by Jack Kerley
“Gee,” Harry said. “I’ve never encountered that.”
Chapter 39
We found Douthitt alone in a small employee lounge on the third floor, eating a bag of chips from one of the machines lining the wall. The room smelled like cigarette smoke. He was leaning back in a chair with his feet on the table, cramming chips in his mouth from his palm, licking it afterward.
“Where is she, Michael?” Harry said.
“Who?”
Harry’s hand lashed out like a cobra, grabbed Douthitt’s collar, pulled him to standing.
“The kid you helped kidnap.”
“I didn’t do nothing. Fuck you.”
Harry reached down and grabbed Douthitt’s long sleeve, pulled it high. Tats: eighty-eights and SS knives and a swastika on his forearm for good measure.
“You like them?” Douthitt sneered. “They don’t like you.”
I grabbed Douthitt by the arm and yanked him away from Harry before my partner could strangle him.
“Michael Douthitt,” I said, pulling out my cuffs, “you’re under arrest. Accomplice to kidnapping in the first degree. And one attempted kidnapping.”
I saw thoughts tumble through Douthitt’s head, calculations followed by puzzlement. And sudden fear.
“I didn’t do nothing but answer a phone call,” Douthitt said. “And not this time. Book me and I clam tight, call my lawyer. First-class, special-ordered, just for me. I’m bailed fast, out and laughing.”
What the hell did Not this time mean? And the bit about the phone call? I felt a prickle up my back; something was haywire.
I turned to Harry, winked twice. Our signal that I was about to go into Oscar-nominee mode.
“Give us a little time here,” I said, brusque, giving Harry an order from the Alpha Dog, showing Douthitt who was in charge. “I wanna get some things straight with Mike. Wait in the hall, wouldya?”
Harry did dumb. “Huh? What you gonna do with –”
“Beat it.” I shot a thumb towards the door. “Go grab a coffee an’ I’ll call you when I need you.”
Harry mumbled, slouched his shoulders, and sullenly shuffled away. Wentworth had mentioned that Douthitt wasn’t bright. A guy in his mid thirties making minimum wage pushing food carts? I figured the human resources director was right.
When Harry left, I went to the door and looked right and left as if making sure it was just Mike and me, two amigos, members of the same tribe. I closed the door and grinned ear to ear.
“I didn’t see you at Arnold’s rally last night, Mike.”
Douthitt’s mouth fell open.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ. I was there. You was there, too?”
“Arnold is God,” I said. “I never miss a chance to see him. It was fuckin’ incredible, right? Arnold roaring in behind that Harley escort, speaking from high up on that van, the fire burning below. An inspiration to white people everywhere. And wasn’t that band the hottest?” I did few headbanger bows while singing “Fuck the spics.”
Douthitt grinned. “Goddamn…you really were there.”
Douthitt had been there too, pretty much nixing him for the grab. But he’d said something about “not this time”. Had he meant the abduction? The advance work? I checked the door again, leaned close to Douthitt.
“Lotsa guys on the force are sympathizers, Mike. I’m the one in charge of going to the meetings, bringing back the news. My pipeline to Arnold used to be Donnie Kirkson, but now I’m tied direct to Boots.”
His eyes widened as much as his gaping, gold-filled mouth.
“Holy shit!” he bayed. “Boots Baker?”
I winced. “Shhhhh!”
“Sorry.”
I sat beside him like a counselor, put my hand on his shoulder. “What went down last night, Mike?”
“Nothing, brother. I was as surprised as everyone else when I got to work today and heard the kid had been grabbed.”
“But the first attempt to snatch the kid…you were in on that, right? The inside man?”
“I got a phone call asking where the kid was. That was all.”
“You don’t know who made the grab last night? You being straight with me?”
He put one hand out, palm down, the other beside his head, like he was swearing on a bible in court. “I swear I got no idea who did the snatch. Not this time. Musta been someone else tipping them off.”
I patted his shoulder like he’d been a good dog. “You got your directions, right, Mike? For if you got caught?”
He tapped his wallet. “I got a lawyer’s number.”
“Call him, pronto. You’re gonna be fine. You gave some directions into a phone, talking casually, right? For all you knew, it was a parent or guardian, right? Getting directions to see the kid?”
Douthitt grinned, thinking I was feeding him lines. He shot some idiot damn Nazi-aryan salute.
I said, “You’re cool, brother, a non-participatory involuntary participantosa. It’s legal shit that means you were involved, but you had no malice aforethought.”
I walked to the door, opened it, peered out. Harry looked at me from a dozen feet away, making sure no one disturbed the conversation in the break room. I turned back inside.
“Tell me something, Mike. Why didn’t you make the grab the first time?”
“They wanted me to, but I wasn’t taking no chance of going to the pen for kidnapping. They said, ‘If you can’t get the kid out, kill it.’ I said, ‘Now I’ve got a murder charge. No way.’ A few days went past, they called and said they’d prepared some guy to do the grab – Bailes. All I had to do –”
“Back up. ‘Prepared’? Your word or theirs?”
“That’s what they said: prepared, like food.”
Bailes being prepped with the lie that he had terminal cancer? Bailes had been prepared, all right; cooked like a goose.
Douthitt continued: “Bailes called, said, ‘Where’s the kid?’ I told him how to slip up the back stairs to the fourth floor, the PICU. The kid was third in a line of five.”
“No calls after Bailes failed?”
“Nothing. I swear.”
I gave Douthitt a long side-eyed glance, like I was gauging his worth for the truth.
“The caller let you in on why the kid had to go, Mike? They told you the story, right? It’s scary.”
A pure fishing expedition. I wondered if Douthitt’s handler had given him a reason for Noelle’s abduction, or if he was an ideological soldier, an automaton.
“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.
Chapter 40
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.