Three

HE TORE THE CHECK LOOSE and held it up. Stuart Lund looked at it and gave it to me. It was made out in the amount of seventy-five hundred dollars.

“That should get you started,” Furlong said. “Now I’ll rest.”

Lund helped him to his feet and through the door to the bedroom. It was a lot of weight for one very old cane to support; but as the architect had said, they built things better then.

When the lawyer returned I filled several more notebook pages with information on the incoming relations. I left him resting his sore foot on an ottoman and went straight to my bank. When a man who tells you he’s terminally ill cuts you a check you don’t stop for lunch.

With a comfortable eight thousand, five hundred dollars lying between me and a reservation at the Cardboard Hilton, I paid some bills, pocketed a couple of hundred to walk around on, and treated myself to a stuffed breast of chicken in a restaurant on West Congress, complete with flatware and tablecloths. Between bread and coffee and the main course I carried my notebook to the pay telephone by the restrooms and made an appointment for that afternoon with Oswald Belder, Furlong’s business partner. Most of the relatives on the list had not yet arrived in town.

Next I tried Lily Talbot’s art gallery. A female voice with wintergreen laid in over the cornpone told me Miz Talbot wasn’t expected in until tomorrow. I said I’d call back. Solvency breeds patience.

The world headquarters of Furlong, Belder, & Associates shimmered in heat waves like isinglass curtains, an urban mirage. It was a retired warehouse on the lip of what they call Bricktown now, converted in the Furlong manner into wide bands of pink stucco with continuous tinted windows slitted in like wraparound glasses. An endangered species, warehouses. I don’t know where we’re going to store all our stuff when the last of them has gone to indirect lighting and swank magazines in the lobby.

Receptionists on two floors directed me to a waiting room the size of a softball field, lined with striped carpets and pressed-tin paneling. Watercolors in black steel frames represented original Furlong designs in ideal settings with plenty of space and garnishes of pruned shrubbery. Another ideal setting, an S-shaped curl of molded plastic aspiring to be a desk, sheltered a burnished black work of art inside its curves. She wore cornrows and dangling earrings that refracted light. The top two buttons of her teal silk blouse were unfastened, below which shadows beckoned. As I approached she reinterred a beige telephone receiver in its form-fitting standard and asked if she could help me.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to wear diamonds during the day,” I said.

She touched an earring. Her smile was cool in an oval face that didn’t seem to have any pores. “They’re cut crystal. It’s hard to ask for a raise when you’re wearing precious stones, Mister”—her lashes swooped down over her appointment book, then back up—“Walker?”

“That is I. He in?”

She lifted the receiver, passed along my name, and hung up. “Mr. Belder’s office is at the end of the hall.” She tilted her head toward an opening without a door. The earrings swung and sparkled.

“Thanks, Crystal.”

“Damaris is the name.”

The band of tinted glass across the back of Belder’s office looked out on the river and Hiram Walker’s distillery—no relation—on the Canadian side. The room was nearly as large as the reception area, painted powder blue, with a deep navy shag carpet and recessed shelves containing oversize pictorial books on architectural subjects and scale models of buildings and stairways. An easel behind the desk held up a detailed sketch of the Pentagon; only the block legend in the corner identified it as a shopping center. Belder—or the man occupying his swivel—sat profile to the door with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, glowering at the sketch. He was a long sack of assorted bones in a blue suit cut to his peculiar shape, wearing thick glasses in aluminum frames. He smeared his glistening black hair straight across his scalp from a part above his left ear. The skin at his left temple was spotted like old cheese and he seemed to be worrying at a set of teeth that didn’t fit him nearly as well as the suit.

He spoke without stirring or looking away from the easel. “Do you know anything about drafting?”

“Not a thing,” I said.

“I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s like one of those pictures in a magazine where you spot the errors and win a cruise. I never made it up the gangway.”

“It looks like a good place to buy a thousand-dollar screwdriver.”

He lifted his chin. “Say that again.”

“All it needs is a flag and a row of staff cars parked in front.”

“That’s it.” He straightened and clapped both palms on his knees. “It won’t do to remind consumers how much of their withholding is being spent on the military. No more three-martini lunches for the boys in market research.” He swiveled and stood. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Walker. You may have saved us some ugly press.”

He wasn’t as tall as he looked sitting, but his knees bent slightly, and anyway, anyone was bound to seem short after a meeting with Jay Bell Furlong and his attorney. Belder had a long sad face blurred with years and what might have been drink, and pocked all over like the Sphinx. My information said he was ten years younger than his partner, but he looked older and a lot less well. His was the type that always acted as pallbearer for more robust friends.

“You probably would have caught it yourself.”

“Maybe not. Sometimes it takes a stranger walking through a door.” He waited until I was sitting before he resumed his own perch. “You’re working for Stuart Lund, you said. Is he in town?”

“Briefly. He doesn’t want to be away from L.A. too long.” Furlong’s actual condition and presence in Detroit were the secrets of the day.

“Yes.” The sad face got sadder. “I wanted to go there as soon as I heard, but my doctor says with my blood pressure I might as well arrange for a hearse to pick me up at the airport. He’s young enough to think that a bad thing. I sent a telegram. No flowers. Jay had—has—definite opinions about pretty things that die and shed petals all over his interiors.”

“His opinion of you is just as definite. Lund says he considers you the conscience of Furlong and Belder.”

“Jay often said that. Once, many years ago, when the company was overextended, I talked him out of signing a deal with a manufacturer who wanted to put his name on a line of prefabricated houses. I convinced him there are some things you just don’t sell. Well, the manufacturer found someone else, went Fortune Five Hundred, and we had to close down our offices in London and San Francisco. But an office is just desks and a water cooler in the corner. A man’s name carries the value he himself places upon it.”

He got up, turned a blank sheet down over the drawing on the easel, and sat back down with a little exhalation that smelled like cherries. “I sometimes think of repeating that old gesture, but we’re a corporation now. You can’t be a conscience to a committee. However, you haven’t come to listen to an old man cry in his expensive imported beer.”

I didn’t jump on the cue. I asked him if I could smoke. He used the intercom and a moment later the black vision I had seen in the reception room glittered in, laid a ruby-colored glass ashtray on the corner of the desk, and shimmered away. She crowded six feet in her modest two-inch heels. Furlong’s hiring practices weren’t exactly consistent with his love of the horizontal.

Belder interpreted my thoughts. “A half-century-old joke. Frank Lloyd Wright, Jay’s mentor, was a short man. That’s why his ceilings are so low. Jay got a perverse pleasure, whenever Wright came to visit the old office, out of watching him look up at the clerks from the mail room. I wouldn’t ever accuse my senior partner of overlooking talent and skill in favor of stature, but his little rebel conceit has become second nature in Personnel. I doubt they even realize it when their eyes drift first thing to the physical description in the employment application.”

I set flame to a Winston and sledded the match down the tray’s glossy side. “Stuart Lund hired me to track down all the heirs to Furlong’s estate,” I lied. “The reading of the will is to take place here in town as soon as the last of them makes it in.”

“Sounds like an easy enough job. People undertake the most arduous journeys whenever a rich relation’s health fails.”

“Not so arduous in your case. You’re already here.”

He nodded. On him it looked like palsy. “I inherit the business and its headaches. But I already have those. I’ve been Furlong, Belder, and Associates ever since Jay decided that just being Jay Bell Furlong was occupation enough. Perhaps it is. In my extremity I’ve come to the happy realization that mediocrity has its advantages. I have little to live up to. But to correct you, I’ve nothing to do with any will. We drew up a mutual agreement when we formed the partnership. Whichever of us predeceases the other, the survivor claims full interest.”

“Which, in dollars and cents, comes to—what?”

There was no guile in that funereal face. Either that, or there was nothing but. The expression that moved across it said he was going to answer the question, truthfully and to the last decimal point. The one that came right behind it said nothing. He folded his long, spotted hands on the place where his blotter would have been if he had one. “Lund would have that information,” he said. “Are you really working for him?”

“He’s staying at the Airport Marriott.” I gave him the suite number. “You can call him and ask.”

“I think I will.” He got on the intercom and asked Damaris in reception to dial the number. When Lund was on the telephone the pair talked for two minutes. Belder’s end of the conversation said the attorney had no surprises for him. He cradled the receiver.

“I’m satisfied. I think Stuart watches old Ray Milland movies to brush up on his accent. There’s a lot of espionage in this business, and that’s as close to an apology as you’ll hear from me.”

“It’s closer than you need. I gave up slapping people with gauntlets years ago.”

“In that case, please don’t insult me with this story about locating Jay’s heirs. Some of the younger members of the board of directors are trying to force me into retirement on grounds of senility. They won’t succeed.”

I smoked the rest of my cigarette. By the time I twisted it out in the ruby tray I’d made a decision. I took the photograph Lund had given me out of my inside breast pocket and laid it face up on the desk. He looked down at it without moving his head, let his eyes register a full stop, then looked back at me. “I’ve seen this before. Jay showed it to me the day it came.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought she had a beautiful body. I was eight years younger than I am now.” Something that would have been a tragic expression on any other face, but which on his passed for a smile, pulled at the corners of his mouth. “If you want me to say I was shocked, I’ll have to disappoint you. When a man who has passed his threescore and ten takes up with a girl in her twenties, he’s a fool to think he can satisfy all her needs.”

“It doesn’t sound like you thought much of her.”

“I didn’t think much about her. I met her only once, when Jay brought her to the office to show her the operation. She didn’t chew gum and she asked intelligent questions. Beyond that I couldn’t judge her. And wouldn’t if I could. I met my wife modeling nude for a life drawing course I attended in nineteen thirty-nine. When we went out she told me she’d appeared in a two-reeler ‘exposé’ set in a nudist camp; a silly little teaser, but it postponed my proposing to her for six months. Six months I never got back. She died five years ago and never once gave me cause for embarrassment. I wish she could have said the same about me. What are you getting at, Walker?”

“The picture’s phony. Furlong only found it out recently. Someone who didn’t want them to marry rigged it up.”

He sat back. “Poor Jay.”

“Poor Jay wants to know which one of his beneficiaries fitted the frame while he’s still capable of knowing anything. That’s the job. So now you know more than you’ve told me. Maybe I ought to ditch this line and look for something in advertising.”

“If he changes the will in his advanced condition the family will break it.”

“I don’t know what his plans are when he has the information. That much Lund didn’t confide in me. Do you know who the man is in the picture?”

“I recognized him then and I still know him. I saw him just two months ago at the Builders Trade Show in Novi. When this was taken he was only a junior partner in Imminent Visions. Now he’s CEO.”

“I guess women’s lib accomplished something after all,” I said. “You no longer have to be female to sleep your way to the top.”

“Ah, but he didn’t. Isn’t that your point?”

I picked up the picture and returned it to my pocket. “Perceptions change, even if people don’t. These days the appearance of impropriety is evidence enough to convict. Witchfinding is becoming more respectable all the time.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“History. Phooey. If Lily Talbot had married Furlong and inherited the best part of his estate, where did that leave your partnership agreement?”

“There would be no change. As I said, the agreement was exclusive to the terms of his will. Is this the third degree?” He tried to appear wry. He only managed to look like a recently bereaved bassett.

“As the widow she’d have been in a strong position to overturn the agreement in court. Or she might have persuaded Furlong to do it himself while he was still alive.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

It was my turn to sit back. “I believe you. I was just trying to make you sore. Do you get sore?”

“Not over money. Never over that.” He refolded his hands. Hands like those—long, yellow, and webbed between the fingers—were made for folding. “Maybe I can help. I’ve met most of Jay’s friends, enemies, lovers, and family over the past fifty years. I think I’d enjoy playing detective.”

“Who do you like for it?”

“Just off the top of my head, Karen Furlong.”

“The first wife?”

“The three that followed all signed prenuptial contracts limiting them to flat settlements in their respective divorces. Karen’s been bleeding Jay for alimony for thirty-five years, and as the mother of his only surviving son she’s not the type to stand by and watch any part of his inheritance go to a latecomer like Lily. Manufacturing an incriminating photo would not be beneath her.”

“I guess you two don’t exchange Christmas cards.”

“She’s the most morally repulsive person I’ve ever known. The great tragedy of that split—the only tragedy, to my mind—was that Jay lost his influence over his son. Under his mother’s thumb John has wasted his life trying to emulate his father’s success through a series of enterprises that were doomed to disaster because Karen can’t abide the thought of that boy—well, man, and a middle-aged one at that—making anything of himself outside her largesse. One way or another she’s seen to it that whatever he attempts turns to sawdust and splinters. No,” he said, rotating his head from side to side, “we don’t exchange Christmas cards.”

“But you stay in touch.”

“Jay’s association with Stuart Lund began many years after the divorce. It’s been my enviable task since the beginning to draw Karen’s checks on the Furlong and Belder account. Fortunately it’s John who comes to pick them up. He keeps me informed and never seems to realize just how much he’s telling me about his relationship with his mother.”

I doodled a dog wearing a hairbow on a page of my notebook. “What do you know about Furlong’s brother Larry?”

“Absolutely nothing. I never met him. I don’t think Jay’s seen him since the forties. He was a postmaster or something out in the country last I heard. I’m sure that’s over now. He must be close to eighty. Jay hardly ever mentioned him.”

“Vernon Whiting?”

“Dead.”

“That’s it?”

“It is where he’s concerned. Not for Jay. He didn’t lose his temper often, but the mere mention of Whiting’s name did it every time. What did Lund tell you about him?”

“Just that he accused Furlong of plagiarizing one of his designs.”

“Poppycock.”

“Poppycock?”

“It’s what people expect me to say when I mean bullshit. On his best day, Whiting never came up with a concept to compare with a Furlong castoff. He built Imminent Visions on that myth. I replaced him here, so I didn’t meet him until later, when we started attending shows. Whenever one of them entered a room the other would leave. If anyone had a grievance in that affair, it was Jay. I expect they’ll have it out in hell.”

“Why hell for Furlong?”

The wry bassett returned. “He wouldn’t last a week in paradise. St. Peter would send him down for trying to redesign the pearly gates.”

“Any other nominees?”

“None I like as much as Karen. Heavy irony on the word like. She’s pretty hard to see around.”

I put away the notebook and stood.

“Thanks, Mr. Belder. I don’t usually get this much candor all at once.”

He kept his seat. “Prejudice is a more appropriate term. When you get to be my age, a good many of the things they’d condemn you for any other time suddenly become virtues. It’s small enough compensation for prostate failure.”

“Live long enough and you become respectable.” I said it automatically.

His head jerked up like an old eagle’s. “Where did you hear that?”

“Lund. He attributed it to Furlong.”

“Oh.” He nodded his palsied nod. “That was Jay’s favorite maxim for years. For a moment I thought—but that would be impossible, wouldn’t it? Poor Jay. Well, good luck. I’d ask you to give my best to Karen out of simple good manners, but the best is lost on women like her.”

I grasped his weak old hand and got out of there before I spilled the name of my favorite teddy bear.