Upside Down wm-2

by John Ramsey Miller

  “But it has a happy ending.”

  “You found the diamond?” the waitress wondered.

  “Heck no. She got the insurance she kept up on it and bought herself a pickup truck and a padded steel barrel and became a rodeo clown. But best of all, that hole in the side of her nose grew back in so you'd never guess it was ever there,” Hank said, winking at her.

  “I think we best order now,” Millie said.

  “Yep, the noon rush will be starting up any minute,” Hank said.

  “I meant while we still have appetites,” Millie said, frowning.

  4

  Paulus Styer sat alone at a table twenty feet from where the two men and their wives were eating lunch. His gray ponytail hung over the collar of his button-down shirt. He tapped his fingers softly on the table and stared down at a folded newspaper beside his bowl of chili. Although he appeared to be reading and listening to music through earphones leading to a Walkman resting on the table before him, the small tape machine was actually an extremely sensitive, narrow-field listening device picking up everything the two couples said. After they finished eating, he followed them out, passing by them as they were saying their good-byes on the sidewalk.

  Styer was a lifelong competitor whose professional life consisted of one chess match after another, and like any grand master worth his salt he was always plotting his assault on the next king he was sent after. He had been at this match, doing his own last-minute daily field study, for a solid week. That week had come only after studying his opponent's dossier, which had been gathered from every source imaginable by the best researchers and analysts in the world. He had spent two weeks prior to arriving in the United States studying those files, committing them to memory. The research phase was necessary to complete an assignment and assure his success. His style of working an assignment was time-consuming, but his success ratio ensured that he had free rein to be as self-indulgent as he liked. What was Trammel's word for this Nicky Green fellow? Eccentric. Oh yes, Paulus Styer was eccentric. Why work if it wasn't fun? What was the point of walking up to someone and putting a pill in the back of their head-running an awl through their medulla? An ex-marine could do that sort of thing for ten thousand dollars a hit. When you were paying for perfection, you wanted a guaranteed elimination, and cost was a secondary consideration. Paulus Styer, lovingly referred to as Cold Wind, was your man.

  A block away, he climbed into his rented car and opened his laptop. Seconds later he was on the Internet, via cellular modem, accessing his e-mail account.

  There was an English text message waiting.

  Please furnish ETA on next delivery.

  He hit Reply and clicked inside the message box:

  Going to New Orleans. Advise client that the job will be completed in the next few days. Require immediate file on Nicky Green / a private investigator from in or near to Houston, Texas. I require two unconnected heavy-lifting assistants and an assorted #9000 tool kit plus vehicle on arrival. Flying this afternoon / Direct flight arrives in New Orleans around 4:00 this day from Greensboro, NC.

  He closed the computer. Terrorists had made it virtually impossible for a legitimate, hardworking professional to travel with the tools of his trade. Having to have his weaponry delivered to the job sites was a maddening inconvenience.

  He had spent several weeks in New Orleans four years earlier after an assignment which left him with wounds to mend. He chose New Orleans in order to listen to some Dixieland and to tour the places of interest he had read about. He had enjoyed himself and was glad he was returning there to work. The city would be a perfect environment for a hunt. He was tempted to charter a flight and beat them to New Orleans, but he decided it would be best to stay close to the Trammels and begin setting up the board.

  A cold wind blows in the City of the Dead.

  5

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Arturo Estrada was on cloud nine as he strolled into the River Club, where the cleaning crew was hard at work getting the place ready for the Friday-night crowd. His client, Jerry Bennett, was a short man who resorted to a girdle to hold back his expansive gut because he was too lazy to do the exercise that remaining trim required. Bennett sat at a table near the main bar, doing business with a woman who appeared to be a sales representative. There was an open sample case beside her leg, and several open bottles of wine stood on the table, along with stemware for sampling. Bennett saw Arturo, but he ignored him the way he might any other employee.

  Arturo strolled straight back to the office in the rear. Jerry Bennett wasn't technically his boss, but he paid Arturo a seventy-five-thousand-dollar yearly retainer in cash that included odd jobs like making more difficult collections, plus a generous bonus for jobs like the one Arturo had performed that morning. In a good year, Arturo made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from his one client. For difficult assignments, Arturo picked a partner and Mr. Bennett paid the tab. It had been a good relationship for five years, mostly because Arturo had always achieved positive results and Bennett had never once tried to stiff him.

  After Arturo had spent ten minutes cooling his heels in the expansive office, Jerry Bennett strolled in. Although his face was the hue of burnished copper, the white skin on his neck and the backs of his hands gave away the fact that his tan was pancake. The collection of fur-thick black hair of his toupee didn't match the mixture of gray and brown chest hair framed in the V of his perfectly starched white shirt. Arturo supposed that nobody had ever mentioned he looked like a silly old woman who made an effort to retain a youthful appearance but only managed to fool herself.

  “Mr. Estrada, I have to go right back out there. I'm considering changing the house Merlot. And, with a nice enough order, I might just get a slice of that little wine representative. A vixen, a vixen for sure.”

  Arturo wasn't sure what a vixen was, but he assumed it had to do with sexual acts. “Good-looking sales rep. And she can give you an alibi for this morning, Mr. Bennett. Not that you need one… now.”

  Bennett's gray eyes blazed with excitement. “You found Amber! You did, didn't you? And you got them back?”

  In answer, Arturo reached a gloved hand inside his coat, slipped the curved envelope out, and placed it on the desk. Bennett opened the flap and slid the photographs out just far enough to see the top one. Then he counted the corners to make sure they were all there.

  “I caught up to her at some lady lawyer's office. The lawyer didn't make copies.”

  “You're sure?”

  “Absolutely. I came in before she made any. I looked around. I don't know what Amber told her, but I know she was there only a couple minutes alone with her. It is possible the lawyer called somebody, but it won't matter, since you have everything back.”

  “Why did she take it to a lawyer?”

  “I found out from one of the girls at the Moonbeam that Amber might be staying with a friend of hers named Erica Spicer. Erica was real helpful. She told me Amber was going to sell those to some lady attorney who's representing the man who's going to die for whacking the judge.”

  Bennett searched his mind for a name. “Kathy Porter?”

  “It was Porter. I guess-”

  “Kimberly,” Bennett interrupted. “Kimberly Porter?”

  Arturo nodded. “I guess since the blackmail thing didn't pan out, the lawyer was Amber's last shot at cashing in.”

  Bennett nodded slowly. “Yeah, that was the only move left. Myself, I'd have gone to the FBI with it, but that Porter bitch would have waved those papers in front of television reporters and then handed them to the FBI.”

  “She told me what building Amber was going to-”

  “Who told you?”

  “Erica, Amber's pal. I almost caught up to Amber before she went in. I had to wait until the janitor left the lobby. He never saw me and there's no security cameras there.”

  Bennett narrowed his eyes. “What about her pal Erica?”

  “She had a little kitchen accident involving a toaster
oven and some spilled milk.”

  “Good work, Arturo. As always. You're the best, kid. With the one notable, close-to-home exception.”

  Marta. Arturo's heart dropped. “None of my business, sir, but I'd destroy those,” he said, gesturing at the envelope. “Souvenirs like those could prove very expensive.”

  Bennett raised an eyebrow. Then he unlocked and opened a desk drawer and removed a thick envelope, which he handed to Arturo. “I added what I owe Marta.”

  “The police have probably found them by now,” Arturo said. “The lawyer mentioned she had some volunteers or other coming in.”

  “Yeah,” Bennett said thoughtfully. “Executions bring bleeding-heart pricks out of the woodwork. You earned your bonus. Take a few days and kick back. Bring a date to the club and dance. Invite Marta Ruiz. Class up the place.”

  “She doesn't like noisy rooms.” He started to leave but turned at the door. “Marta didn't find Amber,” Arturo said. “I did. I guess her fee was a waste after all.”

  “Well, Marta didn't find Amber, but she did handle some unpleasantness this morning. I wish I could afford to employ her full-time. It's nice to know she's around for the big jobs.”

  Arturo felt the burn of jealousy. It was a bitch the way everybody overestimated Marta's ability. She was good, but not as good as her reputation. The thing he did was man's work. People weren't afraid of Marta, she had no presence. It wasn't her who got Amber's evidence.

  Arturo left the office knowing that Bennett was a seriously bent gear, and he was far too attached to his filthy old pictures to ever destroy them. Not that Arturo gave a damn. What Bennett did or didn't do about those had nothing to do with him.

  6

  Faith Ann Porter sat cradling her backpack to her chest as the streetcar made its way up St. Charles Avenue. Faith Ann and Kimberly had lived in New Orleans for a little more than a year. She stared down at the damp knees of her jeans and thought about her mother, whose blood was staining her clothes and skin. How many times the two of them had ridden those few miles together during the past months. Sometimes they rode the streetcar for the sheer pleasure of the experience, sometimes because the five-year-old Dodge Neon had some problem. Faith Ann knew the transportation routes, because weeks before she had moved here she'd gathered as much information on New Orleans as she could so she wouldn't be a stranger. Research, her mother always told her, was crucial preparation.

  Faith Ann felt an involuntary tear rolling down her cheek. She swiped it away with the back of her hand. She didn't have time to feel sad. She looked out the window to see where she was. Just one more stop. Faith Ann wondered if she should go to school, act like nothing had happened, and wait for the principal to send for her. She imagined herself walking into the office, where two cops would be standing there to inform her that some crackhead had murdered her mother along with some big-breasted client named Amber Lee.

  She couldn't risk it. She had to remember that the cops were her enemies and they had ways of tricking people with lies. Even if Amber hadn't said so, Faith Ann knew from listening to her mother that the police and prosecutors had their own agendas. You couldn't trust most of them.

  Hank and Millie Trammel were her only relatives. Millie was her mother's older sister and about the nicest person you'd ever hope to find. Hank was big and could be intimidating, but he was always nice to her and her mother. She held on to the thought that very soon Hank and Millie would be there to take care of her.

  Faith Ann let her mind focus on its image of Horace Pond, her mother's client on death row. He was merely a picture on a corkboard and a small voice heard once over the speakerphone in her mother's office. She noticed that her fingers were trembling and she clenched her fists. She needed to form a plan-to decide how to spend the time until her relatives came, but all she could come up with was to go home and change clothes. At home, it would be easier to think. At home it would all be better. She would be safe at home.

  Faith Ann felt the streetcar slowing for her stop and she stood. When it stopped, she climbed down from the cabin, stepping onto the neutral ground. It was just three blocks to her house.

  7

  New Orleans homicide detective Sergeant Michael Manseur turned onto Camp Street and pulled up behind one of the white prowlers whose doors were appointed with a decal depicting a five-pointed star set in a crescent moon. He switched off his flashing blue light and moved it from the dashboard to the floorboard. The day was warming rapidly, the sun shining, but the weatherman had promised a cold front would be pressing through later that afternoon. Temperatures would drop into the fifties by evening. Manseur had caught the call so he would be the primary on this one, a doubleheader called in by a law student. With luck, this one would be a slam dunk and he could go back to one of the eight active cases on his plate.

  Manseur grabbed a new spiral murder book and checked his pocket for the Cross pen before he stepped from the Impala, locked the door, and walked into the old professional building. A uniformed patrolman standing in the lobby pointed him to the elevator and said, “It's on four.”

  The detective pressed the button, and as he waited for the cab to descend he sneaked a sideways peek at his image in the gold-veined mirror tiles glued to the wall of the run-down office building. What he saw was a shortish man in a crumpled brown suit who was tapping a spiral notebook impatiently against his leg. He looked at the overworked, overweight, underpaid detective-a sad reflection. Behind his back, people sometimes called him Froggie, not because he was of French ancestry but because his face was wide, his lips thick, and his eyes seemed to bulge more than other people's did. He could see skin between the cables of dishwater-blond hair that he carefully combed over to hide his baldness. For years he had promised himself that one of these days he would invest in a hairpiece, but so far there was always something more important requiring his and his wife's salaries. But he knew that there were four things that were very special about him. The first three were his wife and two daughters, and the fourth was that he was an extremely good detective.

  The ride to the fourth floor was slow, the cables supporting the car creaking, the motor laboring. The carpet under his wingtips was stained, the wood-panel walls scarred, the certificate of worthiness made illegible by the scratched plastic lens that protected it. Finally the cab stopped, and Manseur stepped out into a foyer whose floor was comprised of thousands of little white tiles. The border was formed of double black lines of small black tiles, accented at regular intervals with left-facing swastikas. Even though the tiles were laid into place a decade before Hitler adopted the symbol as his logo, forever trashing it, it was unsettling to see it used decoratively.

  Manseur turned right and headed for the open door at the end of the dimly lit hallway, where uniformed cops were gathered. He heard the voices and put on his game face as he neared the crime scene.

  He entered the reception room and cast his frown on a police sergeant, who was leaning back in an old chair and had his feet on the desk, telling a joke. “The fuckin' son of a bitch said he likes his coffee half full of hot sauce! I swear to-” The sergeant cut off the story and scrambled to his feet when his eyes met Manseur's. The other two patrolmen, who had been laughing, were struck mute. Their faces went red.

  “What's the deal here?” Manseur asked the sergeant. His New Orleans accent made the word here sound like heeyah.

  The cop opened his notebook. “Two female vics, forty-seven and forty-three. Multiple bullet wounds, probably from a. 38. No brass. One is Kimberly Porter, the forty-seven-year-old. It's her office. The other is Amber Lee, forty-three years.”

  “Did anybody touch anything?”

  “My people know better. The first officer was sure they were dead and came right out. Porter's law student, Napoleon Ferris, called 911 at 7:10. He's in the kitchen now cooling his heels. The janitor saw him come in, and a minute later he came flying down the fire stairs screaming bloody murder. Ferris swears he came straight here from breakfast at the Camelli
a Grill.”

  “How did you identify the vics?” Manseur was writing everything down in his own brand of chicken scratches and symbols.

  “Ferris is last year Tulane law. He knew Porter from being a legal volunteer. Seems students can handle cases in their last year of law school. And I recognized Amber Lee. There's an outstanding warrant out for her-”

  “Warrant… for?”

  “Embezzlement.”

  “And how did you know her?”

  “From the River Club. Amber's worked there for years and I think was the manager, sort of. I'da never figured her for a thief, but Mr. Bennett himself filed the charges.”

  “You knew her from the River Club,” Manseur repeated, interjecting a fleck of suspicion in his words.

  “I did some security work for the club back in the day,” the sergeant said defensively.

  Manseur didn't know Jerry Bennett personally, but he knew of him. Bennett was one of those “special friends” of the police department, the mayor, the aldermen and fire departments. That meant he was both rich and generous and carried a gold badge the sheriff gave him that allowed him to carry a firearm and could be used in Orleans Parish to avoid traffic tickets-and he would never have to pay one or appear in court, if he got one.

  Like most cops, Manseur had accepted his share of lagniappe from merchants during his eighteen years on the job. As a patrolman he'd turned a deaf ear when a benefactor's car was begging for a parking violation. Sometimes he'd stopped a driver who was going a little too fast, maybe had suspicious breath, and let the guy skate. He had fixed tickets when it didn't matter. But proudly, he had never compromised his oath to protect and serve the citizens of New Orleans.

  “Where's Detective Bond?” the sergeant asked. Larry Bond was Manseur's partner.

  “Larry's in Baton Rouge. His father-in-law died. Be back Monday afternoon. Can we get back to this?”