On the way to the department I planned to stop at the health-food emporium and grab a toasted lentil something-or-other, but pulled into a convenience store and selected a pair of pink-frosted Krispy-Kremes. I’d been faithful to Fossie’s regimen for about a week – vites and grains and juices and teas – but figured a little processed flour and sugar wouldn’t be fatal. I poured two extra-large coffees for accompaniment. In the checkout line I noticed a familiar face on a tabloid newspaper beside the register: the face was Scaler’s, the rag was the World-Week News, which had never before met a Scaler idea it didn’t like.
The headline read: Reverend Scaler’s Death is S&M Scene!
The subhead read: Torture and Devil Worship and a Gay Black Lover.
A starburst in the corner read: A Tangled Web of Weird!
Uh-oh, I thought, reaching for a copy. What went wrong here?
Waiting my turn at the checkout, I sucked on one of my coffees and read. The tabloid’s story was basically true to the facts because they couldn’t be improved upon: one of the nation’s most arch-conservative, family-values-trumpeting moralists had died while being whipped by a gay black junkie prostitute. The candles at the scene were depicted as symbols of Satan. It was a leap, but then it was the World-Week News.
I set the paper beside my coffees. The clerk, a plump, hair-netted woman in her late forties, scowled at the paper as she rang it up.
“Can you believe that guy?” she said, not hiding the anger and betrayal. “All those years of pretending to be holy. What a scummy fake.”
I must have been under Harry’s more-generous influence and mumbled something about all the facts not yet in.
“They’re in enough for me,” she said, anger bright in her face as she handed me my receipt. “The people at my church got all his books and his sermons on CD. But not for long.”
“How so, ma’am?” I asked.
“Tonight we’re gonna light up a big bonfire to lay ’em all on.”
I left the place realizing Scaler’s reputation was as destroyed as if it had been ground zero at an H-bomb test.
When I hit the department Harry was mainlining coffee, chomping a danish, and trying to draw a connections line: who touched who when? None of the lines on the page went far. I waited for him to make reference to yesterday, but the event in my living room seemed to have disappeared as far as he was concerned; fine with me.
Tom Mason wandered over and held up a copy of the World-Week News, the Scaler edition.
“You guys seen this?”
I nodded. “Everything’s out. No more secrets for the Rev. His rep’s going down in flames.”
“I talked to a buddy in Miami where the rag’s written,” Tom said. “For this to hit stands today the story and pictures had to have been ready yesterday. Who leaked and why?”
I did the money-whisk. “The rag pays, people send the stuff in.”
Harry scanned the story, set the paper aside. “Scaler did everything in a big way. Same for his fall from grace.”
“He’s still falling,” Tom said, finger-twitching us to the window. Seeing a CNN van, we sprinted to the conference room and turned on the television.
“First this message,” the anchor was saying, ‘then a bizarre and provocative update on the death of famed religious leader Richard Scaler.”
“This ain’t good,” Tom Mason said.
After a minute of commercial the anchor segued to a local CNN stringer in Mobile, squinting into sunlight. Her hair was strawberry blonde, her face the shape of a heart. I saw our building in the background, MPD headquarters. The stringer lifted the mic to her lips, shook back her hair, a move I’m sure they teach in Reporting 101.
“Sources close to the deceased suggest that the Mobile Police believe the last person to see Richard Scaler alive was a black male prostitute named LaPierre O’Fong. It’s been suggested that Reverend Scaler died of a heart attack suffered during…erotic games. In another bizarre twist, O’Fong was one of the four addicts who died after OD’ing on uncut heroin earlier this week, adding yet another layer of infamy to the once-impeccable reputation of Richard Scaler…”
“They know everything,” Harry said, amazed.
“She said, ‘sources close to the deceased,’” I said. “That’s not the usual line when someone on our side is yapping. Then it’s a source close to the investigation.”
We heard a click as the intercom was activated. “Lieutenant? Lieutenant Mason? Chief’s on line one.”
Tom rolled his eyes. Flicked the phone to private. He said the word Yup five or six times, followed by an uh-huh. He hung the phone up.
“The Chief just got a call from the Mayor who just got a call from –”
“James Carleton the third,” I ventured, stepping into a wide-open space between words.
“That Scaler’s lawyer?” Tom asked.
“The one and only.”
“Mr Carleton is nasty upset at the news reports coming out. The report goes into stuff Mr Lawyer thinks could only come from the MPD.”
“Back in a few,” I said, sprinting toward the door.
I caught the stringer standing beside the news van and applying fresh lipstick in its side mirror. Her videographer was wandering down the sidewalk singing a Green Day song along with the iPod wired to his ears. The woman’s name was Nell Pomeroy; I’d met her when dating a local reporter a while back.
“Hi, Nell,” I said.
“Hey, Carson. How you doing?” Her eyes looked happy to see a potential leak. “Are you on the Scaler case?”
“I’ve got too many other cases,” I finessed, suddenly becoming of no interest to Pomeroy. She turned back to her lips, making a kissy face at her image in the mirror. It reminded me of Harry in the PICU.
“Could I ask where you got the details on Reverend Scaler’s death, Nell? I promise not to tell a soul.”
She dropped the lipstick in what was either a purse or a daypack. “Sorry, Carson.”
“I’m not asking names of sources,” I said, though that’s exactly what I’d hoped for. “But they aren’t inside the MPD or forensics, or the ME’s office?”
She thought, measuring words. “We’re getting stuff from several places. Nothing big came from the cops or the ME’s folks. I can’t say anything else.”
I loped back to Tom and Harry. Shook my head.
“Not us. Sounds like it came from someone with a line into the Scaler organization.”
Harry shook his head. “They’re the last group on earth who’d want Righteous Rev.’s legend besmirched. They have the biggest stake in Scaler having an immaculate legacy. And does anyone on the inside even know all the grim details?”
“Tutweiler,” I grunted. “I told him what happened, remember?”
“Tutweiler would be the last person in the world to expose Scaler,” Harry said. “Everything in Tutweiler’s life is Scaler trickle-downs. The guy made his living riding on Scaler’s coattails.”
“How d’you know that?”
“I’ve been back on YouTube, Carson. Scaler and Dean Tutweiler go back years.”
I nodded toward the conference room. “Show me.”
Harry pulled down all his downloaded material. He tapped the keyboard and Scaler took the monitor by storm, bible in one hand, microphone in the other, preaching at a ball field in a park, the stage over the pitcher’s mound, the crowd in the outfield.
“This is Scaler after leaving his small church up in Pickens County,” Harry said. “I guess it didn’t give him a big enough audience. He’s back on the salvation circuit, pulling the bucks with that big stage presence, Wayne Newton with a chip on his shoulder. Scaler’s sermons often veer close to white-supremacy rants. Watch this next scene…look close at the curtain behind Scaler on the stage. Every now and then a face pops through.”
I leaned close to the monitor. A woman’s face parted the folds of cloth behind the stage, mouth heavy with lipstick, almost a leering face, as if amused there was a party going on in the back, while up front the faithful were falling to the floor, speaking in tongues or offering afflicted parts up to the stage for Scaler to heal.
Harry said, “Here it comes…”
A face parted the curtain, eyes scanning the crowd as though counting money, the lips curling up in what? Amusement? Sneer? It was Tutweiler; no mistaking that square jaw and rack of white teeth. He turned his head backstage, behind the curtain, yelled something, grinned, let the curtain fall back in place.
“He looks like a happy man,” I said.
“He’s got an early seat on the Scaler gravy train,” Harry said. “Who wouldn’t be smiling?”
I shrugged. “What’s your point? Who cares if Scaler and Tut have been buddies since way back?”
“Remember Scaler’s weird tape: ‘I have been led astray by false companions over years’? Tutweiler’s been around for a long time. And I don’t think Scaler had many real friends.”
I watched as the scene shifted to people walking across a field, past cars, folks eating chicken, drinking sodas and iced tea and lemonade. The camera panned past a small guy in a light-colored suit, the clothes making him a parrot in a field of crows. He was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck and spooning cake into his mouth, talking to those around him.
“Go back for a minute,” I said. “Freeze when I say freeze.”
Harry moused back the vid to the start of the scene.
“Just a bunch of crowd shots,” he said. “What are you –”
“Freeze,” I said, leaning forward. The guy in the suit had a half-dozen men around him, heads craned, as though between bites of cake he was giving out first-rate stock tips. I knew those guys, as a type, anyway: quintessential rednecks in white tees and Big Ben overalls, jeans and blue work shirts, mud-caked boots. They looked grown from hard soil, tight-eyed and grim. They’d been born with a grudge and life was a daily matter of nursing it.
I tapped my finger on the small guy with white cake stopped just south of his lips. “Seen that particular piece of hate before?” I asked. “Like maybe he was once a dozen feet from you?”
“Arnold Meltzer,” Harry whispered. “The head of the Aryan Revolutionary Army.”
“Not back then, I expect. But it looks like he might be finding the Scaler audience ripe for recruitment.”
“Let’s talk to Tutweiler again,” Harry said.