I PLACED THE negative and the remaining practice print on his side of the table.
“Tear those too, if you like. The cops have the original negative and can afford to get an even clearer enlargement. Any jury could look at it and match the mark to your cane. From the location, I’d say you leaned on it with your left hand while you used your right to shoot him through the window on the driver’s side of his Porsche.”
He made no move to pick up the items. “Do you expect me to deny it? Very well. I was with Jay when Arsenault was killed. And I have no motive.”
“Furlong might remember whether you were out that morning; sick or well, he’s sharper than any ten men his age. Or he might not. I think you said that was one of his bad days. I couldn’t get through to you when I called from the garage. When you finally answered the telephone, you’d had time enough to drive to Allen Park and back twice.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“That part’s for the cops. So’s the motive, but I’ve got that. You’re the witchfinder. You rigged the fake picture scheme to keep Lily Talbot from marrying Furlong and changing his will.”
“Ludicrous. His bequest to me is purely honorary. I make more than that in a year on his retainer.”
“A retainer that stops the moment he stops breathing. A new one kicks in as soon as you clock in as executor and probate attorney. Given the number of heirs involved—not to mention their temperament—the will could drag on in court for twenty years without a widow in the picture. No one gets anything out of that but the lawyer, you. That has to be the seventh circle of heaven for someone in your profession, a nearly unlimited source of income from a client who can’t pester you because he’s dead. I can think of the names of a couple of dozen ambulance-chasers who’d kill for a good deal less.”
He sipped from his cup. His hand was steady. “If I were your counsel, I’d advise you to keep your voice down. All you have is a snapshot of a stain on a concrete floor. Even if the police manage to match it to my cane there’s nothing to prove I was in the garage at the time of the murder. I could sue you for everything you own.’’
“Be my guest.”
“You say that merely because what you own isn’t worth much. But you’re forgetting your reputation as a detective. When I’m through with you, you won’t even have a livelihood.”
I said, “The cops have Greta Griswold.”
He spilled coffee on his hand. He yelped, slammed down the cup, and wound his handkerchief around the burn. One or two of the diners seated nearby looked at him, then dove back into their conversations.
“And who might she be?” he asked then.
“You might want to put ice on that,” I said. “Hot coffee can raise blisters. I turned her over to the sheriff’s deputies at the airport. I’d tailed her from the Marriott, where you gave her cash to lam to Pasadena. She has friends there. She told me everything. Now she’s telling the cops.”
“What sort of lies did she tell?”
“She’s not good at them. She knows that; it’s why she ran. You know that, or you wouldn’t have bankrolled her flight. But then you know her better than anyone.”
“I never heard the name before this moment.”
“That’s a lie, but you did know her better as Cathlin Faolin. She went back to her maiden name after you stopped living together as man and wife in England.”
He wound the handkerchief tighter and said nothing. The flesh on the back of his hand bulged as white as the fabric.
“Some marriages involving a homosexual partner last a long time.” Since he hadn’t touched the picture and negative, I returned them to the folder and closed it. “Yours wasn’t one of those, although technically you’re still married. She didn’t know that at the time. You told her the divorce was final, and being a solicitor you were able to rig up documents for her to sign that satisfied her. It wasn’t until after she emigrated to America, married again, became a widow, and took a job at Imminent Visions, that you told her she was a bigamist. That meant she was never legally married to a United States citizen and could have been deported. That was your leverage.”
I shook my head. “Poor old Nate Millender thought he was hot stuff as a blackmailer, but he wasn’t a patch on you. You got Greta to help you kill Arsenault by threatening to report her to the State Department if she refused. She didn’t much like him, and she has bad memories of Northern Ireland. It didn’t take her long to make the decision.
“Her car had a big trunk,” I went on. “Still, it must have been a snug fit for a man your size. No wonder your gout’s worse. She smuggled you into the garage past the parking attendant, let you out to wait for Arsenault to come down, and smuggled you back out in the trunk afterward. That’s where you were hiding all the time the cops were searching the building for suspicious persons. Simple enough to work. But you complicated things when you forced Greta to tell the cops Royce Grayling was on the premises at the time of the murder. How long did you think that would hold up, when neither the security guard in the lobby nor any of the video cameras scattered throughout the building saw him?”
“He had an appointment! He—” He clamped his jaw shut. Pain spasmed his heavy features. He unwound the handkerchief from his hand, reached inside his coat, and brought out a plastic prescription bottle. He shook out two pills, swallowed them, and washed them down with coffee.
I nodded. His slip should have made me tingle. Instead I felt saturated and old. My head hurt.
“You have the right to remain silent, Counselor,” I said. “Yeah, Grayling had an appointment to see Arsenault that morning. You knew who he was and what he was from what I’d told you. When you learned from Greta he was expected, you got the bright idea to set him up to take the fall for Arsenault. Only you couldn’t know that Grayling tried to call and cancel. The telephones weren’t working that morning, thanks to me, and Greta couldn’t warn you. She can’t remember now what scheme you’d cooked up with her to get Arsenault to go out to his car at the time Grayling was expected, but that doesn’t matter. She didn’t get a chance to use it. I smoked him out first.
“When he came down to the garage where you were waiting, you assumed Grayling was in position for the frame and went ahead with the kill. Greta nailed Grayling for the cops even though he never showed, not knowing what else to do without you on hand to advise her. That was the blunder, the X factor you didn’t allow for. It turned her into a fugitive; something she wasn’t any better at than she was at improvising a more acceptable lie. These things happen when you don’t take time to plan.”
I glanced at my watch. “She’ll have made her statement by now. It will include how you panicked when I told you Arsenault was ready to crack, and decided to take him down before Furlong found out he was sheltering a fat snake in his bosom and dropped you from the will.”
“There’s no reason to be insulting.” Lund drew a deep breath and let it out. The pills were taking effect. “You don’t know how much of that sort of thing I’ve had to put up with from Jay all these years. I was just his great waddling eunuch. Good enough to be trusted with his financial and legal affairs because I was too hound-dog loyal ever to consider cheating him, but certainly not his equal; not on a level with the immortal embalmed genius, resting as he was on his half-century-old laurels.
“None of this is evidence,” he said. “I’m not confessing to any murders, or even inheritance fraud. I’m just telling you what I’d like to have done. There’s no law against that, here or in my native country.”
I spread open my coat to show him I wasn’t wearing a wire. My shirt was lightweight and he could see through to my undershirt. He shrugged his rounded shoulders.
“First he threw me the bone of custodianship. My years of loyalty entitled me to far more. Then he threatened to take it away by marrying a woman who wasn’t even born when he made his last significant contribution to his field. He was flaunting his wealth and status—yes, and his heterosexuality—and expecting me to accept it without comment. No, not even that. He never thought about me at all. I was just another design on his drafting board: drawn, built, filed, and forgotten along with all his other creations. Well, this was one design that thought for itself.”
“How’d you find Millender?”
“You mean, if I did find him. I told you I’m not confessing to anything. Call it serendipity. I met him in one of those gay singles clubs that were so popular before the plague came along and closed them. The affair didn’t last, but when I found out how he made his money, and that Lynn Arsenault of Imminent Visions was one of his photographic subjects, I started planning. Greta was already in place, a bit of luck. She’d been a legal secretary with my firm in England for four years, and answered the telephone in the Detroit office of Furlong, Belder, and Associates after coming to this country. I arranged that, for old times’ sake. She was grateful, since employment helped her obtain a visa.”
“Is that why she agreed to apply for a job with Vernon Whiting?”
“Partly. The position also paid better and she had more responsibility. At the time it was just a ploy to ingratiate myself further with Jay. The inside information she supplied enabled me to make a number of suggestions that helped Furlong and Belder remain competitive. That was one more of the many services I performed that Jay took for granted.”
“He wasn’t the only one. Greta must have had a lot on the ball to remain with Imminent Visions this long. Along the way she managed to hand you Lynn Arsenault on a silver tray. Twice. She doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”
“She always was an accommodating girl.” He played with the prescription bottle, rolling it back and forth between his great soft palms.
“You must have thought you had God in a box when Grayling capped Nate Millender. Sooner or later he would have put the squeeze on you the way he did Arsenault and others, and Greta might not have been able to help. It’s sort of too bad that’s the very thing that keeps you from pinning Grayling to the murder in Allen Park.”
“Timing is important. Right now I need as much time as I can get.” He returned the bottle to his pocket. When his hand came back out it was wrapped around the butt of a small nickel-plated automatic.
Both my hands were on the table, resting on top of the file folder. The .38 was on my hip. I could have gone for it, possibly even had him cold before he could squeeze the trigger of the .22 he had used on Lynn Arsenault. I had all the experience in the world over him when it came to getting a gun out into the air and firing it.
I didn’t move. “No good, Windy. I called the Detroit and Allen Park Police Departments after I called you. They’ve had plenty of time to seal all the exits.”
“I’ll take my chances. Keep your hands on the table.” He rose. He had the pistol in his right hand, clamped against his side. The great bulk of his body concealed it from the other diners as he picked up his cane. “Awfully un-British of me to stick you with the check, old man. But I’m an American now. I ought to start acting like one. If you try to follow me I’ll shoot, and I can’t answer for my aim. Some innocent people might get hurt.”
I said, “I’ll just stay here and finish my coffee. It’s been a long day, even for Monday.”
“Do tell Jay I said good-bye. I’m fond of the old boy even if he did treat me like an old fat dog.” He withdrew into a hungry throng of men and women in business suits being led to their tables, swiveling a little to keep me in his field of fire until the crowd closed in behind him. Then he moved swiftly, not leaning on the cane now. His foot wasn’t bothering him nearly as much as he’d let on.
I was still sitting there drinking coffee when I heard the first shot. It was loud and deep and came from a much bigger bore than Stuart Lund’s .22.