The guy again started for the roof, caught himself. Returned and continued to study the camera, looking between the lens and the end of the hall. Something blossomed in the twisted face.

“He was heading to the roof to finish the action,” Harry said. “The camera stopped him like a brick wall.”

“He decided to leave a message,” I said. “A spur-of-the-moment suicide note.”

“But what was all that stuff about mutants and clones?”

“I’d say a head filled with speed and psyche-delics. And some kind of psychotic delusion.”

Harry asked the security guy to rewind to a specific moment. The perp raged at the camera.

“LOOK AT ME! FUCKIN’ LOOK AT ME!”

Harry turned to me. “There’s an old movie with an actor name of James Cagney. White Heat. Cagney plays a gangster with a mama complex; it’s actually a psychologically complex movie, Cars. You should check it out. Cagney’s character is as cold-blooded as a snake and pure psychotic to boot. Long story short: beloved Mama dies, the gangster goes full whack. Kill-crazy. There’s some more stuff about an undercover cop – a guy – who Cagney seems to want to please, just like Mama. Cagney’s character gets trapped in a tank yard by the police, flees atop a huge storage tank, a million gallons of gasoline. He decides it’s his day to die and he’s going to go out with a bang. He starts firing into the gas tank beneath his feet. As it explodes, he’s screaming, ‘Look at me, Ma. I made it. I’m on top of the world.’”

“Turning a dead-end into a blaze-of-glory moment?” I mused. “You think that’s our boy?”

“Given that no helicopter was waiting to pluck him off the roof, I think he was planning to fight the cops until he and the kid were killed, or dive overboard with the kid in his arms. Then he saw the camera and decided to have the finale right there.”

“Look at me, Ma, I made it?’

Harry nodded. “He was making a movie for someone.”

“But for who? He mentioned five names: Adolf, George, James, John and a Pastor Buford. And a number: eighty-eight. You know what that means.”

I’d seen it tattooed on prison inmates. Eight meant H, the eighth letter of the alphabet, thus, HH for Heil Hitler.

Harry said, “Guess we got us a white supremacist type. So we wait to see if forensics can ID the perp. I imagine he’s got an arrest record about a half-mile long. Then maybe we can track down all those names he was ranting.”

“I got another way to do things,” I said. “It’ll take a trip to Montgomery…”

“Can’t do it now,” Harry said, looking at his watch and sighing. “It’s gonna take the rest of the day to make our statements and fill out the paperwork.”

“We’ll leave first thing in the morning,” I said. “It’s a good time to get in some veterinary research.”

“Veterinary research?”

“We’re gonna study the underbellies of ugly animals.”

When I finally got home, I sat in the quiet of my living room and let the day dissolve. I wanted to call Clair, but knew I’d start babbling and when she asked why I was calling, have no answer whatsoever. The silence in my head grew so loud that I cranked on the TV and filled my eyes with a show about beautiful, soulless people purposefully stranded on an atoll.

At nine thirty I heard a knock on the door, opened it to find Archibald Fossie in suit pants, shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, wearing a dapper straw fedora with bright paisley band.

I slapped my head. “I forgot. We had an appointment tonight.”

He looked at me closely. “You look like you’ve had a long day, Detective. I’ll stop back in a few days.”

I glanced down and saw a barn-shaped black bag in his hand, the kind doctors carried when I was a little kid. It was reassuring, like a talisman from the past.

“Come in,” I said, grabbing his sleeve. “The day’s been a bowl of boiled dung, but I need something. Maybe you’ve got it.”

“I hope so,” he said, stepping inside as I closed the door against the heat and mosquitoes.

“Can I get you a drink?” I asked.

“Got any Scotch?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Not a glass of soy milk?”

A sly grin. “Alcohol can be healthy in moderation. Though for you, I’d prescribe red wine, four or five fluid ounces a night.”

“Duly noted.”

I got Fossie a neat single-malt kept around for Harry’s benefit, poured myself a tumbler of red wine, deciding to start nutritional therapy tonight. Fossie reached into his bag and produced a stethoscope, hung it around his neck.

“I’ll need you to undress, Detective. Down to skivvies is fine.”

I complied and sat on a dining-room chair as Fossie poked and prodded, thumped and listened. He studied my tongue, my hair. He had me walk across the room and back, making notes on my carriage. He had me do two minutes of push-ups, re-listened to my heart. I told him how I’d been feeling – lack of appetite, vague pains in my gut, lethargy, occasional lightheadedness, insomnia.

“The major machinery sounds fine,” he said, dropping the steth into his bag and plucking several vials out, pouring capsules into paper packets. “In the meantime, here’s a concoction to help you sleep: L-Tryptophan, valerian and a bit of melatonin. These others are vitamins, heavy on B-complex and good for stress.”

“Stress? Really?”

“So is ginseng. Here’s some ginseng extract. Natural medicines, one and all. Take two of each every morning, two in the early afternoon. None after four p.m. I’ll write up a diet I want you to follow, low fat and high protein.”

I nodded and followed him to the door. “What do I owe you?”

“Find out the truth about Richard Scaler,” he said quietly, hand on the knob, looking into my eyes. “Discover what he really was.”

I said, “You spend a lot of time at the Scaler home, right, Mr Fossie?”

“An hour a day or so. I’m actually on retainer, another thing that drove Richard nuts. I go to the co-op, buy fresh fruits and veggies, take them to Patricia. Or I grind herbal medications and mix infusions. She likes to watch and talk while I work.”

“What’s she talk about?”

“Her childhood. The pre-Richard days when she was carefree, a high-school girl with her whole life ahead of her. The conversation is therapeutic. I’m usually there in the morning. With the, uh, unfortunate event, I plan to stop by in the afternoon or evening to make sure Patricia’s all right.”

“You don’t really think it was an unfortunate event, Mr Fossie. Not if the Missus got free of a man who was hurting her.”

He closed his eyes, loosed a sigh. “Being free of that self-righteous beast is the best thing that ever happened to Patricia. But she’s not ready to let herself know that. Though she already knows it deep inside. Does that make sense?”

“Yes. And if you really want me to uncover the truth about Scaler, there’s a way you can help. I need to know who was with Scaler on his last night.”

Fossie’s eyes looked dubious behind the glasses. And maybe a bit scared.

“It doesn’t sound ethical.”

“You want me to reveal the truth about Richard Scaler? Give me something that provides insight into his secret life. See if you can find a calendar entry. Something on his desk. A phone number scrawled on a Post-it. Anything.”

When Fossie escaped into the night, I didn’t know if I’d succeeded in enlisting him. Expecting little, I washed Fossie’s prescribed capsules down with the last of my wine, falling into a sweet and dreamless sleep more satisfying than any I’d had in weeks.

Chapter 14

It was eight thirty a.m. when Harry and I pulled into the failing strip mall on the south side of Montgomery. The offices I sought were on the end. There had once been windows, but they had been bricked over after a shoebox loaded with four sticks of dynamite exploded on the sidewalk outside. The two occupants of the office had been back in the files, or they would have been shredded by glass and shattered by concussion.