Upside Down

by John Ramsey Miller

  Manseur read over his casebook to see if he had missed anything. He stopped at notes he'd made while interviewing a girl from the bar across the street who said she remembered the man because “that white cowboy hat and his mustache made him look like Wyatt Earp.” Manseur looked at the list of found objects again. There was no cowboy hat.

  While there were no cars driving by, the detective hurried out into the intersection, knelt, and scanned under the cars parked on the street. He spotted the hat under a Nissan truck and rushed over to it. Reaching under the vehicle, he captured the pale beaver-skin hat by its brim and pulled it out. Other than being soiled from its journey down the street and smeared with grease along the crown, it was a cleaning and a steam-blocking away from looking new.

  The decorative band was a simple gray cloth ribbon. As he inspected it, Manseur noticed the slightest bulge in the seam. He peeled back the band and removed a plastic disk that looked like the head of a thumbtack with a loop of fine wire sticking out from it.

  He didn't have any idea what the gizmo was, but he took an evidence bag from his coat pocket and dropped the object in. One thing he did know was that it hadn't come with the hat from the Stetson Company, and the fine wire looked suspiciously like an antenna.

  Before he left the scene, Manseur put the Stetson in his car trunk and slipped the evidence bag into his inside jacket pocket.

  27

  Faith Ann locked her bike up in the tall bushes next to a tennis club two blocks away from her house and, careful to walk quietly, cut through the basketball court, stopping at the twelve-foot hurricane fence behind her house. She waited in the dark for fifteen minutes, listening intently for the sound of anybody who might be lurking in wait. After she was sure there was nobody in the rear, she slipped under the base, where there was enough play to allow her to bow out the mesh. Two doors down, her neighbor's dog started barking its fool head off.

  She crept to the house, slipped under it, and crawled to her bunker. Faith Ann took off her backpack and placed it against the wall. Taking the flashlight with her, she crawled out of the bunker and checked for cops in the front and side yards. Satisfied, she hurried back to the rear panel that swung out, climbed out from under the house, and went to the back door. She tried the knob and found that it was locked. Reaching into her shirt, she pulled out her neck chain, on which she wore her house key. Carefully she unlocked the deadbolt, eased the door open, slipped inside, and gently closed it.

  The familiar smell of the house soothed the sharp edges of her fear. She didn't dare turn on any lights, but she could see well enough to navigate because of a night-light in the hallway of the shotgun-style three-bedroom house.

  White-hot fear gripped her again, though, when she turned on the flashlight and looked into her room. It was in absolute shambles. Instead of a few clothes lying on the floor, which was often the case, all of the clothes she owned had been dumped from the drawers, themselves tossed around the room. Her mattress and box springs had been flipped off the frame, her clothes jerked from the closet, the plastic hangers still inside them. Glass from the broken mirror and from shattered picture frames glistened faintly from the layers of clothing. Oh, Mama, why would they make such a mess?

  She spotted a cassette under her chest of drawers, the boom box shattered as if someone had stomped it. There was no label on it, but she knew that it was a tape of poems that she had written and her mother had put to music. Kimberly had often played it to hear her reading her goofy poems in a serious voice with god-awful icky romantic music in the background. She slipped the treasured item into her pocket, fighting back tears.

  This chaos erased any notion she'd harbored that she could stay there. She scooped up another hooded Tulane sweatshirt and her pillow. She clicked off the flashlight.

  In the kitchen she felt her way along the counter and took the scissors from the knife block. Kimberly had bought them from an eager salesman who'd demonstrated them by cutting a copper penny around the edge until he had formed a makeshift corkscrew out of it. She slipped them into her back pocket.

  She went into the hall bathroom and closed the door. There was no window in there, so it was safe to turn on the light.

  They had messed up that room, too. The floor was littered with hair rollers, towels, washcloths, and brushes, and they had thrown things from the medicine cabinet and the closet into the tub, breaking some of the glass bottles. Suddenly sick to her stomach, Faith Ann dropped to her knees and vomited into the toilet bowl.

  Standing, she looked in the mirror and was startled by her own reflection. Her face was streaked with dirt, so she washed it. Her hair was a tangled mess. She looked down in the tub at the empty box that had contained the electric clippers that her mother had used to trim their poodle Luther's fur. Luther had wandered into the street and got himself killed weeks before they'd moved to New Orleans. Kimberly had kept the clippers promising they'd get another dog eventually. Faith Ann pulled off her sweatshirt, put a towel around her shoulders, and plugged the clippers into the outlet.

  Taking a deep breath, she put the buzzing contraption under her hair at the base of her skull and slowly brought it straight up, stopping at the crown. Circling her head, Faith Ann repeated the upward strokes until only the hair on the top of her head was still long. Gathering the remaining hair together, and twisting it so she could hold it up, she was pleased that the plastic gap in the blades had left her hair a uniform one half of an inch on the sides and in the back. With only a vague idea of what a boy's haircut should look like, she set the clippers aside, got the pair of scissors from the dog-grooming box, and started cutting her way through the rope of red hair where it entered her fist.

  After a few minutes hard at work with the scissors, Faith Ann figured she'd best stop where she was. Carefully she gathered up all the long strands of hair she could find in the sink, left on the towel and from the floor, and put them in the toilet. It took two flushes to clear the bowl. Turning on the tap, she carefully washed the shorter bits of hair down the sink.

  As Faith Ann studied herself in the mirror, she fought back tears as she imagined how horrified her mother would be at the sight of her daughter looking like a baby chicken.

  28

  Marta and Arturo sat in her Lincoln Town Car, parked across the street from the Porter house. Marta was certain the Porter girl would return home, because she, like other normal children, lacked the skills to survive outside what was familiar to her. The kid had run straight to her comfort zone immediately after leaving her mother's office. Maybe she had seen the cops waiting here, but if she had, where would she have gone? Best the cops could discover, Faith Ann Porter didn't have any close friends.

  There was no choice but to sit and wait like hunters in a blind. If the cops spotted the girl, they'd call the two detectives downtown and they'd call Arturo and Marta. Problem was that there was no obvious trail to follow, no list of friends and associates. Marta glanced at the sleeping Arturo and could see the golden crucifix through his open shirt.

  Marta thought religion was candy for superstitious idiots. She couldn't stand nuns or priests, crucifixes, statues, or paintings of the Blessed Mother or of Jesus with His cut-out heart suspended in front of His chest. The only thing the Catholic Church had ever done for Marta was to use an ancient padlock on their poorbox. Marta had learned to pick it by trial and error—finally succeeding when she bent an ice pick tip between two bricks and used it like a key.

  As a child, Marta had lived by her wits and her ability to successfully read people and situations. She had learned her lessons by trial and error, and by observation. She'd watched foraging raccoons and seen how they worked tirelessly to figure out how to get to sources of food that people had done their best to keep from them. Because the raccoons didn't understand people and were greedy, the animals left a big mess, so the people they'd outsmarted always figured out a new way to thwart further looting. For several years she had robbed the poorbox of its offerings, never taking more than a sm
all percentage at a time. Picking that first padlock took the patience and ingenuity of a raccoon. Like the animals, Marta knew if she were found out the priests would change the lock to thwart her.

  Marta had learned that often when a job went this wrong, somebody got caught, and then that somebody talked. Once people like Jerry Bennett started trying to save their own skins, they'd throw out every name they could remember to the cops.

  Normally, as a matter of self-preservation, she would have already killed Bennett for his stupidity. Unfortunately, since this involved Arturo, she had amended her normal rules. She had to get the tape, which tied Arturo into this. And she would make sure there was no evidence in Bennett's possession that connected Arturo to any other wet work. Finding that out would only require having Mr. Bennett alone for a short time.

  She had two methods of getting information out of a man. One was by using her sex. The other way, which involved her other skills, was infinitely faster and far more palatable.

  29

  Sean had made Winter's travel arrangements, so even though the plane was only half filled with passengers he flew first class. By the same token, he would be staying at a luxurious hotel. Left to his own devices, he would have flown coach and stayed at the first motel he saw. The truth of it was that nothing mattered but the task awaiting him in New Orleans. It was a bonus that he knew the city, had once been a resident, so he wouldn't need maps.

  Winter spent the entire flight deep in black-cloud thought. He was in a dangerous mental place, suppressing an anger as intense as any he had ever felt. The closer the jet drew to New Orleans, the farther it was from his family and the blacker his thoughts became. How had this horror happened? Who was responsible? How would he deal with whoever was responsible when he got to them? Could he find Faith Ann?

  Never had his job felt like a more futile enterprise. No matter how hard lawmen worked, seriously twisted people popped up faster than they could be chased down and dealt with. He was happy to let those who still believed they could win a lasting victory have it all to themselves. He would be content to simply protect his own.

  At the end of his flight, Winter rented a gray sedan. After leaving the interstate and taking a couple of wrong turns because his mind was running in ten directions at once, he found a place to park on Tulane Avenue, a block from the hospital.

  Charity Hospital was a concrete building constructed by the WPA during the Depression. The state-supported hospital owed its founding to infamous Governor Huey P. Long, whose philosophy, before his assassination in 1936, had been to give the common man what the rich had always enjoyed—or more likely just to convince the poor guys that such was his intention.

  As he entered the building, Winter immediately spotted Nicky Green standing alone reading a folded newspaper. The private detective was easy to spot, since he was bald and wore a dark red leisure suit adorned with yellow piping and a cowboy hat. A walking cane leaned against his leg, a toothpick was clenched between his front teeth. Green glanced up, saw Winter, and folded the newspaper.

  “Nicky?”

  “You must be Winter.”

  “I am. It's a pleasure to meet you.” Winter offered his hand and forced himself to smile.

  Green gripped Winter's hand and shook it vigorously. “I been waiting for you to show up. The sons of bitches won't tell me what color the sky is.”

  “And Millie?”

  “Morgue. Kimberly Porter's there too. Thank God Millie didn't suffer. The initial impact killed her. I expect they'd want to be buried in Texas with their people, but I don't reckon it's up to me to make a decision like that. I know there are cousins all over Texas, but I don't know any of them by name. I reckon somebody will have to look through the Porter house or something to find names.”

  Winter didn't know of any close relatives of either Hank or Millie, aside from Kimberly and Faith Ann. “I expect we can wait to see what Hank wants to do,” he replied.

  “I sure hope you're right. I should have told them I was related, but I didn't.”

  “Let me see what I can do about getting us in,” Winter said. He went to the kiosk and gave the woman the administrator's name along with his own. She handed him a laminated red pass and told him that a doctor would meet him just outside the intensive care unit.

  “I'll need one for Mr. Green,” he told her. The receptionist eyed Nicky suspiciously, called someone, and gave Winter a normal white visitor's badge from a box on the desk for Nicky. Winter and Nicky walked to the elevator bank.

  “They think you're family?”

  “My wife has a way with people,” Winter said truthfully.

  The doctor was waiting at the double doors outside the ICU. He shook hands with Winter and Nicky.

  Winter was glad the doctor used language he could follow without having a medical degree. “First of all, it's a miracle that Mr. Trammel is still alive. He is so broken up inside by the impact that we're forced to keep him in a drug-induced coma. The best we can tell from the tests we can safely perform, he has multiple fractured bones, most of his organs are certainly bruised, he has a serious concussion, and two vertebrae in his neck are broken. There's no massive internal bleeding that would call for opening him up. There's brain swelling we're dealing with, and we have no idea yet how the pressure will affect him down the road. If we do anything in the next forty-eight hours, it will only be because it is absolutely necessary to save his life.”

  “You mean like he might be a vegetable?” Nicky asked.

  “I won't sugarcoat Mr. Trammel's condition. He could remain in a coma even after we try to bring him out, or have a stroke at any moment. Any number of things could bring about his death.”

  “We'd like to see him,” Winter said.

  The doctor handed them masks, and they slipped them on and followed him toward Hank's cubicle. Except for a symphony of machines, the ICU unit was as quiet as a chapel. A frail man who looked like he should be in a hospital bed of his own was seated by the bed of an elderly woman. He nodded impassively to the three men as they passed.

  The rooms were arranged around a nurse's station so the medical staff could sit there and see each of the patients. The rooms were without windows or front walls. In the unlikely event that privacy was necessary, a curtain could be pulled.

  What Winter saw lying in the bed broke his heart. Hank's swollen face had no more surface depth than a pizza—the texture of his skin was like the inside of a grapefruit after the pulp had been eaten. A plastic tube entered the islandlike tip of his nose. An I.V. delivered clear liquid to a needle taped to the back of his hand while cords carried electric impulses of information up into the monitoring equipment. The trademark mustache, if it still existed, was covered by the tape that held a breathing tube in Hank's mouth. His legs were shrouded in clear plastic braces that inflated and deflated every few seconds to keep blood clots from forming.

  “Hang in there, Hank,” Winter said softly. Beneath the calm words, anger boiled inside him. The taste of bile filled his mouth. Hank could die, and he was afraid of the hole that would leave in his life. When his own father had died, Winter had felt the sort of relief one gets at the end of a grueling weight-lifting session. James Massey had abandoned his family and had been living with a barfly in a flophouse in West Memphis, Arkansas, when he died of cirrhosis. Winter had only known Hank for seven years, but their relationship felt as if it had lasted a lifetime. Winter had transferred to Hank the affection his father had rejected, and Hank had treated him like the son he had lost.

  He put his fingertips against Hank's shoulder. “Hank, you just get well. Nicky and I are going to take care of everything else. I promise you that.”

  30

  Assumption Parish, Louisiana

  Each time the battered pickup truck hit a low spot, a great gout of brown water erupted into the air and a wave of slippery mud covered the windshield of the Blazer with the light bar on its roof. The wipers could only swipe a couple of times before the truck launched the next curtai
n of mud. Sheriff Toliver cursed, and pumped at the washer knob until the reservoir was empty of cleaning fluid. The road looked as though great herds of feral pigs had rooted in it. In places, it came within inches of the sharply sloped bayou bank.

  The sheriff looked up in his rearview and saw that the other county car, a prowler, was staying far enough back not to be splashed by his vehicle. His wife, belted into the passenger seat, kept telling him to hang back, but he was too mad to pay her any mind, and he wasn't about to admit that he was driving like an “damn idiot.” Her sudden yelp brought his eyes back to the windshield, and upon seeing the red lights in front of him he slammed on the brakes, sending the Blazer sliding sideways. The sheriff barely missed slamming into the truck, which was no stranger to having its body smacked. The squad car trailing the sheriff stopped, and four deputies poured from its interior like hounds itching for something to chase after.

  “You stay put,” the sheriff said to his wife. He put on his cap and stepped out. “It's muddy.”

  She replied, “Make it fast, Buddy Lee.”

  “Won't take long. Wrecker's on the way.”

  “Yeah, right. I'm not kidding around, Buddy Lee.”