The Witchfinder

by Loren D. Estleman

  The clerk, a thin young Arab with a pocked face and scars on both cheeks, changed my dollar without taking his eyes off me. He kept one hand out of sight beneath the counter.

  I fumbled two coins into the slot and asked the operator to call a taxi company.

  “Which one, sir?”

  “One with taxis.”

  “You can dial that number yourself, sir.”

  “I’m blind.” Not a bald lie; the telephone had two receivers, several sets of buttons, and my choice of shelves to lean on with all four elbows.

  “One moment, sir.”

  The dispatcher, one of the broken-windpipe boys, grilled me for a couple of minutes before agreeing to send a cab. Four drivers had been shot at in the city since February, two hit, one killed. Ordering transportation had become a subversive act.

  I waited in the doorway until the cab showed, a blue beater on mismatched tires. The driver, black and forty with a cloth cap pulled low over one eye, spent some time fumbling with the city map in the pocket above the sun visor as I got in. When he took his hand down to wheel us away from the curb I saw why. It’s illegal in Michigan for cab drivers to carry guns. It’s also illegal to drive without wearing a seat belt, and as far as I could tell the car hadn’t any.

  It was dark out now. I saw his face reflected in the windshield, sea-green in the secondhand light from the dash. He had a couple of dozen figures of Hawaiian dancing girls glued to the ledge, swaying and wiggling as we bumped over the ruts. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  “Man, you looks like you got a early start,” he said. “I don’t usually picks folks up in your shape this time on a Saturday night.”

  “I work Sundays.”

  “Yeah? You some kind of preacher?”

  “Our Lady of the Broken Head. I’m the pastor.”

  “I’m Southern Baptist myself. Well, the wife is, so I am too. She prays so much I don’t figure the Lord’ll throw any bolts at me or He might hit her. So what happened? Fall off the pulpit?”

  “I was shot in somebody’s apartment.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Swear to God.” I made the sign of the cross. It looked more like a distress signal.

  “That’s the way I’d go. Hee-hee.”

  My house was the only one in the block without a light in a window. Saturday night for most of my neighbors meant hot cocoa and Parcheesi. I tipped the driver too much—entertainment tax for the Hawaiian floor show—and let myself in. The rooms had that shut-in smell, but I didn’t have the energy to open any windows. I got the bottle down from the cupboard above the sink and filled a glass. I wasn’t up to wrestling with an ice cube tray.

  The telephone rang and went on ringing. Heading into the living room I barked my shin on a piece of furniture I didn’t know I had. Later I found out I’d broken the skin and started bleeding, but against the pain in my head it was just a dull thud and somebody else’s injury.

  After a short interval the telephone rang again. This time I answered it.

  “Where can you have been? I’ve been calling your office and your house since yesterday afternoon.”

  For a moment I wondered why Ronald Colman was calling me. I took a drink. The fog burned off.

  “Too much story for the telephone, Mr. Lund. Where are you?”

  “Back at the Marriott. I stayed at the Westin overnight in case the police wanted to talk to me again. I very much doubt they were satisfied with that ridiculous story you told me to tell them.”

  “Did they threaten to drag you downtown?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, then. Cops can’t help looking and sounding suspicious; it’s chronic, and probably terminal. The story should hold them until they run out of leads. How’s Mr. Furlong?”

  “Most lively. He ate an enormous breakfast. I begin to think he fares better for my absence. I say, are you all right? You sound badly used.”

  You had to hand it to the English, despite burning Washington. They had a phrase for everything. “I’ll stop by in the morning and report.”

  He said very good and we wished each other a pleasant night.

  After twenty minutes in the easy chair drinking I began to feel a little less like an extra in a George Romero film. That was one advantage of having lost blood; the alcohol didn’t take so long to swim upstream. I got up and opened some windows. The super-stocked Plymouth was missing from next door: Cruise Night. With peace in the offing I flipped through the LPs I keep in a wooden crate from the General Beverage Company and put Eartha Kitt on the little tabletop stereo. “I Wanna Be Evil” shook some of the phantoms out of the corners.

  The eight-day heirloom clock had run down. I found the key and wound it and set it. The click-clunk was louder than usual in the little silences between bars, as if each tilt of the balance wheel were taking the room further into the clock’s past, all the way back to a sawdust-smelling shop in New England, where European fingers, stained with walnut oil and hindered a little by needles of arthritis that would spread from knuckle to knuckle and eventually force the shop to close, assembled the materials to measure time generations beyond their own.

  The headache was in remission and I was seeing single again. I was probably hungry—I.V. fare doesn’t last much longer than Chinese—but I didn’t feel like eating. Instead I read two chapters of a detective novel I didn’t remember buying, about a New York investigator who specialized in child abuse cases. The tough-guy narrator described incidents of abuse with all the detailed slavering rapture of a serial killer recalling past dismemberments. It was the biggest waste of time since leeching and made me want to wash my hands with boric acid.

  I gave it up and retired, feeling shot.

  Twenty

  I WOKE UP FOR THE FIRST time around 2:00 A.M. when the kid next door thundered into his parents’ driveway, gunned the Roadrunner’s mill one last time, and killed the ignition. The noise rammed twin ice picks through my eardrums to the top of my spine.

  I rolled out and stumbled into the bathroom, where in the mirror I saw that I’d bled through the bandage. Teeth bared, I peeled away the adhesive and gauze, used a Q-tip dipped in peroxide to clean the yellow-brown ooze from the stitches, and inspected young Dr. Ebersole’s needlework. If the scar never healed and the hair didn’t grow back I could always start a rock band. Or hire myself out to cure hiccoughs. I applied iodine, and when I climbed back down from the ceiling fixture I put on a fresh patch from the first-aid kit in the medicine cabinet. Then I swallowed a handful of Extra-Strength Bayers and went back to bed.

  There’s nothing like a little daylight to put a fresh face on your situation.

  I had little enough of it because I’d set the alarm to shake me out around dawn. The theory was if Mary Ann Thaler came looking for me she would start as soon as she’d slept off Saturday night on the town, in which case I needed to hit the road early. But a little daylight will do when you’re rested and the aching in your head has subsided to a half-pleasant hum. It was good to be in a position to suffer. The dead are immune.

  I scrubbed off the animal smell, shaved with two lathers, brushed my hair back from the patch, and dressed, selecting a red sport shirt, tan slacks, argyles, brown belt and shoes, no jacket or tie. It was Sunday after all. While coffee was brewing I fried four eggs and slapped them between two pieces of bread with a slice of cheese. I was hungry now and I knew it. I filled my battered old Thermos, threw everything into a paper sack, and picked up the thick newspaper on my way out the door.

  The good news was that when Friday’s stormfront passed through it took the cloud cover with it, allowing the sun to come up as red as my shirt and as big as a hula hoop against a sky streaked with salmon and magenta. The bad news was it made the air hotter. The good news after that was the humidity had dropped. The bad news was that didn’t matter because I didn’t have a car to whisk me from one cool place to another. I can go on in this vein for as long as you’ll let me.

  At the end of eight block
s I spread out my breakfast on a bus stop bench and pulled apart the paper as I ate. The buses don’t run Sundays, but I had time to kill. Even the church traffic wasn’t due for two hours. There wasn’t a car in motion on the street and the air smelled funny without carcinogens. For that one short stretch of the week, Detroit belonged to me and the merchants setting up in the Farmer’s Market.

  The newspaper was more of a mess than usual. The News and the Free Press, formerly the last two hotly competing big-city dailies in the country, had formed a joint operating agreement allowing them to pool their staffs on Sunday. The combined personnel tiptoed around each other like too many hens competing for the attentions of a single rooster. As a result, whatever news found its way into the columns did so by accident and somebody probably caught hell for it. Also there was a newspaper strike on, had been since the Ottoman Empire fell, and most of the bylines were unfamiliar. Not that anyone noticed in the era of CNN.

  A piece in the front section reported that there was nothing new to report on the shooting death of Lynn Arsenault, prominent Allen Park architect, and a paragraph back by the obituaries mentioned that a search was under way for freelance photojournalist Nathan Millender, whose abandoned sailboat showed evidence of a possible tragedy. No connection was made between the two incidents.

  By the time I got through the funnies, the city was coming to life around me by degrees. An ’83 Pontiac held together with masking tape and Bondo stopped for the light and took off with a chatter of lifters, leaving behind a puddle of engine coolant like blue-green urine. The driver had that smoldered-out look of someone on his way home from the last blind pig to close. Two boys not much older than twelve, their Nike high-tops flapping like galoshes on their slender ankles, met in a doorway across the street and completed a business transaction in less time than it takes to describe it. A family of four in stiff blue serge and pressed pink cotton walked past me on their way to the church around the corner. Throw in an auto theft at gunpoint, a WILL WORK FOR FOOD SIGN, and a citizens’ clean-up, fix-up, paint-up committee, and the neighborhood became the drop of teeming water from which an analyst might theorize the existence of a pond called Detroit.

  Cruising cabs are scarce on Sunday, even when no one’s been taking target practice on the drivers. I caught a break when one stopped at the far corner to let out another group of churchgoers and sprinted over there, carrying my empty Thermos and leaving the newspaper on the bench. One of the boys from the doorway swooped down on the sports section as I got in.

  This time my driver was white, sixty pounds overweight, and shared with me his plan for city reform, which sounded a lot like Mein Kampf with grease guns and helicopters. I tuned him out and watched the dark dirty blossom of Motown open its petals to the sun.

  My car was parked where I had left it Friday; the city towing services were as hard up for manpower as the police department. I paid the cabbie, tipped him a quarter for his political theory, managed not to get my toes run over when he drove away, and laid the ticket I found on my windshield to rest with the others in the glove compartment. I was still two shy of a bench warrant. The motor was slow to turn over after the inactivity and the change in the dew-point, but it caught, and I drove through awakening streets toward the Edsel Ford West and the Airport Marriott. The radio news had nothing new on either Arsenault or Millender.

  one last slashing stroke across the paper, then slumped back against the pillows, exhausted. After a moment his eyes opened.

  “Thank you Stuart Lund had exchanged his gray tailoring for eight yards of light blue summer worsted and tucked a pale silk scarf inside his open shirt collar. Aside from that he looked the same: yellow hair carefully combed, waxen blue eyes, black moustache trimmed neatly into an isosceles triangle. The cane with the heavy silver crook was working as hard to support him as it had during the week. I don’t know why I’d expected him to be different. Maybe because I was, and it showed in his face when he opened the door.

  “What on earth happened to you?”

  “I was shot in the head.”

  “Be serious. What happened?”

  “I don’t know why I can’t get anyone to believe me. This isn’t Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” I was feeling drained again. “Am I invited?”

  “Certainly.” He removed his mountain from my path.

  The layout didn’t seem so big now, but then everything looks smaller when you have come back from the other side. The door to the bedroom was ajar. I kept going and pushed it open the rest of the way. The lawyer lumbered along behind me.

  It was nobody’s idea of a sickroom. The carpet was deep and wine-colored, the chairs and sofa were overstuffed and upholstered in plush prints, color blowups of rural Michigan in all four seasons hung on the walls. The bed would have slept seven. Its proportions made the man in it seem small and fragile, but he didn’t look any less healthy than he had when we’d met. He was sitting up in pale yellow silk pajamas with his knees elevated and a drawing board resting against his thighs. The bend of his back, the set of his angular features, and the swift positive motions of the hand holding the pencil all said he was completely absorbed in his sketch. Seen in profile, his sharp nose and chin made check marks against the bright window.

  “One minute,” he said without looking up.

  I watched a DC-10 landing outside. From this side of the triple-paned window the howl of its engines sounded like a blender in the next room.

  Furlong made for waiting. The energy comes in spurts, like water from a clogged pipe. I never know how long one will last, or how long I’ll have to wait before the next. Or if there is a next.”

  “You’re going to need a bigger sheet if you’re drawing a portrait of Lund.”

  Lund hobbled in and dropped into one of the deep chairs. The floor shook. “Having an injury is hardly an excuse to be uncivil. I submit that Jay is suffering a good deal more than either of us, but he has yet to make an insulting remark.”

  “You’re probably right.” I dropped into the other chair: three sick men sitting around a thousand-buck-a-night suite. “You are right. I apologize.”

  He opened the hand holding the cane in a gesture of absolution.

  “As for the rest,” I said, “I’m not Jay Bell Furlong. If I were I wouldn’t have gotten shot.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” The architect narrowed his eyes at the paper in front of him. “There. I suppose. Crude stuff without the proper materials, but not too shabby for a man at death’s door.” He turned the board around and held it up.

  The drawing pinned to it was a simple arrangement of horizontal lines, contoured for a three-dimensional effect. It might have been done on a computer, if the computer’s circuits were wired into Furlong’s brain.

  Lund expelled air. “Absolutely lovely, Jay. Your best work.”

  “Bullshit. Walker? You’re the candid one.”

  “I can’t draw a straight line.”

  “No one has since Leonardo. What does your gut say?”

  “Nice. Ranch or country club?”

  “Neither. Ha. It’s my crypt.”

  “In that case it’s swell.”

  “For God’s sake.” Lund looked from one face to the other.

  “Mausoleum I suppose is the contemporary term,” said Furlong. “I prefer catafalque, but the imbeciles who take their education from those milk-faced pundits on the tube wouldn’t know how to pronounce it. Jay Bell Furlong’s last design, also his final resting place. Appropriate?”

  Full face now, trying hard not to betray eagerness, a child’s plea for praise, he displayed for the first time the signs of decomposition. His ears had begun to turn outward and his teeth showed large and white against his sunken cheeks, the protrusion of his skull. His pajamas hung like tinsel from the bones of his shoulders and slid back from the articulated stalks of his wrists. Cachexia, the oncologists call it. An animated skeleton.

  I said, “I didn’t peg you for an Ozymandias complex.”

  His eyebrows lifted, str
etching the skin further. “A detective who reads Shelley. I’m impressed.”

  “Postal screwup. They sent me The Atlantic instead of Guns and Ammo.”

  “Now you’re getting as testy as Stuart. You must allow a dying man his prejudices. For the record, I’m not a monomaniac. And I am. My first choice would be a plain pine box in bare earth. However, cemetery regulations require concrete vaults, denying us the opportunity of returning to the land, which I might add is a right enjoyed by every other organic thing on the planet.”

  “There’s always cremation.”

  “Vernon Whiting was cremated. I’d have my ashes scattered, but I don’t know what they did with his. What if we were to get mixed up? So. Since I’m to be vacuum-sealed for all eternity, I might as well go the whole nine yards, or six feet, or whatever. I’ve little enough to do with the time left me, and all the buildings this world really needs have already been constructed. All we’ve done since Eisenhower is repeat ourselves. Why not a tomb? Let the world say Furlong was a narcissistic jerk on the grand scale. It will give it something to talk about besides the Super Bowl.”

  He laid the board facedown beside him on the bed. The speech seemed to have consumed his latest spurt of energy. Beads of sweat glittered on his forehead like condensation on crackle wrap. “Did I hear you say you were almost booked on the same one-way trip?”

  “They can burn me if they like. I’ve smoked since I was seventeen.” I shook out a Winston. “Does this suite come with aspirins?”

  “Windy? And a glass of water.”

  “Vodka,” I said. “They dissolve quicker in alcohol.”

  “So does your liver.” But Lund was on his feet and lurching toward the bathroom.

  The pills, or more likely it was the liquor, started working right away. I emptied the glass to make sure and set it on the floor. That simple movement brought the blood roaring to my head like the ocean in a conch shell. I lit up and poured smoke into it. “I was shot once before. I’m trying to keep it from becoming a habit.”