by Jack Kerley
“What happened?” Harry asked, leading the shaky guard to a chair at the nurses’ station. I found a coffee machine, brought him a cup.
The guard wiped his eyes, sucked down half the coffee. “Homer was in the monitoring station, watching the six cams. I was up from the first floor, on break, asking if Homer wanted to go bass fishing next Saturday. He said ‘Hold on,’ ’cause he spotted some guy in a suit creeping down the hall, a backpack in one hand, a parcel in the other. Homer called for the guy to stop. The guy turned and shot with a pistol. Homer shot back. Then the guy pulled something heavyweight out of his pack, turned and fired a burst.” The guard nodded at the glass, the pocked walls. “Everything fell apart.”
“Can we see the security footage from the camera upstairs? The one at the end of the hall?”
“The roof-door unit? Sure.”
We followed him to the security station. He dialed up the camera in question, racked the recording to just before the event, started it forward. We watched the door open at the end of the hall. The abductor approached, running. He’d slung the backpack over a large shoulder, holding Noelle cradled down his forearm like a football. The lens had a fish-eye configuration, giving the psychologically warped scene a visual warp as well, a funhouse mirror at a psychotic carnival. He started to go beneath the camera – entering the door to the roof – but looked up and saw the device. He backed up and stared directly into the lens. His face was distorted, not by the lens, but by a defect or injury, a lopsided face that probably scared the hell out of kids.
The guy again started for the roof, caught himself. Returned and continued to study the camera, looking between the lens and the end of the hall. Something blossomed in the twisted face.
“He was heading to the roof to finish the action,” Harry said. “The camera stopped him like a brick wall.”
“He decided to leave a message,” I said. “A spur-of-the-moment suicide note.”
“But what was all that stuff about mutants and clones?”
“I’d say a head filled with speed and psyche-delics. And some kind of psychotic delusion.”
Harry asked the security guy to rewind to a specific moment. The perp raged at the camera.
“LOOK AT ME! FUCKIN’ LOOK AT ME!”
Harry turned to me. “There’s an old movie with an actor name of James Cagney. White Heat. Cagney plays a gangster with a mama complex; it’s actually a psychologically complex movie, Cars. You should check it out. Cagney’s character is as cold-blooded as a snake and pure psychotic to boot. Long story short: beloved Mama dies, the gangster goes full whack. Kill-crazy. There’s some more stuff about an undercover cop – a guy – who Cagney seems to want to please, just like Mama. Cagney’s character gets trapped in a tank yard by the police, flees atop a huge storage tank, a million gallons of gasoline. He decides it’s his day to die and he’s going to go out with a bang. He starts firing into the gas tank beneath his feet. As it explodes, he’s screaming, ‘Look at me, Ma. I made it. I’m on top of the world.’”
“Turning a dead-end into a blaze-of-glory moment?” I mused. “You think that’s our boy?”
“Given that no helicopter was waiting to pluck him off the roof, I think he was planning to fight the cops until he and the kid were killed, or dive overboard with the kid in his arms. Then he saw the camera and decided to have the finale right there.”
“Look at me, Ma, I made it?’
Harry nodded. “He was making a movie for someone.”
“But for who? He mentioned five names: Adolf, George, James, John and a Pastor Buford. And a number: eighty-eight. You know what that means.”
I’d seen it tattooed on prison inmates. Eight meant H, the eighth letter of the alphabet, thus, HH for Heil Hitler.
Harry said, “Guess we got us a white supremacist type. So we wait to see if forensics can ID the perp. I imagine he’s got an arrest record about a half-mile long. Then maybe we can track down all those names he was ranting.”
“I got another way to do things,” I said. “It’ll take a trip to Montgomery…”
“Can’t do it now,” Harry said, looking at his watch and sighing. “It’s gonna take the rest of the day to make our statements and fill out the paperwork.”
“We’ll leave first thing in the morning,” I said. “It’s a good time to get in some veterinary research.”
“Veterinary research?”
“We’re gonna study the underbellies of ugly animals.”
When I finally got home, I sat in the quiet of my living room and let the day dissolve. I wanted to call Clair, but knew I’d start babbling and when she asked why I was calling, have no answer whatsoever. The silence in my head grew so loud that I cranked on the TV and filled my eyes with a show about beautiful, soulless people purposefully stranded on an atoll.
At nine thirty I heard a knock on the door, opened it to find Archibald Fossie in suit pants, shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, wearing a dapper straw fedora with bright paisley band.
I slapped my head. “I forgot. We had an appointment tonight.”
He looked at me closely. “You look like you’ve had a long day, Detective. I’ll stop back in a few days.”
I glanced down and saw a barn-shaped black bag in his hand, the kind doctors carried when I was a little kid. It was reassuring, like a talisman from the past.
“Come in,” I said, grabbing his sleeve. “The day’s been a bowl of boiled dung, but I need something. Maybe you’ve got it.”
“I hope so,” he said, stepping inside as I closed the door against the heat and mosquitoes.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked.
“Got any Scotch?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Not a glass of soy milk?”
A sly grin. “Alcohol can be healthy in moderation. Though for you, I’d prescribe red wine, four or five fluid ounces a night.”
“Duly noted.”
I got Fossie a neat single-malt kept around for Harry’s benefit, poured myself a tumbler of red wine, deciding to start nutritional therapy tonight. Fossie reached into his bag and produced a stethoscope, hung it around his neck.
“I’ll need you to undress, Detective. Down to skivvies is fine.”
I complied and sat on a dining-room chair as Fossie poked and prodded, thumped and listened. He studied my tongue, my hair. He had me walk across the room and back, making notes on my carriage. He had me do two minutes of push-ups, re-listened to my heart. I told him how I’d been feeling – lack of appetite, vague pains in my gut, lethargy, occasional lightheadedness, insomnia.
“The major machinery sounds fine,” he said, dropping the steth into his bag and plucking several vials out, pouring capsules into paper packets. “In the meantime, here’s a concoction to help you sleep: L-Tryptophan, valerian and a bit of melatonin. These others are vitamins, heavy on B-complex and good for stress.”
“Stress? Really?”
“So is ginseng. Here’s some ginseng extract. Natural medicines, one and all. Take two of each every morning, two in the early afternoon. None after four p.m. I’ll write up a diet I want you to follow, low fat and high protein.”
I nodded and followed him to the door. “What do I owe you?”
“Find out the truth about Richard Scaler,” he said quietly, hand on the knob, looking into my eyes. “Discover what he really was.”
I said, “You spend a lot of time at the Scaler home, right, Mr Fossie?”
“An hour a day or so. I’m actually on retainer, another thing that drove Richard nuts. I go to the co-op, buy fresh fruits and veggies, take them to Patricia. Or I grind herbal medications and mix infusions. She likes to watch and talk while I work.”
“What’s she talk about?”
“Her childhood. The pre-Richard days when she was carefree, a high-school girl with her whole life ahead of her. The conversation is therapeutic. I’m usually there in the morning. With the, uh, unfortunate event, I plan to stop by in the afternoon or evening to make sure Patricia’
s all right.”
“You don’t really think it was an unfortunate event, Mr Fossie. Not if the Missus got free of a man who was hurting her.”
He closed his eyes, loosed a sigh. “Being free of that self-righteous beast is the best thing that ever happened to Patricia. But she’s not ready to let herself know that. Though she already knows it deep inside. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. And if you really want me to uncover the truth about Scaler, there’s a way you can help. I need to know who was with Scaler on his last night.”
Fossie’s eyes looked dubious behind the glasses. And maybe a bit scared.
“It doesn’t sound ethical.”
“You want me to reveal the truth about Richard Scaler? Give me something that provides insight into his secret life. See if you can find a calendar entry. Something on his desk. A phone number scrawled on a Post-it. Anything.”
When Fossie escaped into the night, I didn’t know if I’d succeeded in enlisting him. Expecting little, I washed Fossie’s prescribed capsules down with the last of my wine, falling into a sweet and dreamless sleep more satisfying than any I’d had in weeks.
Chapter 14
It was eight thirty a.m. when Harry and I pulled into the failing strip mall on the south side of Montgomery. The offices I sought were on the end. There had once been windows, but they had been bricked over after a shoebox loaded with four sticks of dynamite exploded on the sidewalk outside. The two occupants of the office had been back in the files, or they would have been shredded by glass and shattered by concussion.
Nothing was taken for granted any more. There were no windows and the door was metal.
Near the entrance to the lot I saw a hulking bubba type slouched in a battered pickup with the door open. He had a square face and had gone days without shaving. His plaid shirt had the sleeves cut off, showing hard and tattooed arms. He shot me a look, flicked the cigarette to the pavement. I checked my rear-view and saw him pull a cellphone.
“You see that guy, Cars? Mean-looking piece of work.”
“Probably just sitting and eating,” I said. “But around here’s where you should let your natural paranoia shine.”
“Cuz it ain’t paranoia if they’re really following you, right?”
“Bingo.”
I parked at the far end of the building. There was no name on the metal door, just a number. But I knew the name: Southern Legal Defense Program. Though the name suggested a program to help indigent defendants, the SLDP was a monitoring organization that kept close tabs on hate groups. The organization had contacts ranging from law enforcement to prison leadership to informants inside the groups. In a recent case information supplied by the SLDP and a couple of similar watchdog groups helped convict two former Klan members of a series of lynchings that had occurred in the early sixties. The Kluxers were now in their late seventies, and I was delighted they got their earthly retributions in before whatever lays in the distance exacted the Universe’s toll.
Much harsher, I hoped.
There had, predictably, been the usual cracker chorus bemoaning the perps’ current ages and calling the investigation a vendetta against a few old men, as though time had washed their crimes away. I recalled video footage of their lawyer, a beady-eyed guy in a loud suit, standing at the courthouse mics after the guilty verdicts, yodeling about injustice to a crowd with few but vocal sympathizers.
Thus the bomb, one of several revenge schemes aimed at the group in its forty-year existence.
I’d known the SLDP’s director since my first year on the force, back when I was in uniform. A murder had occurred on my beat, horrific, a fifty-year-old black man beaten to death with ball bats.
I’d been asking around on the street about the unsolved murder – it couldn’t even have been called a case because I was in uniform – for a couple months when I got a call out of the blue from a guy named Ben Belker. It was curious that he’d heard about my interest, because I was just a beat cop. Belker said I should talk to a guy named Hawley Cage.
Long story short: Cage turned out to be a member of a group called Aryan America Only. Except he was also an informer for the SLDP. Cage told me of interesting boozy conversations he’d overheard at a meeting. Long story shorter: I vetted the info, passed it to the dicks on the case, and a month later they arrested two psychopathic Klanners who’d killed the old guy after he’d yelled at them to slow down in the street because kids lived in the neighborhood.
It turned out Ben Belker had worked for the SLDP for years as a field operative and was now its “survey director”, meaning he assimilated and analyzed data on hate groups to make sense of their comings and goings. If anyone was anyone in the various movements, Ben kept tabs on them.
Ben was at the door as I entered, as skinny as a sapling, brown hair looking like it was combed with a wolverine, big eyes widened by nerdish black-frame glasses. A pen stain soaked the pocket of his work shirt. His shoes were gray Hush Puppies, one untied. He clasped me in a hug as tight as an auto compactor. When we released he slapped the side of my head. Harry seemed content to stand back and watch the drama.
“Jeez, what was that about?” I asked, rubbing my head.
“When was the last time you were here?”
Time has never been exact to me. I tried to recall my last visit.
“Has it been a year, Ben? Year-and-a-half?”
“Three. After promising we’d get together at least twice a year.”
“My bad.”
“OK,” Ben grinned, “I’ve hugged you ’cus I love you, smacked you because you’re a prick, now introduce me to Harry Nautilus and let’s get down to business.”
Harry frowned at the mention of his name.
“Have we met before?”
Ben held his finger up in the hang on motion, went to a computer, tapped a few keys. He waved us over to look at the screen. I saw Harry and me in a crowd in Mobile’s Bienville Square, a prominent civil rights leader at a podium a dozen feet beyond. The event had been two years ago.
“Here’s another,” Ben said, pulling up a second photo from the same day. Both shots were slightly unfocused. “And I think there’s one more…”
Harry didn’t look happy, but kept his counsel and watched Ben select from a sheet of tiny photos, making an enlargement that fit the screen.
“Voila!” Ben said. Harry and I leaned forward to see a shot of the two of us standing outside the front door of a local hotel. I was on the radio, Harry looking to his side at a crowd of sign-holding protestors. I remembered the day: a liberal Massachusetts senator had been visiting Mobile and Harry and I were put on guard duty along with half the force.
“I know there’s an explanation I’m going to accept.” Harry’s tone said it would be a challenge. Harry wasn’t big on unauthorized surveillance of himself.
“We weren’t specifically taking surreptitious photos of you, Detective,” Ben explained. “This guy here, ten feet away, is who we were tracking. Arnold Meltzer. He’s the head honcho of the Aryan Revolutionary Army, a pivotal white power splinter group attractive to a lot of biker gangs. You just happened to be there.”
Harry took a second to let it sink in, nodded acceptance. He studied the photo of a wisp of a man in his fifties, dressed in a light seersucker suit, his face almost totally hidden behind sunglasses. His mouth was a tight pucker, like he was about to lift a clarinet to his lips. He looked as threatening as a canary.
“This guy’s a Klan type, you mean? A real baddie?”
“These days, the danger is a lot bigger than the Klan. Thanks to the internet, white supremacist types are more organized than ever.”
“Obama’s presidency doesn’t change things?”
“People this broken just feel more threatened. It’s made them even crazier, full-blown paranoiac. The movement used to weed out the worst psychotics, but now it gives them leadership positions.”
Harry re-studied the photo of Arnold Meltzer. “And this little fella’s a leader?” He soun
ded dubious.
“Don’t be fooled by Meltzer’s stature. His ideas make him dangerous. As well as his influence and money.”
“Where’s the money come from?”
“Outlaw bikers are big in the drug-running biz. Mules. It’s whispered Meltzer’s into that big-time, like a contractor. He’s also the figurehead for the White Power movement in the South, revered by supremacists.”
Harry scowled at the photo. “I was nearly rubbing shoulders with the scumbucket and didn’t know.”
Ben said, “He’s not in any police files. I was scanning through the photos when I saw Carson. From his descriptions, I figured that was you next to him. I blew the photos up and saved them.” Ben grinned at me, a loopy Cheshire cat. “Something to remember Carson by since he never writes, never calls, never…”
I put my hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I’m here now, Ben. With another photo for you to consider.” I pulled three death photos of our baby abductor, handed them over. He stared, shook his head.
“Never seen him before. What’d he do?”
“Tried to steal a kid from a hospital.”
“I saw that bit of weirdness on the news,” Ben said. “I should have figured you’d be in the middle of it.”
He picked up a magnifying glass from his desk and studied closer. “I know that tat on his shoulder: WR. It shows sympathy with a specific biker gang.” Ben turned to the open door to the back offices, yelled, “Wanda!”
A second later a heavy thirtyish woman with braided hair pushed her head through the door. She wore one of those formless dresses people wear when they don’t give a damn for fashion.
“Yo?”
He held up the shot and she stepped into the office. “This is Wanda Tenahoe,” Ben introduced. “She coordinates the info on biker gangs; a big job, but Wanda has a photographic memory.”
