Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (27 page)

“Moreover, state workers, teachers, city and parish leaders, chambers of commerce, all know gambling is a free ride that keeps their paychecks, raises, and profits coming. One winner’s splurge can make a local retailer’s month, whereas a problem gambler probably has been a bad credit risk even before he started losing. Gambling is an invisible, voluntary tax. Ideal. They complain loudly on the six o’clock news about gambling’s deleterious effect on morals, but in the sanctity of the voting booth, a sufficient number will vote their pocketbooks. These people will know which box to press.”

Wooty admired the senator’s grasp of human nature. He may have studied Bismarck in college history, but outside the classroom he must have apprenticed with the ghosts of Saul Alinsky, Malcolm X, and Huey P. Long. “‘Don’t tax me, tax the man behind that tree,’ right?”

“Yes, that is our anthem here in the Gret Stet,” Bayles said, a flicker of a smile coming into his melancholy eyes. “Where an outcome is in doubt, we buy the votes, as we do with elective office. We’ll procure school buses, pay voters five or ten dollars, and bus them to the polling places. In the unlikely event of a defeat in a parish, we’ll simply bring it back for another and another vote, until we wear our opponents down and they have to return to their everyday business.”

“You could always add a rider,” Wooty said. “Dedicate tax money to something socially irresistible. Like boll weevil eradication or a school for the blind.” He winked, knowing that some years back this ploy had secured voters’ approval of slot machines at several Louisiana racetracks that claimed video poker competition was affecting their profits.

“Ah,” said Augustus Bayles, “you are indeed a keen observer of our political process. My compliments. Democracy, as you clearly realize, is grounded in self-interest. As there was in the big 1996 gambling vote, there will again be widespread relief that all-or-nothing, statewide prohibition is not the only choice. Public debate on local option will have a cathartic effect, satisfying to both the pro and anti forces. They will feel empowered, in control of their destiny. If we wished, we could add dog racing and jai alai to the ballot—about the only kinds of gambling we don’t presently have—and these also would pass.”

“Is all this . . . well, constitutional?” Wooty asked.

“It is if we legislate it so and persuade the people to agree,” Bayles replied with regal confidence. “Should some group decide to undertake an expensive challenge in court, so be it. Louisiana judges and editorial writers have mortgages, children in school, and desires beyond their means, like most people. With the right encouragement, such allies will make sure we carry the day.”

“So, let me get this straight: you’re certain you can get a major local-option election tied to any anti-gambling constitutional amendment that may come out of the legislature? I hear it’s an unpredictable process. You know what they say about watching sausage and laws being made: best for the uninitiated not to witness it.”

“Yes, your parish
will
retain video poker. I make it a practice to maintain a large stack of IOUs,” said Bayles. “And the gambling industry will open its coffers even wider than normal. In the recent past, one out of five state campaign dollars has come from that source. Tens of
millions will be spent on pro-gambling advertising. With that sort of financial muscle, be assured that video poker is here to stay.”

Wooty knew that Bayles was a partner in a minority-controlled company that owned several radio and television stations in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi. The company would rake in piles of cash from the advertising campaign to convince voters to keep gambling legal. What a brilliant set-up, Wooty thought. The guy makes money no matter which way the coin falls!

“Good deal,” said Wooty. “Speaking of casinos, we’d like a little less competition. I’m talking about Indian gambling?”

“That’s a tougher problem. Federal law, as now interpreted, allows it as long as the state has analogous forms of gambling. The Katogoula, I understand, are planning a casino in your vicinity.” He paused, seemingly waiting for Wooty to respond.

Is there anything this guy doesn’t know?
“As a matter of fact, my father and Representative . . . um, I mean, some business friends of mine are trying to get the casino management contract, and I’m supposed to be convincing the tribe to bite at our offer. My original associates would just as soon not have all that activity in the area. Would kind of mess up our quiet little pond, the way we do things.”

“Yes, I’m informed that there isn’t a better corridor between I-10 and I-49 anywhere in the state. Your property is indeed uniquely situated for your associates’ purposes.” Another slow sip of coffee. “A former legislative colleague needs an emergency infusion of cash. Legal expenses. He had the bad taste to get himself videotaped and indicted. He owns a large tract of land not far from your family’s property—but far enough, I submit, to be less of a drag on the video-poker business and certain other enterprises you may or may not have an interest in. Land eminently suitable for an Indian reservation, in my opinion. I’ll
acquire it at a fire-sale price and make the tribe a counteroffer that is even more attractive than the one your casino friends have made.”

“You got your work cut out for you,” Wooty said. “The tribe’s a real indecisive bunch. Internal politics, you know?”
Of course he knows
. “One day they’re for a casino, the next day they’re not. You’ll need someone who understands them, where they’re coming from, where they want to go. Not some slick lobbyist.” He pointed with his thumb around the room, indicating the men huddled in conversation at every table. “That just turns them off, big time.”

“Duplicity comes naturally to you,” the senator said. “From me, that is high praise.” Bayles smiled. An engaging smile that helped Wooty understand why so many people believed in and trusted this man. “Tell your Mexican associates this: I will trade my assistance and my compensation in the form of the hundred video poker machines for you.”

“For
me
? What—what do you mean?”

“Consider our discussion a job interview. You’re hired. Baton Rouge is not my final destination; I need people like you beside me on the difficult road to Washington. You also have a unique rapport with the Katogoula. Therefore, make it clear to your associates: you, or no deal.”

The frigging nerve of this guy! What if I’m not interested?
But he was, and the fact that Bayles had somehow read him like a book fascinated him.

“From a financial standpoint,” Bayles added, “you will be rewarded. Handsomely and soon. In the near term, you will take on significant duties in my media division. When the casino becomes a reality, you will be a ten percent partner.”

Perfect
. This was turning out better than Wooty could have hoped. He was protecting the turf for the Mexican cartel; maybe relations would improve between them, the threats cease. The Katogoula would have another, perhaps better, opportunity to open a casino. And financially,
his bases were covered: his video poker machines, provided he could keep them if he left the active employ of the cartel, were out of danger; if the tribal casino happened on Tadbull land after all, he would inherit the deal and the profits eventually; and if he could pull off what Bayles planned, he’d get ten percent of that casino!

“This is all sort of sudden. . . .” Wooty cleared his throat, shifted in his chair. “But yeah—
hell yeah
, I’d like to be on your team. Tell you what: I’ll leave the sausage making to you, and I’ll do my best to bring home the bacon.”

Senator Bayles spoke quietly in his overly cultivated voice about his far-flung enterprises, his grand battle plan for storming the heights of power. The Blue House had emptied of diners by the time he finished. Bayles never asked why Wooty was double-crossing his own father. He didn’t need to, Wooty figured. The young, sad eyes seemed possessed of a knowledge of human contradictions beyond their years. As a black man in Louisiana politics, Augustus Bayles surely understood suppressed ambition and the impatience of a son kept at arm’s length from wealth and power.

At last, the senator carefully folded his napkin the way he’d found it. The two men stood and shook hands, new friends with a common purpose.

Wooty felt he’d moved up the food chain one very important level.

CHAPTER 18

S
aturday morning, Nick’s bruised right shoulder and sprained, possibly fractured, elbow hurt worse than they had the afternoon before, when an emergency-room doctor prodded and poked him and finally decided that he would live. His right arm was encased in a padded nylon tube affair, resting in a sling. The doctor had determined there was no concussion, but it was a close call. Holly occasionally cast glances of empathetic pain his way.

“If we have to move,” Irton Dusong was saying, “we’ll sure enough do it. I’d just as soon give up this place and be on our own reservation. We don’t even have a sprinkler system.”

“We sure could use a new facility,” Grace Dusong confirmed, “and a bigger operating budget. We could advertise. No one knows where we’re at. Hardly ever more than a dozen visitors on a weekend.”

The Katogoula Museum was a Spanish-style stucco building just within the boundaries of Tchekalaya State Forest. Nick, Holly, and the husband-and-wife caretakers stood in the brick courtyard.

Irton had apparently forgotten to comb his silver hair or shave for several days. Once a tall man, he now leaned forward at an unnatural angle, the result of an accident years before at Tadbull Mill. Grace, his wife, was a round woman with the stiff joints and gnarled hands of advanced rheumatoid arthritis. A cheery yellow floral bandeau secured
her long charcoal-streaked ashen hair. They’d gained unwanted notoriety, and the animosity of certain other tribe members, by favoring at the last moment a tribal casino.

“I’m always patching something or other together, as ’tis,” Irton said, drawing out a screwdriver and pliers from his overalls chest pocket. “Maybe we’ll set us up some of them video poker machines in the new museum. That ought to help out the budget some!” He burst into laughter.

Nick, as he listened to the couple discussing the pros and cons of moving, unobtrusively probed the tender, throbbing bumps distributed randomly around his head.

A deputy had found him, half-conscious, at the bottom of the courthouse stairwell. The culprit had escaped, and Sheriff Higbee had no suspects. Nothing had been taken from Nick’s briefcase—a fact that didn’t surprise him: he was carrying easily replaceable copies of genealogical documents. Had his mysterious assailant, fearing future connections Nick might discover, tried to erase what was in his head, forever? Was this attack on him connected to Carl Shawe’s death, another warning, perhaps, intended to persuade the tribe to change directions? Or was the motive to hurt or kill him rooted in his own experience?

He felt lucky to be alive. More than once in the last eighteen hours he’d been tempted to throw in the towel and hightail it back to New Orleans, where at least the rampant street violence was nothing personal.

Grace Dusong was explaining that the small yearly allowance from the legislature was one of the few benefits of state tribal recognition. The museum dated from the 1950s, the end result of a controversy involving Katogoula relics that had been dug up during highway construction in the thirties.

Holly declined Grace’s offer of a guided tour.

“I’ve been here once or twice,” Holly said, smiling in a friendly, familiar way at the older woman’s solicitousness. “Well, maybe a hundred times. Let me show off a little. You could take this off my hands, though, Grace. Thanks.” She squirmed out of her backpack, which was stuffed with the picnic lunch she and Nick were to eat later, at a “special place,” Holly had promised.

She was a much better guide than Grace would have been, Nick was thinking, as he followed the beautiful red-haired woman. With great difficulty he managed to pay attention to her commentary on the dioramas and hangings and other dusty displays. What was it about her? . . . The delightfully sensual way her lips and tongue danced across her white teeth? Her expressive green eyes? The lovely curves below her supple jeans and snug sage pullover sweater?

Twelve hundred years ago, Holly was saying, the prehistoric Indians of the area made coiled clay pottery, hurled their spears with atlatls, used boiling stones in cooking, and kept dogs as pets. Only a few incomplete pots and isolated bones remained of this early period, and much of that evidence was enclosed in the cases before them. A replica of an atlatl caught Nick’s attention.

It was a foot-and-a-half-long sturdy stick, with one end curved slightly upward and notched to hold the feathered tail of a yard-long spear, the other end wrapped in hide as a grip. A sketch showed how it was used: as if pitching a fastball, the thrower catapulted the loaded atlatl at the prey or enemy, sending the spear—referred to as a dart by modern aficionados—flying with the velocity of a bullet; the atlatl remained in the hand, a good close-combat weapon. Depending on the tribe and time, spear tips might have featured fire-hardened, pointed ends, or stone chipped to incredible thinness and sharpness, or scavenged, shaped metal.

Indians of this archaic period didn’t venture far from the many lakes and rivers, and their shoreline villages were built on middens, communal dumps formed from clam and mussel shells and other refuse.

By 800, a cultural transformation had occurred. New knowledge came from the west, probably originating in Mexico. Farming and the sacred corn arrived, along with a new religion that emphasized elaborate burial rituals and mound building. Tobacco smoking, head flattening, extensive regional trading, and the building of fortified villages were other characteristics of the new order.

“The favored theory is that these prehistoric tribes vanished,” Holly said. “I don’t think so. Entire cultures don’t disappear, not without a trace, anyway. You know that from your genealogical studies.”

“True,” Nick said. “We all leave tracks in the mud of the past. In your lifetime, you’ll generate a trail of documentation seven miles long.”