The Witchfinder

by Loren D. Estleman

  Surf history, stop anywhere, and you’ll find someone applying muscle, a lot of someones submitting, someone resisting alone. Henry Ford. Jimmy Hoffa. Jay Bell Furlong. Amos Walker. It promised to be a bizarre-looking Rushmore.

  When the show ended I switched off the set, picked up the Smith & Wesson from the table where Mary Ann Thaler had placed it, swung out the cylinder, dumped the cartridges, and gave it a good cleaning and oiling, wiping off the excess with an old undershirt. Then I loaded it fresh from the box I kept on top of the refrigerator, taking time to wipe each cartridge before thumbing it into the chamber. If I’d thought to do that with the Mannlicher I’d have a lion rug.

  I went to bed again at ten, mostly out of boredom, and slept without lions. I awoke in gray darkness, feeling chilled. I got up and shut the window. The floor felt like metal under my feet. Michigan will change its mind just that quickly, breaking off a heat wave for no good reason meteorologically speaking, like snapping a dry stick.

  Robed and slippered, I made the circuit, closing windows and turning off fans. The chee-eek of a solitary cricket sawing its legs in a corner somewhere grew louder when everything was sealed. I tried counting the number of chee-eeks per fifteen seconds and adding thirty-seven. It was a country trick for determining the temperature, taught to me by an old farmer whose city-stricken daughter I’d traced to a crack house on Cass; but I was thinking of too many other things and lost track. Anyway a cricket in the house is supposed to mean good luck. Or a death in the family. I never could keep my folksy aphorisms straight. The girl was dead of an overdose when I’d found her; but that was stuff for another nightmare.

  In the kitchen I charged the coffeemaker and set the timer. The digital clock read 4:54. Dawn soon. I switched on the light over the breakfast nook and sat and smoked. I wasn’t afraid to go back to sleep. I wasn’t afraid of lions or political killers or farmers’ dead daughters. I was waiting for the paper.

  When it came I almost missed it. The Monday sheet is light after the weekend advertising supplements; it made no more noise than a gypsy moth hurling itself against the screen door. Drops of dew sparkled on the painted concrete stoop in the spreading pink light. The air felt like late fall or early spring. I was actually shivering when I stepped back inside.

  I went straight past the sections on Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf—why try to keep up?—and cracked the obituaries. Funeral arrangements for Lynn Arsenault hadn’t appeared Saturday or Sunday, probably waiting for the remains to be released from the morgue. Three days is the usual surfacing time, just like with floaters.

  The obituary ran first in alphabetical placement. Unmarried, Lynn Stoddard Arsenault left a sister studying on a cultural exchange program in Beijing and assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered from New Jersey to California. The Rosary and services were to take place Tuesday at Most Blessed Sacrament in Detroit, the Reverend Father Francis X. Ontkean officiating. There was no notice for Millender, but two paragraphs in the City section announced that an unidentified body had been found bobbing against the bank at Flatrock.

  I folded the paper and looked at the clock on the coffeemaker. I’d managed to kill twenty-five minutes out of the longest night of my adult life. I ground out my cigarette and went back to bed for the third time in fifteen hours. I might have slept. For sure I was awake two hours later when the alarm went off.

  Most Blessed Sacrament is a gaunt old Norman Gothic barn constructed along the lines of Notre Dame de Paris at the distinctly non-Parisian corner of Woodward and Belmont, all spiked towers and clerestories, pointing stubbornly toward heaven in an age embarrassed by faith. I had aired out and pressed the summer lightweight, changed bandages again—steadily downsizing—and was feeling as close to holy as I ever got by the time I entered the rectory. The atmosphere was heavy with burnt wax, cheap furniture oil, and something vaguely reminiscent of a team locker room, the peculiar hormonal scent of the mostly male environment.

  “Mr. Walker? I have to say you look like what I’d expect of a private dick. They’re always getting hit on the head in movies.”

  Father Ontkean’s strong handshake pulled me into the room. He was in his late twenties, blonde, and wore his hair short on top and long in back like a kid. No body piercing that I could see. He had a deep even tan, pale gray eyes in crisp contrast, and braces on his teeth. He’d sounded older over the telephone. They say you know you’re over the hill when doctors, cops, and priests start looking younger. I’d boxed the compass on this case and it was still far from over.

  “Thanks for seeing me, Father. I was afraid you’d be too busy.”

  “The cardinal does most of the administrating. A priest in an archdiocese is like an ensign on an aircraft carrier. My responsibilities aren’t exactly crushing.”

  He wasn’t wearing a clerical collar. It wouldn’t have gone with his green bowling shirt, faded corduroys, and running shoes without socks, the great equalizing footwear of our time.

  His office was more traditional: a leather-topped desk with a steeple chair behind it in front of a tall casement window with the drapes tied back. Dust-motes glittered like brass shavings in the hard bar of light slanting through the leaded panes. The window was tipped open, but the petal fan mounted below the vaulted ceiling was still. Outside it was a comfortable seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.

  He steered me toward a less formal conversation area made up of two chairs and a sofa on a square Oriental rug. I took the sofa while he perched on the edge of one of the chairs with his knees apart and hands suspended between, the way athletes sit on television talk shows. A tiny gold crucifix dangled from a chain around his throat. I found that comforting. If it had turned out to be an ankh I was out of there.

  “Your call sounded important,” he said. “Were you and Lynn acquainted?” His tone carefully reserved judgment.

  “Just over the telephone. You told me he specifically requested you to officiate at his services. Did he make the arrangements himself?”

  “Yes, quite some time ago. About the time he converted.”

  “He converted?”

  “Well, returned to the fold. He was raised in the faith, then became a Methodist for business reasons. I understand his late employer had strong feelings about Roman Catholics.”

  “He seems to have had strong feelings in general. Vernon Whiting’s been dead five years. Is that when Arsenault came back?”

  “Not that long ago. I was still in divinity school then. Two years, I think; no more than that. I could look it up.”

  I flicked it away. “Isn’t it unusual for a young man in good health to arrange his own funeral?”

  “Not really. It’s the best way to assure your wishes are honored, and it spares your loved ones the ordeal. Young business tycoons find the organizational aspect particularly appealing.”

  “So you don’t think it had anything to do with the way he died.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I didn’t jump on it. “Obviously he trusted you, to ask you to be the one who reads him into heaven. Did he say what made him decide to reconvert?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. It isn’t Vatican policy to expose tyros to the third degree.” He worked his lips over his braces as if he were unfamiliar with them. “We’re coming into a delicate area here.”

  “Confession.”

  “Yes.” He stroked one hand with the other. He had big hands, the hands of a basketball player. Either one would have held enough water to baptize triplets. “There are priests, some of whom have been ordained much longer than I, who hold that the seal of the confessional is broken when the penitent dies. I don’t agree with them. Death being merely a transition.”

  “I think I know one of the things he carried into the booth.”

  He smiled, showing chrome. “Telling you whether you’re getting warm or cold counts as a violation.”

  “I won’t ask you to confirm what he said. I’m more interested in what absolution you offered.”

  “Ar
e you Catholic, my son?”

  “I was raised Episcopalian.”

  “Non-Catholics often think the role of the confessor is limited to assigning Hail Marys as if he were totaling a bill for services rendered. If it were that simple, there would be standing room only at early Mass. No man is privileged to assure the Lord’s forgiveness. The best he can do is provide counsel that may or may not heal one’s own sickness of the soul.”

  “That counsel being?”

  “To seek out the injured party and ask for forgiveness there.”

  “He sought. He didn’t ask.”

  “That’s sad. Not surprising. It requires great strength.”

  “He offered money instead.”

  He nodded. His face turned toward a large wooden crucifix on the wall above the sofa. “In that case I’m doubly sorry I wasn’t present when he passed over.”

  “If you were, someone else would be sitting in that chair saying the same thing about you.”

  He turned back. “Perhaps. I can’t help feeling responsible for a soul adrift.”

  “You can’t save them all, Father.”

  “If I could save just one I’d feel that all the effort spent in placing me here wasn’t wasted.”

  There was nothing in that for me. “Even a born-again Catholic has to live in the real world,” I said. “Plenty of people would have considered what Arsenault did a kind of expiation.”

  “They aren’t qualified to judge.”

  “Who is?”

  “Only God.” He sat back and rested his hands on his knees. “I’ll tell you this much. And I’ve a hunch I’ll be confessing that I did. If I considered myself in a position to judge Lynn Arsenault, and if I were to turn all my attention to him from now until Sunday Mass, I could not judge him more harshly than he judged himself. I never met a man so desperate to be cleansed.”

  “Huh.”

  He nodded again, as if I’d said something wise. It might just have been something he did on his side of the booth.

  I got up. “Thank you, Father.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was any help.”

  “Our jobs have that much in common. We don’t always know.”

  He worked his lips, then pulled them back and dug at his teeth with a big thumbnail. “You wouldn’t be carrying floss, by any chance?”

  “Sorry. New braces?”

  “The cardinal’s idea. Worse than a hair shirt.”

  “I guess they’re a cross you have to bear.”

  His face went blank. “Go with God, my son.”

  I took what I had to the office, leaned back in the swivel with my eyes shut, and waited for music.

  Not a note.

  Not even a hum.

  I pulled it apart and looked at the pieces.

  One contrite Arsenault, dead in the middle of a campaign to make things right with Lily Talbot for his part in framing her.

  One Nate Millender, less than contrite, dead in the middle of the juiciest blackmail scheme since Eve bit the apple.

  One stone killer named Grayling, who may or may not have started to show cracks.

  Still no music. Laid out like that it was a crystal set with the instructions in Japanese.

  And yet when I put it back together a tune began to play.

  Not a complete melody. The bridge was missing and the tempo kept changing. But it had a familiar refrain that stayed just out of reach.

  I made myself stop listening. Otherwise I’d be all day trying to remember the lyrics.

  I went through the Monday morning mail. The Triple-A Detective Mercantile Company of Portland wanted to send me, free for ninety days, a gizmo that looked like a portable electric razor with an earplug attached. This remarkable technological breakthrough, no larger than a cigarette package, picks up conversations safely and accurately up to six hundred yards away, without batteries or telltale wires.

  The telephone rang while I was trying to read the fine print.

  “Four-F Detective Agency,” I said. “Slightly larger than a cigarette package and just about as safe. Accuracy costs extra.”

  “Walker?”

  I knew the voice, vaguely. Why it made me smell sun and water was a mystery. Then it wasn’t. I put down the circular. “Walker here.”

  “This is Royce Grayling. Do you remember me?”

  “I remember.”

  “Where can we meet?”

  I groped for tobacco. “My office seats two, no waiting.”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  The door opened from the waiting room and Grayling stepped inside, collapsing the antenna on a cellular telephone receiver with the heel of his hand.

  “Silly as hell,” he said, pocketing it. “But I’m a slave to gadgets, can’t get enough of ’em. Let’s jaw.”

  Twenty-eight

  HE WAS DRESSED COMFORTABLY but professionally for a balmy workday, in gray linen slacks, glossy black slip-ons, a blue-and-gray-striped dress shirt, blue silk necktie knotted casually with a dimple below the knot, and an unstructured chambray sportcoat, pale blue and fashionably wrinkled. The coat de-emphasized the power in his chest and shoulders without disguising it. His moustache was dark against his tan, the teeth dazzling in the broad Hemingway grin.

  He spun the customer’s chair on one leg, straddled it, and folded his arms on the back. As usual he kept his right hand free.

  “Good office.” He hadn’t looked around once. “All business.”

  “Thanks. I threw out the Louis Quatorze chairs. They clashed with the Rembrandts.”

  “That’s what I mean. You don’t junk it up with a lot of phony executive bric-a-brac. I don’t use one myself. They cleared one for me downtown but I keep telling them to save the rent and pay me the difference. When you keep an office you get to sitting around in it. I don’t spend a whole hell of a lot of time sitting.”

  “My Uncle Roy had piles too. We shot him finally.”

  His eyes were dark brown, darker than mine, and he used them on me with that trick he had of absorbing light without reflecting any.

  “That’s an old one,” he said. “Cracking wise to keep the other guy off center while you’re thinking about what comes next. You were a cop, right?”

  “Stop guessing. You sat somewhere long enough to run my jacket or you wouldn’t be here now. Sitting.”

  He enjoyed that. He enjoyed me. He uncorked the rest of his thousand-candlepower smile to show me just how much. It made me regret leaving my Smith & Wesson in the glove compartment of the Cutlass. It hadn’t seemed respectful to carry it into church.

  “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.”