FOR 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.
“Well, I broke off the relationship. I didn’t trust myself even to speak to Lily. The tabloids would have lapped up a public scene. I had Stuart send her a letter on Furlong and Belder stationery, gave notice at Wayne State, and went—fled—back to L.A. The only cowardly act in my adult life. I’m telling you all this to give you some idea of how I felt when I found out the picture is a fake.”
“It’s a good one,” I said. “I didn’t spot it.”
“You’d need a glass and some training. I had both but didn’t bother to use them. I fired that pup Arsenault from my firm the year before when I found out he was spying for Whiting. It all fit together, so I never questioned the picture. Then last month I was sorting through some things, getting my affairs in order, when I found the original of the photograph they used of Lily. The damn thing was taken of us together at a charity dinner at the Pontchartrain, an Associated Press photo. I’d clipped it and never looked at it again. I didn’t recognize it, the expression and angle of her face, in the composite. Some genius I am. Another, please, Windy.” He gestured toward the empty glass on the refrigerator.
Lund hesitated. “Are you certain?”
“I think you’ll agree the condition of my liver is someone else’s concern.”
The attorney upended a dwarf bottle of gin into the glass, added ice, and passed it over the back of the loveseat. The stain on Furlong’s cheeks when he drank lasted as long as breath on a mirror.
“The question is,” he said, “who faked the picture and who sent it to me? Find out.”
“Who stood to gain from a breakup?”
“My heirs. Naturally I’d have bequeathed the bulk of my estate to my widow and distributed what was left among the others. If I didn’t, the State of California would have, and not the way I’d have chosen. For an old man, the list is fairly short.”
I got out my notebook and pen while he took another hit from his glass.
“My son John, who has spent every penny I’ve given him on various crackpot schemes, including video telephones and solar houses in Seattle, where it rains two hundred days out of the year. My charming first wife Karen, his mother. She tried to run me down in my driveway the morning of the day I left her, and I’ve no reason to believe she’s mellowed in thirty years. Oh, and my kid brother Larry, who I haven’t seen or spoken to since nineteen forty-seven. I assume he’s retired from the post office by now if he’s still living. Assorted other relatives. I had Stuart prepare a file.”
Lund picked up the manila folder from the table and handed it to me. It contained the photograph and a word-processed typescript double-spaced on heavy bond secured with brass fasteners. The first name after the paragraph on Lynn Arsenault was Oswald Belder.
I looked up. “Your partner?”
“He inherits the business. I can’t believe he’s mixed up in this. Ozzie’s the conscience of the firm. I’d trust him with anything but this mission. He’d have tried to talk me out of it. And he might have succeeded.”
I paged through the dossier. Despite his disclaimer, it seemed like a lot of suspects for one lifetime. “Most of these addresses are out of state. I’ll have to farm some of it out. You might get faster results with a larger agency. Say, two people.”
Furlong smiled for the first time. It made his face look like the label on a bottle of iodine.
“You didn’t think I dreamed up this deathwatch ploy for my personal amusement, did you? It was the best way to get the news around. Most of the heirs have already made contact with Windy. Some of them are already in town for the reading of the will. The rest are on their way. The English gentleman will give you the details.”
“Why Detroit? Los Angeles is crawling with private operators.”
“In my condition you put a lot of thought into where you go, because the odds are that’s where you’ll spend eternity. Detroit is home. I was born here. This is where I found my direction and it’s where I intend to be buried.” He’d quit smiling. “Also I’m fairly certain Lily wouldn’t come out to the Coast even if I promised her an interview with the ghost of Diego Rivera. She runs an art gallery here. That’s the second part of the assignment, Walker. I want you to talk to her. I need to apologize to her while there’s still time.”
“It could take a while.”
“You’ve got four weeks. Less than that, if I’m any judge of doctors. The checkbook, please, Mr. Lund. I’ll draw this one up myself.”
He’d made that simple act sound like a job for heavy equipment. Which it was, for him; by the time he’d signed his name, a plain signature as legible as the name of the bank engraved in block capitals across the top, he was sweating in that air-conditioned room.
“What happens when I find the witchfinder?”
“I’ll have the satisfaction of looking into the eyes of a coward.”