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.
“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.”
The room clerk, Jaime Critizia, shot a frightened look when we entered the Hoople.
“Stay seated, Jaime,” Harry said. “It’s like before, just a conversation. No La Migre if you level with us.”
Critizia relaxed, nodded his understanding.
“Chinese Red, your dead boarder?” I made a syringe-plunge motion with my fingers above my forearm. “I need to know if he ever had friends over here.”
“He had some friends that were…not friends. They came because Mr Red was handsome.”
“They came for sex?”
Critizia wrinkled his nose as if smelling something even worse than the lobby of his workplace. “Ees a bad job here, but I have a sick back and cannot work the chickens or fields or gardens. I must have money for my family in Ecuador, and I can sit in this job. The pay ees no so good as the chickens factory or fields, but I can work long hours to make up.”
Critizia was telling us he only worked at the Hoople because he had no other choice. I figured he’d been a good, upstanding Catholic back in rural wherever, had seen more vice in his first day at the desk of the Hoople than he’d seen in his life. And he wasn’t part of those goings-on.
“Si. For the sex.”
“One of the people who might have come for the sex,” I said. “Did he look at all like this…?”
I held out a photo of Tutweiler pulled from the net. Critizia took a long look before he nodded.
“He dressed to look different. A light hair thing.” Critizia wiggled his fingers over his head, meaning a wig. “And always sunglasses, even when it rains.”
“He was here how many times?”
“One time every week, usually Wednesday in the night. Sometimes he would be here on Sunday.”
“A new meaning for Sunday services,” I said.
Heading outside, we saw Shanelle emerging from a minimart across the street, eating a sloppy po’boy from wax paper. Her green dress had required less cloth than my handkerchief. The gold clogs had turned to sparkly red pumps like she was ready to tap dance over the rainbow.
She saw us and ran over.
“Harry, you look sweet as honey today. How ’bout you and me get tickets for Rio and fly away some night and –”
Harry held up his hand.
“Gotta talk serious here, Shanelle. How well did you know Chinese Red?”
“We was friends, Harry. We’d go to the docks and talk. It’s so unfair he’s gone.”
“Tell me about his last days.”
“Red got clean, Harry. He kicked. He was getting better.”
“But still selling himself, right?”
“When he had to, and only to a couple of high-price clients. He was putting the money away and not in his veins. He was gonna start his own detail shop next year.”
“You’re sure, Shanelle?”
“I ain’t ever been sure of much, Harry. But that’s one of the few things I know for fact.”
Score one for Ryan’s optimism, I thought as we drove away.
“Tut was a regular customer of Chinese Red,” Harry said, rolling up the window. “If someone who knew of the unholy alliance between Dean Tutweiler and Red suddenly needed a way to destroy Scaler’s reputation, putting Scaler with a gay black man with a history of prostitution…”
“Was the kind of inspired move I’d expect of a guy like Arnold Meltzer,” I finished. “But Meltzer lacks the balls to slice pepperoni. He delegates. Which probably means we need to know more about Deputy Baker,” I said, pulling my phone.
I made my call to Ben Belker as Harry drove. Ben was out having lunch and I told Wanda Tenahoe we needed everything Ben had on Boots Baker. She knew who I was talking about, judging by the Ugh when I mentioned Baker’s name. Ben would call back soon, she promised.
With nothing else to do, Harry and I picked up po’boys and headed for the causeway. He didn’t want to eat, but I shoved the sandwich into his hands, let instinct take over.
We leaned against the car and ate without a word, watching the boats and herons and pelicans.
“Has it ever gotten to you, Harry?” I said. “I mean, before today?”
My cell interrupted. It was Ben Belker. He said, “Can rattlesnakes catch hydrophobia, Carson?”
“Why?”
“That’s how I describe Delbert aka ‘Boots’ Baker. He got the nickname from kicking people’s faces to a pulp. While others held them, of course. He’s a rattlesnake with rabies.”
“You know he’s a county sheriff’s deputy?”
“I’ll add that to his file. He must have gotten fired from his last job, guarding at a Mississippi prison. Maybe they found out about his previous prison work.”
“Baker was a guard at Abu Ghraib. One of the worst of a bad lot, a sadist. You heard about water-boarding? Baker invented watersheeting.”
“Watersheeting?”
“Not a bad idea, as first conceived. Soak a sheet or blanket in water, wrap it around someone you want to move – a mummy wrap. Ever try and wriggle from wet fabric, Carson?”
I thought of how hard it was to pull off a wet sweatshirt.
“I can imagine it.”
“Except Baker wrapped prisoners and did things like add a bit of electricity to the mix. They got pain, he got pleasure, and no proof was ever left on the bodies.”
I pictured Baker’s system in my mind. “Because the wet blankets acted as a soft restraint. The prisoners didn’t flail around and contuse themselves.”
“Yep. Just laid there like screaming burritos.”
I shook my head. Saw Harry slipping on water at Scaler’s death scene. The wet floor at Chinese Red’s apartment. Glenn Watkins delivering the verdict of sea water and petrochemicals, like water found near boat traffic.
“You know where Baker lives, Ben?”
“Address is 432 Grayson Court. It’s along the Intercoastal Waterway.”
The waterway was a canal running through the southern half of Mobile county, heavily used by commercial traffic: barges, tows, shrimp boats. The water was often shiny with oil.
“Thanks, Ben.”
I hung up. Looked at Harry. Told him we were heading south.
Delbert “Boots” Baker lived in a ranch-style house on a short spur of the Intercoastal Waterway. It would have been a nice-looking place except for being entirely surrounded by hurricane fencing, the fence dotted with Keep Out and No Trespassing signs. I saw two security cameras pointing toward the street, knew there would be more. I looked for signs of attack dogs, but realized people with paranoiac, possibly psychotic personalities didn’t tend toward keeping animals. They were so inwardly focused that animals distracted them from themselves.
“Looks like Deputy Baker’s built himself a fortress on the water,” Harry said.
“A paranoid,” I said. “Worse, a paranoiac wrecking ball.”
We got out and walked the fence line. The adjoining property was a scrap yard, beater cars hauled or driven in on their last legs to be sold for scrap, hulking piles of metal stacked close to the channel and awaiting passage to China or wherever was using our cast-offs these days.
The house seemed empty of life, no curtains parting. I figured Baker was on duty somewhere, like the day he’d had the confrontation with Al Bustamente. The thought almost amused me until it led to two others: Had Baker been the one to attack Al Bustamente last week? It made sudden and perfect sense: a sociopath of Baker’s ilk would have felt the burn of Bustamente’s derisive words long after the confrontation. I figured Bustamente was lucky he’d only been injured and not killed.
And had Baker been standing in the prints, not because he was ignorant, but because he was trying to destroy evidence? That he knew – or had been part of – whatever had gone down at the house in the middle of nowhere?
I filed these thoughts away, stepping over pieces of metal and car parts that had drifted over from the junkyard, half hiding in the kudzu and poison ivy.
“Look at the back of the house,” I said, pointing.
We saw a pier on the water, a sleek, thirty-foot cruiser berthed against the pilings, a boat that could cross the Gulf like I stepped over a creek. I looked to a concrete pad behind the house, saw two battered five-gallon containers, the big blue plastic jobs, short lengths of rope on the handles. I had a similar container I filled with drinking water when camping in the Smoky Mountains.
“What are you thinking, Carson?”
“I’m thinking a short walk takes Baker to his pier, filling his jugs by setting them in the water.”
The rest of the scenario unfolded: Baker, with the help of one or two of his crew, soaking a blanket from the containers, wrapping Richard Scaler when he answered the knock at his door, immobilizing him for a nighttime run to the camp. Or perhaps Scaler had been lured to the camp, immobilized there. Water had pooled beneath Scaler, suggesting they’d hung him up – struggling, but making none of the marks of struggle to alert the coroner.
“Tutweiler and Chinese Red were immobilized for heroin overdoses,” Harry said. “But what happened to Scaler? Potassium chloride? An air bubble?”
Inject either of the two into the blood and bang, heart-attack city. There was virtually no way to discern that the death was anything but a cardiac event.
“Fits,” I said. “Or maybe Scaler had a heart attack from sheer terror, saving Baker a step. They whipped his back before he died, but once Scaler was in the air, he was helpless. Tie the gag in his mouth, ram the plug into his anus. Set out some candles for effect. There was nothing to be done about the water dripping off the blanket, but they probably figured it would evaporate before the body was found – a miscalculation inside a cool house.”
“Where do you think Baker is?” Harry asked, looking at his watch. “It’s late for him to still be at work.”
“He could be working a swing-shift. Or maybe he’s out torturing small animals, the kind of hobby he’d have, I expect.”
“This place makes my skin crawl,” Harry said. “Let’s bag it for now. But make a note to come back real soon.”
We pulled away, both shooting glances in the rear-views at Baker’s waterfront fortress.
“What’s the strangest thing about this case, Carson?” Harry asked when we were back on the main highway, simultaneously veering so close to a passing gasoline truck I could have leaned out and refilled our tank.
I thought for several minutes, tumbling pictures and events through my mind.
“Why the hatchet job on Scaler’s reputation?” I said. “If someone wanted Scaler out of the way, why not just have him popped with a contract hit?”
“Then he’d just be dead,” Harry noted. “Now he’s dead and discredited. The big question is…”
“Why discredited?” I said, looking out into the night sky. “It’s always ‘Why?’”
We got to the department’s parking garage. It was quiet, the night-patrol shift out on the streets, the detectives long home.
“You going home?” Harry asked.
“I expect it’s all that’s left for today. You?”
Harry blew out a long breath. “I’m going inside and sit at a computer. See if I can find anything else Scaler hid in the internet, in the Tower of Babel.”
“It’s a drudge job. Why not start fresh in the morning?”
“Morning’s hours away. If Noelle’s alive, she may not have hours. I gotta do it now, Carson.”
He exited the car, slinging his jacket over his shoulder and trudging toward the building. In the yellow half-light of the garage, he looked like an ancient soldier, sick to death of the battles, but knowing nothing else.
He also looked desperately alone.