Too Far Gone

by John Ramsey Miller

  “On Fridays. It’s part of the tradition.”

  “Do you have a recent picture of him?” Kennedy asked. “A physical description?”

  “I have hundreds of recent pictures. Gary’s five-ten. He weighs one fifty. Blond hair in a ponytail. A patch of hair beneath his lower lip. I have a picture I took a week ago.”

  “What do you think happened to your husband?” Alexa asked Casey.

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking up. “Maybe he’s in a hospital with amnesia.”

  “Have you called the hospitals?” Kyler Kennedy asked.

  “Grace and I called all of them before I contacted the police. We found no one matching his description,” Casey said, her eyes showing pain. “Please, you have to find him. He’d come home or call if he could, I know he would.”

  LePointe reached over and put his hand on Casey’s shoulder.

  “Mrs. West,” Kennedy started, “I know this may be a bad time to ask this, but do you know if your husband may have been seeing anyone?”

  “What?” Casey snapped immediately. “You mean another woman? Of course not! We love each other.”

  “You can forget that line of questioning,” Dr. LePointe said. “It’s inappropriate.”

  “Sorry, it’s just that sometimes men—” Kennedy started.

  “Gary isn’t like most men,” Casey said.

  “I believe that’s more than enough information to get you started,” Dr. LePointe interrupted.

  “There are more questions that need to be asked,” Kennedy said.

  “Perhaps later when Casey is stronger. It’s very late and she’s upset and tired. I don’t think you’ll learn anything else of value here tonight.”

  “I’m fine, Unko,” Casey protested.

  Alexa caught Dr. LePointe’s reaction to his niece’s use of Unko, which had to be a pet name he didn’t care for.

  “Ask whatever you like,” Casey said. “We have nothing to hide. If my husband were seeing anybody, I’d know. He is usually right here with Deana and me. He doesn’t spend enough time away from us for that sort of thing. And he’s incapable of subterfuge or deceit.”

  LePointe said, “It’s likely Gary will come in or call any moment.”

  Kyler Kennedy closed his notebook and stood abruptly. “Of course,” he said. “More than enough to get started. Thanks for your time, Mrs. LePointe.”

  “West,” Casey corrected.

  “We need the make and model of the car he was driving and the license number,” Alexa said.

  Casey handed Alexa a sheet of paper she’d made up with that information on it, as well as Gary’s description.

  “We’ll show ourselves to the door,” Kennedy said. “If you think of anything…” He placed his card on the table. “Twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I want to go on, if you need more information,” Casey said.

  “The picture,” Kennedy said as he stood.

  “I’ll send it in the morning,” LePointe said. “Now, my niece needs to get some rest.”

  “But—” Casey protested.

  “It’s settled,” LePointe said authoritatively. “I’m the doctor. I’ll have the picture dropped off at your office, Detective. If that’s acceptable?”

  “Certainly, sir,” Kennedy said.

  “Will you be working on finding Gary, Agent Keen?” Casey asked.

  “I’m due to leave in the morning,” Alexa said. “Actually, I should get back to the Marriott.”

  Casey crossed the room, took a framed picture from the shelves, slipped it out of the frame, and handed Kennedy the picture, at an angle that precluded Alexa from seeing it.

  “You are in good hands, Mrs. West,” Alexa said, and left Casey, LePointe, and Kennedy in the kitchen. As she strode up the hallway toward the front door, her footsteps muted by the Oriental runners, she looked at the art on the walls for the first time. She loved art and had taken an advanced art appreciation class in college, so she knew that the paintings she saw were very valuable. Out of the ten paintings she saw on her way out, she recognized a Joan Miró oil she had seen in a book of his work, and a Marc Chagall. There was a large Rothko oil in the dining room. In a den she saw several framed Avedon photographs, including an incredibly large picture of Andy Warhol’s wounded torso. The mantel in that room held dozens of framed pictures, most of which included Gary West. He was a strikingly handsome man.

  When Alexa exited the house, Manseur was walking back from the street. The superintendent and the other detectives had left or were driving away.

  “So, what you think?” he asked her.

  “I think I need to go back to the hotel.”

  “So, you think there’s anything to this?” he asked her as they walked toward the gate. “Do you think he could have been abducted?”

  “I think you have a D11 on your hands.”

  “That FBI jargon for something?”

  “It’s a model of a bulldozer,” Alexa said. “I’m referring to Dr. LePointe. I suspect he’s right that Gary West will come home. If not, maybe Dr. LePointe will allow your Detective Kennedy to start some sort of investigation. Two things I can tell you for certain.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Casey West worships her husband, and Dr. LePointe is accustomed to calling the tunes.”

  7

  Elliot Parnell, as a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement officer, was keeping his eye on the hurricane because it could affect his beat adversely. If there was a mandatory evacuation, he would have to run all over the lakes and channels making residents leave. Most of the people who lived in his district were dumb as snakes, and he’d have his work cut out for him. He hoped the storm turned: he had a lot more important job to do than shooing cow-brained swampers from their hovels.

  Parnell was a patient man. He had been employed as an enforcement officer for the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission for eighteen years. For each of those years—night and day in every kind of weather condition—he had been outrunning scofflaws when necessary, outsmarting them when possible. His job was to catch offenders who dared to take more game or fish than the laws of Louisiana allowed, hunt or fish without procuring the proper licenses, hunt or fish out of season, hunt or fish in restricted areas, sell game or fish, or poach protected animals.

  Elliot Parnell never let a transgressor off with only a warning, unless he knew he couldn’t make a case, and the perp didn’t know it. If he had a man, woman, or child dead to rights, he would issue the citation, do whatever confiscating the law allowed, and testify against them if the case went to court. Parnell had no patience with any type of violator, but he had a special hard-on for people who killed alligators without the proper permits. Leland Ticholet was one of the worst offenders in the state. Any game and fish regulation that a man could break, Ticholet broke. Parnell had caught him on several occasions, and had written him numerous summonses, but mostly the judges let him go. Ticholet was as smart as instincts and criminal genetics could make a man. Parnell had joked that Ticholet’s whole family had been thumbing their noses at the law for so many generations that evolution had them emerging from the womb with the ends of their noses and their thumbs already calloused.

  Parnell preferred to work alone, unless he was after poachers. A poacher could be dangerous. Although Parnell carried a Colt .38, it was best to have someone watching your back. Lawbreakers could get testy or desperate, and sometimes wardens got shot, cut up, or just plain vanished. With people in the swamps killing deer, ducks, and gators out of season and cooking their methamphetamine, getting shot was a very real prospect.

  Parnell looked over at the rookie-in-training, Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Officer Betty Crocker. She was asleep, snoring with her mouth open. Betty swore she didn’t mind people making jokes about her name, because she’d heard them all in her twenty-one years, and claimed she liked having a name people remembered easily. Some would have changed their names, but not her. She wasn’t right for the job, and not just
because she was a black woman from the projects. Elliot wasn’t prejudiced. He’d had sex with black prostitutes when he was drunk. Probably he’d have sex with Crocker given the right circumstances.

  A week earlier Elliot Parnell had spotted Ticholet driving a new boat across the lake. People like Leland couldn’t purchase such valuable items unless they were doing something very profitable, and such people could only make that sort of money illegally. Two days after that, Parnell had set up a digital video camera on a tree pointed so’s to capture activity on Leland’s camp house and dock. Triggered by motion of a boat or someone on the dock, the camera would record, and whatever the subject unloaded or skinned would be captured by the digital video camera, and Elliot would play it in court, and Leland would regret it. The expensive new boat would become property of the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission.

  All Elliot needed was an image of Leland Ticholet pulling one gator carcass out of his boat onto the dock—just one.

  8

  Manseur had driven a good two miles before he spoke. “Would have been nice if you’d mentioned you and Jackson Evans knew each other,” he said.

  “He had only praise for me, right?”

  “He didn’t go into any detail. But if he was ever in love with you, he’s gotten over it.”

  Alexa laughed.

  “He wasn’t happy about seeing you at the scene.”

  “What was he telling you on the porch?”

  “Just that Mr. Gary West married up. There’s a prenuptial agreement. He gets nothing but a small allowance to live on, which he wastes. He’s something of an embarrassment to the family. He is verbal about his extremely liberal points of view, which are not always in line with those LePointe thinks are constructive. He’s also frivolous, and has Casey pouring money into causes like the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the like. The LePointes have their own bylaws and Gary West is never going to get his hands on any of the LePointe fortune. The impression I got is that LePointe hopes his niece will come to her senses and end the relationship. He thinks this abduction is just Gary West playing some game for sympathy or to get attention.”

  “And yet Gary’s wife seems genuinely distraught,” Alexa pointed out. “It’s possible she agrees with her husband’s politics, or at least respects his idealism.”

  “Either way, Evans wants this deal handled as quickly as possible. It looks like Katrina is going to kick our ass. This storm keeps coming our way, we’re likely to have a lot of wind damage, electricity out, a little looting, and maybe some flooding. We’ve been waiting for the big one for years.”

  “The big one?”

  “The whole city is below sea level, surrounded by levees and pumps. Someday some mean-ass hurricane is going to push the Mississippi River down her throat and Lake Pontchartrain up her butt.”

  9

  Back in her hotel room, Alexa decided to take a hot bath and get a couple of hours’ sleep before she left. After she got out of the tub, she put on her robe and switched on the TV, changing channels until she found the weather channel.

  “Now for the latest on Hurricane Katrina,” the weatherwoman anchor was saying. “Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico yesterday after leaving a path of destruction in South Florida. She has been gathering strength due to the extremely warm waters. Katrina is now a category three, with measured winds in excess of 130 miles per hour. The National Weather Service’s Hurricane Center is predicting this storm will keep gathering strength and will be a category four by late tonight. It could well be a category five before it makes landfall on Sunday night.

  “For reference, Hurricane Camille, which decimated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, was a category four when it made landfall. Two hundred and fifty six people died due to the storm surge.”

  Alexa turned off the set. She would be long gone before the storm was within five hundred miles of the coast. She was towel-drying her short hair when she heard a light, but persistent, tapping at her door. Stopping at her purse for her Glock, she put her eye to the peep lens and was met by the sight of Casey West nervously chewing on her bottom lip.

  Alexa returned the gun to her purse, slipped the bolt, and opened the door.

  Casey smiled uncertainly. “Please forgive my intrusion. I know it’s really late…but I was hoping I could talk to you in private.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I heard you say you were staying here.”

  “I didn’t say which room.” Alexa hadn’t moved an inch or changed her facial expression since opening the door. This was a complication she didn’t need, and guests’ room numbers were not supposed to be given out to anybody.

  “I know my uncle well enough to know that he probably told everybody that Gary is a gold digger. Probably said that if there was a kidnapping, Gary staged it himself, or something equally absurd. I know nobody’s looking very hard, or as hard as they should be, and I have to change that.”

  “I understand there was a prenuptial agreement,” Alexa said.

  “There was. But if Gary is alive on Tuesday, he will be presented with a check for twenty-five million dollars.”

  “Come in,” Alexa said.

  10

  When it came to reading people, Alexa Keen’s instincts were like radar. Hard-learned lessons about human behavior had left deep scars on her psyche. She and her younger sister, both products of her dark-skinned mother’s liaisons with white men of dubious reputation, had resided in a series of foster homes in Mississippi. Those many residential assignations had been homes with every sort of person imaginable—some decent, some interested in the accompanying state funds, and a couple of them inhabited by predatory beasts.

  “First off,” Casey said, “Gary did not marry me for my money.”

  Alexa said nothing.

  “When I met Gary, I was staying in New York doing a photography internship with Richard Avedon. That’s when I saw Gary’s play, Trailer Park Tales, which was off-off-Broadway. It was both funny and poignant—a comedy, but tragic, and showed a sensitivity that floored me. Gary is a highly intelligent, very funny, gloriously handsome—a complex individual who tolerates no bullshit. He isn’t impressed by wealth or the people who have and hoard it. He’s into justice for all, culture for the masses, food for the hungry, and affordable health care for the sick. He cries when he sees starving children on television.

  “Despite the differences in our backgrounds, we hit it off. For the first time in my life I felt important—and appreciated for who I really am, on the inside. We talked for hours and hours on the phone and we fell in love like normal people do. With other men I dated, I was never sure it wasn’t my money that interested them—or I was convinced it was. He didn’t even know about my ties to money until after he’d proposed and I’d accepted. He was shocked by it and he actually tried to back out of the commitment because of it. He is a proud man, and he has never once taken advantage of the fact that he can have whatever he desires that my money can buy. He’s never even let me finance a play, even though I’ve begged him to allow me to. He doesn’t spend any of my money on himself. He goes out of his way to ground Deana and me, which is an uphill battle, because I’ve been spoiled rotten since birth. Gary is the best of me. Without him I am just another miserable, shallow rich girl.”

  “Tell me about the prenup,” Alexa said.

  “That’s standard with all marriages in the family. Only a blood LePointe can inherit more than a spousal allowance, sit in control of the foundations, direct the dispersal of interest, or make decisions on grants and investments. Did my uncle imply that if I divorce him, Gary gets nothing?”

  “I got a short-form version. But yes, I got that impression.”

  “What my uncle told you was probably a half-truth to make his personal opinion of Gary valid. It is fact that Gary can’t ever get his hands on any of the LePointe holdings because he isn’t a blood heir. His allowance is two hundred thousand a year, which is only meant to cover his personal expenses. Most of that G
ary gives away. The trust pays our household bills, pays the help, all expenses related to the vehicles and insurances, food, et cetera. There are two separate prenuptial agreements, both of which Gary signed. One never changes. The other runs out on our fifth anniversary and isn’t connected to the LePointes. Five years ago, when I decided to marry Gary against my uncle’s wishes, I had my lawyers draw up a prenup to cover my personal assets. On Tuesday, Gary will get one quarter of everything I have—twenty-five million. It will be his with no strings attached, to do with as he sees fit. Period.”

  “A quarter of your assets.”

  “I had a trust from my maternal grandfather that I could draw living expenses from until I was twenty-five. When I turned twenty-five I inherited half of my mother’s estate. When Deana was born I inherited the remainder. My great-grandfather was Ben McLintock from Houston, Texas. He was one of the early oil wildcatters and buyers of mineral rights in what turned out to be big oil country. He built a real estate empire that spread his oil holdings into shopping centers, office buildings, and housing developments around the country.

  “My mother was one of three children, and her marriage to Curry LePointe was a merger of sorts, but her prenuptial agreement ensured that her inheritance would pass directly to me. Upon the birth of my first child, the rest was transferred to me. When our prenup expires, Gary gets ten percent or twenty-five million dollars. On Tuesday, Gary West will be twice as personally wealthy as my uncle. In the event of my death, Deana and any other of my children will share my estate equally, but Deana alone, being the firstborn, will be entitled to head the LePointe legacy. Barring a total collapse in the world markets, she will someday control a multibillion-dollar fortune.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He’s dead,” Casey said, averting her eyes. “I was four when my parents passed away.”

  Alexa didn’t know what to say. Her mind was running in several directions at once. Based on what Casey had told her, Gary West had no reason to make any waves. In fact, he had twenty-five-million reasons not to do so.