Upside Down

by John Ramsey Miller

  “Officer Gale,” he said. “You did a great job. I'm going to see that you get an FBI commendation for your effort. A nice letter from my director won't hurt your career.”

  “She got away,” Gale said. “I'm sure she went into the hotel.”

  “I am going to ask you to do me a favor,” Adams said.

  “What's that?”

  “Unless your superiors ask you directly, don't go into specific detail about the tracking.”

  “Sir?”

  “For your and Beaux-Beaux's sake.”

  “I'm sorry?”

  “It's just that if it comes down to a question of whether we screwed up, or if Beaux-Beaux here isn't up to the job, or whether your handling was questionable . . . you know what we're going to put in our reports. And if we do, the Director won't be sending any letters or issuing any glowing commendations.”

  “But it was the bleach,” Gale said defensively. “It killed the trail for a few seconds.”

  “I smelled it before we opened that last door,” Adams said.

  “Me too,” Winter agreed. “We thought you'd pull the dog back to save his nose, but you went straight through the door.” He knelt to pat the dog's head. “Tell you what, Gale. Let's just agree that the trail looped back in on itself, which isn't a lie. We'll forget your mistakes, or whatever.”

  Gale stared down at Winter.

  “She just outfoxed us,” Winter said.

  Gale stood listening, his eyes unreadable.

  “You can keep tracking. Start over and follow the trail from scratch. Try and pick up her scent around the building, while we do a search on our own. Maybe she went back through the atrium and through some shops or something. Radio when you find her. You can be the hero. It's fine with us. That way our asses will all be covered.”

  “But . . .”

  “Go on. We'll buy you and Beaux-Beaux some time. We'll tell Suggs you're still looking.”

  “You sure?” Gale asked suspiciously.

  Adams and Winter nodded.

  “I'll just take that swing through and see if we can scare her up.”

  Winter and Adams watched as K-9 Officer Gale and Beaux-Beaux strode back up the ramp.

  “That should buy us some time,” Adams said.

  “I'm glad you're on my side,” Winter said. “Let's see how fast we can get across the bridge.”

  Even though they had taken Suggs by surprise and bluffed their way into holding back twenty itchy-fingered cops, there was no real proof that Suggs was intending to harm Faith Ann and nothing to tie Suggs into Bennett other than Bennett's words. Suggs knew he was under suspicion, but for the moment Winter needed to keep him and his Tin Man team guessing. Whoever the couple was, they were only tied into Tinnerino and Doyle and Bennett. Until he knew who they were, there was nothing to be gained in mentioning them.

  When Winter and Adams came out, Manseur was standing near Suggs's car, between Suggs and Tinnerino. He didn't smile when he saw Winter and Adams.

  “Well?” Suggs said. Winter thought he saw something akin to relief in his eyes.

  “We lost her trail. Officer Gale is trying to find it,” Adams said.

  “So she's still in there?”

  “If she is, she didn't hear me calling.”

  “Or maybe she isn't as innocent as you think,” Suggs said.

  “I believe she is innocent,” Winter said. He turned to Manseur, whose face remained unreadable. “Detective, I'm sorry I didn't level with you and tell you Trammel and Porter were related.”

  “So am I,” Manseur said sourly. He was a good actor, but all good cops are.

  “Well, I'm going to remedy that. Since you are here,” Winter said as he handed Manseur his card, “she'll be in good hands. I need to check on Hank and talk to some people. The K-9 officer will find her. When you find her I expect a call, and Commander Suggs has her lawyer's name. Call him too.”

  Manseur turned his eyes to Suggs. Suggs nodded.

  “I suppose I can do that,” Manseur said. “I'm sorry you don't trust us to do the right thing.”

  “We'll see what happens. You're alerted to our presence and we are going to be watching you.”

  Adams looked into Suggs's eyes and straightened the knot of his tie as though Suggs's round face was a mirror. “Captain, are you familiar with a man named Jerry Bennett?”

  Suggs flashed a pained grin. “Mr. Bennett is very well-known in the community. Why?”

  Adams smiled. “No reason in particular. Massey and I visited with him earlier. I'd be willing to bet you he's not half as well-known as he's going to be in the near future. He mentioned that you advised him to file charges against Amber Lee for embezzlement, and it happens that she was murdered, and you are in charge of investigating her murder. Faith Ann told my son that she did not call 911 because a policeman killed her mother and Amber Lee, and that the police are trying to kill her.” There. It was all out on the table.

  Manseur dropped the indignant look and adopted a perplexed one.

  “That about all?” Suggs's grin was erased, his skin tone a bleached cotton white, which made his reddening ears stand out.

  “Bennett told us you are very close friends,” Adams said.

  “I'd hardly call us friends, and I don't recall advising him to file charges against Amber Lee. Perhaps he was mistaken.”

  “I'm not telling you how to run your detective bureau, but I assume you'll want to bring Manseur here up to speed on the Porter/Lee case, since they are intertwined. I'd think someone like him should be in charge of both cases. Since he hasn't been mentioned by a person of interest in this.”

  Manseur fought back a smile.

  “I had already decided that very thing,” Suggs blustered. “I was just about to discuss that with him.”

  Winter and Adams left Suggs standing on the sidewalk and walked briskly toward their waiting car.

  “You know, this is exactly how I felt back in high school while I was walking away from the boys' bathroom knowing that the cherry bomb I just flushed was about to go off,” Adams said.

  70

  When Arturo called to tell her what Tin Man said about the Feds showing up, Marta had just left Canal Place through a rear exit, walking past two hawkeyed patrolmen. She strode casually down Peters Street to the lot where her Lincoln was parked. She opened the driver's side door, climbed in where Arturo sat slumped, smoking a cigarette. She took the cassette tape from her pocket, tossed it into his lap, and said, “Let the window down. You're stinking up my car.”

  “So this is what it was all about?” he said, holding up the tape and looking at it as though it was a large diamond. “But she is still in there somewhere.”

  “I only saw her for a second. By the time I got down two flights of steps she was gone. There were cops all over the place. Let them find her. She isn't going to sprout wings and fly away.”

  “You lost her,” Arturo said smugly. “They have their dog searching for her. And now there's two federal agents who are very much involved. You should have gotten a tape deck as well as a CD. Like I have in my Porsche.”

  “We can buy a player.”

  “Oh, good thinking,” Arturo said smiling broadly. He tapped the cassette against his knee. “It is too bad that . . . you . . . lost . . . her.”

  Marta's pocketknife appeared. The white blade came to rest in the space just over Arturo's Adam's apple. She held the double-edged ceramic blade with such perfect tension that it made an indentation in Arturo's throat but without enough pressure to open the skin. Arturo slowly turned his pleading eyes to her, and he saw the chill she wanted him to see.

  “I didn't hear you,” she hissed. “What did I do?”

  “I'm sorry.” When he spoke, his Adam's apple bobbed and the tip of the knife had just the necessary additional pressure to penetrate the skin. A thin red droplet rolled down his throat and disappeared inside his open shirt collar.

  “Don't you dare mock me!” She saw anger replacing the fear that had just been i
n his eyes. “Have you already forgotten that I am here in the first place to clean up your mess? I am putting my life on the line for a simpering pussy who sits in the car smoking cigarettes while I am”—she drew closer to him and hardened her black eyes—“losing her, was it?”

  “Um-hum,” he hummed, clench-jawed. He didn't dare speak for fear the blade's tip would slide deeper into his throat.

  “I got the tape for you. Now I am done. Straighten out the rest by yourself. The girl can identify you, so you find her and kill her. I'm sure you won't lose her, like I did. I am going to take a nice long vacation. Alone. Maybe I will come back to attend your funeral after Bennett has killed you. You are such an expert that you can handle this simple matter all by yourself.”

  “Um-hummm.”

  Marta took the knife from his throat and wiped the blade off on his cheek—purposefully smearing it on like rouge. She snapped it closed, then dropped it back into her jacket pocket. Arturo's right hand sprang to his throat, the other tugged a tissue from the package on the console. He pressed the tissue to the wound, took it away, and stared in disbelief at the blood.

  “I was only joking, Marta!” he blurted. “What is your problem? You ruined my shirt. It's silk.”

  “I was joking too,” she said as she started the car. “Wipe your face before somebody thinks you are a whore.”

  “Why do you insult me like that? You know that I am a man. I have no fear.”

  “I know,” she said, laughing. “But you are a macho dog, such an easy target.” She waved her hand. “Turo, I have bigger stones than ten men.”

  “Then you aren't going away?”

  “It depends,” she said as she turned in her seat and backed out of the space.

  “On what?”

  “On many things. I'll make you a list after . . .”

  “After what?”

  “After I have destroyed this tape.”

  Marta put the car into gear and rolled toward the exit. She checked her rearview to make sure there was nobody following. She made a mental note to ask Tinnerino for details on the two agents.

  71

  Nicky called to say that when he got to the landing, the ferry was already on the return trip to Canal Street, that he never saw her, so he was waiting for them. Winter called Manseur but got his voice mail and left a message.

  He said simply, “Call me.”

  Winter told Adams, “Suggs has been a cop for a lot of years, probably a crooked one for that long. He's smart enough to have made it through the anticorruption sweep back in the nineties.”

  “We ought to keep the pressure on him.”

  “He is going to figure out pretty fast that the best way to cover his ass is to hand this mess over to Manseur and get as far away from it as possible. He can say he misinterpreted the crime scene evidence and that he saw the error of his ways and brought Manseur back on. I'm figuring he'd rather look incompetent than conspiratorial.”

  “At his level, incompetence is a job requirement.”

  “Every time you dropped another piece of this on him, he about pissed his pants.”

  “He could see the writing on the wall. That's for sure.” Adams laughed out loud. “Man, you know he thought he had this thing locked until we showed up. If he was helping Bennett, I doubt he's going to be much help from this day forward. You reckon Officer Gale and Beaux-Beaux will come back out today?” Adams added, bringing more laughter.

  Winter's cell phone rang. It was Manseur's name and number. He put the phone on speaker so Adams could listen in.

  “Detective Manseur,” Winter answered.

  “Man alive,” Manseur said. “After you left, I had the strangest conversation with Captain Suggs I've ever had with anybody. He was going around in circles. When he said he knew about the connection between Trammel and Porter, I thought he was going to accuse me of holding back information. Instead he said he spoke to you and Adams and told me there was a federal task force on this already. Man, he was spooked. He said that I might have been right about some aspects of the evidence against Faith Ann. Why did you leave?”

  “She was no longer there,” Winter answered.

  “Did you get her out?”

  “She got herself out. I'll explain it later,” Winter said. “Face-to-face.”

  “I'm on my way to meet the chief at the office to discuss this.”

  “Faith Ann told my son that a cop killed her mother and Amber Lee, which is why she is running from you guys.

  “She said a cop? I think it's more likely a professional hit,” Manseur said. “The silencer, the precision of the shots. Maybe it was a cop . . .”

  “Get Faith Ann reclassified as a material witness only, and get the word out to the cops and the media. Let the patrolmen and detectives all know that she should be located and held for her own protection. Make sure you are the contact person. If Suggs gives you any crap at all, we'll toss another grenade under his chair.”

  “By the way, I'm waiting for a match on the partial prints on the corpse in the Rover. The sheriff who found the Rover said that someone near there saw a black and white taxicab with two people in it enter the highway from that dirt road. There aren't any cabs out there, but there was a taxi stolen in New Orleans last night two hours before the accident. It was recovered locally this afternoon. Wiped clean inside, mud on the underside, wheels. I'm waiting for tire tread impressions from the sheriff to see if they match the ones at the bayou, but they will. There were two empty five-gallon gas cans in the dumpster near the cab, so I'm pretty sure it was how the perps got back to town.”

  “Maybe Tinnerino and Doyle?” Winter wondered.

  “Could be.”

  “Maybe the corpse they put in the Rover was supposed to lead any investigation down a blind alley. If the corpse had a criminal record, the investigation would stop there. Or the couple in the Lincoln could have helped,” Winter said.

  Winter told Manseur about seeing the same couple leaving Bennett's, and Nicky following them to the parking lot. He told him that Nicky spotted the male outside Canal Place.

  Manseur said, “Green get a tag number?”

  “Good question,” Winter said. “Give me a sec.”

  He picked up his radio and called Nicky. “Nicky, you happen to get the tag number on the Lincoln?”

  “Of course I did. Louisiana DX-2088.”

  “I'll run it,” Manseur said.

  “Don't waste your time,” Adams told him. “Let the FBI do the walking through the yellow pages.” He pulled over to the curb, reached down beside his seat, and flipped open a laptop computer. He started typing, and within seconds he had a Louisiana DMV screen. He entered the license number.

  “Registered to the House of Antiquities, Box 2233, New Orleans, Louisiana. The address is 2231 Magazine Street,” Winter read to Manseur from the screen.

  “Let's see who owns it.” Adams brought up another Web page. This time it was for the Secretary of State. He typed, and the screen showed the incorporation information for the antique business.

  Winter read it to Manseur. “The owner is Marta Ruiz. The other two corporate officers are attorneys.”

  “Marta Ruiz? I'm not familiar with the name,” Manseur said.

  Adams was already typing, and suddenly the screen was filled with a driver's license picture.

  “I've got her. Our Jane Doe is in fact Marta Ruiz. Address is Route 2, Box 223, Covington, Louisiana. Five-four, hundred and ten pounds, black hair and brown eyes.”

  “Does the FBI want to run her for a record?” Manseur said.

  Adams was already typing. “Not so much as a parking ticket,” he announced.

  Winter said, “All it takes to keep your record clean is being connected to the right people.”

  “Around here, the art of back-scratching is a science,” Manseur said sadly.

  72

  Suggs looked down at the caller I.D. and shoved the unit into his desk drawer. Bennett!

  Jerry Bennett had called Suggs while
Massey and Adams were inside Canal Place, to see if the girl was in custody, but the nightclub owner hadn't bothered to mention that an FBI agent and a deputy U.S. marshal had been to his club minutes earlier. They had dropped that little bomb on him at Canal Place. Suggs had told Tin Man to get word to Bennett that he would get back to him when he could. It was bad enough that Bennett was in the Feds' sights, but that arrogant little bastard had implicated Suggs when there was no imaginable reason to have done so. God knows what that suicidal idiot said to them.

  If they took Bennett down, that little prick would turn on Suggs, dragging in Tin Man, Doyle, and God knew who else up the ladder. Suggs had never liked Bennett, had never trusted him, but he had never before seen their mutually profitable arrangement as a threat to his freedom. Over the past twenty years Bennett had paid him a tax-free fortune, but not enough to go to prison over. In his career, Suggs had seen scores of his fellow police officers go to jail, and it wasn't going to happen to him.

  Mike Manseur had control of both cases, and he would have to say that Suggs gave him everything he needed to solve them. Any evidence was open to interpretation, and he could justify taking the case from Manseur to his superiors.

  Suggs had never killed anybody for Bennett—if you didn't count framing Horace Pond for two murders Bennett had committed. And Pond had been a nobody, human refuse, whose only accomplishment in life had been using his dick to add to the numbers of snot-nose nigger kids on the welfare rolls or populate the jails and prisons.

  The only thing that Suggs had to do now was to make Bennett vanish so he could never talk. Suggs would have to do that deed himself, and in such a way that it would never point back to him.

  That settled, Suggs felt the hollow burn in his stomach receding, cooled by the knowledge that all he needed was to calm down and devise a simple plan that would tie up the loose ends.

  73

  Thanks to Adams's amazingly efficient FBI computer hookup, which saved Manseur a couple of hours on his NOPD computer, Manseur knew that the woman in the Lincoln was Marta Ruiz. Now he needed to find out who her male partner was, which might explain how the pair had gained access to the investigation. They were clearly connected to Bennett and Tin Man and Doyle, but he needed to figure out exactly what that connection meant before he confronted Tin Man or Doyle. He had an idea on how he might discover who the man was, but his ringing phone interrupted him.