by Jack Kerley
There was a map of Alabama on the wall, mounted over cork so thumbtacks would hold. Harry picked up a box of tacks, went to the board, began sticking tacks to indicate locations.
“Patti Scaler went to a county high school. Everyone in the county went there, no towns in the county big enough to support a school. Check this out: here’s where little Patti grew up, here’s where lawyer Carleton grew up, here’s where – surprise! – Senator Custis grew up. Here’s where Tutweiler grew up. Small-town kiddies, all within the same county, where there’s little to do but drive around and mix and mingle. Everyone knows everyone.”
I studied the array of tacks. “Where’s Richard Scaler’s pin?”
Harry tapped outside the map, where central Mississippi sat.
“It would be up here, a hundred miles away.”
I frowned. “Out of the pattern, brother.”
“Unless you stick it here.” Harry jabbed the tack a bit beside the cluster of others.
“Which is?”
“The little country church he started when he was in his early twenties.”
“Proximity in space,” I said, studying the map. “But what does it mean in time?”
“Oh, wait…got one more little flag.” He pressed a white tack beside the others.
“That being?”
“Arnold Meltzer. Another kid from the county.”
“OK, so you got Meltzer, Scaler, Carleton, Custis and Tutweiler all in the same geographic area. It’s a nice coincidence, especially since they’re similar in age. But we’re looking at Patti Scaler. How does this touch her? She’s six years younger than the others. Not much of a difference, but it’s amplified when younger.”
Harry tapped some keys, arrived at a website called Keep In Touch.
“Here’s where I found a copy of her high school yearbook. Amazing what’s online, right?”
“Where’s the lady?”
Harry electronically turned pages. “Here.”
The photo was black and white and unmistakably the woman who in ten years would become Patricia Scaler, though the name said Patti Selmot. Her complexion was poor. She hadn’t smiled for the photographer, perhaps to hide the teeth.
“I doubt she made prom queen,” I said.
Harry handed me several sheets of paper. “I printed the yearbook’s name listings out, Carson. Now it’s your turn…”
I didn’t sit by the computer, I sat by the phone. Using a combination of charm and deceit, I spent hours calling names listed in the yearbook, sometimes being a lawyer trying to track down the recipient of a will’s largesse, sometimes a guy trying to put together a class reunion, sometimes even myself. It seemed most of the former students had moved away, out of the county, out of state. I wasn’t surprised, heavily rural counties lost a huge percentage of youth.
But I found a few who had stayed. A couple of them had known Patti Scaler, nee Selmot. One told me all she knew; not much. The other woman sounded angry and worn and depressed. She refused to talk to me.
Those were my favorites.
Harry had to stay at the department to monitor incoming information and wait for any ransom note or other communiqué. I made the two-hour run north to the county where every major player in our case had a connection.
The woman I hoped to talk to was Nona Jett. According to the listings below the names, both Ms Jett and Patti Selmot had been in band together.
I followed my Google map down a gravel road that passed beside a rusty water tower. I bumped over a railroad crossing, pulled into the dirt drive of a doublewide modular, a decade-old Buick Skylark in the drive. Walking past it I saw half the back seat was burned away on the driver’s side, generally caused by the driver flipping a cigarette out the window and the wind blowing it back inside, landing in the back seat.
There were a dozen other doubles and singles in the area, scattered willy-nilly through the fallow, sun-parched fields, a fistful of dice on a dirt-brown table.
I knocked, waited. Knocked harder. The door opened a hair. I saw an eye caked with make-up and shadow. Then I saw blonde hair, lacquered stiff as stalactites, scarlet lips, a penciled-on mole.
“Ms Jett? I’m a Mobile detective. I want to ask some questions. There’s no problem, no trouble.”
“Questions about what?” the lips said. I smelled beer.
“Patricia Scaler. Patti Selmot.”
“You called earlier.” The door started to close. “I don’t know a thing. I barely remember her.”
My toes stopped the door. “You were in the same class at a small school. You were in band together. Hard not to know at least a bit about her.”
The eye squeezed to a frown. “Why you asking about Patti? Is it cuz her husband went crazy and took up with a fag nigra?”
“If you believe what you read in the papers.”
She sighed. “I used to think Reverend Scaler was like Jesus’ brother here on earth. He was for us white Christian people. We don’t get no respect any more. We used to own everything, but now Mexicans is everywhere. I work housekeeping at the Ramada and I’m the last white lady left. It’s all nigras and Mexicans.”
I didn’t point out that her sentence didn’t make a lot of sense. Beer does that, in quantity. It helps when you’re trying to establish rapport, though.
“They started letting Mexicans in the Mobile Police,” I said, lowering my voice to secret-telling size. “They cook their tacos on the departmental hotplate. And every day after lunch they sleep on their desks.”
She nodded. “It’s that fiesta they all gotta have.”
I sighed. “The department makes me work with a black guy, too.”
She looked past me at the empty Crown Vic. “Why ain’t he here?”
“I could tell this was a good white neighborhood. I figured you’d feel better if it was just you and me.”
She gave me gratitude. “No one ever thinks a us any more. It’s like white people are a dying breed. Come in.”
I followed her into a tired little space stacked with cast-off magazines bought for a dime at a charity store: People, Us, Entertainment Weekly – the lives of others to distract her from her own. I figured she cheered for people on reality shows.
“Wanna beer?” Jett said, opening the door and nodding toward the fridge. “I’m gettin’ me one.”
I was on duty, but this was pure business. I dug in my wallet, liberated a fifty, handed it to her like I grew fifties in my garden.
“Tellya what, Nona, lemme buy a couple six-packs. You can get ’em later.”
Warming to me fast, Nona Jett brought cheap canned beer in foam cup holders emblazoned with the logo of a local liquor store.
“So what can you tell me about Patti Selmot, Nona?”
She fired up a cigarette, blew a cone of smoke toward the ceiling. “None a this ever gonna come back on me?”
“Here’s my official interview notebook…” I slipped a little red notebook from my pocket, opened to a page, drew a horizontal line at the top. “That’s the space for the name of the person I’m interviewing. That’s all anyone knows about where this comes from. What name do you want me to make up for you?”
She thought a long time, said, “Britney Hilton.”
I wrote B. Hilton in the space. “There,” I said. “No one will ever know where I got my information.”
“That’s good,” Ms Jett said. “Tell this kind of thing and you could get messed up bad.”
Chapter 45
I’d choked down one cheap beer, poured most of the other down the toilet when I’d used the bathroom. In the same span of time, fifteen minutes, Nona Jett knocked back four of them atop whatever she’d had before I’d arrived. I’d not gone the direct-question route, but opted for conversational, asking about high-school activities and so forth, settling in on the personalities of the kids in her class.
“I’m figuring Patti as one of the shy kids in your class, right? Quiet and solitary and –”
Ms Jett laughed, a hard, metallic sound
. “Patti shy? Patti wasn’t nothing near shy. Least not with the boys.”
“She was social?”
Nona Jett circled her left thumb and forefinger, then one by one waggled her right fingers in the circle.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Patti Selmot would fuck anything with a dick. She was plain as Hellman’s with that pasty face and big buck teeth…but when you’re dealing with teenage boys and they know sometime during the night the lid’s coming off the honey-pot, you’re gonna have boyfriends.”
I pictured a homely little girl trying to be popular by letting high school guys feel her up in the backseats of ragged cars.
“That’s sad,” I said.
A harsh laugh. “You’re thinking Patti was like this little curl of fluff being taken advantage of? She busted balls. If a boy was gonna dip his wick, he was gonna pay.”
“Money?”
“Whores take money. Patti liked to take something outta people.”
“Could you explain, please?”
“She might make a guy steal something. Stuff that didn’t mean a thing, like ‘Go get me a gold-colored picture frame.’ The guy’d sneak in a store and come out with a picture frame jammed down his pants. She’d look at it and laugh, then smash it in the gutter.”
“This was in high school?”
“Yep. Then she moved on to the sex stuff. She liked to do things that made people feel bad about themselves later. There was this gross fat girl in class and Patti said she’d give a handjob to any guy who asked the fat girl out then stood her up. Another time she made some boys line up and whack each other off. Said she’d make it with the first guy who came.”
I pictured a motley crew of acne-riddled slackers and dopers sniffing at Patricia Selmot’s heels like dogs round a bitch in heat. It was sad and ugly and all too common.
“Were these guys the, uh, class losers?”
“Hah! A guy could be captain of the football team, but she’d get him under her thumb and twist him down. It was that hot little bod of hers.”
“You mean she’s shapely?”
“She wears them old-timey sacky dresses on the tee-vee, but she’s packing heat. Got little tits, but they’re perkers, nips like gumdrops. Little butt as round as a sugar-baby melon. Long pretty legs…”
She seemed to realize something. Stopped short. She shook her head and blew out a plume of blue smoke. “She did that stuff for a while then moved up and on.”
“She moved out of town?”
“No. She learned what got favors from the boys in school worked even better on older guys with jobs and money and good cars. The last I saw of her, she was with one of the usual groups in a convertible, the guys in their twenties, one guy driving, the others acting like fools to get her to pay attention to them.”
“Always groups?”
“I never saw Patti with one guy, it was always three or four. She liked to walk around with them, showing off at us other girls. Them older boys always had their tongues hanging down, hoping she’d put out. She did. But only on her terms, buddy. They also had this cruel game they played.”
“Which was?”
“They’d drive into a town and Patti would hang around a Dairy Queen or a bowling alley lounge or drugstore place where guys didn’t know her. She’d tease them boys with her eyes and wiggle that round butt in them tight shorts. Walk past them and rub on the front of their pants. They’d forget that pasty face and want what all boys want.”
She paused to light another cigarette, continuing her story from a roiling nimbus of smoke.
“Patti’d get them boys to drive her out to some place in the country, rubbing against them all the way, promising they was gonna get the fuck of their lives. But when they pulled off the road somewhere, the rest of her crew would jump outta the bushes and give the guy a beating.”
I shook my head at how pathetic it all was; the rural version of rolling gays. I thought a minute, added like an afterthought, “You ever hear of the Alliance? Or Arnold Meltzer?”
She took a suck of beer. “It got started a few years ahead of me, but right in our very own school. Ever’body knew someone in it. The Alliance was on our side, like you and me. Mostly it was older guys makin’ sure people knew America was for us and not them. Kickin’ ass when they had to. Lib’rals and communists and such.”
“How’d Patti wind up with Reverend Scaler?”
A shrug. “I dunno. Just one day I heard she was getting married to Reverend Scaler. That surprised me, cuz I’d heard she had the hots for some lawyer-boy. But then I figgured she’d doped out that the Reverend could be somebody big if she grabbed control of things. That girl loved to control. If you ask me, she controlled him all the way to being rich and famous.”
“The Reverend’s church was nearby?”
“Just over in Siler, little white wood place. Scaler was in his early twenties.”
“Mrs Scaler’s a big deal, being on the television and all. This story you told…” I shot a look at a stack of People magazines on the floor. “No one ever passed this story on?”
“There was one girl in our class, she went on to college and everything. Writes those books you see at the Winn-Dixie, romance things? She was going to do a book about Patti Selmot. She was gonna write a…a…”
“Biography?”
“Yep. But when she started going back and asking people what they remembered and all, this whole car full of lawyers showed up and told her if she wrote the book, she better have proof of everything, or they were gonna make her so poor she’d think a can of beans was a Thanksgiving meal.”
“The writer dropped the project, I take it?”
“She didn’t want to be poor. But who fucking does? Patti sure didn’t.”
Dr Matthias put the label on the tube-like container, checked the information for accuracy, slipped the tube into the shock-damping package in his briefcase. It was full. In the morning he’d FedEx the package to the lab to get the tests started, the results on his desk when he returned to Mobile.
He began packing his clothes, the long journey over, a longer one about to begin.
Chapter 46
I got back to the office, downloaded my information from my head to Harry’s. Mrs Scaler was looking more and more like a woman whose troubled past reached straight into today.
The desk sergeant rang my phone.
“You got a caller, Carson. Some drunk. Wants to talk to, and I quote, the skinny white guy who can’t comb his hair, that cop who goes around with the big black monster.”
“Hang on a sec, Sarge,” I said, punching a button. “Lemme put it on speakerphone so the monster can hear.”
Harry rolled his chair close. I pressed talk.
“Detective Ryder.”
“This is Arch Fossie,” he said, his words slurred. “I think you better get over here, Detective. The, uh, Scaler household.”
“What is –”
The phone clicked off.
The front door of the Scaler home was open. We called inside, got no response, went in cautiously, guns drawn. Fossie was in a chair in the corner, head drooping, lips wet, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. His hair stood out in puffs where he’d been scratching at his head. There was a white residue beneath his nostrils. He was a half-step short of totaled.
“What is it, Doctor?”
He waved the bottle toward the study, whiskey splashing out. Harry walked to the study door, looked inside.
“Cars? Better come here.”
I left Fossie to his whiskey and walked over. Senator Hampton Custis lay sprawled on the floor, prone, face turned to the doorway.
His face had been mangled by repeated stabbings. His lips had been sliced away. One of his ears was missing. A shotgun blast had pretty much removed one leg. The torn limb had left a wide swash across the peach carpet as Custis had tried to crawl from where he’d fallen. A series of small red triangles and dots accompanied the swash: bloody high heels. Custis’s tormentor had probably shot his leg fi
rst and followed with the knife as he’d crawled, performing the insane surgery.
“There’s only two things cause this kind of damage,” Harry said, his voice quiet.
I nodded. “Hate or love.”
Custis’s eyes were wide and glazed and his cheeks puffed out, a white strip of paper emerging between his lips. I put on latex gloves and tugged the paper out, a wad that someone had tried to jam down his throat. I pulled it open.
The fake, computer-generated, post-surgery Patti Scaler. The beautiful Patti, where she was smiling with the breathtaking new face.
“Where is Mrs Scaler?” I asked Fossie.
“Upstairs. Locked in her room.”
I looked at the bedroom door at the top of the stairs, heard nothing. “What happened?”
Fossie started to put the bottle to his lips. I stopped it.
“What the hell happened?”
“Patricia called Hampton Custis. Told him to come here alone, she had news. When Hamp ran inside she showed him some picture of herself, said it was what she was becoming. Just for him. They could be together, the Washington power couple.”
“Washington pow…?”
“She said they no longer had to meet in secret. Life was perfect.” Fossie choked out a sound; a laugh, I suppose.
I looked at the room where Hampton Custis’s body lay torn asunder.
“The senator had other ideas?” I said.
Fossie tilted the bottle to his lips, got about half in his mouth. “He obviously hadn’t figured on whatever she had planned. But it made sense to Patti. Richard was dead and the two of them could finally be together.”
Nona Jett’s words about Patti Selmot rang in my head: I’d heard she had the hots for some lawyer-boy. Custis had started out at a law office in Silar thirty years ago.
“Custis and Patricia Scaler were lovers?”
Fossie slurped down another drink. “On and off. She was always trying to get on him, he was always trying to keep her off. Hampton kept his distance, mostly. She scared the shit outta him.” He laughed again, a drunken gurgle. “I used to give him Viagra mixed with yohimbe so he could get his pecker hard enough to slip into her.”
