“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?”
Alexa found the keys to her car in her purse, and said, “If the GPS fails, I can probably smell my way to it.”
35
The car.
Wind and rain.
It is dark in my eyes.
The dark talks.
I am dark.
You do the chop now.
Cut here and there and everywhere.
Why the winds?
Cuts everywhere.
Look they lie here.
My belly.
Not the baby.
No chops.
Yes chops.
The cop.
Chop a cop.
Sibhon!…Sibhon!…Sibhon!
I am Dibbly, dubbly, do-do Sibby Dibby.
Mommy love you, yes she do.
For the fucker man says to do.
I am Sibhon…what?
You are the bloody one.
You are twenty-one.
He says to fuck.
Fuck yes.
Fuck is good.
Fuck is right.