In the Blood (32 page)

“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.

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 first 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.”

It hadn’t escaped me that Fossie seemed to know the senator on a first-name basis. Not what I’d expect from a guy who presented himself as a part-time purveyor of vitamins and herbs and low-fat diets.

“So why did Custis visit?”

“The only way he stayed in office was the votes provided by Richard’s flock of robots. When the great Richard Scaler said, ‘Vote for my buddy Hampton Custis,’ they voted in lockstep. Patti probably told Hampton if he stopped fucking her, she’d tell Richard he was fucking her.” Fossie gurgled with mirth.

“I take it Scaler didn’t know of the affair?”

“If he knew, Richard was probably happy it kept her away from him.”

I said, “You must have been close to hear all this, Doctor.”

“I’ve known Patti for decades.”

Decades? I filed that fact alongside the first-name familiarity with the senator.

“No, I mean today, Mr Fossie. To hear everything that was happening between the pair.”

Fossie frowned through the substances in his head. “Oh. I was working on her meds.”

“Medicines?”

“Uh, vitamins. She needed them to help her through what she said would be a busy day. She said she wanted her head to sparkle. I did an injection, headed downstairs. I stopped to fix a drink and get a few sparklies in my own head. A few minutes later the front door opened. I…” he paused, mouth open, like his engine was sputtering. It seemed my nutritionist had other medications in his bag.

“Keep going, Mr Fossie.”

“I heard Hampton call for Patti and I hid in the gym, figuring they’d go upstairs and knock out a quick fuck and I could leave. I heard talk, then angry talk, then it turned real bad: Patti yelling and breaking things. Hampton was yelling, too, like with Richard gone he was telling her how it really was. Then I heard the…” he blew out a long breath.

“Boom,” I finished.

“Hampton started screaming like nothing I’ve ever heard. It was like he was being eaten alive. I was too terrified to move.”

Fossie made a noise like a deflating cushion. I looked at Harry, then at the closed door at the top of the stairs.

Harry said, “You want to wait for a team?”

“Miz Scaler and I have a history,” I said. “Watch my back.”

I climbed the stairs, stood to the side of the door. Knocked gently. “Mrs Scaler? Patricia? It’s Detective Ryder.”

“It’s not a good time, sir.” Her voice sounded distracted, as if she was nearing deadline on a project and I was interrupting.

“I need to come in, ma’am. Are you decent?”

“I’m a beautiful and desirous woman.”

“Yes, ma’am. You’re a lovely woman. May I come in?”

“Oh, I suppose.”

I said, “You don’t have a gun or anything, do you?”

“I put it back in the locker. I was finished with it.”

I took a deep breath and pushed open the door to see Patricia Scaler’s slender back across the wide room. She was looking out the window, framed in light, her black spaghetti-strap dress cut low and hemmed high. It was an amazing body for a woman nearing fifty. She wore sling-back high heels. Scarlet smudges had followed her across the carpet.

I moved closer. Her hands were touching at her face.

“Ma’am? Are you all right?”

She made a mewing sound and I advanced another few steps, eyes adjusting to the light. Her hand was at her face, elbow jerking back and forth, like a fiddler.

Or a butcher cutting meat.

She turned and stopped my heart. The right side of her face was missing. She threw something my way. It landed on the carpet at my feet. A rag of severed flesh.

“I won’t be needing that any more,” she said, her open teeth and gums glistening with blood, one eye revealed almost fully. “I’m getting a new one.”

She started to laugh, a wet sound.

Tom Mason rolled up at the scene. He’d been working the political side, keeping the brass clued in, getting timelines down. Mrs Scaler had been transported to the hospital forty minutes ago. There were no flashing lights on the vehicles out front, kept to a minimum while things were being sorted out.

Tom held his hat low in respect as the senator’s body was rolled out the door on a gurney. He turned back to us.

“The senator’s aides say he received a call two hours back, looked frightened, jumped in his car.”

“How’s Mrs Scaler?” I asked. “Have you heard?”

Tom shot a glance at his watch. “Sedated. She was screaming when she arrived at the hospital, trying to tear the rest of her face off. A shrink at the hospital thinks she’s gone fully round the bend.”

“She’s always been at the turn in the bend, Tom,” I said, unable to shake the image of Patti
Scaler turning to me with half a face. “Today she had the current behind her.”

Tom shot a look at the techs, busy photo-graphing and cataloging the bizarre scene. He took my elbow and pulled me to a corner.

“What’s behind all this, Carson? Scaler. Tutweiler. Meltzer. A US senator, for crying out loud. What’s going on?”

I could only offer my shaking head as an answer.

“I have no idea, Tom. We’re sure it started in the way-back. Unfortunately, we may have run out of people who can tell us anything.”

Tom sighed, nodded, walked over to Clair. She was directing her tech staff, displaying her typical calm in the middle of chaos. Watching Clair’s serene command I felt a convergence of emotions, then a sense of relaxation; strange feelings to have arise in that troubled house.

“Hello?” said a voice from behind me.

I turned to the open front door and saw a small man in his sixties, suited, his sharp face like an anxious hawk. A neighbor, I thought, drawn by the commotion.

“Yes, sir?” I said.

“I wanted to speak to Richard Scaler. I work for him.”

The man looked guileless, as if he really expected the Reverend. I said, “You haven’t been watching the news, I take it?”

“I’ve been out of the country. Often in isolated places. I’m not big on news anyway.”

“Who are you?” I asked.