Too Far Gone (14 page)

34

Deep in thought, Alexa stared out the passenger window. She was thinking about how things appeared, and wondering how those things might be connected to Gary West's vanishing. As director of psychiatry, LePointe had been in the perfect position to influence what treatment Sibby received, how that treatment was applied, and probably who administered it. Although it was hard to imagine him doing so, it certainly appeared that he could have been torturing Sibby for years. Unless something untoward had been going on, why would Decell, most likely acting on LePointe's behalf, have offered Veronica a reward for warning him if anybody came asking after Sibby, LePointe, or this Nurse Fugate. How Fugate fit in with LePointe and Danielson was a mystery Alexa needed to solve. That anybody could imagine they could make a notorious inmate vanish without someone discovering it and reporting it was a mystery worthy of New Orleans.

“Didn't Sibby have a family?” Alexa asked Manseur.

“Her family was so scandalized that she'd killed the LePointes that they left New Orleans shortly after the killings. I believe her father was some kind of big dog with the Whitney Bank and they lived Uptown in a nice house on Napoleon. Her mother killed herself, I heard. I went to school with her brother at St. Barts. He was a squirrelly little kid who dressed in starched shirts and pressed slacks and had his belt so tight that he looked like he was wearing a lace-up corset from one of those Storyville portraits. He was redheaded and pretty as a girl and held his hand up so it sort of flopped off his wrist, so we all thought he was a little light in the loafers. His name was something odd like Cyrus, or Cecil, which didn't help.” Manseur shook his head slowly, remembering. “He had a hard time
before
his sister chopped up the LePointes. I think there was another brother, who was sort of nutty and mean as a snake if you pissed him off, but it's fuzzy. Not like I hung with him or anything. He didn't fit in and I didn't care. Hell, I didn't fit in either, but I didn't fit in with a better crowd. So, how do we talk to this nurse without setting off dynamite? I don't imagine Dr. LePointe is going to sit still when she calls Decell, or him, and you know damn well she will.”

“I won't know until we talk to her. We'll just tell her we're following up on our visit to the hospital, and since she knew Sibby Danielson, we're wondering what she can tell us about her.”

“Sounds lame,” Manseur said.

“That's only because it is. I'll know when I see her and can watch her reactions to our presence and questions. We don't have to tell her why we're asking questions. We only need to know where Sibby is and that she isn't connected to West's disappearance. Maybe Gary found out about Sibby's vanishing act. Somebody out at the hospital might have ratted LePointe out to Gary because there was no love lost between them. That could be a connection. Decell could see any threat against LePointe as marching orders.”

“If that's the case, Dr. LePointe may not even be aware of it. Maybe Decell just does what he thinks needs doing. Maybe he spirited Sibby out and LePointe doesn't even know it. Decell is capable of who knows what. He could do whatever he thinks is in his employer's best interest.”

“A spin doctor who carries a gun instead of a pen,” Alexa said. “His relationship with LePointe might go back to Sibby's murders. And she cut him pretty good. I suppose LePointe may be unaware of Decell's work on his behalf, but I doubt it.”

Manseur said, “Makes perfect sense to me.”

“In that New Orleans sort of way?”

Alexa was not sure how to take the fact that Manseur hadn't seemed outraged or even particularly surprised by the LePointe/River Run bombshell. Alexa wondered, if she hadn't taken him to the hospital, would he have even gone, or just called the director and been told Sibby was there and let it go at that. And it seemed to her that Manseur considered
This is New Orleans
a phrase that explained anything that was out of line, bordering on illegal behavior in the same way that
After all, this is Mars
might.

Maybe he was burned-out by the grinding down the job did to a man, the terrible pay, the complex political minefield, the embedded corruption of the city, the endless line of corpses, the guilty being set free in astounding numbers by juries who actually were peers of the accused or just anti-cop enough to ignore the truth, ignorant enough not to get the evidence, or nullify the charges because they didn't like prosecutors. She couldn't know that he wouldn't fold up on her if his career were to be in jeopardy. She still wanted to trust him, but she wondered if trust was something he hadn't earned, something that shouldn't be given out like a door prize. True, Winter liked him, admired him, and trusted him based on one situation that had elevated Manseur to his present position. But any way you cut it, Manseur was no Winter Massey.

She tried to picture all of the people she trusted as much as she did Winter, and the gallery walls of her mind were as painfully bare as those of a museum between exhibitions.

There was a lot to admire about Manseur. He seemed to be a good enough detective in a town—to put it kindly—not known for having a gentle, good, or honest police department. He was a family man, who had a picture of his wife and daughters banded to the visor of his vehicle and in his office.

Manseur's cell phone played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” breaking Alexa's train of thought. They drove into the parking lot of the strip mall where she'd left the Bucar.

“Manseur,” he said, pulling to a stop beside the dark green Ford Taurus owned and maintained by the FBI.

“Okay, I'll tell her,” Manseur finished, closing his phone. “That was Evans. Said to tell you Dr. LePointe heard from Gary West, so thank you for your help.”

“Heard how?”

“Letter in the morning mail. West said he's coming back tomorrow morning from a little trip he took to go off and commune with nature or some other happy crap.”

“You're serious?” Alexa said.

“It's what my boss told me. You think he's lying?”

“Somebody is.”

“Why?”

“You're joking, right?” Alexa retorted.

“What makes you so sure it isn't true?” Manseur asked.

“Well, for one thing, when a person is taking a trip to commune or whatever, would he get somebody to crash into his car and hit him in the head with a pipe? LePointe or somebody close to him wants to shut us down. You're a
detective,
Michael. What do you really think?”

“I think maybe you're being a bit paranoid,” Manseur answered. “You're convinced there's a conspiracy.”

“Well, why would I imagine such an odd thing? Let me see…Dr. LePointe most likely had the ability to exercise his will over the woman who savagely murdered his only brother and sister-in-law, leaving their young daughter, who witnessed the horrific scene, orphaned and emotionally devastated. He certainly doesn't want that known, even in New Orleans. Even a plumber's assistant in any other city in the country would see that as less than a normal circumstance.”

“Maybe he's a dedicated professional who can set his personal emotions aside in order to help a very sick woman, who isn't responsible for her actions, regain her sanity. Look, if I were the superintendent of police, and if one of the beat cops gave my wife a ticket, I wouldn't have to leave the department because his sergeant, a man under my command and control, put him on a foot beat in the projects to teach him a lesson.”

“What if the patrolman had been on drugs and he murdered your wife, and your daughters saw it happen?”

“In that case, he'd be in prison,” Manseur reasoned. “Hopefully on death row. Would I want to kill him? You're damned straight I would. But I'm a detective and a professional and I do not take the law into my own hands. And I would have the responsibility to my girls not to end up in jail myself.”

“Right. So you are a professional and you could, if not forgive, let the system deal with him. How would it look if you left the department to become the warden of the prison where the man who murdered your wife was doing time? Say he can be paroled whenever the guards agreed he wasn't a threat to anybody because he had the drug thing kicked?”

“Saddled with two fashion-conscious young girls and the expenses associated with a deceased wife, like a burial and having to hire babysitters, I could never take the pay cut,” Manseur countered, smiling.

“Don't you feel a burning
need
to know the truth?”

“About LePointe's job and if he gave butcher-girl a few extra shock treatments? Most people would say the more shocks the murderess got, the merrier.”

“In the homicide report, it says that Sibby was Dr. LePointe's patient before the murders. I can't help but wonder if a psychiatrist could manipulate a mentally unbalanced person to commit a brutal double homicide. Why, you may ask. Because that would make him guilty of double homicide.”

“Motive?”

“Gee, I don't know. Maybe his brother beat him at backgammon and said, ‘nanny-nanny boo-boo.' Look, if Dr. LePointe did, how could he make sure the truth never came to light? Me, I might do something like make sure she could never rat me out by keeping her drugged stupid in my own private hospital. And if I were retiring and someone else were taking over her care, I could make certain the ugly truth would remain buried by making her vanish. I might bribe or blackmail someone to help me pull it off. Maybe I would turn to a nurse who would agree to help me.”

“Why would a nurse agree to do such a thing? The man is a multimillionaire! You'd never convince a jury he could or would do such a thing. You couldn't convince me.”

“A box of chocolates. A lot more money, which he has access to. But I suspect it is worth looking into. Since we haven't found a shortcut to Gary West, we actually could take a few minutes to check it out. Especially since it could lead us to his abductors.”

“Dr. LePointe did it in the kitchen with a lunatic.” He turned his basset hound eyes to Alexa. “You might make sure your potential witness, who is insane and couldn't get anybody to believe her if she said Christmas was in December, remains under your control?” Manseur asked, sarcastically. “At the risk of his freedom?”

“Exactly,” Alexa said. “Say she's where he can still do that. And it's not too much of a stretch that it's connected to Gary West's disappearance. Suppose we can find and use Sibby to pressure LePointe or Decell to come clean, and maybe that gets us Gary West.”

“Evans called it off.”

“Fine. Let him think you're off it. This hurricane has him with plenty more to think about than what you're actually doing. In the meanwhile, we keep following the evidence off his radar.”

“If you are right and this does involve them spiriting Sibby away somewhere, like LePointe's private torture chamber in his basement—”

“Or another hospital,” Alexa offered.

“Okay, another hospital. The nurse will tell Decell immediately and Decell will tell LePointe and LePointe will tell Jackson Evans and then, best case here, he'll come down on me with a ten-pound hammer and I'll be ticketing parked cars for the rest of my career.
If
I'm lucky.”

“Fine. I'll go talk to Nurse Fugate myself.”

“It's a free country. I expect you can defend yourself if anybody wants some answers why you kept going on this after it was over and done. The fact is, I've been ordered to report to HQ as soon as I've dropped you off. The West case is officially closed until something shows up that merits reopening it.”

“So you're going to HQ?”

“I have no choice in the matter unless I choose to ignore my superintendent's direct orders,” Manseur said. “It isn't like I don't have pressing cases that I'm ignoring to hunt for escaped lunatics and Baby Big Bucks. If I disobey Evans, he'll cut me a new you-know-what. This is our stopping place. Go home, Alexa.”

“I'm not leaving,” Alexa said, angry. “Not until Gary West is home with his wife and child. I don't care how much sway LePointe has or even that we
are
in New Orleans. If he or Decell are in any way involved in Gary West's abduction, they're in my sights. If and when I'm sure they've committed a federal crime, I'll push for an indictment with everything I have. If my director calls me off because he is LePointe's pal, he'll have to face the consequences of this pissed-off Mississippi gal who can take whatever punishment his Harvard-going ass can devise, and more, because I know firsthand what real meanness is all about.”

“Men like LePointe don't go to jail,” Manseur pointed out. “Will not happen.”

“The prisons are full of rich people like him who thought the very same thing,” Alexa snapped.

She threw open her door and slid out, slamming the door behind her. Before she got her keys out of her purse, however, Manseur rolled down his window. “Hey, Keen!”

Alexa turned.

Manseur had a smile on his face. “You're serious about this?”

Alexa raised an eyebrow.

“While you're running around stirring up a Mississippi shit-storm, I'll see if I can get Cooley to work faster on identifying those prints, and I'll go through the phone records if they're in yet. You call me if you have anything to tell me. We need prints on Casey and Gary West for comparisons.”

“You're going to keep working this?”

“You can bet that frown I am. I just wanted to see exactly how serious you were. If I go and get my ass fired, I want to know somebody is going to be standing beside me in the unemployment line.”

He winked at her.

She smiled, wanting to slap and hug him at the same time.

“You find out anything, call me and fill me in,” he said. “And if you need my help at any point, you'll get it. You need a map to that Fugate nurse's house?”