The Witchfinder (2 page)

He worried his moustache with a row of small perfect teeth. No English dentist was responsible for those. “Do you know, I never asked. I hope the old boy hadn’t cast off
all
his breeding.”

Now that I was there his impatience seemed to have ebbed. I picked up the pace. “Who gave you my name?”

“A colleague, Arthur Rooney. He hadn’t many flattering things to say, but what wasn’t good was irrelevant. I’m chiefly interested in your ability to maintain a confidence.”

“I’ve been to jail over it four times.” I spelled it
jail
. “That’s public record. No sense telling you how much it’s cost me in ace bandages. That isn’t.”

He weighed me. The waxy eyes looked as if they would retain thumbprints. “Do you know the historical definition of the term
witchfinder
?”

“I do if it’s anything like witch
hunter
.”

“They’re not the same. Not quite. The Puritans of your—excuse me,
our
—New England colonies employed hunters to rid them of witches. The hunters in their turn engaged witchfinders to gather evidence against them, or rather to manufacture it. I’m not at all convinced that there weren’t such things as witches, but I do question the statistics of the time.”

He rested a hand on the crook of his cane, clouding the shiny silver with his personal humidity. “In the country of my birth we were quick to condemn the Pilgrims for fleeing England in search of religious freedom only to impose a far more repressive creed upon themselves. But they behaved as they did out of a sincere belief in the forces of good and evil, Christ the Redeemer and Lucifer the Tempter. The witchfinders did not share that belief. They were paid commissions on the witches they managed to expose; not an incomprehensible arrangement when you consider the state of colonial finances, but it was scarcely fertile ground for verdicts of innocence. The tests these finders conducted upon the wretches who stood before them accused were barbaric. Those who survived were judged guilty and hanged.”

“Burned, I thought.”

He shook a finger at me.

“You really should know at least as much about your native country’s past as a newcomer. They burned werewolves. They hanged witches.”

I looked down at the glass in my hand. He looked too comfortable to get up and fix me another, and at the rate he was going I would touch bottom long before he reached his point. But he’d hired the audience along with the hall. Behind him on CNN, a brief tape biography of Jay Bell Furlong ended and the camera cut to a reporter standing on the sidewalk in front of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. You know it’s a slow news week when builders log more air time than destroyers.

“When witches passed out of fashion,” Lund went on, “the finders lost their comfortable posts, but not forever. In a culpable society there will always be employment for the bearers of false witness. They’re less flamboyant now, more difficult to identify. They no longer hang out shingles and they’ve burned their black cowls. That’s why I called you. Your assignment is to find the witchfinder.”

“Speak American, Windy. You’re wearing the man out.”

This was a new voice in the auditorium. The door to the suite’s adjoining bedroom had opened. The famous Furlong bone structure was on the screen, and as I craned my head around I thought at first those Lincolnesque features had burned into my retinas, moving with my eyes. The man the nation’s press waited to photograph on his horizontal way to the Los Angeles County Morgue was standing in a hotel doorway in Detroit with a drink in his hand.

F
OR A GHOST-IN-WAITING
, Furlong looked healthy. As narrow as Stuart Lund was wide and almost as tall, he had on one of his trademark pale yellow suits over a pink silk shirt with the collar open, no necktie, and held a tall glass with a couple of ice cubes floating in clear liquid. His hair was white and fine enough to sift sugar through, his complexion brown not so much from the California sun as from natural pigmentation—he was descended from Greek stonecutters on his mother’s side, according to
Who’s Who
—and he had a face like a flying buttress: all planes and angles and prowlike nose with blue veins showing under the tight skin across the bridge. The impression overall was that of his buildings, soaring strength laid on top of tensile steel.

The details belonged to a different blueprint. His collar sagged slightly and the drape of his trousers was off, as if his body were shrinking away from his clothes. The hard glitter far back in the deep sockets of his eyes looked more desperate than determined. He was not just leaning against the door frame; it was supporting him entirely.

Lund put weight on his cane. “Jay, you should be resting. I was going to bring Mr. Walker in to see you in a few minutes.”

“Don’t be the mother-cow, Windy. I’ll be resting soon enough, and forever.” He straightened, found his balance, and came into the room to take my hand in a hard, bony grip. “Thanks for coming, Walker. Rooney told us a lot of good things about you.” The glitter now was determination. That settled the point. He was dying.

“A lot of bad things too, I guess.”

“They said much worse about my designs for most of my career. Then suddenly I was sixty and a national treasure. I got a medal from the president and a week on
Hollywood Squares
. Live long enough and you become respectable. Die early and you get to be a legend.” He glanced at the television. Annoyance crawled under the muscles of his face. “Switch that damn thing off, will you, Windy? Listening to your own obituary gets old fast.”

Lund was on his feet now. He trundled over and punched the
POWER
button.

I said, “Every news story I was ever part of sounded like something else when it reached the air. But I never knew them to miss quite this wide.”

“That’s my fault,” Furlong said, “although I had help. We’re so health-obsessed these days it’s really amazing how far we’ll go on the word of a couple of doctors who like to see themselves surrounded by microphones. We’re in danger of elevating them to the station of high priests, when what we ought to do is replace the caduceus with the Jolly Roger.”

“Spoken like a patient.” I ignored the look that bought me. “What’s it costing you?”

“A new maternity wing at Cedars. My design. Someone else will have to see it through, though.”

He swayed. Lund took his arm and steered him toward the loveseat. The thinness of the architect’s ankles showed when he sat down. They were bare, and the bones stuck out like socket wrenches.

He gulped down half the contents of his glass and set it on the table at his elbow. An orange flush glimmered on his cheeks and went away. “It isn’t so much a lie as an accelerated truth,” he said. “My condition is inoperable and since I refuse to submit to chemotherapy and radiation I’ve been given four weeks. It should be enough.”

“To find the witchfinder?” I sat down on the adjacent couch and drank my Mary.

“Stuart will dramatize. That’s how he got his nickname.”

“You’re the only one who ever called me Windy.” The attorney shifted his cane and raised one foot, looking like a chubby flamingo.

Furlong glanced around, wrinkling the tight skin of his nose. “I might as well be in the intensive care ward as here. I labored fifty years to restore warmth and character to the piles of stone and glass we’re condemned to live in and work in. What a waste of a life. People must want to crawl around in test tubes or we wouldn’t have the buildings we have. We used to make fun, we smug young geniuses, of those neoclassical, Neo-Gothic, Neo-renaissance horrors Albert Kahn plopped down all over this city in the twenties. Everything was neo with him, nothing original or startling or intrinsically American. But he loved what he did, drank it and breathed it and fucked it, saw it through from drafting board to dedication. He didn’t just spit up a six-pack of silos like that abortion on Jefferson and go home. These new Turks have never even held a piece of charcoal, wouldn’t dirty their hands on it. They program their goddamn
faux
ceiling beams and triple-paned windows into the computer and let IBM do the rest. Is it any wonder there’s no blood in their work?”

He sat back suddenly, as if a string had snapped. “Well, I won’t have to look at it much longer.”

But he wasn’t through. The glitter fixed itself on me. “I started here, did you know that? Took a degree in engineering from the Detroit Institute of Technology in thirty-three, worst goddamn year in the century to try to start a career. I worked my ass off with the WPA as an apprentice mason for three years, thirty a week and glad to get it. Before I ever drew my first groined arch I’d built a dozen with my own hands, hoisted the pieces one by one up a sixteen-foot ladder. I was so muscle-bound I could barely close my fist around a Number Two Ticonderoga. My first wife married me for those muscles. When they went away so did she. No refills, Windy. The stuff goes a lot further than it used to.”

Lund, who had come forward to take Furlong’s glass when he drained it, put it on top of the little refrigerator.

“The Depression hung on here and I went West and invented California Modern, not that anybody ever gave me the credit, nor would I want it, considering what they did to it. Well, you can read about what else I did in back numbers of
Architectural Digest.
I never saw Detroit again until eight years ago, when the business retired out from under me and I accepted a job as guest lecturer at Wayne State. ‘He draws! He speaks! He wears yellow on the cover of
GQ
! Come See the Living Fossil Before It’s Too Late!’ ” He balled his fists on his knees, bone on bone. “Anyway it paid better than the WPA, and I got to fool myself into thinking I was still part of things. Also that’s where I met Lily.”

I finished my drink, sat back, and crossed my legs. We were drifting into my waters now. There was usually a Lily.

“She was a graduate student,” Furlong said, “and, yes, she was young enough to be my granddaughter. Beautiful woman. Lovely skin. Lousy architect, but a first-rate artist. She dropped by my office between classes to show me her portfolio. We went out for coffee. We went out for dinner. We had breakfast. I bought her a ring. That’s the chronology. The time span doesn’t matter.”

He paused to recharge his cells. The story was taking as much out of him as several flights of stairs.

“I’m not the imbecile you’re starting to think me,” he said. “I was a grandfather then—a
great
-grandfather now—with three wrecked marriages and a score of silly affairs at my back, and sex is just candy, you can have enough for a lifetime early if you’re greedy enough at the start. I was. And love is a chimera, not nearly as tangible nor as pressing as bursitis after a certain age. Of course I felt something. Of course Lily was in love: with the idea of being married to Jay Bell Furlong, as well as to his line of credit and controlling interest in Furlong, Belder, and Associates, with offices in New York, L.A., Detroit, and Tokyo. And as Windy might say, it was a good job she was.

“It makes more sense than falling in love with an incandescent smile and masses of hair, things that will go to porcelain and naked scalp soon enough. When I
had
those things I had better taste than to choose a partner with so little foresight. You have to respect a woman first because respect is likely to be all you wind up with at the finish. I respected Lily.”

“This is the part where I find it difficult to squeeze back the tears.” Lund rubbed the ball of a meaty thumb over a flaw in the silver on his cane.

“Stuart’s a romantic. It’s the reason he never remarried after his own divorce.”

“It most certainly is not. I’m a homosexual.”

“Who isn’t these days?” Furlong’s color came and went. “All right, damn it, I’ll say it. I was lonely. I was and am a monument, with a footing as deep as the tallest of my buildings. I could pick up a telephone and order the Hollywood goddess of my choice as my escort for the evening—I could make her my wife—but she wouldn’t be the company Lily Talbot was. She was intelligent and stimulating. She took sides, not always mine, and forced me to reconsider my position on everything. A companion like that is damn rare where I am. A man needs someone he can talk to without having to hire a tutor to brief her first.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Furlong,” I said. “I’m nobody’s choice for judge. I’m guessing you didn’t marry.”

The architect opened one of his fists. Lund shifted his cargo to his tender foot like a clerk laying out Fabergé eggs and gave me something from a manila folder on the table. It was a five-by-seven photograph, a crisp professional-looking black-and-white shot like you hardly ever see in our Kodachrome society, of a couple in a naked condition amid rumpled bedding. The woman was dark-haired, with good bones and an athletic body. The man was fair and flabby. The photographer had caught them in the act of breaking an embrace, the woman starting to turn her head, not yet looking directly at the camera, the man staring full into the flash. A reflection of the bulb showed in each of his shiny pupils.

I returned the picture. “I can see why you became attracted.”

“The picture came by mail to my office at Wayne State in a brown envelope without a return address,” Furlong said. “U.S. Postal Service mark, addressed with a typewriter. They weren’t all in museums then. I still have the envelope if you want to see it.”

“I left my junior fingerprint kit in my other pants.”

“Understand, it wasn’t the sleeping around that bothered me. Only an ass expects sexual integrity under those circumstances. It was her partner I objected to. The young man’s name is Lynn Arsenault. At the time the photo was taken he was a junior partner in Imminent Visions.”

“Furlong and Belder’s principal competitor,” Lund explained.

“To hell with that, it’s misleading. This isn’t about free enterprise. Imminent Visions was founded by a man named Vernon Whiting. The son of a bitch is dead now, and the worms can have him if they can keep him down. He was my apprentice. I taught him how to use a protractor and then he went around telling everyone I stole one of his designs. He told it enough times and in enough places it’s entered the lore of this profession. By the end I think he believed it himself. When I saw that picture of Lily with Arsenault, I was convinced Whiting arranged for her to romance me in order to steal some of my own designs; revenge for a wrong I never did him.