Authors: J. A. Kerley
“Oh wow, man, yeah. I heard the kid was something a doctor made in a laboratory, like a Frankenstein nigger or something. It was a threat to the movement and had to be stomped out.”
Frankenstein.
The drooling wreck Spider had used that word. And similar ones, ending with the exhortation to destroy Noelle.
“You were checking the kid that day you rammed the cart into me?”
He nodded. “When I saw two cops, I banged my cart into you for a little fun.” He held out his hand. “No hard feelings?”
I took it, making a mental note to wash my hand in disinfectant first chance I had. “None, brother. You gave directions and that was it. Like I said, Inparticipatory involitudinal nonparticipitude. Or, as we say in the biz, ‘Scott-free’.”
I winked, put a solemn mask over my face, opened the door. Harry came in, cuffs already in hand.
He said, “So, Mikey, you ready to take the walk?”
Douthitt smacked his lips on his palm and blew
a smooch at Harry. “I’m a nonparticipational particulator,” he grinned. “So you can kiss my white ass, nigger.”
Three seconds later Douthitt was kissing the wall as Harry applied the cuffs. I wandered off to find some disinfecting hand soap.
We booked Douthitt, gave him his phone call. I convinced Harry to wait and see who showed as counsel, since Douthitt’s lawyer was special-ordered. Most of these guys used bargain-basement attorneys who had grubby offices squeezed between the bail bondsmen by the courthouse.
Instead, the guy who showed up was a slender, bespectacled guy in his thirties with a tailored pinstripe suit and a creamy leather briefcase that probably cost more than thirty of the canvas satchels I used to tote around papers. Lawyer-boy was using a gold pen to scribe his name into the visitor’s log.
“I know that guy from somewhere,” I said.
“So do I,” Harry said. “Why?”
The image formed, Mr Briefcase standing silently by as a bald bulldog barked at me through a cloud of musk.
I said, “I’m pretty sure he was with Scaler’s lawyer, Carleton, the day we first interviewed Mrs Scaler.”
“Hey,” I called across the room to the guy. “What group of shysters you practice with?”
The guy looked up, pursed his lips. Ignored me. I nodded to Harry and we walked over, stood at his side. We were both taller.
“Carleton & Associates, right?” I bayed, slapping a heavy hand over the poor guy’s skinny shoulder. “Your firm handles all the Scaler enterprises? Why’s a white-shoe hotshot like your fine self even looking at a piece of shit like Michael Douthitt?”
The lawyer flinched at my touch. He looked like he wanted to ditch the fancy briefcase and pen and sprint to the street for safety. I wondered if he’d ever been inside a jail before.
“I’m trying to make partner,” the lawyer said, eyes pleading to be left alone. “I just do what I’m told.”
We headed back to the detectives’ room. Harry was agitated but trying to hold it together. We needed full investigative mode, and that meant emotionless. Emotion crippled logic, and only logic could blaze a path to the heart of this maze. Still, Harry was having a hard time keeping his heart from eclipsing his brain.
“Carson? What if she’s…”
He couldn’t finish. The unspoken was that Noelle might well be at the bottom of Mobile Bay, or in a hole at the edge of a festering swamp.
“She’s fine, Harry. Hold on to that.”
“What did she ever do to anyone?”
“Keep it tight, bro.” I think he’d said the same thing to me a few days back. I hadn’t kept it tight at all.
Harry took a deep breath, began: “Assume the tithe envelope ties Noelle to some aspect of Scaler’s enterprises. That he or someone in the Scaler organization knew who was in the torched house. Maybe put them there. Someone who knew there was a baby out there that was, in some strange way, special.”
“And?”
“Now we’ve got a group of white supremacists who’ve kidnapped her. Possibly targeting her for death.”
“I read you,” I said. “But why didn’t the overseers giving the orders check with Douthitt before making the second, successful attempt? How did they know Noelle was still in the third incubator? Or in the PICU, for that matter? Doc Norlin said she was ready to head to the regular neonatal-care unit.”
“Another pair of eyes in the hospital?”
“Possibility,” I mulled. “But if Douthitt did the job right the first time, why not just use him?”
“That’s nuts-and-bolts stuff,” Harry growled. “We’ve got to come up with what’s underneath this vat of slime. Who’s keeping it cooking?”
“I think you’re on the righteous road, bro,” I consoled. “Every time we learn something, it’s touching the past. Did you get that Meltzer grew
up in the county adjoining the county Scaler came up in? And how about Tut? He goes back thirty years with Scaler. Meltzer, Scaler, Tut…all about the same age, mid fifties. Carleton, too.”
Tom Mason knocked at the door. Tom frowned, held up a call message.
“I just got word that Dean Tutweiler’s dead.”
“What?” Harry and I said in unison.
Tom shook his head. “The Dean was found in his home about fifteen minutes ago. How about the two of you go take a look?”
Tutweiler owned an impressive multi-columned house in west Mobile, not far from the college. The house stood alone at the end of a street, an acre of yard surrounded by deciduous woods.
The uniforms who’d responded when the body was discovered by Tutweiler’s housekeeper – did everyone have a maid but me? – had the sense to realize the potential of the situation, choosing to call the death in on a personal cellphone and not over the air and thus susceptible to police-band-monitoring media types. There were no news vans, no neighbors milling on the lawn with cellphones in hand.
Clair was on the scene as the rep from the ME’s office, which showed the weight of the event. Clair only worked a scene if there was something new she might learn, or the case carried political or celebrity-style weight. Tutweiler, unfortunately, qualified as both.
Tut was sprawled in red silk boxers on a couch. His mouth was open, his tongue lolling. His eyes looked heavenward, which I found ironic. White foam had dried on his cheek. The living room boasted expensive furniture and decorations, but not a touch of personality. It was as if a door-to-door ambience salesman had sold the Dean a pre-selected grouping: the Yawn Suite.
Clair was standing by the body. She looked up from her notes. I saw a split-second struggle over whether to look concerned or nonchalant, opting for the latter.
“Hi, Carson,” she said, the blue eyes as dazzling as always. “How are you?”
“Engaged in the moment,” I said. “I’m here. What you got?”
“An OD by the looks. That’s so far. I’ll know more when we get him to the morgue. Check the pillow beside him.”
I looked down, saw a syringe and an umarked bottle of solution.
“That’s what makes you think OD? Maybe it’s medication of some sort.”
“Look here. His feet.”
I bent as Clair carefully spread the Dean’s long blue-white tootsies, the nails in need of trimming. I saw punctures between the digits. Clair said, “Standard low-profile junkie injection sites. He’s hidden them in other places as well.”
William S. Burroughs claimed being a junkie
was no big deal if you had enough money to guarantee access to good dope. You were like anyone else, except you pumped a feel-good substance into your veins. Burroughs believed the deleterious effects of junk weren’t the drug’s doing, but caused by the typical junkie lifestyle of malnutrition and disease and living in a city’s danger zones.
“So our boy’s had a monkey riding him for a while?” I suggested.
“Years, maybe. His feet are riddled. Hips, too.”
“Is Tut married?” I asked, looking around. No sense of a woman’s presence, hardly a sense of a man’s.
Harry shook his head. “Everything on the web said he’s always been single. His standard line was that he was married to his service to God.”
Harry stood beside the couch, bounced up and down. I heard squishing. Harry bent and patted the carpet.
“There’s water on the floor. The carpet’s wet.”
I crouched over the carpet and sniffed. “Just like at Scaler’s scene and Chinese Red’s. I’m taking bets it’s sea water.”
No one bet against me.
I looked out the window, saw a dark-suited James Carleton stalking toward the house all by his lonesome, his deep-blue M-Benz in the drive. He stopped and talked to a group of uniforms for a few seconds, then pressed past, heading for the door.
No knock. He stepped inside like everywhere was his house. I turned, widened my eyes in false delight, clapped my hands.
“Look who’s here, Harry – Jimmy Carleton. Lookin’ good, Jimmy!” I brayed, treating the upmarket lawyer like the thirty-buck-an-hour ambulance chasers we schmoozed in the courthouse halls.
Carleton eyed us like something unpleasant into which he’d planted the soles of his five-hundred-buck Italian loafers.
“Nothing can be taken from this house without direct linkage to the scene,” he barked, cranking into payday mode, on the clock. “Any and all items taken must be entered in a –”
“How’d you know?” I said.
He scowled. I’d interrupted his cash flow. “Know what?”
“About Tutweiler’s death. No one knows but us chickens here on the scene. It hasn’t been broadcast.”
The face blanked. “I didn’t know until a minute ago,” he said. “I had some papers for Dean Tutweiler to sign. Official papers. I saw the cars, the police. I parked and ran up, heard the terrible news. It’s a horrendous shock.”
I couldn’t read his face. “Could you show me the papers?” I asked.
“Papers?”
“The ones you were going to have the Dean sign. You must have some papers in that fancy
briefcase with a dotted line for the Dean to sign on, right?”
He pulled the case closer. “Anything I have in this briefcase is subject to attorney-client privilege.”
“I’m not looking for the secret recipe for Coca-Cola,” I prodded. “I’m just interested in seeing a dotted line ready for the Dean’s pen point.”
Carleton did what lawyers and politicians do when confronted by an unruly question: changed the subject, looking at his watch and shooting me a glare.
“I suppose this will be in the news within the hour, just like the sordid details of Richard’s sad death. Don’t you people have any clamps on your leaks? It’s a matter of humanity, for God’s sake.”
“Guess not,” I shrugged. “Do you know how the Dean died, Mr Carleton?”
“How would I know? I just got here. A heart attack, I’d imagine. The stress of the past week.”
Carleton retreated to the front porch as Harry and I inspected the scene. It seemed a typical OD, like Chinese Red’s. Only this one was a world away from the apartment in the Hoople, no matter how nicely the benighted Mr O’Fong, scion of the world, had appointed his small space.
“You think Carleton knew Tutweiler was dead? Harry asked when we finally signed the body over to Clair and her people.
“Interesting question,” I said.
I bid farewell to Clair, politely. As I climbed in
the car I saw her shoot a glance at Harry. While yawning nonchalantly, he slipped his hand out the window and gave her some kind of signal.
Clair smiled at whatever it was.
We drove past Carleton, sitting in his massive chunk of German engineering with a phone to his ear, the darkened windows tight.
“Stop,” I said to Harry.
He pulled beside Carleton’s driver’s window. I made the roll-down-your-window motion. It slid down as if tracking on wet butter.
“What?” he demanded.
“How old are you, Mr Carleton?”
“Fifty-four,” he said. “Why?”
“Just taking a survey. I’m thirty-six, Harry’s forty-something.” I decided to drop a bomb, see what it took down. “How old do you think Arnold Meltzer is?”
His eyes reacted, but not his face. A good lawyer can do that.
“We know you know him,” I said, expecting another blank-faced
Who?
or
What are you talking about?
“So the fuck what?” he said.
I nodded toward the house.
“First Scaler, now Tutweiler. What’s Meltzer’s connection?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Reverend Scaler, the poor sick man, died of a heart attack. It appears that Dean Tutweiler killed himself. The pretty lady in there said as much.”
“No,” I said. “The pretty lady in there is my girlfriend. And the pretty lady is a professional. She’d never leap to such a conclusion. I think that’s what you’re planning on – suicide. Where did you get your forensic training, Mr Carleton?”
“I’ll thank you to remove yourself from my presence before I talk to your Chief.”
“How do you know Arnold Meltzer?”
“Anything I might say about Arnold Meltzer is under privilege. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” The window started to roll up.
“Privilege?” I said. “So Meltzer’s your client.”
“Everyone is entitled to representation under the law,” he said, his voice like oil over an eel. “You might try reading the Constitution, Detective. It actually affects parts of law enforcement.”
The window closed. I heard Harry’s door open. The blue Mercedes moved ahead a yard, stopped dead.
Harry was standing in front of its grille. The window dropped.
“Get out of my way,” Carleton barked. “This is harassment.”
Harry put his foot on the bumper. Leaned toward the window. “Not harassment,” he said, his voice as cold as wind from hell. “A warning. If anything happens to that little girl, I’ll cut everyone involved down like a scythe.”
“I h-have absolutely no idea what you’re t-talking about,” Carleton sputtered, putting the car in reverse and backing away.
We drove off feeling that somehow we were shaking things loose. We didn’t know what, but experience had taught us that when high-priced mouthpieces look scared, we were doing something right.
“What next, Sherlock?” Harry said. He hadn’t called me that in weeks.
“Aim for the Hoople Hotel,” I said. “I got a hunch and that starts with H.”