Also I don’t own a computer, and even if I had access to one that night and knew how to use it, I had no way of sending my communication to Lynn Arsenault’s place of work short of the post office, because some destructive creature of the night had put its telephone lines out of commission. So I did it the old-fashioned way. The result wasn’t all that impressive for the above-mentioned effort, but I was proud of the clarity and economy:

  $ ten 000 wait 4 mY CALL

  I clipped the pasted-over sheet of blank notepaper to the phony photo of Arsenault with Lily Talbot, tipped them into a new envelope fresh from the box, and threw in Nate Millender’s Yellow Pages ad, cut from under PHOTOGRAPHERS—FREELANCE. I sealed the flap with a sponge dipped in tap water and block-printed LYNN ARSENAULT—PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL on the outside with a No. 2 pencil. I’d considered spelling it CONFIDENSHUL, but cuteness can get you nailed.

  I scooped the litter into the kitchen wastebasket, dumped a can of tuna between two slices of bread, and washed it down with milk for dinner. Quite a day. I’d pried into people’s private affairs, violated a client’s confidence, destroyed public property, and framed an extortion. Now I went to bed and slept the sleep of the innocent. I dreamed of waylaying travelers in Sherwood Forest with cobbled-up stickup notes and donating the proceeds to the Errol Flynn Memorial Home for Rakes, Rogues, Rooks, and Rascals for Rent.

  After an hour I sat up, wide awake, with a sentence on my lips: “ ‘Personal and confidential’ means ‘open now’ to a secretary.”

  I pulled the drawer out of the nightstand and tore loose the little blue-bound notebook I kept taped there. It was an abridged and coded version of the larger one I had locked in the safe at the office. I found the number I wanted there and padded into the living room to dial it.

  “Goddamn it, hello.”

  A young masculine voice I knew, clouded with sleep and maybe something else that was more the business of the DEA than it was mine.

  “Bob, this is Walker. Did I get you up?”

  “I’m up all the time, friend. Least, I ain’t had no complaints. Hee-hee.” His fog was lifting. “This where I’m supposed to tell you what time it is?”

  “Don’t need it. Do you still have that messenger’s uniform from your last job?”

  “I never had no messenger’s job.”

  “I’m thinking brass buttons and a pillbox hat.”

  “Oh, that uniform. I took it when they canned me for smoking in a supply closet. I was a hop at the Dearborn Hyatt.”

  “What were you smoking?”

  “Tobacco, can you dig it? Every time I bring one of my vices down to the next level, the system lowers its level of tolerance to include me out.”

  “A uniform’s a uniform. Lose the hat.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “I need a message delivered.”

  “Buy a stamp.”

  “I need it to get there.”

  “Call FedEx.”

  “FedEx collects autographs. I need this one delivered to the person whose name is on the envelope, no one else, by someone who doesn’t keep records.”

  “Now?”

  “Tomorrow morning at eight. Well, this morning. You might have to hang around. He’s a cheese, comes in when he feels like it.”

  “Holy shit, I better get started. I only got seven and a half hours.”

  “I just wanted to be sure you were availab
le.”

  “Now you sound like my parole cop. Where we meet, your office?”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t start work that early.”

  “Hey, fuck you. Your crib it is. You fix me them eggs with peppers and onions and shit?”

  “Do I hear the munchies talking?”

  “Fuck you again. I been pissing nothing but clean mountain water for six weeks now.”

  “One Pancho Villa’s Revenge coming up.”

  “Up ain’t the direction it generally comes. Be there at seven.”

  I flipped the receiver at the cradle and went back to bed with my mind clear.

  Robert “Hurricane Bob” Lester had played two straight years of a three-night gig at the Chord Progression on Livernois under the billing “The Best Jazz Guitar West of East.” When a promoter scouting for a New York record label signed him to back up Art Pepper on ten sides, with the promise of six of his own afterward, Bob went on a bat to celebrate. He dropped acid on top of three lines of cocaine and an indeterminate number of Scotch highballs, became convinced that his right hand had detached itself and was trying to strangle him, and hacked off all his fingers with a hunting knife he carried for protection. Neurosurgeons at Detroit Receiving Hospital managed to sew all but two of them back on, then had to remove everything but the thumb when he developed circulation problems.

  All this happened before I met him. His bass player, a friend since childhood who had been left out when Bob signed the record deal, hired me to trace him after he disappeared from the recovery room. I found him in a motel room on Telegraph, working up enough bile to put a slug in his head from a Korean pistol he’d bought from a guy named Slash. After I wrestled it away from him I called in a couple of favors to grease his way past the waiting list at a drug rehab center downtown. The bass player and I were standing out front when he came out, thirty pounds lighter and white-haired at twenty-eight. He hadn’t kept a job since, but on the other hand he hadn’t shot himself either. I found work for him when I could.

  I was up and dressed a few minutes before seven, dusting bits of onion, green pepper, and extra sharp cheddar off my palms into a skillet paved with crackling eggs, when he came to the front door. He was taller than he looked, and much younger. He’d put back on all the weight he’d lost, although he wasn’t fat, just beefy, and his white hair was receding straight up the middle. His skin was golden brown and sharply wrinkled, as if it had been tobacco-cured. In his wine-red tunic and matching trousers with a gold stripe up the side he looked like an old man stuck in a menial job.

  Perfect.

  When I let him in he pointed his nose at the ceiling and inhaled deeply.

  “Smell them eggs. Do they make your eyes run?”

  “There’s no paint left on the ceiling above the stove. You be the judge.”

  In the kitchen he sat down at the table I’d set and made quick work of six eggs and two cups of coffee. The special mitten he wore on his right hand had a clamp built in that let him grip his fork.

  I leaned back on the counter, nursing my first cup. “You working?”

  “Got me a part-time. Flag man for the county road.” He swept up the last of the omelet with a piece of toast and popped it into his mouth. “We’re replacing an overpass railing on the North Lodge. Truck went through it last week.”

  “I read about that.”

  “Got to get the cage back up before the local pukes start pitching concrete down on the underpass.” He filled a glass from the pitcher of orange juice and drank. “No pulp?”

  “When I want to eat an orange I peel one for myself. How’s the money?”

  “I ain’t pricing no Ferraris.”

  “You said last night you were staying clean. That on the level?”

  “I still got the rest of my fingers.” He finished his coffee and pushed away his plate. “Good eggs. Next time more onion.”

  “I was down to half a bag. How well do you know Allen Park?”

  “I played a bar there one whole summer.”

  “The place is on Euclid. Imminent Visions.”

  “Sounds like a hop joint.”

  “It’s a firm of architects.”

  “Same thing.”

  I handed him the envelope and a fifty-dollar bill. “Deliver the envelope. Keep the cash.”

  He fingered the bill with his good hand. “You can get the job done cheaper.”

  “If you don’t want the work, say so.”

  “Man, there ain’t no word in Ebonics for that.” He pocketed the bill. “Thanks, Amos.”

  I told him to sit still and went for my lightest-weight sportcoat, an unstructured one of raw silk. When I came back I asked him what he was driving.

  “Same piece-of-shit Dodge I had two years ago.”

  “Give me a head start. I want to be there when you go in. Don’t forget to lock up when you leave the house.”

  “Ain’t you afraid I’ll swipe your TV set and sell it for dope?”

  “It wouldn’t bring you enough to fill one nostril.” I went out.

  I smelled a break in the weather. The overcast was stained blue-black and a wind from the east was rattling the burnt-out leaves on the trees along Joseph Campau. When the rains come in summer they come fists first.

  Six blocks from my destination I passed an Ameritech truck parked on a corner and two workers in hardhats scowling over a chart they had spread out on the hood. I hoped that meant they were still looking for the trouble along the line.

  At Imminent Visions a green Ford Bronco occupied my old space in the visitors’ lot, but from where I pulled in two slots down I had a clear view of the tent. Nothing was going on there. I slumped down in the seat for comfort and turned on the radio. The weatherman wasn’t reporting rain.

  Hurricane Bob Lester’s old blue Dart swung into the lot ten minutes later. He double-parked behind the Bronco and went inside, carrying the envelope. He never looked in my direction.

  I gave him five minutes to bluff his way past the guard in the lobby. That may have been generous; when he was straight he had a line of patter that was as good as any of his old guitar licks. Ten more to get upstairs and scam the receptionist, and another ten just for fun, unless Arsenault was late. It was Friday and I hoped he was the kind of executive who came in early to clear his desk for the weekend. Much more than that and I’d know Bob was in trouble.

  At the end of twenty minutes the Ameritech truck, or its identical twin, rolled right up to the tent and two men got out to inspect the excavation. They were the same pair I’d seen on the corner.

  I hate modern technology more than carrots. If they finished splicing the cut cable too soon, I’d risked a vandalism bust for nothing.

  Five more minutes crawled past. I had decided to go with Plan B, which was to wish there were a Plan C, when Hurricane Bob came out without the envelope. He walked straight to his car, backed around, and joined the traffic on Euclid, again without tipping me the nod. He left a piece of his tailpipe behind in the driveway.

  The rest was waiting.

  The whole idea behind planting a burr under a mule’s tail is to see where he runs. You can’t follow a telephone call even in a souped-up 1970 Cutlass.

  I was counting on Lynn Arsenault’s reacting to the extortion demand with the same panic that forced him to flee when I’d made an appointment to ask him about the photograph. The theory was that when he tried to call for help and found the telephones dead he wouldn’t reach for a cellular and trust the call to the public airwaves. I wanted him to break cover and run to the witchfinder with his fears.

  Everyone in this line has something he’s best at. Some can stake out Rushmore until Lincoln sneezes. Others can shadow a man on foot for sixty deserted blocks unnoticed, or plant an electronic bug in a woman’s wig without her knowing it. With me it’s the vehicular tail. The man who taught me the basics said I could follow a Thunderbird from New York to California in a Moscow city bus without detection.

  Okay, so it isn’t the polio vaccine.r />
  I waited. The clouds took on a purple cast, then black, and still the radio was predicting more of yesterday. Three visitors left the lot, two more pulled in and walked into the building. A secretary or something in a white silk blouse, gray split skirt, and red high heels came out and talked with the telephone workers, who tipped back their hardhats and explained to her the principles of electronics. She nodded understanding, tossed her tawny hair, and clittered back inside. The clouds turned the color of fresh tar. Thunder grumbled. No cars had entered or left the underground garage in half an hour.

  The workers struck the tent, rolled and folded it and put it in the back of the truck, and began putting away their tools. I got out of the car and walked down the ramp to the garage entrance.

  The attendant in the booth was asleep on his elbow with his mouth open and a thread of spittle glittering off the end of his chin. His visored cap was cocked to one side, showing two inches of shiny pink scalp above a fringe of white hair. He had a flesh-colored lump of hearing aid in one big ear and bifocals with lenses as thick as hockey pucks. I didn’t tiptoe on my way past.

  The air was fetid, sour with mildew and the dank stench of stale urine and new rubber and old exhaust and concrete that had never quite dried. The atmosphere was oppressive. I walked down the aisle with my mouth open, not so much to avoid the smell as to equalize the pressure inside my head. It was more than just the heat and the stagnant air inside and the storm building outside. I had felt it before, and every time I had come upon something unpleasant.

  I found the emerald-green Porsche parked next to the elevator in a space with Arsenault’s name embossed on a red metal plaque on the wall in front of it. The vanity plate above the rear bumper read PRED-8-OR.

  Somebody had gotten a boot out of that.

  The window on the driver’s side was starred from a neat round hole in the center. I closed my mouth, shook out my handkerchief, and tried the door handle. It tipped up without resistance and the door came open.