Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  Didi backed away from him, blindly stumbling into the bench of Amande’s favorite picnic table. She dropped onto the bench. In one fluid motion, she lifted both feet off the ground, swung them over the bench and under the picnic table, then dropped her face onto her folded arms. Her narrow shoulders shook, and Faye actually felt sorry for Didi when she realized that there was no one to put a comforting hand on those shoulders. It certainly wasn’t her place to do it. Maybe when Tebo was released from jail, he might be able to muster up a morsel of sympathy for his half-sister.

  Faye saw Sally studying Didi. The social worker paused, but she must have decided to leave the young woman alone with her grief. Instead of going to Didi, she took Amande by the elbow. Faye watched as Sally led Amande away from the crowd and spoke with her for a half hour or so. By this time, Didi had raised her head and wiped her eyes, so Sally sat down beside her, spending almost as much time with Didi as she had with Amande.

  Faye and Joe had nearly decided to leave when Sally walked their way again, saying, “Well, Didi doesn’t seem all that drunk. Not anymore. Of course, I’ve just stalled for an hour. I was trying to give Didi’s liver a chance to catch up with her.”

  Faye had the sick feeling that Sally spent a lot of time deciding which unsuitable adult was going to be put in charge of which needy child.

  “There’s no law against drinking,” Sally said, “and Didi didn’t drive herself home from her afternoon in the bars, so she didn’t break any laws tonight, not that I know of.” She gestured toward Didi, whose head was once again resting on her crossed arms. Amande was sitting silently next to her, staring at nothing in particular. “That’s no condition to be in when you’re responsible for a child, but Didi had no way to know she’d be coming home to find herself in charge. If I leave Amande with her aunt, for the time being, the child will be able to stay here on this houseboat in her own home. She’ll be with family. And will she have you two around to keep an eye on things?”

  “For another week, at least,” Faye said.

  “Probably longer,” Joe added helpfully.

  “Well, foster care may be the best place for her, but I’m going to let Didi try. We can revisit the situation in a few days, sometime before you have to go home. Didi says she can be responsible for her niece.”

  “Half-niece.” Faye didn’t know why she’d felt compelled to correct the social worker. It had just popped out.

  Sally waved Amande’s and Didi’s fragmentary kinship away with one weary hand. “You cannot imagine the snarled family webs I have to untangle in my line of work. This one isn’t really all that bad.”

  From a distance, Faye watched Amande sit silently beside Didi. Not a word passed between them.

  Sally was arranging several folders full of paperwork in her briefcase, but she saw where Faye was looking. “The girl is going to need therapy, after all she’s been through. If you have any influence with Didi, please ask her not to neglect counseling for Amande after I move on to the next abandoned child.” Then, mercifully, she left.

  Faye watched the pale gray of the woman’s suit fade into the early evening as she walked back to her car.

  Faye wanted to rush after her and ask whether she had any information on Amande’s father. There just had to be someone better than Didi who could take her…someone like Faye.

  Stop it, she told herself. You cannot assume permanent care of this child, and the state of Louisiana won’t let you do that, anyway. You have a child. But it would be really great if you could find someone to take Amande for good…preferably someone who has never been in jail and who isn’t an alcoholic and who won’t take her just to get hold of her very small inheritance.

  Where on earth were she and Joe going to find that person? Sally Smythe clearly didn’t think such a person existed, or she never would have left a vulnerable young woman in the care of someone like Didi.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sally Smythe didn’t generally ask for proof of the relationship when an adoring Great-aunt Bertha arrived to scoop up an orphaned child. It could be impossible to dredge up a complete chain of birth certificates and marriage licenses linking a child to a distant relative. This was one reason that social workers did interviews and adoption case studies, in addition to bare records searches.

  Pedophiles did still slip through cracks in the system, but they were usually related to the kids anyway. Sally couldn’t remember a case where a pedophile masqueraded as a relative and fooled the department into handing over an unrelated child. It was true there had been days, many days, when Sally had been forced to send a child home with an adult she didn’t trust, but those people hadn’t been strangers to the child. On those days, she hated her job a whole lot.

  Faye Longchamp-Mantooth was no pedophile, and neither was her handsome husband. Sally had her doubts as to whether either of the two was Amande’s fifth cousin once-removed, but neither of them seemed like the kind of habitual liars with whom she rubbed elbows every day. There was a reason Sally took a good long shower every night before she sat down to dinner with her family.

  Her kids were grown now, and they understood why Sally’s work made her feel dirty. They had told her that, when they were little, her post-work cleanup ritual had made them think that social workers worked in the mud. If they only knew the truth. Mud could be a clean kind of dirty.

  If she’d only had to deal with the Longchamp-Mantooth family, Sally might have been able to skip the shower until bedtime. But no. She’d been forced to spend time with Didi. Judging by Tebo’s reputation, she’d have probably needed to pick up a fresh bottle of shower gel, if she’d been forced to speak with him. She would have been running up the water bill, trying to wash off his utter ickiness.

  Finding a living situation for Amande that satisfied both Sally and Faye Longchamp-Mantooth was going to be tough.

  ***

  Miranda Landreneau had been well-known in the community. In particular, she had known everybody’s grandparents, so Faye could see that Detective Geoffrey Benoit was hell-bent on doing this investigation right. In fact, he had said as much to her.

  “If I screw this one up, I’m going to have to answer to my own grandmother.”

  Faye had a feeling that the red-headed detective’s complexion was always ruddy, but the thought of facing up to his grandmother seemed to make him flush even more. He was a solemn man with an expression that Faye would almost call “hang-dog,” but he was capable of flashes of deadpan humor that caught her by surprise. Then, while she was laughing, he followed up with a question she wasn’t expecting. He looked way too young to be a detective, but maybe this poker-faced approach had worked well enough to propel him up the ladder quickly.

  He’d questioned her at length about the boat trip she and Joe had taken that afternoon to Amande’s island. In fact, he’d questioned her at such length and with such monotony that she wondered if he was hoping sleep deprivation would loosen her tongue. Faye had lost track of time, but it was very late and her body was screaming for her to close her eyes and rest. The detective’s grandma would be proud.

  “So you don’t have an alibi for most of the day today? And neither does that big husband of yours, the one who looks like he belongs on the cover of one of those bodice-rippers you women read?”

  “I don’t read bodice-rippers, and I do have an alibi. Not unless you consider the dead woman’s granddaughter’s word to be suspect, simply because she’s underage. If Joe or I had been missing long enough to find Miranda and kill her, don’t you think Amande would’ve noticed? And don’t you think that she’d have been interested enough in helping you find her grandmother’s killer to tell you about it?”

  “Settle down, Ma’am. Does that big husband have a temper to match yours?” His shock of orange hair, as stick-straight as Faye’s, fell in his eyes. He shoved it back impatiently, waiting for her answer.

/>   So this was how it was going to be. Joe was a big man, and he was a stranger to this tiny community of people who had known each other since childhood. That made him a suspect, even when it made no sense for him to be the murderer. “No,” Faye said. “Joe has no temper to speak of. Sometimes I pick on him, just to see if I can get him to lose his cool. It never works.”

  “He never gets angry? Not ever?”

  “Oh, he gets angry. Sure he does. He gets angry when old ladies get killed and when young girls are left without anybody to take care of them. But little things? Like when I forget to tell him that the checking account is running low before he takes the debit card to the grocery store? No. He never gets angry over stuff like that.”

  “What about when some doofus like Hebert Demeray gets up in his face, stinking like cheap whiskey?”

  Did this man not remember that Joe’s alibi for the afternoon of Hebert’s death included both Amande and her dead grandmother? Unless he thought Hebert had been dead a lot longer than Faye had assumed, based on the good condition of the body.

  Faye made an effort to keep her voice calm and patient. “Not too many people are tall enough or brave enough to get up in my husband’s face. But when they do? He laughs at them.”

  “What about Steve Daigle? He got up in your husband’s face, for sure, and his own face is certainly not fit for a book cover, so I imagine your husband didn’t enjoy this. What do you know about him?”

  “Well, I know that my husband had all kinds of excuses for beating the living hell out of him just a few days ago, but he didn’t. Your deputies said as much. I saw Steve yelling at Miranda and her family, and I saw Joe stop him. I didn’t hear a lot of what he said firsthand, because I was in our cabin, making sure that Amande and my little son didn’t have to listen to him, but Joe told me everything. If you’re looking for a big man with anger issues, I’d be checking Steve Daigle’s alibi. Wait. I misspoke. I’d be checking both of Steve Daigle’s alibis. We’ve got two dead people, and both of them were members of that family Steve was threatening.”

  “Tell me everything Joe told you about Daigle and his threats.”

  And now Faye saw that she was dealing with a man shrewd enough to cover his tracks, even during a routine interrogation. By any logic, he should have begun this interview with questions about Steve Daigle. The man had, after all, been seen publicly threatening the dead woman. Instead, he’d shoved Faye off-balance by firing off a series of sharp questions designed to rattle her. Detective Geoffrey Benoit rose a notch in Faye’s estimation, but she felt compelled to push back with her own series of sharp questions.

  Why? No reason, really, other than to keep him on his toes.

  “Joe and I have both already told your department everything we know about Steve Daigle. What did you think about those slips of paper in Miranda’s room with Daigle’s name on them?”

  “You saw those? What were you doing in Miranda’s room?”

  “I was looking for her. A frantic sixteen-year-old asked me to help find her grandmother, so I searched the boat. Miranda obviously wasn’t there, so I dialed 911.”

  The freckled skin on his forehead wrinkled. Detective Benoit was not happy with her answer. “Did you touch anything?”

  “No. I mean…yes. I did touch one of those slips of paper, because I thought they were so interesting, and I just wasn’t thinking. But I didn’t even touch it hard enough to move it, and I was sorry later.”

  “Sorry?” The word clearly surprised him, and he jumped on it. “How so?”

  “I touched my eye with that finger, and I thought I just might go blind. Miranda had sprinkled something on those papers that I’m pretty sure was cayenne pepper. You might want to ask a voodoo practitioner what kind of hex she was trying to cast with that pepper. My guess is that she wasn’t harboring any goodwill toward Steve Daigle. And why should she? You’ve heard how he behaved on the one occasion they met. Don’t you think any self-respecting voodoo mambo would hex a man who wished she would die, just so he could have her home?”

  Detective Benoit was tapping quickly on the keyboard of his smart phone, which destroyed the calculated rhythm of his series of pointed questions. Faye took this as a sign that she’d surprised the man.

  “Did you disturb anything else on the houseboat?”

  Anybody else would have just said “No,” but Faye couldn’t make the scientist in her shut up. “I didn’t touch anything else, no. But just being there means that I probably left footprints on the carpet, and probably hairs and skin flakes, too. I didn’t know Miranda had been murdered at the time. I was just in there looking for her.”

  “Fair enough.” He kept tapping on his phone, using both thumbs with the agility of a man young enough to have played video games since shortly after birth.

  “I did see something else that could be important. An appointment time that Miranda had written down and stuck on her refrigerator.”

  He looked at her through narrowed eyes.

  Sensing disapproval, she plunged ahead. “I’m sure your people have already seen it,” she said, gesturing at the boat where some evidence technicians were doing their thing. “But you might not have had a chance to look at it yet.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and used her forefinger to bring up her pictures, because it was quicker and because her thumbs were older than his. “There. See?”

  He didn’t look at the photo right away, because he was busy studying her. “You took a picture of it. Before or after you dialed 911?”

  “I’m not sure. I did the two things at about the same time.”

  He took the phone and, without permission, scrolled back and forth, glancing at the series of photos Faye had taken while on the houseboat.

  Afraid he was about to confiscate the phone, which would drive the last nail in the coffin of Faye’s ability to finish her consulting project, she said, “I can email those to you right now.”

  He handed the phone back and said, “Please do. Here’s my address. And, just for fun, why don’t you tell me what that note on the refrigerator said? I can’t read it on that little phone screen, not even with these expensive contact lenses stuck to my eyeballs.”

  Faye’s glasses were on her nose, and she had the advantage of having already seen the name. “She had an appointment with somebody or something named—” She scrolled through the photos, looking for the man’s name. “Sechrist. It said the meeting was on Friday at two, but it doesn’t say which Friday. It might have been today. It might have been next Friday. Maybe she met with him last Friday, before Hebert died. Before Joe and I even got here. Only Miranda knew for sure.”

  “The little girl might know.” His blue eyes rested on Amande, whose head was resting on her arms in a mirror image of the young aunt sitting next to her. His voice dropped a note and softened. “I’m making a list of questions for Miss Landreneau, so that I can bother her as little as possible.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” Faye heard her own voice grow quieter and softer.

  “I have a little sister,” he said. Then he brought his palm down firmly on the table, as if to say, “This is no time for sentiment. We’re talking business here.”

  “Tell me whether you did anything else while you were onboard that houseboat that I need to know about. Even if you think I’ll wish you didn’t. Then I’ll let you go about your business and you won’t have to think about this stuff anymore.”

  “Nothing, really. I saw that somebody had searched the drawers in both Miranda’s and Amande’s bedrooms, which is one reason I took these pictures.” She held up the hand clutching the phone.

  Did she remember seeing anything else? Any minute now, he’d be moving on to the next witness, and any tiny bit of input she had into the investigation of Amande’s grandmother’s death would be ended. This bothered her more than it should.

  “Could
you tell whether the intruders had taken anything?” he asked.

  “You’re going to have to put that on your list of questions to bother the little girl with. I will say that it didn’t look like someone tore up the place, willy-nilly. All the drawers in Miranda’s room were slightly open. See? A few of Amande’s drawers were still latched shut. Maybe the intruder was looking for something in particular, quitting as soon as it turned up.”

  Faye scrolled through the photos and her finger slowed when she reached the ones she’d taken in Amande’s room. “Be sure you ask her to inventory her artifacts. She had a collection of old money minted while the US was still using silver. I’m not sure which drawer it was in.” She held the phone out for him. “If it was in one of those open drawers, I’d bet money that those coins are gone. It took her years to find them all. Poor kid.”

  “Were any of her other artifacts valuable?”

  “Yeah, but not everybody would have recognized it. She had a piece of a brass sextant. If it’s as old as I think it is, it belongs in a museum. And she had two old Spanish coins. Both silver. And hefty. They didn’t look like much, but if the thief knew what they were…yeah. They’re gone.”

  She felt an idea coming on. It was one of those ideas that prompted Joe to ask questions like, “Couldn’t you just once mind your own business now and then? You know…the business that pays both of our salaries and puts a roof over our heads and puts food on Michael’s plate?”

  Apparently, she could not.

  “I’ve done law enforcement consulting before, Detective. I’m called in to answer questions about how valuable a stolen artifact might be on the black market, or to advise investigators on who might be interested in that artifact. I’ve helped on murder cases, more than once.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  Faye couldn’t keep herself from trying one more time. “If the thief is the same person who killed Miranda, and if that thief was savvy enough to recognize the value of those two corroded old coins—or any of Amande’s artifacts, really, except for obvious things like the silver money, then I can tell you a lot about him. Or her. I think you should consider using my services.”