Too Far Gone

by John Ramsey Miller

  The restaurant’s tables held a remarkably varied assortment of customers. Alexa’s eyes rested briefly on four men wearing expensive suits mere feet from a group of commercial fishermen wearing filthy coveralls and greasy-looking baseball caps. Their hands, with fingernails that looked like peanut hulls, gripped cans of cold beer like they were afraid their beverages would flee the table if they didn’t hold them tightly.

  Manseur opened his NOPD shield case so the receptionist alone could see it. While she went to get the waitress who had worked the Wests’ table at lunch the previous day, Manseur and Alexa took a seat at a table near the front.

  The waitress who came to their table wore a name tag that said CINDY. Cindy was a foot too short for her weight and was saved from being homely by the effervescent smile she wore. The uniform consisted of a carpenter’s apron for her pens, tickets, and cash, plus a black T-shirt, dark jeans, and aged running shoes. Alexa noticed that her fingernails were coated in red polish that had been reapplied several times in the way a peeling house might be painted several times without sanding between applications. After the introduction and the obligatory viewing of Manseur’s shield, Cindy’s big brown eyes darted around as if the answer to any questions he might ask her were printed on cue cards scattered about the restaurant.

  “I understand you waited on Gary and Casey West yesterday at lunch. Are you familiar with them?”

  “Sure,” she said. “They don’t ask for me, but if I’m lucky they sit at one of my tables. Their kid’s name is Deana. Mrs. West’s some kind of rich photographer, and he’s like a writer or something. What’d they do?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing,” Manseur said. “Mr. West reported losing a valuable wristwatch and we’re retracing his routine from yesterday.” Alexa had to fight back a smile at the way Manseur changed the lost article from the wallet she had suggested. It was subtle, but told her he felt a need to put his initials on her suggestion to make it his. He was a man after all.

  “Oh, that’s terrible. They’re regulars, every Friday. Yesterday they sat at a table up by the front door, but they don’t have a regular place or anything. They’re really nice and super-good tippers. I didn’t see a watch after they left. I didn’t see him take it off, but it seems to me he usually wears an inexpensive watch. Like a Timex or a Citizen, because we’ve discussed the way, you know, they’re rich, but not flashy. No bling for him.” A look of quiet terror crossed her features. “They don’t think I took it, do they? I would never do something like that.”

  “They didn’t suggest you took it. We think a pickpocket might have. Did the Wests leave together?” Manseur asked.

  Cindy’s brow creased as she contemplated the new question. “No, he left a few minutes before she and their kid did. I’m pretty sure Deana was still eating when he left. You wouldn’t believe how much that little girl eats. Mr. West paid the bill with cash. I know because he tipped me seven dollars and a nickel, which was their change. He always does that—tips the entire amount like that. I remember because it wasn’t very busy around that time, which it usually is on Fridays. But not like Saturdays. The hurricane thing has people jumpy, and I guess most people are putting wood on their windows, gassing up their cars, and stuff.”

  “How did they seem?”

  “Like usual, pretty much. They’re always laughing and joking around and like.” She looked off across the restaurant. “Happy. I mean, why not? They’re good-looking, young, and rich.”

  “Nothing about them yesterday was different?” Alexa asked.

  The waitress looked at her, surprised.

  “You said ‘like usual, pretty much.’ So something was different. What was it?”

  “Well, when I took their orders, she made some comment like, ‘I want to look at the menu,’ and he said, ‘As though there’s some mystery. She wants the gumbo.’ She said, ‘I can order my own food,’ and he said, ‘Excuse me,’ or something like that. Snippy. And anyway, she ended up ordering the gumbo, and they laughed about that. He was right. She always orders a bowl of gumbo and eats only half of it.”

  “After that things were normal?”

  Cindy nodded. “Like always.”

  “So she wasn’t upset when he left?”

  “Not at all,” she answered, glad to be on the positive side of her clients again. “They were talking and laughing like always. I remember thinking what nice people they were. He stood up, they kissed—I remember wishing my husband kissed me like that—and she touched his cheek and watched him all the way out the door. Oh, and he tried to kiss the baby, but she didn’t let him. Gosh, I hope he finds his watch. Anything else?”

  “Thank you, no, Cindy,” Manseur said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Oh,” she said, laughing, “my name’s not Cindy, it’s Nancy. I wear the tag because I don’t want people to know my real name on account of some men can be too friendly and bug me, but I don’t wear my wedding ring because it really cuts down the tips. How skitzed is that? Plus, my husband is the jealous type. Men tip more if they think you’re single. Do you guys want to order anything?”

  “Coffees,” Manseur said, closing the notebook. “Black for me. Alexa? And we’ll be eating breakfast.”

  “Black is fine,” Alexa said, lifting a menu.

  “Right up,” Cindy, who was really Nancy, told them.

  “By the way, Nancy,” Alexa said, “did you notice any odd people in here yesterday? Maybe hanging around outside while the Wests were in here?”

  “Odd people…in here? Throw a rock.” Nancy walked away laughing.

  A minute later, she returned with two mugs of hot coffee and two menus. “I don’t think most people even know who the Wests are. Sometimes people who know them are here and they visit and like that. But not yesterday that I noticed.”

  “Did you see any older green vehicles?” Alexa asked.

  “No. Well, there was a beat-up SUV that I saw drive by about five or six times.”

  “Wouldn’t be an SUV,” Alexa said. SUVs didn’t have glass headlights.

  “Thanks, Nancy.” Manseur smiled. “You’ve been a big help. If you remember anything, please call me.” He gave her one of his cards. Unlike his boss, he only had one kind, with his office phone, fax, and cellular printed on them.

  Nancy tucked the NOPD card into the back pocket of her jeans after reading it. “Is there a reward for this missing watch?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Manseur told her.

  Nancy turned and went back to work.

  “So it sounds like there was serious trouble in paradise,” Alexa said, opening the menu.

  Manseur looked at her with a puzzled expression.

  Alexa laughed. “I doubt their marriage could have survived the gumbo incident.”

  Manseur smiled and shook his head. “Obviously they love each other.”

  “He was abducted,” Alexa said. “There’s not a doubt in my mind. So there’ll be a ransom demand, or he’s dead.”

  “See anything you want to eat?” Manseur asked, opening his menu.

  “Detective Kennedy mentioned the seafood gumbo,” Alexa said. “Best on the Lakefront, he said.”

  Manseur said, “Breakfast of champions.”

  20

  Betty Crocker felt like an idiot as she followed Parnell’s wide backside through the weeds and around the stunted trees and bushes. She had to fight laughing out loud, because the fool kept waving his hand around in the air, gesturing commands. The trouble was Parnell hadn’t told her what his signals meant. As far as she could tell, he could have been saying anything from “Follow me” to “Gal, I’ve got me some itchy-ass hemorrhoids.”

  She was carrying the video camera and was tempted to film him from behind, but she was afraid she’d erase the hulk toting up into his private dwelling that sheet-wrapped object Parnell said was probably a gator with its tail chopped off.

  Wildlife and Fisheries Officer-in-Training Betty Crocker followed the wide-ass fool Elliot Parnell o
nto the blistered-wood dock that anchored the floating-on-rusting-oil-drums, crooked little shack. Betty was careful to avoid the pool of crusted blood that looked like a pizza-sized scab that had flies scrambling over it and buzzing in the warm still air. On the dock, just underneath the tin porch roof, bowls of rusted fishing hooks and all manner of spring-loaded traps and empty-halfway-up scum-coated milk jugs were stacked helter-skelter on chicken-wire crab traps. The shack’s windows were covered inside with burlap sheets.

  Parnell was sweating, so his shirt looked like he’d been juicing oranges using his armpits. The gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, in his hand was rock-steady. He reached out and slowly turned the shack’s doorknob.

  “It’s not locked.” Officer Parnell’s voice creaked just like the hinges on the door.

  Pushing it open, Parnell looked inside. He took a step into the shack and his right foot crashed through rotten boards to his left knee. His right leg folded, causing him to bang his knee.

  “Sheee-IT!” he bellowed.

  Betty stared at him, trying not to laugh at what felt like a pratfall, but wasn’t.

  “My damn leg’s caught in something. Shit! What was that!?”

  Betty set the camera down and grabbed his left arm and pulled him up while he used his bent leg for additional leverage. When his leg came out of the hole, there was a large band of something wrapped around his boot. To Betty’s horror, it flopped and writhed hideously, then fell back into the hole. “Moccasin! It was a cottonmouth!” he screamed.

  “You git bit?” she asked.

  “Can’t bite through my boots. It was sliding all over my foot. If I hadn’t been wearing my snake-proofs, I’d be good as dead.” Parnell sat back in the doorway, pulling off his boot. Using his fingers as well as his eyes, he explored his naked fish-belly-white ankle with veins in it looking like blue lightning strikes.

  “It was a damned booby trap!” He leaned forward and looked down. “Two of the biggest cottonmouth bastards I ever saw! Christ almighty.” He laughed nervously as he stood and, holding on to the doorjamb, tested the floor beyond the rotten spot. When he found solid flooring, he moved into the room. “Careful, Betty. Wait a second.”

  “I don’t want none of them snakes,” she said, watching him lift a hinged plywood panel that he flipped over to cover the trap. She walked in and let her eyes grow accustomed to the dim interior and her nose to the remarkable stench comprised of God knew what all. The room was as cluttered as a junkyard storeroom and she knew she would have to be careful in case there were more booby traps, or snakes.

  “Smells like a crack house,” she muttered.

  “You been in a crack house?” Parnell smarted off.

  Her eyes found a cot with a sheet covering something that appeared to be hiding a more human than alligator form beneath.

  “Careful,” Parnell warned as she approached the cot. He was aiming his revolver at the still form.

  “Your alligator’s breathing,” Betty said. She leaned out, reached down, and threw back the sheet.

  “Good God!” she said as air rushed from her lungs. “It’s a man. He’s been beat to shit.”

  “You sure he’s alive?” Parnell said.

  “Put that gun away,” Betty said after noticing Parnell was still aiming his gun at the poor man. She felt the guy’s neck. “He’s got a pulse.”

  “We need to call this in to the sheriff.” Parnell was looking around, probably hoping to find a fresh alligator skin or two in the mess, because that was the kind of prick Parnell was. A half-dead man and he’s still looking for some evidence on Leland Ticholet, Betty thought. Just itching to write a damn citation, like he was paid by the piece.

  “I need something to wash off his face,” she said. “Call for help.”

  As she started looking for some water, she noticed Parnell slapping at his belt. “My radio,” he said.

  “You must have left it on the boat.”

  “No, I think I set it down when I was looking at the video out there. Go get it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in charge, Officer Crocker. Go get the radio.”

  “You going to help this man while I’m gone, or search for alligator skins? He’s your responsibility. He got to be cleaned up—top to bottom.”

  “Okay,” Parnell said, “I’ll go.”

  “And bring the first-aid kit,” she said. She would have bet that Parnell had never changed a baby diaper, much less cleaned up a grown man.

  Betty found a mason jar and filled it with questionable water from the faucet—rainwater that came from the cistern beside the cabin. For several minutes, she worked to clean the man’s head wound and soften the dried blood so she could wipe it off. He was in his thirties, she figured. His long blond hair was matted with blood. He opened his mouth and said something that sounded to Betty like “Ca…zah?”

  “I’m here to help you, sir.” She lifted his head, put the jar to his lips, and poured some water in, which he managed to swallow. He opened his eyes and she saw that the right pupil was a tight pinpoint set in a bright blue iris; the other was fully dilated. Her mother was a nurse’s aide and she had told Betty what different-sized eyes meant. “You going to be just good as new. Betty gone get you to the hospital, and they’ll fix your concussion.”

  Finally she heard the door open and Parnell’s lazy ass coming back. He stopped just behind her.

  “He’s going to be all right, I think. He’s breathing, and took some water. He got himself a concussion. Did you bring the first-aid kit?”

  When Parnell didn’t say anything, she turned and looked up. Betty’s eyes went first to the face—the features covered with tiny red droplets, the forehead filled with crisscrossed scars. She let her gaze shift downward to take in the gore-streaked length of pipe clenched tightly in Leland Ticholet’s large hand, inches from her face. Betty felt her bladder give and the warm wetness as it flowed between her legs and pooled around her knees.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

  21

  Despite the number of other boxes in Manseur’s office, he pointed to the one that had arrived while they’d been out of the office. “The LePointe files.”

  Alexa was closest, so she picked it up. The cardboard box was roughly the size typing paper came in, but with flaps that were secured with thin cord wrapped under hard plastic disks the size of quarters. On the end and top someone had used a permanent marker to write the subjects’ names, a pair of consecutive case numbers, and the date of the crime. A bright orange sticker that said CLOSED had been added. As she lifted the box to the conference table, Alexa was struck by how remarkably light it was.

  While Manseur looked on, she unwound the cording and opened the flaps. Inside there were file folders, one tabbed with the name Curry LePointe and the second with the name Rebecca LePointe. There were no more than ten sheets of paper in each file, which consisted of the medical examiner’s report on the cause of the deaths; a sketch of the crime scene by homicide detectives, indicating the locations of the bodies; and photocopied pages of the detectives’ spiral case notebooks.

  “This is a very thin case file,” Alexa said. “Where are the autopsy pictures, the crime-scene photos?”

  “Should all be in there,” Manseur said.

  “Well, they aren’t. So where would the rest be?”

  “No idea. Maybe it got misfiled in another case box, lost, or stolen. Taken as a souvenir or something. Those were different days for the department, to say the least.”

  Alexa was familiar enough with the New Orleans PD’s reputation for corruption and criminality that came to a head in the early nineties, when the FBI came in and arrested a large number of cops, a lot of whom went to jail, two ending up on death row. The FBI had almost taken over the department, and state troopers had been used to patrol the streets alongside the cops who hadn’t been arrested in the initial days of the crackdown. It was one of the reasons New Orleans cops didn’t care for the FBI—like they needed mo
re reasons than the cops in most other cities had collected in their own day-to-day dealings with the Bureau.

  Alexa held up the detectives’ report. “Investigating detectives were a Harvey Suggs and Robert Bryce. They still around?”

  “Both are dead,” Manseur said.

  “Wasn’t Suggs your predecessor? Wasn’t he murdered when Winter Massey…”

  Manseur nodded. “Suggs was beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat by a crooked businessman named Jerry Bennett, who murdered a judge and his wife. Bryce was dead before I got here—killed by Suggs—and totally crooked.”

  “So, the files could have been sanitized by those two detectives for some reason.”

  Manseur nodded, took some of the papers from her, and thumbed through them, reading. “Reason would be money.”

  Alexa said, “The patrolman who answered the alarm that night was named Kenneth Decell. He suffered an injury when he disarmed the perpetrator, Sibby Danielson. The name Decell seems familiar to me.”

  “Decell was at the Wests’ house last night when we got there. Red-haired fellow in his early fifties. Been a private detective since he retired about ten years ago. Mostly rich people uptown call him when they have family that get themselves entangled with issues of the unpleasant type. Police problems, runaway or out-of-control kids or spouses, extortion threats, cheating husbands or wives, background checks on people they are curious about. Security issues.”