Harry and I traded cards with the participants, knowing we’d all soon be contributors to endless pages of interlinked reports on the converged cases. We headed off to retrieve our vehicle from the scrap yard. Harry sat in the driver’s seat, but didn’t fire up the engine. We sat quietly for several minutes before he turned to me.

“Uh, Carson.” Harry said. “Fossie was mixing up stuff for you, right?”

I had been staring out into the night and thinking the same thing. My first freaky incidence was winging the table into the camera equipment at Bailes’s mother’s house. I’d started my day with a few of Fossie’s capsules. The same for everything: the scam at the prison, my fight with the hapless Beefer, my anger at Clair, the gun-blazing march into the bikers…all on days I’d taken Fossie’s vitamin potion. What had Ernie Hemmings said about Stenebrexin?

“…mixed with a cocktail of meth and Prozac, the stuff interacts poorly. It can lead to odd behavior, anxiety, acting out. Doesn’t take much, either.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “I got doped. Fossie was screwing with my head.”

“Why, you think?”

“Probably thought it would give him more control while he filled me with lies about Scaler, which I expect it did. I also expect that my herbal sleeping pills were the more traditional sort.”

Harry said, “When was the last time you took that shit?”

“I got tired of drinking perfume tea and eating healthy things that tasted like hay two days ago. Dropped the vites, too.”

Harry grinned. “Saved by fried chicken and gravy. That’s my boy. You been feeling any different?”

I looked out the window, saw a gurney being pushed from Baker’s backyard toward the ambulance out front. They’d found the body. It was draped with a sheet, the sheet soaked with sea water dripping from the corpse.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m suddenly feeling a lot better.”

Chapter 50

Harry and I were in the swing state between adrenalin rush and total burnout. We headed homeward to try and bag some recovery time before tomorrow renewed the hunt for Noelle.

I fell asleep without Fossie’s pills, but it only lasted four hours. I was up before dawn, on the deck, drinking coffee and shoveling cheese grits and bacon into my food hole. My mind felt clear and charged full, and I paced the deck for an hour, unraveling a timeline intermingled with the cast of characters. The timeline was almost four decades long.

I sat at my computer. Did a Google search. Found what I’d half-expected. I called Harry as I was driving to work, said we were running up to the SLDP’s offices, I needed to ask a couple more questions.

Harry hadn’t slept much either, and was still ragged from the previous night’s search of the ’net. I drove to Montgomery and let him bag out in the back seat for a change. He made a whistling sound when he snored. I awakened him at a gasoline stop outside of Montgomery. He headed into the station and brushed his teeth, splashed on some after-shave. Got in the front seat and away we flew.

“So you think Ben Belker has something we could use?” Harry asked.

“Worth a shot,” was all I said.

We entered Ben’s office. He gestured toward seats but I preferred to stand.

I said, “I looked up a few things on the internet, Ben. Your father died eight months ago. I’m sorry.”

He pushed up his black glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Thanks, Carson. I appreciate that.”

“Why didn’t you mention anything?”

“I don’t like to talk about it. Dad spent his life in pain. Growing up, I had to watch him try and walk, doing his best to hide his misery so we could all live something like a real life. He was legally blind from blows to his eyes. His whole life was torn away from him.”

“All in the span of a horrific beating,” I said.

Ben said, “I hope whoever who did it pays by burning in hell.”

I leaned against a bookcase filled with hate literature. “They’re paying now, Ben. Scaler, Tutweiler, Meltzer, Custis. Maybe Fossie and Carleton. Paying it all back, right?”

A beat. Ben Belker’s eyes flickered, then affected perplexed. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Carson.”

“Your father came to the South to fight for the poor. He went to town one night, stopped at a diner. He was abducted by racists. They took him to a field and crippled him for life.”

“Yes.”

I looked at Harry, saw a frown. I turned back to Ben.

“Is that how it really was, Ben?”

“Of course. Everyone knows it. My father was a legend.”

I pulled a chair up close to Ben and sat it backwards, arms crossed on the back, looking straight into my friend’s face.

“I think something else happened that night, Ben. I think a woman came on to your father. Her name was Patti Selmot. Plain in the face but with a body that’d give a corpse a hard-on. Your father went trotting after her with his tongue hanging to his knees.”

Ben leapt to his feet. “You’re lying.”

I pointed to his computer. “Your father’s death sent you on the trail of his attackers. Years of gathering information all came together and you discovered what really happened that night.”

Ben pointed a quivering finger at me, his face red. His eyes closed. He turned away, fists clenched, but his shoulders were slumped in defeat.

“Luring men to beatings was a hobby to that crazy bitch,” Ben hissed.

“The truth was a blow to your father’s legacy,” I said, my voice low and reasonable. “Thomas Belker beaten not over human rights, but over a hick drugstore bimbo.”

Ben collapsed into his chair, dry-washed his face.

“When Meltzer discovered my father was Jewish, he went crazy with a ball bat, getting the others to join in the fun. All the time she was laughing, urging them on.”

“What was Scaler’s part in all this?”

“There was a big manhunt when Dad was found, the FBI was involved. It scared hell out of the attackers. They went to their ideological twin, Richard Scaler, and told him they’d been trying to send a do-gooder Jewboy back to New York, but things got a bit out of hand.”

Harry said, “Scaler helped them with their alibi.”

Ben nodded. “He swore they were members of a night bible study and had all been in attendance.”

“The Feds bought Scaler’s story?” I asked.

“It was almost forty years ago, Carson. Every fourth male in the county would’ve beaten up a Yankee organizer. The Feds had a suspect list fifteen pages long. The case went nowhere.”

I put the missing links in the chain. “The perpetrators stayed free and helped one another through the years, bound by criminality and mutual silence. Three months ago, Scaler began re-thinking his life, having doubts, the great crippler of ideologues. Scaler hired Matthias for verification that Scaler’s superior-white-folks concepts were correct. But this time, Matthias had the full story.”

Ben said, “It shook Scaler to his core. He felt his soul was in danger. He was starting his amends through a major announcement, that the tribes of the earth were coming together.”

“How did you discover Scaler’s change of heart?” I asked. “Through your contacts?”

Harry stepped up. “Mrs Herdez, right?”

“Close, Detective,” Ben said. “Luna Martinez was picking up her aunt after work one day when Scaler asked for help with his computer. It had frozen while he was writing his journal. He knew Ms Martinez was a programmer. He didn’t know she was a long-time sympathizer with the SLDP.” He paused. “That’s all I’ll say.”

“It’s enough.” I imagined when opportunity presented Ms Martinez continued to check on what Scaler’d been writing. Or planted a worm in his computer that piped his writings to her.