“FURLONG RESIDENCE.”
Another female on the other end of another telephone. This one had a Middle Eastern accent. There are more of those in the metropolitan area than in all the remakes of Beau Geste put together.
“Mrs. Furlong, please.” I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke hang on the motionless air. I miss booths. The telephone had its own built-in shade, leaving me outside to face the heat and noxious gases on East Jefferson. A red 1965 Mustang convertible mumbled past, followed by a 1915 Ford depot hack, a 1950 Hudson Hornet, and a Tucker; on their way to a road rally to celebrate the centenary of the automobile. There was always some kind of motoring anniversary coming up, and Detroit never missed one. It was the only thing good that had happened to the city since Cadillac came ashore to dump the water out of his boots.
“Who is speaking?”
“My name is Amos Walker. I’m an investigator hired by Mr. Furlong’s attorney to—”
“Is he dead?”
This was a new voice, a contralto without age or nationality and precious little gender.
“Mrs. Furlong?” Araby was confused.
“I’ve got it, Khalida. You can hang up.” After the click: “This is Karen Furlong. Are you calling to report Jay’s death?”
“No, he’s still alive,” I said.
Air blew out through a pair of nostrils. “The son of a bitch was always on his way somewhere else all the time we were married. Why did he have to pick now to hang around? What did you say your name was?”
I said it again. “Stuart Lund has hired me to interview the beneficiaries of Mr. Furlong’s will. It’s a routine investigation connected with the reading. Are you free anytime today?”
“I suppose so, if it will speed up the process. Four o’clock.”
“Will John Bell Furlong also be available at that time?”
“Yes, yes. My son’s always available. Don’t be late. I have the decorator coming at five.”
I hung up on the dial tone and walked the block and a half to where I’d left the car. By the time I got there I was squelching inside my clothes. At Rivard a big cop was directing traffic around a stalled Bonneville with steam rolling out from under its hood. The cop had sweated through his light blue uniform shirt and his face had the look of pavement buckled in the heat. I didn’t ask him if he was intending to celebrate the invention of the automobile.
I had thirty minutes to kill and the office was nearby, so I parked in the abandoned service station across the street from my building, gave the derelict who lived in the empty bay a dollar not to slash my tires, and went up. The stairwell smelled of kippers. There hadn’t been any food in the building since the stove manufacturer who built it converted it from apartments in 1911, but on stagnant days the ghosts of old meals prowled the hallways.
The only things waiting in my waiting room were the voting-age Field & Streams on the coffee table. I’d left the table fan, a refugee from the Eisenhower administration, oscillating on the window sill in the think pit; a homey odor of burning bearings greeted me when I opened the door. A pigeon feather jigged around in the current when I closed it, paused on top of the telephone, then fluttered off again when the fan swung back that direction. I wondered where it got its energy.
In the little water closet, installed as an afterthought by an exasperated contractor when the fad for indoor plumbing didn’t pass, I stripped to the waist, splashed my face and chest and under my arms, used the thin towel, and applied a generous layer of talcum. I broke a fresh shirt out of the black iron safe and sat down behind the desk without fastening the buttons. I contemplated the picture on the wall of Custer having it out with the Sioux. He looked hot. I decided to shop for one of Peary at the Pole.
The feather came back and landed on the telephone a second time. I took the hint and called Barry Stackpole.
I’d met Barry in a shell crater in the jungle. Since then he’d lost a leg and two fingers, acquired a silver plate in his skull—all this stateside—written a couple of books, and established his reputation as the Detroit News’s expert on organized crime. Now he had shucked off the dead cocoon of print journalism and joined the enemy. He’d been nominated for a couple of Emmys as the producer of a weekly crime watch segment at one of the cable stations in town, losing both times to a Cajun cooking show out of Louisiana.
A future TV anchorwoman with a thirty-seven-word vocabulary put me through to Barry’s office.
“How are things in the Magic Kingdom?” I asked him when we’d run out of insults.
“It beats thinking. I had lunch with the station owner yesterday. I found myself using words like skew and demographics without feeling like a complete horse’s ass. Which means, of course, I am one.”
“Breeding shows.”
“Funny guy. We may go syndicated this fall, if Channel Fifty doesn’t move The Brady Bunch into our time slot and knock us out of the book. How about you? I hear AIDS is working wonders for the keyhole business. All those husbands and wives and significant whatevers wondering what the better half may be bringing home from the office besides the bacon.”
“My job’s secure until they get that humanity thing worked out,” I said. “What do you know these days about pictures that don’t move?”
“An old girlfriend comes to mind.”
“Now you’re getting corny. I’m looking for someone who can trace a faked photo to the artist.”
“Blackmail case?”
“Nothing a big-time muckraker like you would be interested in. For the record, it’s a honey of a job. The Rembrandt who did it must have a reputation.”
“I don’t know. I watched a kid here at the station who couldn’t spell CNN morph up a picture of the current Ayatollah chomping on a Big Mac that would spark a new revolution in Iran. The equipment was strictly Radio Shack.”
“This one goes back eight years. Computers hadn’t quite made dark rooms obsolete.”
“Sure I can’t do anything with this? I need something for the fall sweeps.”
“I’ll let you have it if it jumps that way.” If Furlong’s doctors were anywhere near right, he wouldn’t be around to see the show.
“Throw in two bottles of H-and-H and I’ll see what’s under my silver plate.”
I paused. “I guess AA was just a lark.”
“No, I’m back with the program to stay. I’ve got sponsors to ply. Be glad I’m not with one of the networks. There it’s kilos.”
“Two pints.”
“Fifths.”
“One fifth,” I said.
“That’s less than two pints.”
“I flunked Weights and Measures.”
“Two pints,” he said. “And the story.”
“I repeat, if it jumps that way. You know this drill, Barry.”
“Randy Quarrels is your man.”
I wrote down the name. “Photographer for the News, right?”
“He ran the staff until he snuck a picture of the chief of police snoozing on his office sofa on Law Enforcement Day. The chief pulled a string at the paper and hung Randy on the end of it. These days he’s holding down a portrait studio in Birmingham.”
“Ritzy.”
“If you call Jonas Salk working a counter in a drugstore ritzy. Randy’s eye is wasted on rich little spit-ups who won’t smile at the clownie. If anyone can track your picture to its source it’s him.” He gave me a telephone number. Barry’s head is a directory; he’d be an idiot savant if he didn’t have an IQ of 180.
I thanked him. We traded vile comments on our respective lineages and I worked the riser and dialed.
“Cassandra Photo.”
It was a relief for once to get a male voice first thing. This one was an interesting combination of shallow youth and the flat bone-weariness of disillusioned age. You hear it in cops who are no longer rookies and reporters with no hope of ever mounting to the editorial staff. I asked if I was speaking to Randy Quarrels.
“Well, I’m not Cassandra.”
There was no humor in the reply. I introduced myself, said I’d gotten his name and number from Barry Stackpole, and told him what I needed.
“Positive or negative?” he asked.
“Positive.”
“Depends on the quality of the print. Bring it around. The best guys have their own style. If it’s one I know it won’t take long.”
“How long if it isn’t?”
“Not much longer if it’s as good as you say. There aren’t that many aces in this deck.”
“How late are you open?”
“I close at five sharp.”
“Can you spot me an extra half hour? I have to be in Farmington Hills at four.”
“I’ll have to charge you double the usual sitting.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t planning on retiring this year.”
Pause. “Yeah, you know Barry, all right.” The connection went away.
Karen Furlong’s house was a half-timber job with gables and shake shingles, six thousand square feet if it was a cabana, overlooking the rest of Oakland County from the top of a shared private drive winding up from Orchard Lake Road. It wouldn’t have made much of an impression on the dozen or so half-million-dollar structures it was tucked in with. I parked in front of a horseshoe-shaped front porch, straightened my tie, and rang the bell. Poppies and impatiens spilled over the sides of a two-wheeled carriage with red spoke wheels encamped on the pampered lawn.
The door opened between the ding and the dong. I identified myself to a golden-olive face above a maid’s black uniform trimmed with white lace and she let me in. The entrance hall was a vertical shaft rearing straight up for thirty feet to a leaded-glass skylight that divided the sun into colored slices on the ebonized wood at our feet. She curtsied in that fluid way of societies where the women wear veils and went off to find the mistress of the house. It didn’t seem like enough for her to do given the setting. For the first time in years I was sorry I’d stopped wearing a hat.
I killed time trying to make eye contact with a fierce old buzzard in a frame crusted over with gilt Cupids, the room’s only decoration. He wore a wing collar, iron-gray handlebars, and the general air of a man who preferred to mess around with moustache wax and studs. He was clutching a rolled document as if it contained directions to the Lost Dutchman.
“Fascinating old gargoyle, isn’t he?”
The man who had appeared at my side was my height but forty pounds heavier, most of it around his waistband. He had on a cream-colored knitted polo shirt with an animal embroidered above the pocket, loose tan cotton slacks with pleats, and cordovan loafers, artfully scuffed. Underclassmen’s clothes, with a butch cut to match; but there was plenty of gray in it, and salt and pepper in the whiskers his razor had missed between chins. He was late forties, maybe fifty, but his eyes hadn’t gotten the news. They were as bright as uncirculated dimes.
“Mother commissioned the painting last year. They mixed dirt in with the varnish to make it look old. I forget just which one of my ancestors it’s supposed to represent, but I understand he stole a railroad. They named a bridge after him in New York. All Jesse James got was a bullet in the head. John Furlong.” He turned and extended a hand the size of a flipper. “Are you the detective? I’m sure you’re not the decorator.”
I told him my name and gave him back his hand. Like his face it was as pink and soft as salmon flesh. I searched the face for signs of his famous father and came up empty. There was nothing more to connect him to the ferocious party in the painting. Chromosomes will do that sometimes.
“You move quietly, Mr. Furlong. I never heard you coming up on me.”
“Mother’s hearing is preternatural. You learn to sneak around if you’re going to have any sort of freedom.”
There was a pause that needed filling. “I’m sorry about your father.”
“Thank you. I rang him up just last month to cut him in on a little syndicate I’m putting together. Naturally I wouldn’t have disturbed him if I’d suspected he was in poor health. I imagine that’s why he decided to pass up the opportunity.” The dimes brightened. “You wouldn’t happen to have some capital lying around you don’t know what to do with, by any chance?”
“I wouldn’t call it capital. More like lower case.”
“Oh. A shame. It’s a crackerjack idea, and all mine. I borrowed against my trust fund to buy a stable of racehorses, but they all turned out to be related and there was something wrong with the bloodline. They faint when they get excited. The least little shock and they drop like laundry.”
“Tough break.”
“I thought so, too. Then I rented this old movie starring Gary Cooper. The Bengal Lancer Something.”
“Lives of a Bengal Lancer.”
“Have you seen it?” The dimes glowed.
“I like old movies.”
“Well, then, you know there are a lot of battle scenes with cannons bursting and horses falling and things. The studios were terribly irresponsible about how they made horses fall back then. They used tripwires. Dozens of animals broke their legs and had to be destroyed. It was barbaric.”
“Now they just dump helicopters on the underage actors.”
“Yes.” He wasn’t listening. “These days they hire trainers to teach the horses to fall on command. I started thinking about that, how I could rent these fainting horses of mine to Hollywood productions and make a fortune. I don’t even remember how the movie ended, I was so full of this wonderful idea.”
“At least.”
“That’s the definition of true genius, you know: the ability to identify a liability, analyze it, and convert it into an asset.”
“I thought it was an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
“That’s another. There are several. The trouble is I don’t have any contacts in the industry. That’s why I hoped Father could help, I mean being out there and known by everyone. If I’m going to make any sort of impression there I have to check into the most expensive hotel in town and throw money around. Also the horses are stabled in New Jersey and transporting them across the country will be complicated, especially since—”
“They’ll be falling down in ten states.”
“Right. So any way you look at it I need more money than I’ve ever had to make more money than I’ve ever dreamed.”
“Ain’t that the way, though?”
“Ain’t it indeed.” He looked glum as roadkill.
“Ever have this problem before?”
“Almost constantly. But not to this degree.”
“Know anything about photography?”
He thought about that one. Thinking about things would always be a problem for him unless they appeared in the flare of the spastic lightbulb that lived inside his skull, like a cartoon character’s. It would be pretty dim in there between flashes. If it was an act, he’d had it down cold a long time before I came.
He was still struggling when Karen Furlong joined us from the next room. At a glance I could see that here was someone who was related to the predatory-looking gent in the oil painting.