Accused

by Michael Kerr

  “He could be out in the trees waiting,” Ellie Mae said. “You could walk straight into a trap.”

  Logan took that assertion on board. If Cassidy had flown the hitman in, then presumably he was very good at what he did and wouldn’t do the expected, and so Ellie was probably right. Jansen would not quit and give them chance to escape, or contact Cassidy and tell him that he had failed to fulfill the contract. There was every chance that the guy would be in the proximity of the cabin, probably side on to it so that he could see both the front and back doors.

  Logan mulled it over, nodded, and said to Mike, “Is there another way out of here?”

  “No. Just the windows and doors.”

  “Okay, let’s assume that we’re pinned down, so here’s what we’ll do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DETECTIVE Rod Reynolds took a call and made a few scribbled notes on a legal pad on the desk in front of him. He cradled the phone and waved his hand in the air to attract Lucy’s attention as she walked towards him from the drinks machine with a cup of coffee to keep her awake. It was late. Her shift had supposedly ended over an hour ago, but she was catching up with bookwork. All she wanted to do now was go home, take a shower and hit the sack.

  “What is it, Rod?” Lucy said.

  “A double slaying out at Woodmere. We need to attend.”

  “Forget the we, I’m done here. If I don’t get some sleep soon I’ll pass out.”

  “It’s our case.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The deceased are Brad Dicky and his wife. Both apparently died of gunshot wounds in their house.”

  “Do we have a suspect, or is that a stupid question?”

  “No suspects, no witnesses. The next door neighbor was putting the garbage out when the Dicky’s’ cat came up to her. Seems it never went out, so she picked it up and took it round. No one answered the door when she rang the bell, but there were lights on and she could hear the TV. The door was closed but not locked. She went in and found Mrs. Dicky dead in the hallway, so called the police.”

  “We can assume that Nathan Cassidy was behind it,” Lucy said.

  “I don’t like to assume anything,” Rod said. “The facts are that we only have the word of Logan to incriminate Cassidy.”

  “Do we have any reason to believe that Logan would lie to us?”

  “He coerced a guy into fingering Cassidy. That’s not admissible and may not have any foundation. If I beat the shit out of somebody they’d tell me black was white to stop being hurt.”

  “So you want me to come with you to look at a couple of stiffs?”

  “Yeah, we’re partners, Luce. It’s what we do.”

  Lucy sighed, took another swig of coffee, set the cup on the desktop, pulled her jacket off the back of the swivel chair, and took her hip holster and gun from the drawer to clip on to the belt of her pants.

  Rod drove the pool Crown Victoria out to the house on Destrehan Avenue and parked behind a half dozen official vehicles. A CSI handed them latex gloves and plastic booties to put on before allowing them into the house.

  Alma Dicky’s body was lying on its back on the carpet in the hallway. The belt of a brightly colored kimono had come loose and the garment had fallen open to expose her body – naked apart from slipper socks – for all to see. It was not a pretty sight. The large breasts sagged apart and were grayish, due to the blood settling to the lowest part of the corpse. They reminded Lucy of dead or dying jellyfish on a beach. And the pubic area at the fork of the dead woman’s bent and open legs was shaved and looked like a plucked chicken’s rear end.

  Alma’s mouth was hanging open, her eyes were rolled back to show the whites, and a single trail of blood had run down from inside her left ear to drip onto the rust-colored carpet runner.

  Lucy noted the yellow nicotine stains on the thumb and pointing finger of the upturned right hand. Looked around and saw a partly smoked cigarette near the front door, which had burned a small brown hole in the nylon pile of the carpet.

  “Appears that she opened the door and was pushed back and shot in the head,” Lucy said. “That’s a small entry wound and there’s hardly any blood. The perp used a low caliber gun. This had to have been LaSalle or Nash.”

  “Maybe,” Rod said. “We don’t know that for certain. We need to consider that this may not be related to what happened at the diner. Keep an open mind.”

  Lucy had no intention of keeping an open mind. As far as she was concerned Logan had been straight with them. And even though he had obviously used more than verbal intimidation to interrogate Dwayne Nash, she believed that Nash had been telling the truth over why he, Tate and LaSalle had been at Dicky’s Diner, and that the man behind it was Nathan Cassidy.

  Walking around the body, Lucy entered the living room to be faced by the sight of Brad Dicky on his knees; ass stuck up in the air and his head twisted to the side. Behind him was the wheelchair that he had obviously tumbled out of.

  “Guess you’re right,” Rod said from behind and to the side of her. “Whoever did this came here to kill Dicky.”

  “And I know that Cassidy was behind it. He had Dicky taken out in case he had a change of mind and decided to talk to us. The guy is closing all the doors that could give us anything concrete to charge him with.”

  Rod looked down at the overweight body of the now deceased diner owner who had allegedly owed Cassidy a lot of money, and so had unwittingly generated the events that had taken place. He should have known that Cassidy would lean on him as hard as he deemed necessary to collect the debt. Events had escalated with the gratuitous bloodshed at the diner. And now there was just Logan and the waitress between him and absolute certainty that he would not be implicated.

  “Are we done here?” Lucy said as she turned away after watching a fly land on Dicky’s upper lip to presumably siphon blood up from the streams of it that had run from the man’s nostrils.

  “Yeah, let’s go and talk to the neighbor, then get a cup of coffee and call it a night,” Rod said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this case. LaSalle and Nash aren’t going to say jack shit, and if we don’t lift Logan and the waitress, we’ve got nothing.”

  “I think that Logan will deal with it,” Lucy said as she headed for the front door, not allowing herself to look at what had been Alma Dicky again. Being a homicide detective meant that you got to see sights that became a mental catalog of violent scenes, that your mind stored and you couldn’t delete. It was depressing, with only the upside of closure of cases being a way of coping with it to remain focused and able to keep doing what you did. You couldn’t undo the suffering that many victims had endured, but could often bring a killer in to face justice for his or her actions, which hopefully eased the heartache for the loved ones of the deceased. The hardest part of the job was to somehow find balance; remain detached and yet keep hold of empathy for those that had met a premature death at the hands of another person. It was a profession that she both loved and hated. The hours’ were long; the pay was never going to allow her to have the kind of house or lifestyle that she envied, and her social life was almost nonexistent. Bottom line was that being a cop was a vocation, like that of a firefighter or priest. She had an inner need that required her to somehow make a difference. It wasn’t something that she could easily quantify. She just knew that even if she ended up an old spinster with regrets, she had to do what she did. Maybe that was being foolish, but she lived day to day and got on with being who she was.

  “I’m putting my papers in at the end of the month,” Rod said as they sat in a corner booth of Chico’s on City Park Avenue and had coffee and doughnuts. “My wife’s health ain’t too good, so we need to ease back and go live next to a sandy beach and enjoy each day.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” Lucy said. “Won’t you miss the job?”

  “Hell, no, Luce, we’re just human garbage collectors. We shovel a little of it up off the streets, but not enough to stop it rising. Crime is here to stay. It’s part
of the human condition. I’ve spent more years than I like to remember watching violent crime rise. And now it’s time for me to walk away from it. It’s not my problem. The department is fucked up because it’s under funded, like all public services, and that means there are less of us out there to deal with it. We don’t have the resources to protect and serve any longer, and things are getting worse, not better.”

  Lucy was saddened to hear her partner voice what was in essence the truth. But you couldn’t just turn your back on law-abiding people because the city’s coffers were virtually empty. Lawlessness had to be dealt with, or society would crumble, not just in New Orleans but throughout the nation. Austerity was one of the main reasons for a degree of lost hope and lack of faith in the government and the fat cats that were living high on the hog. Ordinary folk were suffering, and some cities were virtually bankrupt, with poverty, debt and high unemployment dragging them down.

  “So you’ve given up on what you dedicated your life to?” Lucy said.

  Rod smiled and his upper denture slipped down a little. He sucked it back up into place and said, “I decided that what might happen in the next thirty years won’t affect me, Luce. I’ll most likely be dead and gone. So I intend to make the most of what time I’ve got left and leave it to the next generation or two to turn the world around, if they can, which I have reservations about. Old values have been overtaken by greed and a consumer mentality that makes the rich richer and the masses poorer.”

  “Sounds like you’re getting bitter, Rod.”

  “I’ve always been bitter. I grew up in the Magnolia projects uptown on Washington Avenue. You want to know about poverty and legendary crime rates, look no further. It was one of the worst housing districts in the country, and had the highest murder rate in the city. I only got out because my father was caught in crossfire on his way home from work. Two rival gangs opened up on each other in broad daylight, and four commuters on a passing bus got to die that day: a six-month old baby, its mother, a senior citizen and my dad.

  “It was the saving of me in a way. My mother packed what little we had and we moved in with her parents in a marginally better area.”

  “You never said anything about it before,” Lucy said.

  “No reason to. I just thought I’d let you know why I’ve never been dedicated to being a cop. It’s been a job of work that helped me raise a family. And now I don’t need to keep doing it. You only get one spin of the wheel, Luce, so look after number one, because most of the citizens out there don’t like us and won’t give a shit if you die tomorrow in the line of duty.”

  Lucy got home and went straight to bed. What Rod had said had in some way cheapened what she did each and every working day. The war against crime was in many areas being lost. But without law enforcement public safety would be eroded and criminality would spiral out of control. There had to be the fear of capture and incarceration to deter many individuals from taking the law into their own hands. Thinking about that brought the image of the ex-cop, Logan, to mind. He had no faith in the law. He was out there somewhere taking action against those that the police could not bring to book. Could she blame him? It was only with his intervention that Ellie Mae Sawyer was still alive and presumably somewhere safe from the men that Nathan Cassidy had ordered to kill her.

  Having slept fitfully, Lucy got up, showered and looked forward to questioning Clayton LaSalle and Dwayne Nash again. They were prime suspects for the murders of Brad and Alma Dicky. Once armed with warrants to search both of their addresses for the murder weapon, she and Rod would bring them in and attempt to play one off against the other. Nash seemed the weaker-minded of the two. If they said that LaSalle was selling him out he might believe it and give them the break they needed.

  Nash was not at his address. A neighbor said that she’d seen him getting in a cab the previous evening as she had returned from walking her dog. They forced the door, and after confirming that Nash was absent, a three-man team began searching while Lucy and Rod drove over to LaSalle’s high-rise apartment in Terrytown, followed by two uniformed officers.

  Rod knocked at the door of 603. There was no reply and so he shouted: “Police. Open the door.” Five seconds later he stood to one side and nodded for Trooper Dan Matthews to employ a handheld Blackhawk breaching ram to gain entry. One blow from the steel-pad of the ram sent the door crashing open, and Rod entered with his gun drawn.

  LaSalle was not in the apartment, but they found a trail of bloodstains leading from the hallway into the living room, and more on the carpet in front of a large sofa, and also from the sofa across to a corner bar.

  The officers searched the apartment as Rod and Lucy attempted to evaluate what had happened.

  “What’s your take on this, Luce?” Rod said.

  “Someone was injured out in the hall. It looks as if whoever it was crawled through here and spent some time bleeding on the carpet, then went over to the bar.”

  Rod agreed and said, “If Nash came here to see LaSalle, it would appear that they fell out over something and one of them was badly injured. But we don’t have a body.”

  “We have a bullet hole in the wall next to the door in the hallway,” Trooper Matthews said. “And what I think is another in the carpet.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Rod said. “I can’t fathom why one of them would turn on the other.”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Lucy said. “It could have been a third party.”

  “Logan?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where is everybody? If Logan, LaSalle and Nash were here, how come they all got to walk away?”

  It was no more than conjecture, but Lucy’s instinct told her that the ex-cop had been involved, and that someone had died here. But why were there no corpses.

  “So you think that Logan turned up, got himself killed, and that Laurel and Hardy got rid of his body?” Rod said.

  “I don’t know, probably, because if Logan had killed them he would have left them here. And if he is dead, then we’ve got nothing. The video he had on a phone will have been got rid of.”

  “So all we can do is let Forensics work their magic and see who’s DNA, latents or other trace is here, and hope that we can locate and lean on LaSalle and Nash.”

  “Could be the other way round,” Lucy said. “Logan could have walked out of here.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Luce. If he did, then where are the stiffs?”

  “Got rid of by their boss.”

  “You think that Cassidy organized a clean up?”

  “It isn’t much of a clean up. But I do believe that Cassidy had the DBs taken away. They worked for him, and he knows that if we found them shot to death he would be a prime suspect. And look at the wall phone. Someone made a call after the incident.”

  Rod went over to the bar and saw that there was a smear of blood on the handset, and spots beneath it on the counter.

  “So run with the supposition,” he said. “What do you think happened after the shooting?”

  The tip of Lucy’s tongue ran back and forth over her bottom lip as she assessed the scene and used her logic to produce a possible set of circumstances. “If Nash came here, which we can check with local cab companies, I believe that Logan was in the vicinity and gained entry. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t have left his prints on the phone or anywhere else, so he dealt with them, but left one alive. LaSalle or Nash made a call to Cassidy for help, and got a bullet instead. I’m certain that we’ll not see either of them again.”

  “That means Logan could still be in the city and closing in on Cassidy,” Rod said. “What do you think he intends to do?”

  “He doesn’t need to do anything else. With Dicky, LaSalle and Nash out of the way he has no reason to think that he or Ellie Mae are now considered a threat to Cassidy. Logan was out cold and didn’t see what happened, and all Ellie Mae can do is identify two men that are most likely dead and at the bottom of the river in concrete boots.”

  Rod grinned. His
teeth stayed in place, much to Lucy’s relief. “That’s folklore,” he said. “Concrete takes too long to set. There has never been an authenticated case of a body being found wearing so-called concrete boots.”

  “Whatever. You get my drift. Cassidy will have made the bodies vanish.”

  “Logan won’t know that Dicky is dead or that whoever he left alive here might or might not have been murdered. He sees Cassidy as a threat, and so he’ll make a move on him.”

  “That wouldn’t be a loss,” Lucy said. “Cassidy is worse than most of the perps we take down. He has an air of respectability, runs a chain of restaurants, gives to charities, and lives the country club life; all on the back of being an asshole who takes advantage of people and bleeds them dry.”

  “They don’t have to borrow money from him, Luce. They know what they’re getting into.”

  “If you’re desperate you’ll act like a drowning man and grab hold of anything that’ll keep you afloat.”

  “It’s supply and demand, an age-old way of operating. That’s why people are having their houses and cars repossessed every day of the week by banks and finance companies. Money is what makes the world go round. If you can’t pay you go under.”

  “I know that. But it doesn’t say much for society, does it?”

  “I don’t really give a fuck about society, Luce. I’m a little world-weary, and just get on with getting on, without letting others’ misfortune affect me.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. Nobody really cares enough to make the world a better place.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? You’ve got to look after you and yours and let everything else go over your head. Maybe you’ll come to realize that in twenty years, when your outlook on life and priorities have changed.”

  “I don’t want to stop caring, Rod. No man is an island, some poet once said. We’re all part of the big picture, and if we don’t carve out a place in it for ourselves, then what’s the point?”

  “There doesn’t have to be a point; that’s what over half a century has told me. All I do now is go through the motions and look forward to some quality time away from all this crap that we have no way of cleaning up.”