I dialed the college, got the general switchboard, was shunted to Tutweiler’s office. He’d been a long-time friend and business partner of Scaler’s. We figured he might have something interesting to say.
I asked the female voice when Harry and I could come and talk to the Dean, suggesting fifteen minutes from now would be a good choice. I heard her muffle the phone with her hand, talk to someone, Tutweiler, I supposed. She came back on.
“Dean Tutweiler can meet you tomorrow after lunch, say one o’clock? He has fifteen spare minutes and wants you to know he’s a firm supporter of the police.”
“I was thinking more like within the hour.”
“He’s very busy,” she said. “He’s having a difficult week.”
“Not as difficult as his boss, ma’am,” I said, hanging up. I heard that drumming in my head again, like my irritation had developed a soundtrack. I frowned at Harry. “We have an appointment for tomorrow. Let’s go confirm it now.”
We passed the boundaries of the college minutes before coming to its buildings, the border denoted by plastic strips flapping from pine poles in the ground: surveyor’s stakes. A billboard-sized sign proclaimed we’d hit Elysium, after a fashion, providing a twenty-foot-long artist’s soft-edged rendering of the institution in the near future, a cityscape of architectural splendor and curving streets embracing dormitories for tens of thousands of the faithful. A white cross was displayed in the upper-right-hand corner of the signage like a beaming sun.
It took us another half-mile to get to the college, a cluster of boxy concrete buildings. As we drew close I saw a large white tent awning near a hole in the ground: the site of last week’s groundbreaking ceremony. Students, faces scrubbed and backpacks tight with books, wandered by. No one wore jeans or tanktops or miniskirts. I attended college in the early 90s, briefly at the University of South Alabama, then, more seriously, at U of A. Those venues seemed a world distant from this quiet campus.
We followed signs to the administration building, took an elevator to the top floor, entered an anteroom, behind it a wide room with a round cerulean desk at the end, making the receptionist look as if she were stuck in a big blue inner tube. We walked fifty feet of fancy parquet flooring.
The receptionist was in her late thirties, a bit chubby, with a small and pretty face beneath a swirling tower of golden hair.
“Can I he’p you gennulmen with –”
“Mobile Police,” I said. “We need to see Dean Tutweiler.”
“Uh, I’m sorry, but he’s not in his office.”
“But he’s in the building, right?” I said. “Or nearby?”
“Uh, yes, I think.”
I nodded toward the open door at her back. “We’ll wait inside his office, ma’am. Thanks.”
The office was more akin to a CEO’s sanctuary than a religious academic’s lair, though a massive podium in the corner held a huge leather bible, a purple bookmark tucked into some pithy passage. Turning back I heard approaching footsteps outside, followed by Tutweiler speaking as though giving dictation to be chiseled into granite tablets.
“Call the PR people and tell them to meet me at 11.45. No, make that 11.50. In the Mary Baker Eddy room. Tell them to start working up a statement on the school’s position vis-a-vis the enemies of Christianity and Truth. Richard’s enemies. They know the drill.”
Scaler veered from his receptionist and into the room, tall and dark and splendidly suited in the thin-lined black of a banker. He saw us and his eyes darkened at foreigners in his sanctum sanctorum.
“Can I help you?”
I remained seated and flipped open my ID wallet. “I’m Detective Ryder with the Mobile Police Department and this is –”
Tutweiler shot a not-subtle glance at his watch. “Can it wait, officers? I’ve got a meeting with the board and the faculty advisors group. The donors committee. Right now I’ve got to return a call to People Magazine.” He turned away, reached across his desk and lifted the phone. It was a fancy one with a shitload of buttons. I wondered if one of them was reserved for God.
“Please have a seat, sir,” Harry said, using his quiet voice. It’s about as deep as the Marianas Trench with the timbre of Thor’s hammer striking a small planet. “I promise this will be fast and easy and you’ll be back on track in a brief while. Is that all right?”
Tutweiler didn’t look like he was going to break into song, but he set the phone down and took the chair behind the desk, more a throne, actually, red velvet with gold leaf over embossed wood, the high back a carving of Adam and Eve holding hands in Paradise. They looked like adolescents. There was no serpent in sight.
Tutweiler angled his throne and leaned his head back, the better to display his imperious profile, half Caesar, half Heston. Harry said, “We’re trying to find out about Mr Scaler’s last few days and if you can help us with –”
“Reverend Scaler was his title. You could also use Doctor Scaler, another of his titles.”
I looked up. Tut was definitely getting on my nerves. “Reverend Scaler had an MD?”
Tutweiler narrowed an eye my way. “A PhD.”
“Impressive. From where?”
“The Southwestern Arkansas Institute of Bible Studies.”
“Forgive me for not recognizing the school, sir,” I apologized. “Is it an accredited institution, like, say, the Harvard Divinity School?”
Tutweiler’s jaw clenched. “The Southwestern Arkansas Institute holds the highest possible accreditations, those from God.”
“Of course,” I said, writing earnestly in my notepad. I wrote pompous pinhead asshole.
“Was anything bothering Reverend Scaler recently?” Harry asked Tutweiler. “We saw TV footage of the groundbreaking for the new structures. He seemed distracted, not his usual self.”
“I’m probably far better acquainted with Richard’s usual self than you gentlemen are,” Tutweiler sniffed. “He seemed fine to me. What makes you think otherwise?”
“For one thing,” I said, “he went five minutes without begging for money.”
Harry shot me a glance. Tutweiler reached for his phone.
“What’s the name of your superior?” he said, nose in the air. “I don’t have to put up with this.”
I jumped from my chair so fast it tipped over backwards. I slammed my knuckles on Tutweiler’s desk, leaning forward until the Dean’s eyes filled with my face.
“Here’s what you’re going to put up with, Brother Tutweiler. Right now no one knows the Rev. was hanging upside-down with whip marks scalded across his fat white ass. Or sucking a ball gag the size of a lemon. Or wearing lipstick and frilly women’s panties with a dildo jammed into his last supper. Those little details might never surface if we get some straight answers to our questions.”
Tutweiler turned white. The phone returned to the cradle. The Dean of Kingdom College stood and walked to the window, gazing over the spreading green commons four stories below. Students walked casually across the bright grass, as fresh and clean-scrubbed as if pulled from a casting agency for a Happy Days remake. Tutweiler sighed and turned to us.
“The past year – maybe longer – Richard seemed to grow more and more erratic. He stopped writing his sermons. He sat by the lake. He disappeared for days sometimes. It was getting worse.”
“How so?”
“A week before he was scheduled to address the National Fundamentalist Council, he told me to cancel the engagement. He’s been the keynote speaker for years, it’s always a powerful address, covered by the international media. He said he wasn’t going to deliver the speech. I was floored. It’s a huge event for both of our organizations. After the Reverend delivers his speech we always get huge…” he paused, winced.
“Donations,” I finished. “Don’t be afraid to say the word ‘money’, either, Dean. It’s the truth, right?”
“Yes,” he said, looking away. “Donations. To continue our many ministries.”
“Detective Nautilus and I heard Reverend Scaler mention an eye problem in the news clip. Macular degeneration? Cataracts? Something as simple as conjunctivitis?”
For the first time, Tutweiler looked totally perplexed. Dumbstruck.
“Dean?” Harry asked.
“I have no idea, Detective. I never heard him mention his eyes before or after that day.”
“It seemed a big deal at the time,” I prodded.
Tutweiler shrugged. “Got me. The whole eye thing came straight from the blue.”
We hammered at a restrained Tutweiler for a few more minutes. He had nothing earth-shaking to add, save for a solid alibi for the three days pre and post his boss’s murder, a symposium-cum-revival in Albany, New York. For verification he mentioned several congress people and aides. When we headed out, he made no mention of my behavior. His voice was subdued.
“Can…all these sordid details…uh, can they…”
“Things may leak out,” Harry sighed. “But I imagine we can keep a lid on the worst aspects.”
The door closed at our backs. We went to the cruiser. Harry paused before he put the car in gear. Looked at me.
“Carson, did you plan that action in Tutweiler’s office? You looked about to jump across his desk and strangle him.”
“An act planned from the git-go,” I said, waving it off and hoping it sounded like the truth.