Upside Down (29 page)

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.

“Mike, Captain Suggs.”

“Yes sir?”

“Can you join Detectives Tinnerino and Doyle in the conference room?”

“Sure.”

The two detectives sat like surly schoolboys behind the boxes containing the assembled Porter/Lee evidence. Suggs sat at the head of the table and indicated that Manseur should sit opposite the other two—exactly where he belonged.

“Mike,” Suggs started, “I have just informed Tony and Clint that you are going to be the primary on both the Trammel and Porter/Lee cases. I've explained the connection between the two cases, and they have agreed to work with you to solve them. When will Larry Bond be back?”

“He's supposed to be back tonight. He might be back already. I was planning to call him.”

“Excellent,” Suggs said. “Whatever you need, I'll okay. Manpower, overtime, whatever. Just ask.”

Doyle's and Tin Man's resentful eyes bored into Manseur.

“First off,” Manseur said, “I have issued a new bulletin on Faith Ann Porter listing her as a material witness pickup, and I removed the armed-and-dangerous tag. I also took the liberty of changing the contact number to my own.”

Tin Man shook his head rigidly.

“Problem, Detective?” Manseur asked.

“Just that there's no evidence that she
didn't
clip her old lady and Lee.”

“Detective Doyle, do you agree with your partner?”

“Absolutely. She did it. Look at how she slipped out of Canal Place. She ain't like any twelve-year-old I ever saw.”

Manseur's phone rang. He looked at the I.D. and saw Massey's name and number. “I need to take this,” he said.

As he listened, the other three men talked about Faith Ann's escape from Canal Place. Manseur listened to Massey, let him know that he couldn't answer his questions, and told the deputy he'd have to call him back. What Massey had asked him had put a hot, hollow burn in his stomach.

“I think Mike is on track,” Suggs said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “We can charge the kid after we interrogate her, if it is warranted.” He rose. “Gentlemen, I'll leave it with you. Whatever you need, Mike. You're in complete charge.” With that, Suggs walked from the room.

“How do you explain the evidence we found?” Tinnerino demanded.

Manseur said, “Maybe it was planted there.”

“By who? Nobody else was there between when she was and we were.”

“I wasn't suggesting that
you
planted it, Detective. Might be that the killer, or killers, did. Maybe they came before you got there.”

Tinnerino clenched his jaw.

“Faith Ann Porter told a federal officer that a policeman killed her mother and Amber Lee. It will be interesting to learn how she came to believe that.”

“That evidence wasn't planted in that hamper,” Tinnerino argued.

“Then maybe she picked the gun and empty brass up, in shock, and took them with her. Unless one of you saw her put the evidence into that hamper, it is possible someone else did it. Hand me over the firearms files on the murder weapon.”

Tinnerino looked in the stack and pulled out the files. Manseur flipped through them, scanning them while the other detectives sat silently.

“The .380's barrel is threaded on the inside. The M.E. found steel wool in the wounds. What does that say to you?”

No answer.

“The Taurus .380 was one of twenty stolen from a dealer in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, nine months back. Two from that robbery have been picked up at crime scenes since. To me that indicates they were either sold by the dealer under the table or hijacked and sold to criminal types. That points to a professional. Not a twelve-year-old who merely witnessed the murders.”

“That's bullshit,” Tinnerino said.

“I say it isn't. And I am running this. If you want, I'll relieve you from the team. In light of the insinuation of there being police involvement in these homicides, it might be best to bring in all new people who have open minds.”

“No,” Tinnerino said, too quickly. “No, you're the primary. If that is how you want to read the evidence, that's cool with us. Right, Clint?”

“Sure,” Doyle agreed.

“If you say she was framed, she was framed,” Tinnerino said.

“Who ransacked the Porter house?” Manseur asked.

“Did what?” Tinnerino said. He and Doyle exchanged looks of surprise.

“You didn't?” Manseur asked.

“Of course not.” Tinnerino was indignant. “We searched. Who said it was ransacked?”

“Adams, the FBI agent,” Manseur said. “You met him at Canal Place.”

“Then I bet it was some of those porch chimps that hang out at that basketball court behind the house,” Doyle said.

Manseur ignored the slur. “I need to go over the evidence you've collected,” he said. “I'll need your notes and the report you've written so far.”

“We have a problem there,” Tinnerino said.

“We had a detailed report all typed up,” Doyle started. “But . . .”

“But what?” Manseur asked, bracing himself.

Manseur left the conference room bothered by Winter Massey's call. He had given Tin Man and Doyle busywork, and they would be at their desks retyping the missing report for some time.

Massey had mentioned Horace Pond, a name that filled Manseur with anger. Pond was guilty, and Manseur didn't believe this had anything to do with him. It was a troubling direction that Massey was walking in, and he had to nip it in the bud. He spent ten minutes calling up and reading through the police files on Pond's case on his screen. After that, he looked up Doyle's and Tinnerino's service dates. Neither of the detectives had been involved with the Pond case. Doyle hadn't even been on the force then, and Tinnerino was patrolling in the Quarter.

Satisfied, he remembered to find out who Marta Ruiz's male partner was.

74

Faith Ann reached into her jeans and took out the envelope and the audiocassette she had taken from her mother's office. She tore open the corner just enough so she could slip the cassette inside.

Looking around, she spotted her hiding place. She wedged the envelope between a folded canvas fire hose in a frame and the steel wall behind it.

While Peter, the Bible bee boy, stood outside the van and engaged the driver in conversation, she slipped up the steel ladder on the van's rear, then onto the roof of the vehicle.

Faith Ann nestled among the duffel bags and equipment cases. When the ferry slowed a couple of minutes later, she heard people leave the bow to get into their cars or go back upstairs to the passenger deck.

She felt the van rock as the teenagers climbed back inside.

As the van drove off the ferry, Faith Ann looked up at the darkening sky. If the cops caught her before she got to Mr. Massey, and even if they killed her, Peter knew where the envelope was. She had told Peter just enough so that if anything happened, he would seek out Mr. Massey and tell him where she had left the evidence.
Justice will be served, Mama. I promise you.

75

Marta put the batteries in the cassette recorder she had bought at an electronics place on Canal Street. She rewound the tape while Arturo blew smoke rings out of the open window of her Lincoln. The cassette was a ninety-minute version, forty-five to a side.

The tape player made a loud snap to alert Marta that the tape had rewound. Holding her breath, Marta pushed the Play button.

“I'm recording,”
a woman's voice said. Marta turned up the volume to hear better.

“And you fixing to die in a minute, bitch,” Arturo muttered.

Marta punched him hard in the shoulder. “Shhhhhh!” she hissed.

“It's her. The lawyer,” he told her.

“You ready?”
the lawyer asked somebody.
“And, let's be serious. This is serious material.”

“
It is
not!
Why do you say that, Mother?
” Marta, who had been anticipating another adult's voice, was surprised to hear the voice of the young girl reply.

“Because these are your thoughts, Faith Ann. And they are important.”

“Im-por-tant? Oh, Mother, please.”

“Important because you wrote them. They reflect your life, your world. Someday they might be valuable because they are your words.”

“Yeah, right,”
Faith Ann's voice said.
“This is so gay.”

“It is not,”
her mother countered.
“It's precious.”

“That's the lawyer bitch,” Arturo said. “And that's her kid.”

“Just shut up, Arturo!” Marta snapped.

He shrugged. “Kid was in the office.”

“Someday you'll be so glad to have this tape,”
the lawyer said.

“And you'll use it to humiliate me,”
her daughter shot back.

“No, I won't. Cross my heart. Ready? First poem . . .”

“Okay, you'll start the music again when I wave my hand. Okay? Okay. The name of this poem is ‘A Penny for Your Thoughts.' I wrote it about everybody having opinions about everything, even stuff they know absolutely nothing about.”
The soft strains of chamber music came up in the background.

“A penny for your thoughts, by me, Faith Ann Porter.

I think without stopping.

all Spring through to Fall

If you get them for a penny

they're worth nothing at all.”

Marta snapped the Stop button and hit fast forward.

“I want to hear the poem,” Arturo protested.

Marta let it run for several seconds, then she punched the Stop button. “You can listen to the poem
after
I hear the hits.” She pressed the Play button.

“—or maybe it's the fact that your breath is bad or your feet stink sometimes—”

Arturo laughed. “She's talking about her mother!”

Stop.

FF.

Stop.

Play.

“. . . but I never knew him, or if he really wanted a son, or if he liked baseball or basketball more . . .”

Stop.

Marta stared at the tape player, unable to speak. Anger enveloped her. Or maybe it was that she wasn't accustomed to being outsmarted, outstreeted by a kid.

“This is bullshit!” Marta snapped.

“This is maybe just stuff before Amber got there, that's all,” Arturo said.

FF.

Stop.

Play.

“—because like maybe you meant to fly a kite, but never had the right string for it. And—”

Stop.

FF.

“Her poems suck,” Arturo said.

Stop.

Play.

That fucking string music. Those stupid verses.

And so it went for almost the entire side of the tape.

“Turn it over,” Arturo said.

The other side was blank.

“That little monster!” Marta raged.

“There was no tape of me,” Arturo said. “Don't you see? This was what she took from the machine. This was the last tape in the machine. Her mother didn't turn it on for her.” He sniggered. “A bunch of silly girl-shit poems about stinky feet.”

Marta burned him with her best “of all the dumb shit I ever heard” glare. “The little bitch! I can't believe this.”

“Well. If there is one, where is it? I say there's no tape.”

“That little conniving shit!” Marta yelled. She shoved the cassette player off the console onto the floor at Arturo's feet, startling him. The cigarette fell from his open mouth. Marta's hand shot out. She snatched the butt in midfall, clenched it in her fist, and squeezed hard, extinguishing it. That done, she flung it through Arturo's open window. “She handed us a dummy tape! Damn her. Goddamn her!”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I know is how I know. She left this shit in that player, and she took the earphones because she knew it would take time to hear what was on it. She was playing for time. She knew that if we had the tape, we would be satisfied enough to lose our focus for a few minutes. And it worked!”

“She's just a little kid,” Arturo said. “No way she put that together. There is no tape, Marta.”

“She has it, Turo. I am telling you she does. I would bet my life on it. And she has those negatives too. This is not a child. This is a demon. She isn't running scared at all. And she is going to give them over to someone who will use them. And, when that happens, you are going to die. Bennett will kill you, or Suggs will kill you, or the state of Louisiana will kill you. I am going to find her and I am going to cut out her little black heart and feed it to a pig.”

“Take some deep breaths,” Arturo said.

Marta stared at him, just daring him to say another word. He shrank against the door.

She closed her eyes for fifteen, maybe twenty seconds.

“I only have one question,” he said finally.

She opened her eyes slowly, pinning him with her glare. “What?”

“Where you gonna get a pig from?”