by Jack Kerley
He jumped into me to try to get his hands around my neck, and for a split-second his fat throat was open. I drove a knife-hand chop into his larynx.
Game’s end. Beefer’s hands fell from my throat and clutched at his own. I stood, resisting the notion to punt his head like a football and instead crouched beside him as he struggled for breath, my hand clutching his hair.
“The war began in 1861,” I whispered into an ear so close to my lips I could have bitten it off. “Manassas was the site of the Battle of Bull Run. The capital was Richmond, as in the state of Virginia. Say it.”
“Hur-ugh,” he rasped.
I yanked his head back, the better to see the fear in his eyes. “The name of the capital of the Confederacy.”
“Rug-mom,” he gargled.
I threw Beef’s head toward the ground and spun to the truck, yanked open the door. The syphilitic hillbilly Confucius held his hands in front of his face, babbling, “No, man, I didn’t disrespect you. No, man…”
I yanked him from the truck and sent him skittering across the parking lot. I tore the flag free of the rear window. I climbed in my truck and drove away, jamming the flag under the seat.
I felt like crying, but didn’t know why. So I started yelling as loud as I could. The feeling passed by the time I reached the next curve.
When I rolled in, at half past seven, Harry was still there, looking through YouTube videos in the side conference room. I wondered if he was checking out more background on Scaler or just playing around.
“Do I smell mint juleps?”
I opened my mouth and showed him a green tongue. “Tic-Tacs,” I slobbered. “Mint flavor.”
He frowned and sniffed the air. “I could have sworn I smelled whiskey, too.”
“Because you associate mint with whiskey,” I explained. “It’s how the mind works. Now sit your ass down and let me tell you what I got solved.”
I conveyed my conversation with Kirkson.
“That begins to explain things,” Harry said, after I’d run through the play-by-play. “Bailes was on the way out. Looking at nothing but pain and a plot in Potter’s Field.”
“A man with no future. Remember when he got quiet? I said to him, ‘It’s over. Set the kid aside and you get to live’?”
Harry thought back. Nodded. “Bailes said, ‘No I don’t.’”
“Bailes knew he was a goner, so he decided to act out some weird-ass fantasy,” I said. “Kirkson inadvertently helped light the fuse by telling Bailes to get his shit together and man up. Then do what he wanted because he was in the no-consequences zone.”
“Why did Bailes get weird? What was the fantasy?”
“No one will ever know what Bailes was thinking. When you’ve got a mama like that and a face like that there ain’t no way to turn out normal.”
“What if there’s more to it, Carson?”
“There isn’t.”
“We’ve got to make absolutely sure.”
“I’ve got two goddamn cases on my plate, Harry. One is a preacher who died while getting whipped as part of his sex life. The other is a delusional man-child who tried to jump out a window with an infant. Both are over. THE PEOPLE ARE DEAD!”
It finally seemed to penetrate Harry’s leaden skull. He thought for a few moments, shifted gears.
“Hardasses like Kirkson never tell cops anything without a trade. How did you get Kirkson to spill?”
I ahemed and told him the story of my on-the-spot creativity with the fake transfer.
“Jesus,” he whispered, jumping up to close the door. “You could have gotten your ass fired. The guard’s ass fired. Why did you take such ridiculous chan—”
“It worked,” I said, waving my hand in the done-with-talking mode. “That’s what’s important. Why don’t you call Clair and ask if she can get a pathologist to run the ripsaw through Bailes tomorrow after Scaler’s funeral so we can confirm the rotten pancreas and file this case under Dying Freak’s Last Wish?”
Harry paused, picked up the phone. I went to the can to take a leak. Washing my hands, I saw a wide red smear on my face, an abrasion from the set-to with Beefer. Harry had looked straight at it and hadn’t mentioned a thing.
When I returned to the meeting room, Harry was gone, a note in his place:
Post on Bailes @ 11.30 a.m. tomorrow. Scaler’s funeral at nine.
I went home, took a couple of Fossie’s sleeping pills, and watched a show about groups of people racing around the world. Everyone was angry at everyone else and I drifted into a rich and welcome sleep as they screamed at one another in an airline terminal in Singapore.
Chapter 23
Scaler’s service was at the Kingdom College chapel. My head was thick with sleep and I arrived late at the department. Harry and I had the misfortune to fall in behind Senator Custis’s motorcade as it traveled the final miles to the campus, four black Yukons book-ended by State Police officers, two on motorcycles, two inside cruisers. Sirens wailed, lights flashed. Senators did not move with stealth.
We kept a distance of a hundred feet behind the parade, careful whenever a clot of folks on the long drive leading to the bounds of Kingdom College held aloft a sign praising Custis. His black Yukon, the last in the quartet, would slow to roll down the smoked black window so the senator could wave and shine his teeth at the onlookers.
After our fifth slow-up in two miles, Harry cranked down our window. I watched as he stuck his face into the oncoming breeze and sniffed. He pulled his head back inside and rolled up the window.
I gave him a what-was-that-about? look.
“Just smelling the self-importance,” he said.
“How thick is it?”
“Like a ham loaf.”
The motorcade turned from the main road to a stretch of two-lane, the final half-mile before crossing into the confines of Kingdom College. A dozen men and women rose from lawn chairs positioned at the grassy green intersection and applauded as a news crew shot video. Two men held aloft signs proclaiming, Custis: The People’s Choice and Custis For Family Values. The signs were red-and-blue type over a white background with a full-color shot of Custis’s face in profile. I figured the senator’s PR team had scoped the route and passed out signs much in the manner of Jesus distributing loaves and fishes.
I looked ahead to the opaque rear window of the senator’s vehicle and smelled something worse than ham. Senator Hampton Custis had become emblematic of a class of politicians using fear to fuel their drive to power. Though the Civil Rights movement was years past by the time Custis made the jump from a rural county prosecutor to a senate seat, he’d based his campaign on the greasy residue of Jim Crow, speaking of a ‘golden age’ that had disappeared, oddly enough, when blacks gained full voting stature.
Like many Southern politicians who had risen from humble beginnings to heights of power, he maintained a thick rural accent, although amused reporters often noted his speech became much less mush-mouth in the halls of Congress than on the stump.
Custis’s ascension had been fast and not unmarked by controversy. After college, he’d returned to his Alabama home town and practiced small-town law, advertising on billboards and park benches: Divorces, $100! While in his late twenties he ran for county prosecutor when both the incumbent and main competitor were affected by scandal. He won by a few votes and made his mark as a strict law-and-order type.
Seemingly able to smell news cameras, Custis learned to speak in sound bites provocative enough to gain face time on the national news. He called a group of conservative gays, “pansies that got in the wrong boat somehow”. Another was, “Any woman who’s considered abortion for any reason is a murderer in her heart.” In a renowned 1983 trial of three white men arrested for raping a black woman, Custis’s office lost or “misplaced” crucial evidence, the loss allowing the perpetrators to go free.
In the late eighties, Custis’s office was surreptitiously investigated by the SDLP, prompted by the discovery that, where blacks and whites were accuse
d of the same crime, the blacks were 320 per cent more likely to be jailed. There were also accusations of pay-offs and bribes.
Snarling about “political assassination”, Custis had jumped from the embattled prosecutor’s office into a senate race. In the primary, he defeated a respected moderate senator by accusing him of insufficient patriotism and liberal sympathies because the man had once said that slavery had been a blight on the South. A concurrent rumor campaign held that the incumbent had either fathered one black child and one Hispanic child, or a single child of both persuasions. Though the stories were unfounded, the rumors were so well-seeded that the incumbent spent half his campaign refuting them.
After winning the primary, Custis drummed up wads of money, advertised constantly, refused one-on-one debates with a black opponent – “I want to talk direct to the people, not jabber with some lib’ral” – and won the general election by point-zero-two per cent on a viciously contested recount.
Canny enough to realize his victory had been secured not with ideas or personality but money, Custis had since devoted himself to amassing the kind of largesse to keep him in office and his contributors in tall cotton. He received much, and gave much to the campaigns of his fellow lawmakers. In Washington DC, honor withers in the face of money, and Custis was allowed great berth in biases and pronouncements.
After seemingly hours in the wake of Custis’s motorcade, we flashed our ID at the impromptu security point still a mile from the college. The general public had been channeled to a side road. Free of the need to wave, Custis’s motorcade picked up the beat to about eighty-five mph and rocketed away.
We flashed ID again when on the campus, were sent to a lot reserved for non-security cops, press, buses, and mid-range celebrities. Our IDs bought fast entry through a side door. The main floor was a melee of sweating bodies reeking of deodorant and cheap fragrances. We hiked to the balcony.
The stage of the chapel was about eighty feet wide and fifty feet deep, the depth necessary for the pulpit, the band, and the choir’s eight rows of risers. The area was lit from six stories above by a lighting system an arena-rock band would have admired. Two huge video monitors flanked the stage.
Taking front and center of the stage was Richard Bloessing Scaler, his suit white, his casket hammered brass, his hands laced over a black bible. Above the casket was the pulpit, looking like the helm of a sailing ship, if helms were white and gold and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
The bereaved elite sat in velvet-upholstered chairs behind the pulpit. Closest to the casket was Patricia Scaler. She was in the requisite black with a veil so dense it seemed opaque, as if she had believed it would wall her off from the thousands of incoming mourners and reporters. I felt deep sadness for her.
I saw Fossie beside Mrs Scaler, his eyes drifting over the crowd. After a few minutes I saw her move from Fossie’s side to Senator Custis. She leaned low, spoke a few words, and sat beside him. He put his hand over her forearm, gave a squeeze of reassurance.
Sitting in the other chairs – many still arriving – was an assemblage of what I assumed were friends and people from the college and various Scaler media enterprises, though I could recognize only two: Dean Tutweiler, looking amply doleful, and the lawyer Carleton, sitting beside the Dean and whispering in his ear, probably putting the funeral on the clock. Looking down into the front rows of the congregation, I recognized several other notable right-wing televangelists, out to pay their respects to a colleague in the industry. Or maybe making sure he was dead.
We watched a half-dozen orations which, save for the vocalizations, sounded the same. Between speeches the choir sang hymns. When I’d shoot a glance at Mrs Scaler she remained in the same position, unmoved by so much as a breath, hiding in the fortress of her grief.
After nearly an hour of hagiography, Custis took his position at the podium, the main event. He tapped the mic and asked for more volume. The senator cleared his throat, then opened his hands toward the man in the casket below the podium.
“I’ve known this beautiful man since his days as a simple country pastor in a small church. It feels like a hundred years, such has been the Reverend Richard Scaler’s influence on my life and devotion to our Lord. Here lies a true man of God, a warrior for righteousness, a soldier of Heaven, the vanguard scout for the legions of Truth and the point man for Jesus Christ our Eternal Savior…”
Custis’s voice boomed from the walls. Amens arose from the crowd. I heard Harry mutter something. A sixtyish, blubber-necked white guy in the pew beside us turned to see a black guy talking to himself. Blubber-neck couldn’t hide his disgust.
Harry looked back. I couldn’t see the expression on my partner’s face, but the white guy turned even whiter and snapped his head back to Custis’s eulogy.
“…Richard and I were two sons of the South, scions of small towns close to one another. It was a simpler time then, a better time then…before the hippies and the nay-sayers and the America-haters took to the streets, before the Godless heathens stormed the gates of rectitude…”
More amens from the crowd, though I saw less-hardened faces looking uncomfortable at Custis’s opportunistic language. The raw politician in Custis sensed the same, backed it down.
“…Then the seventies came with what Richard later called his ‘finding’ period. Finding who he was, discovering his full potential as a preacher, though he had preached since the age of four. He could have given it all up, my friends. Or stayed in his small country church away from the great responsibility he later undertook. I knew him then just as I knew his beloved Patricia then, and I hope that my friendship was some inspiration to him…”
I took as much as I could stomach and left, Harry on my heels.
When we arrived at the department, Tom Mason whistled me to his office. “You can come along, too, Harry,” Tom added.
I sat, Harry stood. “Got us a li’l problem here,” Tom said, looking at me.
“Which is?”
Tom picked up a sheet from his desk, put on reading glasses. “A woman name of Vernia Teasdale and a Mr Jameson Daniels signed a complaint avowing that, lacking proper cause, you entered their domicile yesterday and broke camera equipment, a table, and caused them to be in fear of their lives. They say you scared them so much they locked themselves in the bathroom until you left.”
I shook my head. “Teasdale is the mama of Terry Lee Bailes, the guy who tried to abduct the baby at the hospital,” I explained. “I was there to inform Mrs Teasdale of the death of her son. She became emotional. The man with her didn’t like me causing her distress. They were shooting a porn movie or performing for an internet audience when I arrived. A marijuana roach was found on the premises – seen when the door was open, proper cause. The aforementioned man took offense at my ability to arrest him. There was a small scuffle. Objects fell.”
“No one was arrested because of…?” Tom asked.
“I didn’t want to place the woman under any more emotional duress, Tom. She was having a tough day, her son dead and all.”
Tom studied a pair of rap sheets. “Both of ’em got records, low-life stuff: misdemeanor dope busts and three DUIs on Teasdale, Daniels has grand theft auto, second-degree assault. It’ll turn into your word against theirs, and the judge’ll throw their charges out like a week-old biscuit. I don’t see a problem here, do I?”
“Nope,” I said. “Because there is none.” I laced my fingers behind my head and smiled at Harry. He frowned back at me.
What? I mouthed.
He looked away. I stood and headed out the door, went to my desk. When I turned back, Harry was still in Tom’s office, only this time the door was closed.
Chapter 24
Harry was scheduled for another meeting at the District Attorney’s office, which left me to attend the autopsy on Bailes. Leaving Harry still in with Tom, I went to the morgue. The pathologist handling Bailes was Ernie Hemmings, a rotund black man with huge sleepy eyes, octagonal glasses, and a constant smile as bright a
s his hairless pate. I always saw Ernie as a character in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Cheshire Pathologist, maybe.
Ernie was studying a report as I entered.
“The blood screen on Bailes,” he said, frowning at various numbers on the pages. “We got some interesting hits including a Prozac-type substance. Plus the stuff you’d expect, like THC and meth. And one big surprise, Stenebrexia.”
“What the hell’s Stene-whatever.”
“I suppose you could call it a psychotropic dis-inhibitor. It was developed to help people with inhibitions and anxiety disorders, like stage fright and agoraphobia. But the stuff interacts poorly with other drugs, common ones like Prozac and the ilk. It can actually promote anxiety, plus odd behavior and acting out.”
“But if the stuff dissipates fear, it could have helped Bailes step into the hospital.”
“You’re right. It could have made it easier. Thing is, Stenebrexia is only legally available in a half-dozen countries, the US not one of them.”
“Pharmaceuticals seem able to float over borders, right?”
Ernie nodded, turned to study Bailes’s misshapen face. “Maybe the guy was afraid of his mirror. Anyway, time for the show.”
When Hemmings pushed the scalpel into the swastika tat on Bailes’s sternum and pulled it south, I started from the room.
“You’re leaving?” Hemmings said.
“I’m not paid enough to watch you root through garbage. I’ll be back.”
I jammed my hands in my pockets, went out a side door, and cut to the parking lot. I found a coffee shop with a television and watched CNN – abducted woman of the week, children starved in a basement, a man poisoned to death by his wife – until I duked the clerk five bucks to switch to the Weather Channel. When I returned to the morgue, Hemmings was lacing Bailes’s abdomen shut with stitching like shoelaces. The Frankenstein stitches fit the lopsided face.
