Too Far Gone

by John Ramsey Miller

  Alexa left Sibby’s new cell without searching.

  Maybe Veronica’s call to Decell had caused him to warn Fugate to vacate, to move her prisoner. The house sure felt abandoned. As if in answer to the question, Alexa heard, from the back of the house, the loud creaking of a floorboard, followed by the unmistakable sound of a door snapping closed. She pulled out her Glock and held it aimed at the ceiling. “FBI! Come out, I have a gun!”

  Getting no response, Alexa lowered the barrel and moved to the swinging kitchen door. Heart pounding from an adrenaline rush, her mouth dry. Breathing slowly, Alexa steadied herself. If she’s armed and it’s between the two of us, I’m the one going home and she’s the one going to the morgue zipped in a bag.

  Taking a position of cover behind the jamb, Alexa pushed the door open with her left foot and followed her gun into the kitchen, pivoting and taking in the entire room. The putrid stench of decomposition hit her like the wave of heat from an oven door.

  The kitchen and dining room were combined in one large space. There were two partially open doors—a pantry and a broom closet—as well as a third door, this one closed, beside the refrigerator, and a back door with glass panels. Buzzing black flies performed acrobatic maneuvers in the still air over the garbage can.

  A bucket filled with rose-colored bleach water rested against the back door, which was locked; the dead bolt was missing the key required to open it. The window over the sink was cracked open, its screen missing, which was obviously how the flies got in.

  The flies were gathering on the garbage can. Thanks to its partly open lid, flies crawled in and out freely. Pressing her foot on the pedal to fully open it, Alexa saw a paper sack filled with shrimp husks, the source of the stench.

  Stiff spaghettilike strands of a cloth mop filled the sink, its handle resting on the counter. The message machine—also on the counter, beside the telephone—was blinking the number eighteen; the open trapdoors showed her that both its cassettes had been removed. From the time she had called and gotten Nurse Fugate’s outgoing message, someone had removed the tapes in the ten minutes since.

  Alexa kept her attention focused on the one door that was closed. Whoever was in the house had to have pulled that door shut from inside, and was hiding behind it.

  The floor creaked as she moved carefully to the side of the door. “Nurse Fugate! FBI! I have a gun, come out now!”

  Using her left hand, Alexa twisted the knob, pulled the door open, and was surprised to find a set of steep stairs leading down into the darkness. She knew that basements were rare in New Orleans because of the water table. Bodies were buried aboveground in crypts or inside concrete vaults, because a casket buried belowground would, with the first rain, pop up out of the ground like a surfacing submarine.

  “Ms. Fugate! You need to come up here. I need to ask you some questions.” Like why you’re running a private insane asylum.

  She didn’t see a light switch where it should have been located, so Alexa figured the switch for the light must be downstairs. There wasn’t one good reason to go downstairs alone, and a hundred reasons not to. Even if Fugate was down there with Sibby Danielson, how would Alexa justify coming into the woman’s home and pointing a gun at her? That she’d sweat over later. Alexa, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do!

  She reached her left hand into her purse for the small SureFire flashlight. “I said come on up!”

  Alexa took a tentative step down, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it down the steep stairs. She was assailed by flies swarming up into the kitchen, and put her hand up to protect her face. There was a creaking noise behind her, and before she could turn, someone shouldered the door hard, slamming it against her and knocking her down the staircase—her left side, her hip, and her arm hitting the edges.

  She saw a flash of light when her head struck the floor. The flashlight and the Glock landed noisily on the concrete floor.

  She blinked her eyes slowly, stunned. She knew, lying there, unsure whether she was seriously injured, that Fugate or Sibby must have been hiding in the pantry or broom closet, and she cursed herself for not looking inside them. She had driven that person to the kitchen, where there was no escape without the back door key, so they had shut the basement door and had hidden in one of the tiny spaces.

  Lying there dazed, Alexa distinctly heard the skeleton key turning—the door into the basement being locked.

  She listened to footsteps moving out of the kitchen and down the hallway. When the front door slammed shut, it sounded a million miles away.

  Alexa rolled her head and saw the flashlight a few feet away from her, illuminating a circle of brick wall next to the base of an old furnace. Flies swarmed in the beam. There was an odor of blood and decomposition down here that wasn’t coming from a pile of shrimp.

  Lying still for a few seconds taking inventory, Alexa moved her arm at the shoulder, then the elbow, the wrist, and finished by wiggling her fingers and making a fist. It was painful, but nothing was broken except her self-respect.

  She sat up slowly, wincing. Her head was sore, bruised, but not wet, so she wasn’t bleeding. Her hip felt numb and she knew that she was going to be bruised from her ankle to her shoulder.

  Alexa crawled over to the flashlight, and picking it up, she swung the circle of light around to locate her handgun, illuminating as she did a shelf where ancient spiderwebs covered dust-caked jars of canned fruit and pickles so old the tin lids were painted with the white powder of oxidation.

  She shifted the light and saw a single, unlaced white orthopedic shoe with a brick-colored sole, and beyond it the foot it belonged to, looking like an overstuffed sausage. The skin on the leg looked like sun-dried earth. The other shoe was still on its owner’s other foot.

  Alexa steeled herself before raising the circle of light.

  A female corpse sat on the concrete floor, her shoulders against the wall, legs splayed open. Her open left hand rested beside her leg as though positioned to catch a flipped coin. Her right hand gripped an unusually large aluminum meat-tenderizing hammer that was caked with dried blood, bone chips, hairs, and blackened brain tissue.

  Alexa had seen all manner of dead bodies in various stages of mutilation and decomposition, but nothing more horrific than what she was sharing the small basement with.

  She raised the beam, whimpered involuntarily, as tears filled her eyes.

  The woman’s head had been smashed in with such force that the top of her skull was indented in the way of a rotten rubber doll’s head that some child had pushed her thumbs into and peeled open like an orange. The froglike eyes appeared to be coming out of her cheeks. The open mouth was so completely filled with blackened tongue and animated larvae that the jaw was resting against her chest.

  Alexa scooted back against the furnace and, using it for support, made it to her feet.

  Based on the shoes, Alexa assumed that this horror was what remained of Dorothy Fugate, since the alternative was that the nurse had gone crazy and beat Sibby to death with a meat hammer, which seemed highly unlikely. Although why Sibby would have positioned the corpse that way was a mystery best left to psychiatrists. Maybe it was some sort of humor springing from an insane brain.

  Using the flashlight, Alexa located and tugged on the string to turn on the overhead bulb. Flies reacting to the sudden light filled the room like a cloud. Alexa located her gun and stuck it into her purse’s holster compartment.

  Alexa was trembling. She wanted only to get out of there, into breathable air, away from the corpse. She heard a noise and realized that it was the sound of her own whimpering as she moved as quickly as she could up the narrow stairs. Peering into the keyhole, she saw that the key was no longer in the lock. Her flashlight caught a glint of the skeleton key, which had been pushed under the door.

  Sibby knocks me down into hell and then is thoughtful enough to leave me the key before she flees the house?

  Alexa opened the door and after she slammed it shut she leaned with her bac
k against it and took her first deep breaths since she’d been pitched down the steps. Then she started crying, overwhelmed by the embarrassment of being taken by surprise, the pain of the fall, what she had seen. Her whole body was racked by the sobs as she fought to regain her composure.

  Her crying turned into the hysterical laughter of someone who understood, at a whole new level, what a blessing life was. She wiped her eyes and headed for the front door.

  37

  If she had been a smoker, Alexa would have lit up and gone through an entire pack. At the gate, she looked in both directions down the still street. Sibby Danielson was gone.

  Reaching into her purse, Alexa found her cell phone.

  “Yeah,” Manseur answered.

  “I’m at Fugate’s.”

  “She know where Sibby is?”

  “I couldn’t ask. She’s dead.”

  “You sure it’s her?”

  “Reasonably. I mean, the corpse is a bottle blonde, and I don’t have the slightest idea what Sibby looks like.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Somebody played patty-whack on her skull. Best I can tell from looking at her and based on the odor and the insects’ labors, she’s been dead a few days. But Sibby was here until a few minutes ago.”

  “Danielson did it?”

  “She didn’t type out a confession, but based on the fact that it’s pretty clear she’s been staying here in the house, and given her track record for anti-social and impulsive behavior, it’s a good bet it wasn’t the mailman.”

  “Don’t do anything. I’m on my way.”

  “I think I’ve done quite enough for the time being,” Alexa said after she hung up.

  It appeared to Alexa that Sibby Danielson had killed her jailer and then stayed in the house. Maybe, Alexa thought, the woman hadn’t had any place to go. Most people, even insane ones, would have left the scene of their crime before now, especially considering the smell.

  Alexa decided that while she was waiting for Manseur, she would take a look around and see what she could discover about Sibby. She was no longer worried about not having a search warrant to enter—the odor of decaying flesh wafting through the open front door had given her enough probable cause. Manseur could collect evidence since it was a homicide.

  The pill bottles that had been with the steel box on the bed were gone, but the box was where it had been earlier. Had Sibby stopped escaping long enough to pick up the bottles because she needed to take the medication? If she’d been medicated, would she have killed Fugate?

  In the drawer in Fugate’s bedside table, Alexa found a polished wooden box with delicate ivory inlay work on its lid, which she opened, to discover a stack of snapshots. She flipped up the prints by their edges so she wouldn’t disturb the existing fingerprints, or make new ones. Despite the very heavy makeup and teased blond hair, the buxom Dorothy Fugate had been attractive in her younger years. In a picture probably taken at her graduation from nursing school, she looked more like Jayne Mansfield playing a nurse than a real one. As time had passed she had become somewhat pudgy, and, though still attractive, her features had softened with age, her body rounding itself off. The hellish effigy in the basement bore no resemblance to the woman in the pictures, but Alexa had no doubt this was Sibby Danielson’s keeper.

  Alexa lifted the mattress and found nothing. There was nothing of interest in the drawers but a few pieces of fairly expensive-looking gold jewelry.

  Looking into Fugate’s closet, she lifted the fallen nurse uniforms and noticed that one of the wide floorboards wasn’t flush. She raised it, to find a secret compartment, within which was a lone wooden cigar box. Inside, there were more pictures. Again being careful in handling them, she flipped through them one by one.

  There was a snapshot of a small boy and a young girl attempting to pull a red wagon with an adult laughing man seated in it. Another seemed to be a fairly recent shot of Dorothy and the same grown man, whose hair had turned gray. There was such a marked similarity in their features, Alexa thought he was a relative of Fugate’s.

  Another picture showed a stern-faced Dorothy standing beside a short male teenager dressed in a military school’s uniform who stared blankly at the camera. The young man could be a relative or a friend’s child and he might even be the wagon-pulling child. He had a round face, which matched his body, small eyes, and his fat lips added to the smirk he wore.

  The other snapshots were of Nurse Fugate with hospital staff or civilians, taken at various times over the years. There were several shots of small groups that included Dorothy, some of which also contained Dr. William LePointe. The next-to-last photo in the stack was of Dorothy in her starched uniform standing alone with LePointe at a party. It was a recent photo, and Alexa thought it might have been her or his going-away party, because there was a partially disassembled slab cake on a table in the background. Dorothy was smiling broadly, while Dr. LePointe looked like he was about to have a tooth extracted instead of his picture taken. In the background, Veronica Malouf was in profile and was obviously talking to someone out of frame.

  The final shot was the stunner. It was a Polaroid taken from the hallway into the bedroom through a partly opened door. The image showed a naked man with wet and carefully combed silver hair standing in front of a full-length mirror, obviously admiring his body, which was nothing to write home about. Well, he was naked but for the black socks held up by elastic bands. “Jesus,” Alexa murmured. Dr. William LePointe’s appearance, aside from being naked in Dorothy Fugate’s bedroom, might be the key to some answers. Unless he had been showering at Fugate’s house for some innocent reason, Fugate and LePointe appeared to be more than coworkers.

  Alexa put the cigar box on the dresser and replaced the board in the closet floor. She noticed that there was a smudge on the outside of the box, and it appeared to have been made by a bloody finger.

  She sat in the living room to wait for Manseur. She had no physical description of Sibby nor any idea how she was dressed. Let Manseur’s locals handle this. She pictured LePointe’s smug face and felt a flush of anger. Controlled through modern medicine, she thought to herself. You really flubbed this one, Doctor. Now Dorothy Fugate is dead and Sibby killed her for some reason we’ll probably never know. I guess they’ll round her up and send her back to River Run.

  When Manseur came in, Alexa led him back to the kitchen, letting him stamp alone down the stairs. She’d already seen more than enough of the basement.

  Manseur spent five minutes downstairs, and when he re-emerged he was holding a handkerchief to his nose.

  “I’ll never get used to that smell,” he declared. “You okay?”

  “Sibby shoved me down those stairs,” Alexa snapped. “Can we go outside before I faint?”

  “Tell me everything,” he said as they walked.

  “I knocked and got no answer. I tried the door and it opened. I smelled decomposition and entered to investigate. While searching for the source of the odor, I heard a door closing. I came into the kitchen, and the basement door was the only one that was closed. While I was shining my light down there, somebody—whom I assume was Sibby—knocked me down the steps.”

  “Solid statement. Did you get a good look at her?”

  “No. The basement door was between us.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “I’m just assuming it, based on the fact that she’s been staying in Nurse Fugate’s guest cell,” Alexa said.

  “Christ,” Manseur said. “This is a grand mess.”

  “There’s a cigar box with a bloody fingerprint on it that was under the closet floor in Fugate’s room. Sibby might have taken something of hers out of it at some point. There’s a metal lockbox on Fugate’s bed that was full of tranquilizers and anti-psychotic drugs prescribed to Fugate by Dr. LePointe. Sibby took them when she split.”

  “Alexa. Only you saw them, but she took them. Maybe she’ll have them with her when we find her and we can use them somehow to question Le
Pointe. We have to be damn sure of something before we accuse him of anything. Very, very damn sure.”

  Alexa nodded.

  “You’re lucky she just pushed you down the stairs,” he said. “That sure isn’t the worst she’s capable of.”

  “Obviously not.”

  Manseur said, “Here’s the deal. I’ll handle this as an anonymous-reported death and keep you out of it. So, how do you think it went down?”

  “I think Fugate was attacked in the kitchen probably with that meat hammer and dragged down to the basement, because the kitchen and the stairs were cleaned up. You know, something about Sibby doing this doesn’t quite make sense,” Alexa said.

  “Since when do crazy people make sense?” he asked.

  “Okay, she loses it, beats Fugate to death, then drags the body down there to keep it from being found, which means she knew killing her was wrong. I wouldn’t imagine an inner-voice-minding psychopath would bother to mop up. And there’s no blood spatter on the walls and ceiling. That would seem to indicate Fugate was first assaulted upstairs, maybe was struck just hard enough to knock her out. Sibby calmly drags her down the stairs, props her against the wall, and then does the real damage with the mallet and puts it in her hand for some reason.”

  “Maybe her rage grew as it went on,” Manseur conjectured. “Or she was staging it as a suicide.”

  “Funny. To be released by the committee, Sibby had to be cured. Twenty-six years rocking away and suddenly she does this. It doesn’t feel right. And why would she mop up?” Alexa asked.