There were two cars in the drive, the blue Toyota that belonged to Mrs Herdez, the Scalers’ housekeeper, and a red pickup with a Mexican flag on the bumper.
I knocked. Seconds later Mrs Herdez’s face appeared at the door. It took her a second to recognize Harry and me. She didn’t look happy to see us.
“I’d like to speak with you, ma’am,” I said. “About your employers.”
“No speak Ingles.” The door started to close.
Harry’s hand caught the door and eased it open.
“You spoke it well enough to work for the Scalers. Or did the Scalers comprende Espanol?”
A trapped look from Mrs Herdez. We used her moment of confusion to slip into the room and close the door, as if invited into the home. Despite the second vehicle, I didn’t see anyone else. The place was bright and clean and orderly, a couch and chairs covered with woven blankets, a tube-style television in the corner. One white wall was covered with photos going back years; family, I expected, far more black-and-white photos than color. Some were faded and yellowed, dark-skinned people leaning on rattletrap cars or sitting beneath mesquite trees or gathered in a room, the walls obviously adobe.
“You’re not in any trouble, ma’am,” Harry said. “We just need to ask you some questions about the Scalers. Mrs Scaler, in particular.”
Mrs Herdez’s face seemed overtaken with sudden joy. Her hands clapped.
“Mrs Scaler is a lovely woman. An angel. Kind and generous. She shares her things with me, gives me clothes, food. One time there was a party and she gave me twenty pounds of camarones to take home to my family.”
“How did she and her husband get along?”
“They were like children in love. Kisses, the snuggles.”
“We heard they didn’t still sleep in the same room,” Harry said. “Or talk a lot.”
“I don’t know who would speak such things. They were happy like two doves.”
From the other room I heard, “That’s a load of sandeces, Maria Herdez. It’s bullshit.”
I looked toward the door to the kitchen. A slender woman with angry eyes strode into the room. She was in her forties, probably very pretty when her face wasn’t tight with anger. Her hair was in a braid and outsized loop earrings dangled from her lobes. She put her fists on her hips and glared at Mrs Herdez.
“Tell them the truth, Tia. Now.”
“I am telling the truth,” Mrs Herdez said, not meeting the other woman’s eyes. “The Scalers were like children in love.”
“Who might you be, ma’am?” Harry asked our surprise addition.
“I’m Luna Martinez, and this is my aunt. Tia Maria won’t tell you the truth because she’s afraid she’ll get a bad mark on her work history.” She looked to her aunt. “Everyone you’ve ever worked for will give you excellent marks, Tia. Forget the Scalers and tell the truth.”
They lapsed into Spanish, firing sentences back and forth. It was like watching a tennis match. Harry and I turned our heads to Mrs Herdez for the serve, to Mrs Martinez for the return, back to Mrs Herdez. Boink. Boink. Boink.
Finally, a nervous Mrs Herdez picked up a square of lace from the table beside her, smoothed it with her hands, set it back down.
“It was a house like no other have I ever worked for.”
“How angry did Reverend Scaler get?” Harry asked. “Was he a danger to you?”
Ms Martinez jumped in. “Not the Reverend! It was that miserable wife of his! Tell them what she made you do, Tia.”
“Shhhh,” Harry said. “Please let your aunt speak.”
Mrs Herdez said, “Mrs Scaler…was not bad. She was just touchy.”
“Touchy? You call a hair-trigger touchy?”
“Ms Martinez, please,” Harry said.
Mrs Herdez said, “Mrs Scaler wanted things done a certain way. Breakfast at eight forty-five in the morning, lunch at twelve thirty-eight, the dinner between twelve and sixteen minutes past six. Ees a good way to be, so I always know what she wants.”
Ms Martinez had put her energy into tapping her foot. “And if you missed by a minute, Tia? Tell them what happened then.”
“I sit in a chair and look at the wall until I am needed. It was good in a way. My feet felt good to sit.”
“Were Mr and Mrs Scaler happy?” I asked.
“The Reverend spend his time in his office, working. He slept on his bed in there or one of the other bedrooms – there are five. They did not speak unless she wanted to talk. Mostly she would yell and he would do the things she asked, until it was time to walk outside the door. It was like she had the…cojones in the house.”
Ms Martinez said, “By cojones, my aunt means –”
“Yes,” Harry said. “We’re acquainted with the word.”
“Tell what else she makes you do, Maria.” She looked at us. “I didn’t find out about this until last week. I work from my home, writing computer code. At noon I heard a knock and Tia Maria was there, not able to look in my eyes. Maria almost never drinks, but she had two cervezas y tequila and her shame wiggled out on a loose tongue. Tell them what you did for that woman,” Mrs Martinez said. “Every morning at nine forty-five.”
“I wiped her,” Mrs Herdez mumbled.
“Pardon?” Harry said.
“After she made the…bathroom from behind her. I wiped her. I had to do it just right. The paper couldn’t be wadded, it had to be folded and ironed.”
“Ironed?” Harry echoed.
“With the steam. To press the paper flat without losing the softness. Eight folds, then iron. When she was done I had to show her the…” she couldn’t say the words.
“The results?” I asked.
“It was very important to her. When I had done all that I could do, I had to clean her with mouthwash – it could only be the Listerine with mint.”
I shot Harry a glance that said, mouthwash? and turned back to Mrs Herdez.
“This was daily at nine forty-five?”
“She was very much a prompt woman.”
Harry leaned forward. “You don’t work on Sundays. Uh…”
“No problem, señor,” Mrs Herdez said. “She saved until Monday.”
“Patti Scaler is an absolute control freak,” I said as we drove away. “My mistake was not realizing her timidity was an act. She controlled me every time I talked to her.”
“She dished out what you wanted to see. And feel.”
I nodded. “Anger at Scaler and pity for her.”
“We’re making forward motion by looking into the lady’s present,” Harry said. “You want to check out her past?”
We went to the department. Harry planted himself at the computer in the conference room, hung his purple tie over a chair, unbuttoned his yellow shirt and, using a keyboard like a shovel, began digging into Patricia Scaler’s history, trying to see past the press releases and gloss, find what had been hidden in the shadows.
There was a map of Alabama on the wall, mounted over cork so thumbtacks would hold. Harry picked up a box of tacks, went to the board, began sticking tacks to indicate locations.
“Patti Scaler went to a county high school. Everyone in the county went there, no towns in the county big enough to support a school. Check this out: here’s where little Patti grew up, here’s where lawyer Carleton grew up, here’s where – surprise! – Senator Custis grew up. Here’s where Tutweiler grew up. Small-town kiddies, all within the same county, where there’s little to do but drive around and mix and mingle. Everyone knows everyone.”
I studied the array of tacks. “Where’s Richard Scaler’s pin?”
Harry tapped outside the map, where central Mississippi sat.
“It would be up here, a hundred miles away.”
I frowned. “Out of the pattern, brother.”
“Unless you stick it here.” Harry jabbed the tack a bit beside the cluster of others.
“Which is?”
“The little country church he started when he was in his early twenties.”
“Proximity in space,” I said, studying the map. “But what does it mean in time?”
“Oh, wait…got one more little flag.” He pressed a white tack beside the others.
“That being?”
“Arnold Meltzer. Another kid from the county.”
“OK, so you got Meltzer, Scaler, Carleton, Custis and Tutweiler all in the same geographic area. It’s a nice coincidence, especially since they’re similar in age. But we’re looking at Patti Scaler. How does this touch her? She’s six years younger than the others. Not much of a difference, but it’s amplified when younger.”
Harry tapped some keys, arrived at a website called Keep In Touch.
“Here’s where I found a copy of her high school yearbook. Amazing what’s online, right?”
“Where’s the lady?”
Harry electronically turned pages. “Here.”
The photo was black and white and unmistakably the woman who in ten years would become Patricia Scaler, though the name said Patti Selmot. Her complexion was poor. She hadn’t smiled for the photographer, perhaps to hide the teeth.
“I doubt she made prom queen,” I said.
Harry handed me several sheets of paper. “I printed the yearbook’s name listings out, Carson. Now it’s your turn…”
I didn’t sit by the computer, I sat by the phone. Using a combination of charm and deceit, I spent hours calling names listed in the yearbook, sometimes being a lawyer trying to track down the recipient of a will’s largesse, sometimes a guy trying to put together a class reunion, sometimes even myself. It seemed most of the former students had moved away, out of the county, out of state. I wasn’t surprised, heavily rural counties lost a huge percentage of youth.
But I found a few who had stayed. A couple of them had known Patti Scaler, nee Selmot. One told me all she knew; not much. The other woman sounded angry and worn and depressed. She refused to talk to me.
Those were my favorites.
Harry had to stay at the department to monitor incoming information and wait for any ransom note or other communiqué. I made the two-hour run north to the county where every major player in our case had a connection.
The woman I hoped to talk to was Nona Jett. According to the listings below the names, both Ms Jett and Patti Selmot had been in band together.
I followed my Google map down a gravel road that passed beside a rusty water tower. I bumped over a railroad crossing, pulled into the dirt drive of a doublewide modular, a decade-old Buick Skylark in the drive. Walking past it I saw half the back seat was burned away on the driver’s side, generally caused by the driver flipping a cigarette out the window and the wind blowing it back inside, landing in the back seat.
There were a dozen other doubles and singles in the area, scattered willy-nilly through the fallow, sun-parched fields, a fistful of dice on a dirt-brown table.
I knocked, waited. Knocked harder. The door opened a hair. I saw an eye caked with make-up and shadow. Then I saw blonde hair, lacquered stiff as stalactites, scarlet lips, a penciled-on mole.
“Ms Jett? I’m a Mobile detective. I want to ask some questions. There’s no problem, no trouble.”
“Questions about what?” the lips said. I smelled beer.
“Patricia Scaler. Patti Selmot.”
“You called earlier.” The door started to close. “I don’t know a thing. I barely remember her.”
My toes stopped the door. “You were in the same class at a small school. You were in band together. Hard not to know at least a bit about her.”
The eye squeezed to a frown. “Why you asking about Patti? Is it cuz her husband went crazy and took up with a fag nigra?”
“If you believe what you read in the papers.”
She sighed. “I used to think Reverend Scaler was like Jesus’ brother here on earth. He was for us white Christian people. We don’t get no respect any more. We used to own everything, but now Mexicans is everywhere. I work housekeeping at the Ramada and I’m the last white lady left. It’s all nigras and Mexicans.”
I didn’t point out that her sentence didn’t make a lot of sense. Beer does that, in quantity. It helps when you’re trying to establish rapport, though.
“They started letting Mexicans in the Mobile Police,” I said, lowering my voice to secret-telling size. “They cook their tacos on the departmental hotplate. And every day after lunch they sleep on their desks.”
She nodded. “It’s that fiesta they all gotta have.”
I sighed. “The department makes me work with a black guy, too.”
She looked past me at the empty Crown Vic. “Why ain’t he here?”
“I could tell this was a good white neighborhood. I figured you’d feel better if it was just you and me.”
She gave me gratitude. “No one ever thinks a us any more. It’s like white people are a dying breed. Come in.”
I followed her into a tired little space stacked with cast-off magazines bought for a dime at a charity store: People, Us, Entertainment Weekly – the lives of others to distract her from her own. I figured she cheered for people on reality shows.
“Wanna beer?” Jett said, opening the door and nodding toward the fridge. “I’m gettin’ me one.”
I was on duty, but this was pure business. I dug in my wallet, liberated a fifty, handed it to her like I grew fifties in my garden.
“Tellya what, Nona, lemme buy a couple six-packs. You can get ’em later.”
Warming to me fast, Nona Jett brought cheap canned beer in foam cup holders emblazoned with the logo of a local liquor store.
“So what can you tell me about Patti Selmot, Nona?”
She fired up a cigarette, blew a cone of smoke toward the ceiling. “None a this ever gonna come back on me?”
“Here’s my official interview notebook…” I slipped a little red notebook from my pocket, opened to a page, drew a horizontal line at the top. “That’s the space for the name of the person I’m interviewing. That’s all anyone knows about where this comes from. What name do you want me to make up for you?”
She thought a long time, said, “Britney Hilton.”
I wrote B. Hilton in the space. “There,” I said. “No one will ever know where I got my information.”
“That’s good,” Ms Jett said. “Tell this kind of thing and you could get messed up bad.”